Futurismo Verde :: En servicio al proyecto del Foro sobre Política y Crisis, la Red Hot Spring de innovación y debate plantea una conversación global sobre la seguridad alimenticia y la escasez crónica de agua y comida en África. Las lecciones de este experimento en investigación y brainstorming colaborativos se podrá aplicar a otras situaciones de crisis y escasez alrededor del planeta.

Los temas principales de debate serán:

1. Problemas relacionados con el abastecimiento alimenticio global, sobretodo en aplicación a las poblaciones más necesitadas;
2. La degradación medioambiental: o sea, servicios ecológicos y medidas de bienestar ambiental;
3. Deficiencies en las políticas de uso terrenal: cómo mejorarlas;
4. Caza furtiva de animales y cosecha furtiva de leño;
5. Tendencias corrosivas económicas;
6. La corrupción y la deficiencia urgente de presupuestos;
7. Medidas cooperativas para extender el suministro alimenticio a las zonas de conflicto;
8. Cómo superar los límites de la infraestructura de transporte;
9. Las enfermedades comunicables: tratamiento, educación, efectos socio-económicos;
10. Fallos comunicativos: cómo hacer llegar los datos tanto investigados como anecdóticos a los servicios relevantes.

La meta será idear y modelar soluciones calibradas a los desafíos al parecer imposibles de resolver, en relación a la seguridad alimenticia en diversas regiones del continente africano. Esperamos poder proporcionar ideas nuevas y factibles, prácticas y económicamente virtuosas, para que las poblaciones locales interesadas puedan comenzar a desplegarlas en su entorno.

Click aquí para agregar sus comentarios al foro…

El ser humano se ha vuelto tan influyente en los proceso naturales que los científicos ahora temen que la naturaleza ha perdido capacidades vitales de resistencia

Futurismo Verde :: En una reunión de científicos europeos, en Estocolmo, el hombre que inventó el término ‘antropoceno’ para describir una nueva época geológica—en la que la influencia humana domina los proceso naturales—ha anunciado que el término ahora se está aplicando desde múltiples campos de estudio. La importancia real del término es que la información ecológica es cada vez más imprescindible para poder llevar a cabo las ambiciones humanas de una forma responsable y sostenible.

The Financial Times, de Londres, ahora informa que “The EuroScience forum in Stockholm heard on Thursday that climate change was the most obvious of a complex range of man-made effects that is rapidly changing the physics, chemistry and biology of the planet.” [En el foro EuroScience, en Estocolmo, el jueves pasado, escucharon que el cambio climático era el más obvio de un complejo tejido de efectos de la actividad humana, que están cambiando rápidamente la física, la química y la biología del planeta."] Otros efectos tendrán que ver con la resistencia de la cosecha, fertilidad de la tierra, elasticidad de habitat vital para especies de sustento.

El alba de la época Antropocena, en la historia geológica, conlleva una cantidad importante de desafíos y oportunidades. En sentido de llevar a cabo una transición rápida de ubicuos modelos económicos a una metodología sostenible, hay una gran oportunidad de aumentar la producción económica potencial de la economía global. Hacerlo, sin embargo, exigirá cantidades masivas de inversión y de innovación acelerada.

Un grupo de 21 de los científicos e investigadores más respetados ha publicado su estudio de la cronología geológica en GSA Journal, y han confirmado que ocurrió un cambio fundamental a una época geológica definida por el efecto humano en el medio ambiente, a principios del siglo XIX. Lo que ocurre ahora, más allá de eso, es que se está desarrollando una conciencia del impacto severo de 200 años de expansión industrial agresiva, incluyendo explotación de recursos, construcción urbana y remodelación terrenal sin precedentes.

Estamos llegando a un punto de inflexión, después del que la ciencia no podrá evitar la necesidad de reconocer y manejar los impactos de la actividad humana en los sistemas naturales. Se ve ahora alteraciones fundamentales en la sedimentación, calidad de tierra, patrones geológicos y habitat biológico, hasta en la misma flora y fauna que habita los sistemas naturales afectados, y en la atmósfera respirable.

Específicamente:

From the beginning of the Industrial Revolution to the present day, global human population has climbed rapidly from under a billion to its current 6.5 billion (Fig. 1), and it continues to rise. The exploitation of coal, oil, and gas in particular has enabled planet-wide industrialization, construction, and mass transport, the ensuing changes encompassing a wide variety of phenomena, summarized as follows. [...]

Humans have caused a dramatic increase in erosion and the denudation of the continents, both directly, through agriculture and construction, and indirectly, by damming most major rivers, that now exceeds natural sediment production by an order of magnitude [...]

Carbon dioxide levels (379 ppm in 2005) are over a third higher than in pre-industrial times and at any time in the past 0.9 million years [...]

The projected temperature rise will certainly cause changes in habitat beyond environmental tolerance for many taxa (Thomas et al., 2004). The effects will be more severe than in past glacial-interglacial transitions because, with the anthropogenic fragmentation of natural ecosystems, ‘escape’ routes are fewer.

Los mecanismos principales de resistencia ecológica se ven erosionados, y el medio ambiente natural se encuentra menos capaz de adaptarse a los cambios en los sistemas naturales y su manera de competir dentro de y entre sí. El estudio también cita evidencia de un nivel acelerado de extinción de especies y de la creciente probabilidad de una ola masiva de extinciones, resultado directo de la actividad humana.

La comunidad científica ha comenzado a elaborar modelos informáticos del sistema natural integral, un complejo de ecosistemas e interacciones a nivel planetario. Esos modelos servirán para averiguar hasta qué punto la actividad humana influye en el medio ambiente y cómo se puede actuar para mitigar esos impactos y lograr un futuro más sostenible, y más capaz de seguir proporcionando los beneficios naturales necesarios como base de la civilización humana.

La idea del periodo Antropoceno es más que una clasificación cronológica del momento en el que nos encontramos. Se trata de una conciencia cada vez más desarrollada de la necesidad de modificar nuestras tendencias para colaborar con los sistemas naturales de los que dependemos tanto para la supervivencia. Es un despertar al efecto que tiene nuestro nivel de vida, nuestra producción y consumo industriales, y a lo que significa la integración de las sociedades alrededor del planeta, en una red global de comunicación y un mercado global de intercambio material y cultural.

Es posible ahora hablar de una creciente conciencia global de la necesidad de cambiar las motivaciones básicas de la política estatal, el negocio privado, el consumo y los mercados en general. Es posible ahora hablar de un momento en el que la evidencia existe para darnos cuenta del poder que tiene la industria de una civilización globalizada sobre el medio ambiente.

La época Antropocena existe porque el impacto medioambiental ya no se trata de un impacto local, en un ambiente limitado, sino de un impacto a nivel global, con secuelas en ecosistemas que no parecen tener contacto directo con la causa de su malestar. El cambio de pensamiento que ahora viene tiene que coincidir con una creciente capacidad de imaginación y colaboración, para dejar atrás la dependencia peligrosa que nos ata a los combustibles fósil.

• Geological Society of America: “Are we now living in the Anthropocene”
• Financial Times / MSNBC: “Scientists warn of a new Anthropocene age”
• About.com Geology: “Introducing the Anthropocene”
• Max-Planck-Institut für Chemie: “Anthropocene” [article that coined the term]
• Resilience 2008: “Resilience, Adaptation & Transformation in Turbulent Times” [Conf., Stockholm 14-17 April]
• Albaeco, Sustainability School: “Masking Environmental Feedbacks”

In more than 100 years of Nobel Peace Prizes, only a dozen women have ever won. Civil-rights and peace activist Jody Williams, received the award in 1997 as the chief strategist of the International Campaign to Ban Landmines, which established the ?rst global treaty banning antipersonnel mines.

Williams believes that peace is de?ned by human (not national) security and that it must be achieved through sustainable development, environmental justice, and meeting people’s basic needs. To this end, she co-founded the Nobel Women’s Initiative, endorsed by six of seven living female Peace laureates. She chairs the effort to support activists, researchers, and others working toward peace, justice, and equality for women and thus humanity. Williams also continues to ?ght for the total global eradication of landmines.

The following text is an official transcript of Pres. Obama’s remarks to a joint session of the Indian Parliament, as delivered on Monday, 8 November 2010, at Parliament House, New Delhi, India

5:40 P.M. IST

THE PRESIDENT: Mr. Vice President, Madam Speaker, Mr. Prime Minister, members of Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha, and most of all, the people of India.

I thank you for the great honor of addressing the representatives of more than one billion Indians and the world’s largest democracy. (Applause.) I bring the greetings and friendship of the world’s oldest democracy —- the United States of America, including nearly three million proud and patriotic Indian-Americans. (Applause.)

Over the past three days, my wife Michelle and I have experienced the — and dynamism of India and its people — from the majesty of Humayun’s Tomb to the advanced technologies that are empowering farmers and women who are the backbone of Indian society; from the Diwali celebrations with schoolchildren to the innovators who are fueling India’s economic rise; from the university students who will chart India’s future, to you —-leaders who helped to bring India to this moment of extraordinary promise.

At every stop, we have been welcomed with the hospitality for which Indians have always been known. So, to you and the people of India, on behalf of me, Michelle and the American people, please accept my deepest thanks. (Applause.) Bahoot dhanyavad. (Applause.)

Now, I am not the first American President to visit India. Nor will I be the last. But I am proud to visit India so early in my presidency. It’s no coincidence that India is my first stop on a visit to Asia, or that this has been my longest visit to another country since becoming President. (Applause.) For in Asia and around the world, India is not simply emerging; India has emerged. (Applause.)

And it is my firm belief that the relationship between the United States and India -— bound by our shared interests and our shared values -— will be one of the defining partnerships of the 21st century. This is the partnership I’ve come here to build. This is the vision that our nations can realize together.

My confidence in our shared future is grounded in my respect for India’s treasured past -— a civilization that’s been shaping the world for thousands of years. Indians unlocked the intricacies of the human body and the vastness of our universe. It’s no exaggeration to say that our Information Age is rooted in Indian innovations —- including the number zero. (Applause.)

Of course, India not only opened our minds, she expanded our moral imaginations — with religious texts that still summon the faithful to lives of dignity and discipline, with poets who imagined a future “where the mind is without fear and the head is held high” — (applause) — and with a man whose message of love and justice endures -— the father of your nation, Mahatma Gandhi. (Applause.)

For me and Michelle, this visit has, therefore, held special meaning. See, throughout my life, including my work as a young man on behalf of the urban poor, I’ve always found inspiration in the life of Gandhiji and his simple and profound lesson to be the change we seek in the world. (Applause.) And just as he summoned Indians to seek their destiny, he influenced champions of equality in my own country, including a young preacher named Martin Luther King. After making his pilgrimage to India a half-century ago, Dr. King called Gandhi’s philosophy of non-violent resistance “the only logical and moral approach” in the struggle for justice and progress. (Applause.)

So we were honored to visit the residence where Gandhi and King both stayed —- Mani Bhavan. And we were humbled to pay our respects at Raj Ghat. And I am mindful that I might not be standing before you today, as President of the United States, had it not been for Gandhi and the message he shared and inspired with America and the world. (Applause.)

An ancient civilization of science and innovation; a fundamental faith in human progress — this is the sturdy foundation upon which you have built ever since that stroke of midnight when the tricolor was raised over a free and independent India. (Applause.) And despite the skeptics who said this country was simply too poor, or too vast, or too diverse to succeed, you surmounted overwhelming odds and became a model to the world.

Instead of slipping into starvation, you launched a Green Revolution that fed millions. Instead of becoming dependent on commodities and exports, you invested in science and technology and in your greatest resource —- the Indian people. And the world sees the results, from the supercomputers you build to the Indian flag that you put on the moon.

Instead of resisting the global economy, you became one of its engines —- reforming the licensing raj and unleashing an economic marvel that has lifted tens of millions of people from poverty and created one of the world’s largest middle classes.

Instead of succumbing to division, you have shown that the strength of India —- the very idea of India —- is its embrace of all colors, all castes, all creeds. (Applause.) It’s the diversity represented in this chamber today. It’s the richness of faiths celebrated by a visitor to my hometown of Chicago more than a century ago -— the renowned Swami Vivekananda. He said that, “holiness, purity and charity are not the exclusive possessions of any church in the world, and that every system has produced men and women of the most exalted character.”

And instead of being lured by the false notion that progress must come at the expense of freedom, you built the institutions upon which true democracy depends —- free and fair elections, which enable citizens to choose their own leaders without recourse to arms — (applause) — an independent judiciary and the rule of law, which allows people to address their grievances; and a thriving free press and vibrant civil society which allows every voice to be heard. This year, as India marks 60 years with a strong and democratic constitution, the lesson is clear: India has succeeded, not in spite of democracy; India has succeeded because of democracy. (Applause.)

Now, just as India has changed, so, too, has the relationship between our two nations. In the decades after independence, India advanced its interests as a proud leader of the nonaligned movement. Yet, too often, the United States and India found ourselves on opposite sides of a North-`South divide, estranged by a long Cold War. Those days are over.

Here in India, two successive governments led by different parties have recognized that deeper partnership with America is both natural and necessary. And in the United States, both of my predecessors —- one a Democrat, one a Republican -— worked to bring us closer, leading to increased trade and a landmark civil nuclear agreement. (Applause.)

So since that time, people in both our countries have asked: What’s next? How can we build on this progress and realize the full potential of our partnership? That’s what I want to address today —- the future that the United States seeks in an interconnected world, and why I believe that India is indispensable to this vision; how we can forge a truly global partnership -— not just in one or two areas, but across many; not just for our mutual benefit, but for the benefit of the world.

Of course, only Indians can determine India’s national interests and how to advance them on the world stage. But I stand before you today because I am convinced that the interests of the United States —- and the interests we share with India -—are best advanced in partnership. I believe that. (Applause.)

The United States seeks security —- the security of our country, our allies and partners. We seek prosperity -— a strong and growing economy in an open international economic system. We seek respect for universal values. And we seek a just and sustainable international order that promotes peace and security by meeting global challenges through stronger global cooperation.

Now, to advance these interests, I have committed the United States to comprehensive engagement with the world, based on mutual interest and mutual respect. And a central pillar of this engagement is forging deeper cooperation with 21st century centers of influence -— and that must necessarily include India.

Now, India is not the only emerging power in the world. But relationships between our countries is unique. For we are two strong democracies whose constitutions begin with the same revolutionary words —- the same revolutionary words — “We the people.” We are two great republics dedicated to the liberty and justice and equality of all people. And we are two free market economies where people have the freedom to pursue ideas and innovation that can change the world. And that’s why I believe that India and America are indispensable partners in meeting the challenges of our time. (Applause.)

Since taking office, I’ve, therefore, made our relationship a priority. I was proud to welcome Prime Minister Singh for the first official state visit of my presidency. (Applause.) For the first time ever, our governments are working together across the whole range of common challenges that we face. Now, let me say it as clearly as I can: The United States not only welcomes India as a rising global power, we fervently support it, and we have worked to help make it a reality.

Together with our partners, we have made the G20 the premier forum for international economic cooperation, bringing more voices to the table of global economic decision-making, and that has included India. We’ve increased the role of emerging economies like India at international financial institutions. We valued India’s important role at Copenhagen, where, for the first time, all major economies committed to take action to confront climate change —- and to stand by those actions. We salute India’s long history as a leading contributor to United Nations peacekeeping missions. And we welcome India as it prepares to take its seat on the United Nations Security Council. (Applause.)

In short, with India assuming its rightful place in the world, we have an historic opportunity to make the relationship between our two countries a defining partnership of the century ahead. And I believe we can do so by working together in three important areas.

First, as global partners we can promote prosperity in both our countries. Together, we can create the high-tech, high-wage jobs of the future. With my visit, we are now ready to begin implementing our civil nuclear agreement. This will help meet India’s growing energy needs and create thousands of jobs in both of our countries. (Applause.)

We need to forge partnerships in high-tech sectors like defense and civil space. So we’ve removed Indian organizations from our so-called “entity list.” And we’ll work to remove — and reform our controls on exports. Both of these steps will ensure that Indian companies seeking high-tech trade and technologies from America are treated the same as our very closest allies and partners. (Applause.)

We can pursue joint research and development to create green jobs; give India more access to cleaner, affordable energy; meet the commitments we made at Copenhagen; and show the possibilities of low-carbon growth.

And together, we can resist the protectionism that stifles growth and innovation. The United States remains —- and will continue to remain —- one of the most open economies in the world. And by opening markets and reducing barriers to foreign investment, India can realize its full economic potential as well. As G20 partners, we can make sure the global economic recovery is strong and is durable. And we can keep striving for a Doha Round that is ambitious and is balanced —- with the courage to make the compromises that are necessary so global trade works for all economies.

