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Kurt Vonnegut
address at Ohio State University
(should be this, 01 MAR 2006)
Quoted in Kurt Vonnegut's "Stardust Memory"
by Harvey Wasserman
Published on Sunday, March 5, 2006 by the Columbus Free Press (Ohio)
"In fact, the main value gap today is not between Europeans, Americans, Asians, and Africans, but between all of us and the values of the ruling economic fundamentalism -- which even in democratic countries is presented as sacrosanct and without alternative. Our problem today is not a 'values vacuum' but that widely-agreed human values are not acted on. Indeed, they have often been rendered invisible by the refusal of commerce and finance to accept that they should be restricted by the values of the societies in which they operate."
"A New Human Story", by
Jakob Von Uexkull,
The Ecologist, May 2001
Quoted at Save the Earth : Get informed
"The Hungarian Marxist writer Georg Lukacs once said that the essence of opportunism is always to begin with ‘parts and not the whole, symptoms and not the thing itself’.
This is an apt description of the current outbreak of mourning over the Yangtze river dolphin. It overlooks ‘the thing itself’ that caused the dolphin to die off: China’s transformation of the Yangtze into a source of nourishment, livelihood and wealth for millions upon millions of human beings. What the Chinese have done to the Yangtze in recent decades could be described as a mini-industrial revolution. Over the past 200 years, and the past 50 years in particular, the Yangtze has become one of China’s main lifelines: its waters support and enable vast amounts of agricultural work, which keep millions of people in employment and produce millions of tonnes of food; the river also allows the transportation of goods -- food, medicine, bicycles, computers, furniture -- through nine of China’s provinces, which cover 695,000 square miles of land.
The Chinese have harvested the river to make mind-boggling amounts of rice. And as one writer on the world’s rivers points out, rice remains ‘the world’s single most important food crop and a primary food for more than a third of the world’s population’ (6). China accounts for 35 per cent of the world’s rice production. A large proportion of this Chinese rice is cultivated around the Yangtze: each year, the river deposits more than 170million cubic metres of silt, which makes up the fertile plains of the Jiangsu province, and the Chinese use these plains to make ‘abundant harvests’ of rice (7). Millions are employed in China’s rice production industry, and their harvest feeds millions more Chinese as well as millions of people across the Third World. Remember that soppy Band Aid song ‘Feed the world’? Well, China’s harvesting of the natural properties of the Yangtze (or what some refer to as its poisoning of the Yangtze) is helping to do precisely that.
The river enables modern industry, too. Tonnes of fish are pulled from the Yangtze every day and transported to Shanghai and other cities across China. Most strikingly, 20,000 labourers are currently working on finishing the Three Gorges Dam. ... It will create a five-trillion gallon reservoir which will be 400 miles long and hundreds of feet deep. It will further stabilise the river, allowing freighters weighing up to 10,000 tonnes to navigate their way into the heart of China. The dam’s turbines will generate the same amount of electricity as 18 nuclear power plants, and will supply around a ninth of China’s electricity. Put another way, they will meet the electricity needs of 150 million people. Modern China harvests the Yaghtze for fish, rice production and energy.
Of course, vast amounts of waste and sewage are created as a result of all this activity on the Yangtze, and they have given rise to pollution and caused hardship for certain animals." (Of course. "Hardships" such as going extinct, for example. Or surviving in an environment of sewage. We might respectfully request that writer O'Neill be subjected to the latter [though not the former] for a few years, and then re-examine his feelings on environmentalism vs development.)
"Q. What's the difference between the Democratic and Republican parties?- A page on this site on / "Republicrats" /
A. Not enough.
"How is it that domestic politics in this country is at once so rancid and so banal, so embittered and yet so uninspiring? Why should it be that two parties with few if any essential differences are ready to speak of each other as if a cultural or even a civil war were only a few speeches away? Obviously, much of this fatuous rhetoric arises from the need to disagree more and more about less and less, to maintain the mills of fundraising in a churning condition, and to keep the dwindling groups of genuine loyalists and activists in a state of excited pseudo-commitment. (I think that Neil Postman's analysis in Amusing Ourselves to Death : Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business is also quite apposite here.) But much of the dankness and dinginess is owed to the influence exerted by professional political operators, those who have a careerist interest in "the process" as it is -— which is to say partisan in theory and bipartisan in practice. ...
The self-satirizing summa of all this is the bizarre (sic) marriage of Mary Matalin and James Carville, who actually contrived to run opposing presidential campaigns in 1992 while still, at the end of the day, proving that the two parties were essentially in bed together."
"Tomihiro Taniguchi, vice chairman of the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), said the challenges of cutting carbon emissions should be viewed as an opportunity to develop new technologies and make a profit in the process.
``There is still...a wrong perception or wrong conviction that the environmental issues including climate change can be a minus, or harmful to economic development or the recovery.
``But the main message is that this is not necessarily the case. We can have a lot of net benefit, no regret options. That message is very difficult to convey.''
On genetic engineering in agriculture -- a subject I admittedly know little about. Has the potential for great benefits and extraordinary harm. For the present, it seems to me that for the release of genespliced organisms into the environment (e.g. agricultural applications), the risks generally edge out the potential gains.
from Billionaires for Bush (or Gore)
"Capitalism is an economic system where the means of production are for the most part privately owned and controlled; socialism is an economic system where the means of production are for the most part publicly owned and controlled. Most Green Party programs do not advocate either system. Greens in the US characterize their economic orientation in a phrase: community-based economics."
