Promethean Hubris and the Ruining of Rongelap

Richard Westall, Paradise Lost 1793

The first thermonuclear explosion ever to occur on the earth, Ivy Mike, was detonated by the US Military on Eniwetok atoll in the Marshall Islands on 1st November 1952. The device itself weighed 60 tons and was housed in a six-storey structure containing the massive cooling apparatus needed to produce a temperature of minus 250 degrees Centigrade whereby the deuterium used to fuel the bomb could be liquified.

Sixteen months later, the explosion of Castle Bravo on Bikini atoll marked the beginning of a second series of thermonuclear tests staged with the express purpose of creating a much smaller "deliverable" thermonuclear weapon in the megaton range.

Promethean Hubris offers an account of the events surrounding these tests, and describes the human and environmental consequences of such tests from the perspective of the inhabitants of the Marshall Islands.

This post offers both an audio presentation and a substantive essay detailing the events leading up to and following on from the nuclear weapon testing program conducted by the US in the Marshall Islands from June 1946 to August 1958. Special attention is given to the effects of Castle Bravo, the first of six thermonuclear tests that were conducted as part of Operation Castle between 1st March and 22nd April 1954.



Promethean Hubris and the Ruining of Rongelap can be streamed using the media player above. A CD quality mp3 audio file is also available for download here.

Production Notes
Voices
J. Robert Oppenheimer: Archival recording
Holly Barker: Interview with Mick McCormick, February 2012 (Radio4All)
Tony de Brum: "Atomic Testing in the Marshall Islands" (Youtube)
Steve Osborn: Interview with Dori Smith, March 2004 (Radio4All)
Martini Gotje: Interview with Shirin Brown, July 2010 (Internet Archive)
vincentd (Commentary)
Music
 A. Coe, "Now I am Become Death" (Jamendo)
Alexander Sitnikov, "Downfall" (Internet Archive, MixGalaxy Collection)
Steve Kahn and Rob Mounsey, "Mahana"
Dead Can Dance, "Black Sun"
Doc and Lena Selyanina, "Steppe" (Internet Archive, Netlabels Collection)
Dead Can Dance, "As the Bell Rings the Maypole Spins"
Archie Roach, "There is a Garden"
Poetry

Steve Osborn: "The Day of the Two Sunrises"
Effects
Ryansnook: "Nuclear Explosion" (Freesound)

WHEN PROTECTORS BECOME DESTROYERS

Castle Bravo Detonation

While the colours of the rising sun were beginning to play over the skies of a still Pacific morning on the first day of March 1954, a second sun suddenly and furiously erupted from Namu Island in the Bikini atoll. It carried the fruition of an unflinching determination by the nuclear physicist Edward Teller to gift the world with a weapon as powerful as the sun itself, a weapon based on the fusion of hydrogen atoms.

Within one second of that infernal detonation, an immense fireball 7 kilometres in diameter had formed. In less than a minute, the fireball had risen to a height of 14 kilometres. Eight minutes later, the fiery cloud had billowed out to a height of 40 kilometres and had spread out over a distance of 100 kilometres. Even so, it continued expanding outwards at a rate of more than six kilometres a minute. Beneath this unearthly fury, the Bikini atoll had been riven in two by a gaping crater two kilometres wide and nearly 200 feet deep.

The clever men who had worked so hard to create such a weapon were well pleased. The 80,000 inhabitants of the Marshall Islands, in which the Bikini atoll was situated, were to suffer for generations to come. 

Rongelap atoll lies 170 kilometres to the east of Bikini. On the morning of March 1st 1954, the sky lit up as it had never lit up before. The atoll shuddered as from an earthquake and a horrific roar filled the air. A little later, white flakes began to fall from the sky, covering everything on the atoll with a layer of ash up to two centimetres thick. The sky had turned a ghastly grey, and families gathered together wondering what had happened. The children played with the strange “snow” fallen from the heavens. Some even tasted it to see what it might be.

One day later, some Americans arrived by boat. They were wearing full protective clothing and proceeded to take a number of measurements with their Geiger counters. According to the islanders, they came and went within 20 minutes, and did not speak to any of them during that time. A number of US navy boats returned the next day, more than 48 hours after the initial blast, and began to evacuate the islanders.

Even before the Americans arrived, most of the inhabitants of Rongelap had developed symptoms. Many were vomiting and had developed diarrhoea. Within a few days, their skin started itching and burning and began to develop black-pigmented areas that became ulcerated and infected. Within a fortnight, most of their hair had fallen out, and blood tests showed significant abnormalities. This was but the beginning of a tribulation that continues to sear the lives of three generations of Marshall Islanders.

Further afield, the radioactive plume from the Castle Bravo atomic test had settled on numerous inhabited atolls in the Marshall Islands archipelago, exposing many thousands of their inhabitants to varying levels of radioactivity.

Hiroshima was the first triumph of a group of new Prometheans intent on unleashing undreamed of destructive power in the service of the forces of war. The first atomic explosion in human history, not-so-cryptically named Trinity, had lit up the morning skies of the New Mexico desert in July 1945. That awesome event inspired J. Robert Oppenheimer, the director of the Manhattan Project, to ecstatically sing Vishnu's chant of power from the Bhagavad Gita: “I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.”

The Ruins of Hiroshima, August 1945

Within a year of the atomic slayings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the US military had claimed the Marshall Islands as their hidden testing ground for nuclear weapons. As a result of backroom negotiations, the United Nations handed over the Marshall Islands to the US as a Protectorate in July 1947. But in June 1946, a full year before the UN handover, the US Navy exploded a 23-kiloton atomic bomb above Bikini atoll. Three weeks later, they detonated a similar device 90 feet below the atoll. The Promethean Games had begun in earnest.

At the end of World War II, Stalin lost no time in ensuring that the Soviets would not be left behind in the race for nuclear supremacy. Armies of engineers and scientists were put to work and within four years had constructed a replica of the Fat Man bomb dropped on Nagasaki. The Soviet version was detonated in August 1949 and had an explosive power of 22 kilotons, or the equivalent of 22,000 tons of TNT.

This successful detonation by the Soviets drove US military planners into a frenzy of renewed activity. They soon enlisted the support of the Hungarian physicist Edward Teller who, even while working on the Manhattan Project, was dreaming of the feasibility of producing a fusion bomb based on deuterium and tritium, the isotopes of hydrogen. He understood that theoretically, there was no limit to the explosive power of such a weapon.

Edward Teller

After the Soviet atomic test in 1949, Teller set to work convincing his colleagues that the time had come to develop a more powerful weapon based on thermonuclear fusion. Both Oppenheimer and Enrico Fermi had voiced their opposition to the construction of such a bomb. But the successful Soviet atomic test changed everything. After intense lobbying at the highest levels by Teller and his military supporters, US president Harry Truman rubber-stamped the project in 1950.

Many of the nuclear physicists who had worked on the Manhattan Project were contacted. Within a short time, a group of 20 scientists calling themselves “The Matterhorn Gang” were furiously working up theoretical formulae to compute the progress of a man-made thermonuclear combustion process. The calculations proved so formidable, that IBM programmers in New York, the entire computation department of the University of Pennsylvania, and the operators of the large experimental computers owned by the US government were enlisted in the project. Most of the available computing power in the United States at the time was handed over to the scientists at Los Alamos.

Work began shortly after on the construction of a large-scale heavy water nuclear reactor at Savannah River in South Carolina. This facility was to produce the tritium that enabled the production of a massive arsenal of thermonuclear weapons by the US over the next forty years.

