DC 2013 Environmental Film Festival is here

by Gary Berg-Cross


We celebrate lots of things in March. We've already had Women’s Day - March 08  and today (March 12)  is  Brazilian Librarian’s Day. The US  sent American Library Association (ALA) President Molly Raphael to  Brazil speak on two of her presidential initiatives: advocacy for libraries, and diversity in leadership.


Coming up we have St. Patrick’s Day (March 17) and the longer March 12-24, 2013) and always wonderful DC Environmental Film Festival. The Festival scheduled is online although some cancellations do happen.

This year it features 190 documentary, feature, animated, archival, experimental and children's films from around the world. It started off with the very timely:

SPOIL

Heavy crude oil extraction from the northern Alberta tar sands is arguably one of the world’s most environmentally devastating industries... 

There are more than 75 venues around Washington, DC, which besides our regular theatrics  gives neat value added trips to museums, embassies, libraries, & universities. Some screenings are free to the public and it is wonderful when they include discussion with filmmakers or scientists.

As with last year you can watch some past Festival films on EFF's channel at SnagFilms.com for FREE!

A special focus this year is very appropriate to our Potomac and Chesapeake locals - the critical role of rivers and watersheds.
 

Discussing an Agenda for a Democratized Economy So it is the People’s Economy

By Gary Berg-Cross

Saturday, Nov 3rd, from (2-4 p.m.) the MDC chapter of WASH will have a talk Margaret Flowers & Kevin Zeese (co-directors of Its Our Economy) entitled: "Shifting Economic and Political Power to the People. ”  This will be at the Wheaton regional library 11701 Georgia Avenue  Wheaton, MD 20902.


As attorney Kevin Zeese notes the Roman philosopher/statesman Marcus Tullius Cicero defined “Freedom” as “participation in power.” By that standard most of we Americans are not free since do not participate in real power and decision making. Yes, we get to vote every now and then, but this seems a distant form of influence now.  Real power resides in organizations like the Bank of America which has spent millions lobbying the US Congress to pass laws that benefit then directly or indirectly by deregulating industry. One example cited is their spending millions to oppose bills like the Credit Cardholders Bill of Rights &  the Foreclosure Prevention Act, Helping Families Save their Homes Act, Mortgage Reform and Anti-Predatory Lending Act, all of which would have directly benefited consumers and hence the Public. 

Self advancement and deregulation explains in part why our system could not avoid a Bush-era economic/financial system collapse in 2008.  This followed the longer, contextual 30 year decline of basically stagnant and minimized worker wages. The result has been to produce a numbing, record household, personal and educational debt. 

An article on the Its Our Economy site described the scene this way:

At the same time working Americans saw jobs disappearing, hours reduced, salaries shrinking and more under-employment.  They also saw their retirement savings disappear, 5 million foreclosures, record bankruptcies, record poverty and shrinking housing values.  The cost of everything from health care, to food to energy kept rising while incomes fell. And, the social safety net, limited as it was compared to other developed countries, was shredded, a process continuing as austerity budgets take hold across the United States.

Why doesn’t the economy work better for most Americans? 

One particular chicken and egg problem seems to be the growing wealth gap caused in part by stagnant wages and debt. This inequality creates an imbalance of actual intertwined economic & political power. Eggs that hatch from such confluence craft economic and political policies that seemed designed to extract wealth from the economy and direct it at a favored few. The result is a form of structural poverty leading to struggle on many fronts (education, health care, home ownership, saving etc.). 

Margaret & Kevin will describe a 20 point:“ strategy and tactics to shift economic power, and thereby political power, to the people. “

As time permits they may cover parts of their 20 point agenda to stabilizes the economy in the short term & turn things around from misguided policy to a more sustainable democratic economy. The outlined action evolved from a Prosperity Agenda (www.ProsperityAgenda.US) written in 2009 to provide for a democratized economy that combines policies that have proven to be effective along with innovative new solutions.  Here are highlights of the proposal.

