Bill Ellis writes: We belong to the Webs-of-being — to the Cosmos — to Earth — to Gaia.

Belonging is the protovalue from which all other values derive.

We
belong to the physiophere, to the biosphere, to the ideosphere. We
belong to Gaia. As the aborigines said it  “we are the ownees of the
land, not the owners of the land.” As Chief Seattle said it, “We can
not own the land, we are part of the land.” We belong to and are
inseparable from our culture– from one another –from Earth — from
Gaia. We are interdependent with all that is.

Belonging is scientific fact; and, belonging is more than scientific fact.

Belonging
is not merely “being a member of,” but it is being subject to — being in
partnership with — being responsible for. We belong to — are
responsible for — the webs -of-being — the universe — the Earth –
Gaia. Belonging to-Gaia means recognizing that we are enmeshed in the
webs-of-being and that our well-being is dependent on the well-being of
Gaia. If we destroy Gaia, we destroy ourselves.

Belonging
implies “cooperation” — working with what is — with Gaia — the webs
of being. Belonging implies “community.” In our face-to-face
relationships with people we form community — we belong to community.
Belonging implies “responsibility.” We are responsible for Gaia. We are
responsible for one another. Belonging implies “Love.” We can not
separate love (agape) from the fact that we belong to Gaia. We love
because we must love to preserve Gaia — to preserve ourselves — to
preserve the webs-of-being

Cultures built on values other than
belonging are doomed to self-destruct. A culture built on “domination
of the earth, and all the animals therein” is doomed to disappear. A
culture based on “self-interest” is doomed to disintegrate. A Culture
based on “survival-of-the-fittest” will not survive. A culture based on
competition will destroy itself.

To be stable and sustainable a
culture must be based on cooperation, community, responsibility, love,
honesty, caregiving, and the other values which are implied by and
intertwined with one another and with belonging.

We can no more
separate ourselves from belonging — from Gaia — and remain a viable
culture; than an oxygen atom can separate itself from hydrogen atoms
and retain the qualities of water. (08/21/08)
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Eugene Gholz & Daryl Press write: WHILE oil prices have declined somewhat of late, the volatility of
the market and the political and religious unrest in major
oil-producing countries has Americans worrying more than ever about
energy security. But they have little to fear — contrary to common
understanding, there are robust stockpiles of oil around the globe that
could see us through any foreseeable calamities on the world market.

True, trouble for the world’s energy supplies could come from many
directions. Hurricanes and other natural disasters could suddenly
disrupt oil production or transportation. Iran loudly and regularly
proclaims that it can block oil exports from the Persian Gulf. The
anti-American rhetoric of President Hugo Ch·vez of Venezuela raises
fears of an export cutoff there. And ongoing civil unrest wreaks havoc
with Nigeria’s output.

Even worse, this uncertainty comes in the context of worrisome
reports that oil producers have little spare capacity, meaning that
they could not quickly ramp up production to compensate for a
disruption.

But such fears rest on a misunderstanding. The world actually has
enormous spare oil capacity. It has simply moved. In the past, major
oil producers like Saudi Arabia controlled it. But for years the
world’s major consumers have bought extra oil to fill their emergency
petroleum reserves.

Moreover, whereas the world’s reserve supply once sat in relatively
inaccessible pools, much of it now sits in easily accessible salt
caverns and storage tanks. And consumers control the spigots. During a
supply disruption, Americans would no longer have to rely on the good
will of foreign governments.

The United States alone has just more than 700 million barrels of
crude oil in its Strategic Petroleum Reserve. Government stockpiles in
Europe add nearly another 200 million barrels of crude and more than
200 million barrels of refined products. …

Make no mistake, any major disruption — from a war, a terrorist attack or a natural disaster — would make prices jump until markets realized that the pipes feeding crude into refineries were not going to run dry. But recognizing the great capacity of global reserves to weather disruptions will go a long way to minimizing panic.

Emergency reserves have their limits. They cannot free the industrialized world from the underlying economic fundamentals that drive energy prices. As the global economy grows, demand for energy will rise and oil prices may remain high.

