En Villanova, cada noche de lunes, la palabra sencilla y poderosa emprende su vuelo sin encender motores y no para de revolotear, de elevarse y planear como gaviota luminosa sobre la noche siempre cálida de la hermandad poética reunida en la mesa del Taller Literario Pinzon 9. La idea de un día dedicado a la poesía se transformó en dos días de poesía, y en un par de semanas había comenzado a tomar forma un festival que ocuparía todo un fin de semana. Así nació este festival y la presente antología de colaboradores.

La antología incluye obras de los siguientes poetas: María Elena Arias Zelidón, David G. Barreto, Andrea Cote, Silvino Edward Díaz Burns, Rodolfo Figueroa, Andrés González, Cristiane Grando, Gladys Ilarregui, Carlos Jiménez, Víctor Martín Iglesias, Floridor Pérez, Magnolia Pérez Garrido, Salvatore Poeta, Joseph Robertson, Enrique Sacerio-Garí, Cristina Sánchez-Conejero, Róger Santiváñez y Carlos Trujillo. [Más información...]

¿Dónde cae la hoja que cae de la hoja?
¿Dónde, la hoja que se suelta de sí misma
como mirando lejos y hacia adentro,
como mirándose desde lejos
igual que si fuera otra hoja la que cae
mientras ella la mira?

Where does the leaf fall that falls from the leaf?
Where, the leaf that lets go of itself
as if looking into the distance and also inward,
as if looking upon itself from afar,
as if it were some other leaf falling
while it is looking on?

The work of the poet is not easy to define. It involves imagination, observation, a musical ear and a kind of daring that allows words to forge new spaces for meaning. But none of these alone makes the poet, or the poem. In this bilingual edition of Carlos Trujillo’s Palabras, his first collection to be published in English, the award-winning Chilean poet offers the reader a hands-on experience of the creative work of the poet, and by his elegant, melodic approach, suggests a more intimate understanding of what poetry is and how it comes to draw breath. [Read more...]

Este libro junta poemas tanto filosóficos como de amor con ensayos cortos y un cuento lírico. Es a la vez la obra más ambiciosa y más íntima del poeta, y marca un momento de cambio de enfoque en su obra y en su visión poética. Aquí siguen unos extractos del texto:

somos más que consciencia
somos invención

somos más que perspicacia
somos ver y no ver

(de ‘plenitud’)

la pregunta básica, apoyada en el arte divino de una respuesta íntegra : la hermosura, la superación de la espera : la resistencia y el regalo sin aparatajes : el ser : el compartir y abrirse : porque sólo así se abre a la vida : sólo siendo rangos de color, entre lágrimas : sólo juntos : la nieve dio lugar a la frescura almada de los últimos días del invierno : entre el bullicio y la vastedad, la semilla : el primer paso, el futuro…

(de ‘viernes, ciudad de nueva york, marzo 2010′)

Article published in Issue 8 of the Gender & Media Diversity Centre’s Southern Africa Media Diversity Journal, March 2010

The FIFA World Cup is coming to South Africa this year, the first global event of its kind hosted by an African nation. That means 2010 will bring many aspects of life in South Africa into view for people around the world. There are competing theories about whom such grandiose event-stagings benefit: credible arguments can be made for the view that the Olympic Games or the FIFA World Cup infuse an established order with new money, media focus and influence, while others see such events as necessarily elevating civic virtues by forcing an established order to exhibit them. The 2010 World Cup can put all issues relating to women’s rights and possibilities in the forefront of global perceptions of South Africa.

South Africa has the legal framework, the people, the initiative, in short: the means, of making great strides forward for women, but also conditions that pose a constant threat to women’s health, physical safety and possibility for ascending through the established order to maximize their potential, in the workplace, the political sphere or even the realm of personal realisation. South Africa’s commitment to reaching the Millennium Development Goals [MDG] on gender issues should be moved forward as the world turns its gaze on the situation South African women face in living their daily lives.

Media do not exist in a vacuum, but by definition are contacts between people. An event as pervasive and attention-grabbing as the World Cup cannot occur without the media environment experiencing a wave of feedback inducements to new points of view. On rights issues, this can just as easily lead to voluntary adoption of the view that change is too hard, or even unnecessary, as to an increased understanding of what civic virtues need to be elevated, why and to what end. The chronically low profile of the problem of domestic violence in many societies, or the particular difficulties US president Barack Obama has had in effecting sweeping reforms in healthcare or banking, are examples of how easily an urge to distraction can shift popular consciousness away from the project of engagement with problem-solving.

Engagement with the media environment from a humanitarian perspective, to deepen the general understanding of women’s issues and heighten awareness of violence against women and inequality of opportunity, means taking a germinal role, aiming to spread a new perspective through an environment not necessarily attuned to the vocabulary of the problem. The philosopher Brian Massumi writes in Parables for the Virtual that: ‘A germinal or “implicit” form cannot be understood as a shape or structure. It is more a bundle of potential functions localized, as a differentiated region, within a larger field of potential. In each region a shape or structure begins to form, but no sooner dissolves as its region shifts in relation to the others with which it is in tension. There is a kind of bubbling of structuration in a turbulent soup of regions of swirling potential. The regions are separated from each other by dynamic thresholds rather than by boundaries.’ (Massumi 34)

Abstract as it may be, Massumi’s analysis regards the nature of media and information flows. He uses this analysis of Simondon’s exploration of ‘non-localized relations’ as key to how atoms ‘emerge’ from an undefined region of interrelations as a new vocabulary to talk about how recognizable forms —which can include perceptions, identities, even preconceptions— coalesce around evolving relations and feed back into their environment. The intense media focus on South Africa, during the 2010 World Cup, offers that ‘bubbling of structuration’ and the real possibility of more ‘dynamic thresholds’ operating between competing visions of the nation, its culture and its people, where before there had been less permeable boundaries.

