Jerry Mander, Founder and Board Member of the International Forum on Globalization (www.ifg.org), and Senior Fellow at the Public Media Center, introduces the Teach-In on Indigenous Peoples’ Resistance to Economic Globalization, A Celebration of Indigenous Sovereignty: Victories, Rights & Cultures, that took place at Hunter College, NYC, on November 18, 2006.

The event was jointly presented by the International Forum on Globalization and the Tebtebba Foundation (Indigenous Peoples' International Centre for Policy Research and Education). Tebtebba, a word used by the indigenous Kankana-ey Igorots of the Northern Philippines, refers to a process of collectively discussing issues and presenting diverse views with the aim of reaching agreements, common positions, and concerted actions.

The following article is a transcription of his talk at the event.

Thanks so much, Ralph [ed.: Ralph White, co-founder of the New York Open Center and Editor of Lapis Magazine Online], and thanks to Cooper Union, and thanks to all our co-sponsors. We’re so happy to be here in this place.

I’m standing at the Lincoln podium, where Abraham Lincoln announced his presidency in the 1860’s, his run for the presidency. Of course, that was at a time when everything west of the Mississippi, or many things west of the Mississippi, were still Indian country and, arguably, some people may feel that it should have remained that way.

I have the high honor of being able to kick this event off and set a context for the nine- or ten-hour marathon today, focused on Indigenous Peoples’ Resistance to Economic Globalization.

This is an amazing, complex, multifaceted story with lots of fast-breaking news. It will be told by 35 of the leading players in local situations from most continents on the planet. We will get updates in the battle going on here in New York right now at the United Nations, over passage of the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples – a profoundly important document in my view – that has been the source of struggle for 13 years now. But it just may get passed this week. You’ll hear a lot more about it and Vicky [ed.: Victoria Tauli-Corpuz] will talk about it very shortly [ed.: see note regarding Declaration at end of article].

In these nine hours, we’ll only scratch the surface unfortunately, but we’d better get going. So, I’m going to start with some basic facts. No communities of people on this earth have been more negatively impacted by the world’s global economic system of today, than the world’s remaining 350 million indigenous peoples. And no communities of peoples have so courageously and lately, successfully, resisted these invasions and pressures. It is our central purpose with this event today to convey both the scale of the problem that they face and the successes and visions of the resistance, and to try to stimulate non-indigenous support for these movements.

Here’s the root of the problem: economic globalization, which some people see as the modern-day version of the old global colonialism of the past 500 years since Columbus, though a more “ramped up,” higher-speed version. But the economic model is of the global corporations and central globalization institutions, like the World Trade Organization, World Bank and others that drive this machine. These global corporations and institutions literally cannot survive without an always-increasing growth and profit. This growth itself depends on an ever-increasing supply of the world’s remaining resources, much of which, unfortunately, is on indigenous lands: oil, natural gas, coal, uranium, timber, minerals of every kind, from copper, zinc, lead to gold, and now coltan [ed.: the ore for tantalum, used for consumer electronic products] for our computers, fish from rivers and seas now in a very depleted state, genetic diversity from our wilderness regions for our pharmaceutical industries, fresh water (the world is fast running out of that), arable lands for massive export-oriented industrial agricultural experiments.

These resources are the basic building blocks for global corporate industrial activity in the modern world. Without them they can’t keep making more and more “stuff” for consumers and industrial markets. They can’t grow and the system starts to fail. A globalized corporate system also requires infrastructural development in pristine areas; new roads, pipelines, massive dams, electricity grids, airports, seaports are needed to take the resources and carry them across vast landscapes and oceans and factories and markets in still other countries – that’s globalization.

Without this growing rate of resource extraction, and modern global transport polluting the oceans, the macroeconomic model we call economic globalization really can’t live. In fact, the whole architecture of the globalization model is built upon a really rickety platform requiring never-ending exponential growth in resource use, which is actually impossible on a finite, quite-small planet.

The idea of constantly expanding this activity and doing it forever is absurd on its face and it takes the highest degree of denial and alienation and a lot of misguided economics courses (in universities like at Columbia where I went to school) to even imagine that it could work in timeframe but the very, very short run. But the corporate timeframe is the very, very short run. Short-term profits and growth are what keep corporate investors happy. In the long run it can’t continue. We already see the beginning of the end in such things as climate breakdown and peak oil and we’re also seeing other spectacular declines in many of the world’s key resources, leading to fierce global competition over the remaining supplies, even wars, as in Iraq over oil and elsewhere soon over water and land. The limits of the planet are becoming visible.

To stake the future of all life on Earth on such a clearly unsustainable model is ridiculous, ecologically disastrous and a little bit insane. But for indigenous peoples, the situation is particularly serious and very immediate, because in the world today, a very high percentage (some believe at least 50%) of the remaining critical resources in the world are found on indigenous lands, places where native peoples have lived successfully for centuries or longer. And so now, even more than in past colonial contexts, indigenous peoples are direct targets for corporate resource raiders. That’s one of the prime focuses of this event today and also this book Paradigm Wars that Vicki and I edited, that’s just been released as well. (Purchase Paradigm Wars here.)

These are the roots of some very serious conflicts: invasions, forced removals, cultural and political assaults and, very often, extreme violence. You could characterize all this as “resource wars.” But in our new report we’re calling it “paradigm wars,” deeply based in opposite understandings of how human beings should be living on the Earth. There’s a great and tragic paradox here: the very reason that native people have become such targets for corporate resource exploration is exactly because indigenous peoples have been so successful over millennia in maintaining traditions, cultures, economies, philosophies and practices that are not built upon some ideology of rapid expansion, economic growth or short-term profit-seeking or the gaining of individual personal wealth.

Generally speaking, intact indigenous cultures have not sought to mine every last square inch of the natural world where they live; nor do they ship mountains of resources like logs or oil across oceans to foreign markets. Indigenous peoples, even when generally very different from each other, have all tended toward philosophies and economic formulas that include such primary values as these:

• The central importance of community values, collective ownership, collective governance, above individualistic values and personal acquisition;

• Integration, rather than alienation from the natural world;

• Reciprocal relations with nature, economies of limits and balance.

Those traditional indigenous values and others are diametrically opposite to those of the dominant society – so even after millennia of living in one place, nature’s resources are still there. But to global corporate players these resources call like sirens as corporate existence depends upon them.

That’s the bad news. Here’s the good news: native peoples are now strongly resisting and increasingly with great success. And so, in the Amazon jungles and the mountains of the Andes, where the issues may be oil or minerals or forests or pipelines and infrastructure development; in the tundras of the far North, where it’s oil, gas, minerals and climate change; or in the forests of Canada and the central plains of Alberta where oil is the issue; as well as in Siberia and Indonesia or on the small islands of the Pacific where militarism, ocean exploitation, tourism and climate change may be the issues; or in the agricultural lands of the Philippines, Guatemala, Mexico and the US; and in the grasslands of Africa, where diamonds are an issue (now unfortunately also where coltan is found); in all these places, we find native peoples facing grave threats to their lands, forests, wildlife, minerals, waters and themselves, but actively resisting and battling back and succeeding in many cases.

Remarkably, because of their growing convictions and with the support of amazing new collaborations among indigenous groups of different regions, as you’ll hear about today, and with added help of indigenous and non-indigenous organizations, indigenous peoples are actively trying to reverse this tide.

OK, what are they asking for? You’ll hear a lot about that today. I’ll just summarize by saying native peoples are demanding a few key things:

• Confirmation of their rights to full sovereignty, both internal and external, and the rights to self-governance in all cases;

• For the rights to collective ownership and processes;

• They seek protections for a recovery of the languages, cultural and religious practices and artifacts that may have been invaded;

• And for control of their resources and traditional knowledge and science;

• But arguably, the single most important demand of indigenous peoples of the Earth right now, is to globally codify their control of all decisions about their ancestral lands and the rights to determine when, and if ever, the resource removal or any other economic, cultural or political intrusion is to be allowed, and under whose terms.

This is the so-called “Right of Free Prior and Informed Consent,” presently denied in most parts of the world. This single issue is the basis for hundreds of struggles in domestic and international contexts. All of these points are extensively discussed in the book and will be discussed today, but they are also very important ingredients of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples being fiercely debated up the street [ed.: UN headquarters are located less than two miles north of Cooper Union, the site of this forum].

The draft Declaration is a very profound document with remarkable political concepts including some of those that I named, such as collective governance, prior rights, free prior and informed consent. It has been thought about for thirteen years and now is on the verge of passage at the UN, except for the fierce opposition of guess who, John Bolton, as well as the UK, Australia, New Zealand and Canada (that otherwise wonderful human-rights Mecca), as well as some of the poorest countries of the world who are in an unfortunate position of getting rapidly bought off or at least people are trying to buy them off. We’ll come back to this often in the discussion and I know Vicki’s going to talk about it.

Finally, there are also amazing stories about political successes, particularly in such places as South America. That’s where indigenous resistance has been one of the most important factors in a continent-wide political shift that is truly beginning to shake the world and we have some substantial delegations from throughout South America here with us today, as well as Central America.

In only the last five or six years, we have seen new governments elected on anti-globalization platforms in Brazil, Argentina, Venezuela, Uruguay and, of course, Bolivia, where indigenous uprisings against water privatization and the export of natural gas to the US, and for recognition of their agricultural needs, has led to an indigenous farmer becoming the president, Evo Morales, and we have a representative of that government here on the panel today.

In Ecuador, several presidents have lately been overturned largely by actions of indigenous peoples and there are shifts taking place in Peru and in Central America. When George Bush came down to sell the FTAA, he was basically laughed off the continent. And of course, Mexico, where the Mayan Zapatista uprising changed the political culture in that country profoundly. It arguably led directly to the election of Mr. Obrador, a few months ago, though he was denied his election in the manner of Bush vs. Gore.

Not everything’s been solved for indigenous peoples’ interests in any of these places, but the first major steps have been taken. Indigenous mobilizations against the excesses of globalization have been key factors in the changes of political power that are growing in these countries – changes to regional and local political systems as opposed to global. The ideas of local self-sufficiency and local control – these have all been greatly influenced by indigenous uprisings and indigenous philosophies, albeit in some places more than others.

As the ecological limits of the planet become ever more clear, the alternative visions of self-reliant, localized land-based systems as provided by indigenous economic, political and cultural forums will become ever more persuasive and viable. So, in my personal view, judging from the great tangible shifts in the world lately against the institutions of corporate globalization, the handwriting is on the wall: South America is only the first continent on the Earth to begin turning away from a failing globalization model, but it’s not the last. Soon all regions will be seeking alternative sets of practices that stand a better chance for a sustainable social, political and ecological future.

The role of indigenous peoples in this process is crucial, and it’s a main purpose of this event to make that clear. My personal plea is that all communities of activists will recognize that their own issues will be benefited if the indigenous struggles are included as their own. We must actively support these movements, and we must help fight for the passage of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People, which sets a new high standard for international recognition and behavior. Some people say that declarations like that are not important as they have no real enforcement powers. If they are not important, why are John Bolton and the US Government and all these other governments fighting so hard to try to kill it?

So, thank you so much for coming and helping us to get this day launched. And now I’m going to turn it over to Victoria Tauli-Corpuz. Thank you so much.

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Note [the following statement is taken directly from www.iwgia.org/sw248.asp, where readers can find the final Declaration]: With an overwhelming majority of 143 votes in favor, only 4 negative votes cast (Canada, Australia, New Zealand, United States) and 11 abstentions, the United Nations General Assembly (GA) adopted the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples on September 13, 2007. The Declaration has been negotiated through more than 20 years between nation-states and Indigenous Peoples. Les Malezer, Chair of the International Indigenous Peoples' Caucus, welcomed the adoption of the Declaration in a statement to the General Assembly:

"The Declaration does not represent solely the viewpoint of the United Nations, nor does it represent solely the viewpoint of the Indigenous Peoples. It is a Declaration which combines our views and interests and which sets the framework for the future. It is a tool for peace and justice, based upon mutual recognition and mutual respect."

It was expected that the Declaration would be finally adopted by the General Assembly in November 2006. However, at this late stage it emerged that some African States had serious difficulties with the text of the Declaration and were not prepared to accept the recommendation made by the Human Rights Council to adopt the Declaration. Namibia presented an amending resolution, which called for the vote on the Declaration to be deferred to allow more consideration. To the great surprise of all this resolution was adopted, and the final vote on the adoption of the Declaration thus postponed.

Between Novermber 2006 and  September 2007, when the Declaration was finally adopted by the UN General Assemby, indigenous peoples and states supporting the Declaration have engaged in intense dialogue with African states in an attempt to clarify the doubts, and promote the adoption of the Declaration. In early September 2007, an agreement was reached between the co-sponsors of the Declaration and the African Group of States on nine amendments to the text as adopted by the Human Rights Council in June 2006. This agreement, and the amended text, formed the basis for the draft resolution on adoption of the Declaration.

This article, Part 1 of a two-part series, is adapted from a talk sponsored by The New York Open Center and City University of New York Graduate Center that was given at CUNY.

Michael J. Thompson is the editor of Islam and the West: Critical Perspectives on Modernity, and founder and editor of Logos: A Journal of Modern Society and Culture (www.logosjournal.com). He teaches political theory at Hunter College.

All forms of fundamentalism are an attempt to reach back to the past to regenerate the present. In many ways you could say that it had its greatest moment within Christianity itself during the Reformation with Luther's entire project of reinventing Christianity through the return to the purity of Christian texts (with the doctrine of sola scriptura) and by turning away from the institutions of the church, which he thought to be corrupt and deviating from true Christian teachings, toward the content of the individual's soul. He wanted to embrace a true Christian morality with a turn toward conscience.

Now, familiar names like Osama bin Laden and Ramzi Yusef have been deeply influenced by Qutb's ideas. They have read his books and studied his ideas. So by understanding Qutb's objectives I think it is possible to gain at least some degree of insight into what the contemporary form of Islamic fundamentalism is trying to achieve, whether it be in the form of attack or critique.

One of the things that happened after 9/11 is that there was a huge debate about its causes. On the one hand there were those on the political left who said that fundamentalism and Islamic terrorism are the result of decades of economic exploitation and political manipulation. Fundamentalism and terrorism are the results of imperialism, disenfranchisement of the population and of massive economic inequality and poverty and therefore people in the Islamic world embraced fundamentalism as a way of rebelling against these injustices and finding fault with the imperialist, and Christian, West. Then there were others who argued that there was something inherent within the faith of Islam, within the traditions of Islamic thought and the content of the religion itself, that leads ineluctably toward the logic of fundamentalism and acts of terrorism.

Yet in many ways to understand Qutb we need to see him as someone who fits into neither of those categories. The problem with the first perspective is that it actually demeans and devalues what Islamic fundamentalism has to offer. The kind of fundamentalism that Qutb formulates has its own philosophical center, its own moral message and set of ideas to offer. It is not simply a foil to modern Western consciousness, to capitalism, to modernity, to liberalism. It is both a critique of it and an alternative to it.