Government-controlled stockpiles should not be used to try to smooth out short-term blips in global supplies, the normal variations that companies account for with their inventories and financial hedging. Public inventories are a blunt instrument designed to protect the oil market as a whole from major disruptions — national strikes, hurricane damage, wars and attempts at geopolitical blackmail. (08/21/08)
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Tom Engelhardt writes: It was probably all those afternoons at my local library when I was a kid, reading Isaac Asimov’s sci-fi version of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, the Foundation Trilogy,
and those nights under the covers with a flashlight — long after I was
supposed to be asleep — frightening myself to death with H.G. Wells’s War of the Worlds and the like. …

Still, even at my age, I continue to enjoy a glimpse into the future. Of course, so do the Pentagon and the U.S. Intelligence Community. In fact, in recent years, they have practically taken out a copyright on the future. These days, they’re always producing scenarios for (and plans and weapons for) 2020 and beyond. As Frida Berrigan noted
at this site recently, most federal agencies “project budgets just
around the corner of the next decade. Only the Pentagon projects power
and possibility decades into the future, colonizing the imagination
with scads of different scenarios under which, each year, it will
continue to control hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars. Complex
2030, Vision 2020, UAV Roadmap 2030, the Army’s Future Combat Systems
– the names, which seem unending, tell the tale.”

But my feeling is: Why leave voyages into the future to them? Okay,
when TomDispatch writers look ahead, they only control budgets in the
low double figures, but still. …

Back in December 2006, I asked site regular Rebecca Solnit to bring
that year to an end by stepping into the nifty TomDispatch Compac 1221
Time Machine, just the basic model of course, and zipping forward to
the year 2026 in order to take a gander at the past we have yet to experience. She ended that post:

“The future, of course, is not something you predict
and wait for. It is something you invent daily through your actions. As
Mas Kodani, a Buddhist in Los Angeles, said in the early twenty-first
century: ‘One does not stand still looking for a path. One walks; and
as one walks, a path comes into being.’ We make it up as we go, and we
make it up by going, or as the Zapatistas more elegantly put it,
‘Walking we ask questions.’ What else can you do?

“Perhaps respect the power of the small and the mystery of the future to which we all belong.”

Solnit’s piece was so satisfying that, every time I noticed that snappy
little, all-red Time Machine in my closet, I was beset by regrets.
Fortunately, just this week, out of the blue — and the future — I
received the following report. Buckle your seat belts, you’re in for a
ride.  (08/21/08)
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The Guardian / UK — If you want proof the world has a water problem you’re better treading the damp summer pavements of the City than the parched bed of the Aral Sea.

Goldman Sachs says water is the next oil and has bullish investment trends to prove it. For the rest of us a water boom spells trouble: investors can smell scarcity a mile off and, however much money they pump into managing it, the last result they’ll want is abundance.

It will be our plates, not our rates, that bear the brunt of water shortage. As today’s report from WWF spells out, the amount we spew out of taps is piddling compared with what it takes to make stuff and, especially, to grow our food.

The volumes involved are staggering: the 200 billion litres a second it takes to grow the world’s food is like gulping down the Amazon day in, day out. In the UK, we use about 58 bathtubs full of water every day, both directly and in the food we eat and the clothes we wear, and 62% of that comes from other countries. We’re eating dry Lake Naivasha in Kenya and Australia’s Murray River, as well as running down our own reserves.

But our water problem isn’t just about the amount we use. Quality is as crucial as quantity. Whether water is clean, dirty or briny, comes from groundwater or from rainfall, and its whereabouts, can make all the difference.

To tackle water scarcity we need to remind ourselves why it is a problem. The most obvious reason is that we just can’t keep using water at current rates. In practice, running low on a resource can mean that rich places like the UK barely notice while poor people take the hit.

But we’ve been there already with water – other countries have suffered from scarcity for decades – and we’re now at the point where even the big-name companies that feed us are feeling the squeeze and getting seriously worried about the security of their supply chains.

But, just because this problem is now affecting rich countries, it doesn’t mean we’ll carry our fair share of the burden. So the second problem is injustice, destroying other people’s livelihoods as we try to sort out our own supply problems. Just as pulling the rug from under the people who grow our airfreighted fruit and veg due to concerns over air miles is a problem, so too for water-scarce regions. (08/21/08)
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