Ecology - The privileges and obligations

In many isolated cultures that must survive on local resources alone, actions that would be detrimental to the future are perceived and avoided. Such local feedback in decision making is lost when isolated cultures are incorporated into large and complex societies. Economics must develop a coherent theory of decision making behaviour that is applicable at all levels of group organisation. This will necessitate defining self interest in terms of survival rather than consumption. Such a shift would bring economic behaviour under something akin to the rules of the nature, which has worked so well to insure the perpetuation of life on earth over the eons. One of the obstacles to avoiding overshoots in resource use is named the tragedy of the commons (Hardin, 1968). Commons means here the part of our environment that is open to use by anyone and everyone, with no one person responsible for its welfare.

If our present political and economic methods continue unchanged, severe boom and bust cycles will occur. Essentially, this is a modern systems approach to the older Warnings to Humankind classics. The Limits to Growth (Meadows et al. 1972) denounce society’s obsession with growth, in which at every level the goal is to get richer and bigger and more powerful, without considering basic human values and the ultimate cost of unrestricted, unplanned consumption of resources and stress on environmental life support goods and services.

The tragedy in these modern times is that local restrictions, as might be embodied in zoning ordinances, are so easily overturned by the pressure of big money - that is the capital that is available for the kind of development that yields large short term profits, often at the expense of local quality of life. In too many cities, citizens have to engage in constant battles to keep their neighbourhoods from being overbuilt.

In the early development of civilizations taking dominion over the environment and exploiting resources such as clearing the land for crops, mining the earth for materials and energy, etc. and high birth rates were both necessary for human survival. But as our society becomes ever more crowded, resource-demanding, and technologically complex, there is less need for large families and child labour, and more important, various limitations are reached that force us to turn to stewardship in order not to destroy our life supporting house.


Social trap

A situation in which a short term gain is followed in the long term by a costly or deleterious situation not in the best interest of either the individual or society has been called a social trap (Platt 1973, Cross and Guyer 1980). An analogy is a trap that entices an animal into it with an attractive bait. Cigarette smoking is an example of a behavioural social trap while hazardous waste dumping, destruction of wetlands (or other life support environments), and nuclear war are examples of environmental social traps.

We can turn social traps into trade offs by levying a tax or charge on the parties responsible for creating long term deleterious situations for example levying a pollution tax on a hazardous waste generator. Money collected in this manner could be put into a trust fund and used to monitor and ameliorate environmental impacts , if the impact was less deleterious than originally predicted, money could be returned to the generators or future taxes could be reduced (Cross and Guyer, 1980).


Economic Growth versus Economic Development

In 1991 UNESCO issued a report entitled environmentally sustainable economic Development, which made distinction between economic growth, which involves getting larger (quantitative growth), and economic development, which involves getting better (qualitative growth) without increasing the total consumption of energy an materials beyond a level that is reasonable sustainable. The report concludes that a five to tenfold expansion of anything remotely resembling the present economy , which some economists say is necessary to reduce poverty worldwide - world simply speed us from today’s long run unsustainability to imminent collapse. Therefore the economic growth required for poverty reduction (especially in the less development countries) ‘must be balanced by negative throughput growth for the rich.

In 1992 world leaders convened an Earth Summit, in search of international agreements that could help save the world from pollution, poverty and the waste of resources. Confrontation between the wealthy ‘north’ and the poor ‘south’ dominated the proceedings, and few meaningful agreements were reached; however, the concept of sustainable development did emerge as a means of combining economic and ecological needs. Many who attended the summit came away with the feeling that a pathway had been opened for future cooperation among nations. The human disposition being what it is - we wait until a problem gets really bad before taking action - it often takes a crisis or a disaster to bring about good environmental planning and a start on the transitions we have been discussing.


The Human Landscape: Setting priorities

Because human predicaments differ dramatically in different parts of the world, priorities for seeking solutions must differ accordingly. In terms of current economic conditions and population densities, William Clark 1989 divides the world into four regions. In low income countries the first priority is reducing poverty, which means promoting sustainable economic growth. In high density countries reducing birth rates by family planning or other means should be paramount. Reducing waste and over consumption of resources should be the first priority of high income countries, which means shifting from quantitative to qualitative growth. Most high income countries are already well into the demographic transition to reduce their population growth rates.