Together, we can strengthen agriculture. Cooperation between Indian and American researchers and scientists sparked the Green Revolution. Today, India is a leader in using technology to empower farmers, like those I met yesterday who get free updates on market and weather conditions on their cell phones. And the United States is a leader in agricultural productivity and research. Now, as farmers and rural areas face the effects of climate change and drought, we’ll work together to spark a second, more sustainable Evergreen Revolution.

Together, we’re improving Indian weather forecasting systems before the next monsoon season. We aim to help millions of Indian farmers — farming households save water and increase productivity, improve food processing so crops don’t spoil on the way to market, and enhance climate and crop forecasting to avoid losses that cripple communities and drive up food prices.

And as part of our food security initiative, we’re going to share India’s expertise with farmers in Africa. And this is an indication of India’s rise —- that we can now export hard-earned expertise to countries that see India as a model for agricultural development. It’s another powerful example of how American and Indian partnership can address an urgent global challenge.

Because the wealth of a nation also depends on the health of its people, we’ll continue to support India’s effort against diseases like tuberculosis and HIV/AIDS, and as global partners, we’ll work to improve global health by preventing the spread of pandemic flu. And because knowledge is the currency of the 21st century, we will increase exchanges between our students, our colleges and our universities, which are among the best in the world.

As we work to advance our shared prosperity, we can partner to address a second priority —- and that is our shared security. In Mumbai, I met with the courageous families and survivors of that barbaric attack. And here in Parliament, which was itself targeted because of the democracy it represents, we honor the memory of all those who have been taken from us, including American citizens on 26/11 and Indian citizens on 9/11.

This is the bond that we share. It’s why we insist that nothing ever justifies the slaughter of innocent men, women and children. It’s why we’re working together, more closely than ever, to prevent terrorist attacks and to deepen our cooperation even further. And it’s why, as strong and resilient societies, we refuse to live in fear. We will not sacrifice the values and rule of law that defines us, and we will never waver in the defense of our people.

America’s fight against al Qaeda and its terrorist affiliates is why we persevere in Afghanistan, where major development assistance from India has improved the lives of the Afghan people. We’re making progress in our mission to break the Taliban’s momentum and to train Afghan forces so they can take the lead for their security. And while I have made it clear that American forces will begin the transition to Afghan responsibility next summer, I’ve also made it clear that America’s commitment to the Afghan people will endure. The United States will not abandon the people of Afghanistan -— or the region -— to violent extremists who threaten us all.

Our strategy to disrupt and dismantle and defeat al Qaeda and its affiliates has to succeed on both sides of the border. And that’s why we have worked with the Pakistani government to address the threat of terrorist networks in the border region. The Pakistani government increasingly recognizes that these networks are not just a threat outside of Pakistan —- they are a threat to the Pakistani people, as well. They’ve suffered greatly at the hands of violent extremists over the last several years.

And we’ll continue to insist to Pakistan’s leaders that terrorist safe havens within their borders are unacceptable, and that terrorists behind the Mumbai attacks must be brought to justice. (Applause.) We must also recognize that all of us have an interest in both an Afghanistan and a Pakistan that is stable and prosperous and democratic —- and India has an interest in that, as well.

In pursuit of regional security, we will continue to welcome dialogue between India and Pakistan, even as we recognize that disputes between your two countries can only be resolved by the people of your two countries.

More broadly, India and the United States can partner in Asia. Today, the United States is once again playing a leadership role in Asia —- strengthening old alliances; deepening relationships, as we are doing with China; and we’re reengaging with regional organizations like ASEAN and joining the East Asia summit —- organizations in which India is also a partner. Like your neighbors in Southeast Asia, we want India not only to “look East,” we want India to “engage East” —- because it will increase the security and prosperity of all our nations.

As two global leaders, the United States and India can partner for global security —- especially as India serves on the Security Council over the next two years. Indeed, the just and sustainable international order that America seeks includes a United Nations that is efficient, effective, credible and legitimate. That is why I can say today, in the years ahead, I look forward to a reformed United Nations Security Council that includes India as a permanent member. (Applause.)

Now, let me suggest that with increased power comes increased responsibility. The United Nations exists to fulfill its founding ideals of preserving peace and security, promoting global cooperation, and advancing human rights. These are the responsibilities of all nations, but especially those that seek to lead in the 21st century. And so we look forward to working with India —- and other nations that aspire to Security Council membership -— to ensure that the Security Council is effective; that resolutions are implemented, that sanctions are enforced; that we strengthen the international norms which recognize the rights and responsibilities of all nations and all individuals.

This includes our responsibility to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons. Since I took office, the United States has reduced the role of nuclear weapons in our national security strategy, and we’ve agreed with Russia to reduce our own arsenals. We have put preventing nuclear proliferation and nuclear terrorism at the top of our nuclear agenda, and we have strengthened the cornerstone of the global non-proliferation regime, which is the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

Together, the United States and India can pursue our goal of securing the world’s vulnerable nuclear materials. We can make it clear that even as every nation has the right to peaceful nuclear energy, every nation must also meet its international obligations —- and that includes the Islamic Republic of Iran. And together, we can pursue a vision that Indian leaders have espoused since independence —- a world without nuclear weapons. (Applause.)

And this leads me to the final area where our countries can partner —- strengthening the foundations of democratic governance, not only at home but abroad.

In the United States, my administration has worked to make government more open and transparent and accountable to people. Here in India, you’re harnessing technologies to do the same, as I saw yesterday at an expo in Mumbai. Your landmark Right to Information Act is empowering citizens with the ability to get the services to which they’re entitled — (applause) — and to hold officials accountable. Voters can get information about candidates by text message. And you’re delivering education and health care services to rural communities, as I saw yesterday when I joined an e-panchayat with villagers in Rajasthan.

Now, in a new collaboration on open government, our two countries are going to share our experience, identify what works, and develop the next generation of tools to empower citizens. And in another example of how American and Indian partnership can address global challenges, we’re going to share these innovations with civil society groups and countries around the world. We’re going to show that democracy, more than any other form of government, delivers for the common man —- and woman.

Likewise, when Indians vote, the whole world watches. Thousands of political parties; hundreds of thousands of polling centers; millions of candidates and poll workers — and 700 million voters. There’s nothing like it on the planet. There is so much that countries transitioning to democracy could learn from India’s experience, so much expertise that India can share with the world. And that, too, is what is possible when the world’s largest democracy embraces its role as a global leader.
As the world’s two largest democracies, we must never forget that the price of our own freedom is standing up for the freedom of others. (Applause.) Indians know this, for it is the story of your nation. Before he ever began his struggle for Indian independence, Gandhi stood up for the rights of Indians in South Africa. Just as others, including the United States, supported Indian independence, India championed the self-determination of peoples from Africa to Asia as they, too, broke free from colonialism. (Applause.) And along with the United States, you’ve been a leader in supporting democratic development and civil society groups around the world. And this, too, is part of India’s greatness.

Now, we all understand every country will follow its own path. No one nation has a monopoly on wisdom, and no nation should ever try to impose its values on another. But when peaceful democratic movements are suppressed —- as they have been in Burma, for example — then the democracies of the world cannot remain silent. For it is unacceptable to gun down peaceful protestors and incarcerate political prisoners decade after decade. It is unacceptable to hold the aspirations of an entire people hostage to the greed and paranoia of bankrupt regimes. It is unacceptable to steal elections, as the regime in Burma has done again for all the world to see.

Faced with such gross violations of human rights, it is the responsibility of the international community —- especially leaders like the United States and India —- to condemn it. And if I can be frank, in international fora, India has often shied away from some of these issues. But speaking up for those who cannot do so for themselves is not interfering in the affairs of other countries. It’s not violating the rights of sovereign nations. It is staying true to our democratic principles. It is giving meaning to the human rights that we say are universal. And it sustains the progress that in Asia and around the world has helped turn dictatorships into democracies and ultimately increased our security in the world.

So promoting shared prosperity, preserving peace and security, strengthening democratic governance and human rights — these are the responsibilities of leadership. And as global partners, this is the leadership that the United States and India can offer in the 21st century. Ultimately, though, this cannot be a relationship only between presidents and prime ministers, or in the halls of this Parliament. Ultimately, this must be a partnership between our peoples. (Applause.) So I want to conclude by speaking directly to the people of India who are watching today.

In your lives, you have overcome odds that might have overwhelmed a lesser country. In just decades, you have achieved progress and development that took other nations centuries. You are now assuming your rightful place as a leader among nations. Your parents and grandparents imagined this. Your children and grandchildren will look back on this. But only this generation of Indians can seize the possibilities of the moment.

As you carry on with the hard work ahead, I want every Indian citizen to know: The United States of America will not simply be cheering you on from the sidelines. We will be right there with you, shoulder to shoulder. (Applause.) Because we believe in the promise of India. We believe that the future is what we make it. We believe that no matter who you are or where you come from, every person can fulfill their God-given potential, just as a Dalit like Dr. Ambedkar could lift himself up and pen the words of the constitution that protects the rights of all Indians. (Applause.)

We believe that no matter where you live —- whether a village in Punjab or the bylanes of Chandni Chowk — (laughter) — an old section of Kolkata or a new high-rise in Bangalore — every person deserves the same chance to live in security and dignity, to get an education, to find work, to give their children a better future.

And we believe that when countries and cultures put aside old habits and attitudes that keep people apart, when we recognize our common humanity, then we can begin to fulfill these aspirations that we share. It’s a simple lesson contained in that collection of stories which has guided Indians for centuries —- the Panchtantra. And it’s the spirit of the inscription seen by all who enter this great hall: “That one is mine and the other a stranger is the concept of little minds. But to the large-hearted, the world itself is their family.”

This is the story of India; this is the story of America —- that despite their differences, people can see themselves in one another, and work together and succeed together as one proud nation. And it can be the spirit of partnership between our nations —- that even as we honor the histories which in different times kept us apart, even as we preserve what makes us unique in a globalized world, we can recognize how much we can achieve together.

And if we let this simple concept be our guide, if we pursue the vision I’ve described today —- a global partnership to meet global challenges —- then I have no doubt that future generations —- Indians and Americans —- will live in a world that is more prosperous and more secure and more just because of the bonds that our generation has forged today.

So, thank you, and Jai Hind. (Applause.) And long live the partnership between India and the United States. (Applause.)

END 6:17 P.M. IST

The United States of America is the “wealthiest country in the history of the world”. We hear this repeated so often, it’s almost as if it has become the national slogan. Economists tend to agree that it’s the truth, but that wealth is relative: tens of millions of Americans live in abject poverty, unable to obtain basic sustenance, medical care, adequate education or even basic public safety. One in five children in the United States now live in poverty. Among African American and Hispanic children, the rate is 30 percent.

In some formerly leading industrial states, one in four households is now on food stamps, and unemployment insurance and welfare are now capped and conditioned on expectations that cannot be met given the real-world economics of the places where affected people live. The social assistance system was reformed virtually out of existence in the 1990s, and over the last 12 years, has evolved to offer solutions that only highly educated people with no history of credit problems or public assistance could really qualify for.

Essentially, people who have comfortable lives have engineered, through their political choices, a system in which people who have never had comfort, or opportunity or anything resembling a fair and level playing field, are treated as if their poverty is the result of laziness. This is a misplaced focus on the virtues of independence and free will. We cannot use the virtue of individual liberty to throw our fellow citizens to the proverbial economic wolves.

Yes, anyone does have the freedom to and should have the wherewithal to apply informed free will to make sound choices and lead a productive, self-sustaining life, but the conditions in which such a thing is possible are not always within reach. When a system of economic activity becomes as complex and sophisticated as that of the United States, it is all too easy for hard-working, intelligent, good people to be systemically boxed out of any and all real opportunity. We should guard against that kind of institutionalized hardship cycle.

When a cycle of economic, political and educational degradation, persists long enough, entire communities can find they have no one working to improve them that is simultaneously rooted in the community and empowered by a series of successes and by a network of people who stand on solid economic footing. In such a situation, communities degrade radically, until there are no supermarkets, no banks, no clothing shops, no reliable businesses and normal everyday life cannot function in line with commercial expectations for a prosperous economy.

In that kind of situation, what sort of jobs is one supposed to seek? Whole communities find their local economic stock depleted to the point where they can only look for work in neighboring communities, often having to compete with people not facing the same obstacles they face. Protections that would help them obtain work in such communities have been stripped away and the financial cushion meant to help them retrain and take advantage of opportunities has been cut off.

The United States now faces the disturbing contradiction of being the world’s richest country, blessed with an extreme surplus of food, clothing and property, yet being unable to provide affordable housing and food to a very large segment of the population. In 2009, one in seven Americans, 14.3% of the population, was living in poverty, according to official government numbers.

That’s 44 million Americans living in poverty.That’s the entire population of Spain. Of 224 nations on Earth, 194 of them have populations smaller than the number of Americans living in poverty. There are more people living in poverty in the United States than in the Sudan. And poverty is not just a temporary gig: it’s a spiral of factors that close in and make escape all the more difficult, despite the lavish opportunity available to others within the same society.

When a family is in those circumstances, the most likely scenario is that there is not enough money to pay for enough food for everyone to thrive. When public assistance is cut off, there is no solid economic footing on which any member of that family can stand to make a move upward. Upward mobility is supposed to be the “American dream” —anyone can build a castle for his or her family, if only they work hard enough—, but the United States has fallen behind Denmark, Australia, Norway, Finland, Canada, Sweden, Germany and Spain, in social mobility.

The new report [pdf] from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) finds the United States falling behind other leading industrial democracies, as access to quality basic public schooling and higher levels of education is put out of reach of more and more people. Deep cuts in social spending, spurred by massive, unfunded tax cuts in 2001 and 2003, have put unprecedented stress on public school budgets, causing property taxes to rise and playing havoc with crucial programs that cultivate a more dynamic, upwardly mobile workforce.

France, Italy, the United Kingdom and the United States were singled out as four developed nations where the socio-economic status of fathers closely determines the opportunities available to children. The report also finds that “Inequalities in secondary education are likely to translate into inequalities in tertiary education and subsequent wage inequality.” (OECD, p. 5) In other words, if the quality of high school education is vastly disparate, access to the empowering environment of a top-level university education will be greatly diminished for those with a less advanced high school experience.

Since 2008, states and municipalities have been aggressively cutting the funds available for public education. California’s budget crisis bodes very ill for its once vibrant network of cutting edge public schools, and has caused its lauded research universities to turn to private funding to expand their endowments. In New Jersey, cuts have been so deep, even individual schools in rural Cape May saw 7-figure cuts to their annual budget, causing layoffs and reducing the resources available to students.

If not for a $100 million challenge grant from Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, many outside observers believed Newark’s failing school system was headed for financial ruin and possible institutional collapse. Chronic underfunding and a property-tax-based system of public school funding put Newark in a kind of razor’s edge circular logic of failure and penalty, undermining students’ chances and degrading the local community.

The failing school system was in such dire straits, it was under state control (a condition in municipal-control New Jersey that means “bring of disaster”) for 15 years. Now, Zuckerberg’s grant will allow Republican governor Chris Christie (responsible for crippling cuts elsewhere) and Democratic mayor Corey Booker to give control back to the city, with Booker’s office taking on the responsibility for finding $100 million in matching donations and administering a wholesale revival of the district’s schools.

Funding matters. And education matters. The philosopher Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam, speaking of his passion for Greek classics, is credited with saying “When I get a little money I buy books; and if any is left I buy food and clothes.” But in the United States, fiscal pressures lead politicians to toss funding for books, schools and teachers, to the wind, even as they decry the cost of social assistance such as food stamps and welfare (clothes and shelter).

But it might be that investing in books is precisely what troubled school districts from Newark to Camden to Cape May (all in New Jersey) to Philadelphia to Sacramento need to do. Cutting funding allows politicians to posture about their own short-term “fiscal responsibility”, but that political capital is purchased with the degrading of young people’s and entire communities’ future opportunity and prosperity.

Punitive standardized testing, viewed with concern by many education experts as something of a racket that pads the profits of educational publishers (who create and distribute the tests and sell books designed to help prepare course material related to them), has nudged public education away from the paradigm wherein every innocent child has the right to a complete and thorough top-quality education, which also serves our interest as a society by yielding more well-rounded, dynamic thinking citizens, to a cut costs, punish-to-improve mentality.

But a student that tests well in science in 3rd grade might see his or her future career limited to low-paying vocational work that requires mechanical understanding, if he is never exposed to any creative fields that work on the intellectual centers of the brain, and a 3rd grader who tests not very far above average in basic science, but excels at playing the cello, painting and gymnastics, might have a better chance of being able to recognize the potential of a career in astrophysics, and be better prepared for it.

If we are not upwardly mobile, we are not as free as we pretend to be. If we leave 44 million of our fellow citizens behind, without so much as a flutter of the eye or a downward curl of the lip, our republic is not as committed to democratic principles as we say it is. We are the republic, every one of us, and if the inner-city child in a single-family home that owns no property can’t get her hands on a book to develop her own abilities, we are less free, and if the Appalachian child, living with three generations of his family cannot develop writing and IT skills, we are less free, every one of us.