The great psychological theorist and researcher Luce Irigaray treats the way reflections on the love offered to, or coming from, the other are dealt with by men or by women. Her assertion is that each subject may perceive the other either as part of a system of relations centered on the self or as the focus of one’s own relational outreach. In the former, the other is treated in the third person and the focus is on the first person; in the latter, the other enjoys second person privilege and the first person is subsumed in the question of the other’s reaction to that outreach. This suggests that any communication on issues of sexual difference, or on the promotion of a more just and egalitarian future, will first have to pass through ‘the bubble in which [the listener] is situated and enclosed’. (Irigaray 135) The listener listens through an implicit inquiry as to how the message relates to life within the space of his or her own selfhood. Massumi’s ‘parable’ of a ‘bubbling of structuration’, of ‘differentiated spaces’ across a ‘field of potential’, suggests the intensity of an environment of emergence, of germinal communications, can move some of those perceptual barriers and shift the communicative process into a realm of ‘dynamic thresholds’. If the emergent arguments are received only at the dynamic thresholds across which the communication seeks to travel, then the message is conditioned as much by the perceptual field in which it emerges as by the conceptual (germinal) understanding of its proponents.

The media environment of the 2010 FIFA World Cup may be hostile to any narrative focused on the details of equality/inequality or justice/injustice dynamics, except where that narrative fits into the narrative of nations, performance and talent. For actual nation states, their socio-political ‘virtues’ can be equated to ‘talent’, defining the field of potential across which civic-minded awakenings and social justice reforms can emerge. In 1992, the autonomous Spanish region of Catalunya, whose capital is Barcelona, seized the opportunity inherent in hosting the Olympic Games to highlight its unique cultural situation, its history of linguistic and political marginalisation and the fragility of Spain’s young democracy, rooted in the post-fascist constitution of 1978, in effect for just 14 years at the time of the Barcelona Games. Spain, as a whole, with a Socialist party government made up of fierce opponents of the old fascist regime, sought to build its qualifications, not just perceived qualifications, as a viable, stable, humane democracy. ‘Nationalism’, including Catalán regional nationalism, vied for prominence with humanism. The darker side of nationalistic leanings was demonstrated by the removal of Roma and vagrants living in shanties along the waterfront to predetermined sites on the outskirts of the city. (Sadd 2009)

Similarly, the 2010 World Cup could turn into a quest to obscure ongoing injustices suffered by women in South Africa, but it’s important to note that the Catalán identity culture was during this time, and as a result of the enthusiasm and the focus on civic virtues and democratisation, overtaken by a wave of youthful civic engagement more interested in demonstrating the idiosyncratic virtues of an egalitarian parliamentary democracy than in using force or censorship to create the appearance of order. To the extent that the 1992 Barcelona Olympic Games spurred a construction boom, and therefore windfalls for the related industries, the claim that they were a great social success needs to be tested against whether that boom also benefited groups who were marginalised or underprivileged before the Games. For many, the perception is that the economic boom surrounding the Games exacerbated a problem of chronic inequity in housing, pushing property values far beyond what lower-income residents —Cataláns and immigrants alike— could afford. This, together with the revitalisation of civic sentiment and the urge to demand democratisation and equality in new areas, helped lead to a widespread and still powerful housing-focused protest movement (Del Olmo 2004).

The lasting legacy has been a trenchant Catalán popular valuation of open democracy, civic awareness and pluralism, even where that means accepting the Catalán-speaking children of African and Asian immigrants as Catalán. The intense focus on Barcelona and its attendant political and social culture allowed for that bubbling of structuration, with regard to cultural and national identity, moving boundaries and leaving an intangible but measurable social incentive to adhere to more open and democratic principles.

The bubbling of political perspectives —which means the dynamisation of differences and the freer movement of ideas— was also evident in China, during the months surrounding the 2008 Olympic Games. The Charter ’08 movement was not limited to one region or a narrow group of intellectuals: it marked the emergence of a critical mass of popular complaint against corrupt institutions and arbitrary abuses. China’s governmental reaction was authoritarian in tone and method, and entailed a crackdown on dissent and the jailing of dissidents linked to the reform movement. Though the most visible supporters of the Charter ’08 petition for democratic reform, have been detained and face serious prison time, that reaction itself helped to spread the atmosphere of complaint and the germinal argument for reform, i.e. the idea that indeed a problem exists and reform could be desired and supported by serious people across the society.

• For the full article, visit the Southern Africa Media Diversity Journal site

The individual does not actually suffer less, but somehow, human beings —across cultures, ages groups and regions— appear to have an almost inborn tendency to convince themselves that the one who suffers with others is somehow safer. This is, of course, rarely true. While yes, a young boy might survive because his older sister goes without food, two young children in a population beset with pervasive, persistent scarcity or political disorder, may be at significantly heightened risk of violence, or even enslavement.

Others suggest the phenomenon of psychic numbing is more to do with some sort of instinctual calculation of the worth of one’s efforts. If one seeks to help one lone child, one’s actions seem able; if one seeks to send a small amount to help millions, one’s actions may seem less able, less capable of ‘making a difference’.