Ivy Mike

In less than three years, the previously deserted Eniwetok atoll in the Marshall Islands had become home to a six-storey structure built especially to house the first hydrogen bomb, innocuously named Ivy Mike. It contained an immense cooling apparatus to maintain temperatures at minus 250° Celsius (minus 417° Fahrenheit) in order to liquefy the deuterium used to fuel the bomb. The whole assembly weighed over 60 tons. This structure was linked to a two-mile long tunnel filled with helium, which enabled scientists to determine what occurred in those infinitesimally small moments during which the fusion reaction commenced.

Despite the fact that Teller had driven the process from the start, he chose not to join the audience of over 10,000 mainly military observers gathered around Bikini Atoll to witness the event preferring, rather, to monitor the explosion on a seismograph in a Californian laboratory. He reasoned that if the detonation was successful, its shock waves would be easily detectable on the US West Coast, 8,000 km away. He had reasoned correctly. Long before word of the event could arrive through the usual channels, Teller jubilantly reported the success of the operation to his colleagues at Los Alamos, and to his political sponsors in Washington.

The blast exploded with a force of 10.4 megatons, the equivalent of 10.4 million tons of TNT. It completely vaporised the structure in which the bomb was housed leaving a crater more than a mile wide and forming an immense mushroom cloud 100 miles wide and 25 miles in height. The blast destroyed all life on the immediately surrounding islands.

Teller and his group immediately set to work on building a new bomb that would be “deliverable” by air to any nominated target. In the design that followed, the liquid deuterium used in the first thermonuclear explosion was replaced by solid lithium deuteride. This could be detonated in such a way as to split the lithium atoms into heavy isotopes of hydrogen, thereby providing the necessary fuel for a thermonuclear fusion process. This new design formed the basis of the weapon that was exploded on Bikini atoll on March 1st 1954.

Despite their most careful calculations, Teller and his group seriously underestimated the explosive power of their second more portable version. They had predicted a yield of five megatons, but when their baby burst forth into the world, it flashed out at an astonishing 15 megatons – a thousand times more powerful than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima - and spewed millions of tons of radioactive debris throughout the region.

Stalin and his scientists had in the meantime been watching these developments with great interest. On August 12th 1953, nine months after Ivy Mike, the Soviets exploded their own thermonuclear device. It came in at 400 kilotons, nearly 30 times more powerful than the bomb used in Hiroshima. Unlike the first US hydrogen bomb however, the Soviets had produced a useable weapon that could easily be dropped from a plane. Two years later, the Soviets detonated a more respectable 1.6-megaton hydrogen bomb at Semipalatinsk in northeast Kazakhstan.

Tsar Bomba Detonation

The party got progressively wilder. Within six years, the Soviets exploded Tsar Bomba, a mother of a bomb that clocked in at 58 megatons. In human language, that single bomb carried the explosive power of 58 million tons of TNT. At the time, Soviet president Nikita Khrushchev boasted that his scientists and engineers could easily have done better, but were restrained by the fact that the Soviet Union was not large enough to absorb a shock that would have shattered windows 4,000 miles away.

Teller had been correct in his conjectures. There was in fact no limit to the explosive power that could be released in thermonuclear detonations.

Writing from Gethsemane Abbey in Kentucky a year after the Tsar Bomba explosion, Cistercian monk Thomas Merton reflected:

“Up to now (August 1962) there have been 106 nuclear tests since testing began again (almost a year). Thirty-one of these by the USSR, seventy-four by the USA, and one by Britain, in the USA (Nevada). The USA has made twenty-nine atmospheric tests, twenty-six in the South Pacific and three in Nevada. The USA has also made forty-four underground tests and one in the stratosphere. Total of all nuclear tests since the beginning: USA 229, USSR 86, UK 22, France 5.

Grand total: 342 tests, of which 282 were in the atmosphere.

Nice going, boys!” (Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, 1965)

But it was not such nice going for the people of the world, and more particularly, for the people of the Marshall Islands who had in the 12 years between 1946 and 1958, weathered the fallout of 67 atmospheric tests conducted by the US military.

Within a decade of the Castle Bravo test, 90% of the children who were under 12 years old on Rongelap at the time of the explosion had developed thyroid tumours. Marshall Islanders continue to have one of the world’s highest rates of abnormalities of the thyroid.

Many of the women from Rongelap suffered stillbirths and miscarriages in the years after Castle Bravo. Beverley Keever, author of “News Zero: The New York Times and The Bomb” describes the experiences of Ainri, a young 18 year old woman who was pregnant with her first child at the time of the 1954 test:

“After the blast, Ainri gave birth to a son, Robert. His thyroid glands were so damaged that he became dwarfed. The glands were later removed, consigning him to a lifelong regimnen of medication. Ainri got pregnant again and gave birth, she said, to “a bunch of grapes that had to be pulled out of me.” Twice more Ainri got pregnant, she said, and gave birth to children who appeared to be normal but died several days later. Another son, Alex, survived, but again with damaged thyroid glands. Ainri herself has thyroid problems: two new growths recently (2004) appeared there.”

There is a more sinister dimension to the experience of the Marshall Islanders that has only recently come to light. Even before the Castle Bravo detonation, a research document entitled Project 4.1 carried the statement that the Bikini blast would enable a “study of responses of human beings exposed to significant beta and gamma radiation due to fallout from high yield weapons.” That particular document was circulated on November 10, 1953, four months before the test.

What had been observed after Hiroshima and Nagasaki was simply not enough. More data was needed and the Marshall Islands, being at a suitable remove from the US mainland, provided an opportunity for some useful “information” to be gathered. Those who oversaw the “management” of the Marshallese affected by the atomic tests knew exactly what they were doing.

The irradiated inhabitants of Rongelap were removed from the island three days after the initial blast. They have been monitored on and off ever since. In 1957, they were returned to the island by US authorities. During their three-year absence, the US continued to carry out both atomic and thermonuclear weapon tests in the Marshall Islands. A further 11 thermonuclear tests had been conducted on Bikini atoll, while an additional eight atomic and three thermonuclear tests were carried out on Eniwetok atoll.

No attempt was ever made to clear Rongelap of the immense amounts of fallout to which it had been exposed. The Rongelapese were told that it was perfectly safe for them to return to their ancestral lands. They were, however, advised to avoid the more northern islands in their fishing expeditions. It was also suggested to them that they should eat mainly imported canned food.

In 1956, the year before their repatriation to Rongelap, Merril Eisenbudd, an official with the Atomic Energy Commission, had this to say about the “data” being gathered for Project 4.1:

“Now, data of this type has never been available. While it is true that these people do not live the way westerners do, civilized people, it is nonetheless true that they are more like us than the mice.”

And after they had been returned to Rongelap, Dr Robert Conard, head of the Atomic Energy Commission medical surveillance team wrote in his 1957 annual report:

“The habitation of these people on Rongelap Island affords the opportunity for a most valuable ecological radiation study on human beings. . . .  The various radionuclides present on the island can be traced from the soil through the food chain and into the human being.”

During the 1970s, the inhabitants of Rongelap became increasingly distrustful of reassurances by US government representatives about the safety of their land. A number of children had been born with birth defects and others had been diagnosed with leukaemia and thyroid tumours. They sought independent advice.

In 1983, the people of Rongelap were eventually provided with copies of a translation of a US Department of Energy document prepared in 1978. The document stated conclusively that many parts of the island they had lived on since 1957 had a contamination rating of Level 3, the same as that deemed for both Bikini and Eniwetok atolls where all human habitation was forbidden.

Their worst fears were realised. They immediately approached the US authorities and asked to be evacuated from the island. Their request was summarily refused and they were again reassured by the US Department of Energy that Rongelap was “safe” and that there was no cause for concern.

