Bryan O’Rourke shares his thoughts on technology, business, and consumer trends in health, fitness and more.
You have got to love Lawrence Lessig. This professor eloquently explains the realities of the clash between the old and new. A great presenter and knowledgeable expert on copyright law and the implications of technological advancements to the law, his talk on TED is worth the 20 minutes of your time.
Zakaria, who's new CNN show, Fareed Zakaria, GPS, was recently launched, writes another engaging book about the reality that the new global community represents. As he wrote, "This is not a book about the decline of America, but rather about the
rise of everyone else." So begins Fareed Zakaria's important new work
on the era we are now entering. Following on the success of his
best-selling The Future of Freedom, Zakaria describes with
equal prescience a world in which the United States will no longer
dominate the global economy, orchestrate geopolitics, or overwhelm
cultures. He sees the "rise of the rest"—the growth of countries like
China, India, Brazil, Russia, and many others—as the great story of our
time, and one that will reshape the world. The tallest buildings,
biggest dams, largest-selling movies, and most advanced cell phones are
all being built outside the United States. This economic growth is
producing political confidence, national pride, and potentially
international problems. How should the United States understand and
thrive in this rapidly changing international climate? What does it
mean to live in a truly global era? Zakaria answers these questions
with his customary lucidity, insight, and imagination. Here is an excerpt:
How much? Well, consider this fact. In 2006 and 2007, 124 countries grew their economies at over 4 percent a year. That includes more than 30 countries in Africa. Over the last two decades, lands outside the industrialized West have been growing at rates that were once unthinkable. While there have been booms and busts, the overall trend has been unambiguously upward. Antoine van Agtmael, the fund manager who coined the term "emerging markets," has identified the 25 companies most likely to be the world's next great multinationals. His list includes four companies each from Brazil, Mexico, South Korea, and Taiwan; three from India, two from China, and one each from Argentina, Chile, Malaysia, and South Africa. This is something much broader than the much-ballyhooed rise of China or even Asia. It is the rise of the rest—the rest of the world."
The industrial revolution at its core created the ability to leverage economies of scale through new production technologies. Central to this paradigm was separating producers from their source of production, thus increasing the efficiency of production and simultaneously creating consumers of goods. The industrial revolution "systematized" processes to create "things" more efficiently. As the industrial revolution spreads across the world, however, we are realizing the consequences of its global application.
"Consumerism" grew rapidly as the people of an increasingly industrialized world were marketed to in order to spur on increasing consumption of goods. Increases sales are necessary to perpetuate the system. Over the past century this trend is increasingly evident as world consumption has expanded at an unprecedented pace, with private and public consumption expenditures ..”reaching $24 trillion in 1998, twice the level of 1975 and six times that of 1950. In 1900 real consumption expenditure was barely $1.5 trillion” (Doyle). The idea was that humanity would benefit from improved lifestyles and life quality from the industrialized system's efficient concentration of production and consumption. However, the reality is beginning to hit home that never ending increases in production and consumption are unsustainable as the world becomes more developed. The notion that more is better is coming unglued. Now it is more important that we figure out how to use what we have. The industrial revolution is becoming a less relevant solution; thus the dawn of new solutions.
Examples of over consumption and unsustainable systems that evolved from the industrial and consumer society are every where. The global obesity epidemic is an excellent example. The number of overweight people rivals the number of underweight people for the first time in history.While the world’s underfed population has declined slightly since 1980 to 1.1 billion, the number of overweight people has surged to 1.1 billion.The population of overweight people has expanded rapidly in recent decades, more than offsetting the health gains from the modest decline in hunger. In the United States, 55 percent of adults are overweight by international standards. A whopping 23 percent of American adults are considered obese. And the trend is spreading to children as well, with one in five American kids now classified as overweight.… Obesity cost the United States 12 percent of the national health care budget in the late 1990s, $118 billion, more than double the $47 billion attributable to smoking and its has only become worse.
At its current growth rate, the amount of grain and paper that China would need in 25 years’ time equals 70% of all grain production in the world and 200% of paper production. More oil will be consumed at that time than all of the global oil production of today put together. The UN and the World Bank recently issued an extensive report on the state of the world. It did not make for an amusing read.
Out of the 25 natural resources sustaining life on Earth, nearly 20 are endangered. If every single person in the world consumed like Europeans do, it would take more than two Earths to sustain it. Americans consume even more, at a rate according to the same calculation would require four Earths.
The consumption rate of the world cannot continue and it is necessary that the foundations of the industrial revolution be undone. We cannot proceed on the basis of more is better. We are moving towards a new revolution, this time directed by the limits of our planet and the many associated risks of our consumerism practices.The era of the new revolution will ultimately eliminate at its core what the industrial era advanced - segregating producers from their means to produce thereby driving consumers to consume more than they need in order to maintain an inefficient production system that cannot be sustained.
For the vast but relatively brief time that humans have elected to engage, create, or submit to governments, whether they be religious institutions, monarchies, dictatorships, social regimes, republics or any other form or combination thereof, the basis upon which those in charge wielded their power is the control of information and the associated lack of understanding and education of their constituency. Be it building superior armies, affecting rumors or common thinking or submitting to and enabling commercial influence of the masses, those in charge, over time, tend to manipulate the masses to a view that benefits their control.
A significant and historical dimension of controlling the citizenry has been wielded through the control of information. Begining with the printing press, this mode of control started to diminish. In the past century information control has diminished increasingly as technology and education proliferate across the globe. More people have access to information than ever before, and therefore the means with which governments and institutions have to hide from information is diminishing greatly. However, this reality does not result in enhanced governance. In fact, it is resulting in more corruption and poorer governance and those in charge are increasingly attempting to seize what they can through this time of great change and flux. The battle is between the old and the new and what lies ahead is an opportunity- if people only seize it.