Right now, one in seven American citizens is living in poverty. If you’re not the one, then one in six of those around you is. And if you can safely say “not so in my backyard”, then you are living a segregated life where everybody’s liberty and life experience, including your own, is degraded. One in seven of us is living in poverty. One in American children are living in poverty. One in three Hispanic or African American children are living in poverty.

In the eight years from 2001 through 2008, household median income fell by $2,000. Our economy collapsed in 2008, because our banking system was operating on the assumption we were all getting richer, when in fact, most of us were getting poorer, even as basic expenses, and interest rates, healthcare and transport costs, steadily rose, eroding our individual liberty to live as we would choose.

The road to real reform is long and complicated. It will require tough choices. But those choices might have to be something a little more selfless than “cut the budget for my neighbors’ kids’ school”. It may have to be: “if I vote you in, I want you to do whatever it takes to make sure our schools work, and our kids have a future, and our neighbors’ kids and their neighbors’ kids”.

It might have to be we take seriously the lessons of thinkers as diverse as Thomas Hobbes and Martin Luther King, Jr., Adam Smith and John Maynard Keynes, John Dewey and Thomas Jefferson: if even one among us is boxed out of a full, self-empowered and prosperous life, excluded from the generosity of human intellectual history and real-time human ingenuity, then we are all diminished, and our freedoms are hollowed out, and our republic is in jeopardy.

While the Great Recession, or its lagging statistical wake, rattles on, we need to make sure that no one who lives in this society is treated as less than fully human, that no one is denied food or shelter or the right to self-improvement or genuine opportunity. We need to make sure there are no hungry children and no school closings based on ideological bias or unstudied experimentation. We need to take seriously that every single thing we do is building our future republic: do we want to slide toward an anti-democracy, or empower every citizen to help shape a better, freer future?

TheHotSpring.net :: Buckminster Fuller was one of the 20th century’s most visionary architects, whose philosophy of socially responsible planning and design has influenced cutting-edge technology research and public policy the world over, through the UN’s development programs and pioneering entrepreneurship aimed at lifting billions out of poverty. His vision was, in his own words, “To make the world work for 100% of humanity in the shortest possible time through spontaneous cooperation without ecological offense or the disadvantage of anyone.”

So Buckminster Fuller made it his mission as thinker and designer to aim for a new paradigm in the use of technology, wherein the ancient and medieval assumption that the world could only provide for 1 in every 100 people to live comfortably could be discarded by the self-evident power of more advanced technology and economic balance, in which 100% of people could live in comfort, freedom and dignity. Metropolis magazine has called the prize “socially responsible design’s highest award”.

According to the Buckminster Fuller Institute website:

The Buckminster Fuller Challenge is an annual international design Challenge awarding $100,000 to support the development and implementation of a strategy that has significant potential to solve humanity’s most pressing problems. It attracts bold, visionary, tangible initiatives focused on a well-defined need of critical importance. Winning solutions are regionally specific yet globally applicable and present a truly comprehensive, anticipatory, integrated approach to solving the world’s complex problems.

The complexity of Fuller’s vision is daunting, because it entails as a foundational principle finding a way to transcend the more primitive tendencies of human socio-political organization which lead us to believe that we can only gain by displacing our costs to terrain inhabited by others. But the embrace of constructive complexity is part of what makes Fuller’s vision so relevant and so important today. The U.S., for instance, must find a way to not only reduce its dependency on “foreign oil”, but in doing so must realize that there is no genuine economic resilience gained by simply causing poorer societies to carry the environmental costs of our carbon-based economy.

So there is a deep optimism, firmly rooted in reason and in scientific imagination, that guides the work of those who seek to carry out Fuller’s vision, by which humanity can only achieve long-term sustainability by also doing something like achieving the ideal. The “challenge” is very much the same challenge Fuller put to himself, and which he demanded all people everywhere rise to comprehend and to pursue. The prize given in his name is a way of driving that optimistic approach to problem-solving forward.

This year’s winner, Operation Hope, describes its function as demonstrating “how to reverse desertification of the world’s savannas and grasslands, thereby contributing enormously to mitigating climate change, biomass burning, drought, flood, drying of rivers and underground waters, disappearing wildlife, massive poverty, social breakdown, violence and genocide”. Solving multiple problems related to a complex and evolving crisis situation is key to why Operation Hope was able to win this year’s Fuller Challenge prize.

To submit ideas for 2011, applicants are asked to

Please choose two of the following issues your entry primarily addresses:

communication and media
community and social systems
economy and livelihood
education
energy
environmental health
food systems
human health
human rights
materials and resources
shelter and built environment
transportation
water

And to answer nine questions such as: “How does your strategy and approach respond creatively and comprehensively to key social, cultural, economic, ecological, and technological issues which shape the condition you are seeking to transform? Why is your strategy a breakthrough and what makes it a preferred state model? (300 words)*”

For more, or to apply or recommend an applicant, click here

Sustainable security is a paradigm shift in foreign policy, economic and defense planning: it entails considering that not only diplomatic relations and military preparedness or alliances, but the full spectrum of connections between our society and the world abroad, determine the degree to which our future security and prosperity can be reasonably guaranteed.

Practices and relations that promote insecurity of the food supply in remote areas of foreign nations, or which drive unstable nations like Yemen toward total persistent clean water scarcity —the total collapse of the fresh water supply— pose a serious and measurable threat to both security and economic stability back home.

The US Department of Defense has recognized this, specifically calling for concerted national action to combat emissions-induced climate destabilization and to promote the protection of ecological systems across the world, as a matter of promoting stability and human prosperity, in order to prevent a domino effect of failing states from destabilizing the global political sphere.

Share ideas here for how to promote sustainable security, including cases where sustainability thinking is creating a framework for sustainable food, water, political and economic security…

• Join the discussion now on The Hot Spring Network

Earth Day 2010 finds our world, in many ways, at a moment of crucial historical importance, on the issue of climate destabilization and environmental stewardship. The combined effects of major scientific advances, which have brought a wealth of hard evidence, the global campaign to raise awareness, and the deteriorating conditions of the carbon fuel sector’s relationship with consumers’ interest, now mean awareness of the urgent need to achieve a more sustainable global economic infrastructure has spread rapidly.

But consciousness is only part of the process: achieving meaningful action will likely be more arduous and more elusive an undertaking, and the entire environmental responsibility movement is now facing a multi-hundreds-of-millions-of-dollar campaign by interested parties aiming to smear the entire field of climate science, sow doubt and undermine progress.

But the early 21st century has given us the clearest signals we have seen, on a global scale, that stewardship of the natural environment is not just a human ethical imperative but that it requires our coming to understand and work together with natural systems, to protect the natural resources and services that provide us with a base of incalculable value for sustaining our civilization and our species. In 2010, climate policy is moving forward in historic ways, and the United States is now coming to grips with the opportunity/obligation to serve as a global leader in responsible energy, development, and climate policy.

2010 will also be remembered as the year when the first all-solar-powered plane took flight, and when the most advanced electric vehicles (EV) to date became available to the consumer market. The Solar Impulse prototype plane cannot carry a substantial passenger load just yet, but it is the major first step on the road to a carbon-free transport future. Tesla’s and Fisker’s stunning inaugural EV models remain too expensive for most consumers, but as the infrastructure, the battery technology and the energy efficiency rapidly advance, they will likely set the standard for 21st century automotive transport.

The Chevy Volt and the Nissan Leaf will also take the EV model to a new level, allowing a far wider range of consumers to really benefit from the option to move away from carbon-only transport fuel, and drive a paradigm shift in fuel-sourcing, clean energy and fuel-efficiency standards. Building the green economy has become an integral part of long-term economic policy in the US and the EU, but also across Asia, the Pacific and deep into Africa.

How effectively environmentally sustainable advances are put into practice, and across how wide a scope, will determine whether we are able to stave off some of the worst effects of comprehensive climate destabilization over the next 100 to 200 years. Even as major cities across the world seek to promote clean-fueled public transport and daily bicycle use, coal-fired power plants are expanding their number at an historic pace, in China and India, and governments are increasingly looking at nuclear energy (far from environmentally neutral or 100% “safe”) as the most powerful alternative to slow this process.

In the US, there is mounting grassroots pressure on the White House and Congress, both controlled by progressive, environmentally conscious Democrats, to make more committed, more aggressive plans for a comprehensive shift away from high-intensity carbon-polluting fuel sources, like coal and petroleum. But sustainability requires astute attention to detail on a range of issues far beyond energy and fuel use: sustainable agriculture, water use, even genetic science policy, all relate to the long-term sustainability quotient of any given nation’s overall policy framework.

The International Museum of Women, an online art gallery, which aims to foster dialogue and promote new educational directions for women and in relation to issues of women’s rights and opportunity, is hosting an exhibit called ‘Ecomomica‘, which explores the role women play in the evolving global economy.

The exhibit explores whether the global economic crisis has in fact created opportunities for women, the question of whether food is a basic human right and how scarcity affects women and what women do to counter it, whether women might be “paying for China’s economic prosperity with their bodies”, the dynamics of leadership and power, and how women may be changing the Arab and Islamic world.

The exhibit’s themes also touch on women’s access to capital, through traditional banking and more innovative micro-lending programs, the practice of linking credit to education and healthcare, which helps to create personal security and future opportunity, and the effect of debt inherited by women from family or deceased husbands and how banking failures in the west have affected communities.

Also of real importance is the response of women around the world to mounting economic pressures: in many communities across the world, women have begun to organize in order to help ensure their families or communities are protected against some of the more severe risks of a global marketplace for goods and services.

• Visit the exhibit at IMOW.org
• Or join our discussion on the Hot Spring Network

Continuing our series on the evolutions that can be expected over the coming decade, we look at new directions in particle physics, media technologies that are enabling not only greater freedom, but a new communicative paradigm which will, in part, help steer us to the great discoveries of this moment in history, and a vital new understanding of global economic patterns, which will revolutionize the way governments around the world plan for domestic spending and trade policy.

Particle Physics

The Large Hadron Collider at CERN —Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire—, outside of Geneva near the French-Swiss border, is the world’s most powerful particle accelerator, the most complex machine ever created, and designed to smash subatomic particles together at rates of speed high enough to mimic the kind of physics that existed nanoseconds after the Big Bang, from which our universe is believed to have emerged.

The big game is the Higgs boson, a particle that is theorized to lend mass to all other particles, and which possibly exists only briefly for this purpose. The Higgs boson, also popularly known as the “God particle”, for its capacity to generate mass for other particles, has never been observed. The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is believed to be powerful enough to actually generate, and record information about the behavior of, the elusive Higgs boson.

This breakthrough would confirm vital aspects of the cosmological model of supersymmetry and bring together, for the first time in the history of human science, a comprehensive model of the known universe. Another elusive gap in the standard model —which integrates Einstein’s theory of relativity with the advanced discoveries of quantum physics— that could be tested and demonstrated by the LHC, is quantum gravity.

In December, the LHC achieved a world record for high-energy particle acceleration, reaching 2.36 trillion electron volts (TeV). That threshold moves the LHC closer than any other experiment in human history to being able to reproduce and observe conditions similar to those that would have existed nano-seconds after the Big Bang, when key elements of the physical dynamics of our universe were brought into being and set in motion.

It is also believed the Higgs boson gives rise to dark matter, the theoretical substance, which contains the majority of the mass in the universe and which is clustered around galaxies. Discovering the physics of that process and possibly observing the early physics of the birth of star systems, galaxies and star-forming regions, could help to reorganize our understanding of matter, energy and the universe itself, in ways as yet unprecedented in the history of science.

Media Freedom & Decentralization

The coming decade is already poised to see major breakthroughs in low-energy, high-capacity integrated communications technologies. The complex computational technology that goes into encrypting, sending, decrypting and storing, digitized messages, including text, voice, imagery and video, is increasingly light-weight, efficient and inexpensive. Handheld phones are increasingly powerful and integrated into the world wide web. Some now use remote IP connections to provide voice services.

Social networking is the new standard for high-intensity information exchange online, with global conversations building up around issues of major controversy. The post-election demonstrations in Iran this past summer were one example, where information was shared and testimony published and proliferated around the world, despite extreme measures used to curtail open communications within the nation itself. The Copenhagen Conference on climate policy gave rise to the most extensive global policy debate ever seen, from the government level through the grassroots.

Even as economic policy and environmental science drive a more global view of human activity, the rapid expansion of dispersed information-sharing technologies and the world wide web are helping to create a climate in which a decentralized grassroots conversation emerges around any issue of major import, stripping political leaders of centralized power and requiring them to respond to more diverse views from a more informed public.

The key paradigm-shift involved in the decentralized information-freedom revolution is the decentralized aspect of it. Individuals can join a wide array of networks, for varying purposes, in order to build up and maintain significant relationships in their personal and professional lives. Deprivation of resources within borders can be alleviated through those relationships, and vital information about political leadership, public controversies or events, can be delivered from sources outside the country who also have sources within the country.

Global Consumer Protection

The financial crisis of 2008 occurred at a uniquely pivotal moment in economic history. As the failings of the “globalization” process reached critical mass —a severe widening of the gap between rich and poor, the undermining of labor rights across the world, and perilous lack of transparency and provenance for tracking money flows—, massive systemic manipulations in the financial world were revealed, as trillions of dollars in reported “wealth” evaporated almost overnight.

An integrated global fabric of economic activity and banking relations meant the freeze in lending in the US and other wealthy nations would serve as a contagion of economic stagnation in poorer nations. A global response was needed, and in April, Pres. Obama succeeded in persuading the G20 nations to agree to a global financial rescue process. The IMF would create a $500 billion fund, with $100 billion put up by the United States, over several years, to ensure malfeasance or a risky economic climate would not lead to a contagion of banking collapses around the world.

That agreement was one of the most important economic achievements of 2009, because it allowed two important things to happen: 1) there would be a means of rescuing banking systems on the verge of collapse, around the world, to prevent a deepening of the global financial crisis; and 2) nations that have never had solid records of financial transparency would be incentivized to sign up to a new regime of banking transparency and financial ethics, further shoring up the global financial system against potential abuses.

Issues related to the security of fresh water resources, the human food supply and climate stability, have led to a significant increase in overall international economic negotiation. The virtues of pragmatic shared-interest negotiations have become apparent, and economic incentivization is now part of many crisis-level negotiations. The crisis regarding Iran’s nuclear program, for instance, involves a triangular proposal that would allow Iran’s enrichment process to involve both Russia and France, providing economic benefits to all three nations, but denying Tehran the capacity to develop nuclear weapons.

Job creation is increasingly dependent on global flows of financial and natural resources. China’s enormous consumption of mineral resources has built up its economic clout, and lowered the cost of its massive nationwide industrialization and construction process, but it has also deprived other nations, as well as multinational conglomerate corporations, of the ability to do business in a dependable way trading certain mineral resources, like copper and iron ore.

China is consuming cropland in Africa, in an effort to provide for the basic sustenance of its people, and world grain reserves are being depleted in line with the depletion of fossil aquifers around the planet. These patterns of global economic impact are more than just wave trends; they are part of a new way of negotiating for the sustained prosperity of local populations. The state of California, for instance, the world’s 5th largest economy, negotiates parallel agreements, not waiting for the US to make trade deals to help shore up the California economy.

But consumer protection is the missing component that has made globalization a less flexible process, too heavily oriented toward guaranteed windfalls for big investors. The 2008 global financial crisis, rooted in financial abuses, a property-price inflation bubble and the credit markets, made clear this shortcoming of global economic policy. Transparency is one of the responses, but global consumer protection is another.

It is now likely that over the next decade, negotiations to provide for consumer protection across borders, and to ensure consumers have the ability to distinguish between businesses that negotiate fairly with workers and those that use sweatshops and abusive labor conditions to pad their profits. Improvements to global economic ethics will come from enhanced consumer protection guarantees and a more global awareness of economic activity.

Conclusion

These are just nine fronts on which major paradigm-shifts are either already underway or are likely to occur in the coming decade. The details of each of these nine areas of focus provide extensive room for overlap, and touch on literally thousands of other details of personal quality of life, political and economic stability and human potential.

One of the most critical, and perhaps underreported, aspects of the social networking revolution, is the technological capability of spontaneous alliances of thoughtful individuals to locate information, fashion reports and instigate a culture of vigilance, on virtually any issue, at any time.

There are major political and economic implications tied to this trend, and local and international institutions and governments of nation states, will have to think ahead about how to integrate genuine ethical protections into the fast-changing environment of global policy. New media connectivity and decentralized civic infrastructure have allowed for a kind of de-formalization of policy-shaping events and communications between local communities and world leaders.

There is a “bubbling-up” effect that takes place, where large numbers of people can quickly band together to act as conscience to the broader world and exert pressure on leaders; international development and crisis negotiations will take this into account, as part of a new‘transactional’ cosmology, in which leadership is always under scrutiny and the facts of human life do actually matter.