Sinking of the Rainbow Warrior. Auckland 1985

Yet they were desperately concerned about their own and their children’s futures. Again, they sought outside help. The Greenpeace yacht Rainbow Warrior travelled to Rongelap in May 1985 in order to relocate all of the inhabitants to Mejato Island, 180 kilometres away. This was to be the last action of the Rainbow Warrior.

Two months later, the Greenpeace yacht was on the bottom of Auckland Harbour after having been torn apart by two bombs planted by agents of the French government.

In 1988, the US government was forced to acknowledge the extent of the contamination of Rongelap declaring parts of the island group “forbidden territory” and in the words of Beverley Keever, “recommending that the remaining part would be safe only if inhabitants ate imported food for the next 30 to 50 years” (italics in original). During the 28 years from 1957 and 1985, the inhabitants of Rongelap had been continuously and knowingly exposed to dangerous levels of Caesium 137, Strontium 90 and a white-hot cauldron of long-lived radioactive isotopes that had settled everywhere.

In the time since their relocation by the Rainbow Warrior, some reparations have been made through the US Nuclear Claims Tribunal. Over 1,800 Marshall Islanders received some financial compensation from the US government for the leukaemia, cancers of the oesophagus, stomach, small intestine, pancreas and bone, and severe growth retardation due to thyroid damage that they have suffered. But Keever observes: “46% of affected islanders died before they were fully paid for their injuries.”

Clean-up operations on Rongelap began in 1999, with massive amounts of potassium being shipped to the island. This was added to the soil in order to decrease the uptake of radioactive caesium by plant life. Despite the unimaginable damage that has been done to their lands, the people of Rongelap are looking forward to soon returning to the islands that they have inhabited for over 4,000 years.

The story of Rongelap is not an isolated event in the sordid history of nuclear adventurism. Between 1945 and 1998, the US has conducted a total of 1,054 nuclear tests, over 330 of which were atmospheric. The Soviets have detonated over 700 nuclear weapons during the same period. Between 1966 and 1996, the French have carried out nearly 200 nuclear detonations - both atmospheric and underground - in Moruroa and Fangataufa atolls in Polynesia. China has conducted 45 tests, as has the UK, while India, Pakistan and North Korea have between them exploded 14 nuclear devices.

The world has been irremediably altered by the nuclear tests conducted during the latter half of the twentieth century, a time in which we have also come to see the creation of a massively expensive medical system to treat a world-wide epidemic of childhood cancers and so-called “diseases of civilisation.”

What we have witnessed during this time is the dehumanising dimension of certain aspects of the scientific endeavour. This is not a peculiar feature of twentieth century civilisation, but is evident in the calls of Francis Bacon in the sixteenth century to extract “nature’s secrets” by whatever means possible. This attitude toward the natural world was further spurred by Rene Descartes in his declaration that life was essentially a clockwork mechanism that could be subjected to the demands and manipulations of the res cogitans, or the sphere of human thought and will.

The free expression of the seemingly limitless power of human rationality has come at the cost of distancing the human heart and human feeling from the determinations of so-called dispassionate science and research. Yet the present over-reach has brought in its train its own inherent breakdown. Having failed to cultivate the capacity to reflect on the human and natural consequences of our projection of power in the material world, we have lost sight of the sustaining forces that have enabled such projections to begin with. We are both in the world and of the world and as the air, earth, fire and water within which we live, move and have our being become progressively more damaged and more toxic, so too ourselves.

Within the sweep of history, the fate of the people of Rongelap is but another small stain in the wash of blood and grief that reaches far beyond the vast charnel grounds of time and empire.

The gift of human intelligence has yet to be sufficiently informed by the greater gift of human wisdom. The power of human will has yet to be sufficiently infused by the greater power of human love.

Further Sources

1. Beverley Keever’s important paper “Suffering, Secrecy, Exile. Bravo 50 years later” published by Nuclear Age Peace Foundation describes many of the hidden dimensions of the plight of the Marshallese since the Castle Bravo detonation.

2. Glenn Alcalay’s brief overview “AtomicAtolls” published March 12, 2010 by CommonDreams.org offers the perspective of an American anthropologist who served as a Peace Corps volunteer on in the Marshall Islands during the 1970s.

3. The Acceptance Speech given by Senator Jetan Anjain of Rongelap on receiving the Right Livelihood Award in December 9th, 1991 gives a brief but poignant account of the how the Rongelapese have had to deal with the deception and neglect perpetrated by US government officials over the past half-century.

4. For the more masochistically inclined, there is fascinating insight to be gained regarding the mindset of the scientists involved in the creation of both the atomic and thermonuclear weapons at Los Alamos in a series of video remembrances by Edward Teller recorded in June 1996.

Wendell Berry. Finding our Souls before we Lose the World

Mountaintop Removal, Kentucky

The muses are presently poised between a Requiem for the Species and a Symphony for the Great Turning. The song that our children hear will be determined by decisions made and decisions avoided during the remaining years of the present decade. There is much that has already occurred that portends a completely altered planetary and human reality. We know enough to know that neither governments nor mining and corporate behemoths are about to willingly alter the pattern of their present activities sufficiently to avoid the bang or the whimper towards which we inexorably move. The gestures of collective aspiration and goodwill that found expression in Copenhagen in 2009, at the Rio Summit in June 2012, and in the Occupy Movement since its inception have been met with the immensity, the intractability and the brutality of the forces arraigned against meaningful change.

Olympic Dam Mine, South Australia

In the meantime, the continuing meltdown of three reactors at the Fukushima nuclear facility and the slow leaching of radioactive elements into groundwaters and ocean waters has done nothing to soften the determination of the nuclear industry in the pursuit of its ultimately destructive agenda even though both the Japanese and German governments halted their own nuclear programs in consequence and are now re-examining more sustainable and less damaging modes of energy production.

Oblivious to these realities, and anticipating a much-vaunted "renaissance" of activity in the nuclear marketplace, Australian politicians have endorsed a voracious expansion of the Olympic Dam mine in South Australia into the world's largest open cut mining operation that will result in an increase of Australian uranium exports from their present level of 10,000 tons annually to an estimated 19,000 tons by 2020.

While activists such as Chris Hedges in the US continue to warn all who would care to listen of the increasingly violent confrontations that are likely to occur as the heat builds up, many are coming to accept that, like the Titanic, industrial civilisation is steaming blindly towards inevitable tragedy.  Many are now choosing to direct their energies to both creating and recovering ways of living that are more attuned to the sensitivities and limits of a seriously damaged planet.

Among them is the American writer, poet, farmer and political activist Wendell Berry.


Heaven's Treasure, Earth's Friend

Wendell Berry was born in 1934 into a family that had been farming land in Kentucky for several generations. As a boy, his love of such activities as hunting and fishing was tempered by an equally great love of poetry and literature. At the age of 14, his father sent him to a military school to try and rein in his exuberant nature. On completion of his studies there in 1952, he immediately enrolled at the University of Kentucky, determined to become a writer. Within eight years, Wendell Berry had published his first novel, Nathan Coulter, which continues to be widely read.

He took up a position as professor of English at New York University in 1962. Berry drew little satisfaction from New York's intellectual and academic circles and in 1964, accepted a teaching position at the University of Kentucky. He describes his departure from New York in the following terms: "The reason I came back [to Kentucky] was because I wanted to. . .  When we started down the New Jersey turnpike with the New York skyline behind us, it was exhilarating." Berry, together with his wife and young daughter, was returning to the place where he had generational roots. Within a year, they had purchased Lane's Landing, which remains the family farm that he continues to manage to the present day.