There is a theory that this might be related to a long “prehistoric” period —far longer than the period which we refer to as “recorded history”— in which smaller tribal bands were the organizing principle of human society. We can understand safety in numbers, but we can’t conceive of how sending a few dollars, or writing a letter, will in any way contribute to easing the suffering of millions of people. Biologically, this just doesn’t compute in a cerebral infrastructure organized around tribal society.

Yet there are alternatives: there is the theory of an informational tipping point. The lone photo, with no information and no statistics, will spark great compassion. Adding statistics or removing the photo, or naming numbers that run into the millions, will lessen the likelihood of compassion across a large population. But when enough information is given so that the reader/viewer can comprehend in intellectually resilient terms the scale of a tragic crisis, the real energy of compassion is again motivated, perhaps more effectively than by any other means.

Social networking has allowed people to share information and to make donations with an ease of effort and on a scale of cooperative endeavor never before possible. This may be helping to ease the transition away from generalized psychic numbing and toward generalized charitable predisposition, as social networking sites help to shrink the size of the planet to the biologically comprehensible “village” scale, familiarizing people with their counterparts across the world.

How much of a role is there for social networking in solving this problem? How much of the problem is about resistance to new information about crises of massive scale? How much is a crisis of imagination? And are there examples of how we can do or are doing better in any given case?

• Join the discussion at The Hot Spring Network’s Crisis Policy Forum

Essay presented as seminar, on Thursday, 21 January 2010
for the Villanova University Freedom School Sessions

On the Question of Hope

In September, 2008, the question of hope, of what it is and why we need it, was coming to political prominence, due to an election campaign and a collective demand for significant change in the direction of US policy, on a number of fronts. As a result, the very idea of hope came under political attack. Political operatives that sought to ridicule the idea of a “change candidate” who could bring hope to the American people sought to make it appear that hope was a soft virtue, a wishy-washy ethereal promise, something one seeks only if one has no intent to act. It seemed to me this was both dishonest and also dangerous, because hope does not work like that at all, and because there had been a very responsible engagement with the topic, which held some promise in terms of waking a population that had not thought of being involved in shaping its own destiny.

So, I sought to write something solid, something viable and lasting, about hope, about the nature of optimism and how closely linked the quality of imagination is to our ability to conceive of, work for and see through to completion, meaningful improvements to the human condition. I wanted to write about it because it is such a vital commodity in our times, such a spiritual enigma and a challenge to our political systems, but then one glaring fact became clear that seemed to limit what can be said about hope: this vital spiritual resource does not stand alone, but is linked in every case to human specifics, inseparable from what we seek to apply it to, and so hope is different to all people, even in its most essential manifestations.

The question of human involvement, of how one behaves with regard to the energy of hope, then, feeds into the question of where it resides, where it takes root, and what our aims will be once we find it. For some, hope is a question of finding belief, finding vision, finding willpower, in the abstract, in the nested particulars of inner life; for some, it is about what comes before finding, on the way to resolution or achievement, the summoning, the calling forth of energy and possibility; for others it is about what summoning does for the one who issues the call, how that act translates into hope. And still others find it to be the distilled question of will it or will it not work out: if so, then I can believe; if not, then all is lost and the human condition is hopeless.

It is easy to discourage those actively searching for hope, because it is most necessary and most applicable precisely when events seem least hopeful, and because we forget, with equal parts frequency and convenience, that what has happened is not and never was the only thing that could have happened. We imagine that a negative result occurs because it was 100% likely to occur, even though a small amount of effort, concentrated or otherwise, may have made almost any other outcome more likely. We forget to examine the landscape and reformulate the potential enclosed in the unrealized past-future.

It is easy to say that all good things come to an end and that entropy is the basic direction of all things, simple or complex… but that reading really depends on timescales, metabolism and intent: all biological organisms, all solar systems, eventually break down, all concentrations of energy eventually come apart, but it is worth noting how successfully energy and matter first self-organize, how star systems and life forms first come together in astonishing utilitarian precision and complexity, with purpose and efficiency, each part playing a role that benefits other segments of the system so that the whole might exist at all.

So yes, there is entropy, there is unraveling, there is approximation and the loss of cherished order, but this is a result of how an environment coalesces into concentrations of matter and energy, an initial anti-entropy, to make what we know and experience. Is that a tragic thing, or a stroke of incredible, incalculable good fortune? How can we who survive to speak, as cynically or hopefully as we see fit, not see some heartbreaking beauty in the functional fragility of what we are?

So, to write about hope is to write about the fact that it is a question and not an answer, that it cannot exist if not enmeshed with the specifics of what we suffer or strive for, that it springs from our recognizing that questions, obstacles and uncertainty are not dread irreparable crises but part of what brings forth the value of the good in life, that to face questions, to sink into doubt and to recoil against loss, is not to be lost, but to be involved in the same summoning of what comes next, the calling forth of ideas and energies, communicative strategies and informed risk-taking that plays out in what we like to refer to as hope.

Before entropy and disintegration, there was a healthy metabolism of self-organization, interstellar atomic elements coming together to make the soft tissue and the dreaming life of a human being, made from the inheritance of so many prior generations: why do we so easily forget how valuable that has been to us? Before admittedly taking the “wrong road”, there were right choices: why do we not go back and explore some of these, turn ourselves over to the fact that possibility does not cease altogether with a single mistake or an unwilled bad outcome?