2nd Decade of the 21st Century: What’s in Store?

1. Denuclearization, Green Tech & Cooperation
2. Gender Equality, Food Security & Counter-extremism
3. Particle Physics, Media Freedom & Global Economics

Because three issues alone will not adequately describe the breakthroughs we will experience in the coming decade, a second installment of the 2nd decade prognosis is necessary. While denuclearization pacts and a verification process for limiting the threat of nuclear weapons is likely to be key to international relations, and the green technology revolution will spur economic development around the world, international cooperation must also be directed toward issues relating to basic resources, like water and the food supply. Gender equality will be key to peacemaking efforts, and counter-extremism will be a leading aspect of collaborative development efforts.

Gender Equality

Why gender equality? Women constitute more than half the world’s population, but in nearly every country in the world, including the US and even the Scandinavian countries, they still experience a disadvantage in earning and advancement in the workplace. It is likely today’s generation of university students will see true equity in many advanced industrial countries, where women’s rights have a long history of progress. But across the developing world, discrimination against women has a very direct impact on quality of life, access to food and other basic resources, and on the ability of a political order to maintain peace.

Women have shown themselves to be integral in efforts to provide micro-lending opportunities to the poor. The Nobel Prize-winning Grameen Bank, in Bangladesh, discovered this early on: women are more reliable in repaying micro-loans and more disciplined in running the localized everyday businesses they are able to finance with such schemes. Closer bonds to children and family, as well as less tendency to expensive vices, are thought to explain this tendency. It is now widely known that women’s role in developing families and communities, as well as in raising children and providing food and shelter, is key to creating an atmosphere of political stability and peace.

The US Department of Defense has taken direct interest in the status of women’s rights around the world, especially in conflict zones, and is collaborating with the Obama administration’s initiative to promote the rights of women and girls. Pres. Obama has established a panel on which every Cabinet-level department head must report on the status of women and girls as relating to their purview. And women’s rights in places like Afghanistan, Pakistan, Burma, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and other key nations, is now a focus of Sec. of State Hillary Rodham Clinton’s assertive “3D diplomacy”: diplomacy, development, defense.

Promoting the rights and the needs of women and girls will help to create a more educated, more civil and cooperative population, and should help to speed development to remote areas where improvements to basic infrastructure and economic cohesion cannot take root without active, sustained participation, and even leadership, on the part of women. More secure family environments and more advanced educational resources should also mean a reduced risk of armed conflict, factionalism and the collapse of basic services. The rights of women and girls are linked to all efforts to prevent or to combat the proliferation of failed states.

Food Security

There are growing risks of a partial or total collapse of the human food supply in corners of every continent. Arable land is being eroded, split up, sold off and industrialized. Desertification is taking increasing amounts of land south of the Sahara and across northwestern China. Glacial reserves of fresh water are being lost in the Himalayas and in the heart of Africa. At least 3 billion people live in regions where access to arable land is under severe threat, given demographic trends.

World grain harvests have failed to meet global demand for several consecutive years, meaning world grain stores are being depleted, prices are being pushed up, and the most fundamental element of economic stability —the availability of affordable nutrients— is under threat. With irrigation schemes expanding rapidly across much of the developing world, the Nile River, the Ganges, the Brahmaputra, and other major rivers upon whose flow of fresh water billions of people depend for their sustenance, are becoming threatened rivers.

The extinction of fresh water systems is fast becoming the single most urgent international resource crisis. Negotiations related to resource scarcity, fresh water depletion and threats to the food supply, are now central to regional economic and military collaboration around the world. Democratic governments and authoritarian regimes alike face the possibility of rising extremism and instability due to the risk of long-term deprivation facing increasing numbers of people within and along their borders.

The politics and economics of the coming decade will be heavily and persistently affected by a wide array of issues relating to the security and stability of the human food supply. There will be increasing pressure to reach binding agreements related to cutting greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, as the effects of climate destabilization more severely impact the global food supply. Neighboring states, like Pakistan, India, Bangladesh and China, or Chad and Sudan, or the US and Mexico, will be faced with opting between mounting hostility or committed collaboration, to secure needed resources.

A paradigm-shift favoring broader international cooperation to help secure and restore resource-generating ecosystems and slow the spread of climate-related environmental degradation should help to move most of these cross-border resource crises in the direction of committed collaboration. Efforts to prevent the collapse of troubled states and impede the spread of armed conflict will be vital to international peace and security and the resilience of increasingly interdependent economic relationships.

Counter-extremism

The 2000s has been a troubled decade, marked by rising economic inequality, expanding scarcity and an explosion of armed conflict around the world. Hate-speech has infiltrated the relationships between nations, with the presidents of Iran and Venezuela referring to the American president as “Satan” or “the Devil” and factionalism and racist violence spreading in tribal regions of many countries, including Sudan, Chad, Somalia, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Yemen, Nigeria and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Militant Islamist factions, more closely linked to political violence than to any of the fundamental teachings of Islam, have sought to exploit widespread suffering and deprivation in many countries, in hopes of driving desperate young people to devote their lives to armed struggle. The killing of innocent people has proliferated across the world, and has been justified by one after another political movement or government, even as the international community seeks to prevent such killing of innocents.

In the United States, the political discourse is increasingly poisoned by radical hate-speech, either thinly veiled or overt, with radical ultra-conservatives calling for armed rebellion, bringing loaded weapons to political rallies and threatening the life of the president. Such extremism is a threat to the civic order and to the peaceful practice of democratic process and enlightened public policy. The security of political systems and of populations around the world depends on efforts to counter and to eradicate violent extremism.

Counter-terrorism is a key tactical tool in armed struggle against militants. But counter-extremism, the sincere effort to heal deep political wounds, eliminate hate and secure educated and open populations against the rise of radical militia, requires an intensely complex process of education, development, and collaborative diplomacy. The deployment of advanced diplomatic resources, including highly trained cultural liaisons and media technologies designed to open traditionally closed societies, will be integrated into standard global diplomatic efforts.

The UN system, including a vast reservoir of talent and informational resources linked to non-governmental organizations (NGO), will likely gain influence, as increasing democratization and the specific goal of countering hate-speech and violent extremism demand both the commitment of sustained human effort and highly informed charitable outreach infrastructure. Counter-extremism will be both a political ethic and a strategic necessity in both the wealthiest and the poorest of the world’s nations.

2nd Decade of the 21st Century: What’s in Store?

1. Denuclearization, Green Tech & Cooperation
2. Gender Equality, Food Security & Counter-extremism
3. Particle Physics, Media Freedom & Global Economics

As ongoing global climate destabilization builds momentum, and fundamental climate-linked environmental processes come apart, we are hearing time and again that melting ice, whether in glaciers or in the Arctic Ocean, is “the canary in the coal mine”. The metaphor is very tempting, indeed, as coal is the most carbon-intensive fuel in use and a major contributing factor to global warming and climate destabilization, but the problem with the metaphor lies in the meaning of the canary being nothing more than an alarm signal. Glaciers are very much more important to human civilization than that.

In fact, melting ice is not just a sign of the underlying problem, and something precious to life that can be corrupted and wiped out by ongoing climate change, it is also one of the fundamental engines of climate-linked disaster, as projected in most scientific models looking at the negative impact of warming. As glacial ice melts, it increases the flood-intensity of river systems downstream, during certain periods, but flooding pushes excess water through, leaving more arid conditions behind. Flooding also erodes riverbeds and surrounding terrain, reducing water absorption capacity.

As melt and erosion build into a cycle of degradation, the result is less fresh water available for farming, less stable riverside communities, and reduced protection against forest depletion. Each of these factors enhances the spiral of environmental degradation that depletes the resources which make vital ecosystem services possible. Without those ecosystem services, like forest-cover which absorbs carbon, stabilizes topsoil, takes up water and shifts precipitation patterns inland and upland, the fertility base and stable landscape civilization depends on are not sustainable.

But glacial melt is also part of the process that links rising temperatures to higher sea levels. When sea ice melts, it contributes to the warming process —as ice is more reflective and therefore less heat absorbing than deep-blue ocean water— but it does not contribute to the rise in sea levels, as the floating ice already displaces water to the same volume. But when glacial ice melts, it releases new water into the global ocean, adding volume and pushing sea levels higher.

Rising sea levels are one of the most severe environmental threats to result from global warming. The most obvious result is the erosion of coastal land. Some small island nations are threatened with total disappearance if global sea levels rise just a couple of meters. Whole populations will have to be relocated, raising serious questions of political sovereignty, democratic rights, and the nature of the link between citizenship and geography. Bilateral treaties are already being negotiated to prepare for such evacuations.

In the developed world, such cases seem rare, and highly exotic, and seaboard erosion tends to be equated with beachgoing and little more. But it is very much more serious than that. Nearly half the world’s population lives on land that is close enough to sea level to be under threat with just a couple of meters’ worth of sea-level rise. River systems and watersheds could see tidal flows interrupted and coastal cities could become uninhabitable, without unprecedented water-retention spending and technological development.

But more severe still is the effect such tidal shifts would have on low-lying nations like Bangladesh. With over 162,000,000 people, Bangladesh is the 7th most populous nation in the world, one of the most densely populated, and intensely poor. Enjoying some of the world’s most fertile land, a high percentage of Bangladesh’s arable land lies below sea level, meaning a sea-level rise of just two meters could erase more than 20% of the nation’s land area, most of its best cropland, and displace tens of millions of people.

Already, south Asian countries are dealing with the prospects of catastrophic and unprecedented mass migrations due to climate change. Serious erosion of Bangladesh’s arable land could cause migrations of up to 80 million people, destabilizing border regions and saturating neighboring countries with unmanageable new concentrations of people. Already, the entire Nile River basin is facing such severe chronic water scarcity that migration patterns, food aid requirements and political stability are linked to the water management policies of countries along the river’s length.

Glacial melt is not a canary in the coal mine; it is both a sign of and a driver of human habitat destruction. Without stable climate patterns and resilient ecosystem services, agriculture is not possible and human civilization as we know it cannot be sustained. Where we are seeing accelerated or even severe glacial melt, we are already facing the long-term fallout from climate destabilization linked to carbon emissions and the greenhouse effect. Concerted restorative action is needed to slow or reverse that melting.

Devoting valuable grain crops to fuel production has had an immediate negative impact on the global food supply, reducing supply and pushing prices higher, even as one billion people suffer from chronic hunger. In the United States, high prices and economic crisis mean on in eight are now insufficiently able to access adequate food supplies. But a new generation of crop-based biofuels will be more efficient and need not interfere with the food supply.

Switchgrass can yield 1,000 gallons of fuel per acre planted, while miscanthus (elephant grass) is projected to yield 1,250 gallons per acre. By comparison, corn yield only 400 gallons of ethanol per acre, and even sugarcane only 650. Oil palms produce 610 gallons of biodiesel per acre planted, while coconut yields only 276 gallons per acre. (Figures for ethanol come from the North Carolina Cooperative Extension Service, for biodiesel from the National Sustainable Agriculture Information Service.)

The United States is shifting its biofuel focus to grasses, many of which are native to the prairies where they will be planted —an ecological selling point—, and those new crops are expected to yield a higher return not only per acre planted, but per dollar invested, helping to accelerate to the shift from petroleum-based fuels to biofuels, while reducing costs and expanding a new, native energy sector. And certain biofuel grass crops would be expected to produce 13 times as much energy as petroleum, once optimally refined.

According to Scientific American:

Farmers in Nebraska and the Dakotas brought the U.S. closer to becoming a biofuel economy, planting huge tracts of land for the first time with switchgrass—a native North American perennial grass (Panicum virgatum) that often grows on the borders of cropland naturally—and proving that it can deliver more than five times more energy than it takes to grow it.

Working with the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), the farmers tracked the seed used to establish the plant, fertilizer used to boost its growth, fuel used to farm it, overall rainfall and the amount of grass ultimately harvested for five years on fields ranging from seven to 23 acres in size (three to nine hectares).

Ken Vogel, a plant scientist for the USDA, says switchgrass will produce 540% of the energy required to produce and refine it, while corn-based ethanol produces only 125% of the energy required to produce it. That’s a net energy gain of 440% as compared to 25%, over and above the energy invested. By that measure, in the optimum case, switchgrass can be 5 times as productive in terms of planting and 17 times as efficient in energy production.

The switchgrass fuel-production process is itself not only more efficient than other biofuel sources, but can free up food-oriented crops to continue toward building grain supplies and shoring up the global food supply, helping to keep prices within reason and reduce the economic impact of the fuel-economy transition.

In 2008, Science Daily reported that:

In a biorefinery, switchgrass biomass can be broken down into sugars including glucose and xylose that can be fermented into ethanol similar to corn. Grain from corn and other annual cereal grains, such as sorghum, are now primary sources for ethanol production in the U.S.

In the future, perennial crops, such as switchgrass, as well as crop residues and forestry biomass could be developed as major cellulosic ethanol sources that could potentially displace 30 percent of current U.S. petroleum consumption, Vogel said. Technology to convert biomass into cellulosic ethanol is being developed and is now at the development stage where small commercial scale biorefineries are beginning to be built with scale-up support from the U.S. Department of Energy.

With the DoE and the USDA both helping to fund an aggressive shift to high-efficiency crop-based fuels, designed not to erode the food supply, switchgrass ethanol and biomass-based cellulosic ethanol have the potential to displace petroleum as the fuel-base of choice. Ethanol may not replace petroleum-based fuels across the entire energy economy, but they would be able to meet the combustible fuel demand running parallel to a comprehensive shift toward zero-combustion renewables like wind and solar for electric and battery power.

The World Bank is working with the Chinese government to fund major industrial development in specific areas across Africa, as part of an effort to spur development and create jobs. The effort is needed in order to breathe new life into African cities that are experiencing population explosions, with little new investment to match the demand for resources and jobs. But three key factors raise questions about whether the China plan for African industry will be good for Africa.

Those factors are human rights, environmental protection and the legitimacy of governments associated with the ramping up of Chinese investment. China has been heavily criticized for taking advantage of politically precarious situations to win favorable investment conditions, leading to Chinese money and technology helping to prop up sometimes brutal regimes. It has also been criticized for alleged plans to use Africa as a colonial dumping ground for its own industrial waste.

And the question of human rights is crucial: China has long resisted nearly any effort by the international community to lobby on behalf of downtrodden minorities or dissidents in any country, a policy generally considered to mirror Beijing’s concern that its own internal power would be destabilized if intense international scrutiny of its rights standards were permitted and/or published. China’s censorship and persecution of dissidents is thought to be a threat to already fragile democracies in Africa.

But the Chinese investment goes beyond the admittedly fearsome complexities of those three main points. The depletion of Africa’s resources is already a serious problem for nearly every nation on the continent, and China is very explicitly seeking to expand its own direct exploitation of those already scarce resources. China is facing a severe crisis in food production, with grazing ranges and arable land being reduced dramatically by desertification and industrialization.

As a result, China is seeking to lease or buy land in countries in several African countries, including Zambia and Mozambique, as well as Russia, the Philippines, Australia, Myanmar, Kazakhstan and Brazil. In the Democratic Republic of Congo —a desperately poor country whose abundance of natural resources has made it the site of a catastrophic regional proxy war in which 5 million lives have been lost— China has secured a lease for 50% more land than the entire nation devotes to growing corn, its staple food, for 66 million of its own people.

What’s more, human-induced climate destabilization is having a more direct impact on Africa than on any other continent, in part due to already unfavorable climate patterns, and so geography, but also due to the inability of governments to adequately fund both sustainable practices and the regulatory regimes necessary to maintain stable conditions for climate-sustainable practices. China is fast catching up to and will likely soon eclipse the United States as the world’s leading emitter of greenhouse gases.

This means Chinese industrial expansion, whether in China or in Africa, poses a direct threat to the environmental, economic and political stability of African societies, and therefore a significant conflict of interest for the African populations whose governments would be negotiating with the World Bank to secure fresh Chinese investment. There are significant reasons for concern about what strings come attached to that investment, like a demand for neglect of environmental concerns or an incentive to slow democratic progress.

In much of Africa, infrastructure is failing or non-existent, with only one in four having regular access to electricity, while one in four also lack access to safe drinking water. This crisis-level situation, across whole regions, helps explain the appeal of China’s investment strategy. But African nations will have to study very closely what the impact of any specific project will be on their local environment, living conditions, political freedoms, and economic dynamism. Standards should be adopted that require both Chinese entities operating or investing in Africa and the local authorities, to meet certain criteria that advance the interests of the population on each of these fronts.

Soil erosion is just one of the many factors of sustained entropy undermining the global agricultural capacity, and by extension the global food supply. Desertification affecting sub-Saharan Africa, including the expansion of the indomitable Sahara, and across northwestern China, poses a very real threat to cropland feeding hundreds of millions of people. A farm sustainability corps could help deliver resources, know-how and restorative and sustainable soil conservation practices to the most affected areas.