-- sounds to me like this should be indistinguishable from, or at least very similar to, syndicalism
"For the Greens, it is common-sense that the Left in the U.S. ought to have a political party as it does in other Western democracies. The right has two parties, both committed to serving the consensus of the U.S. business leadership. One is socially moderate, the other socially conservative. The corporate parties are ruled by what are commonly called 'special interests', -- those bodies who benefit economically from prevailing policy. The fact that neither party thought twice about allowing the likes of Anheuser-Busch to underwrite the 2000 Presidential debates underscores their total acquiescence to their own corporate sponsorship.Links and bold are mine -- ed.
... there is good reason that Gore and Bush excluded Nader. Not only would Nader have wiped the floor with them on the issues, he would have spoken plainly to the American public about the policy matters that we care about, the issues that the two party 'duopoly' ignores."
"... perhaps as I sit here typing these words, fully convinced that everyone must feel at least a degree of the meaningless and alienation -- of the anomie -- that I feel and project upon the world around me, you are thinking just how grand life is and what a wonderful world we all live in: To each his own. I would argue, however, as William Monroe does in Power to Hurt: The Virtues of Alienation, that this is unnatural:Links are mine -- ed.
'This suspicion, and often renunciation, of the twentieth-century world -- with its exploitation, war, mechanization, conspicuous consumption, and pervasive mendacity -- has been compelling. What man or woman of sensitivity and conscience would not be against such a world and opposed to the cultural forms and genres that support and take sustenance, however indirect, from that world?' (68-69)."
"Green Party candidates and leaders have called the sustained assault on the U.S. Constitution over the past decade one of the missing issues of the 2004 election year. 'The Constitution -- not the flag or the Pledge of Allegiance -- is the glue that holds our nation together', said Marakay Rogers, Green candidate for Attorney General of Pennsylvania. 'Democrats and Republicans alike tell us that anticonstitutional measures like the USA Patriot Act are necessary for security and for law and order. But these measures promote the transformation of the U.S. into something that more and more resembles a police state, an authoritarian regime, an empire. ...Links are mine -- ed.
'The rights, protections, and laws enshrined in the Constitution are now in danger of erosion to the point where it may become an irrelevant historical artifact', said David Cobb, Green candidate for President of the United States. 'Greens are committed to upholding and defending the Constitution, and amending it legally where it falls short'. "
"In 1900, there were only a few thousand cars in the world. Today there are over 500 million. From a few thousand barrels of oil per day in 1900, we have increased our appetite for oil to 72 million barrels per day in 1997. Human population has increased exponentially, from 350 million at the turn of the last millennium, to 1.6 billion at the turn of the 20th century, to almost 6 billion today. And just about every single one of them wants a car.Links are mine -- ed.
If the world follows the Western model of one car for every two people, we will have 5 billion cars by the mid-21st century, boosting our fuel consumption to one trillion barrels per year. Ironically one trillion barrels is the current estimate of the total amount of oil remaining to be extracted from the Earth. No one really expects oil to be around by 2050. 80% of the oil produced today comes from fields discovered before 1973, and the U.S. Congressional Office of Technology Assessment estimates that all known oil reserves will dry up by 2037."
"(Western) People like to talk about how different indigenous peoples are than us as westerners, but people are often really much the same at the end of the day. What do they want? They want a good life. They want a decent life for their kids. They want clean air and water. And if you tell them OK you can have more money in your pocket but all this other stuff is going to disappear -- potable water, your medicine, your food, your sacred sites -- it becomes a pretty obvious choice."
"For almost as long as I can remember, the experts have been saying that the US, with 5% of the world's population, consumes a third or more of the Earth's resources. That is no longer true.Links are mine -- ed.
China has now overtaken America as the world's leading resource consumer. Among the basic commodities -- grain and meat in the food sector, oil and coal in the energy sector, and steel in the industrial sector -- China now consumes more of each of these than the US except for oil. It consumes nearly twice as much meat -- 67m tonnes compared with 39m tonnes in the US; and more than twice as much steel -- 258m tonnes to 104m. ...
The western economic model -- the fossil fuel-based, car-centred, throwaway economy -- is not going to work for China. If it does not work for China, it will not work for India, which by 2031 is projected to have a population even larger than China's. Nor will it work for the 3 billion other people in developing countries who are also dreaming the "American dream".
In an increasingly integrated global economy, where all countries are competing for the same oil, grain and iron ore, the existing economic model will no longer work for industrial countries either. ...
Business as usual -- Plan A -- cannot take us where we want to go. It is time for Plan B, time to build a new economy."
"... short-term and local self-interest must yield to a long-term, global consciousness -- a tall order. Increased efficiency and alternative fuels might for a time fill the gap left by petroleum’s decline. But we have yet to devise an alternative as versatile as petroleum that can fill its huge role -- especially in the face of relentlessly growing demand for energy. And whatever we do to support population growth will only make overshoot worse in the end.Links are mine -- ed.
In addition to unique abilities, we have a serious shortcoming. We are unwilling, perhaps unable, to see ourselves as subject to the same constraints as Earth’s other inhabitants. But in our dependence on the environment for food and water, we most certainly are subject to those constraints. Without a solution, we will die ....
Given Earth’s limits, there already are too many of us for the long run. But the day of reckoning is many years away (months at least!), and it is notoriously difficult for political leaders to seek moderate sacrifice today to prevent terrible sacrifice tomorrow when there is too little general recognition of the trouble ahead."
This is of course the libretto of the song Turn Back, O Man
from the 1971 stage production / 1973 film Godspell.
I was quite surprised to learn that this was originally written in 1916.
"Clifford Bax, an English hymnodist, wrote this in 1916,
at the request of his friend, Gustav Holst.
This was during The Great War, of course –
'the war to end all wars'."
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