The paradox of technological development

Just about every technological advance that is intended to improve our well being and prosperity has its dark as well as its bright side. Example of this paradox such as the mixed blessings of plant, pest and disease control technology and Green Revolution technology. The bright side of these technologies is increased yield of food produced with less labour. The dark side is the heavy use of fertilizers, pesticides, and machinery, which results in widespread air, water, and soil pollution, the development of resistant strain of pests, and serious rural unemployment. Another example is the coal fired power plants that provide electricity but also make a major contribution to acid rain. The point to be made here is that as we seek new technologies, we must be aware that they will have dark sides that must not only be anticipated but also dealt with. Often what is needed is a counter technology that will at least ameliorate the detrimental effects.

Like the evolutionary arms race, action counter action is the way of life in the affairs of humans as in nature. In nature, natural rules takes care of the counter action but in human affairs we have to apply our own negative feedback. The danger is either in not anticipating the need for counter action or in waiting too long to act. The delay in implementing clean coal technology, for example, is due to the fact that there is a transition cost in making the change. Governments should assist utilities, and industry in general, in making the transition by providing tax relief, grants, or other incentives rather than promoting the status que - business as usual - as governments wont do unless we, the public, tell politicians you want changes that will improve health and the quality of life, even if there is a temporary economic cost. Anything that improves the quality of our environment and our lives benefit’s the economy in the long run.

Restoration

Because so much of the environment has been damaged beyond natures’ ability to repair it, restoring damaged ecosystems is becoming big business. Ways and means of restoring wetlands that were drained or destroyed before their value as life support buffers was recognized is an especially active area of research. A pioneer in developing the new field of restoration ecology is John Cairns. In reviewing such environmental engineering projects, it is evident that hey are most successful when four key groups work together in a coordinated manner - namely, citizen’s groups, governmental agencies (local, state, and federal), science and technology, and business interest. When any one of these groups is not strongly involved, restoration projects usually fail to achieve their long term goals.

The proper path for third world countries to take in developing their agriculture is to bypass the wasteful, high input stage and go directly from their traditional agriculture to new low input practices, using strategies such as genetic biotechnology, which can create plants that require less energy subsidy and environment damaging chemicals.

Maintaining and improving environmental quality requires an ethical underpinning. Not only must it be against the law to abuse nature’s life support systems, it must be understood to be unethical as well. Aldo Leopolod’s the Land Ethic, suggested that the extension of ethics over time is a sequence as follows: first, there is the development of religion as a human to human ethic. Then comes democracy as a human to society ethic. And finally there is a yet to be developed ethical relationship between humans and their environment; the land relation is still strictly economic entailing privileges but not obligations.



Youth to maturity parallels
Individual transition as adolescence
Biotic community transition as ecological succession
Society transition as demographic transition

Human societies go from pioneer to mature status in a manner parallel to the way that natural communities undergo ecological succession and individuals go from youth to adulthood. Continuing to act on a short term, one problem/one solution basis as society grows larger and more complex leads to what economist Khan(1966) call “the tyranny of small decisions”. increasing the heights of smokestacks - a quick fix for local smoke pollution- is an example in which many such “small decisions” lead to a larger problem of increased regional air pollution.

If human society can make these transitions then we can be optimistic about the future of humankind. To do this we must merge the study of the household (ecology) and the management of the household (economics) and our ethics must be extended to include environmental as well as human values. Accordingly bringing together these three Es is the ultimate holism and the great challenge for our future. To bring about the needed changes and reforms we need to add the two Cs, Consensus and Coalition. And finally if we can “dualize” our current capitalism - in other words an economics that gives equal consideration to market capital and natural capital - we can really be optimistic about our future.




Extracted from:

Brown , L.R. The State of the World. Worldwatch Institute, Washington, DC. Bratton, S. 1992, Six Billiion and More; Human population Regulation and Christian Ethics. Westminster/John Knox, Louisvill, KY

Costanza, R. 1987. Social traps and environmental policy. Bio science 37;407-412
Constanza, R., 1991 Ecological Economics: the science and management of sustainability. Columbia Univ Press, New York

Gray, P.E. 1989. The paradox of technological development.