In the time since acquiring the farm, Wendell Berry has taught classes at the University of Kentucky, written over twenty books of poetry, sixteen volumes of essays, and ten novels. He has also been prominent in political actions against the Vietnam War, nuclear energy, US Department of Agriculture policy, George W. Bush's post 9/11 National Security policy and more recently, the mining of coal by the methods of Mountaintop Removal in Kentucky. All the while, he has continuously worked his 125 acre farm using the organic methods described by the English botanist and agriculturalist, Sir Albert Howard. Berry has eschewed the use of heavy machinery, preferring rather to plough his land behind heavy horses. This is fully in keeping with his expressed view that mechanisation has contributed not only to alienation in the workplace, but alienation from the forces that sustain life and community, a view shared by such different individuals as E.F. Schumacher and Simone Weil. Berry observes:

"What I am against - and without a minute's hesitation or apology - is our slovenly willingness to allow machines and the idea of machines to prescribe the terms and conditions of the lives of creatures, which we have allowed increasingly over the last two centuries, and are still allowing, at an incalculable cost to other creatures and to ourselves."

Apart from the dehumanising aspects of mechanisation, the unspoken context of Berry's position is an understanding that the power and freedom gained by the use of machines will not be infinitely available as cheap and accessible reserves of petroleum begin to dry up.

Over the course of his life, Wendell Berry has come to embody a peculiar synthesis of land husbandry and literary creativity. Through it all, he has maintained a moral position firmly grounded in his own Baptist faith. This has not prevented him from fiercely denouncing the long-standing and contradictory collusion of the established churches with corporate and political institutions that have over the past half century systematically despoiled the earth in the name of economic growth and industrial development. Berry writes:

"If Christianity is going to survive as more than a respecter and comforter of profitable iniquities, then Christians, regardless of their organisations, are going to have to interest themselves in economy - which is to say, in nature and in work. They are going to have to give workable answers to those who say we cannot live without this economy that is destroying us and destroying our world, who see the murder of Creation as the only way of life."

Yet such workable answers are unlikely to emerge from the institutional forms of religion that are, like economics and industrial civilisation itself, riven by a deep alienation from the natural world. He continues:

"This separation of the soul from the body and from the world is no disease of the fringe, no aberration, but a fracture that runs through the mentality of institutional religion like a geological fault."

Berry's interests lie more in economy than in economics. He consistently uses the term in its etymological sense of housekeeping, of managing a household. The fact that both economy and ecology have common roots is central to his thinking. He is fully conscious of the immense disconnect between the principles that we nominally live by as "Christian" nations and the policies and values that determine our actions in the world:

"Christ's life from the manger to the cross was an affront to the established powers of his time, as it is to the established powers of our time. Much is made in churches of the "good news" of the gospels. Less is said of the gospel's bad news, which is that Jesus would have been horrified by just about every "Christian" government the world has ever seen."

The Peculiar Myth of Progress

Wendell Berry takes a contrarian view regarding the near-universal acceptance of industrial development and technological innovation as forces for good in the world. The promotion of such notions by governments and their corporate sponsors effectively creates malleable populations that happily disregard the damage caused to peoples and planet in the name of "progress" in exchange for the promise of endless novelty and economic growth.

Berry describes the more insidious aspects of the myth of progress that is everywhere used to underwrite and justify contemporary political, technological and economic depredation:

"It [the myth of progress] substitutes this infinite advance towards better and better life in the material sense for the old pilgrimage which you make by effort and grace to become a better person. . . . It takes people's minds off the important things. It becomes, at its worst, a kind of determinism. All we have to do is just passively go along and things will get better and better, and we'll be happier and happier."

Wendell Berry herein identifies a major cause of the widespread alienation and social narcissism that assails the present times. The Socratic focus on an examined life grounded in reflective consciousness has been displaced by the boundless positivism preached by scientific and technocratic elites who forever push the boundaries of what is known in pursuit of "the new." We are constantly reassured that such "cutting edge" developments will replace existing technologies with newer, faster and more efficient versions, entertain our restless minds, restore our deteriorating health, and eventually correct dangerously altered climatic patterns. All the while, our collective pockets are steadily emptied into the already bloated coffers of transnational corporations and their shareholders. In his characteristic manner, Berry queries the nature of the "progress" that has been so relentlessly pursued:

"What is the measure of progress? It is possible to measure the progress of the last two or three hundred years in soil erosion. We can measure it in the rate of species extinction. We can measure it in pollution, in the toxicity of the world. Those things, like power and speed, are perfectly measurable. But we need also to raise the questions that are not quantitative. How happy are people? What do we make of all this complaining? How healthy are people? How are love and beauty faring? What do we make of all this doctoring and medication that is going on all the time at such a great expense?"

The benefits of industrial civilisation have been gained at a cost which is only now beginning to be more widely understood. The systemic nature of the damage already caused is affecting virtually every dimension of human and planetary life, from the health of ecosystems to the stability of climatic patterns. Together with E.F. Schumacher, Wendell Berry finds such destructive consequences to be inherent in the very nature of the methods of industrial civilisation. He reflects:

"Industrialism, which is the name of our economy, and which is now virtually the only economy of the world, has been from its beginnings in a state of riot. It is based squarely on the principle of violence towards everything on which it depends. . . . The violence towards nature, towards human communities, traditional agricultures and local economies has been constant."

This violence is most obvious in the mining and energy industries from which industrial civilisation gains much of its momentum. But it is also present in more subtle ways in the sweat-shop and assembly-line methods of production that create the surfeit of poorly-made and often-useless "goods" that fill the shelves of retailers everywhere. Wendell Berry has long lamented the loss of community-based traditional skills that supported the work of shoemakers, bread-makers, soap and candle-makers and tailors. Unlike the sweat-shop, such activities provide a measure of independence and human dignity to the worker and cultivate the small satisfactions that come through personal attention to the fruits of one's labours.

Wendell Berry is untiring in his call for restraint in the political and economic forces that drive the now-ruinous industrial project. He continues:

"The captains of industry have always counselled the rest of us to be 'realistic'. Let us therefore be realistic. Is it realistic to assume that the present economy would be just fine if only it would stop poisoning the air, or if only it would stop soil erosion, or if only it would stop degrading watersheds and forest ecosystems, or if only it would stop seducing children, or if only it would quit buying politicians, or if only it would give women and favoured minorities an equitable share of the loot? Realism, I think, is a very limited programme, but it informs us at least that we should not look for bird eggs in a cuckoo clock."

The Thrasymachean principle of "might is right" now operates in such areas as energy policy, economic development, resource extraction, and - as we have come to observe more recently in Occupy Movement protests - in methods of social control. Wendell Berry urges us to become more conscious of the background forces and the hidden agendas that conspire to keep power in the hands of corporate elites and their armies of political lobbyists. Central to Berry's mission is a call for the re-empowerment of local communities:

"If it is unreasonable to expect a bad economy to try to become a good one, then we must go to work to build a good economy. It is appropriate that this duty should fall to us, for good economic behaviour is more possible for us than it is for the great corporations with their miseducated managers and their greedy and oblivious stockholders. . . . We must learn to spend our money with our friends and not with our enemies. But to do this, it is necessary to renew local economies and revive the domestic arts."

Reclaiming Community

Throughout his life, Wendell Berry has sought to artfully uncover the deceptive rhetoric that represents our time as one of utopian possibilities and universal fulfilment. While acknowledging the transformations wrought by industrial and technological civilisation, he calls our attention to the perennial values and unchanging realities that condition our being. We are born into the world and remain part of it regardless of our ability to construct space stations and cruise the ocean floor in nuclear-powered submarines.