Is it determinism, or a misapplication of religious spiritual traditions, that makes us believe that everything is pre-scripted, intended from a distant original urging, that we have no choice, that vision after-the-fact is somehow more divine than vision in-the-moment? The pressure to demonstrate control over events leads us to believe that it would be rational to claim control over events —or to demand it from others—, and this can lead to a flawed application of the intellect to working out the problems at hand, undermining our agility and imagination instead of feeding into them.

Hope is not a mystical reality, not an elixir, not a character trait; it is a process of thinking toward, in living time, the ways in which what should be better might be. Hope is not a blind or blissed-out waiting-game for easy luck; it is a process of claiming responsibility for the energy and the material action that —in often halting steps, in often turbulent surroundings— bring us closer to what we aspire to. Hope is not merely a solemn prayer for a best result when all factors of circumstance are beyond our control; it is overcoming the problem of control, robbing Fate of its false power and starting from the place where you are.

In Practice: A Bridge Across

That brings us to the key question at the root of any pursuit of, encounter with or communication of hope: where do we find ourselves? In relation to origins, in relation to our ideals, in relation to what we intuit to be the best in ourselves, but most importantly, in relation to one another. Hope emerges, or comes together, when the defenseless individual —fearing the universal urge toward entropy, toward the undoing of systems that allow for nourishment, what we call failure in the human sense— finds there is another bridge across the abyss, a way to believe that the next step will not be unraveling or collapse.

The most difficult thing about hope is that it emerges within and around, and is most relevant to, the person who has the hardest time finding it. Someone who does not feel threatened, undermined or abandoned, may get through a healthy string of days without giving a second thought to whether she has hope or could call it forth if necessary. It is the person with a palpable sense of hopelessness, who can cite one after another ‘reason’ why hope seems a foolish gamble, that is in need of and more likely to be searching for hope.

Leaving that person with no help, no human connection, no reliable bond that consistently affirms not only his humanity but also the reasonable belief that he is entitled to some dignified and humane future, leaves him without hope. He perceives entropy, atomization, corruption of the known world, little chance for being spared the ravages of time and competition, let alone uplifted. What is ‘out there’ is too vast, too unconscious, too competitive; no protection against disaster will be afforded, if the disaster begins to loom near…

Despair follows easily from such perceptions… trust breaks down, and the appeal of cynical prejudgments is dramatically enhanced. Hope, in its true, contagious and useful form, may actually hide within and be born of the hardships that seem to undermine or negate its possibility. Failure to locate it, cultivate it, even to speak of and confess to it, invites the logic of fanciful pessimism to flood the scene and come to prevalence, however false its claim to know of negative future outcomes in advance.

Hope is what allows people to believe that a social contract, however implicit, nuanced or intimate, will be honored and will sustain and celebrate the humanity of all involved. Doubting such a possibility in fundamental ways leads to and helps to justify attitudes and behavior that work against better outcomes. At least as important as the power of hope to motivate transformative vision and action —on the personal, community or societal levels— is the power of hope’s absence to undermine transformative vision and impede the effecting of actions that will lead to a better outcome, in the personal, community or societal intrigues that make hope a meaningful question to begin with.

We can look to literature, to history, to give us some signs of what it means to know hope or to live without it. Sadeq Hedayat’s The Blind Owl, written during a time of severe oppression and political persecution, gives us a glimpse of the corrosive effect such persecution can have on the ability of the human mind to cope and to dream a way forward. The narrator, a painter of pen-cases struggling to find a way to build a world imagined to compensate for the ravages of the world as it is, confronts the nature of truth in the body of his own shadow. He writes:

I was growing inward incessantly; like an animal that hibernates during the wintertime, I could hear other peoples’ voices with my ears; my own voice, however, I could hear only in my throat. The loneliness and the solitude that lurked behind me were like a condensed, thick, eternal night, like one of those nights with a dense, persistent, sticky darkness which waits to pounce on unpopulated cities filled with lustful and vengeful dreams.

This is the detachment of the despairing soul. The painter seeks to know a way of being where the works of the imagination can outlast death. Though it seems that death is the more powerful force, Iraj Bashiri, one of Hedayat’s translators into English, writes of the book that “Hedayat emphasizes the importance of individual salvation, stressing that individual reform is the prerequisite for community reform. Every individual […] must realize the intrinsic significance of his own inborn gift of freedom; he should individually struggle to unshackle the fetters that bind him…”

It is a message both of despair, and of hope. One is faced with the silence of the divine; hope does not rest on the coming of a Messiah, for the narrator. Instead, Bashiri suggests, “The individual can become a recluse and attain a degree of false freedom; or he may […] wage an unending war against ignorance and, by enlightening his fellow residents, prevent illusion from perpetuating ignorance in his community.” (Bashiri 2000)

Elias Khoury’s City Gates takes us into the surreal devastation of a city made desolate by war, allowing us to see what happens to the human urge for narrative when the traces of normalcy and order are obliterated and faith in the structure and security of society is lost. Faced with the problem of being both human and narrative, the protagonist struggles first of all to believe he might have a story, or be a story, that would be of interest.

Even identity seems a forbidden indulgence, irrelevant to and unreachable from within the muddle of discordant voices the world has come to be. He is less a person than a world taken apart by what amounts to the dehumanization of an entire landscape, an entire cultural presence, a concentration of human activity that has been dispersed by terror. He is lost, because the ways, the places, the conceptualizations, he would use to define himself, have become unavailable. The healthy echo of one being in the experience of another has been stripped away. It is as if he walks in a landscape as devoid of purpose as of sound.