But what is it an alternative to? The one thing that characterizes western societies and western democracies since the Enlightenment is the notion that there is a distinction between church and state. There is a distinction between the religious sphere of faith and the secular political sphere. That is the founding notion of liberalism and of all western liberal democracies.

What Islamic fundamentalism says — especially Qutb's brand of fundamentalism — is that this distinction is artificial and it leads to the moral corrosion of any culture. Once you have a separation between the realm of God and absolute moral values and a secular sphere where human beings create their own morality, you have immediate moral corrosion through an alienation from the "true" moral principles that religion (in Qutb's case, Islam) offers. Qutb is very specific on this point, although I don't think you see anything very different, in this regard, with a group like the Christian Coalition in the United States and Christian fundamentalism here, from the public display of the 10 commandments to other encroachments of religion into the public realm.

The separation of church and state ironically has religious (Protestant) foundations. The basic idea was that I can never tell you what your path to salvation is since that is ultimately dependent on the individual to find the path to his own salvation. This was the emphasis on faith and conscience that Luther's Reformation provided and it means that no one — including and especially the state — can privilege one religious creed or doctrine over another. Faith is something for you and you alone. This means that I have to tolerate your religious views, which then leads to religious pluralism. That is the essence of liberalism in respect to religion and the state.

This separation between the sacred and the secular is something that fundamentalists find repugnant because they consider their viewpoint as essentially the only truth, divined from the realm of God himself. God's messages and the moral values that we ground on his revealed laws have to be relinked with the political organization of society. However, western democracy and western culture in general, for at least the past 150 to 200 years, has been concerned with the idea that we can have a just society without any notion of God underlying it. As human beings we can create our own system of values that are totally legitimate in and of themselves. This is another aspect that Islamic fundamentalism find repugnant: the self-creation by human beings of their own moral values.

Qutb was born in 1906 in a remote village in Egypt. He pursued a degree in education and then became a member of the Ministry of Education in Cairo. He was sent in 1948 to Colorado to study teaching curricula in the US. The people who sent him thought it might broaden his horizons, and that he would come back with new ideas about teaching and educational systems. But the two and a half years he spent in the US moved him decidedly toward a reaction to the West and a reformulation of Islamic ideas and values. Upon returning to Cairo in 1951 he joined the Muslim Brotherhood. The reason for this is described in his book on America, The America I Have Seen, which is well read among Islamic fundamentalist circles, where he recounts different aspects of American life. The whole point is not to give an accurate description of what America was about, although you would recognize some of it. The real point of the book is to show a broader view of why Islam itself is not simply true, not just a religious conviction. The point is that all true human justice and true human happiness can come only through Islam.

To make this argument, he takes the United States as his premier example. He talks about visiting a Methodist church in Colorado where he observed a dance party. In describing the church dance, he writes, "they danced to the tune of the gramophone and the dance floor was replete with tapping feet, enticing legs, arms wrapped around waists, lips pressed to lips and chests pressed to chests. The atmosphere was full of desire." In a Methodist church in 1949 this is probably a little over the top. But the overarching theme is one of cultural and moral decay.

He then goes on to describe American women. "The American girl is well acquainted with her body's seductive capacity. She knows it lies in the face and the expressive eyes and thirsty lips. She knows seductiveness lies in the round breasts, the full buttocks, and in the shapely thighs and sleek legs. And she shows all of this and does not hide it." For an Islamic audience, women having any sort of autonomy or freedom is bad enough, let alone being seductive.

However, it's not the women in the church that disturb Qutb the most. What he sees in American culture is a land of barbarism that is not only immoral but amoral — lacking all moral values whatsoever. There are no foundations and therefore human beings start to degenerate into beasts. He talks about this in the phenomenon of the mass-sporting event, especially wrestling, which really bothered him. He goes on to write that "this primitiveness [of American culture] can be seen in the spectacle of the fans as they follow a game of football, or watch boxing matches or bloody, monstrous wrestling matches. This spectacle leaves no room for doubt as to the primitiveness of the feelings of those who are enamored with muscular strength and desire it." So the degeneration of culture toward the animalistic is something that he sees as completely repulsive and it is directly the result of not being Islamic, and this is the crux of his project.

In the end, it was the Islamic world itself which was more Qutb's concern. In the Forties and Fifties the Islamic world was increasingly following western political models, whether socialism or liberalism. Either way, there was some form of separation between the public and the private, the sacred and the profane. The fear was that, since Islam is really the only path to true human happiness, justice, freedom, and equality, once it is destroyed in the Islamic world, specifically in Egypt, then humanity has no hope of ever reattaining these values in the world. Hence the strong return to Islam and its teachings as an opposition to the moral decay of the west and its cultural products, ideas and values.

So philosophically, Qutb makes a distinction between two kind of social systems. The first one is truly Islamic, or Nizam Islam. Societies are truly Islamic that follow Islamic law (sharia) and are therefore enlightened as to the moral values that Islam has to communicate through culture and throughout its political system. And then there are those societies that are pre-Islamic, or ignorant or barbaric, or Nizam Jahi. The second word is from the root word Jahiliyya which is a word in traditional Islamic theology that refers to era before Mohammed, the prophet of Islam, came with the message given to him from Allah via the Angel Gabriel.

Before Islam, the Arab peoples, the Jahiliyya, are ignorant and barbaric. They have not been made human. Jahiliyya means specifically "pagan ignorance." What Qutb does — and this is an interesting move for modern fundamentalism — is to say that Jahiliyya is not simply a period before Mohammed arrives. It is a state of being itself, in the world. It is not simply something that was before Mohammed came to the Arab people; it is all over western Europe, it is all over the communist world and it is in the United States. The fact that it is also within the Arab world means that Arab countries are degenerating toward what the US has become with its women, its churches, and its bloodlust for wrestling. It is this usurpation of God's existence and authority on earth which is the primary focus of Qutb's critique. Allah's authority must be reconnected to the entire world, not just its Arab nations.

But it should be emphasized that Qutb's idea is not a nativist one. The idea is that we are all ignorant but we can all be enlightened. Ironically enough, in the light of the events of the last three or four years, this is Qutb's essential message. This is why Qutb is a more problematic figure that initially meets the eye and not simply as black and white as he has been painted. He wants to say that Islam is not simply for Arabs; it is for the entire human race, and it is the only way that all human beings can be truly free and truly equal.

He offers this diagnosis of the crisis of all mankind in one of his most important books, Social Justice in Islam:

"Mankind today is on the brink of a precipice. Not because of the danger of complete annihilation which is hanging over its head, this being just a symptom and not the real disease. But because humanity is devoid of those vital values which are necessary not only for its healthy development, but also for its real progress. Even the western world realizes that western civilization is unable to present any healthy values for the guidance of mankind. It knows that it does not possess anything which will satisfy its own consciousness and justify its existence."

This is similar to the views of critics of the European Enlightenment like Nietzsche, Herder and Hamann as far back as the middle of the Eighteenth century. They felt that the French and German Enlightenment had produced a scientific renaissance of the mind at the expense of human values, culture and morality and that this emphasis on intellectual progress leaves behind our emotions, leaves behind the true value of being human.

The modern world, the western world, European civilization is corrupt, it's bankrupt and going nowhere because it has no moral foundation for its existence. This is precisely Qutb's critique. The beginning of this problem is not within Christian theology itself, or Judaism. This problem has arrived because of the emergence of modern political society, of liberalism. Anybody who has read the ABCs of political theory is familiar with Thomas Hobbes and his book Leviathan, which introduces the idea of a social contract. The basic idea is that we are the ones who forge the political state through conscious, rational choice. We create the values upon which the state stands. Government, politics, and culture, the entirety of society itself, is the result of a social contract which is totally factitious, it is not the result of God's will. This leads Hobbes to the separation between the public and the private. I can do whatever I want at home but in public, I am accountable to the laws set out in the social contract.

For Qutb and for most fundamentalists, this is the central problem: you cannot have a public morality and a private morality. This is seen as a fundamental contradiction. The western world, western liberalism itself, is seeping into Islam and into the Arab world, the home of Islam. In the 1950s, many Arab countries were very open to western notions of political organization and its associated institutions. And Qutb ran into trouble with the Nasser regime over this precise issue. Nasser saw the flowering of the Muslim Brotherhood under Qutb's increasing philosophical influence and jailed him for ten years. In detention, in a concentration camp for religious fanatics, Qutb wrote a thirty volume commentary on the Quran. Through this period of detention, his whole critique of western society ceases to become just an analysis of what's wrong. He now begins to turn to the question of how we can actually rejuvenate an alternative through a return to Islam.

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Go To Part Two

This article, Part 2 of a two-part series, is adapted from a talk sponsored by The New York Open Center and City University of New York Graduate Center that was given at CUNY.

Michael J. Thompson is the editor of Islam and the West: Critical Perspectives on Modernity, and founder and editor of Logos: A Journal of Modern Society and Culture (www.logosjournal.com). He teaches political theory at Hunter College.

If we look at the sources and foundations of modern ways of living, it becomes clear that the whole world is steeped in Jahiliyya, and all the marvelous material comforts and high level inventions do not diminish Jahiliyya. This Jahiliyya is based on rebellion against God's sovereignty on earth. It transfers to man one of the greatest attributes of God, namely sovereignty and makes some men lords over others. It is now not in that simple and primitive form of the ancient Jahiliyya, but takes the form of claiming that the right to create values, to legislate rules of collective behavior, i.e. politics and to choose any way of life, rests with men without regard to what God has prescribed. The result of this rebellion against the authority of God is oppression of his creatures. When God's wisdom is taken out, the only result is human oppression of men by men.

The source for this kind of thinking can be seen as rooted, Qutb argues, in the way that western science and philosophy have developed. For Qutb, there are two forms of science. First there are the physical sciences; next are the philosophical sciences. The physical sciences are medicine, chemistry, biology, and engineering and they should be cherished and embraced because they can help with in the alleviation of physical ills and aid in human happiness. He has no problem with technology and the sciences, it is philosophy that is the problem because it forces us to reconsider our value system, and that leads to moral corrosion and inevitably the elimination of God from the world. It leads to questioning the existence of God and his divinity and it leads to a hubristic assumption that we, human beings, are the ones in control of our own destiny. It leads to the death of God and to the shattering of all kinds of foundation for a true human morality and for human happiness.

In his period of detention, in the midst of writing his thirty volume magnum opus on the Quran (probably the least read of his writings), Qutb begins to articulate new themes. Traditionally, the general notion of Islamic scholars, the ulama, or wise men, has always been that the modern world is too corrupt to realize the ideal Islamic society, the umma. During Qutb's time, it was a common view of Islamic theologians and scholars that the modern world is far too barren of values, too corrupt. There are occupations, there are wars, etc. and we should simply forget about trying to establish any form of Islamic law.

Now historically, the ulama was the social organization that existed immediately after Mohammed gave Islamic law to the Arab people. And one of the core principles of Islam is to reinvent or reestablish this umma, or ideal Islamic society, where there will be peace, equality, and justice: in short, utopia. Qutb, however, says that this general position is wrong. The fact that the world is too corrupt to recognize the umma means you have to fight against that corruption. You don't sit there and wait for the world to get better and then establish your ideal Islamic society. You have to fight against Jahiliyya here and now. You have to eradicate it from the earth. You have to eradicate it first from within Islamic society and culture, and then you have to eradicate it wherever else it may exist on earth.

It is not because, (and this may be the argument of someone like bin Laden), those caught in jahiliyya are the enemy. For Qutb, this eradication of jahiliyya will be for everyone's good. This is always the argument of people who proselytize: you don't know it yet, but if you submit to our faith, you will be better off. This connects with the notion of jihad; another classical Islamic term of Islamic theology, which simply means "struggle." But Qutb takes this theological concept and twists it again. Struggle against what, he asks? You struggle against two things. You struggle within yourself to realize that Islam is the truth. Once you know that, you struggle against all of jahiliyya. That is your one purpose: the elimination of pagan ignorance from the earth and the true liberation of humanity.

Qutb was released from prison and two years later began to publish his writings and essentially began to advocate the overthrow, in very implicit terms, of the Nasser regime. He felt that it was a corrupt, pseudo-western regime that was simply going to reproduce all of the corruption that the West had brought to Egypt and the Islamic world more broadly. Inevitably, Nasser had had enough. He arrested Qutb again and in 1966, he was hanged with a smile on his face as he dropped from the scaffold.

We have a problematic image of Islamic fundamentalists in our minds. Someone like bin Laden-along with many other Islamic fundamentalists-dresses in what we would call traditional clothing. Qutb, through the day he was hanged, wore a three-piece suit with short hair and a trimmed mustache. Qutb's brand of fundamentalism is too sophisticated to simply be branded as nativistic or regressive or anti-modern. It is in fact not anti-modern. What he does is turn around the notion of jihad, and the notion of how the umma can be realized on earth. Traditional Islamic scholars held that the umma existed during the time of Mohammed; it may exist again, but we cannot reproduce it. All Qutb does is detach these terms from their traditional historical context and argue that they are actually forms of thought that can be realized at any time.

Anybody who knows anything about Marxism and its theory of history knows that you have to go through the development of capitalism before you can have a revolution and have socialism or communism. You have to wait for the bourgeoisie to come to power to develop the means of production and technology. Only then can you overthrow the machinery of the state. It was Trotsky who said we're not going to wait for this in Russia. We've just got to keep on pushing, keep on revolting until we get to where we want to be. This is the doctrine of permanent revolution, and it was something that people like Mao Zedong also used to support ideologically the Cultural Revolution in China. This was an idea that was very influential for Qutb in the sense that he wanted to keep jihad going until the umma is realized. You keep on stamping out jahiliyya wherever it is realized: inside of you, in a suburb of Cairo, or in Manhattan. It doesn't matter where, as long as you eradicate it like a plague on humanity itself.

Now, sharia is a system of law that doesn't talk about justice or equality, but how you regulate your domestic life: how you wash, how you procreate, etc. Sharia offers a complete way of running your life according to Allah's will. And it's only by going back to classical Islamic texts that you can truly understand what Sharia has to communicate to you. The core idea is to imbibe sharia through true engagement with the religious texts. Then you go through your own jihad and realize that this is the truth and that this is the way you should live your life.

Augustine says that governments are like hospitals for the morally diseased. If we were all true Christians, he argued, we wouldn't have much need of the state because we would all have ethical consciousness. We would be regulated from within through religious law. This was similar to Qutb's idea. Once sharia has completely penetrated both you and everyone else, the state will be basically useless. Another Marxian idea, the idea that the state will wither away once you have communism because you don't need it anymore. You only need the state because you have class antagonism, but once that is gone, everyone will get along fine.

This is similar to Qutbs's idea that the state and its laws coerce. Only conscience allows you to submit to God freely once you have understood what sharia has to offer you: the enlightened path. There is no need for the state, there is no need for laws. The only thing that will regulate your activity is God's promise of either paradise or wrath. A completely unmediated relationship will exist between the individual and God.