Part of Berry's mission has been to awaken us to how far we have drifted from the sources that connect us to each other and to the earth. As one who has astutely observed the separation of our collective psyches from such basic considerations even as the source and nature of the foods that sustain us, he offers clear vision:

"No matter how urban our life, our bodies live by farming; we come from the earth and return to it, and so we live in agriculture as we live in flesh. While we live our bodies are moving particles of the earth, joined inextricably both to the soil and to the bodies of other living creatures. It is hardly surprising, then, that there should be some profound resemblances between our treatment of our bodies and our treatment of the earth." ("The Body and the Earth", The Art of the Common-Place, 2002)

Berry's pursuit of the perennial has also brought him to a clear understanding of the role of healthy communities in the life of humanity. He reflects:

"What I'm talking about in my work is the hope that it may be possible to produce stable, locally adapted communities. . . .  The idea of a healthy community is an indispensable measure, just as the idea of a healthy child, if you're a parent, is an indispensable measure. You can't operate without it."

Wendell Berry has never sought a following. But he has ever sought to awaken us to the sacred dimension of earthly life. Wendell Berry simply asks to be heard.

                    I will wait here in the fields
                    to see how well the rain
                    brings on the grass.
                    In the labour of the fields
                    longer than a man's life
                    I am at home. Don't come with me.
                    You stay home too.
                                         (Stay Home, 1980)

Star Dust Consciousness. Miriam MacGillis, Sister of Earth

The problems that confront us during these darkening times are not simply the consequence of runaway industrialism or an economic system gone wrong. They have extensive roots in a mindset grounded in alienated and opportunistic views of the world within which we live. We have mastered the methods that give us power over the natural world and have created tools that extend our reach from the manipulation of sub-atomic particles to the visualisation of immense fields of galaxies that have been forming for unthinkable periods of time. Yet we seem to be obstinately incapable of taking collective action in the face of a fate that approaches us in ever more dramatic manifestations.

In this audio presentation produced by chazk of Virtual Renderings, we hear reflections from Sr. Miriam MacGillis, director of the Dominican community at Genesis Farm and long-time friend and interpreter of Thomas Berry, regarding the changes that need to occur in our ways of thinking if we are to effectively understand why we are where we are and how we might attain a truly sustainable human future on the earth.



Star Dust Consciousness. Miriam MacGillis, a Sister of Earth can be streamed using the media player above. A CD quality mp3 file is available for download here, and both CD quality and LoFi mp3 files are available for download here.

Program Notes

Voices
vincentd
Sr. Miriam MacGillis
Terry Tempest Williams

Music
Crosby, Stills and Nash, "Long Time Gone"
D LOOP, "Peace"
Lisa Gerrard and Pieter Bourke, "Broken"
Joni Mitchell,  "Woodstock" (Woman of Heart and Mind DVD)

With many thanks to chazk of Virtual Renderings for both alerting me to the work of Sr. Miriam MacGillis and for so generously sharing this artful presentation.


Miriam MacGillis. Midwife of the Ecozoic Era

While the men of the Vatican continue to split hairs over obscure issues of dogma and issue restrictive edicts chastising socially conscious and politically active nuns for their "excessive" and "inappropriate" involvement in worldly matters, Sr. Miriam MacGillis and her group of fellow Dominicans have, over the past 30 years, been quietly developing new ways of being on the earth and new approaches to worshipful presence in the created world.

Miriam MacGillis is director of the Genesis Farm spiritual community, a 220 acre farm and education center based in north-west New Jersey. During her early years in the Dominican order, she served as a teacher of art at both high school and college levels. In 1973, she moved to the Newark Archdiocese where she held the position of co-ordinator of Peace and Justice Education for a period of 3 years. In 1976, she joined Global Education Associates (GEA), whose stated mission is, "to advance global systems that will secure ecological integrity, peace, human rights, economic and social well-being, and democratic participation, with special care to include the voices and perspectives of poor and marginalized people of diverse cultural and religious traditions."

While organising a GEA conference in 1977, she met with Thomas Berry for the first time. This meeting proved to be a turning point in her life. She later recalled:

"After he finished delivering his paper I could not have told anyone what he said, but I knew I had heard the most important thing I had ever heard."

This encounter also proved to be highly consequential for Thomas Berry. After the conference, a number of his articles and essays were published in Whole Earth Papers, a series of monographs produced by GEA between 1977 and 1983. These helped to carry the developed ideas of Thomas Berry out of academic and theological circles and into the broader community.

Things then started to move quickly. In 1978, 140 acres of farmland was unexpectedly bequeathed by the Von Boecklin family to the Dominican Sisters of Caldwell, New Jersey, the group of teaching nuns of which Miriam MacGillis was a member. She later wrote regarding this extraordinary development:

"There had never been any association between the Von Boecklin family and the Dominican Sisters, but through some providential purpose this farm was left to the Sisters who use it as a new expression of their traditional work in eduction."

Two years later, Genesis Farm was established as a teaching center with Miriam MacGillis as its Director.

Recovering an Earth-based Spirituality

In the 30 years since it was established, Genesis Farm has become a source of inspiration and renewal for over 50 similar centers founded by women's congregations in North America and elsewhere. Author John Edward Carroll commented in 2004:

"Genesis Farm has provided a model for the Franciscans, Sisters of Charity, Sisters of Loreto, Sisters of Notre Dame, and numerous other Catholic religious women's orders in their design and organisation of what now constitutes the Sisters of Earth network." (Sustainability and Spirituality, p. 82)

Genesis farm offers programs in such areas as earth literacy, organic and biodynamic gardening, community-supported agriculture, wild-crafting, food preservation, non-hybrid seed distribution, solar energy and straw-bale house construction. In addition, it promotes ecologically sustainable methods of agriculture that restore soil fertility and provide local communities with chemical-free, high-quality produce. The Genesis Farm community is also actively engaged in environmental advocacy both regionally and further afield. Miriam MacGillis has recently written:

"Stemming, in part from our profound concern about transgenic seeds, the power line expansion, hydraulic fracking for natural gas and other local and planetary ecological threats, we have been working to explore what options are now available to us for expanding our traditional approaches to advocacy and activism. . . .

Humans now stand on the threshold of a critical point in time, where our collective and individual actions have enormous potential and import."

Integral to the philosophy underlying many of the programs at Genesis Farm is the New Cosmology as articulated by Thomas Berry, Brian Swimme and others. Our view of the universe and our place in it has in recent centuries been radically expanded by the discoveries of science. This change in perspective can, if incorporated into our individual and collective understanding, awaken us to the errors in thinking that have led to a widespread and relentless destruction of the natural world by industrial civilisation, and the savaging of human communities through warfare and the exercise of titanic military capabilities.

This newly emergent view of the nature of the phenomenal world has also confirmed at the deepest level many of the insights expressed in the various wisdom traditions of the world. Drawing on the ideas of Thomas Berry, Miriam MacGillis reflects:

"[Thomas] Berry suggests that . . .  western society is being given a new revelation powerful enough to awaken us from our destructive behaviors toward the natural world. We are seeing with new eyes such as through the Hubble telescope or at the quantum level into the profound inner and outer unity of all being.  He [Thomas Berry] describes this capacity to see the sacred unity of the whole and our participation in it as a moment of grace."

Like Thomas Berry, and to a certain extent, Teilhard de Chardin before him, Miriam MacGillis views the progressive development of scientific understanding as a vehicle whereby our own understanding of the universe and its nature can be powerfully transformed. Ironically, this "moment of grace" is not universally received. There are many who interpret the same "revelation" as a refutation of the notion of the existence of any sacred meaning or purpose underlying both the cosmos and our human experience of the cosmos.