The key to this exploration of the void is to find purpose by way of human connection. There is the mysterious presence of one woman, then another. Relationships are unclear; boundaries are unclear; roles and rights and worth and common ground are all more fluid than reliable. The story must be shaped, however it ultimately comes to be, in this landscape of uncertainty and roiling, co-extensive mysteries that recognize in one another the possible way back to something like reliable human connections.

Frederick Douglass takes us, in his autobiography, through the horrors of slavery, both the intimate personal oppression (the intellectual and moral deprivation) and the physical cruelty (the relentless persecution, the inhumanity of the slave-owning culture). Yet he takes us to a real world illuminated by defiance and by the hope of something better and more dignified.

His moral outrage is palpable, and implicitly justified, and strikes a basic chord of humanity in us, as we read; his humanity —and so his hope— in the face of despair and torture is communicated to us, across the distance of years and of unthinkable oppression.

Yet he illustrates the way forward for the human soul on the brink of disaster, and weaves a true story that is not just inspiring, despite its many horrors, but informs us all in important ways about what it is to overcome desperation and the moral desertion of the spirit that will not anymore muster the strength to hope.

Just as Douglass takes us through the process of recovering basic human dignity by first recognizing it —recognizing that somehow, it may never have been lost, that it was there to be lived— then finding a way to outlast his tormenters, he tells us what it is to choose between hopelessness and hope. He reminds us of the human bonds that helped him believe there was a better humanity beyond the reaches of that system of terror and torture, actual human beings that, together with his own observations, worked as hints of a better way for humanity to be, more in touch with what St. Augustine might call a “fragrant” and transcendent truth. (Augustine, 56)

Despite the irrefutable evidence of terror and tragedy, there is also something else, something cleaner and more resilient. Douglass has tasted it, understands it, seeks it, will take risks for it. His narrative is not merely a story of escape; it is a story of searching, of risk-taking and of building a life beyond despair.

Hope, not by Example, but by Effort

If the jailed writer, if the starving mystic, if the Holocaust survivor and the slave, for whom the basic human right to intellect might be a dangerous crime, can find the reason in deliberately overcoming the false logic of a fantasist despair —fantasist because it pretends to know the future—, then somehow it would seem reasonable to locate the clues, discern the horizon and exert the effort ourselves.

W.E.B. Du Bois wrote history, he wrote social science, he wrote of the aims and frustrations of human beings in a world of human beings, but a world divided by perception and prejudice and which needed a corrective prism of forthright analysis. His great works on the process of emancipation —an ongoing process that required not just law, not just the end of the old south, but a collaborative perceptual way forward in which a divided, reluctant society actually would become the society of emancipation, in which African Americans were treated not as a race apart, not as a problem related to the old south, but as the full-fledged, committed members of society that they actually were— became in many ways a study in the choices that ultimately determine whether hope or despair wins out: the thing was to speak about what needed doing, what needed to be revealed, to communicate and to give voice.

Du Bois helped introduce to the American popular consciousness a narrative that actually included the African American in the process of emancipation, reminding of an oppressed people’s contribution to the Civil War effort, to the complexities of the Reconstruction coalition governments of the new south, whose thankless work was to wipe away the old system and replace it with something more modern, more inclusive, more universal. His work helped set the stage for the later popularizing of the civil rights movement, the moral outrage of ordinary Americans against the fundamental injustice of Jim Crow laws, segregation and chronic deprivation. And it was, fundamentally and in its boldest aspirations, an effort at revitalizing communication.

Hope does not exist in a vacuum. There is, of necessity, an element of human connection required to make it viable. It does not arise out of a stubborn desire to wipe away all the hard facts of a brutal world. It comes with recognition of our frailty, recognition of our interdependence, and then, with the sense that we have found some element of the human experience through which the restoration of a reliable human bond can be achieved. The space of hope, even before communication materializes and forms a connective tissue of meaning, is made of agency. It is involved in and made up of a complex process of choosing, if not a choice in itself.

When we reach out to people at the margins of our society, cast aside because they have no access to an education profound enough in content or far-reaching enough in scope to give them a fair chance at competing with the resources of the more fortunate and more prepared… when we reach out to people who have been abandoned, not just by the system broadly, but by the accidental disappearance of family, of communities they may have loved or trusted, people uprooted from a young age by household or societal turmoil, by the vagaries of the justice system, by the ripple effects of injustice, betrayal and unresolved deprivation… it becomes apparent that accumulated resources, influence and power, do not bring hope to those that can rely on them…

None of those touchstones are enough to make hope flourish in the mind or in the actions of the people they would protect. Trust is more effective a vehicle, more significant in delivering clear thoughts about the possibilities of another day. Comfort gives rest, but trust allows a deeper vitality to flourish. It breeds hope not within us, but between us.

Du Bois writes that the aim of his work is “that men may listen to the striving in the souls of black folk”. He was conjuring, as an historical moment, as a monument to the untold struggle of too many people, that same urge we must all have felt at some point in our own deep inner world, the urge to find a way to make known what we live, to bridge the divide between and among people —that so often, so easily, so much to our detriment, defines our chances—, to speak and to achieve understanding.

While these are anecdotal references, they are potent and go to the heart of what we struggle with when we seek hope in the midst of despair. Richard Rorty has written that his “candidate for the most distinctive and praiseworthy human capacity is our ability to trust and to cooperate with other people, and in particular to work together so as to improve the future.” (Rorty, xiii) It might be that we are most able to imagine constructive future selves, in constructive future worlds, when we are connected to people that give us signs of an understanding that runs deep, can be expanded, and includes us in their own imagined futures.