But the Quran says that there is no compulsion in religion, that no one should be compelled to follow a faith. Qutb says there is one thing worse than compelling someone to follow Islam and that is subjecting them to slavery and oppression. He writes that oppression is worse than killing. It is better to kill than have people live under a state of jahiliyya where the oppression of men by other men is the norm. So the moral set of priorities is completely shifted. In many ways, killing is generally seen in liberal democracies as one of the worst things you can do. Of course, if you recall Dante's L'Inferno, the first circle of hell if reserved for those who commit treason, not murder. It hasn't been the case historically that murder has been seen as the most repugnant of human acts. Qutb says the same thing. It is worse to allow people to live under a state of oppression than it is to actually kill them. All of this filters into the political brand of contemporary Islamic fundamentalism.

Qutb believed that only Islam preaches a fundamental equality and universalism. Liberalism doesn't do it, socialism doesn't do it. Nor did the alternatives that existed in the 1950s and 1960s across the political spectrum. He believed that none of these things offer true universalism, or true equality or true freedom. The only way to achieve this is through this internalization of sharia and the overcoming of any kind of distinction of tribe or class or clan or race. It is overcome when you embrace true Islam, because Islam is the universal will of God, the entirety of the cosmos.

In many ways, Qutb is not very original. A lot of his ideas came from a Pakistani jurist Sayyid Mawdudi, who died in 1979. There is a passage from Mawdudi in which he expresses this idea that the only way you can have true freedom and justice in the world is when the entire world is united under one system of morals and politics. Aquinas calls it the cosmopolis. Dante calls it a world monarchy. Islam has its own version as well.

Mawdudi says Islam wants the whole earth and does not content itself to simply be a part thereof. It wants and requires the entire inhabited world. It does not want this so that one nation dominates the earth and monopolizes its sources of wealth after having taken them away from one or more other nations. Islam wants and requires the earth in order that the human race all together can enjoy the concept and practical program of human happiness by means of which God has honored Islam and put it above the other religions and laws. As Mawdudi says:

In order to realize this lofty desire, Islam wants to employ all forces and means that can be employed for bringing about a universal, all embracing revolution. It will spare no efforts for the achievement of this supreme objective, this far-reaching struggle that continuously exhausts all forces and this employment of all possible means are called jihad. It is the absolute, universal revolution and the overturning of all barbarism and non Islamic, or pre-Islamic, all jahiliyya, all barbaric ignorance and reinventing all humanity under one sphere of justice, peace, and freedom.

My own personal view differs from what a lot of people are saying now about Qutb. He is not simply engaging in a critique of political institutions. He is going after what in philosophy is called epistemology, or how we know about the world, how we think. The western way of thinking is based on a post-Enlightenment notion that there are no absolute moral values that undergird all human society. There is no such thing as the absolute good, there is no such thing as only one form of good life. Only through toleration and pluralism and the acceptance of pluralism can we survive without social strife and turmoil. This is precisely the problem that Qutb sees: there are, in fact, universal values that undergird human existence, and any rejection of them leads to the corrosion of morality and to human corruption.

I don't know if anyone has ever read Immanuel Kant's essay, "What is Enlightenment?" He goes through a whole diatribe in which he says that enlightenment is me thinking for myself without any needs. I don't need a doctor to tell me my diet, I don't need a priest to tell me how to be moral. I always make my own autonomous choices using reason as my guide. This whole philosophical movement in German thought radiated out to western civilization with its emphasis on the individual. Moral values, science, judgment, come from me. There is no external authority that rules over my choices, to believe otherwise is generally seen to be superstitious. This is an idea that is morally repugnant to Islamic fundamentalists like Qutb because they are convinced that there is a transcendental universalism. In fact, it is this that defines our moral values and our moral life. Fundamentalists like Qutb see the whole idea that we ourselves can create the values and the laws by which we live as an expression of hubris and the price that is being paid is a falling into corruption, ignorance and barbarism.

These ideas are encapsulated nicely in this passage from Qutb:

The Islamic civilization can take various forms in its material and organizational structure. But the principles and values on which it is based are eternal and unchangeable. These are the worship of God alone. The foundation of human relationships and belief of the unity of God. The supremacy of the humanity of man over material things, the development of human values, and the control of animalistic desires, respect for the family, the assumption of the vice-regency of God on earth according to his guidance and instruction and in all affairs of this vice-regency, the rule of sharia and the way of life prescribed by him. In the scale of God, the true weight is the weight of faith. In God's market, the only commodity in demand is the commodity of faith. The highest triumph is the victory of soul over matter. The victory of belief over pain and the victory of faith over persecution.

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Go To Part One

Robert Thurman is professor of Indo-Tibetan Studies at Columbia University and president of Tibet House. He is the translator of numerous works including The Tibetan Book of the Dead, and author of Inner Revolution, Circling the Sacred Mountain, Essential Tibetan Buddhism, and Worlds of Transformation.

Excerpted from Robert Thurman’s new book, Infinite Life: Seven Virtues For Living Well, published by Riverhead Books, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. (c) 2004 by Robert Thurman with permission from the Penguin Group.

Problem: Injustice
Part One

As we decide to change our lives and move in the direction of real happiness, we must begin by recognizing that to a large extent, how we feel is determined by how we relate to the larger nexus of beings around us. We must look around us, especially in America today. We immediately become mindful of the great fortune we have in being here at all, especially in the middle and upper classes. Our national military and economic power, our relative comfort, our unusual physical resources and spiritual ideals, all combine to enable us to accomplish unprecedented good things in this world. At the same time, we must also recognize that in actual day-to-day fact, we are drowning ourselves and others in a toxic flood of injustice.

Take killing, the taking of life, which causes us to lose our lives over and over again in a difficult future. We are consuming too many animals, breaking the evolutionary code and preparing our own future downfall, killing far too many beings, destroying the environment of those we don’t kill directly. Of course, it’s hard to avoid killing beings in daily life—indeed, beings are killed by our ordinary metabolism, in the sense that a single human being is a colony of countless micro-beings, and our personal digestive and respiratory processes involve the living and dying of numerous beings. Our food comes from the death of many beings, even producing vegetables involves killing masses of insects. All the products we use involve killing creatures, polluting the environment. We drive huge cars over roads paved on the bodies of small creatures, the survivors often piling up on our windshields. The Buddha was moderate even about this, acknowledging that some killing is unavoidable until we become buddhas, and that our human lives are still specially precious because we are near to becoming buddhas. In contrast, some other Indian teachers of the time despaired of purifying the sins of any aggregated life-form.

On the collective level, we have unwittingly shifted from being a nation of liberators, defenders of freedom, into becoming a nation of arms dealers and mercenaries, fabricating our own weapons of mass destruction and arming tyrants with the tools to oppress their own people. Within our own society, we jail more prisoners than any other country in the world, 85 percent of them people of the nonwhite races—red, black, brown, and yellow. We are one of the few nations that still indulge in the death penalty for increasing numbers of these prisoners. We must become mindful of these negative things, since we need not support these actions of our nation to be affected negatively by their evolutionary impact, unless we mentally, verbally, and ultimately physically, disassociate ourselves from them.

Consider stealing, defined as “the taking of what is not given,” the negative evolutionary action of depriving others of their property. As scrupulously honest as we may be personally, we are still individually entwined in our collective taking of others’ property. Our nation was founded upon imperialism. Our ancestors took this land of the Turtle Island continent away from the native peoples without giving anything in fair exchange. They killed most of the original inhabitants and enslaved the rest, and then brought more slaves from other colonies. On the good side, some of our founding fathers then identified with the imperialized, made an earth-shaking revolution, and created a theory and system of equality, freedom, and justice. We then sided against imperialism for some time, rid ourselves of slavery, and got involved in the great wars among the imperialists themselves, still fighting for freedom and democracy. The creativity and energy released even by our imperfect practice of freedom made us ultimately invincible in these struggles.

But now we have unleashed our multinational corporations to enfold all world cultures into our commercial culture of consumption, even though most other peoples will never have the means to consume the majority of goods we parade before their spellbound eyes. We are letting these corporations alter the genes of every plant on Earth, patent them, and thus try to sell everyone their own water, food, fuel, and even air. We are standing by while they destroy the environments of weaker nations in extracting resources, making their people sick in the process, then selling a few of them the technological medicines they desire to replace the healthy diet, lifestyle, and natural medicines their civilizations have long enjoyed. Within our own society, we have a huge disparity between rich and poor, even though all are supposed to be equal. In the area of sexual harming, the rich citizens of all the industrial nations support a booming slave trade that exploits tens of millions of young girls and boys in brothels. We promote a culture of sexual promiscuity that exploits young women and men in many ways, while our ever more powerful religious fundamentalists block their access to sex education, contraception, and other basic health measures.

So much for the tip of the iceberg of the physical level of injustice. On the verbal level, as for lying, we lie to our children in the educational arena, giving them a sanitized, whitewashed version of American history, suppressing the true horrors of conquest, native genocide, agricultural slavery, industrial exploitation of immigrants, and the continuing horrors of racism, sexism, religious bigotry, and classism. We lie about our role in the world, pretending to defend freedom everywhere, when we in fact support the tyrants, export violence and sell weapons, and subvert freedom whenever it rears its supposedly unprofitable head. Our leaders lie all the time, promising one thing and doing the opposite, and then denying it. Our media distorts its coverage of the facts, since it has become monopolized by corporations that manipulate us all to extract more profits.

As for speaking divisively, we pretend to be peacemakers, but in fact we don’t subscribe to international law or justice, we deny power to the U.N. community when it goes against our commercial interests, and, though we send out diplomats to defuse dangerous situations, our military-industrial merchants vie with each other to sell weapons to both sides of every conflict. In order to disunite the popular will and vote, our politicians lie to poor whites that poor blacks on welfare are making their lives miserable, when in fact our corporations are exporting the jobs of both to even poorer people under dictatorships we support abroad.

Speaking harshly is endemic in the media, which keeps up a drumbeat of focus on violence and oppression and danger and terror, subliminally frightening people into submission to the dictates of our self-serving leaders.

Speaking meaninglessly is often thought of as entertainment, used to distract people from what is really happening, reinforcing the epidemic depression of “the mass of men today” who “lead lives of quiet desperation,” as Thoreau once said so eloquently.

Coming to the negative evolutionary paths of thought, nurturing greed is widespread, since hours of TV commercials, billboards, and print advertisements feed us daily a concentrated diet of discontent, making us feel we have to buy numerous unnecessary things.

Harboring malice is also hard to avoid, since others are portrayed in our mythology and media culture as harsh, violent, dangerous, hateful, and inhuman. We could never accept such a poor quality of politician if we were not indoctrinated to feel divided against one another so that each thinks the leadership will protect them against the other they so fear and hate.

Finally, the unrealistic worldviews we are taught to hold by our confused philosophers and scientists have reached a new height of senselessness. Either we are material quanta with brains but no minds, emerging randomly and purposelessly from a cosmic chemical soup only to disappear meaninglessly back into the physical elements, worth less than a penny on the commodities market; or we are immortal souls temporarily confined in filthy bodies on a filthy planet, all of which is also worthless, but our souls will be yanked back into peaceful oblivion or antiseptic angelic boring existence in heaven as long as we maintain blind faith in the right prophet and God. These unrealistic worldviews or ideologies come from gross misinterpretations of religious and scientific teachings. They reinforce our sense of disconnection from everyone and everything around us. They encourage us to be irresponsible to other beings and confuse us about the great purpose of our human embodiment. They line us up to be the mindless minions of the industrial-corporate machinery that is beyond control, even by its owners.

When we face it squarely and stereoscopically in this way, we can see that there is a great problem of injustice permeating our lives. Its toxic effects seep into our unconsciousness and enter our consciousness in the form of a nagging conscience that leads us to despair, depression, numbness, and cynicism.

Some writers in the spiritual development movements tend to lump all this injustice under the rug of, “It’s just the hopelessness of the material world—the unenlightened life! Better withdraw from it all and get enlightened!” or “…holy!” or “…spiritual!” Some psychologists react to the plague of depression that afflicts our citizens—there are staggering statistics of the near-clinically depressed—by conceding to the drug companies’ marketing efforts and prescribing tranquilizers, mood-lifters, and antidepressants.

Both these efforts have good points, appropriate in some ways. But all time-tested spiritual traditions of conscious evolving prescribe, first, developing recognition of the full weight of the negative conditions around us; then cultivating insight into how they cause our depression; then making serious lifestyle changes, practicing mind-transformation, and, finally, attaining realization. Real cure is the total understanding by wisdom of the reality of things, which again reinforces the lifestyle changes and the mind-transformations. So we should turn to the proven methods. Now, how can we address effectively the problem of massive injustice binding us into sadness and negative evolution? How can we lift our moods of depression by ameliorating the injustice swirling within and around our lives?

Robert Thurman is professor of Indo-Tibetan Studies at Columbia University and president of Tibet House. He is the translator of numerous works including The Tibetan Book of the Dead, and author of Inner Revolution, Circling the Sacred Mountain, Essential Tibetan Buddhism, and Worlds of Transformation.

Excerpted from Robert Thurman's new book, Infinite Life: Seven Virtues For Living Well, published by Riverhead Books, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. (c) 2004 by Robert Thurman with permission from the Penguin Group.

Practice: Meditation as Mental Evolutionary Action
Part Two
 
Even if you’re not usually depressed, if you tend to be a cheery and upbeat person, when you look around you at your world, your life, your interconnection with others globally today, you tend to feel quite down. You are clearly blessed in your personal situation, or you wouldn’t be free to read these words and to meditate in this way. But look at most of the people in our world, not to mention all the animals. Register the killing, deprivation, violation, deception, betrayal, distraction, abuse, envy, hatred, and confusion that swirl around every being on this planet. Now begin to meditate upon all this.

As usual, first visualize yourself in your seat of good fortune on the top of the world, calm, comfortable, with your mentor heroes above and all around you in the sky, blessing you from on high. Sit yourself down on your meditation seat, your lion throne, if you wish, with its lotus, sun, and moon cushions, and then become aware of all beings in a vast field around you. In this meditative shrine-space, perform all the preliminary visualizations. Absorb blessings in the form of light, radiate light rays out to all the sensitive beings in the host around you, and equalize your attitude to all of them. Salute and praise the luminous mentor beings, and take refuge with them. Make offerings, confess your sins, rejoice in your virtues and those of others, request liberating teachings and the ongoing presence of the enlightened mentors, and dedicate all your merit to your own full enlightenment for the sake of all.

Now, transform your meditation room into the cosmic newsroom, or a situation room, like the ones in the Pentagon or at the NORAD base in Colorado—you’ve seen enough of them in War Games or other military action movies. Imagine the dozens of TV monitors surrounding you in diaphanous walls, with a huge map of the Earth superimposed and traced in light on the ceiling. Keep the sense of the mentor heroes and heroines in the luminous space above this, but focus on the Earth and the beings on the Earth. Imagine that the monitors are bringing you graphic, in-depth news reports of what is going on with every being imaginable on the planet at that very moment. Not only people being blown up by suicide bombers, as in Israel; civilians caught in cross fire by revolutionary soldiers, as in strife-torn Liberia; search and destroy governmental actions, drug wars, police suppressions, border conflicts, criminal activities, as in Colombia or Sudan; but also children starving in situations of famine and drought, in the Sahel, Bangladesh, India, China, among tribal people everywhere.