*  *  *

New, Efficient, Clean Energy Economy
1. The foundation for a new economy is a carbon-free/nuclear-free energy economy; that distributes energy production down to individual homes and businesses and uses energy efficiently.  
2. The U.S. automobile industry, recovering from near collapse, is caught in the web of long-term costs for its retired and current employees, especially the uncontrollable cost of health care and rapidly changing transit needs.  Further, the auto industry has to move toward the new green economy, instead continuing to build SUV’s rather than hybrids and electric cars.
3. Infrastructure in the United States is literally falling apart and not keeping up with the needs for a sustainable carbon-free/nuclear-free energy economy. Long term investment is needed for new infrastructure. 
4. The U.S. and world need to dramatically reduce carbon emissions. A critical step is to tax carbon emissions at the source as they enter the economy, i.e. tax coal, oil and gas for their emissions

5. Develop local economies to reduce use of fossil fuel in transport and allow local businesses and communities to flourish. 
Creating Jobs, Providing Housing, Health Care and Building Local Economies
6. Individuals as well as state and local governments are in fragile financial positions and thus in need of an economic and social safety net.
7. Another tool for developing local economies, particularly around housing and land use. This is a nonprofit corporation which acquires and manages land on behalf of the residents of a community.
8. To address housing we must stop the mortgage crisis by requiring mortgage holders to reconfigure mortgages to allow homeowners to stay in their homes and not lose them to foreclosure. 
9. Face up to the health care crisis which is approaching 20% of U.S. GDP.  The United States has the most cost-inefficient health care system in the world.

End the Wars and Reduce the Military Budget
10. End the Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Libyan wars and reduce military spending.  The United States needs to end a foreign policy based on empire and militarism

Re-making Finance, Shared Prosperity
11. Transform corporate welfare into taxpayer investment. Even before the current bailout, the U.S. government provided hundreds of billions of dollars annually to big business interests in loans, tax breaks, under-valued access to federal lands and a host of other mechanisms. 
12. Democratize access to financing by re-making the Federal Reserve and re-forming the nation’s money system. The Federal Reserve’s Board of Governors leadership is the exact opposite of democracy; it is control of the money system by the wealthy few, plutocracy.
13. Democratize corporate power by increasing shareholder rights, expanding the rights of shareholders to choose directors of corporations and submit resolutions to set the direction and priorities of the corporation they invest in and of which they are part owners. End corporate personhood, so that corporations do not have the rights of human beings. 
Financing the Government: Taxes and Deficits
14. Reconsider the tax structure to make it more equitable. 
15. Be mindful of the deficit and debt at all levels of government but also recognize there times when government must spend to rebuild the economy. 
Workers Rights
16. Democratize the workplace by encouraging employee-owned businesses
17. Reduce the work week with no reduction in pay. Before the economic collapse, 7% of the U.S. GDP was based on consumer buying.  Since the early 1970s wages have been flat in the U.S. and the consumer economy has continued because of two-income families, increasing personal debt and cheap goods from abroad.  This is unsustainable
18. Establish a national guaranteed income for all Americans based on the model proposed by Richard Nixon in 1969.
International Trade and Finance
19. End World Bank and IMF dominance (which means ending U.S. and European dominance) of the world financial markets.  These entities need competition and regional banks in Latin America, Asia, Africa and other regions should encouraged as should stabilization funds to assure currency stabilization.  These organizations need to be democratized, made more transparent and include appropriate representation and decision-making by developing nations.
20. Remake international trade from corporate trade to people’s trade.  The current rhetoric calls trade agreements “Free Trade” but in reality they are trade agreements that favor corporations over the interests of labor, the environment and consumers.  Trade agreements need to be redesigned so they serve the interests of people and the planet rather than the interests of corporations. 

Kevin Zeese, co-director of Its Our Economy, is an attorney who has been a political activist since graduating from George Washington Law School in 1980.  He works on peace, economic justice, criminal law reform and reviving American democracy.

Margaret Flowers, co-director of Its Our Economy, is a Maryland pediatrician. After graduation from the University of Maryland School of Medicine in 1990 and completion of pediatric residency at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, Flowers worked first as a hospitalist and then in private practice. She left practice in 2007 to advocate full-time for a single payer health care system at both the state and national levels.

Images

Hierarchy of Power: http://griid.org/2012/09/11/a-grand-rapids-power-analys/

Carbon Democracy: http://www.amazon.com/Carbon-Democracy-Political-Power-Age/dp/1844677451

Democracy and Alternatives: http://www.srilankaguardian.org/2011_11_01_archive.html

Kevin: http://portland.indymedia.org/en/topic/economicjustice/newswire/archive44.shtml

Margaret: http://portland.indymedia.org/en/topic/economicjustice/newswire/archive44.shtml

Youthful Plan Bs needed for our Earth

By Gary Berg-Cross

With 2012 Rio+20 concluding and its draft text in the air it is seems an apt time to talk about alternative plans for sustainability. There is wide recognition that current approaches and default tactics are failing. the Resulting trends are unsustainable but no committed agreement on how to proceed. For some the proper course is what they call "sustainable development" or as the term has been turned to "sustainable growth". To political economist Robert Skidelsky this is not balance or wise and just more of the same and part of “politically orchestrated insatiability that we call economic growth.”