The foundation of a just governance of people is based on an enlightened people. Therefore, when the citizens of the world object to wrongs it is they who must take responsibility for those acts which reflect an unexamined and unchallenged government. While the grip of the revolution is seizing us all, failing to take on the responsibilities associated with the new paradigm will result in the possibility of more oppression and lost opportunity available through the revolution of change. A visionary, Jefferson opined years ago of the realities of humanity, governance and leadership. In the age of revolution his words carry more weight than every before and bare consideration in reflecting upon the opportunity for mankind.
"Some preparation seems necessary to qualify the body of a nation for self-government." -- Thomas Jefferson to Joseph Priestley, 1802. FE 8:179
"Reformation in government follows reformation in opinion." -- Thomas Jefferson to Richard Price, 1789. ME 7:366, Papers 15:138
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with inherent and inalienable rights; that among these, are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; that to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed; that whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness." --Declaration of Independence as originally written by Thomas Jefferson, 1776. ME 1:29, Papers 1:315
Turn off the tube, read, write and seek to understand the revolution. You have a duty to human kind to learn, think and act.
In a recent CNN Report, “Food Crisis, a Silent Tsunami” , Josette Sheeran, executive director of the United Nations' World Food Program, claims bio-fuel promotion is unintentionally adding to skyrocketing world food prices and threatening to “ plunge more than 100 million people on every continent into hunger." Sheeran attended a Food summit hosted by British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, aimed at determining ways to boost food supplies and identify deterrents as commodity inflation of the past year is contributing to increasing consumer food prices and a food crisis in unindustrialized countries. Yet the debate between fuel or food is really misplaced. As my friend Phillip Mills pointed out to me some time ago during the publishing of his and his better half's book "Fighting Globesity" Our method of industrial food production is at its roots inefficient, inextricably tied to fossil fuels as a base for its production and that is the real problem and basis of the challenge. How sad more people do not realize how untenable the unsustainable nature of the human food supply chain is.
The views expressed by an increasing number of well meaning educated people, like Sheehan, are an example of how broken the global and industrial food system is and illustrates the lack of understanding surrounding it. The method of industrial global crop production is unsustainable; therefore to incorporate the debate of rising cost of food with bio-fuel competition is akin to worrying about how the furniture on the deck of the Titanic is arranged. The global food system is very inefficient and dysfunctional. How we are processing energy for human consumption is vastly problematic and is why we are experiencing both large jumps in fossil fuel costs and food commodities at the same time. The reality is we use vast amounts of fossil fuels to grow soy, corn and wheat - the core components of the global industrial food system. Wether we use those crops to feed people or alternatively to grow "bio-fuel" is irrelevant in the long view simply because the manner in which global grop production is occuring is so damn inefficient.
As Pollan points out in his book The Omnivore’s Dilemma, “when you add together the natural gas in the fertilizer to the fossil fuels it takes to make the pesticides, drive the tractors, and harvest, dry and transport the corn, you find that every bushel of industrial corn requires the equivalent of between a quarter and a third of a gallon of oil to grow – or around fifty gallons of oil per acre of corn.” Simply put it takes more than a calorie of fossil fuel energy to produce a calorie of food. That is the real problem, which people like Sheeran, among others, fail to grasp. Even the surge in "organic" foods does not help - it costs over 70 calories of fuel to transport 1 calorie of organic lettuce from California to the central U.S. This does not even begin to address other side effects of our food system - the permeation of corn and its contribution to obesity and the adverse consequences of industrial farming to the environment are but a few of many other ill affects. As the world becomes more industrialized and developed the reality of the unsustainable nature of the system is exacerabted.
How can this change? How can we help avoid the situation where the industrialized world is becoming increasingly obese while one child is dying every five seconds from hunger-related causes? How can we reconcile that one of the most productive base of farms and a key food basket for the world, Iowa, is a food dessert that only produces feed grade corn and soy and must import 80% of what the population there consumes as food? While complex, the solution is truly basic. We must decentralize our food chain and make it sustainable as nature intended. We must go back to our roots. This relates directly to the revolution – our centralized modes of production do not work any longer. It will take more people making more informed and better choices to drive the change. Unfortunately, this requires that things break before they get better and many unfortunate will suffer the consequences of change.
In recent decades both central planning and the mechanical worldview that justified it have lost their practical and philosophical appeal because they increasingly do not work and our food supply is but one example. The emerging worldview, now becoming more widespread in business as well as in countless other fields, has replaced the mechanical, reductionist model with the organic and the relational. This is the basis of sustainability. Whether the subject of study is a living thing, a society of living things, or a corporate re-organization, the new focus is on the sum of inter-relationships of its members rather than the isolated members themselves. When the centralized industrial era segregated animals from crop production by replacing naturally occurring manure that nourished crops with petroleum based fertilizer and substituted grains grown on the farm to feed the livestock with subsidized corn in feedlots, we created short term gains while eroding rational systems, creating the unsustainable.
The new systems worldview accepts and respects the voluntary, natural order as well as the inborn character of its constituent components, whose natural interactions create that order, an order that is more durable and flexible than one imposed from the outside, no matter how many PhDs helped conceive it. The systems view teaches that all working systems succeed because they comprise smaller, self-organizing sub-systems that retain some degree of autonomy, which enables the overall system to remain adaptable and robust. This view not only restores respectability for the naturally occurring, traditional order, but philosophic legitimacy for local autonomy and decision-making. It is the foundation of the revolution both in how we live, and how we eat.
Copyright © 2021, Bryan K. O'Rourke. All rights reserved.