See animals dying due to deprivation of habitat, as rainforests are clear-cut; fish and coral reefs dying from pollution, global warming. Scan the people right in your home cities who are homeless, in prison for petty crimes, starving, elders eating cat food, children malnourished in urban ghettoes and rural backwaters. Even well-fed people, note how they are eating unhealthy diets, vegetables grown with chemicals or genetic manipulation, animals fed with steroids and antibiotics and female hormones, living in misery, filled with endocrine substances generated by fear, frustration, pain, and despair. Animals have emotions and therefore negative neurotransmitters permeate their flesh.

Note how prosperous people overeat, overindulge in drink and drugs, live under self-imposed high stress, get into conflicts with their loved ones by having affairs, desiring more and more pleasure and excitement, get into car wrecks, get mugged and killed by desperate criminals, attract assassination by mental cases. Look at all those with birth defects, insane, retarded, deficient in sense organs or limbs. Look at the people in the countries under various forms of overt tyranny—such as the 1.3 billion Chinese people ground under the heel of the Communist Party bureaucrats, living very sparsely while the party members and their families whiz by in sleek Mercedes limos; sent to labor camps for protesting, beaten, arrested, and tortured for seeking to practice spiritual disciplines such as qigong, trying to be a Buddhist or a Christian without following the state institutions; seeing their sons and daughters killed in infancy or forcibly aborted due to population control policies. See the members of the 55 million non-Chinese “minorities” who are basically colonialized, enslaved people who have lost their lands, their relatives, their culture and way of life and belief. Think of those many people who belong to a minority race or religion in whatever country and how they are persecuted. Visualize sniper alley in Sarajevo, Beirut, Jerusalem, and so forth. Go back in history if you want, to the Hitler Holocaust, the world wars—the many wars of the twentieth century—Stalin’s gulag archipelago, Mao’s prison provinces filled with dying people trapped in famines, slavery in Africa and America, and serfdom in Russia, the innumerable conquests and wars, the genocide of the native Americans and Africans, and Australian aborigines, the genocide of Asians under imperialism. Let what you can visualize of these horrors flood over your imagination as they pour forth from the monitors.

Look unflinchingly at all the dreadful things that are happening to all these people, and note carefully how these things connect back to you in your situation. Don’t think right away about what to do—just observe everything carefully, excruciatingly if necessary. Don’t recoil, don’t let your mind veer away in any partial explanations, whether confused or insightful. Just take it in. If you were feeling a little down when you started, you will go through a phase of feeling really down, perhaps angry, then maybe despairing. Try not to shut it off or go into denial. “Why should I pay attention to this? What can I do about it? I am just getting myself dragged into it and adding to the chaos!” Realize that just by attending to it, just by overcoming areas of denial and neglect in your mind, you are taking powerful action. You are remembering the horrors of the past. You are attending to the horrors of the present. You are anticipating the horrors of the future. Just by doing that, you are honoring those who suffer. You are laying the foundation of things that could help them. You are sending out a resonance that will subliminally nudge others to remember, attend, anticipate. You are making mental baby steps that are part of true caring.

People trying to be spiritual sometimes don’t like cultivating this kind of awareness. They think it’s useless, can’t help, just depresses people. Such an attitude is not only part of the problem, it leads to methods of spiritual development that don’t really work, just cover things up temporarily. They may palliate your symptoms for a while, but won’t heal your spiritual malaise. We humans are totally interconnected, intersensitive, naturally empathetic beings. The condition of those around you totally affects your state of experience. If all around are in agony, you will suffer. If you wall yourself off, live in denial, you will be depressed with a nagging, sinking mood. You won’t know why and will seek distractions. But the dominant mood will keep rolling over you. So the first step to overcoming your own depression is to turn away from your self-preoccupation, open the doors and windows of your life, and take a wide look around at the reality of others all around you. This is the first step in truly satisfying spiritual growth.

After an intense period of exposure to these realities, we can start to cultivate good reactions. Analyze the situation and take actions in your mind. The first good reaction is to count your blessings. This is like the classic meditation of developing awareness of the “preciousness of the human life privileged with liberty and opportunity.” You, after all, are not immediately caught in the horrors you are witnessing on your cosmic monitor array. Those so caught are there because of their evolutionary momentum; you don’t have to feel existentially guilty about it, though you should also not make this an excuse to forget about them.

I remember once a dying horse we found collapsed in the road in Almora, an Indian Himalayan town in the Uttar Pradesh state. It was a little packhorse, employed in those hills to carry heavy slate panels used for roofing houses. It had been worked to death, was lying on its side breathing heavily, oozing pus from eyes, nostrils, and mouth, with bad sores on its back and sides. A few crows were hanging around, but no vultures yet. It was in a rocky dirt path right in front of a farmhouse rented by a group of spiritual seekers, what tourists in 1971 would call a “hippy house.” We were driving on a barely better dirt road, nearby across a field, and for some reason we got out and discovered this soon-to-be horse carcass. My wife and I and our two children thought this was a cruel way to die, so we decided to take the horse in our VW bus to the garage of our rented home and call a vet. We got some villagers to help carry it across the field and load it in exchange for piling in and getting a ride up the mountain. They were laughing and making jokes about us, but willingly helped. Once we had lifted it, the horse took steps, and, propped up, staggered across the field. Once we started in, throughout the whole process, a couple of the “seekers” in the house came out and were very upset with our humanitarian efforts. “It’s just the karma of the horse, man! What are you doing! You can’t do anything about it! It’s just the custom around here! Shouldn’t interfere with karma!” And so on. They were a bit irate. I just said, “Well, it’s our karma to try to help in some way, and so it’s its karma to get helped!”

We got the horse home, put an old blanket over it, our three year old brought it water, and we went to get the vet. He came, had already heard about the situation, and after looking over the horse, told me it was too far gone. He then, to avoid problems for us, took me down to a tea shop where he found the horse’s owner. After glasses of tea all around, he scolded him, in a firm but friendly way, about how he had warned him some time back to let the horse rest and get a foreleg problem worked on before it was too late. Then he explained how I had been unhappy to find the horse in the road waiting for the leopards and vultures, and had taken it to shelter and offered to pay for a humane death injection, provided the owner would give permission, and come and get the carcass. The villagers were bemused by my involvement, but not angry. They agreed to the doctor’s conditions, we paid fifteen rupees for the shot, and they came and took the carcass away.

This all happened during the summer when the atrocities committed by the Pakistani army against Bengali civilians were at their worst; the Nixon–Kissinger–controlled U.S. was supporting Pakistan against India; China and Russia were in conflict on the Manchurian border; Kissinger was preparing to join up with China against Russia. The Indian press was full of horrendous news. I remember having a dream around that time, in which I saw my original teacher, a wise old lama from Mongolia, who sat silently looking at me while I protested strongly—“Look at these babies being impaled on bayonets! Look at these suffering beings! Where are the buddhas and bodhisattvas and fierce protectors? How can we talk of the all-pervasive Truth Body of the buddhas, their Emanation Body manifestations, as many as beings need to help them?” He said nothing, but then his body began to grow and grow, and soon it was much larger than the high Himalayan peaks that ringed our horizon at five miles’ height, reducing my sputtering self to less than flea size, impressed with an immeasurable magnitude, my railing away trailing off into inaudibility.

Years later, I remembered this dream when I heard Ram Das tell how, that very same summer, at an ashram near the Himalayan town Nainital not very far away, he asked his guru, “What about the horrors in Bengal?” The guru smiled and said to him, “Don’t you see it’s all perfect!” Ram Das then said, “Yeah! It’s perfect—but it stinks!” I was so delighted at that, as I thought, “There he touches nonduality!” This seeming paradox preserves how it can be seen as perfect from an enlightenment evolutionary wisdom point of view, while simultaneously being unbearable from the sufferer’s point of view, which that same wisdom never allows compassion to ignore.

We might think, “What’s the point of insisting ‘But it stinks!’ when there’s nothing we can do about it?” The point is that by not letting go of our empathy for the victims, by our refusal to accept that such things should happen to any being, we are doing something of critical importance! Our mind is performing an evolutionary deed, it is acting powerfully, sending out tendrils of connectedness, setting up a morphic resonance with other minds and hearts that this must not stand. This must not be. We must intervene. We must help. This morphic resonance reinforces compassion and mercy in other hearts, and a wave goes round the world. Eventually, people with power do change their policies. Perpetrators feel tired, feel disheartened about their horrific acts, begin to pull back, try to restrain the truly insensate ones, ultimately rebel against them, and these things end. It is the callousness itself, the ideologically forced, behaviorally conditioned hardening, the ignoring of the pain, the shutting off of our natural, innate human fellow-feeling, that sets up its own vicious morphic resonance and unleashes waves of violence and causes these horrors. So our not surrendering to the slightest temptation to shut off in our depths of heart, far away and seemingly totally unconnected, except by the wrenching and numbing news, is a powerful act. It is resistance. It is mental evolutionary action. It stirs other minds invisibly, and it will spur our own and others’ speech, and our own and others’ physical acts, inevitably.

After counting your blessings, your second positive reaction is to recognize the impermanence of all these conditions, remind yourself of your special new—perhaps still experimental—infinite life context and vow to stay with anyone who suffers, whether they die or not. If they do die, then stay with them in the between and in all their future lives. If they survive, then wish them well and help them in whatever way possible later in this present life.

In your daily meditations, you should always take a moment to reflect on the beings who have died that day, who are dying that minute, of natural causes or caught in wars, street conflicts, starvation, disasters. You should reach out to their souls that have just broken free from embodiment, wandering in confusion in a dreamlike state while thinking they should be normal, present in their bodies, perceiving their bodies as alien things, or familiar but wondering what happened. Think of them and use the Tibetan Book of the Dead type of address to them. Send them calming lights, sweet soothing sounds, beautiful sights, encouraging words. Urge them to recognize where they are, what a fantastic opportunity to drop the hankering, fearing, worrying, and wondering, realize they’re evolutionary beings, think of the ultimate nature of the light, its wisdom, lovingness, their unity with it; merge with it, seek its advice on how to proceed evolutionarily, how to serve self and others according to its all-permeating loving wisdom. Visualize and project for them portraits of desirable life-forms in useful life circumstances, and impel them to seek such rebirth, in attunement with the great wisdom of the light. In meditating like this, you become liberated from just focusing on the tragedy of the departed one losing her body, you accept the inevitable about it and turn to the positive opportunity of better rebirth. This resonates helpfully to the departed in fact, and she is encouraged to make the best of their dreamlike between-state situation, instead of being caught in the poisonous disappointment and anger and frustration about not being able to cling to her discarded form—emotions that can lead to a painful ghost existence, causing much harm to self and others.

Your third meditation is to investigate the causality of it all, resolve to avoid the causes of such suffering, and not try to solve the situations by adding more to negative karmic patterns. Try to see how the ten paths of evolution operate in specific ways, how someone suffers like this because of having thought or spoken or acted like that. Think of the positive turns people can and do take, how they restrain this or that reactive behavior, how they succeed in acting transcendently here and there.

Fourth, realize that there are no egocentric states you can move these people into that won’t get messed up and that there is no alternative to helping each individual wake up totally. It is very important not just to get caught in utilitarian calculation and lost in schemes about improving the world as if it were merely a linear project. Such thinking will ultimately prove exhausting and unworkable.

Fifth, analyze your personal involvement in changing anything from negative to positive. Are you invested in any companies that cause any of this? Do you buy products from any of them? Does your government, whether North American, South American, African, Australian, Asian, or European, have anything to do with these activities? If not, have you tried to get that government involved in a positive way? If so, have you tried to influence that government’s activities, changing them from negative to positive? Do you find in yourself any attitudes about how, “it’s not my business, it’s all too much, it’s just dragging myself into misery I have the good karma not to have this happening to me right now.” It is not necessary that you run out in the street to protest, though that is not at all out of the question to an aware person. It is necessary that you meditate clearly on how you should protest, become clear how what is being done by the powerful is mostly destructive, and become clear about the alternatives.

Clarity and confidence about the heart of justice is what is necessary here. This is action of the heart. Public actions of body and speech will come later. They will be effective when they come from this wise and compassionate heart of clarity. Here, the practice of confession and repentance is extremely important. Once you face your involvements, personal and collective, you must decide forcefully that you don’t want any longer to do such things or be collectively involved in them. You feel great regret that you have thought, spoken, or done such things on the individual level, or overtly or secretly agreed in your heart when others did them. Thus, repent when you did something violent to another, slammed the door on them, shouted at them, cursed them or made an ugly gesture, hated them for something, coveted their things. When the U.S. president bombed some country or did something aggressive or threatened someone, did you approve it and enjoy it? You must confess and repent and resolve no more to do such things in your mind. When someone is executed, confess and repent if you thought, “Good riddance!” as if that solved any of your problems.

Performance: Living Justly

To live justly is to begin our quest for enlightenment by coming into our true humanity. The human animal is the most other-regarding, empathetic, and imaginatively sensitive in interaction with others. Of course, humans can be just as egocentric as any other animal, and their selfish actions can be far more destructive, precisely because they have greater knowledge of and power over relationality. Living justly requires the three kinds of just activities. First, you restrain the negative actions—of your own body and speech primarily, and ultimately of your mind—focusing on not doing anything harmful or evil. Then you perform positive actions, focusing on doing good for self and others. Finally, you perform liberating actions, those that ultimately fulfill the aims of other beings by leading them toward their own freedom and enlightenment.

David J. Passiak is the Associate Editor at Lapis magazine. He holds an MA in Religious Studies from Arizona State University and has recently finished his third year of a PhD program in Religions of the Americas at Princeton University, from which he is currently on leave. David is now a Program Associate in the Religion and Conflict Resolution Program at the Tanenbaum Center for Interreligious Understanding.

A pacifist and a Quaker who eventually served as Defense Minister of South Africa; an activist for gender and racial equality unjustly imprisoned three times, the most recent of which was for an entire year in solitary confinement; a member of the African National Congress who refused to pick up a gun in her struggle to end Apartheid; a loving wife and mother of two sons — Nozizwe Madlala-Routledge is a remarkable woman who truly defies categorization.

Among her many other professional affiliations, she is an activist for Women’s Rights and Peace, serves on Portfolio Committee on Land Affairs and the Parliamentary Committee on the Improvement of the Quality of Life and Status of Women, is a chairperson of the multi-party Parliamentary Women’s Group and the ANC Parliamentary Women’s Caucus, and she is involved with a number of other organizations, including WOW, a network of local women leaders.