Leopold, A. 1949. The Land Ethic. A Sand County Almanac. Oxford Univ Press

Kahn, A.E.. 1966. The Tyranny of Small Decisions; Market failures, imperfections and the limit of economics. Kyklos 19:23-47

Odum , E. P. 1977. Ecology - the common sense approach. The Ecologist 7:250-253

Goodland, R., H., Daly, S.E.Serafy, and B. von Droste, eds. 1991. Environmentally sustainable Economic Development: Building on Brundtland. UNESCO, Paris

Ecology, A Bridge Between Science and Society , Odum, Eugene P. , School of Geography, University of Oxford

Seligson, M.A. 1984. The Gap between Rich and Poor; Contending Perspectives on Political Economy and Development. West view Press, Boulder, CO. (Between 1950 and 1980, the per capita income gap between rich and poor nations grew from $ 3677 to $ 9648. The gap is also widening within rich nations)

The integration of Economy and Ecology, 1993, The book of essays edited by Daly and Townsend

Geography as Social Theory

Geography is the study of relations between society and nature, space being the surface expanse of natural environment worked up by social forces into humanized landscapes. It became apparent that this relation is part of a broader and even more fundamental relation between mind and matter, or culture and nature, and that issues of some significance, like the natural or spiritual origins of consciousness, and the character of representations of people and earth, are involved in geographical understanding. To conceptualize space and nature, two main philosophical approaches were explored: idealism and realism.

Moving further, there is concern on how space is remade by human action, how it is represented in mind, discourse and culture, and how representations relate to human actions in space. The primary sense of space is not abstract and geometric but embodied - there is a fundamental spatiality embedded in existence. The hermeneutic of space searches for an ontological, existential understanding of the universal structural characteristics of human spatiality as the precondition for understanding more exact places and spaces.

Space is transformed by social forces acting under the influence of social relations, so that socialized space is a class phenomenon, a gendered phenomenon in socialist feminism. Structuralist theories, such as that of the early Castells, specify the component parts of the production of space using the organizing concept of mode of production: hence, there are economic, political, and ideological spaces articulated differentially. Here the tendency is towards an increased emphasis on ideas, ideologies, discourses, and concepts a s forces in the transformation of natural expanse into social space.

What came to be known as humanistic geography derived much of its considerable critical power from existentialism and phenomenology. Both had long histories of criticism, both were reconstructive in the philosophical and social theoretical senses. The existential phenomenological critique rejects the Cartesian dualism between mind and body underlying Enlightenment rationality and its most famous offspring, positivist science. For existential phenomenologist, Cartesian dualism misinterprets the subject by emphasizing rational consciousness at the expense of emotional subjectivity and bodily presence, reduces objects to the measurable qualities of things, and mischaracterizes subject-object relations by careless removal from everyday experience into a never-never-land of abstract observation. Existential phenomenology wants to return people, including scientists, to the study of the life world, the historical field of lived experience, in a cathartic spasm of rebirth and renewal - in two senses: as a kind of democratization of the objects and processes of study, and in the sense of life world as primary constituent of thought world. Here, ‘Scientific Methods’ becomes ‘Hermeneutics‘, a science of ‘Interpretation‘, source of understanding rather than abstract knowledge, a science of possibilities at its best.

Humanistic geography interprets life world as the contextualization of experience in place, with place conceptualized not as point in space, nor even landscape, but as community, field of care, centre of significance, all linked formatively and reflexively to human identity. Such a reconceptualization transforms space into a mosaic of places, an entirely different surface than the abstract space of positivist geography -indeed, nowhere can we see more clearly the effects of beginning from a different philosophical viewpoint than in the differences between existential place and positivistic space. Yet also there are problems with a humanistic geography of places, problems which have their origins exactly in existential phenomenology. For the human relation to place is phrased far too frequently in the ghostly terms of ’deep spiritual and psychological attachment’, while the literature resounds with a lexicon of experience, meaning, intention, and sense, all terms easier to use than to say what they mean (except that hey sound nice). Particularly difficult is the notion of an inherent intentionality, not as struggle to survive, nor even as vitalist dynamic essence, but as a spiritual urge to bestow meaning - here, medieval mysticism survives in the modern theory of the subject, again, for all its talk of intersubjectivity and community, humanistic geography has little conception of social relations and therefore little idea of spatial relations.

Some social practices and relations are fundamental in the sense that they allow existence to take place and change. These are the basic activities of social reproduction, practices which enable the material production of life, those physically producing bodies, necessary objects, places to live. Yet this statement of position does not reduce life to its direct production; it is merely a starting point from which analysis proceeds. During material activity, within the confrontations and contradictions of the making of social life, meanings emerge and ideologies are constructed, all under conditions of domination: hence, consciousness comes to express domination in multiple, ideological ways. Thus are societies interpreted through the lens of social reproduction. Nature is seen as origin and source of the production of existence, space is the medium in which reproductive relations occur, life elements an practices happen in places bound together through social relations. In this way, geography is integrated into critical social theory - indeed, placed at the heart of a materialist understanding of the world and its peoples; with this too, geography matured as a discipline.