The Opening Doors

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Miriam MacGillis has also been strongly influenced in her spiritual and intellectual development by the Jesuit priest, paleontologist and theologian, Teilhard de Chardin. Teilhard was among the first in recent times who sought to reconcile the discoveries of science, particularly in the areas of anthropology and evolutionary theory, with his own commitment to Christian spirituality. He wrote prolifically during the 1920s and his provocative ideas became widely known within the French Jesuit community and among theologians more generally. The men of the Rome saw fit to remove him from the European scene because of his "extreme" views and sent him to China where he continued his studies in anthropology and paleontology. Miriam MacGillis offers some thoughts regarding his contribution:

"He [Teilhard] intuited that matter was not just matter but was spirit. He sensed that the  universe was evolving, not just in its physical aspects but as a deeply spiritual process. . .  He feared that if we did not develop our capacities to see (and by that we might say into evolutionary time and space ) that we wouldn’t have an adequate vision of the outer world to activate the energies needed to take us through our emerging crises in order to open up a different direction into the future."

Though Teilhard was profoundly Christocentric in his vision, it is clear from a number of essays published in his Christianity and Evolution that he had strong sympathies with a pantheistic view of the world that saw all of creation as being charged with divine presence. Miriam MacGillis reflects further:

"Genesis Farm is rooted in a belief that the Universe, Earth and all reality are permeated by the presence and power of that ultimate Holy Mystery that has been so deeply and richly expressed in the world's spiritual traditions. . .  This Sacred Mystery, known by so many religious names, is the common thread in our efforts."

One of the signatory elements in the work of Miriam MacGillis is a deep respect for the spiritual traditions of all cultures. The diversity of ways in which sacred presence is honoured reflects the diversity of experience and history of different cultural groups. She is no worshipper of monolithic institutions, be they of a political, religious, or corporate nature, but delights in the fact that we have the freedom to draw upon "the wisdom of all the earth's peoples."

The Sisters of Genesis Farm are giving form to an emergent spirituality that is grounded in a deep realisation that revelation is mediated by more than sacred texts and the dogmas voiced by institutional religions. The universe itself and all that is within it can become sources of deep insight and transcendental knowledge to an awakened human consciousness.

Miriam MacGillis calls for a broadening of traditional religious forms, particularly those of Catholicism, and the development of more creative ways of prayer and ritual that can connect us more strongly with the divine presence in which we live and move and have our being.

Further Sources
"The Fate of the Earth", a two-part 90 minute lecture in which Sr. Miriam discusses in detail a number of ideas that have been influential in her formation can be downloaded as an mp3 audio or as a transcript here.

Thomas Berry. Healing a Savaged Earth

Despite the fact that we have clearly entered uncharted territory in relation to the effects of industrial civilisation on the fate of the earth and her creatures, big government of all persuasions seems intent on relentlessly pursuing economic growth, environmental plunder and social and political control at every level.

In view of our gathering predicament reflected in such intangibles as steadily rising carbon dioxide levels, deepening ocean acidification and accelerating methane exhalations from formerly locked under-sea and tundra deposits - to say nothing of the numerous social, political and environmental pathologies that continue to assail humanity - it may be instructive to revisit the thoughtful offerings of Thomas Berry, a wise elder who sought to awaken us all to the changes that have already occurred and those that will inevitably follow.

"Healing a Savaged Earth" is a tribute to the prophetic insight, vision and integrity of cultural historian Thomas Berry. Though others viewed him as a depth theologian and cultural guardian, he chose in his later years to call himself a "geologian" as an acknowledgement of his earth-centred philosophy which drew strongly from the insights of Taoism, Confucianism  and the mysticism of Teilhard de Chardin and Henri Bergson.

This post offers an audio presentation drawn primarily from "The Ecozoic Era", a lecture given by Thomas Berry in 1991.



Thomas Berry. Healing a Savaged Earth can be streamed using the media player above. A CD quality mp3 file is also available for download here.

In bringing this program to formation, I am grateful for the inspiration offered by chazk of Virtual Renderings in his remarkable 2008 tribute to Thomas Berry, Notes on Thomas Berry's Great Work, and for his more recent exploration of the transitional time within which we presently find ourselves, Notes From the Great Turning.

Program Notes

Voices:
vincentd (Intro)
Thomas Berry, "The Ecozoic Era", Great Barrington, Massechusetts 1991 (Schumacher Society)

Music:
Nico Di Stefano, "The Inverloch Sessions"
Digital Samsara, "C#" (SoundCloud)
Ani Difranco, "Millennium Theatre"
Yggdrasil, "Al Dabaran"
Prem Joshua, "Daia"
Xavier Rudd, "The Letter"
Paul Kelly, "Last Train to Heaven"
Tryad, "This" (Jamendo)

Further Sources:
1. For a more detailed account of Thomas Berry and his ideas, see the short essay posted in Integral Reflections on June 26th 2011, Restoring a Ruined Earth. The Heroic Mission of Thomas Berry.
2. A high quality 13 minute video of Berry discussing his ideas can be viewed at the Ecological Buddhism website.

E.F. Schumacher. A Voice for Wisdom in an Age of Folly

The economist E.F. Schumacher has served as a source of inspiration for many over the past half-century. His essential message is carried in two books published in the five years before he died, Small is Beautiful. A Study of Economics as if People Mattered (1973) and A Guide for the Perplexed (1977).

His ideas continue to be explored, developed and disseminated by such groups as the Schumacher Society in the UK and the New Economics Institute in the US as well as numerous individuals and groups in both the developed and developing world.

This post offers both an audio presentation drawn from two lectures given by Schumacher in the 1970s and a review of some of his ideas as presented in Small is Beautiful.


E.F. Schumacher. A Voice for Wisdom in an Age of Folly can be streamed using the media player above. A CD quality mp3 file is also available for download here.

Program Notes

Voices
vincentd
E.F. Schumacher, "Decentralist Economics", Lindisfarne 1974 (Schumacher Society)
E.F. Schumacher at Michigan State University 1977 (Youtube)

Music
Nico Di Stefano, "Slow March"
SaReGaMa, "One Thousand and One Nights" (Jamendo)
Endorphine, "Podroze:Kultura" (Jamendo)
Esbjorn Svensson Trio, "Bound for the Beauty of the South"
Dire Straits, "Telegraph Road"
Cat Stevens, "Where do the Children Play?"
John Butler Trio, "Treat Yo Mama"

Regarding Small is Beautiful

 In this time of ageing empires and of fruitless opinions, it can only be helpful to reconsider the reflections of those who would show us ways out of the maelstrom that presently engulfs our civilisation. E.F. Schumacher was such a one.

Copies of Schumacher’s Small is Beautiful, first published in 1973, can still be found in many libraries. And it occasionally chances as an unexpected treasure on the shelves of second hand bookshops. Although the book was published as a small paperback, it remains one of the most important works of the twentieth century.

As an economist, E.F. Schumacher was more interested in determining how economics could be made to serve human needs than in detailing the adventurism of rapacious financial institutions and their pursuit of big profits. His work has had a profound influence on many who seek to restore the rhythms and capacities of an earth that has been sorely damaged by industrial civilisation and its destructive technologies. In his own words: 

“We must thoroughly understand the problem and begin to see the possibility of evolving a new life-style, with new methods of production and new patterns of consumption: a life-style designed for permanence.”

 Schumacher identifies Keynesian economics as a primary driver of the politics of greed that has steadily consumed the latter half of the twentieth century. A few years before the collapse of the world-wide economic system in 1930, Keynes wrote: 

“For at least another hundred years we must pretend to ourselves and to everyone that fair is foul and foul is fair; for foul is useful and fair is not. Avarice and usury and precaution must be our gods for a little longer still. For only they can lead us out of the tunnel of economic necessity into daylight.”

 Pity, says Schumacher, that we listened to Keynes and not to Gandhi.