The Tanenbaum Center for Interreligious Understanding (www.tanenbaum.org) awarded Nozizwe with their Peacemakers in Action award to acknowledge her religiously motivated efforts to peacefully resolve conflicts, efforts that at times involved risk of her own life. This past May, she and other Peacemakers in Action from around the globe, along with foreign diplomats and renowned scholars, convened in Amman, Jordan for a retreat hosted by HRH Prince El Hassan bin Talal. Participants shared their respective perspectives on the ways in which religion can help facilitate, rather than exacerbate, conflict resolution. (Interested readers should keep their eyes out for the forthcoming volume Peacemakers in Action: Profiles in Religious Conflict Resolution, which will contain a synopsis of the outcomes of the retreat and case studies of Peacemakers’ efforts around the globe. It will be published by Cambridge University Press by the end of 2004, and edited by Harvard Professor David Little.)

As someone who has an immense amount of wisdom to share on the subject, I sat down with Nozizwe during her most recent visit to the US to talk about nonviolent approaches to conflict resolution and the ways in which models developed in South Africa after the death of apartheid might be translatable to other situations in the world, such as the present conflict in Iraq. I began by asking about her experiences in South Africa.

Nozizwe Madlala-Routledge: I think that the experience that we had in South Africa gave us a very good perspective on conflict and ways to resolve conflict. The choice that we made in 1990 after the negotiations, or rather, after Mandela was released from prison, when the organizations that had been banned (the ANC, the PAC, the South African Communist Party) became unbanned, and we sat down with our former enemies and negotiated the future.

The choice was based on the desire for a different kind of South Africa, a South Africa where we can all work together, where we could all build the country together. We had been divided immensely, and religion had been used as a dividing tool. We saw a need therefore to put aside our differences.

This wasn’t easy. I always want to emphasize that it wasn’t easy, but we were guided by the love for our country, and the need for us to build the future where our children could live side by side. And I think the choice that was made was the best choice, because I think now we can start anew, having had so many years of violent conflict.

David J. Passiak: Could you reflect upon your experiences in South Africa and ways in which we could learn from them in terms of solving other conflicts, and also in relation to the development of foreign policy.

N: I think that it is important to start with some basic values that we all cherish, because I think different societies, different communities, each have a set of values that they hold dear which have been a part of their societies and their lives forever, if you can look at it that way. Then say, “What is it that is common among us with regards to this value?” and you will find there is quite a lot that is common.

If you take the example of the types of conflicts that are taking place around the world, you will find that what developed into hatred, into violent conflict, could easily have gone the other way. It then becomes possible to see a different future, a different way forward. If perhaps I can be more specific, I think a number of the conflicts around the world, even though they may be of a religious nature, tend to be conflicts that are based on the unequal distribution of resources — issues of social, issues of injustice, issues of inequality — and then different concepts become identified as the basis for the conflict.

In South Africa, race became a major dividing tool. But as I understand it, the real conflict was about power, about control of the resources. But then as I said earlier, religion also got involved as another dividing tool. So whether it’s violent conflicts that may actually lead to war or whether it is at the level of gender relations or personal conflict, if you go to the bottom of what actually may be responsible for the conflict, it is a conflict of who decides, of who makes the decisions, who controls the resources.

D: So it’s issues of power, exchange, and inequality.

N: Yes.

D: Now in South Africa, you mentioned the issue of race, and in preparation for this interview, I read that you also experienced intra-ethnic conflict. I think that a lot of the readers may have an oversimplified view of conflicts w/in South Africa and think of them solely in terms of black and white. Could you talk a little about intra-ethnic violence in South Africa?

N: The violence in South Africa got so entrenched and became so much a part of life, that it transcended to include divisions based on race, went into the arena of ethnic violence and actually characterized itself as ethnic violence. And to us, just close to the end of the period before the negotiations, where there were quite a few huge conflicts that could have been characterized as black on black violence, we had an understanding that this was an extension of the violence that had started which was based on race.

The situation was that in order for apartheid to survive, the apartheid rulers emphasized the differences between the different ethnic groups and allocated resources unequally, which then led to I would say a kind of stigmatization of some of the ethnic groups. The actual situation that I describe here where we had what was called black on black violence, it was actually the same violence, just taking a different form.

D: So you would interpret that as inevitably a byproduct of the apartheid system?

N: Yes, because the system was deeply entrenched and very brutal, and it actually bred other forms of violence. If I look at domestic violence, for example, I want to make a link with the racial violence in the sense that domestic violence happens in white families, it happens in rich families, in happens in black families, it happens in poor families. But there is an understanding that because violence was seen at the broader level being used as a way to resolve conflicts, it then became entrenched, and became used and seen as a tool to resolve other forms of conflict, whether it is in the home, or in the society, in the community.

D: So are you suggesting that people learn to resolve conflicts through violence because that’s what their experiences taught them?

N: Yes.

D. In recent years there has been a great amount of civil unrest throughout Sub Saharan Africa, in terms of civil war, and there are a number of war torn regions now. How would you characterize these conflicts, and do you think that the roots of that violence may be similar to what you describe in South Africa?

N: Well, I was very interested to study the conflicts in Sierra Leone and to compare it to the conflicts that have developed or evolved over the years in the Democratic Republic of Congo. I read various books which gave me an understanding that the violence that we see — this very brutal violence where limbs are chopped — has a very direct link to the period during colonization, when as a way of subjugating the ethnic communities, brutal force was used to force them into becoming laborers, and in turn, those who resisted were subjected to very direct and brutal violence.

When I look at the present form of violence, it is just a continuation of that where people were rendered powerless through a system that really took away from them what all of us hold so dear. Each and every person values security to feel that you can have your next meal; that your children can grow up in a safe environment; that you will not be exposed to harm; and that you’ll also be able to participate in the democratic process, in the decisions that are made about your life, and government. All of those issues — these are the basic values that all of us share.

And when this is taken away from you — just take the actual issue of human dignity and human security — when these are taken away from you, you are then left in a situation where it is quite easy for you to be mobilized into a violent force, which will then be used to overturn whatever ruling power is there. But then what then happens often is that people — as I said, in some instances — become used by people who just want to replace whatever power is there and take over that power.

The situation becomes very important. Again, I keep reflecting on my experience. In the fight or in the struggle for democracy, you create what you want to achieve, you make that a part of what you do and how you struggle. So I am saying that if what you want to achieve is peace, then that should reflect in also how you struggle for that peace, so that the end becomes the mean. That is how the desire to strive for nonviolence is so strong in me, because I’m saying if what you eventually want to achieve is peace, then as you struggle for that, it’s best to actually try to develop nonviolent means.

My understanding is that — it’s almost perhaps from the teaching of Gandhi — in order to live what you want to be, you believe it. Whatever it is that you want to achieve, it becomes a part of you as you go towards that. So, for me, it is a totally incorrect way to say that in order to achieve peace you must prepare for war. My approach, and my understanding says that in order to prepare for peace, in order to achieve peace, you must prepare for peace, which then means that in your own personal life, you must look for ways to solve conflict in a nonviolent way. You must also find ways to relate to others in a nonviolent way.

D: Within the US, during the war in Afghanistan as well as Iraq, coverage by most mainstream news media was very much in support of the war. For example, there were a number of embedded reporters and almost no criticism or questioning of US foreign policy. I know that you were in New York at one point, and were involved in some of the marches in protest of the US led invasion in Afghanistan. Could you reflect upon the contemporary situation with the US and its media coverage abroad?

N: Yes, the situation that you described is very worrying, because the media plays a role where it becomes an extension of the violence itself. I think that the different forms of media need to play a role that actually helps to give people a much broader understanding of what the issues are, instead of maybe just giving them a more limited view.

I know that with the war in Iraq there was for some time quite a good spread of different perspectives with the BBC, with a number of other news media. And that was important for us to see a number of different perspectives rather than just one perspective where one viewpoint is fed down people’s throats to say, “this is the truth and the only truth.”

I think the media can play a very clear role in educating and informing people about other realities. Embedded journalists. There’s a problem with that because, again, as I said, it’s fighting the war from a different side, only it’s not just bombs and guns, but visuals, which can be very powerful, giving a war one perspective. I remember at one stage watching or reading about the war — I can’t remember which war it was — there was so much bombardment by very destructive messages, which I think was emphasized by the media to serve a particular purpose.

D: We’re at a point where sovereignty has been transferred to the Iraqi people, there will be a trial coming of Saddam Hussein, and there are a number of things going on in that particular region. Could you talk about your own experiences and the possible ways in which models developed in South Africa, such as the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, could be translatable to other situations around the world, and to Iraq in particular?

N: Well, I’ll start off by saying that the Truth and Reconciliation Commission was a very important part of the reconstruction and development of a new culture and of a new South Africa. Although the Truth and Reconciliation Commission was able only to relate to violations of human rights, we were also aware that what it touched was just the tip of the iceberg.

But the Truth and Reconciliation Commission had a very important role for us. What was key was that there was a strong desire for reconciliation, which, in terms of our understanding, would help ensure that the experiences that people had gone through would not be repeated. There was a very strong message of saying, “never again would South Africa ever see that type of violence play itself out.” It was important for the whole nation to participate in that process. So, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission was a very public process.

You cannot just assume that by taking the view that the people must be punished, they must therefore go through a process of being tried, that the desire for justice would then bring about a fuller reconciliation. What we chose was to go through a process where there was a broad participation.

We invited people to come forward who had been responsible for violations of human rights and invited those who had been victims, bringing the victims and the perpetrators face to face. This gave the opportunity for the victim to know who their perpetrator was, and to find a way to heal, because we actually realized that the wounds were very deep. We needed to find a process of healing, and for the perpetrator to also face the person who had been the victim of their actions. It’s really a situation where you make it possible for people to confront their actions.

What was critical was getting to know the truth, which in itself is a very important part of the process, but the end product being to reconcile and move forward. The concern we had was that if we had gone through the process of the Nuremberg trials, our desire for justice and for people to pay for their crimes would not have satisfied the long-term desire for peace and for this terrible cycle of violence to never be repeated.

I think what’s seen in other situations around the world, where it has been hoped that through those trials it would bring about the end of violence and conflict, in fact there had in many instances been a repetition of the same violence many years down the line. So — and we did actually study a whole lot of experiences around the world — we chose the truth and reconciliation way. It actually is a process. We can’t say, for example, that overnight we’ve solved all those problems. And as I said earlier, we also broadened our understanding and our thinking by looking at what other ways people were subjected to brutal systems of deprivation, of violence.

We then said the whole process of reconstruction and transformation in South Africa must actually involve the redistribution of resources, which should involve affirmative action; it should involve a transfer of the land to people whose land was taken away from them; it should involve a process of economic justice, of gender justice. So, all those components are part of the same process, to correct the wrongs of the past and to move together to the future.

So, you asked specifically about Iraq, I think right now there are people who are concerned that the perpetrators of the violence in Iraq should actually be brought into a form of national process, so that at the end, what you would have is a process that brings together all of the components, not just one side. You may perhaps think in terms of the newspapers reports that have shown former president Saddam Hussein being tried in a court of law. That may just satisfy one aspect of the peace process there, but I think what is needed is a much broader based process of reconstruction, which would involve the people of Iraq into finding each other and moving forward and rebuilding their country.

D: Religion has played a central role in your own life and your motivations for facilitating peace and conflict resolution. Yet throughout the world, in many instances religion is seen as a component of national and international conflicts. Could you talk about how religion has helped guide you and shaped the decisions you’ve made and the possible role religion could play in helping to facilitate conflict resolution?

N: I think that religion has a very important role in assisting with the resolution of conflicts, and I think we must recognize the role that religion has had and continues to have in creating conflict. So, the values — the very basic values that are central to the different religions, values about respect for life, the fact that each person must do unto others as they would have done unto them — are basic components which I think inform us individually. But then these should be the basic component that brings the different religions together in saying, “We ought to all be working towards what in our own personal life we would like to have, so let’s all work towards that together for our broader, wider society.”

My experience has been that it’s important to start with yourself, and to work to strengthen those aspects which are positive that would link to the next person’s religion, which would then bring those values together in a positive way. I saw in the Tanenbaum retreat a very interesting, and for me quite a positive example, of how the different religions can actually work together. These people coming from all different religious beliefs were all working together and sharing, and I think this can be replicated in the different conflicts in the world. For example, we had two people from Africa, from Nigeria, from different religions, who were working together in their country, which I think again is an illustration that it is possible.

We need to start believing that a peaceful world is possible. Even though where you start may be extremely violent, and you cannot believe when you look at it a different situation would be possible, it is best to start by believing that it is possible, because I think that is what then would lead you to overcome whatever is in your way to try to reach that goal that you are striving towards.

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Simon Retallack is managing editor of special issues for The Ecologist magazine, and co-director of the Climate Initiatives Fund.

The haze of combusted fossil is at last beginning to clear; the long awaited revolution in the way we generate energy could now finally be in sight. A fortuitous confluence of events is propelling renewable energy technologies out of the shadows into the glow of political, corporate, and financial limelight.

Climate Change

The last nine months alone have contained enough horror stories about the impact of our changing climate for political and economic elites to begin to take the problem more seriously. The effects of climate change have taken a substantial toll in the United States as farms have suffered from severe drought, raging fires have destroyed vast acreages of forest, and milder winters and nights have enabled the deadly West Nile Virus to survive and spread. In Europe, too, tinder dry summer conditions in many Mediterranean countries led to unprecedented forest fires. Increasingly violent and frequent fall storms, with high wind speeds and torrential rain have cast a swathe of destruction across Italy, France, Spain, and the UK — a large area of which was affected by record-breaking floods. If that were not enough, open water has been sighted at the North Pole for the first time in human history. Recent studies have shown that the Arctic ice sheet has been reduced by nearly half over the past four decades; that the vast Greenland ice sheet is melting at a rate of more than eleven cubic miles each year; that the last decade was the warmest in a thousand years; and that average temperatures could rise by a further 6 ?C by the end of the century.

Finally, the world’s leading climatologists — members of the UN’s Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change — have laid the blame for these changes more confidently than ever on humanity’s doorstep. The burning of fossil fuels, they say, has “contributed substantially to the observed warming over the last fifty years.”

Fuel Crisis

By appropriate coincidence, crisis has simultaneously enveloped the very fossil fuel that the world uses most: oil. Over the past two years, the price of a barrel of oil has more than tripled from just over ten dollars in January 1999 to a peak of $35 in mid-October 2000. Whether or not the oil price falls (and there are strong grounds for doubting that it will, at least in the mid-to-long-term), the experience of living with it at such a high cost has been alarming or painful enough for politicians and members of various sectors of the business community to appreciate how dangerously dependent on oil we still are.

Blockades of refineries and distribution depots by angry truck drivers and farmers brought several European countries to an almost complete standstill for days in 2000, as petrol stations ran dry, people couldn’t travel to work, the sick couldn’t be treated in hospitals, and food could not reach supermarket shelves. Whether or not politicians reacted by cutting fuel taxes, most suffered a marked decline in popular support in the polls — sufficient to make them extremely anxious to avoid a repeat performance.

In the United States too, the unpopularity of high gas prices at the pumps brought energy policy and, in particular, the country’s dependence on foreign oil and the consequent economic vulnerability which that brings, straight into the Presidential and Congressional election campaigns.