A view postmodern emerges in its incredulity towards met narratives of any kind, but especially those central beliefs of critical modernism - universal truth, justice, rationality, liberation, causality, aand even coherence. Instead, postmodernism looks to the margins, to forgotten or subjugated narratives, to difference rather than similarity - thus in the extreme, intensities, and becomings. Yet even this proposes still the possibility of a creative critical response to the modern world. With other theorists, postmodernity is a universe of nihilism, where meaning of any kind has long since disappeared, and people float in a void of prescribed sign pleasure and dominating sign objects. The reaction of Anglo-American intellectuals to t his wild beast of a post-modern philosophy is to tame it by rephrasing the postmodern as an historical period, or condition of late capitalism and therefore explainable in economic terms.

If geography is about difference in contexts of similarity then it has much to learn from feminist thought. For the notion of difference is debated fiercely by feminists originally in terms of differences with men, increasingly in terms of differences within the different. And if contemporary human geography is involved in a search for different epistemologies, then again it has much to learn, for t he critique of conventional science - this time as masculinity scarcely disguised, or as false universality - again has a long, contentious history in feminist thought. Feminist geography begins to construct an alternative paradoxical space, proposing to use critical methods. In this developing feminist conception, place identities are unfixed, contested, multiple and places open and porous, far different from the places of humanism, the space of positivism. Yet such notions, contested, multiple are yet to be specified, ideas whose evolution is often retarded by too stifling a political correctness.

Thus, geography exits modern knowledge in a form which resembles its entry, interest in difference if not in differentialtion, but with thinking at a level which demonstrates the influence of a succession of philosphies, at a level which shows its entry into modern, and now post modern social theory.

The ghost of Kant haunts the geographical imagination as a spectre rising from the intellectual graveyard. As a careful review of the social construction of nature by Judith Gerber (1997:3) concludes, overcoming the original Cartesian dualism between nature and society entails not only changes in language and categories but requires investigation of the ‘complex processes at work when the physical, the mental and the social interact.’ Soja (1996) argues that mainstream geography has a dual mode of thinking: first space, fixed on the concrete materiality of spatial forms; and secondspace , conceived in ideas about space (cognitive representations). Another form of spatial awareness emerging, a thirding of the spatial imagination simultaneously real, imagined, and more : hence, the notion of thirdspace. Including paradoxical spaces which dissolve divisions between mind and body, metaphorical and real, and space as ‘dynamic simultaneity’ (Massey 1994), the lived world as simultaneous multiplicity of intersecting spaces held precariously together by relations of paradox or antagonism.

Thus there is two current positions: a poststructural discursive idealist conception of space, in which imaginaries structure multiple spaces; and a radical humanist discursive materialist view, in which imaginaries arise from prior real spaces to help structure the practices currently altering contemporary spaces. While both schools have conceptions of absolute, relative, and relational spaces, the tendency is for absolute space to recede from the geographical memory, and relative a and relative and relational spaces (represented, representational, and materially altered) to fascinate this area of social thought. Geography is changed almost beyond recognition in style and sophistication, yet it is dominated still by ancient themes.

Derived from:
Modern Geographical Thought, Richard Peet, 1998, Blackwell Publishers
T.Putnam, G. Robertson, and L. Tickner, Mapping the futures. London: Routledge, 59-69
Massey, D. and J. Allen 1984. Geography matters, A Reader. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ Press
Merton, R.K. 1968 Social Theory and Social Structure. New York: Free Press
Lyons, J. 1973. Structuralism and linguistics. In D. Robey, Structuralism: An Introduction. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 5-19
Livingstone, D. 1992, The Geographical Tradition. Oxford: Blackwell
Mackenzie, S. and D. Rose 1983. Industrial change, the domestic economy and home life. In J. Anderson, S. Duncan, and R. Hudson, Redundant Spaces: Industrial Decline in Cities and Regions. London: Academic Press, 155-99
Johnston, R.J. 1983 Philosophy and Human Geography. London: Edward Arnold
Kierkegaard, S. 1936, Philosphical Fragments. Princeton: Princeton Univ Press
Harvey D. 1969, Explanation in Geography. London: Arnold
Macmillan, B. Remodelling Geography. Oxford: Basil Blackwell