A coordinated volunteer corps —backed by massive funding from wealthy nations and in association with the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and World Food Programme (WFP)— bringing together NGOs, engineers, scientists, farming experts, suppliers and policy-makers, would have the ability to help restore sustainable farming methods, including protections against soil degradation and topsoil erosion. It would also help protect against the risks of monoculture, over-pumping of aquifers and deforestation that contributes to the breakdown of key ecosystem services necessary for productive, sustainable agriculture.

The project will require not only soil conservation techniques but also large-scale efforts to restore natural systems that help prevent excessive flooding, runoff, and wind erosion, like mountainside forest cover and healthy river-fed ecosystems. When China saw deforestation contributing to the catastrophic Yangtze River flooding that caused $30 billion worth of damage to an area inhabited by hundreds of millions of people, the government banned tree-cutting throughout the Yangtze River basin, valuing standing trees at 3 times the value of cut trees.

The standing trees, with their collective effect of providing forest cover and the thirsty soil where they are rooted, provide a complex natural “service” that is hugely expensive to replace technologically, and virtually impossible to do in as effective, subtle and flexible a way as nature does it: halting rampant runoff and keeping topsoil more or less in place, even amid heavy flooding. The problem has been seen in various nations where deforestation led to catastrophic flooding.

South Korea has labored seriously to reforest much of its once barren countryside, helping to restore both fertility to its soil and rainwater runoff protection to its hill country and the low-lying areas below. Haiti’s near total deforestation has led to a situation where hurricanes almost automatically cause flooding, mudslides and numerous deaths that could be avoided were there forest cover in the mountains above the floodplains.

The Philippines was forced to grapple with the same problem, when monsoon rains not only flooded dozens of villages, but caused catastrophic landslides, killing hundreds. The president of the Philippines, Gloria Macapagal Arroyo declared an indefinite moratorium on illegal logging, blaming the practice for the landslides and the high number of deaths.

Such indirect relationships between unsustainable resource exploitation and the erosion of arable land are key to assessing and ensuring the sustainability of farming practices. Each of the natural services related to preserving and enriching the depth, stability and fertility of topsoil, must be cultivated and cared for. How best to organize international aid and efforts to spread best-practices is one of the ongoing problems in agricultural stewardship, and a substantial international volunteer corps, with a coordinated strategy for collaboration can help do it.

Further research, and a broad evaluation of the specific fiscal and commercial pitfalls facing the most affected countries. Zimbabwe, for instance, needs to get a hold on rampant monetary inflation, flawed and degraded irrigation, and soil fertility depletion. Nigeria needs aggressive efforts to reforest the north of the country to protect against the advance of the Sahara from the north.

Nearly the entire Nile River basin needs to work against political unrest and the collapse of public services, which are hampering efforts to manage the distribution of the river’s resources, promoting the piracy of agricultural goods and the destabilization of agricultural holdings and distribution systems that guarantee the food supply. Despite the massive volume of the Nile and its tributaries, every nation along its length is experiencing either intermittent or chronic severe drought, and the river itself is in danger of failing to reach the Mediterranean.

An initial proposal for the farm sustainability corps would do well to fit the following criteria:

• provide funds, knowhow and materials, for diversification of crop varieties — i.e., open seed banks and reduce the leverage of agribusiness over farmers’ ability to cultivate, rotate, plan and repeat their harvest;
• deploy engineers and farming experts to targeted affected areas, to work on fast-paced restoration and ecological maintenance plans;
• introduce sustainable, high-productivity irrigation systems that help to prevent aquifer depletion or the degradation of river systems;
• build resilience into unique local ecosystems and natural supports that provide for agricultural stability and productive capacity;
• scale back use of chemicals and genetically modified (GM) crops, while introducing new varieties, more efficient crop rotation, better de-pesting practices to increase yields without degrading environment;
• help to ensure that erosion-inducing practices are minimized or eliminated;
• institute aggressive restoration practices (like reforestation) in highly eroded areas, to prevent further loss of arable land…

The UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and World Food Programme (WFP), along with governmental agencies like the United States’ Department of Agriculture (USDA), the Peace Corps and USAID, as well as numerous investigatory bodies and NGOs —like the Clinton Global Initiative and Oxfam—, are working to achieve many of these goals in countries across the world. But a specifically chartered farming sustainability corps would be able to focus all its efforts on the complex array of factors that affect agricultural sustainability and the retention or erosion of related resources.

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The global food supply is facing major security challenges, as warming global average temperatures and the destabilization of climate patterns and natural services undermine dependable agricultural cycles and threaten resources. The food supply is the most direct and visible connection between the breakdown of global climate systems and human health and wellbeing, but not the only link. The possible collapse of a major part of the human food supply means the collapse of agriculture, i.e. the breakdown of the human habitat.

Habitat is something we tend to associate with non-human animal life. Most species are evolved to function in highly specialized habitats, and complications common in neighboring natural environments can pose a direct threat to the fragile natural systems on whose balance a sustainable habitat depends. Human beings, however, like mountain lions, ants and a number of bird species, have shown near universal adaptability in terms of diverse range of climates. But the human habitat is more than temperature and precipitation: it’s sustainable agriculture.

The breakdown of global climate systems means a much less certain probability of being able to intelligently select good arable land, and little likelihood of being able to expect it will remain so. When agriculture breaks down, human civilization itself is under threat. Chronic food scarcity logically provokes mass migration, armed conflict, the scrambling of political borders and political systems, something very different from what we expect of the organized structures of human society.

But long before we need to talk about the total collapse of global human civilization, we can talk very really and very much in the present, about the direct and immediate threat to food supplies on which hundreds of millions depend for sustenance. As the Himalayan glaciers retreat, they first create untimely excessive flooding, then prolonged drought, draining entire river systems and threatening all of southeast Asia with chronic drought.

Rising sea levels then reclaim low-lying land from humanity, putting as much as 20% of Bangladesh’s land-area at risk over the next few decades. The resulting loss of cropland could deprive up to 2 billion people of a sustainable, affordable supply of life-sustaining nutrients. And the lesson of Hurricane Katrina must be taken into account: deny human beings the basic needs to sustain life —like food, water, shelter and basic communal security— and the normal order of society quickly breaks down.

The collapse of specific river systems and the cropland they feed, coupled with the disappearance of some of the most fertile land in Asia under the waves, will cause a mass migration of unprecedented proportions. Demographers and economists speculate the effect could make political borders throughout the region virtually meaningless for an indefinite period of time, as hundreds of millions seek shelter and sustenance.

For most of the last decade, the world stores of surplus grain have been depleted, as demand far outstrips supply, and major grain producers like China have gone from being vital net exporters to significant net importers of grain. The situation has been gravely exacerbated by the global financial crisis and the paralyzation of credit across the world.

Writing for Nigeria’s Daily Champion newspaper, Chima Obbuji reports:

Amid global concern over food insecurity situation, which continues to impose serious threat for humanity, the world leaders have designed a summit to stem the tide of the insecurity. With food prices remaining stubbornly high in developing countries, the number of people suffering from hunger has been growing relentlessly in recent years.

The global economic crisis is aggravating the situation by affecting jobs and deepening poverty. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) has estimated that the number of hungry people could increase by more than 100 million in 2009 and will surpass the one billion mark.

With chronic shortages of safe drinking water on the rise, and more than one-third of the world’s population lacking dependable access to safe drinking water, there are concerns the crisis in food security could begin to spiral. If water supplies continue to be depleted, and warming trends continue to rob the world of arable land and reliable annual harvests, the food crisis could become a global economic catastrophe.

The FAO estimates that 923 million people around the world suffered persistent hunger due to extreme poverty during 2007, while a further two billion slip in and out of chronic hunger due to less severe, but persistent poverty. In total, more than half the world’s population could experience some period of food shortage this year. Even in the United States, the most agriculturally productive nation in history, often called “breadbasket to the world”, one in eight are going hungry.

World grain stocks are now at their lowest level in thirty years. The human population now consumes more food than farmers can produce. Sea-borne food like fish are now produced primarily by way of industrial aquaculture, with oceanic fisheries across the world in collapse. Europe has had to mandate a freeze on fishing for certain species in the Mediterranean and the Atlantic, in hopes the natural fish stocks can replenish themselves.

The rate of increase in farming productivity by way of hybridization and other growing techniques or chemical treatments has slowed, so the hugely successful “green revolution” of the 1960s, which deployed new strains of rice, wheat and maize, to stave of famine and save hundreds of millions of lives across India, is unlikely to be repeated. Genetic modification may pose dangers to both human health, to the long-term sustainability of specific crop varieties, and to ecosystems verging on the land where GM seeds are planted.

Environmental factors that erode the supply of productive arable land and deplete natural resources like fresh water, fertile soil and specific species of animal life —like bees that pollinate crops—, are making the global food supply less sustainable. That mounting insecurity in the food supply is fast becoming the most immediate and comprehensive challenge facing nations around the world, and so will be instrumental in deciding the approach to climate danger response that will emerge from Copenhagen.

The government of Ethiopia has issued an emergency appeal for food aid to prevent 6.2 million people from falling into chronic hunger. The collapse of harvests and prolonged severe drought conditions has made it near impossible for Ethiopia to provide food for its surging population. The new aid plea has international aid organizations and financial institutions scrambling to work out the real human need and arrange assistance.

Allegations of political corruption and criticism for Ethiopia’s heavy spending on an extensive military build-up and operations around the region have been widespread since the aid request, but aid agencies and international donors have been adamant that the victims of famine cannot be victimized again by being denied life-saving food aid for political reasons.

The World Bank has approved $480 million in emergency aid, a $350 million aid package and a $130 million credit to help expand assistance to the millions in need, through a food-for-work safety net program. The aid package is intended to help Ethiopia cope with the threat to its people while also providing an incentive for spurring innovation and economic output.

There is widespread suspicion the policies of the government are partly to blame for the chronic food shortages and economic stagnation linked to the famine. Some observers even decry policies of racial and ethnic segregation that have effectively shifted the burden of chronic famine from one part of the country to the rest of the country.

According to Opride:

Now 25 years after [the tragic Ethiopian famine] the tribal junta has managed to institute ethnic apartheid policies to discriminate against the Oromos, Amharas and other Ethiopians. In so doing it shifted the famine from Northern Ethiopia to Central, Southern, Eastern and Western Ethiopia—making Ethiopia yet again the closest thing to hell on Earth.

The Western Countries and International Financial Institutions must stop providing financial, political and above all military aid to the minority ethnic regime of Meles Zenawi in order to end famine and continuing humanitarian catastrophe in Ethiopia.

25 years after rampant hunger killed one million people, Ethiopians remain on the brink of starvation in massive numbers, and there is pressure on Ethiopia to shift its policy and spending priorities, even to demand that extensive military aid be replaced with economic an humanitarian strategies for long term recovery.

Even as momentum gathers for major collaborative climate-linked emissions regulatory policy, aimed at reducing greenhouse-gas emissions like carbon dioxide (CO2), some in industry remain convinced of an outdated theory that assumes emissions reduction must be bad for business. The US Chamber of Commerce (CC), a leading business lobby, is devoting $150 million to fight regulation of carbon emission and prevent a transition to clean energy, and to “kill” much needed healthcare reform.

The CC project is rooted in the theory that only if status quo practices are encouraged and extended can business as we know it thrive. Critics argue such lobbying efforts are, far from market-oriented, in fact part of a quest to establish or maintain a rigged game in which narrow interests can prosper without having to compete, improve or innovate. The result is that one after another major firm, including Apple, Nike, Johnson & Johnson and GE, is walking out of the Chamber of Commerce in protest. Even local chambers of commerce are ending their support for the national organization due top the radicalization of its agenda.

But while some business interests cling to the outdated idea that burning more (carbon-based fuels) means earning more, industry broadly —including major industrial consumers, like the US military— is moving more toward a paradigm shift focused on fuel economy, reduced emissions and sustainability. The US Navy, for instance, is preparing to unveil its first hybrid ship, which is projected to be able to go two additional months before refueling and to power up and mobilize more quickly.

The CEO of the Huntsman chemical company has told the Financial Times the US and EU need to enact aggressive emissions reductions and regulations and raise environmental standards for industrial manufacture. Peter Huntsman also said the world’s two leading economic producers need to ensure that such regulations are enacted in conjunction with global agreements that prevent competitors abroad from cheating such standards in order to compete unfairly.

The United States never ratified the Kyoto Protocol largely as a result of its inability to constrain the expansion of carbon emissions in competitive and rapidly growing developing economies, like China and India. It is expected China, which is already consuming more in raw numbers than the US in some heavy commodities, could soon be the world’s leading emitter of carbon dioxide.

The old standard thinking on this point was that China’s expanding emissions make it ever more competitive as against any wealthier nation that puts environmental issues ahead of raw GDP growth. But this is no longer a viable argument over the long-term. It is increasingly evident that major and compounding advances in clean energy technologies mean the nations that most pervasively and most expeditiously transition from the combustible fuel era to the clean energy future will be the most competitive and resilient.

The glut of combustible fuels on which the present conventional economy depends is not sustainable, and the natural world whose regularity and productive services are the basis of our global civilization cannot absorb its emissions without serious destabilizing side-effects. Harvest-collapse, chronic drought, rivers running dry and mass migration are real effects already evident in many places around the world.

Cynics hav argued that as scarcity becomes more common and good prices soar, demand for fuel will increase and fossil fuels will see their fortunes turning brighter than ever. But, that assumes 1) that fossil fuels are the only game in town; 2) that massive price increases don’t cause a backlash and spur interest in renewable resources, as they have over the last two years; 3) that a ripple effect doesn’t cripple consumer spending ability and undermine the economy so much that we approach another collapse and the bottom falls out in terms of demand.

It must be remembered, for the most part the immense prosperity of oil companies has been consistently dependent on a constant significant global increase in demand for their product, made more lucrative still by massive government subsidies and by a speculative marketplace that unlike most has very direct, though remote, impact on prices everywhere.

Water resource depletion leads not only to chronic scarcity of clean, safe drinking water for increasing numbers of people, but means arable land is harder to cultivate and to maintain. Persistent drought and accelerated desertification (the expansion of deserts into the farmed and/or built environment) are results of water resource depletion.

But the most insidious and threatening long term effect is the erosion of the overall human food supply. With climate destabilization accelerating, arable land increasingly hard to come by, and grain harvests collapsing, the global food supply is under serious threat. Long term political stability, and the defensibility of political borders, is linked to a sustainable food supply.

As Lester Brown notes, in his report “Rethinking Food Production for a World of Eight Billion“:

Farmers are faced with shrinking supplies of irrigation water, a diminishing response to additional fertilizer use, rising temperatures from global warming, the loss of cropland to nonfarm uses, rising fuel costs, and a dwindling backlog of yield-raising technologies. At the same time, they also face fast-growing demand for farm products from the annual addition of 79 million people a year, the desire of some 3 billion people to consume more livestock products, and the millions of motorists turning to crop-based fuels to supplement tightening supplies of gasoline and diesel fuel. Farmers and agronomists are now being thoroughly challenged.

The shrinking backlog of unused agricultural technology and the associated loss of momentum in raising cropland productivity are found worldwide. Between 1950 and 1990, world grain yield per hectare climbed by 2.1 percent a year, ensuring rapid growth in the world grain harvest. From 1990 to 2008, however, it rose only 1.3 percent annually. This is partly because the yield response to the additional application of fertilizer is diminishing and partly because irrigation water is limited.

Best-practice water productivity measures, in activities ranging from farming and industry to infrastructure and personal home and garden use, are central to fostering a climate of cooperation and political security in the emerging culture of global food politics. The vanishing of Saudi Arabia’s grain supply, along with China and India’s massive grain import demand, are part of an established trend that is destabilizing food supplies around the world and driving prices up, even in the most productive regions of the US, Brazil and Europe.

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The field of ecological research and reporting is a part of the basic human urge to engage the world through reason and a quest for understanding. It is not about seizing control of society’s urges and services and limiting the freedom of anyone, but rather about making sure we have the information we need to make the best choices, then advocating for those choices, when inertia and custom stand in the way of better health — for individuals and in the manner in which human individuals respond to their social and natural environments.

Ecology is the study of what surrounds, what encompasses our everyday activities, it is economics that looks to a broader picture that includes all of the resources and services on which the more limited “economy” depends for its very existence. There is a mischaracterization of ecological science as a vague and ideologically motivated quest to control or rein in corporate enterprise or human behavior generally, and that unjust mischaracterization is a distortion promoted by interests that seek to avoid having to acknowledge or live up to any greater responsibility to the social or natural environment — even where those responsibilities are already written into existing law.

In short, ecology is a study of the balance that might or might not exist among natural systems, and so by definition it must take into account human behavior. Efforts to impede the expansion and the dissemination of the facts brought to light through ecological science are attempts to work against the human interest inherent in finding ways to interact sustainably with the natural systems that provide humanity with a climate and a landscape favorable to civilization, and in concert with which civilization has been built.