Hope is not an essence or commodity to be extracted from the cold earth of injustice; it is not a character trait; it is a process of thinking toward, in living time, the ways in which what should be better might be. Hope is not something we derive from a neat metaphor or a good example, but from our own effort and the resulting bonds we are able to forge and to protect. It reaches us when we choose to overcome the problem of control, strip deterministic arguments of their false power and start from the place where we are. The human place. Defined by the quality of our connections to the world around us.

Works Cited

• Augustine. On Free Choice of the Will. Hackett. Indianapolis. 1993.
• Bashiri, Iraj. “The Message of The Blind Owl: Analysis”. 2000. <http://www.angelfire.com/rnb/bashiri/BdOwl/owltalk.html>.
• Du Bois, W.E.B. The Souls of Black Folk. 1903.
• Rorty, Richard. Philosophy and Social Hope. Penguin Books. London. 1999.

The relief effort needs to deliver as much fresh medicine —already in chronic shortage in Haiti before the quake—, clean drinking water, safe blood for transfusions, food aid and temporary shelter, to the victims of the quake, as soon as possible. The logistical complications are extreme, as no stable means exists of locating and reaching each of the victims. Time is, however, of the essence, because quick delivery of medical assistance can help prevent non-lethal injuries from becoming fatal.

As time passes, water, food and medicine remain scarce, and dead bodies continue to accumulate in public areas, in the street, in building entrances, near water flows —established or spontaneous—, the risk of infection can escalate exponentially. Concerns about cholera, malaria, dysentery and other water-borne and communicable diseases, are dire, widespread and worsening.

Haiti already had the highest rates of infant, under-five and maternal (childbirth) mortality, in the western hemisphere, meaning the collapse of health services in the midst of the disaster, with all its attendant increased threats, means young children and pregnant women are particularly at risk, even if they are not yet injured or suffering ill health.

It is estimated that as much as 60% of the population of Haiti lacks access to even basic health services. HIV/AIDS is the nation’s leading contagious cause of death, and tuberculosis, which is more prevalent in Haiti than in any other country in the Americas, is second. UNICEF reports that: “It is estimated that about 5.6 per cent of people aged 15-49 years old in Haiti are living with HIV/AIDS. This includes about 19,000 children. Antiretroviral drugs are extremely scarce.”

And a report from EmaxHealth reads:

High rates of disease associated with intestinal worms, such as ascaris, trichuris, and hookworm, also plague Haiti. These worms cause anemia, stunted growth, malnutrition, and impaired physical and cognitive development. The dire state of the water and sanitation infrastructure in Haiti are a main cause of these diseases, which prompted a recent effort to tackle these problems using grants by Spain and the Inter-American Development Bank, according to a news release from the latter in October 2009.

The widespread public health crisis that already afflicted Haiti before the quake means the nation is particularly at risk for epidemic outbreaks of infection in the aftermath of such a natural disaster. The extreme depletion of basic resources, like shelter and sources of food and water, due to the destruction of the built environment, means those in need of treatment may be harder to locate, and may fail to access treatment, even as aid flows in.

Doctors without Borders (MSF) is reported to have found at least two hospitals in the quake zone that are in good working condition, and is working to set up ongoing emergency treatment facilities there. But the clock is ticking, and two hospitals are just the smallest start on what could be a population of millions in need of varying degrees of emergency aid and medical attention.

Due to the chronic shortage of fully functioning hospitals, medical infrastructure and medicines, a proliferation of free clinics, run by charities or by local physicians, have come to be increasingly important in Haiti’s sporadic and unreliable health services delivery system. Over the last two days, such clinics have been overwhelmed with unprecedented numbers of patients seeking treatment, and according to some media reports, in some cases have been forced to start laying dead bodies outside, to reduce the risk to the health of those inside.

The ICRC is possibly the world’s most experienced and far-reaching blood-distribution system, and as of this writing reports it “is meeting any requests for blood due to this tragedy through current supplies”, but urges those who wish to donate, especially type O-negative or type B-negative (always in short supply), to make an appointment with a Red Cross blood donation center. There is a proper procedure for preparing to donate blood and for donating, which is laid out on the Red Cross website, and which urges donors to hydrate after donation and avoid heavy lifting or strenuous activity after giving blood.

ABC News is reporting the Obama administration’s text-to-donate program for the Red Cross’ Haiti relief mobilization has raised $5 million in just 2 days. According to their report:

The Obama administration’s program to raise money for the Red Cross’s relief for survivors of the earthquake in Haiti through text messaging has raised $5 million in just over two days, administration sources tell ABC News.

By texting HAITI to 90999 through their cell phones, donors give $10 to the Red Cross, a charge that will appear on their bills.

The Red Cross is donating in excess of $10 million to provide emergency relief for Haiti, but will also mobilize people and resources. Foreign teams are entering the country, joining a 15-person in-country staff aided by thousands of Haitian volunteers. A news release from the organization specifies:

The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) is helping to reconnect separated families within the country. They have established a special Web site, enabling persons in Haiti and abroad to search for and register the names of relatives missing since the earthquake: www.icrc.org/familylinks. An ICRC plane carrying 40 tons of supplies — mainly medical items — is expected to leave Geneva today. Included are specialized kits to help treat the wounded, basic medicines and chlorine for water treatment. Other Red Cross partners have deployed a mobile hospital as well as medical teams to support it as well as more than 40 others who can coordinate the relief activities, including sheltering, water, sanitation and telecommunications.