Politicians Switch On

The response by politicians on both sides of the political divide and both sides of the Atlantic has been remarkable for one reason: among the various solutions offered, all have included pledges to expand energy production from renewable sources. Al Gore promised he would make a host of tax breaks available for the purchase of fuel-efficient automobiles and solar energy technologies for homes and businesses, and to help offset some of the cost of purchasing clean energy from electricity utilities. A few months before being picked as Gore’s running mate, Senator Joe Lieberman together with Republican Senator Jim Jeffords proposed a bill to require that twenty percent of the US energy supply be derived from renewable sources by 2020. Even George W. Bush promised $1.2 billion to fund research into renewables and $1.4 billion to support tax credits for electricity purchased from renewable sources (albeit over ten years).

In Europe, meanwhile, only a month after the fuel protests, the German government promised an extra DM 300 million of investment in renewable energy technologies (including DM 100 million for the development of hydrogen fuel cells for use in cars), and British Prime Minister Tony Blair promised to create a £50 million fund for low carbon technologies and to set aside a further £50 million specifically for power generated by offshore wind and biomass.

Wall Street Wakes Up

Just as significantly, private investors have also suddenly taken a much greater interest in renewable energy. Early in 2000, with the dot com bonanza slowing, Wall Street analysts on the hunt for promising new investments turned their attention to renewable power companies. The result has been a substantial rise in the value of shares of manufacturers of fuel cells, solar photovoltaics (PV), and wind turbines in particular. Stock in fuel cell makers Ballard and Plug Power — which had been at twenty and fifteen dollars per share respectively — rose to seventy and fifty dollars just six months later, with Ballard’s shares peaking at $145 and Plug Power’s at $156. The shares of solar companies such as Astropower, Spire, and Energy Conversion Devices, and those of wind turbine makers like Vestas, have also risen and stayed well above pre-surge levels.

This sudden burst of stock market attention in renewables has been followed by a mini-explosion in the creation of new investment funds to finance both start-ups and existing companies in the renewables sector, infusing them with previously unthinkable levels of capital. Merrill Lynch has started a $200 million fund that will invest in renewable energy companies; Sarasin Bank has set up a 40 to 60 million Swiss Franc fund; Sustainable Asset Management is raising $93 million; Tridos Bank $60 million; $100 million is being raised for the Clean Energy Fund; and Nth Power Technologies has already invested $65 million and plans to raise $75 to 100 million more.

Renewables are even luring several of the world’s leading oil and auto companies. US oil giant Texaco has recently announced an investment of $67 million, mainly in solar PV manufacturing. Earlier, both Shell and BP Amoco committed themselves to invest $500 million in renewables over five years; in the case of BP, mainly, once again, in solar. Indeed, BP is apparently so confident about the future of renewable energy that it has re-branded its initials accordingly. Instead of standing for “British Petroleum,” they now stand for “Beyond Petroleum.” Toyota, Ford, DaimlerChrysler, and GM, meanwhile, are investing millions in fuel cell technology.

Increasing evidence of climate change, signs of greater political will to do something about it, and above all, growing appreciation of the scale of the profits to be made from the transition that will be required all help to explain the significant shift in behavior that is taking place. But so too do the advances that have occurred in the development of renewable energy technologies and the speed with which they are being applied across the world.

Wind: Powering Ahead

Twenty years of innovation have produced larger, stronger, and more efficient wind turbines using the latest in fiberglass technologies, advanced electronics, and aerodynamic engineering. The largest, with blade spans of over two hundred feet, are now capable of generating up to three megawatts (3000 kilowatts) of electricity — enough to power 3600 homes. These advances have helped bring the cost of wind power down dramatically so that it is now directly competitive with conventional power plants. The cost of wind power has fallen from forty cents per kilowatt hour in 1980 to four to six cents today, which is no more expensive than new coal or even gas-fired power plants. This has helped propel wind power into the lead as the world’s fastest-growing source of energy. The amount of electricity it generated increased by an average of twenty-four percent annually in the 1990s, surging to thirty-nine percent in 1999 (to 13,800 megawatts — eight times more than a decade ago), while the amount of megawatts of wind turbines installed in 1999 was sixty-five percent higher than the preceding year, generating three billion dollars worth of business and supporting 86,000 jobs.

Germany leads the world both in terms of additional wind turbine capacity installed last year and in terms of total installed capacity. Wind now generates two percent of the country’s electricity and eleven percent of that of its northernmost state. The United States has the second highest level of total installed wind capacity and also witnessed a surge in new installations last year — most notably in Iowa, Minnesota, Oregon, Wyoming, and Texas. Denmark, home to the world’s leading wind turbine manufacturers, has the third highest level of installed capacity and generates eight percent of its electricity from wind, the highest proportion of any country. Just behind, in terms of total installed capacity, is Spain, which also rose to second place in new wind turbine installations last year. Its northern state of Navarra now generates twenty percent of its electricity from wind. Though lagging, limited wind development in the industrializing world is occurring in India (which has 900 megawatts of generating capacity), China, and Costa Rica.

Wind power should have a very promising future. The world energy potential is simply enormous. The US Department of Energy estimates that three states — North Dakota, South Dakota, and Texas — have enough harnessable wind energy to meet America’s entire electricity requirement. Similarly, it has been estimated that Europe’s offshore wind potential in waters of one hundred feet or less could supply all of the continent’s power. China, meanwhile, has so much wind energy that it could double its national electricity generation by harnessing it.

Solar: Hotting Up

Solar photovoltaic cells — the silicon-based semiconductors that convert sunlight (even under cloudy skies) into electricity — are now the world’s second-fastest-growing energy source. Improvements in efficiency and production, and the development of amorphous silicon thin-film PV in particular, have brought prices down from $500 per watt in 1972, when solar PV was born as a commercial industry, to $3.50 per watt today. With the assistance of government subsidies, this has helped solar PV begin entering the grid-connected market on residential and office rooftops where a typical system (costing around $24,000 to buy and install) generates two to five kilowatts — enough to meet a household’s energy needs (apart from heating) — and enter the market for off-grid appliances such as powering telecommunications, traffic signals, and village households. In turn, in 1999, the production of solar PV cells grew thirty percent over the previous year to 200 megawatts, a five-fold increase in ten years, taking the value of the market to over $1.6 billion. After twenty-seven years, solar PV generated its first gigawatt (one billion watts) last year and it is confidently expected to reach its second within four years or less.

Leading the global expansion of the solar PV industry is Japan, whose production of solar cells in 1999 increased sixty-three percent over the previous year, spurred by the installation of 9,000 PV systems in 1999 as part of Japan’s generously supported program to install 70,000 on rooftops and building facades by 2004. This initiative has helped Japan’s Kyocera become the world’s second largest PV producer and provide the country with over two hundred megawatts of installed capacity. With similar incentives, Germany — which already has 11,000 PV installations — is now well ahead of schedule in meeting its target of installing 100,000 solar PV systems on roofs by 2003, which will give it an installed capacity of over three hundred megawatts. This has also recently enticed the solar division of Shell to open a large twenty-five megawatt solar cell production plant in Germany, which, together with BP Solarex — the world’s largest PV producer — will assist solar PV achieve further market growth in Europe as a whole, where countries such as the Netherlands, Norway, and Italy also have solar home programs.

In the United States, although PV production has grown more slowly than in Japan or Europe, 100,000 solar roofs have now been installed since 1997 under the Million Solar Roofs Initiative (which actually aims at installing 500,000 solar PV systems and 500,000 solar thermal ones by 2010), and the US solar market was expected to grow by thirty percent in 2000 to $785 million.

In the developing world, solar is already the low-cost alternative for remote, off-grid locations that require power. Several countries have established their own PV manufacturing industries, including Kenya — which has the highest per capita PV penetration rate in the world, with 100,000 systems sold to date and with 20,000 added annually — India, Morocco, and the Philippines. South Africa, meanwhile, plans to install 350,000 solar home systems and provide solar electricity to rural schools and clinics.

The future should certainly be bright for solar power. Studies suggest that half to three quarters of our electricity needs could be supplied if the rooftops of existing buildings were covered by solar PV. The key is to achieve further cost declines in grid-connected applications, and there is every reason to suppose that that will be possible. A US Department of Energy study shows that the cost of solar PV falls eighteen percent each time the amount of PV produced worldwide doubles. A study for Greenpeace International by the accountants KPMG suggests that the construction of a five-hundred megawatt plant (at the cost of $660 million) would bring the wholesale price down to ninety cents per watt, which Allied Business Intelligence analysts believe would cause demand to rise to several gigawatts a year and make the solar PV industry worth hundreds of billions of dollars.

Hydrogen-Fuel Cells: The Next Big Thing

A number of other renewable technologies and fuels are also advancing rapidly. Geothermal energy is being harnessed in Iceland, New Zealand, the US, and in parts of Asia and Latin America. Micro-hydro systems are gaining prominence in Nepal, Bhutan, and Peru and in some areas of the US and Europe. Biomass gasifiers are converting crop waste into energy in rural China, India, and Indonesia. Cars running on air, using compression engine technology, will soon be factory-produced in France, Spain, Mexico, South Africa, and Australia. Small-scale wave and tidal systems are being commercialized, and new large-scale, circular tidal systems out at sea are being developed — such as the £500 million station with a 400 megawatt capacity being proposed in the Irish Sea that will generate a seventh of Wales’s electricity (which overcome most of the problems often associated with large traditional tidal power barrages.

Each technology will have its place in the new renewable energy economy. But one, perhaps more than any other, has developed far enough to have the potential to replace oil and the internal combustion engine, as well as provide an important new clean source of residential power: hydrogen-fuel cell technology.

Fuel cells are solid-state devices with no moving parts that silently and efficiently — and without any combustion — turn hydrogen and oxygen in air into electricity, hot water, and nothing else. While the technology was first invented in 1839 and was used to power US manned space missions in the mid-1960s, it was only in the last decade that the breakthroughs necessary for its widespread deployment were achieved. In the transport sector, the technical gains made by such companies as Ballard Power Systems, based in Canada, have been such that their fuel cell stacks have proven in tests to have greater power and efficiency than the internal combustion engine at the same weight and height.

So impressed are the major automakers that they have now nearly all adopted fuel cell programs. DaimlerChrysler is spending $350 million in a joint effort with Ballard and Ford, which is investing an additional $420 million to create hydrogen-fuel cell engines that will be ready for mass production in buses by 2002 and in cars by 2004. Daimler promises production of 40,000 such cars in the first year, rising to 100,000 annually by 2005. General Motors has also promised to produce fuel cell cars by 2004, while Toyota and Honda say they will do so by 2003. Bill Ford, chairman of Ford, is so confident about the future of this technology that he predicts, “fuel cells will finally end the hundred-year reign of the internal combustion engine.”

It could do even more. Companies and research labs in eight industrialized countries have advanced programs underway to commercialize fuel cells of varying sizes that will power buildings of any scale. Some systems will be on the global market by 2001.

Prospects for the fuel cell could be very exciting as long as costs continue to fall and the hydrogen required is produced using renewable sources of energy. That should become increasingly feasible. Some experts predict that as the market grows and economies of scale are achieved, fuel cells could halve in price by 2005, and as wind and solar power continue to grow, more renewably-generated electricity will be available to produce hydrogen cleanly.

Obstacles and Catalysts

Together, these developments could permanently revolutionize the way we power our world. Remarkable progress is clearly taking place, but we should be under no illusions that there remain significant obstacles in the way of the sort of rapid transition away from fossil fuels within thirty to fifty years that will be necessary to avoid the worst impacts of global climate change.

Despite recent developments, renewable sources of energy (excluding biomass burning) still account for just 0.4 percent of the world’s total primary energy supply, while fossil fuels account for 79.5 percent. The level of political and financial commitment necessary to reverse that situation, though improving, simply does not exist yet. Public and private sector investments flowing into fossil fuels and products that use them still dwarf those flowing to renewables, making it hard to achieve the increased levels of production necessary to bring the costs of several renewable energy technologies down for consumers.

It is certainly laudable for Shell Oil to spend $500 million on renewable energy over the next five years, but that sum wouldn’t even pay for a quarter of the cost of a new oil rig, and represents less than 0.4 percent of Shell’s annual turnover. Similarly, BP’s $500 million investment in solar over five years is equivalent to the cost of nine weeks exploration for new oil or a twentieth of what BP intends to spend on gas projects over the next two years. Indeed, the oil industry as a whole is still spending $39 billion a year on adding to carbon stockpiles by seismic testing and wildcat drilling for new oil in areas outside existing reserves. That is not the behavior of a sector committed to withdrawing from fossil fuels and making the transition to renewables.

Similarly, while Wall Street and the private sector investment community is beginning to wake up to the profitability of renewables, hundreds of billions of dollars are still flowing into fossil fuels from investment banks, pension funds, mutual funds, and individual shareholders. Likewise, tax payer-backed support for renewables by governments worldwide while increasing, still represents a tiny fraction of the $300 billion provided in subsidies each year to the fossil fuel industry globally. The same is true for publicly supported international financial institutions. The World Bank, for example, spent twenty-five times more money on fossil fuel projects — $13.6 billion on coal mines, oil and gas fields, and fossil-fueled power plants in developing countries and the former Soviet bloc — than on renewables between 1992 and 1998.

The market is further distorted in a way that makes it harder for renewables to compete, preventing their rapid and broad deployment by a host of regulations and policies designed to serve the interests of large fossil fuel-based electricity generating companies. Complicated and costly grid connection and permit requirements have to be met, discriminatory planning application rules overcome, and tariff systems put up with that reward renewable energy being supplied to the grid at a lower rate than utilities may charge for their electricity.

Widely lacking is the sort of taxation system that reflects the true environmental cost of carbon-derived energy and the benefits of renewables. Higher carbon taxes are unpopular and tax breaks for renewables not large enough. The lack of sufficient grants or low-interest loans for the purchase and installation of renewable energy systems contributes to the difficulty of overcoming the initially higher capital costs that are involved with certain technologies and hence fails to ensure sufficient public demand for them when they come on to the market — a clear prerequisite for their success.

At the moment, the level of political drive and public pressure for a rapid transition to renewables is insufficient to surmount fierce resistance by the vested interests in the fossil fuel production and combustion industries who are determined to extract maximum possible returns from their investments (to which they are constantly adding) in the status quo.

But that could change, and change fast, if current trends persist and intensify. The most authoritative predictions suggest that the impacts of climate change are likely to increase in severity in the coming years, causing the human and financial costs to rise with them. At the same time, energy experts believe that the price of oil could rise still further, at least in the mid-term, as global oil production peaks in around 2005 and begins to decline by about three percent per year from 2010, with further serious economic impacts. It is unthinkable in this situation that governments and investors will fail to accelerate the transition to a renewable energy economy, especially when there are such large profits to be made from doing so.

A New-Look World

Indeed, the prize will be enormous. If the renewable energy revolution succeeds, not only will it spare us the worst of the chaos and misery of further climatic destabilization and oil price shocks, it has the potential to raise our quality of life significantly and change many aspects of the world as we know it in countless beneficial ways.