Eighty years after Keynes issued his decree, powerful nations and their financial institutions continue to insist on their freedom to exercise avarice and usury regardless of the effects of their actions on the lives of individuals and families, or on the health and stability of an increasingly ravaged planet.

We saw this expressed in the refusal by the Clinton and Bush Administrations in the US and the former Howard Government in Australia to support the implementation of the Kyoto Protocols during the 1990s and more recently in the covert corporate manipulations enabled by the deregulation of Wall Street – again under the aegis of the Clinton and Bush Administrations - that has seen millions of Americans dispossessed of their houses while managers of mortgage funds pocketed seven and eight figure salaries in return.

Regarding the obscene levels of energy consumption in the US and its aggressive promotion of nuclear power, Schumacher reminds us of the conveniently neglected fact that nuclear reactors have a finite life beyond which they become unusable and unserviceable. Every reactor in use today will become an incandescent monument emitting vast amounts of radiation for centuries to come. Flesh and blood simply cannot adapt to high levels of radioactivity because of the inherent nature of DNA. If the world does not end with a bang, the whimper of ghostly mutations will echo long through the lives of future generations.

We have witnessed this in the Ukraine and Belarus after Chernobyl and more recently in Iraq, where the widespread aerosol dispersal of over three hundred tons of depleted uranium used in weapon-piercing artillery during the first Gulf War has resulted in the birthing of monstrously deformed foetuses and children. We have yet to fully witness the tragic visitation of radiation-caused disease and genetic mutation on the people of Japan as a result of the Fukushima meltdowns.

E.F. Schumacher points to the essential malignancy of a technological civilisation which, in the guise of easing life's burdens, has in fact hastened the progressive poisoning of the earth and of humanity. When Schumacher wrote Small is Beautiful four decades ago, he meticulously detailed the excesses and disparities that were tearing the world apart at that time. The situation has steadily worsened since the time of his writing. 

Schumacher called for a reversal of the gigantism and the obsession with globalisation that were beginning to overtake governments both North and South. His suggestions found no resonance in the dominant political and economic powers. These powers are more intent on driving the world towards more of everything than in restraining an empty consumerism that sweeps through the world in the name of economic growth.

Yet between the lines, Schumacher calls our attention to the fact that committed individuals and visionary groups have been quietly work towards developing ways of living and new technologies that are more in keeping with the needs of the earth and her people than with those of shareholders and their corporate minders.

E.F. Schumacher calls for the creation of educational systems in both the developed and the developing world that are more attuned to the perennial rhythms of the earth and which nurture the development of wisdom, compassion and skill rather than satisfying industry-driven demands to create new cadres of compliant technicians and robotic technocrats.

Such individuals as Satish Kumar and Vandana Shiva have become powerful advocates for Schumacher’s ideas. They, along with many others, have taken up the work of awakening and informing all who would hear that blindly continuing to pursue the goals of industrial civilisation does not bode well for humanity and its home. 

Strong Gandhian sentiments permeate Schumacher’s work. He bluntly demolishes the myth of limitless growth as the natural destiny of economies and nations. Yet the common sense spoken by Schumacher is still nowhere to be seen in the economic and political style of the present day. There has been little if any change in the way things are done since he delivered his message forty years ago.

A profound aesthetic sense is expressed in Schumacher’s thought. He continually returns to the criteria of beauty, of elegance, of non-violence and of human scale in his pursuit of a workable future for humanity during a time of growing uncertainties.

E.F. Schumacher remains an enduring source of wisdom in an age of madness and folly.

A Beautiful Bohemian. Remembering Darren Jones

We have in the present age become desensitised to violence. It is glorified in movies, simulated in computer games, sanctioned in contact sports and casually glossed over in the blur of daily news broadcasts. Yet every act of violence can create psychic and emotion shock-waves that reverberate thereafter in the lives of those affected by it.

A Beautiful Bohemian. Remembering Darren Jones offers a sixth anniversary remembrance of the death by knifing of Australian musician Darren Jones who was killed in an unprovoked attack while returning home from the Victorian College of the Arts in the early afternoon of February 23rd 2006.

This audio presentation was developed through a series of depth interviews with 11 people - many of them fellow musicians - who were part of Darren Jones' intimate circle. It explores the effects of this shocking event on the lives of a community of artists and reflects the slow and painful process of healing that follows such an existential collapse.

The music heard in this program is drawn from recordings of several bands in which Darren Jones participated as guitarist and vocalist. It also includes three musical tributes composed and performed by Nico Di Stefano, Ben Kelly and Dan Licht . The track Blood Stain was composed and performed by fellow musician and friend, the late Heath King who was himself tragically killed in a road accident in September 2008.

This program was first broadcast on public radio stations 3PBS (Melbourne) and 3MDR (Emerald) in March 210.




A Beautiful Bohemian can be streamed using the media player above. A CD quality mp3 file can also be downloaded here.

A shorter half-hour version was broadcast on 360 Documentaries (ABC Radio National) in September 2010. It can be heard here.

Durban. The Supplication of a Dead Man's Hand

The UN Climate Conference held in Durban last December closed with a hollow whimper. No commitment to real action. No commitment to effective change. Just the continuing slow burn of business as usual.

The only substantive decision reached by the Conference was an agreement to form yet another committee, the Durban Platform for Enhanced Action. The Durban Platform rests on the dubious ambition of crafting a global agreement to limit greenhouse gas emissions by 2015. This will serve to replace the Kyoto Protocol which expires at the end of 2012. The Durban Platform will lay out the terms for legally-binding global emissions reductions that will "come into effect and be implemented by 2020."

Executive Director of Friends of the Earth (FOE) Andy Atkins offers his assessment: "This empty shell of a plan leaves the planet hurtling towards catastrophic climate change." And Chair of FOE international Nnimmo Bassey gives his own verdict: "Delaying real climate change until 2020 is a crime of global proportions. . . .  An increase in global temperatures of 4 degrees Celsius, permitted under this plan, is a death sentence for Africa, Small Island States, and the poor and vulnerable worldwide."

Even during the first days of the Durban Conference, the Global Carbon Project released figures showing that global carbon emissions increased by 6% - the greatest yearly increase ever recorded - between 2009 and 2010. This surge occurred in the year after the Climate Conference in Copenhagen that many had hoped would be a turning point.

Commenting on the longer-term implications of the inaction at Durban, a group of independent scientists from Climate Action Tracker concluded that: "Global mean warming would reach about 3.5°C by 2100 with the current reduction proposals on the table. They are definitely insufficient to limit temperature increase to 2°C."

This is not news. In August 2008, an article published in the UK Guardian noted that senior government scientists were projecting a 4°C rise in global temperatures based on existing evidence at that time. Of itself, such a temperature increase will affect hundreds of millions of people living in coastal areas. Such a temperature increase will likely produce a mass extinction event resulting in the loss of between 20% and 50% of all animal and plant species on the planet. Such a change in global temperature will also result in the widespread collapse of ocean ecosystems and food chains everywhere. Most alarmingly, such a rise in temperature will result in the painful and tragic reduction of human populations to below one billion people.

It is generally understood that even before global temperatures reach such levels, a number of tipping points will be crossed. These will push the planetary climate into completely unknown terrain. Yet this is precisely the scenario that the Climate Conference at Durban has soporifically agreed upon by refusing to set binding limits on emissions and choosing rather to delay action until 2020. The failure of Durban can only deepen the cynicism and frustration that have grown since the failures of Copenhagen in 2009 and Cancun in 2010.

We are a heedless and refractory species. It is not until, as Kurt Vonnegutt Jr. put it in 2006, "the shyte hits the fan" that any decisive (and by then largely useless) action is likely to occur.