The Red Cross provided blood and blood products to the US Naval Air Station in Jacksonville, Florida. That blood, requested by the US Navy, was shipped by the US Navy to their facilities at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba in support of Haitian evacuees and patients. In addition, the American Red Cross sent a shipment of blood products to the United Nations Mission in Haiti. To date, the Red Cross has sent more than 100 units of blood and blood products to Haiti and Guantanamo Bay. The American Red Cross is meeting the needs of this tragedy through current supplies. At this time we do not anticipate the need for a special donor appeal to support our efforts. As always, blood donors are encouraged to call 1-800-RED CROSS or visit us online at www.redcrossblood.org to make an appointment.

Two days into the earthquake aftermath, the scarcity of safe drinking water is now becoming a much more immediate concern. Security and public health concerns converge, as lack of shelter, panic, grief and repeated aftershocks, prevent people from sleeping, which together with potentially severe dehydration, not only diminishes the body’s defenses, but also inspires desperation. If illness and infection take hold among those already grieving and/or wounded, the situation could seriously deteriorate and more deaths will be likely.

The next 24 hours will be crucial in terms of getting aid delivery centers and health treatment facilities set up. Aid workers and government officials will need to be able to move out into the field, to search for survivors, especially the vulnerable or immobilized. The equation for sustaining the population through the next phase of disaster relief will boil down to: medicine, water, blood, food and shelter, assuming the logistical challenges are overcome, and help can get through.

Links to Haiti earthquake relief campaigns:

• Red Cross (ICRC) relief & rescue efforts in Haiti
• Haïti : le CICR intensifie ses efforts pour venir en aide aux victimes du séisme
• UNICEF Emergency Relief Effort for Haiti
• L’UNICEF déploie son aide d’urgence après le tremblement de terre
• Doctors without Borders: Setting up clinics to serve the wounded
• MSF: Haïti: des centaines de blessés reçoivent les premiers soins
• USAID Haiti Earthquake Disaster Response
• Clinton Foundation: Haiti Earthquake Relief
• Oxfam: Preparing response for victims of Haitian quake
• Radio Soleil: Broadcasting in New York
• CNN.com/IMPACT: Links to Reliable Agencies Providing Relief
• Catholic Relief Services: Haiti Relief Effort
• World Food Programme: Mobilizing Food Aid to Haiti Quake Zone
• Programme alimentaire mondial (PAM) mobilise aide alimentaire pour Haïti
• Habitat for Humanity: Haiti Earthquake Disaster Response
• U.S. Dept. of State: Effort to Locate Relatives of Americans in Haiti
• Text HAITI to 90999 to donate $10 to Red Cross relief efforts in Haiti
• Private aid donations page from CIDI (Center for International Disaster Information)

UPDATES / IN THE NEWS:

• UN Emergency Relief Coordinator Press Conference on Haiti
• UNESCO Director-General appeals for emergency aid for Haiti
• UNDP: Search-and-rescue operations continue in Haiti
• Red Cross Blood Donation Process & Guidelines
• UNICEF: Aid begins to arrive in Haiti for earthquake survivors in dire need
• Haiti: disaster beyond magnitude (historical context)
• US response swift, generous, amid deep public sympathy for Haiti
• Thousands seek missing loved ones in Haiti
• Disaster Response for Haiti Earthquake — A New Paradigm? (discussion)

2010 promises to be a year of historical landmarks, with important breakthroughs in ecological science, collaborative diplomacy and key international negotiations on economics, arms reduction, democratization and security. Efforts to reform the financial system in the US, Europe and Asia, to prevent the kind of abuses seen during the sub-prime lending bubble, will bring a new focus on corporate ethics and sustainable banking practices. Micro-lending, small-business resilience and consumer protection, may gain unprecedented and concerted momentum around the world, likely in connection with rapid investment in clean energy technologies.

The coming decade will see key improvements to the interactive quality of human relations around the world, and an increased role for populations in shaping the policies of their governments and the major economic forces that determine their access to wellbeing, freedom and security. We examine here, in broad strokes, the following topics: green tech, denuclearization, cooperation and connectivity, gender equality, food security, counter-extremism, particle physics, media freedom and global consumer protection.

Green Tech

The United States is now seeing the beginnings of an historic investment in electric vehicle (EV) transportation infrastructure and cutting-edge high-speed regional rail services. By the end of 2010, the process of forging a stable, long-term EV infrastructure should be in full swing, and recognizable across much of the nation. The coming decade may see a near total shift toward EV, away from internal combustion engines for automotive transport, in new vehicles. Retrofitting will also become key to the overhaul of the US transportation infrastructure, and such initiatives will be closely linked to economic recovery.

Efforts to green the energy economy will mean direct competition against parallel negotiations on binding targets for cuts in greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. The political and the technological responses will vie for prevalence throughout the decade, with both political and technological advances in GHG reduction helping to steer both investment and economic prosperity to centers of economic activity around the world. This new flourishing of economic dynamism will be key to how global political trends shape up over the coming decade.

By the end of the 2010s, the standard for new energy and transport technologies should be decidedly focused on a new zero-combustion paradigm. A number of already existing technologies will compete for prominence in this new energy economy, but we should also expect to see dramatic innovations as yet never produced, which will help to drive the transition to a zero-combustion energy and transport economy.

Denuclearization

And as the new decade dawns, North Korea has expressed its wish to bring an end to hostile relations with the United States and to comprehensively denuclearize the Korean Peninsula. While it is too soon to celebrate this New Year’s statement as a sign of any lasting peace, it affords serious consideration of the possibility that Pyongyang will now rejoin the six-party negotiations on denuclearizing, and possibly usher in a new era in east Asian security politics and global nuclear diplomacy.