OIL - Delivering light to a world of darkness

Coal bestowed power in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but it came at a price. Coal's black smoke was so thick that it could be seen hovering over English cities from miles away in some cases blocking the sun's rays entirely. Londoners, squinting by their sooty windows, switched on their lamps to read the morning papers. Children toiled in the coal fired factories, and even worse, in the dank toxic coal mines themselves. '“For watching the doors, the smallest children are usually employed” noted economist Freidrich Engels '“who thus pass twelve hours daily, in the dark alone sitting usually in damp passages without even having work enough to save them from the stupefying brutalizing tedium of doing nothing“. Children dragged themselves homewards after their long shifts in the mines so tired that many were found, hours later, asleep on the road. Deprived of sunlight subject to poisoned air and explosions, they died in droves. Most of the poor in mid nineteenth century Manchester did not survive to see their eighteenth birthdays. Those who did, aged prematurely. Nevertheless London was affectionately dubbed the big smoke a smog-shrouded city that Lord Byron romantically described as a wilderness of steeples peeping on tip toe through their sea coal canopy. Painters such as James Abbott, McNeill Whistler, Joseph Mallard, William Turner and Claude Monet captured the city's foggy phantasmagoria, and Charles Dickens wrote of coal's soft, black drizzle. Jack the Ripper stalked his prey under cover of coal's thick brown haze.

Across the Atlantic a different story was unfolding. People found tons of black coal but they also found something else, a liquid fuel that would slowly gain in popularity until it overtook coal altogether. When set alight, oil's long chains of carbon split apart, releasing the energy stored in their powerful bonds. Afterwards, oil's hydrogens and carbons pair off with the oxygen in the air, forming carbon dioxide and water. The amount of energy stored in a gallon of oil is equal to the amount in almost five kilograms of the best coal, or more than ten kilograms of wood or more than fifty well fed human slaves toiling the day away. Oil contained so much energy that it could be used with abandon and still release much more energy than was required to get it out of the ground.

The men in Pennsylvania had a better idea than time consuming hand digging for this miraculous new liquid. They would drill an oil well. John Rockefeller, a stern pious entrepreneur from New York built his fortune on the market for kerosene. Rockefeller considered his task in almost spiritual terms, “Delivering light to a world of darkness“.

“Give the poor man his cheap light , Gentlemen,” he told his colleagues. Nonetheless it was big business and hugely lucrative. Rockefeller made it so with his merciless quest to expand his oil empire and dominate markets.

Britain had taken the plunge and converted its warships from coal to oil in 1912, even though the country itself had coal reserves but no known sources for oil. It was like switching to an all fruit diet while sailing the Arctic seas.

On the other side of the ocean Russians drilled the seeps whose eternal fires had so entranced the Persians. They shipped the oil from Baku in tankers - the first was called the Zoroaster, across the Caspian sea. Around Baku the smoke from the two hundred refineries that distilled the oil was so dense that the area was known as black town. Russia’s dirty oil started filling lamps across Asia along with oil extracted from dripping rocks in Indonesia by Royal Dutch Shell. Entrepreneurs with dollar signs dancing in their eyes braved the hostile lands, and people of Persia to drill along oil seeps there.


Over the first World War the allied forces did not lose faith in the internal combustion engine and its magic fuel. A faith that turned out to be worth the trouble. Britain and the United States unleashed the fury of their agile petroleum burning machines. About 163000 oil burning vehicles and 70000 airplanes vanquishing Germany’s bulky coal fired ones, black gold was crowned king. Ten days after Germany surrendered, in Nov 1918 British statesman Lord George Nathaniel Curzon declared the allied forces triumph as petroleum's 'the allied cause had floated to victory upon a wave of oil’ he said.

The United States with seemingly plentiful oil in Texas, Oklahoma, California and else where had little need at first to plunder foreign lands for its black gold. But many fields were rapidly exhausted as the second world war exerted its heavy demands on the industry. The technology that would allow the industry to sniff out deeper, more hidden oil reservoirs had yet to be developed. By the end of 1943 Secretary of the Interior, Harold Ickes was sure the united states stood on the brink of an oil famine. “If there should be a world war 3 it would have to be fought with someone else's petroleum because the United States would not have it”; he wrote warning that American crown symbolizing supremacy as the oil empire of the world is sliding down over one eye.