The fight over visions of a sustainable future remains. Time to consider a Plan B, the  popular term used to mean a reserved, secondary plan, in case a first plan (a hypothetical 'Plan A') fails. There seems no alternative or Plan B for climate change in part because it involves other difficult topics like energy, financial systems etc..  An example is the reported stumbling blocks with climate is the evolving concepts of what is commonly called “green technology” and “green economies.” Part of this is the legacy of unfulfilled promises made 20 years ago by rich countries to help poor countries develop by funding efforts to leap into a green economy and avoid a dirty economy trap. That would contribute to a sustainable world, but there is yet no agreement on the Equity Principle formulated in Rio 20 years ago.

All of this suggests there are many alternative visions of the future. Perhaps it is time to consider Plan Bs ourselves. This is an idea that an organization called “Our Task” is pursuing. The Our Task group, located here in the DC area focused on giving young adults a chance to create a mutually enhancing relationship between humans and Earth. After all it will their Earth we leave them with. Our Task tries to help youth:

• Understand what is happening to our Earth and global civilization;
• Develop their own vision of the Earth they want to inherit;
• Developing communication and leadership skills; and
• Advocating for changes that might allow everyone to live out the 21st century.

As a first they have are looking at Plan Bs and assembled examples of “Plan Bs” including:

· World on the Edge by Lester R. Brown;

· The Youth Earth Plan (this by the Our Task group itself);

· Limits to Growth and later editions;

· Living Planet Report 2010, Global Footprint Network; Millennium and,

· Declaration and Development Goals, by the United Nations

All of the research is being assembled to support Our Task’s first in a series of youth conferences. The first is Saturday, August 11th in Arlington, Virginia, and will feature a vision of Earth in 2100. The event will be streamed live and people can sign up to get news on the event by going to conference site.

They are still gathering Plan B nominations and the final set will be shared with in advance of the meeting “Earth-2100 Conference: What’s the Plan?”. It will be interesting to see what comes out of this. I expect it to be more of a sustainability view than our leaders can agree on at Rio+20 and that is what we and our children need.

DC Filmfests- Humanist Treats

by Gary Berg-Cross

March has snuck up on me. I didn’t know that it was World Water Day March 22nd until it was upon me. Lots of events in DC around the same week. The DC Water For People group helps people in developing countries improve quality of life by supporting the development of locally sustainable drinking water resources, sanitation facilities, and hygiene education programs organized. They have a new video here and an info page too!

In celebration with this year’s Environmental Film Festival (ongoing till March 25^th) they are premiering Last Call at the Oasis at the film festival on Wednesday, he 21st.

Which brings me to DC's annual 20^th Environmental Film Festival (EFF). It is just one of several film festivals we have that make the area a real film going pleasure. The 26th Annual Filmfest DC is April 12 – 22 and Silverdocs is June 18-24. Many of them offer secular and humanistic gems that advance public understanding of things like the environment through the power of film. And they often are shown in culturally interesting venues such as the National Geographic Society, the Carnegie Institution for Science, National Building Museum, various universities and embassies. There’s something for everyone with topics on water, sustainability, architecture, nature. I’d love to see Happy, IN ORGANIC WE TRUST or BIOPHILIC DESIGN: THE ARCHITECTURE OF LIFE shown as part of the multi-day, multi-venue Health and the Environment Film Series. The summary for BIOPHILIC is catching:

Embark on a journey from our evolutionary past and the origins of architecture to the world’s most celebrated buildings in a search for the architecture of life. The film showcases buildings that connect people and nature...

LIFE: CHALLENGES OF LIFE is another one:

Capturing the extraordinary things animals and plants must do to survive and reproduce, this film documents the actions of an array of creatures. Witness amazing behavior, captured at 1,000 frames per second...

And its being shown with BROKEN TAIL: A TIGER'S LAST JOURNEY, ELSA: THE LIONESS THAT CHANGED THE WORLD, HELGOLAND: ISLAND IN THE STORM and MY LIFE AS A TURKEY

Too many good things to catch them all. That’s one reason I was excited to see that SnagFilms is presenting select documentary films from the festival online. Bravo.