Pres. Barack Obama’s initiative for a nuclear-free world has already made great strides in 2009, with the US and the Russian Federation about to sign a major new strategic arms reduction treaty, to halve the number of their most destructive nuclear warheads. This leadership, by Presidents Obama and Medvedev, is steering the international community toward a new paradigm for international security cooperation.

All five permanent members of the UN Security Council —all nuclear powers— voted this year to move global nuclear policy, through the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), toward Pres. Obama’s stated goal of a “world without nuclear weapons”. The decade of the twenty-tens should, as a result, see the most important progress toward denuclearization since nuclear weapons were first tested and deployed, during World War II.

If significant progress toward sustained diplomatic cooperation is made among the world’s leading nuclear powers, the polarization problem that has plagued global politics since the onset of the Cold War more than six decades ago, could be lessened. Nations seeking to compete for defensive security with the world’s most powerful states could see the promise of nuclear weapons research diminish, as the world unites to treat all nuclear weapons as an unacceptable and immoral threat to human civilization.

Cooperation & Connectivity

But the hallmark of the tens is likely to be enhanced diplomatic cooperation as such. Key developments of the first decade of the 21st century, like the Iraq war, have shown the pitfalls of unilateral action. The trend in climate-policy talks has been mounting global pressure, from the grassroots through the level of government for far-ranging international cooperation and consensus. The economic crisis of 2008-2009 has led to unprecedented concerted efforts to shore up the banking system and prevent long-term collapse.

Connectivity may be the key word to describe the coming decade. As governments lean toward cooperation, economies integrate not through harsh bilateral trade agreements, but framework negotiations aimed at sustainability and quality of life, and security talks privilege political stability and human rights above unilateral security policy, media technologies will provide for the most comprehensive interconnectedness yet seen between populations around the world.

Both the “digital divide”, the problem of low ease of access for poor populations to the world wide web, and freedom of information —press freedom, net neutrality and communicational freedom— will be constantly at issue in nations both large and small that are emerging into more regular relations with an international community centered on democratic principles and universal rights. China, India, Pakistan and Indonesia, four of the world’s most populous nations, need to grapple with the problem of balancing severe economic stress with large populations and persistent factionalism.

Democratization in this environment will depend less on the will of political leaders than on the actual use by ordinary people of information technology and the degree to which such technologies allow for more open media environments that help to create a sense of sustainable balance between diversity and unity. The vanguard of open media will gain significant political and economic clout in such nations, helping to shift the paradigm for exercise of power in complex populous nations.

Mexico, Nigeria and Bangladesh, also among the world’s most populous nations, will have to grapple with the same problems of socio-economic degradation and factionalism, while facing the problem of imminent mass migration due to climate change. Each of these nations will face desperate and heated negotiations with neighboring countries over water resources, arable land and food security. One of the most persistent security threats will be the correlation between military exercises along borders and resource scarcity.

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.

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 nanoseconds 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 and decentralizing 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 whose underdevelopment in global policy 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 must be 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, will provide real opportunities to integrate into the fabric of global commerce a more responsible human-centered model of trade, if the details of this crisis are not discounted. 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.

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.

Calls to Sen. Reid and Sen. Lieberman’s offices suggest the plan is little more than a framework proposal and is not yet written into any specific legislative language. Sen. Reid (D-NV) offers no comment on whether he favors this plan, and Sen. Lieberman (I-CT) continues to refuse to say whether he will support healthcare reform legislation, even with this compromise included. Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-ME) is said to be considering the plan, her support being necessary to get at least one Republican vote.

In order to help keep costs down and bring us closer to universal coverage, the plan is said to include a lowering of the Medicare eligibility age to 55, which would entail younger participants paying money directly into Medicare, instead of to private insurers, ostensibly to help keep Medicare solvent and lower costs for a high-risk age-group.

If the non-profit, private-run plan is included, it must meet the following criteria:

1. It must be low-cost and it must benefit from subsidies to those who cannot afford it otherwise;
2. It can never deny coverage for pre-existing conditions;
3. It can not refuse access based on income, geography, age or health status;
4. It cannot in any way interfere with doctors’ and patients’ shared choices on health treatment;
5. It cannot pay anything below what Medicare pays for treatment;
6. It must be accepted everywhere, by every doctor and hospital;
7. It must be regulated, so that insurers cannot institute a “medical-loss ratio” analysis intended to reduce access to care;
8. It must be part of an overall reform that brings us to near 100% coverage…

Unless the plan meets these criteria, the entire health reform bill will fail to achieve the two main goals of opening access to health insurance to all Americans (so that people do not suffer deteriorating health and even death, due to non-coverage) and lowering costs across the board (so that families, doctors and hospitals do not face the threat of bankruptcy due to the idiosyncrasies of insurance reimbursement).

If we don’t fix those two fundamental crises in our healthcare system, we face the near certainty that our entire economy will continue to suffer intense pressure from the out-of-control and still rapidly escalating costs of the current healthcare system. One possible safeguard would be to allow policy-holders to have a role in setting policy for the non-profit plan, so that it has some of the virtues of a cooperative and the added market “efficiency” of consumers spelling out clearly what works for them.

• Stakeholders Should Form Non-profit Grassroots Health Co-ops Now
• Healthcare Reform Explained
• Health Reform Requires Full-menu Insurance Exchange, including Low-cost