Ickes insisted that we should have available oil in different parts of the world and the time to get going is now. No matter how generous domestic oil reserves may have been controlling the giant foreign oil fields that other countries would have to rely on could only elevate the United States strategic power.

The railroads forged in the heat of the industrial revolution, ferrying coal, steel, and people, coupled with horse drawn carriages, defined transportation in the nineteenth century. Both required sizable inputs of energy to power their motion. The oil industry had partnered with automakers to lobby for a network of smooth black asphalt crisscrossing the country on which their war winning cars could ramble. In 1956 while the last coal fire was stubbed out in London their lobbying finally paid off. The US congress earmarked over 26 Billion used for the national interstate and defence highway system Act setting off a fit of road building that would profoundly alter the country.

American families and industries used the smooth roads and their new automobiles to drive themselves away from the congested cities. Between 1950 and 1990 suburban sprawl had become so intense that some areas were gobbling up land four times faster than their populations grew.

As much as geologists knew about oil and its movements and the huge amounts of money involved, when they were wrong about their guesses, nine out of ten exploration wells drilled in the United States were dry holes. Just one in a hundred exploration wells discovered a usable oilfield. Military technology harnessed to hunt the enemy and under written by the public was transferred to the private hunt for oil which many described in openly warrior like terms. The mapping of the ocean floor for submarines, aerial surveys for picking out bomb targets and seismographs used to pin point enemy artillery all of these military technologies developed to wage war were put to service in the hunt for oil. The seismograph proved to be the most powerful new weapon of all as one historian put it translating the echoes of seismic waves pumped into the ground could reveal the deformations where they lay below unseen just as a bat's clicking could find its mosquito.

Over the course of the 1990s oil explorers found seventy six oil and gas fields of over 500 million barrels each more than half lay not under the familiar arid plains or even arctic tundra but deep under the oceans restless currents and the sea floors shifting sediments. The deeper waters off the Gulf of Mexico continental shelf for example had been virtually ignored by oil explorers for years.

Ironically, though, the vast majority of the 6 million metric tons of oil that enter the world’s oceans every year comes not from accidental spills but from chronic, routine, and deliberate ones. More than 40 percent drips off the car clogged roads and highways into rivers and streams sliding into the sea. Another 30 percent leaks in because oil tankers are so tipsy when emptied of oil. They fill up with sea water to stabilize themselves, then pump this oil contaminated ballast water overboard when the tanker refills with oil. The oil industry’s latest technique, FPSOS, will require even more tankers ferrying even more oil around the world’s oceans.

Underwater pipeline networks, although expensive and cumbersome for the oil industry to build, are much safer than transferring and conveying huge amounts of oil around on the surface of the water in tankers and other vessels, as FPSOS require, part of the reason why US regulators had banned FPSOS from the Gulf of the Mexico until 2002. In a single year, the hive of oil industry activity in the Gulf of Mexico emitted fully eight hundred spills of oil within ten miles of the Texas coast, over two thirds of these spills were not from the Gulf’s extensive network of underwater pipelines but from the vessels ferrying the oil to and from.

The end of oil’s story is still being written but it is clear that the conclusion nears. Much will depend on how a thousand other stories end. In Moscow, Russian officials debate whether to ratify the Kyoto Protocol, one that with the US’ and Australia’s refusals to ratify, now hangs in their hands. Will they or wont they? Elsewhere, reluctant government regulators brood over the latest scientific findings that around a third of the species in three of the most biologically diverse places in the world may be condemned to climate change induced extinction within fifty years. Will these losses be enough to change their minds? In Colombia, some Indian tribes succeed in protecting their lands from industry’s oily explorations but then the state run oil company plans to continue. Will the tribes’ threat of mass suicide deter the drills again?

The signs are ambiguous, to say the least. In Detroit, hundreds reclaim the former capital of the car, coating it with acres of productive green gardens while up north in Canada, officials giddily sign proclamations announcing their intentions to step up tar sands production. In Iraq and Libya, Texan oilmen jostle in the queue to re-enter old stomping grounds, while in Houston, aging oil executives are handed multi billion dollar bills to upgrade their decrepit tankers and pipelines. In Alaska, oil company trucks sink into the permafrost’s melting mud while in Washington, oil execs press for more access to protected lands. In London, people are penalized for driving their cars, while in Beijing and Shanghai, erstwhile bicyclists press up against the sparkling glass of GM and BMW’s new showrooms.