The incidence of respiratory illness from air pollution — which currently claims up to 570,000 lives annually worldwide and has helped bring about a forty percent increase in childhood asthma since 1980 in the US — will decrease dramatically. Our cities, towns, and villages will become vastly more liveable as cars will run in near-silence. Forests will be saved from the threat of acid rain; mountains from being ravaged by new coal mines; and pristine areas of natural beauty — such as the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska — and countless local communities worldwide rescued from enduring the scars of oil extraction.

Millions of new jobs will be created and vast sums of money made as production of the new technologies grows. Power blackouts of the sort that have been disrupting the lives of millions of people and thousands of businesses in the US in recent summers will be a thing of the past. People will be increasingly energy self-sufficient, enabling them to make large long-term savings on utility bills and profits from excess electricity generated. This in turn will create economies that do not suffer from the vast trade imbalances that exist today (largely the result of importing enormous volumes of oil) and that are far more decentralized; where the revenues created from energy generation remain in the community — in stark contrast to those made from fossil fuels. The social and ecological costs of geopolitical instability and huge military expenditures associated with our current dependence on the Middle East will also subside, generating savings in the area of $57 billion per year.

This is but a taste of what the world will look like when we all have solar tiles on our roofs, fuel cells in our cars and garages, and wind turbines in our fields and off our shores. If recent signs are to be believed, we could be on the cusp of a revolution that makes such a world a reality. But the sobering realities of climatic change leave us with just thirty to fifty years at most to achieve it, a challenge that will require far greater levels of political will and financial support to see through. We must do everything possible to ensure that it happens. If we want to be left with a planet that is worth living on, nothing less will do.

To learn more about the issues raised:

1 Seth Dunn, “Micropower: The Next Electrical Era,” Worldwatch, Paper 151, (Washington D.C.: July 2000).

1 Paul Hawken, Amory B. Lovins, and L. Hunter Lovins, Natural Capitalism: The Next Industrial Revolution, (Earthscan, UK, 1999).

2 “Climate Crisis”, The Ecologist, Volume 29, Number 2, March/April 1999.

3 David Flemming, “After Oil”, Prospect, UK, November 2000.

4 www.renewableenergy.com

5 www.solarcentury.co.uk

Michael Tobias, PhD, is a documentary filmmaker, historian, ecologist, and author of 14 books. Formerly a professor of environmental affairs at Dartmouth College, and humanities at California State University, his most recent book is on population and the biosphere. This article is from his presentation at the Open Center/ Lapis conference on the Millennium, November 1996. 

It costs $95 to apply to be an American. The millions of people who apply each year stand to enjoy the full range of benefits which citizenship has come to mean-rental assistance, health care, food stamps, and the testing for lead poisoning in children, among other things.

Of course, for years Americans have also been urged to focus less on benefits and more upon obligations and duties. Duties rather contradict the origins of citizenship, a concept steeped in rights and privileges and ownership from Greek and Roman times. Nevertheless, today, we generally recognize that being a citizen, entails-at least idealistically-citizenship on planet Earth. A UN poll recently claimed that environmentalism is now a "religion", with more followers than any other religion in history; just at the time when there are more countries, and more citizens than at any other time in human experience. Ecology and citizenship. They are reciprocal.

A true citizen casts informed votes, works constructively, pays taxes, helps people and hopefully other kindred life forms through selfless service, and by countless steps and measures takes part in the life of what is, of course, a biological community. As earth citizens, the details are slightly more complicated. We are summoned to be shepherds and stewards, to extend the traditionally family-or, at best, community- oriented altruism of our genes and instincts and pragmatic orientation to the whole world. Some would call that an impossible, counter-intuitive, even self-destructive concept; others an ideal worth working towards. Still others will say, think globally, but act locally. Other injunctions cascade: do more with less, do less with less, do nothing at all, nature will take care of everything, in her own way, in her own time.

Such idle declarations and points of view lose their edge, grow faint-hearted, even ludicrous against the context of what is actually happening to the biosphere. Take the largest democracy in the world, India-a country where citizenship implies, perhaps, the barest minimum of rewards or duties. Seven hundred million Indians are impoverished, a third of the country has become wasteland, the benefits of the Green Revolution are long gone, 60 percent of all Indian children are malnourished, literacy rates country-wide hover around 40 percent for men, less for women, and there is virtually no water anywhere in the country that is safe to drink, or even accessible. In Mumbai, which now numbers somewhere around 15 million people, at least six million are slum dwellers, sleeping on the street. Health care, electricity, and education for women is still a dream for many. Yet, India spends eight times more money on military weaponry, including its nuclear arsenal, than on social welfare, health, education, or anything having to do with the environment. Centralization of power for purposes of industrial exploitation has resulted in the rape of every habitat. India's tigers number fewer than 2,000, the country's forests are down to less than 9 percent, and every species of any charisma, such as rhinos, Asiatic lions, and snow leopards, are going extinct. India's population, now at nearly one billion, could well double in the coming century, while her neighbor, Pakistan, is set to reach 500 million. The two countries, each armed with nuclear weapons, are not on the best of terms. Stifling demographic pressure, poverty, degradation of habitat, loss of water, wood, and food, are making for an apocalypse, possibly one of many in coming years.

The pattern of democratic erosion in South Asia is repeated throughout the world. In wealthy western countries like Italy, the Netherlands, and Germany, the soil and forests are dead or dying, rivers are fouled, wildlife is going extinct at epidemic rates. If Germany, with its nearly $19,000 per capita income, was unable to safeguard a third of her species, which have gone extinct since post-World War 2 reconstruction, how-one asks-will Somalia, or Brazil, or Vietnam do so, with average per capita incomes 20 to 50 times less? Neither per capita income, nor the superficial embrace of democratic principles has served to impede full-scale environmental destruction. Taiwan, with its $60 billion surplus, has one of the worst environmental records in the world. South Korea churns out more engineers each year than most Western European nations combined. Yet, very few of those engineers are turning their expertise towards environmental engineering, auditing, or remediation. It has been argued that a $4,000 per capita income should necessarily translate into environmental consciousness, legislation, and green technology. That when people can afford to do so, they will protect the environment. But, tragically, that has not proved anywhere near the truth.

Even in America we spend more in one day on the military than on the preservation of all remaining US wetlands or endangered species in an entire year. In fact, despite hundreds of environmental laws, and supposedly high points for ecological recognition, only 5 of more than 700 species on the endangered list are making any kind of a comeback in the US. (In the State of New York, alone, there are at least 20 known endangered plants and animals.) Every major stream and river in the United States is polluted; we have lost more than a third of the soil's fertility through agricultural abuse; we cut down more primary temperate timber-such as at Tongass, in Alaska-than any country in the world; less than 500 out of 32,000 identified toxic waste sites have been cleaned up; and we are even unwilling to pay to protect our national parks from poachers. At the same time, America is witnessing a population explosion. By late in the next century, at current fertility trends, we could number over half-a-billion consumers. The number of men and women using any form of contraception is dropping in the US, not going up-we spend more money on Halloween costumes each year than on family planning.

Even if a case could be made for wealth translating into ecological consciousness, the fact remains that the majority of nations are not yet at the $4,000 per capita mark. Not even close. The poor are getting poorer; the North/South debate more strident and insoluble than ever before. Many Third World nations are beginning to think twice about the supposed blessings of the GATT World Monetary Order. It could prove disastrous to their environments-just as the ecological consequences of NAFTA are yet to be fully revealed. The majority of nations, however, are intent upon engendering a global $50 trillion economy, knowing that it will likely mean more tarmac, shopping malls, chemical factories, and the appropriation of the world's last remaining wild places, unless, of course, as citizens, we act adamantly, collectively, and intelligently to oppose it. We must, in short, replace inefficient, high-intensity, unsustainable consumerism, with some other, modified vision of what it means to be a responsible citizen in the 21st century.

With nearly six billion of us stumbling across the increasingly denuded planet, poised to double, during our very life time-with all too imaginable ecological consequences-it is the realizable goal of environmental citizenship that must become our crucial barometer for action. We are the last stand. It was the late author-philosopher Edward Abbey who said that the mark of a true citizen, or patriot, is one who is prepared to defend her country against the government. That's civil disobedience, as Thoreau likened it. Democracy, which we cherish, does not make it easy, for it is the quintessential ecological contradiction, as the case of India, and so many other places, tragically bears out.

We are in a state of war against nature, what I have, elsewhere, termed World War 3. It is a war that transcends all others in history, because it is fueled by those very sentiments and conditions which humanity aspires to-economic well-being. It crosses rich and poor communities alike. Population, per se, is not the guilty party. The unsustainable behavior of 5.6 billion humans is the problem, transcending easy policy thrusts, or even the human heart. Nor is it useful to simplistically point the finger at illegal immigrants, or multinational corporations, or hostile governments. Nor is it safe to assume that Norplant, by itself, will curtail toxic wastes, or condoms save the Panda. Even in countries where, for 40 years, family planning has been pushed, between 50 and 90 percent of all exports are primary resources, like coral reef or virgin rain forest. Ending this war will require a many-tiered approach. Social justice precedes nonviolence. Empathetic land reform, health care for mothers and their children, and secondary school education for every- one are prerequisites of any environmental reform, let alone true citizenship.

The challenge to such citizenry is massive; the potential, if present trends continue, of an ecological winter of sleepless nights and radiological horizons. A pulp future world teeming with 15 or 20 billion people, the majority of them stressed out, confined largely to slums in crime-ridden, malnourished, developing countries; a world bereft of more than half of all its species, its primary forests and wetlands gone, all arable land reduced to monoculture, mountains eroded, oceans plundered, river and acquifers fouled, and the ozone layer thinned to the point that even marine phytoplankton-the basis of the largest food chains in the world-will be threatened. To put the accelerated rate of extinction in context, consider that prior to Homo sapiens, on average, about 300 species would go extinct every million years. At present, we are driving between 70 and 760 species to extinction every day! The kill rate is staggering. At the same time, the potentially countervailing, sustainable wisdom of the world's several hundred million indigenous people is also being lost-those individuals converted not to citizens, but impoverished consumers in alien social orders, where their fossil fuel emissions are survival emissions, not luxury emissions. But with so many billions of people inflicting collective pressure on Mother Earth, an emission is an emission is an emission.

This dire litany aside, I would nonetheless argue that every war can be peacefully negotiated, even humanity's pathological war against nature.

Let me, then, change directions in order to broadly, and quickly outline just a few of the countless new directions that might, collectively, begin to steer us off this destructive course.

I refer to domestic and international legislative approaches to ecological restraint that invite practical monitoring. Such enforcement is actually written, albeit quietly, into Article 20 of the GATT Treaty, as well as the US Pelly Amendment to the Marine Fisheries Act, mandating ecological protection in the global commons. A global EPA, and increased ecological responsibilities in the World Court are being studied by many. More and more national court systems are permitting individuals, and/or public interest groups to take the government to court, and to act on behalf of other species and habitats which have no voice. Citizen's suits, boycotts, diplomatic pressure, and actio popularis (one nation's suit against another) now have a crucial environmental role to play. As do nongovernmental organizations and individuals who may gain consultative status to international treaty debates. NGOs are often the key to more effectively persuading government agencies in other countries to adopt ecological strategies, particularly when hard currency, or debt-for-nature swaps can be introduced, like those in Poland, and Mexico. We need new ideas about cost/benefits analysis that can re-focus industrial designs, processes, and distribution so as to prevent ecologically pernicious externalities and faithfully internalize real costs to the environment-such as over-exploitation of fisheries off New England or Costa Rica, or soil erosion in Java. Those costs to nature need to be appropriately taxed or penalized. The Miller Act of 1935 mandates performance bonds as a contractual guarantee for those contractors providing services for the state, local, or federal government. Bonds or notes are posted by a surety company guaranteeing full compensation to the government if the contractor in any way defaults. Robert Costanza, Director of the Maryland International Institute for Ecological Economics, has suggested a similar mechanism for curtailing environmental degradation; by imposing similar bonds on all projects requiring environmental impact statements, to be monitored through the EPA. The price of repaying the bond would be based upon the worst case scenario. That might have made a difference in the case of the Exxon Valdez. We need a system of ecological tariffs and global bonds, imposed by all free-trading partners worldwide.

And of utmost importance, we require innovative technologies that can be transferred to those countries and communities which can most benefit endangered habitat, or reverse social injustices, through their implementation. Technologies like photovoltaic arrays and smokeless cookers, E-lamp light bulbs and pressurized fluid bed combustion techniques for reducing S02 and NOx emissions.

And perhaps the most revolutionary of all-the fuel cell hydrogen technologies for both transportation and stationary energy needs. New ideas for environmental moderation, and hence, enlightened citizenship, abound. Like musician Peter Gabriel's idea for a home shopping network that specializes-not in trinkets, but in indigenous products, the proceeds going directly back to third world villages, mostly to women who make the handicrafts. In the West, manufacturers have been trading emission quotas within pollution bubbles on the Chicago Stock exchange. This has tended to favor major polluters. People and industries will change if given reasonable incentives. It has even been demonstrated in the open market that the so called "existence value"-just the knowledge, unpartaken of, that something exists-of wild, unfettered wolves in Yellowstone, or elephants in Kenya, for example-far outweighs (by a factor of 60 to 1) the value of hunting revenues for trophies or meat. The art of factoring such values and trade-offs will become, I suspect, the dominant creative task facing all concerned environmental professionals in the coming years. The reason is simple: we are confronted with too many global priorities. We must act presidentially and choose our imperatives. That's because there is nowhere near enough money, or hours in the day, to process, or pay for them all. But the shift to a green economy can be systematically engineered.

Consider the types of trade-offs we will be confronted with. Does a foundation committed to improving quality of life for young people spend its limited dollars on free school lunches in rural Alabama, or free condoms in Seattle? If it's a choice, what will effect the largest social good for the most people, after, say several subsequent generations? Or what about nuclear war, by far the worst ecological calamity one could imagine. Does nuclear preparedness, then, in an ecological context, justify the current $80 billion a year in military R & D, and a nearly $300 billion annual defense budget? Would 15 million Mexican migrants impact less on biodiversity in Texas than in the Yucatan? Does the World Wildlife Fund place its bet on the Mosquitia Forest of Nicaragua, the Choco Forest of Colombia, or three competing preserves in the sub-Sahara? Does a foundation put its money into preserving live plants, identifying new species, or saving the largest fraction of genomes and geneplasm? For $62,000 an American taxpayer can help place a species on the endangered list, or support a prisoner in jail for 30 months. Take your choice. You may have to choose. Prepare yourself. Determine your criteria for choosing. Figure out what kind of world you, personally, are prepared to go on living in. The sweeping Agenda 21 resolutions of the Rio Conference would cost approximately $600 billion per year to implement. But there's much more: We know, for example, that the US would need a minimum of $1 trillion to clean up toxic wastes in the US and at military bases. We already have a greater than $6 trillion national debt. That's one problem, one country. But in spite of the $600 billion annual price tag, the countries at Rio could only agree upon pledges (which are non-binding) totaling a measly $5 billion. Much of that has not yet even materialized after five years. The Japanese have understandably been stalled in their largesse following the tragedy of Kobe. Moreover, nearly $1.5 trillion has been spent in the US in the last decade on environmental cleanup. Future money will have to come from savings created through conservation, and by inventive compromises. Well, that suggests numerous possibilities, though Interior Secretary Babbitt and California Governor Pete Wilson have used the language of compromise to assist developers in what is one of the most endangered biodiversified hot spots. Nonetheless, consider that 11 percent of all US chemical expenditures now go into pollution control, both for reasons of regulation and profit. Du Pont's Environmental Remediation Services division expects to be doing a billion a year in business. There is a revolution going on in recycling. We need not choose toilet paper over Malaysian orangutans. It is estimated that as much as 42 percent of US consumed paper will be recycled by this year. Meanwhile, seedlings bound for reforested mine sites are being inoculated with fungi to enable them to survive in environmentally damaged soils. In Los Angeles, a study released last year showed that despite the most stringent air pollution laws in the country, those key industries likely to have been adversely affected in fact came out ahead of their competitors elsewhere in the US. And Oregonians have discovered that there is indeed economic opportunity outside of the forests. Spotted owls are no longer public enemy number one in Portland.