If we lose touch with that problem of how to balance ecological sustainability with human need and ambition, then we risk forfeiting any future benefit from our present activities to the unwinding of complex and often delicate natural systems that provide the Earth with a certain natural systemic cohesion that allows civilization to exist at all. If we are not good stewards of the natural resources we seek to exploit, the costs of exploitation will be more than we, in our small corner of the natural calculus of energy distribution, can afford.

Arguments against ecological science often tout the notion that “nature finds a way” or “nature is too big to be destroyed by human activity”. This is true, of course; nature will go on. But whether it goes on in a way that allows us to keep exploiting natural resources —which include clean water, stable climate systems, and temperature ranges useful to agriculture, storm protection and construction— as we need to, as a species, is another matter altogether.

Nature’s going on, it’s post-industrial phase, might not be conducive to human civilization as we know it. It might, in fact, require sacrifices on a scale we cannot imagine, with entire river systems disappearing, whole regions giving way to comprehensive desertification, and the acceleration of what is already the 6th great mass extinction known to human science.

The way nature survives might present in human terms the collapse of the global food supply, water shortages on a scale never before seen, wars over water, grain, forest and even air resources, and the migration of tens or even hundreds of millions of people whose biological needs respect no political borders. Each of these scenarios has already begun to unfold on the microcosmic scale, and efforts to prevent their contagion to the global level are among the most complex ongoing negotiations in which governments are now engaged.

Climate destabilization is a process that has been seen before in the Earth’s long history. In the past, the destabilization of global climate systems has been brought about by meteor impact, volcanic eruptions, and other cataclismic events. It is thought that slow-growing systemic phenomena —like over-consumption of plant-life by mega-fauna or the chemical differentiation of oceanic waters due to geological activity, over time— have also played a role in altering global climate patterns.

But in the last 300 years, no single factor has played a greater role in altering fundamental elements of balance and resilience —like the concentration of carbon dioxide (CO2) or ozone (O3) in the atmosphere or the natural elasticity of river systems and the vast ecosystems dependent on them— than human industry. This has been demonstrated by the most advanced scientific measures of chemical composition and variation available in today’s technologies, and it is for that reason that ecological science continually points the way toward more responsible, more sustainable resource-exploitation models.

There is no reason for high-profit businesses, like the multinational petroleum extraction and distribution firms, to take an adversarial posture toward such science, because like all science, ecology helps point the way to what will become the most useful and profitable activities under a new energy-exploitation paradigm. If those firms pay attention, they can capitalize on the work of ecological scientists by building a future that works better, is more efficient and in which high-profit enterprise does not promote the degradation of basic natural services and systems or the cost fallout involved in combatting the effects of climate-destabilizing behavior.

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The UN General Assembly, which brings together every head of government in the world, to offer their country’s position on issues, their country’s demands regarding trade and conflict negotiations, their country’s hopes for a more harmonious world, this year truly grapples with issues of global consensus. Economic recovery, for many parts of the world, will require an unprecedented expansion of women’s rights and sustained attention to responsible environmental stewardship.

Climate change, or global climate destabilization, has come to the fore as the most severe and pervasive security threat of the 21st century. The G20 summit in Pittsburgh later this month will work in part as a prelude to the Copenhagen climate conference to be held in December. The goal is to achieve worldwide consensus on a comprehensive, binding strategy to reduce carbon emissions and to protect against the unwinding of climate patterns that have remained consistent throughout all of recorded human history.

Women’s rights is now being viewed by more nations and by more major international organizations as key to the economic and political stability of fragile nations. The Obama administration, under the leadership of Sec. of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, has made women’s rights a priority and has laid out goals for helping to promote women’s rights through economic development, modernization of educational systems, and democratization of the political processes in nations around the world.

A consistent theme of Sec. Clinton’s travels around Africa this summer was the need to end the out of control violence against women that plagues many African nations, and bring women into the fold of the political process and economic structures. She visited the eastern Kivu region of the Democratic Republic of Congo, where one of the world’s most desperate and protracted civil wars continues to put women in jeopardy of random attacks on a daily basis and where mass rape has been used as a weapon of war.

Her message was clear: the United States does not intend to continue directing aid to regimes that do not combat the extreme conditions of violence and repression in which millions of women find themselves, but aid will be directed toward those policies that are designed to empower and protect women. There will be efforts to persuade China, which strongly backs some of the worst offending nations, like Sudan, to demand better treatment for women.

Pres. Obama has called for a global initiative to move toward the eventual elimination of all nuclear weapons, which he admits may not occur during his lifetime. He and Russian president Dmitry Medvedev have already begun the process to establish a new comprehensive strategic arms reduction treaty (StART). Iran, under intense pressure from the international community to cease uranium enrichment, has also proposed a framework for eliminating all nuclear weapons worldwide.

The nuclear question looms large, and will consume a lot of words in open and back-room negotiations. The UN Security Council can be expected to receive new pressure from western powers to threaten sanctions against Iran if it does not halt uranium enrichment. And the recent announcement of the Obama administration’s plans to scrap Bush-era plans for stationing missiles in Poland is thought to be in part a call on Russia to support sanctions against Iran.

In a recent CNN interview, with Fareed Zakaria, Pres. Medvedev sounded tougher on the Iran question than at any time previous: he said Russia would only ever provide Iran with “defensive” weapons equipment and would neither help Iran develop long-range ICBM nor come to Iran’s defense if it were attacked. He called on the international community to come together to secure peace and prevent conflict in the middle east.

Medvedev also confirmed that he had met in secret with Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu. He said the meeting was kept secret at the Israelis request and that he had “honored the wishes of our partners”. He revealed that in that meeting Netanyahu, who has been under intense pressure from the west to tone down bellicose rhetoric, said Israel had no plans to attack Iran or destroy any of its research facilities, adding that he trusted Israel and hoped new partnerships could be created to prevent further conflict in the region.

Pres. Obama has invited PM Netanyahu and Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas to meet with him to discuss the path to lasting peace, during the UN General Assembly in New York. The two have accepted, setting the stage for what might be breakthrough negotiations on concessions from both sides that could lead to a two-state solution.

As the Wall Street Journal reports:

In a break from the Bush administration, Mr. Obama pressed early in his administration for new, U.S.-brokered talks between the two sides. In another departure, Mr. Obama has ratcheted up pressure on Israel, publicly calling for a total freeze in Jewish settlement construction in the West Bank.

That issue has blocked progress in restarting talks so far. Palestinian negotiators have demanded a total freeze before agreeing to any substantive negotiations. Mr. Netanyahu has refused.

The US and NATO nations may refrain from openly pressing Russia on its interventions in the volatile Caucasus region, but the problem of Georgia and the former Soviet Republics along its borders must be dealt with. Abkhazia has declared independence with Russian diplomatic backing, and Georgia has sought to blockade Abkhazia as a protest against that declaration of independence. There are fears the blockade could lead to another bloody Russian intervention against a state that seeks to join NATO.

There is, however, an opportunity for a new era of cooperation between the Russian Federation and NATO. European leaders have proposed that with the US putting aside missile defense basing plans for Poland, the opportunity may exist to come together and create a unified missile defense system covering all of NATO and the Russian Federation.

But economic empowerment and global financial regulation may turn out to be dominant themes of the General Assembly meetings. The 2008-2009 global economic crisis has shown the vulnerability of poor nations to the unraveling of sometimes delicate international trade pacts and resource flows. The threat from intercontinental climate destabilization could result in the collapse of food supplies to half the world’s population and the migration of hundreds of millions of people, if one year’s monsoon doesn’t materialize.

The empowerment of poorer nations to be capable of competing for internationally trade resources, including food and water, is vital to preventing mass climate migration and the resulting destabilization of nation states in coming years and decades. The beginnings of these negotiations, to prevent protectionist measures and expand the internationally accessible resource base, will be taking place as world leaders meet in New York.

Rights and democracy as such will also be highlighted. The election of 12 June 2009 in Iran has stirred a global firestorm of opinion over what measures might be taken to guarantee transparency and prevent massive fraud engineered by leaders of government. More than 100 nations whose leaders will be in attendance have significant voting rights issues that must be addressed in order to legitimate their electoral processes and improve transparency.

The US will seek to lead on this question, even as dozens of its own states struggle to clarify election process and balloting laws, to ensure manipulation is not possible and guarantee the transparency of upcoming elections. New Jersey might be held up by some foreign states as an example of a state that still won’t guarantee its voters paper proof of their votes, while Venezuela may claim legitimacy on this point, a contrast that is sure to make for contentious negotiations on standards for international voting rights and ballot-counting transparency.

Capitalism is “survival of the fittest”… capitalism is rooted in the idea of merit; everyone should be compensated according to his or her contribution (to the common good?)… capitalism is about the movement of capital; the more it moves, the richer everyone gets… capitalism is an upgraded feudalism, where the capitalist is an overseer of an abstract terrain made up of investments, not of arable lands… capitalism is democracy; the free spirit of an open society requires capitalism to support the liberties of individual citizens, and protect against government overreach… capitalism is virtue… or, capitalism is the absence of virtue…

These are just a few commonly held ideas, not all compatible with one another or with reality as we know it. Depending on point of view, we find ourselves favoring or opposing some aspect of something we call capitalism, with sometimes radical swings in the underlying reasoning of our political philosophy — we being Americans, generally. And across the world, the same questions come up time and again: one nation’s democratic marketplace, rising tide that lifts all boats, is seen from a poorer nation as an upgraded feudalism, a new age of empire.

What about pragmatism? Capitalism is the best way we know, the idea goes, to achieve the best results for the largest number of people, so it is a pragmatist ethic. Or… capitalism is an efficient, “organic” model of wealth distribution: the market distributes wealth “efficiently”, because individual players in a free market make all their own interested choices about where they should send their capital in order to extract the benefits, the goods and services, they seek or require.

This is perhaps the truest statement about the potential virtues of capitalism, or what are widely accepted to be virtues any capitalist system should aim to embody. But, in practice, a system that privileges capital over cause often does so by giving special privileges to those who hold the capital, not to those who seek it, or who are laboring intensely in the harshest conditions to earn a share of it.

Capitalism is the enemy of communism: this idea is almost universally held, but actually, it refers to one of the biggest grey areas in the history of social philosophy. As a matter of social ethics, communism cannot really emerge in its Marxist form, as a philosophical approach to economics, unless it emerges within a capitalist society. Marx specifically says so: communism is not suited to old-style agrarian societies, because only the industrial societies, where democracy and capitalism have taken root, have the kind of civil structures able to reward the actions of collective bargaining organizations.

Hence the violent tendencies of many Marxist factions around the world: even in the US, there was violence during the heyday of 19th-century unionizing, but in the US, a dynamic, open democracy allowed for collective bargaining to achieve nearly all of the major socialist innovations the world has seen (the weekend, the paid vacation, the 40-hour work-week, over-time pay, the end to child labor).

Does this make the US a socialist or a Marxist country? No. It means that in the capitalist system, underpinned by the most experienced modern democratic system, the United States found efficient ways to achieve major social-policy goals of Marxist philosophy, without undermining or uprooting the capitalist system. Several European nations have now followed that example and gone further (Sweden is a commonly used example), but they remain democratic, capitalist societies.

Michael Moore has argued that capitalism is “legalized greed”, a view held by both critics and proponents, rooted in the idea that the most pragmatic approach to economics is to let vice have its purpose, and let self-interest power the mill. This idea is partly about social darwinism, partly about a near cynical approach to human freedom, or if you’re Michael Moore, it’s about the reasons why capitalism needs to be curtailed by democratically determined regulations.

Moore argues that what we now call capitalism needs to be cast aside in exchange for a different kind of market system in which democratic processes allow the citizenry to guide the hand of economic influence. But whether one agrees that capitalism is legalized greed or an organic model of resource allocation, it remains true that it is only as virtuous as those who apply it to the circumstances of human experience.

Capitalism, the same as any -ism, is not a hard-and-fast, unchanging object or species; it is a conceptual realm whose qualities vary as applied. It is what we make of it and only as virtuous or democratic as we shape it to be. Because capitalism, as a tendency, as a philosophical urge, operates among and across the lived realities of a society, it is only as democratic as its interrelationship with those realities.

Capitalism that fosters and cooperates with, protects and serves democratic processes and principles can be democratic in both purpose and in practice, but capitalism that interferes with, obstructs, undermines and abuses democratic processes and principles tends to be undemocratic in both its purpose and its practice.

It is a false choice that would have us choose between capitalism and morality, or between the service of profit and allegiance to the liberties and worth of individual human beings as a socio-economic priority. It is a false choice that asks us to choose between naked laissez-faire capitalism, unfettered by any social conscience and the crushing political bind of a planned economy in which no one is allowed to seek personal gain.

Capitalism is about privileging the flow of capital through society. It works better when those who do not have access to capital are able to come in contact with it, acquire some of it, and capitalize on their own merits, expanding their economic reach. That cycle must, however, be both persistent and pervasive. The freedom to seek personal gain and to innovate must share space with the need to ensure that human dignity is not eroded and free people subject to strategies of indenture.

The pastoral letter on a Catholic approach to economics, Economic Justice for All, makes clear that it is not only unnecessary, but unreasonable, to hand over the navigation of our economic policy to purely profit-driven considerations that ignore ethical accountability, erode community bonds and disrupt the human quality of human existence within our society.

In the preface to the 2006 edition of the pastoral letter, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops writes that:

… the measure of our economy is not only what it produces, but also how it touches human life, whether it protects or undermines the dignity of the human person, and how it promotes the common good.

In order to support and expand on that idea, they then offered five principles that must inspire the direction of major economic policy choices:

• The economy exists to serve the human person, not the other way around.
• Economic life should be shaped by moral principles and ethical norms.
• Economic choices should be measured by whether they enhance or threaten human life, human dignity and human rights.
• A fundamental concern must be support for the family and the well-being of children.
• The moral measure of any economy is how the weakest are faring.

How the weakest are faring… a great and successful market economy must find a way to protect against starvation, deprivation, homelessness, and lack of access to quality medical attention when needed. Indeed, an economy in which the human person is made subservient to the imperatives of an economic machinery of resource allocation is totalitarian and not democratic, though one can imagine plenty of examples where something called ‘capitalism’ has this effect.

To protect the human rights and the human dignity of the individual, a democratic society must establish meaningful checks on the unfettered application of raw power through accumulated wealth. A social conscience must be part of a democratic society’s application of capitalism as an economic paradigm, or the primal urges of the marketplace will allow for distortions of the economic landscape, the rise of monolithic power structures, the blocking of dynamic resource flows, and the erosion of democratic freedoms and quality of life.

For this very reason, the American system has been a brilliant example of a free, democratic society, in which capitalism has fought its fight, but major achievements in the history and advancement of social justice have come, through democratic processes and the free assembly —Constitutionally guaranteed— of free people, demanding that capital not sideline the citizen.

Capitalism is not democracy, though the two can be mutually nourishing. And capitalism is not unfettered economic aggression. It is not imperialism, though it can be used to effect a kind of imperial control of resources and social patterns. It is not an ethos, not a way of measuring whether we are good or bad, right or wrong.

Capitalism is an idea, a way of looking at the priorities of a society, and the diffusion of power throughout a political system. It is a conceptual realm, in which pirates and villains compete with saints and public servants, where control competes with creativity, where concentration of wealth competes with discovery and the opening of new terrain.

The capitalist imperative is not to amass the most wealth imaginable, but to effect the most practical outcome for the most dynamic society possible. This will always be to the benefit of those with the most access to capital, even if their actual wealth is not as high as it might be in a less democratic setting.

In order to achieve that most dynamic society possible, however, virtually nothing is as vital as ensuring that the human individual, at all levels and across the entire range of that society, be as empowered, as capable, as free and as worldly a being as possible. Any one human individual that lacks the skills, the agility, the rights or the freedom, to choose a better, more dynamic and broadly beneficial path, slows the entire process of adaptation and makes the whole system more sluggish, less dynamic, less able.

This is where capitalism and democracy have their most vibrant and nourishing interaction, in their potential to adequately shape the dynamics of markets —for resource distribution, pricing, quality of the human contribution and reach of human mobility— in such a way that the human individual becomes society’s greatest asset, both economically of high value and socio-politically of primary worth and reliability.

No amount of stripping away of individual rights or the terrains of individual liberty will make a capitalist system more vibrant. On the contrary, such measures help to foster the concentration of wealth, but those concentrations have a sclerotic effect on the economy broadly and tend to pressure democratic systems in such a way that they must over-react or give way.

As the “perfect storm” gathers from inchoate, deceptively non-threatening winds, we can look ahead, backward and into the mirror and ask how crisis comes, or why, if it is inevitable, if we might just fall right out of it, as we fell into it. But the answer is simple: human crisis comes from excess, from inordinate ambition, from misplaced aggression, from over-exploitation of resources, each of which generates real and problematic tension across the landscape of human experience.