A Witches Brew of Global Challenges

By Gary Berg-Cross

I got an email recently about a MeetuP to talk about What are the challenges we face before 2100, and what can we do about them? It’s a good question and they asked for ideas. Just looking at the related Meetups provided a few obvious items like environment and energy. With gas prices high one thinks of Peak Oil (Fossil fuel and mineral resources rapidly depleting ) along with pollution (Topsoil is disappearing and with it the land’s ability to produce nutritious food). To these we might add interlocking challenges like:

• Personal & institutional debt ( from man-made capital) which has spiraled out of control
• Divisions between the rich and the poor are wider than ever before
• Fresh water supplies are drying up (natural capital)
  
• Clean air, untainted by pollution, in urban centers is becoming a distant memory
• Fish stocks in our oceans are critically low
• The population, increasingly poor, has increased beyond the point where the planet’s resources can support it
• With stress and pollution and expensive health care rates of illness– both physical and mental – are rising
• Values of many people in the developed are less humanistic and more consumeristic
• Political systems are locking up.

One has to put down climate change as a big challenge in a long line of nested challenges. In January, the U.S. Agency for International Development released a climate change strategy called Climate Change & Development: Clean Resilient Growth . It’s blueprint addresses impact that climate change might have on global development and hence AID’s assistance programs such as climate smart agriculture to feed growing populations. The world’s population edged over the 7 billion threshold and while slowing the rate is slowing the number has been projected to reach 9 billion by around 2050. With a billion people already hungry, this raises the question– how can we feed them and the billions still to come? Based on input from multiple U.S. agencies and NGOs, the document “paints a picture of the threats climate change poses for development – calling it “among the greatest global challenges of our generation” – and commits the agency to addressing both the causes of climate change and the impacts it will have on communities in countries around the world.” Two other challenges make the climate mitigation effort challenging. One is that the global community faces fiscal and economic challenges in a dismal political climate. Fiscal constraint puts aid and development assistance under pressures scrutiny. And fiscal problems point to deep problems in our economic system. Can we grow ourselves out of our immediate problem or do we move on to a more "sustainable” and less growth oriented economic system? Sustainability, as shown in the previous Figure, is an inclusive concept that focuses on the linkages between three key pillars: environmental, economic and social.) In Britain Conservative PM David Cameron argues that they need the type of thing we hear from American conservatives deregulate business and cut back on spending, trim the safety net in order to "promote growth". This the type of thing discussed at the recent G20 global economic summit. President Obama, reported that the discussions there had revolved around the question:

"How do we achieve greater global growth?"

But not everyone agrees with this 1% consensus. Recently a few economists have advanced a no growth view. They argue that we have lived in a growth economy for a while, with an underlying assumption that growth makes us richer. But now we see that only 1-5% have gotten richer and now the has slowed with loss for most and bonuses for the people who seem somewhat responsible. If the global economy stops growing as predicted by a Limits to Growth idea (GDP growth is impossible to sustain over the long run anyway because we live on a planet with limited natural resources), will everything fall apart unless we change the structural relations and value sustainability? Herman Daly (Professor Emeritus, School of Public Policy, University of Maryland who also worked at the World Bank, says that we can and need to. But this requires that we change our values. He falls on a general notion beyond what he calls chance and natural selection, which I could see in a Humanist tradition.

Other economists like France’s Serge Latouche have argued that growth is not always (usually??) good for the environment including the deep health of communities who need more sharing of resources (urban farms, green open spaces, communal housing). The commons is a new way to express a very old idea – that some forms of wealth belong to all of us, and that these community resources must be actively protected and managed for the greater good. A more commons-based society would shift values and policies away from a narrowly focused on private wealth achieved via the market-based system that has dominates modern society since WWII and has more recently morphed into what seems like a mixture of speculation, crony capitalism and crony government.

This introduces another factor - the political environment which along with climate change skepticism and free market ideology makes progress on things like climate change legislation and financial reform unlikelyIndeed each of these makes it difficult to attack a range of social problems like population and immigration challenges.

Revisiting the Limits to Growth Ideas

By Gary Berg-Cross

I see that the ultra free market Club for Growth (CfG) has gotten into the news again today teaming with The Wall Street Journal against a legislative proposal to subsidize the adoption of natural-gas-based transportation vehicles. They say they aren’t against natural gas vehicles but like good conservatives they don’t support the idea of government should be picking winners and losers (aka "helping" a particular industry) to solve a big problem like energy. The Club, however, has been pretty active in picking winners and losers in political campaigns. They keep score. As Jonathan Weisman reported in The Times recently, a seeming moderate like Oren Hatch had a lifetime rating of 78 percent from the CfG, but, with the rise of the T-Party in the past two years, Hatch has radically elevated to close to a 100 percent rating – a fact bemoaned even by David Brooks.

