[R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] Collapse

[Bill Totten]

Walmart and Waiting for the Shoe to Drop

by Alice Friedemann

Culture Change (January 20 2008)


As I screwed in yet another fluorescent light bulb that didn't work, I
thought about what else I could do to put my finger in the dike of the
Limits to Growth. I can almost hear ecosystems groan as they nearly
burst from the weight of heavy metals, pavement, and drought.

Jared Diamond, in Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
(2004), believes ecology plays a major role in the breakdown of
civilizations.

But Jonathan Friedman, at Lund University in Sweden {1}, counters that
Diamond has it backwards. The social logic of civilization makes limits
opaque to its citizens, who can't even see there are limits imposed by
natural resources, so they don't plan ahead. A good example is not
preparing for peak oil thirty years ahead of time, as Robert Hirsch
points out ought to be done, in the study he headed for the US
Department of Energy, "Peaking of World Oil Production" {2}.

This blindness is evident in the Presidential campaign as well, where
none of the candidates is running on a platform of the need to reform
industrial agriculture, drastically reduce our consumption of goods and
energy, or slow down development and population growth.

Friedman says this disconnect with reality is most powerfully expressed
by Kafka, where the characters are trapped in ways of seeing the world
they can't see beyond. At a time when most of the world's problems are
due to the depletion and destruction of the ecosystems that keep us
alive, politicians and people in general continue to see the world
through political and economic filters.

Even those of us awake to the world being one big cockroach about to get
smashed by energy limits, are trapped likes ants in the amber of the system.

What's ridiculous is that we, personally, are supposed to save the
world, not collective action. We're on our own, without government and
corporate help. PG&E, the northern California utility that serves five
million customers, is encouraging us to buy long-lasting fluorescent
light bulbs. It sounds like a bad joke - how many Californians does it
take to screw in a light bulb to prevent The Collapse of Civilization As
We Know It?

Andrew Szasz, in his new book Shopping Our Way to Safety (University of
Minnesota Press, 2007), says that our government and regulatory agencies
have been so weakened, we've lost hope in collective action. Szasz finds
that chilling - we can't shop our way out of our problems, no matter how
many green goods we buy, and thinking that we can gives us less urgency
to fight for meaningful reform.

Buying organic is only possible for people who can afford to pay extra,
and doesn't do much to change the way food is grown. Agriculture should
be at the top of the reform list, because it does the most damage. The
way we grow food destroys topsoil, depletes aquifers and fossil fuels,
eutrophies water, and poisons land and water with petrochemicals.

As we all know, shopping is what got us into this fix to begin with. Yet
we continue to throw hungry devices that suck ever more electric power
into the System, like primitives sacrificing goats to the Gods, unable
to stop because the financial structure depends on endless growth. The
Beast must not only be fed, but mended as it ages and falls apart, its
sagging bridges, pitted roads, rusting fresh water pipelines, and aging
dams perpetually patched.

Walmart executives must have realized they had to cut back on energy to
make profits, and they're trying to turn this to their advantage by
Greening their image, hoping to win back the millions of affluent
customers who've been boycotting them for years.

On the one hand, it's great that WalMart has decided to green up their
image. We need corporations and governments to take the lead in making a
transition, since they're the institutions using most of the energy and
natural resources.

But as many have pointed out, how can Walmart even be slightly green?
They're the main corporation that turned China into a cesspool of coal
fumes, sewage, and chemicals to produce throwaway goods, whipping the
gyre of consumption into the global tornado that's devoured the flesh of
the earth and poured our trees, fish, clean water, topsoil, oil, and
metal into cheap goods. They're at the center of the vortex, keeping it
spinning, the essence of the delusion we live in. How on earth can they
become Green?

Those helping with the WalMart makeover point out that since Walmart is
such a large part of the problem, Greening WalMart will have more impact
than changing light bulbs. They want to do something, even if in the
end, it doesn't do much to avert collapse.

As I see the giant foot overhead drawing nearer, and knowing that my own
feeble attempts to hold it at bay are pointless, I can't disagree. We
all do what we can, what we think will help, if only to forget we're
cockroaches for a while.

Notes:

{1} Robert Costanza, et al. 2007. Sustainability or Collapse? An
Integrated History and Future of People on Earth. MIT Press.

{2} Peaking of World Oil Production: Impacts, Mitigation and Risk
Management, Robert L Hirsch, SAIC: projectcensored.org

_____

Alice Friedemann has been part of the peak oil community since
discussions began on energyresources listserve, and has attended many
ASPO conferences. She's spoken at the University of California
(Berkeley) on biofuels and published at culturechange, energybulletin,
energypulse, theoildrum, et cetera. She was a senior-level systems
architect and engineer for 25 years in health care, banking, and
transportation. Her website is energyskeptic.com

http://culturechange.org/cms/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=152&Itemid=2#cont


Bill Totten http://www.ashisuto.co.jp/english/index.html

TO POST A COMMENT, OR TO READ COMMENTS POSTED BY OTHERS, please click
on the word "comment" highlighted at the end of the version of this
essay posted at http://billtotten.blogspot.com/