Around the world, people resist the petrolife, practicing less consumptive ways of feeding, transporting, and sheltering themselves, the vast majority under the strictures of deprivation, others by choosing new ways and rediscovering old ones. The end of the story of oil will depend on them , too, and how they fare against big oil’s bulldozer, for there is still time before the ancient liquid vanishes for people to realize, as Kenneth Deffeyes put it, that crude oil is much too valuable to be burned as a fuel. Perhaps a new era of sporadic supply interruptions and volatile prices coupled with an influx of better technology to harness solar, wind, and other renewable energies will start to slowly persuade people not to opt for oil. Worries about climate change might restrain the quest for new oil and gas, with declining oil production easing the inequities it so frequently triggers. Perhaps there might be enough oil left, in other words, to mine aluminium and silicon for windmills and solar panels before the drills, shovels, and clouds of carbon dioxide render earth uninhabitable.

In many ways, the path forward will depend on how we view the path behind us. With the dawning realization of crude’s finite bounty has come a flurry of ideas about how to sustain our energy intensive civilization with a bit less oil. More fuel efficient s u v s, a sprinkling of nuclear and coal burning power plants, hydrogen gas stations, all are touted as the next big thing, our saviour. Few nudge the basic assumptions of machines, roads, and sprawl, as according to conventional wisdom, the west’s high tech, hydrocarbon based society lies at the pinnacle of a natural, inevitable development path. There is no need evening the face of oil’s decline, according to this view, to veer off in a new direction.

An alternate view hold just the opposite: that the petrolife is an anomaly, based on the improbable discovery of relatively rare, finite accumulations of energy under the ground during an era of unusually stable climatic conditions, a development as unlikely as winning the lottery. According to this view, the discovery of oil, the harnessing of its power, the rapid development of a society nourished and sustained by its short term riches, despite its long term and far away costs -none of this was pre ordained or inevitable. If the very basis for this aberrant way of life is receding, there is no reason left to cling to its pathways. It is time, then to adjust to radically new ones.

Oxfam launches £1 million appeal for West Africa Food Crisis

With more than three million people, including almost a million children, facing starvation in Niger, Oxfam today launched a £1 million appeal for the West Africa Food Crisis.

"The situation is desperate. Even the limited food that is available has soared in price rendering it unaffordable for most families and there is no hope of any harvest for at least three months. Families are feeding their children grass and leaves from the trees to keep them alive," said Natasha Kafoworola Quist, Oxfam’s Regional Director for West Africa, currently in Niger.

Oxfam are calling on the public to support the appeal because the international community have pledged only one third of the money needed to save lives in West Africa. In many cases, even the pledges that have been made have not translated into money arriving. The failure to fund these appeals is putting lives at risk.

Oxfam experts in Niger are setting up a $2 million food support programme. Vouchers will be distributed to 130,000 people which can be traded for food with local traders. Plans are also in place to help 28,000 nomadic herders to buy new animals for a fair price.

"Oxfam's programme is saving lives but in the face of the level of need, this is just a drop in the ocean. Almost four million people need food aid now. The UN appeals need immediate funding to ensure that all those in need receive help," said Quist.

The World Food Programme (WFP) increased its appeal on July 12th asking for a further $12 million to help the people in Niger to make it through the next three months. The UN emergency appeal for $18.3 million, launched in May, remains less than a quarter funded. Between them, the appeals are two thirds under-funded, with a total funding shortfall of $26.5m.

"The people effected by this crisis need money now. Every day that the world’s richest countries look the other way, more people face starvation," added Quist.

Last year's locust invasion and rain failure during the agricultural season have plunged nomadic herder and farming families into crisis. Emaciated livestock, worth nothing, cannot be sold. The price of cereals has more than doubled and no staple foods are available in the markets.

ENDS



Notes to Editors:

The UN emergency flash appeal for Niger for $18.3 million was launched in May 2005. It remains less than a quarter funded, with a shortfall of $14.7m.

Oxfam is responding to food crises that are also emerging in Zimbabwe, Zambia and Malawi and is calling on the international community to respond before they reach an acute stage.

To arrange an interview with Natasha Quist, Regional Director for West Africa, please call Kate Pattison on 0044 1865 312 498 or 0044 7967 984 634