Too bad for many reasons including the naivety of its ideas on growth. The Club for Growth argues for a “high growth economy” believing that markets invisibly provide prosperity through market ideas couched in phrases like economic freedom. You hear the call to grow out of our woes all the time. Given the big downturn under the conservative Bush administration and its market policies one can understand the Club’s angst in this political season. But there may be real limits to simple bubble like growth that we are approaching. We saw some of that in the financial realm where artificial growth was pumped up by debt, leveraging and rapidly moving money with nothing real behind it. The fiscal problems in Europe as well as here suggests that we may have reached the limits of our current economic approaches.

Perhaps an equally important factor to consider is the long disparaged nemesis of growth advocates - the Club of Rome‘s (1972) The Limits to Growth. It is having a 40^th anniversary this year and its conclusions looking more relevant all the time. The book modeling the consequences of a rapidly growing world population and finite resource supplies. Reflecting some of the concerns and predictions of Thomas Malthus in An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798) the research used the World3 model based on a technique known as systems dynamics, developed by Professor Jay Forrester at MIT to simulate the consequence of interactions between the Earth's and human systems.

One conclusion of the study suggests that without major change in the physical, economic, or social relationships that have traditionally governed world “development” human society will run out of the nonrenewable resources within a time span of less than 100 years (2072 usually rounded to 2100 for convenience). When resources like oil, clean water, rare earths etc. have been depleted, a decline and eventual collapse of the economic system will result. The results would be manifested in massive unemployment, decreased food production etc.

The report was about behavioral tendencies and population, capital, resource and pollution system activity. The intent was to stimulate debate and discussion about the challenges of these interactions and how to plan for the projected “overshoot” of global carrying capacity which their modeling revealed. What they got was a fierce attack against the warnings. People generally have the feeling that it was shown to be essentially erroneous. Whenever the limits to growth argument came up in later days it was denounced as disproven by claimed facts of continued growth. In particular it was attacked by people who fervently believe in the power of markets and market forces to silently, and wisely, overcome whatever needs arise. These are some shallow claims that get repeated s often they seem like facts but are only pseudo claims as shown by Graham Turner’s (2008) A COMPARISON OF THE LIMITS TO. GROWTH WITH THIRTY YEARS OF. REALITY. If you listen closely you can hear some pseudo claims about growth in some of the conservative politician arguments. Indeed they are attacked if they don't promote these beliefs. But perhaps these types of claims are more than a little bit due to a 1 % principle and confirmatory hypotheses at work. Perhaps this and the current downturn argues for a renewed view of natural limits to growth as we celebrate the idea's 40^th year.

What are some of the real facts of depletion, decay and peaks? Have they been too threatening to the established industrial culture to be contemplated. Certainly that’s not the view one gets looking at 10 year update reports. The study team published both a 20 year (Meadows, Donella, J. Randers and D. Meadows. Beyond the Limits.) and a 30 (Meadows, Donella, J. Randers and D. Meadows. Limits to Growth: The Thirty Year Update 2004) year follow ups. These add measures and improvements in the computer simulation model, but the analyses came to the same conclusions as the original study – continued growth would lead to overshoot, leading to a collapse of growth with its consequences. In Revisiting the Limits to Growth After Peak Oil System Ecologists Hall and Day said:

The original projections of the limits-to-growth model examined the relation of a growing population to resources and pollution, but did not include a timescale between 1900 and 2100. If a halfway mark of 2000 is added, the projections up to the current time are largely accurate, although the future will tell about the wild oscillations predicted for upcoming years.

A recent review article in American Scientist of Revisiting the Limits to Growth After Peak Oil commented on the research this way:

“They have re-examined some of the data that led to the discrediting of the “limits to growth” theory and have shown that both resource use and costs have only risen, and are no longer being mitigated by market forces. Although new sources of energy have been found, they are much more expensive to extract, a declining return on investment that Hall and Day think could lead to large societal problems in the near future.”

It will probably be a few years before an analysis of the 40th year comes out, but it will probably have quite a bit to say about diminishing resources and increased pressures on a sustainable world. It will, I hope, spur some reasonable debate and discussion about how to manage the global carrying capacity.