The Dust Bowl of the 1930s resulted from a misguided atomized over-exploitation of arable land. Ancient Sumerian civilization collapsed entirely because excesses of irrigation coupled with poor planning raised soil salinity to levels toxic to agriculture. At the end of the 20th century, global industrial activity had come to far outstrip the available resources feeding into it, and our global economy had come to depend on increasing demand and increasing output to feed unsustainable rates of increasing growth, across the planet.

Hyper-exploitation is a doctrine: it underpins public policy, government spending, security policy and the philosophical arguments for and against deregulation and the trickle-down theory of economic growth as related to tax policy. It requires that we believe in unstated, unproven modes of natural replenishment; it is a proposition that all things can be tapped, moved, transformed and spent, infinitely, because somehow, the market will set all the right limits and excesses will never be so severe as to ignore the laws of nature.

It is, for this reason, dangerous, because it not only is a doctrine that requires us to use more of the vital resources we require than can be replaced at sustainable levels, it moves us deeper into the vice of living on borrowed time. The result is that we must periodically learn the lesson that borrowed time cannot be financed, that we must pay the full price when it comes due, and our unprecedented resource depletion will leave us, quite simply, without the level of supply required to sustain our standard of living.

Burning finite resources in order to power expensive luxury vehicles or do long-term harm to the natural environment, within which all human activities must occur, by default, is not a generative process and requires heavy-handed protective measures to allow it to compete in a market where better ideas exist. Powering our entire economy without burning anything is possible, but lacking a generative approach that privileges wise resource use over the lust for hyper-exploitation of existing methods, we will not get there.

A generative economics seeks to tap into the more democratic nature of markets, not for the concentration of wealth, but for the dissemination of prosperity. It aims to establish mechanisms for protecting genuine manifestations of conumser-oriented innovation and systems serving the public good —the status of which is itself a major economic driver—, keeping market leaders honest, preventing collusion, corruption, distorted accounting practices and non-generative (i.e. predatory or parasitic) commecial behavior, with the aim of ensuring that the most far-reaching economic trends actually contribute to the resource base, instead of eroding it.

Building the opportunity to exploit each of these resources in a sustainable way, into our overall economic outlook, is a necessary step for bringing American democracy —and humanity generally— into the 21st century. The quality of action engaged by governments will determine not only whether such ideas are workable, but to what degree individual human beings are really free to choose their destiny in a world increasingly driven by mass crises and resources scarcity. The toughest question we will need to answer is: how do we get there?

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The security of the global food supply is deteriorating rapidly, due to a convergence of forces all related to long-gathering crisis-level erosions of human agricultural capital: stocks, resources and prospects. Desertification, water scarcity, massive toxic runoff and oceanic wildlife collapse, are all putting the global food web under unprecedented stress.

Human civilization depends on a static agricultural control over land, water and mineral resources. As patterns of natural services, like wind and water, which help feed into the agricultural services and their hold on the land, shift, those agricultural services are deprived of fundamental resources that cannot be easily replaced or relocated.

At this writing, the food supply is under persistent attack, on a a scale unprecedented in human history, across the world. In the United States, the most agriculturally productive geographically defined political entity in history, massive toxic runoff into river systems has spurred severe algal blooms offshore that are creating oceanic dead zones in the Gulf of Mexico and that are without precedent.

Contaminants ranging from mercury to heavy metals to complex breakdown-resistant polymers are killing ocean life across the Pacific, the world tuna catch has been severely diminished, and the Atlantic cod fishery is suffering one of its most severe shortages in recorded history (the earliest industrial-scale cod-fishery collapse dates back more than a thousands years, when Basque fishermen were forced to travel as far as Greenland in search of live cod).

Haiti, recently described as “the only 4th-world country in the Americas”, is engrossed in persistent internecine conflict and afflicted with the ills attendant to chronic endemic poverty, worsened by scorched-earth deforestation and pervasive soil degradation and erosion. Farming prospects there are scant in productive yield and always dependent on the most fragile balance of social and environmental factors.

In the immediate sub-Saharan savanna belt and the Rift Valley, destabilization of global climate patterns is threatening to break the rhythm of the monsoons that are effectively the only natural defense against the great desert’s southward spread. Goatherds and cattle-drivers have seen their herds nearly wiped out in much of Kenya’s Rift Valley.

Collapse or diversion in the patterns of the African monsoon, especially across this region of east Africa, could limit the amount of water flowing down into the Nile River, and affect already arid countries as far north as the Mediterranean, where the Nile flows out of Egypt into the sea. Glacial runoff in the Himalayas is threatening the water supply to as many as 10 nations that sit downstream from the Gangotri and other key glaciers.

The collapse or shift of monsoon patterns to such heavily populated regions means a very serious threat to the irrigation water supply, and therefore vastly more hostile conditions in which to raise crops for the human food supply. Desertification, salinification and hyper-industrialization are also claiming valuable cropland elsewhere.

China, one of the world’s largest grain producers, is not only now a net-importer of grain —a fact which reduces the available grain supply to the rest of the world and drives up prices—, but is losing much-needed arable land across its north and west to a mounting feedback spiral between industrialization and desertification. The 1.3 billion people in China and the 1.1 billion in India are putting unprecedented pressure on the food resources of a region facing some of the most pervasive challenges to human agriculture.

If nature’s services are optimized to produce a best-case outcome, it is not necessarily an outcome that favors human survival. To a great extent, the massive power of our ideas and our sciences has allowed us to contemplate nature as something that serves us, but we must also build our interests and pursuits into nature’s rhythms, if our interests are to converge at all.

Human intelligence is fundamentally about anti-entropy —figuring out how to make ordered systems work and to last longer, to postpone entropy or protect against it, for as long as possible—, but we have not traditionally focused on preventing the erosion of natural systems by way of human industrial activity.

As the Pittsburgh G20 conference, the UN General Assembly and the Copenhagen climate summit are approaching, serious effort needs to be devoted to crafting not just better policies, but better ideas about policy, to ensure that human activity works to foster a better, more favorable environmental circumstance for human civilization, going forward. Worldwide harvest shortfalls could produce the most devastating socio-economic crisis of our times, with mass migration, resource-based conflict and an escalation in civic breakdown.

Tens of thousands of head of livestock are dying in Kenya, due to one of the worst recorded droughts in the east African nation’s history. The UN is requesting $230 million in aid, and says 4 million people may face hunger if food aid is not delivered. Goatherds report being unable to get their herds to water, having to leave their animals along the way and carry what small amount of water they can back to the dying animals.

In many cases, there are no animals left alive to drink. With croplands drying up and livestock dying off, Kenya’s human population is increasingly likely to face crisis-level food shortages, and severe malnutrition is already on the rise. There are concerns about political stability in the especially hard-hit southeast of the country, as people must migrate in search of work, food, and even water, in ever larger numbers.

Gabrielle Menezes, of the UN World Food Programme, says as many as 1.3 million people are not receiving the food aid they need to weather the drought. That news means that without a significant investment in ramping up aid to Kenya’s remote areas, over 1 million people could soon be facing starvation conditions.

Kenya’s situation is made still worse by the ongoing drought crisis in neighboring Uganda, where up to 2 million people are in need of food aid, and the government has banned the export of certain crops. The Ugandan coffee harvest has been severely diminished by the drought, further tightening the economic power the nation’s people can use to bring food to the table.

With crops withering across the southeast, and food for livestock ever more scarce, Kenya now faces the possibility of the collapse of the human food web across part of the country, including the economic devastation that will emerge from the mass death of livestock needed to sustain local economies. As families lose the livestock on which they depend for a living, communities may break down, and mass migration looms as a social, political and economic problem.

A World Bank study has projected that the global financial crisis and resulting recession will plunge some 53 million people across “emerging markets” —like China and India— into absolute poverty, in 2009 alone. In China, tens of millions of people have lost jobs related to the export-dependent manufacturing sector.

Such a collapse in private fortunes for millions in the developing world could lead to major political instability, so China and other nations are on the lookout, ramping up security operations and domestic crackdowns on dissent or public gatherings. Unrest in China’s western Xinjiang province tied to repression of the Uighur muslim minority also has a socio-economic component, as Beijing steers Han Chinese merchants into Xinjiang with subsidies, while Uighurs remain poor.

It is thought the upheaval in response to Iran’s apparently manipulated vote, indeed the manipulations themselves, may be rooted in failing economic fortunes, as foreign wealth to invest in commodities like petroleum shrinks and jobs and wealth across the Islamic Republic are threatened.

The World Bank study also finds that some 400,000 additional children will die each year through 2015, as a result of fallout from the current global recession. Foreign Affairs reports that unstable governments in Africa —like the Central African Republic, the DR Congo or Zimbabwe— could be further destabilized by popular unrest following the near total collapse of investment or lending.

Foreign reserves in sub-saharan Africa are so low that DR Congo, a nation already beset by economic chaos and a multi-front conflict that has taken over 5 million lives, may soon be unable to import basic economic life-supports, like food and fuel. The Central African Republic has no funds to pay government employees, a sign its central authority could collapse and the system come apart amid spreading poverty.

Zimbabwe  earlier this year hit the practically meaningless estimated rate of 230 million % inflation. Its fragile coalition government, between the Zanu-PF party of Pres. Robert Mugabe and the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) of his arch-rival and prime minister Morgan Tsvangirai, has struggled to act with unity or implement major fiscal reforms.

Both parties have routinely sniped at each other throughout the process of forming a unity government and attempting to govern. Their rivalry has hardly been put aside, and observers continue to fear the violent crackdown against the MDC could resume if Mugabe feels his authority threatened by circumstances.

In the 1960s, architect and philosopher R. Buckminister Fuller delivered a series of lectures compiled in the still highly relevant book Utopia or Oblivion: the Prospects for Humanity, in which he lays out the argument that throughout history, the ratio of easily accessible commodities to human population meant that only about 1 in every 100 people could achieve a comfortable standard of living, but that by the mid 20th century, this logic of scarcity had become obsolete.

Fuller’s argument was that political systems and traditional forms of administering power over people and markets continued to focus on the need for specific entities (cohering geographically, politico-militarily or commercially) to accumulate the largest possible reserves of everything, to the detriment of all others.

His suggestion was that with the new efficiencies achieved by the most advanced societies by the mid 20th century, the only sustainable collective goal for human civilization would be “to make the world work for 100% of  humanity in the shortest possible time through spontaneous cooperation without ecological offense or the disadvantage of anyone”.

Radical free-marketeers have long wrestled with such an idea, both claiming that the totally open market, unconstrained by any regulation whatsoever, would best achieve that goal, while openly decrying such a goal as inherently adverse to the interests of the so-called “free market” (always in truth a partially free or freely programmable market).

But such an approach to global economics need not be totalizing or degrading to human freedom in any way; Fuller offers no ideology in his vision, only the scientific fact that human civilization had evolved dangerous enough weapons, large enough populations and enough diversity to allow for either a state of permanent brinksmanship and dangerous conflict or a cooperative international system in which human ingenuity bring dignity and freedom to all people.

The success of campaigns like the ONE campaign, the Global Fund or the Clinton Global Initiative, in refocusing international trade policy and the fiscal and lending policies of the world’s wealthiest governments, at the Gleneagles G8 conference, for instance, shows that such a goal can become part of a viable international system of negotiation among free societies, with the specific aim of spreading relative historical affluence to populations around the world.

But Roger Altman aptly notes in Foreign Affairs that “globalization” —which some view as a complicated attempt to realize something like Fuller’s cooperative vision through capitalist liberalization, while others view it as either the creation of a “global village” or the extension to planetary scale of the reach of multinational firms and wealthy economies— is in fact in retreat.

Altman’s view of China is telling: he suggests that “Beijing’s unique capitalist-communist model appears to be helping China through this crisis effectively”, adding that “measured by its estimated $2.3 trillion in foreign exchange reserves, no nation is wealthier”.

There are significant problems with this view: one is that China’s “capitalist-communist model” embodies some of the worst flaws of both systems at their most radical, and its current position on the global stage is also owing in many ways to historical accident as it is to anything resembling responsible stewardship. It has the nakedly nationalistic policies that seem helpful to insulate against fiscal contagion, and its relationship with the US has allowed it to build up those massive foreign reserves, but this does not a sustainable future make.

China’s example is also one of devastatingly high risk in terms of resource management: it’s western deserts are expanding across the northwest of the country at extremely worrying rates, allowing severe dust storms to reach Beijing and beyond, and eroding arable land area at dizzying rates. China now imports more grain than it exports, despite being one of the largest grain producers in the world.

Its infrastructure development plan is car-centered, which may help rig its GDP to continue escalating, unless there is a radical price-distorting environmental collapse that could lead to something like the 1930s dust bowl and Great Depression in the United States, which, like the 1930s, would spread to other nations and contribute to the collapse of China’s needed international trade sector.

With 23 million migrant workers now jobless in China and an escalating rate of unemployment among urban Chinese —figures that do not include migrants—, some observers estimating as many as 50 million Chinese workers may have lost jobs since last fall, when global demand for Chinese manufacturing started to sharply decline and major banking support for foreign investment collapsed.

Altman observes that “Global economic and financial integration are reversing”. He adds that the state is acquiring increasing prominence in the shaping of economic policy the world over. Protectionism is a risk, and voters are demanding solutions. While Altman and others argue that GDP growth must continue to be the focus of government policy, it is increasingly clear that this is a parallel consideration to whether or not international fiscal policy helps or hinders the extension of relative historical affluence —higher standard of living and access to resources— to the world’s poor.

Failure to effectively manage major resources like arable land, fresh water, forests and mineral distribution, will continue to increase the pressure on GDP that results from challenges to the economic stability of billions of poor and working families around the world. Their instability is the instability of communities, regions, markets, and nations.

Altman suggests Obama should use “the enormous global goodwill he enjoys” to lobby for further globalization through market liberalization, but Obama’s task is really far more complex than that. And he appears to understand it as such. He must lobby for global cooperation and for the virtues of human enterprise and democracy, but he must fashion a vocabulary which does so while espousing the need to prevent massive marginal populations from falling into desperation and disarray.

Fuller’s philosophy of cooperative innovation and “world-around” knowledge and resource distribution is instructive, and may blend well with Obama’s message of democratic change and grass-roots enabled reform. But the escalating pressure on human populations around the world, who are threatened with the collapse of their economic life-supports, must be a central concern of all ongoing negotiations on trade, fiscal policy and international lending.

Preventive use of antibiotics has one salient effect: it speeds the evolution of targeted bacteria, allowing them to develop pervasive resistance to known treatments. In short, preventive administration of antibiotics makes diseases far more dangerous. The US government is now seeking to end the practice of administering antibiotics to livestock, which health officials believe is putting human health at risk.

In fact, as much as 70% of all antibiotics used in the US are used to treat healthy farm animals. In fact, factory farming practices may be promoting the spread of dangerous disease agents, for a variety of reasons. One of these is the use of antibiotics, which affect the evolution of resistant bacteria strains. But there are also suspicions that the outbreak of a previously unknown strain of flu virus, the A/H1N1 “swine flu” that reportedly emerged from La Gloria, Mexico, may have something to do with the massive factory pig farm nearby.

The Preservation of Antibiotics for Medical Treatment Act (PAMTA), H.R. 1549/S. 619, aims to prevent the erosion of antibiotic effectiveness due to overuse and has the support of the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS). The bill would target the use by confined animal feeding operations (CAFO) of antibiotics in animal feed. The FDA would be empowered to review licenses for the use of antibiotics vital to human health in any ways that could promote resistance or otherwise put human health at risk.

According to the UCS:

CAFO operators add human antibiotics to the feed of animals to accelerate animal growth and prevent diseases common in overcrowded and unsanitary living conditions. An estimated 70 percent of antibiotics produced in this country—nearly 13 million pounds per year—are used in animal agriculture for these nontherapeutic purposes. This amount is estimated to be more than four times the amount of drugs used to treat human illness.

Antibiotic resistance linked to food animal operations is on the rise. New studies suggest that hog farms are a source of a new strain (ST398) of MRSA (Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus), a disease responsible for more deaths per year in the United States than AIDS.

As noted by Wired: “Other types of drug-resistant staph infections already kill 18,000 Americans every year. The new strain, which appears to have evolved on Dutch farms and is spreading through U.S. pigs and into people, will only add to the toll.” Efforts to combat such disease agents by blanket use of antibiotics are extremely counterproductive, actually enabling the bacteria to develop sustained, even complete resistance, to treatment with existing antibiotics.

The PAMTA bill would put 7 classes of antibiotics specifically vital to human healthcare under review, possibly allowing their use for healthy livestock to be entirely banned, based on the potential danger to human health. The Pew Commission on Industrial Farm Animal Production determined last year that “the present system of producing food animals in the United States is not sustainable and presents an unacceptable level of risk to public health”.