Crossing to Death's Other Kingdom

Gulf of Mexico 2010

The problems that assail the present age reach much deeper than the oil deposits and coal seams that are fuelling an inexorable increase in carbon dioxide emissions. Carbon has become emblematic of our present crisis because its concentration in the atmosphere is by far the over-riding determinant of regional and global temperatures, ocean acidity, and global climatic patterns. Each of these factors in turn profoundly influences the web of interconnected energies that has sustained all life on this planet over time periods far greater than the two million years that humans have walked the earth.

Industrial civilisation has been driven by far more than the extraction of fossil fuels, even though those fuels have enabled many of the signatory elements of the present times to be realised. These include:

• The enabling of transport systems that move hundreds of millions of people and hundreds of millions of tons of materials every day.
• The development of an agricultural system that has replaced small-scale integrated agriculture with broad-acre methods that make use of increasingly modified and genetically-manipulated seed-stock and produce increasingly chemicalised and vitiated soils.
• The creation of massive industrial infrastructures that have, since World War II, overseen the production and dispersion of over 80,000 new chemical compounds - many of which are highly toxic - throughout numerous ecosystems. 
• The intensely energy-consuming and environmentally destructive extraction of minerals and metals on every continent. 
• The clear-felling of vast swathes of the world's old-growth forests for timber and wood-chip production and the creation of new agricultural lands.

The problem is not simply one of reducing carbon emissions. It is more in the nature of attending to the numerous pathologies that have riven the body of a senescent and dying civilisation.

The Valley of Dying Stars

North American physician Max Gerson was among the first to awaken to the insidious and damaging effects of agricultural chemicals on the processes that sustain all life. Gerson, who was described by Dr Albert Schweitzer as, "one of the most eminent geniuses in the history of medicine" is remembered for having independently developed a powerful nutritionally-based cancer therapy during the 1940s. In his Introduction to A Cancer Therapy. Results of Fifty Cases published in 1958, Gerson wrote:

"The coming years will make it more and more imperative that organically grown fruit and vegetables will be, and must be, used for protection against degenerative diseases, the prevention of cancer, and more so in the treatment of cancer."

Gerson's prescient understanding has, however, been subverted and dismissed by the powerful corporate interests that control industrial agriculture, scientific medicine, the cancer establishment and the dominant media. Government health and agriculture departments have been fully co-opted in the corporate expansion of both chemical-based industrial agriculture and chemical-based cancer treatments.

Gerson's insight arose during the course of developing treatments for chronic diseases, including cancer, during the 1930s and 1940s. His treatment program requires, among other things, the consumption of large quantities - nearly 10 kilograms daily - of fruits and vegetables in the form of freshly expressed juices. Gerson observed that several weeks after starting treatment using conventionally-grown fruits and vegetables, virtually all of his patients, regardless of the nature of their cancer, began to develop severe yet near-identical symptoms. He went on to discover that this new pattern of symptoms was due to the toxic effects of chemicals - mainly chlorinated hydrocarbons - that were used universally in the industrial-scale agriculture that produced most of the fruits and vegetables available in North America at the time.

Gerson instructed his patients to thereafter use only organically-grown fruits and vegetables. Within a short time, the distressing symptoms began to disappear and patients continued to improve. Gerson was later to write:

"The soil and all that grows in it is not something distant to us but must be regarded as our external metabolism, which produces the basic substances for our internal metabolism. Therefore, the soil must be cared for properly and must not be depleted or poisoned; otherwise, these changes will result in serious degenerative diseases, rapidly increasing in animals and human beings."

This comment, made in 1958, presaged the observation made by Thomas Berry in 1991:

"It should be especially clear in medicine that we cannot have well humans on a sick planet. Medicine must first turn its attention to protecting the health and well-being of the Earth before there can be any effective human health."

Herein lies the essence of the problem. The health and well-being of the Earth will not be restored simply by capping carbon emissions, continuing to fuel industrial civilisation using "clean" nuclear energy, or implementing Promethean geo-engineering projects. Great damage has already been done and continues to be inflicted on the earth's forests, soils, lake and river systems, groundwaters, and marine environments.

This has been evident to the more visionary among us for decades. While Max Gerson was among the first to alert us to the effects of agricultural chemicals on human health, Rachel Carson went on to document the effects of both agricultural and industrial chemicals on wildlife ecosystems in the 1960s. She gave the ominous title of Silent Spring to her report in acknowledgement of the widespread decline in health of bird populations due to the effects of agricultural chemicals.

Soon after the publication of Carson's seminal work, we began to learn of the unexpected effects of industrial and agricultural chemicals on the hormone systems of numerous species throughout the ecosystem. The dispersal of immense quantities of such chemicals in the environment has already resulted in numerous reproductive abnormalities. During the 1970s, salmon stocks in the Great Lakes of North America exhibited a range of endocrine changes including thyroid enlargement, precocious sexual maturation in males, and poor egg survival (less than 15%). Bird species feeding on Great Lakes fish exhibited reproductive loss and early mortality of hatchlings.

Right across the US and throughout the UK, large numbers of the fish that inhabit freshwater rivers and lakes now show intersex characteristics. It has also become apparent in recent years that many frog species are undergoing extinction at an alarming rate while frog populations globally continue to steadily decline. On yet another front, bee populations continue to decline catastrophically throughout North America for the fifth year in succession in the phenomenon that has come to be known as Colony Collapse Disorder. 

Chernobyl Reactor 4

The tragedy of Fukushima has served to reinforce what is clearly understood by those like Helen Caldicott who have looked deeply into the human consequences of the nuclear project. While engineers and politicians blithely reassure us that there is nothing to fear in the increasing levels of background radiation resulting from the unearthing and processing of radioactive elements, internal emitters such as Caesium-127 Strontium-90 Uranium-235 and Plutonium-239 are silently incorporated into our body tissues to actively seed mutations that will eventually produce cancers or will - if lodged in testes or ovaries - irreversibly alter the DNA of sperm and egg cells and project the dark shadow of industrial civilisation into the lives of future generations through the influence of genetic mutations.

Despite endless soft-soaping by the International Atomic Energy Commission and the nuclear industry, we now know that over a million people have already died as a result of Chernobyl. Thomas Berry has spoken clearly and prophetically about the consequences of pursuing a nuclear future:

"One of the most ominous expressions of the natural world has to do with nuclear energy. When we go deep into the natural world and penetrate the inner structure of the atom and in a sense violate that deepest mystery for trivial or destructive purposes, we may get power, but nature throws at us its most deadly consequences. We are still helpless with regard to what to do once we have broken into the mysterious recesses of nuclear power. Forces have been let loose far beyond anything we can manage."

Voices Singing in the Wind

Beyond these issues which bear down increasingly in the present time, the nature and viability of a civilisation is equally reflected in the institutions, philosophies and practices that underlie it and give it direction. There is little to inspire confidence when one looks closely at the militarism, inequality, corporate greed, valueless production and commodification of nature that have come to characterise the present style.

The problems that now confront us are as much moral as practical, as much philosophical as pragmatic. The myth of endless growth that has so driven Western economies over the past two centuries is now confronted by the reality of a seriously damaged world. We have failed to honour our duty as stewards of an exquisitely beautiful planet but have rather treated the created world as an endless commodity into which we can project our technocratic fantasies and unload the toxic detritus of industrial activity without thought of consequence.

While governments dither and corporate behemoths evade and obstruct the growing collective will for a more conscious participation in our fate, we are more likely to be herded towards the flames than guided towards more appropriate ways of living on the earth in this time of growing troubles.
 
Let us continue individually and collectively to work towards the creation of enduring communities, to cut through the destructive effects of greed and ignorance, and strive to preserve and perpetuate those sources of wisdom that will enable future generations to avoid the tragic errors that presently unfold around us.

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