Of 24 findings specified by the Pew Commission for its determination that the US livestock production system was unsafe, 5 related to the use of antibiotics in farm animals. Public health officials are increasingly concerned that continued habitual use of antibiotics in factory farming could lead to the evolution of a wide array of untreatable multi-resistant disease agents, like MRSA-ST398.

While the “farm lobby” has expressed opposition to the measure, testimony before Congress suggests there is no risk to food safety from banning the use of antibiotics on healthy animals. The FDA’s principal deputy commissioner of food and drugs, Dr. Joshua Sharfstein, gave written testimony saying that any use of antibiotics for “purposes other than for the advancement of animal or human health should not be considered judicious use“.

Dr. Sharfstein also specified that “Eliminating these uses will not compromise the safety of food”. Livestock producers have long suggested using preventive antibiotics in animal feed makes the animals healthier and reduces costs of production. They have tended to ignore studies showing the resulting microbial risk to human health due to drug resistance that develops from the practice. The Congressional fight is expected to be contentious, but some who favor PAMTA want the controls put into healthcare reform legislation.

Carbon offsets allow the use of carbon-emitting processes to help fund and develop clean alternatives, which can then compete with and possibly replace the offending carbon-emitters. But there are also ways in which carbon offsetting can be used to combat poverty around the world. If offsets are focused on reducing bad habits, resulting from those engaging in those habits having either no alternative or no training to find alternatives, people living in the poorest conditions can find themselves benefitting from the clean energy revolution.

The group CarbonAided, which helps inform, and provide guidance for implementing carbon offsets, is now seeking to establish means by which carbon offsetting can produce real-world benefits for marginalized and poor communities in developing countries. Breaking the cycle of bad carbon practice the world over requires this step be taken, and the logic of doing it through carbon offsetting is that developing countries can be brought up to speed on emissions reductions by the same process that helps developed industrial countries break their bad habits.

The UN’s Millennium Development Goals (MDG) are a set of parameters set up by UN agencies, in conjunction with governments and NGOs, that aim to improve the lot of the world’s poorest people and thus help to resolve percolating crises of international scope and reduce the temptations of conflict and the risks to public health that result from scarcity and deprivation. The MDG have been difficult to meet, in part because the richer nations have treated them like a gift to the poor, an extracurricular activity whose return-on-investment they don’t know how to measure.

The MDG aim to achieve bold priorities by the year 2015: to end poverty and hunger, achieve universal education, gender equality, child health and maternal health, effectively combat HIV/AIDS, improve treatment and impede its spread, achieve viable environmental sustainability and standards of global partnership that allow the world’s nations to work together in a credible and energetic way to resolve these issues.

A shift in the carbon waste-scape could assist in changing the dynamics related to poverty, education, maternal and child health, environmental sustainability and if implemented in the right ways, be helpful in fostering global partnership. As CarbonAided artfully explains:

For example, by substituting a clean biogas cooker for an open wood fire, the air in the kitchen is transformed from an un-breathable smog which, according to the World Health Organisation is responsible for the deaths of 1.5 million women and children each year. Not only does this address the health MDG but since the women no longer have to spend hours gathering fuel wood from increasing distances they can become involved in income generating activities to reduce their poverty. Children released from fuel gathering are able to go to school. An improved energy supply also allows food to be cooked in a more healthy way thus reducing hunger. 4 MDGs are thus addressed by this type of project as well as the significant reduction in carbon and other GHG emissions.

Elimination of a cause of mass death and chronic ill-health by way of one specific, targetting program that can fit into carbon offsetting protocols, allows developed nations’ industrial activity to improve health, reduce hunger, improve education, even promote gender equality. And in the process, total global emissions are reduced, moving the world toward a healthier and more sustainable future.

One of the key factors of carbon offsetting that has spurred skeptics to doubt its practicality is the need to find creative ways to achieve real-world carbon-emissions reductions, substantial enough to offset existing emissions. Fields like the airline transport industry have traditionally adhered to the notion that their industry cannot effectively participate in emissions reductions, because they have no choice but to burn carbon-based fuels in massive quantities.

But carbon offsetting options are expanding widely, and efforts to reduce the use of carbon-based fuels and promote public health and better practice in poor countries mean there is a global menu of options to choose from, to achieve 100% carbon offsets by backing such projects. Making sure irreplaceable emissions, in the short run, correspond to real-world offsets that reduce emissions and improve standards of living elsewhere mean that burgeoning networks of sustainable development projects can help major industry reduce their net carbon footprint to zero.

The Swiss firm Solar Impulse is also building the world’s first solar-powered airplane, which would be entirely emissions free. Airlines can devote funding to such projects or place advance orders, in order to prepare for a future in which they will require fewer offsets to reach a zero net carbon footprint. In the meantime, efforts to reduce carbon emissions worldwide help slow global climate destabilization, which itself also poses more of a threat to the world’s poor than to the richest nations, for geographical and eco-economic reasons.

In India, one group working with CarbonAided, the Hassan Rural Biogas Project, has developed a mechanism for addressing the issues discussed above, related to home cooking fuel and resulting pollutants and time-consumption, but which also reduces the negative impact of farming practices on the local environment and can reduce the spread of chronic poverty:

The farmers’ situation is also not good. Because of the indiscriminate use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides the expenditure on agriculture has gone up and the land fertility has come down resulting in lower yields. The use of chemical fertilizers has made the land barren and the water retention capacity of the land has come down drastically.

To change this situation, S K G Sangha, have developed a system called ‘Composite vermicompost bio reactor. This system consists of two main parts. One part is a family size bio reactor producing clean gas which can be used for cooking and lighting and the other one is a vermicompost production unit producing high quality fertiliser.

While the composite vermicompost bio reactor system improves the quality of home cooking fuel, and exhaust, it also produces high-grade organic fertilizers. Roughly 50% of the fertilizer produced can be used on the family’s own land, to replace harsh chemical fertilizers that lead to toxic contaminants accumulating in the soil over time and running off into drinking water.

The rest of the fertilizer can be sold at market, providing a steady stream of income for the women, improving their conditions and helping the family to combat chronic poverty and better their own future. Such generative economic strategies mean carbon offsetting aimed at improving conditions in the developing world can help eliminate some of the most serious obstacles to long-term improvements in energy and environmental practice.

A variety of desert rhubarb, indigenous to the deserts of Israel and Jordan, is the world’s first identified “self-irrigating” plant. The broad green leaves of the plant are unique in the harsh arid climate, and have been found to benefit from a system of water distribution which speeds rainwater down into the soil, toward the roots of the plant, by way of channels along the exterior of the leaves’ veins, lubricated by a substance that keeps the rainwater moving.

Perhaps the most astounding aspect of this discovery is the degree to which the plant’s unique water-channeling strategy out-performs the local average. Researchers from the University of Haifa-Oranim have found that water flowing down from the desert rhubarb’s leaves penetrates 10 times further down into the soil than in the plant’s surroundings and effectively provides the plant with the equivalent of an enriched ecological bubble. As reported by Wired magazine:

“Even in the slightest rains,” the researchers wrote, “the typical plant harvests more than 4,300 cubic centimeters of water per year and enjoys a water regime of about 427 millimeters per year, equivalent to the water supply in a Mediterranean climate.”

This means the plant is one of the most efficient naturally occurring irrigation systems observed to counter harsh desert conditions like those found in Israel and Jordan. Its efficiency has the effect of fundamentally altering its relationship with the scarce resources of the local environment. There could be lessons in its structure and in the chemical make-up of its leaves, for producing better and more efficient irrigation systems and even closed water-resourcing service systems.

The discovery is of uncertain value: while it shows an apparent evolutionary adaptation that allows this plant to thrive in the parched terrain of its habitat, specific applications for the technical specifics of its structure are not immediately apparent. What is clear is that plants have structural innovations that are designed to help ensure survival, and that the communication of upper extremities with root-structure is key to these innovations.

Since the reporting of this discovery, there has been debate about the significance of the find. Wired, for instance, added a comment from a plant ecologist from the University of Arizona named Lindy Brigham. Brigham noted that the leaf-structure of many plants appears optimized to help direct water flow toward the base of the plant and its root-structure.

The desert rhubarb has a unique approach to the problem, and performs impressively in a forbidding climate, but many plants have features that perform similar functions, to increase water intake over chance soil filtration. For some systems ecologists and green economic thinkers, the plant is an example of optimized scarcity thinking, finding abundance by multiplying the net effect of a broadly scarce resource.

The following is a transcript of Pres. Obama’s interview with AllAfrica.com, as released by the White House, 7 July 2009

3:03 P.M. EDT

Q    We asked visitors to our site, AllAfrica.com, what they might be interested in with respect to your policy.  And as you might imagine, the responses are everywhere:  conflict resolution, development issues, trade issues, et cetera.  But they and we have one immediate question:  How is it that you happened to pick Ghana as the first place to visit in sub-Saharan Africa?

THE PRESIDENT:  Well, part of the reason is because that Ghana has now undergone a couple of successful elections in which power was transferred peacefully, even a very close election.  I think that the new President, President Mills, has shown himself committed to the rule of law, to the kinds of democratic commitments that ensure stability in a country.  And I think that there is a direct correlation between governance and prosperity.  Countries that are governed well, that are stable, where the leadership recognizes that they are accountable to the people and that institutions are stronger than any one person have a track record of producing results for the people.  And we want to highlight that.

Q    And I assume that you’d like to see a lot more Ghanas in Africa.  And part of your policy would be, I assume, to encourage that.

THE PRESIDENT:  Absolutely.

Q    How?  Do you get –

THE PRESIDENT:  Well, part of it is lifting up successful models.  And so, by traveling to Ghana, we hope to highlight the effective governance that they have in place.

I don’t think that we can expect that every country is going to undergo these transitions in the same way at the same time.  But we have seen progress in democracy and transparency and rule of law, in the protection of property rights, in anti-corruption efforts.  We have seen progress over the last several years; in some cases, though, we’re also seeing some backsliding.  In my father’s own country of Kenya, I’m concerned about how the political parties do not seem to be moving into a permanent reconciliation that would allow the country to move forward.  And Kenya is not alone in some of the problems that we’ve seen of late, post-election or pre-election.

And we just want to make sure that people are mindful that this isn’t just some abstract notion that we’re trying to impose on Africa.  There is a very practical, pragmatic consequence to political instability and corruption when it comes to whether people can feed their families, educate their children, and we think that Africa — the African continent is a place of extraordinary promise as well as challenges.  We’re not going to be able to fulfill those promises unless we see better governance.

Q    Do you have, with respect to that, priorities in terms of countries or regions?  For instance, West Africa is extremely important in terms of oil, or East Africa in terms of some of the strategic concerns of the United States?

THE PRESIDENT:  I think the entire continent is important.  And keep in mind that although I’m visiting Ghana on this particular trip, we’ve already had Tsvangirai of Zimbabwe in the Oval Office.  We’ve had Kikwete from Tanzania in my office.  And in each case, I’m trying to send the same message.  You’ve seen some very good work by the administration in Tanzania focusing on how to deliver concrete services to the people, and wherever folks want to help themselves, we want to be there as a partner.  And I think that you’ve got some very strong leadership in Africa that is ready to move forward and we want to be there with them.

On the economic front, that means opening up better trade opportunities.  It means that we are interested not just in foreign aid, but in how we strengthen the capacity for development internally in these countries, and we want to work in a multilateral context, as well as the bilateral strengthening of relations with many of these countries.

But as you point out, there are both strategic, national security, economic, environmental reasons why we think this region is important.  And part of the reason we wanted to — although we’re only going to one country this time, I actually thought that it made sense for us to connect a trip to Ghana to a previous trip with the G8, and we’ll be meeting a number of African countries in Italy during the G8 meeting — before that, a meeting in Russia — to show that Africa is directly connected to our entire foreign policy approach; that it’s not some isolated thing where once every term you go visit Africa for a while to check that box, but rather it’s an ongoing part of a broader discussion about how we move many of these international challenges forward.

Q    Development assistance will presumably be an important piece of your Africa policy.  Now, development assistance is pretty fragmented whether you look at the United States or you look at it globally in the sense of varying countries have varying approaches.  And now you, more than any President, are associated with using technological tools, and I can’t help but wonder if you have in mind or have thought about using technology to bring some coherence, if you will, like tracking how aid works or goes and where it goes, et cetera.

THE PRESIDENT:  Look, I think you make a very important point and that is that even just within the U.S. government, our aid policies have been splintered among a variety of agencies, different theories embraced by different people depending on which administration, which party is in power at any given time.  Trying to create something steady and focused on — and always basing our policies on what works and not on some ideological previous position is going to be very important.

And technology can play a very important role in streamlining our aid to countries, making sure that we’re tracking how that aid is being applied, making sure that it’s reaching the people it’s intended to reach.  One of the concerns that I have with our aid policy generally is that western consultants and administrative costs end up gobbling huge percentages of our aid overall.  And it seems to me that what we should be doing is trying to minimize our footprint and maximize the degree to which we’re training people to do for themselves.  So I think using the Internet, using software, using modern technology, to improve delivery systems is important.

Now, I also think on the ground in many of these countries, how we think about not high-tech stuff but low-tech technologies to, for example, improve food production is vitally important.  And I’m still frustrated over the fact that the green revolution that we introduced into India in the ’60s, we haven’t yet introduced into Africa in 2009.  In some countries, you’ve got declining agricultural productivity.  That makes absolutely no sense.  And we don’t need fancy computers to solve those problems; we need tried and true agricultural methods and technologies that are cheap and are efficient, but could have a huge impact in terms of people’s day-to-day well-being.

Q    In addition, you mentioned just a few minutes ago also the importance of investment and not just aid.  What’s the balance between assistance and investment?  You get — most businesses get a bigger return on their investment in Africa than any other part of the world.  So should that receive more emphasis than it’s been getting?  What kind of balance in your mind exists in development assistance?

THE PRESIDENT:  Well, a couple of points I would make.  Number one, you’re not going to get investment without good governance.  So that’s part of the reason why we emphasize it.  Again, this is a very practical, hard-headed approach to how we’re going to see improvements in the daily lives of the peoples of Africa.  If government officials are asking for 10, 15, 25 percent off the top, businesses don’t want to invest there.  That’s point number one.

Point number two, I think that when my father left Kenya and traveled to the United States back in the early ’60s, the GDP of Kenya and South Korea weren’t equivalent — Kenya’s was actually higher.  What’s happened over that 50-year period?  What you’ve seen is Korea combine foreign investment, integration with the global economy, with a strategic sense of certain industries that they can promote for export; great emphasis on education for a skilled workforce; insisting that foreign investment is accompanied by technology transferring so that homegrown industries can be built and nurtured.

So we’ve got models out there.  We know what it might take.  What we haven’t seen is, is a consistent, steady application of some of these models over time in Africa, and I think that now is the time to start.

Q    Is that a failure of U.S. policy or is that a failure of governance in Africa?

THE PRESIDENT:  I would say that the international community has not always been as strategic as it should have been, but ultimately I’m a big believer that Africans are responsible for Africa.

I think part of what’s hampered advancement in Africa is that for many years we’ve made excuses about corruption or poor governance; that this was somehow the consequence of neo-colonialism, or the West has been oppressive, or racism — I’m not a big — I’m not a believer in excuses.

I’d say I’m probably as knowledgeable about African history as anybody who’s occupied my office.  And I can give you chapter and verse on why the colonial maps that were drawn helped to spur on conflict, and the terms of trade that were uneven emerging out of colonialism.

And yet the fact is we’re in 2009.  The West and the United States has not been responsible for what’s happened to Zimbabwe’s economy over the last 15 or 20 years.  It hasn’t been responsible for some of the disastrous policies that we’ve seen elsewhere in Africa.  And I think that it’s very important for African leadership to take responsibility and be held accountable.

And I think the people of Africa understand that.  The problem is, is that they just haven’t always had the opportunities to organize and voice their opinions in ways that create better results.

Q    In the last minute or so of our conversation, even though you are really barely into your presidency, I already feel compelled to ask you a legacy question.  (Laughter.)  And that is:  What, when you finish your presidency, do you expect your stamp on Africa policy to be?  What do you — what do you think that will be?

THE PRESIDENT:  I would like, at the end of my term in office, to be able to say that the United States was an effective partner with countries throughout Africa in building the kinds of institutions, both political, civil, economic, that allowed for improving standards of living and greater security for the people of Africa; that we moved them on a trajectory in which they are integrating with the global economy; and that a young person growing up in Johannesburg or Lagos or Nairobi or Djibouti can say to themselves, I can stay here in Africa, I can stay in my country and succeed, and through my success, my country and my people will get stronger.

That would be a good legacy.  I don’t expect that we’re going to get there in four years or eight years, but I think we can get on that path.  And the United States is a critical partner in that process.

All right?

Q    I need another hour or so.  (Laughter.)  But I thank you for your time.

THE PRESIDENT:  Thank you so much.

END
3:18 P.M. EDT