I think humanity is primed to manifest a new human nature, an ecological renaissance. And, fortunately, there are a good many beacons and metaphors to understudy from; ecologically stable societies, from the nearly eight million Jains in India-strict vegetarians who have mostly pursued nonviolent professions-to the Bhutanese-an entire nation that has endorsed E F Schumacher's principles as outlined in his 1973 classic Small is Beautiful. The first truly ecological government was Iceland, as far back as the 11th century. For a thousand years, that country had managed to sustain its demographically stable population by quietly farming its interior, and by maintaining public spaces, or commons, that were legally inviolate. Today, with a population of a mere 250,000, a huge percentage of Iceland remains as wilderness, while the country sustains one of the highest per capita incomes of any nation. You can have both. That's the lesson. Its global share of greenhouse gas emissions is zero, while geothermal energy accounts for more than 80 percent of its household heating needs. The country has its share of problems, as do the whales and large quantity of fish it murders, but, all things aside, as an example of environmentally-attuned citizenship, Iceland suggests an important source of data.

I would add to the list organic farming movements in Sweden, New Mexico, and Cuba, Dutch and New Zealand Green Agendas, and the intriguing Gaviotas Commune, Eastern Columbia's own version of an ecological utopia. A kind of solar socialism, zealously focused on restoring biodiversity.

In Sri Lanka, the Sarvodaya rural self-help movement, based upon principles of Buddhist ecological economics, has now spread to over 30,000 villages. In the US, groups like Washington's Sojourners, Atlanta's Open Door Community, Habitat for Humanity, the Social Contract group in Philadelphia, and the Home Coop in Maine are providing similar examples of community re-empowerment. As is the First Nations environmental groups across Canada.

In Japan, the Seikatsu Cooperative is doing half-a-billion dollars a year in green products. There is a boom in new socially conscious investor portfolios. In Ketchum County, New Mexico, the controversial Wise Land Use Movement is beginning to attract individuals from all sides of the political spectrum in support of a practice that would obtain federal lands (as the cattle industry has done for decades) at nickel and dime prices, specifically to take that land out of production, and preserve it. In Australia, the government has embraced the (once deemed as radical) alternative LETS program-Local Exchange Trading Systems. And in Ithaca, New York, the HOURS alternative money economy is picking up speed, and has been adopted in 44 states across the US. In addition to encouraging local economies, the HOURS program rewards sustainable small business enterprises with interest free loans. Even the World Bank has spawned a new generation of economists, some who have begun Alternative Structural Adjustment Programmes in the Developing World that are strictly determined by ecological sustainability criteria.

In many countries ecotourism is gaining ground as a tactic towards rejuvenating indigenous economies and encouraging conservation. By the year 2000, it is estimated that there will be 640 million tourists annually. Consider that the majority of those people can identify very few plant and animal species, but can easily recognize and recite a thousand product labels. In a recent poll of young people in Arizona, 60 percent had never spent more than approximately thirty minutes in the wild. As a culture, we are divorced from nature, and so ecotourism may well offer a powerful range of ecological antidotes, though as the Yanomani in Brazil, and the penguins in Antarctica have learned, ecotourism unmonitored, can also be very destructive. And there are other ecologically-linked areas where the challenge of restoration looms: an unmet contraceptive need among 300 million couples which could be paid for, according to the UN Cairo Conference, by approximately $17 billion a year early in the next century-one-third the price of the Gulf War. Why is that important? In Africa, for example, if the rate of contraceptive use could double, and it can, then Africa would have half-a-billion fewer hungry people in coming generations. That's fewer wars, fewer remaining tropical forests felled, fewer species driven to obliteration. The same situation prevails in California, where a newly released study showed over three million hungry people in the state, nearly 10 percent, with the figure expected to nearly triple by the middle of next century, when California doubles in population. There are 174 endangered species in metropolitan Los Angeles, and, in addition, more psychiatrists per square mile than anywhere else in the world, over 2,000. Prescription-free contraceptives need to be provided over the counter. It's all related. Demographic pressure, hunger, anger, disease, decimation of the natural heritage. In Washington, population issues have become security issues.

Laws regulating adoption need to be liberalized. Adoption by itself won't solve the population problem, but it will solve the problem of unloved orphans.

Virginity is back in vogue. There is pride to be taken in waiting, as well as in delaying marriage, and delaying one's first child. That in turn will go a long ways towards curbing a tragic, worldwide abortion rate numbering 60 million, at present, with very high associated maternal mortality rates. And, of great importance, vegetarianism is being adopted by tens-of-millions of individuals worldwide. The vast suffering of our fellow beings-the cows and turkeys, goats and sheep, chickens and dogs-and so many others consumed in factory settings-is being slowly reduced. But too slowly. Animal rights is a crucial sector for attuned human citizenship. For it reminds us acutely that we are citizens, first and foremost, of the Creation, not just of nations defined by arbitrary political boundaries.

Ultimately, ecological citizenship will best play out if it is inculcated among the youth of every nation. We need ecological literacy, a revolution in environmental awareness and activism. It is clear to me the potential is there. We've seen school children raise hundreds of thousands of dollars to preserve rain forests. Others have canvassed their neighborhoods with petitions in support of New Zealand's call for an Antarctic World Park, more recently taken up by Greenpeace. A little girl's letter to the CEO of Dupont is said to have convinced him of the necessity of phasing out chlorofluorocarbons well before the Montreal Protocol on Ozone depletion. One economist at the University of Wyoming has suggested turning over all stewardship and management of other animal species in the wild to young people, who are more likely to serve the Earth with less cynicism than their older colleagues.

The unprecedented ecological dilemmas of our time demand a morally gifted generation; individuals who are not about to allow the continued squandering of this precious planet of life. These are people whose ideals have less to do with utility than with meaning. Who prefer to pass on a legacy of joy and health to their own offspring. And who, finally, to quote Ortega y Gasset, prefer "to live a life which is something above meaningless tragedy or inward disgrace."

Let me conclude by referring to the words of Mahatma Gandhi who once outlined his own vision of a virtuous communality and, by inference, virtuous citizens. He described such a community as one where politics have principle… where wealth can only be justified by sustainable, ecological work…where commerce is defined by morality, and where pleasure is only taken if in good conscience where education has the courage of a lofty and diverse character, and where science and technology have embraced humanity above all else. And finally, where reverence, under any guise, completes its commitment to an ideal through necessary self sacrifice. We're all in this together. At the very least, we owe the Earth a lifetime of due diligence.

A woman, veiled in black, drags herself through sweltering, war-ravaged streets, searching for bread to feed her children. She crosses the path of a policeman from the "Department of Virtue and Prevention of Vice". He demands an explanation. Why she is walking the streets unaccompanied by a male escort of her family? When he notices her bare and exposed ankles, he erupts in anger and viciously beats her with a car antenna. She falls to the pavement unconscious. He leaves her lying there.

Such incidents are commonplace in the Taleb-held cities of present-day Afghanistan. The agonizing situation of women there represents one of the most desperate human rights situations in the world today.

"We're caged," says Benazir Hotaki, former principal of a Kabul high school. "All doors are closed to us. All we can do is cook. We're not human beings any longer. We only eat, drink, and sleep, like animals."

Throughout the 20-year Afghan civil war, an estimated 1.5 million men, women, and children have lost their lives. In 1995, from religious seminaries in Pakistan, refugee Taleb student warriors, most of them from the ethnic tribe of the Pathans, burst into their homeland and have since overrun 22 of Afghanistan's 29 provinces, including the capital Kabul. While the population of Taliban-controlled areas enjoys improved security, there has been a dramatic and alarming increase in human rights violations, especially against women. Diplomats and aid workers have witnessed a veil of isolation and discrimination descend over all women in Taliban territory.

Deeply embedded in the tradition and customs that prevail throughout Afghanistan are rigid patriarchal practices that nurture an ingrained belief in male superiority and designate men to keep tight control over their women. The most stringent views on how to treat women are those embodied in the tribal code of the Pathans. In the opinion of Noor Mohammed, a senior member of the Taliban Central Committee, "Women just aren't as smart as men. They don't have the intelligence…and we categorically refuse to let women vote or participate in politics."

The Taliban acknowledge that women traditionally hold the moral power in Afghan society, but for women themselves this is a double-edged sword. Conscious and resentful of their vulnerability to the covert power of women, the Taliban have interpreted the shariah, Islamic law, in order to repress that power.

The shariah is not a fixed set of laws. It has always been open to interpretation. Parts of the Qur'an emphasize equal status for men and women. Others indicate differences and even inequalities. The Taliban have adopted the most extreme interpretation regarding the rights of women, specifically to support ancient traditions that protect the authority of men. In their fatwas, or religious decrees, the Taliban emphasize strict external forms of religious conduct specifically to justify their attitudes towards and treatment of women.

New fatwas addressing what constitutes "honorable" behavior for women are constantly announced over the loudspeakers of local mosques or the radio or by word of mouth. Taliban laws are enforced by rogue squads of young fanatics – the Department of Virtue and Prevention of Vice – and offenses are punished by random beatings, jail sentences, torture, amputations, or death by stoning.

Amnesty International reports a typical example of what happens when a fatwa is broken: "Turpeki was taking her toddler to the doctor. The child had acute diarrhea and needed to be seen by a doctor urgently. She reached the market area when a teenage Taliban guard noticed her. The guard called her. Turpeki knew that if she stopped she would be beaten for appearing in public. She was also frightened that her child might die if she did not hurry. She began to run. The Taliban guard aimed his Kalishnikov at her and fired several rounds. Turpeki was hit. Several bystanders intervened and rushed the mother and child to the doctor. They survived, but when Turpeki's family complained to the Taliban leaders, they were simply told that it was Turpeki's own fault. She should not have been appearing in public in the first place. Once she did, she should stop when told to do so, and not run away."

The most demeaning of the fatwas are the denial of education to girls over the age of nine, the prohibition on women to work (with minor exceptions in the medical field), and the restriction on women leaving home without a male escort from their immediate family. In any case, women may not be outside at all without wearing a burqa, a garment covering the body from head to toe with only an embroidered lattice across the eyes. Other rules include prohibitions against playing music, dancing, drum-playing, kite-flying (a favorite pastime for Afghan children), portraits, photographs, posters, and pictures of any kind (to prevent idolatry), paper bags (just in case they might be recycled copies of the Qur'an), keeping pet birds (a favorite hobby of Afghans), and hammams, the traditional bath houses around which social life for women has revolved for centuries.

Tim Johnston of Reuters reports: "The Taliban regulations barring women from working have hit Kabul's huge population of war widows particularly hard. Already marginalized and struggling to make ends meet in Afghanistan's traditionally male-oriented society, the Taliban's ban on working has driven many of Kabul's widows to destitution."

Even though all women in Kabul are effectively under house arrest, widows have to search for food. In the end, rules don't matter much. When your baby is crying out from hunger, what is a beating if you come back home with food? The widows who venture out must of course be fully dressed in a burqa, making sure that not even a part of their ankle is showing. Women who didn't have a burqa before the Taliban arrived in Kabul have had to spend excessive amounts of money to buy one. Afghan women protest that if women, especially widows, don't have the money to buy their children food, then how can they be expected to buy themselves a burqa?

Many widows, out of desperation, abandon their children at local mosques or orphanages. Some then go home and commit suicide. To these women, who regard themselves as having failed as mothers and unable to raise their children in a stable and peaceful environment, with no rights and freedom of movement, it seems the only sane solution in a world gone mad.

CARE Afghanistan employs a few Afghan women, with the written authorization of the Taliban authorities, to monitor and survey the organization's emergency feeding program, which provides food for ten thousand widows. On May 26, 1997, five female employees of CARE, on their way to work, all in conformity with the Taliban-enforced dress code, were ordered off their bus and publicly beaten with five-foot long whips made of metal and leather. A leading member of the Department of Virtue and Prevention of Vice used a loudspeaker to denounce these women as prostitutes and demand that they get their salary from God, not from foreign NGO's (non-governmental organizations).

Low-ranking, illiterate Taliban religious policemen are equally arbitrary and unscrupulous in their enforcement of the law and treatment of offenders. One Afghan woman reports, "A few months ago I was waiting for a taxi, when a Taleb stopped and asked me why I was wearing white shoes. He told me that this was illegal, because the Taleb flag is white, and white shoes could not touch the dirt on the ground. The color white should always be held high, like the flag. So now, I don't wear white shoes."

Until the Taliban takeover, women had enjoyed rights of employment, freedom of movement, and equal opportunity in education granted to them in a series of constitutions and legal statutes over the course of half a century. Inevitably, the Taliban have clamped down especially hard on women living in the cities. Mature women have had to forsake everything they grew up taking for granted. Teenage girls hopeful of building a career now sit idly at home, devoid of prospects for a meaningful future. Any attempt to question the fatwas results in the most harsh and archaic punishment and public humiliation.

For adultery or theft, the punishments are most severe. There have been several especially gruesome episodes of lovers being stoned to death in front of thousands of onlookers. Special front-row places are reserved for the victim's family, even the young children.

One blazing afternoon in Kandahar province, in August 1996, Nurbibi, 40, and her stepson and lover Turyalai, 38, were blindfolded and each put in a pit with only their chest and head above ground. They stood facing their judge, a Muslim cleric who, according to tradition, picked up the first stone from a pile and threw it at the woman. Immediately, the Taliban fighters who had been summoned for the occasion showered the lovers with stones the size of a man's hand. Turyalai was dead within ten minutes, but Nurbibi took longer to kill. Her crying son went to check if she was still alive, and when he told the judge she was, Taliban fighters finished her off by smashing a large rock directly over her head.

Mohammed Wali, 35, head of the Taliban's religious police, said of the incident, "When I see this kind of thing, I am very happy, because it means that the rule of Islam is being implemented." John F Burns, a correspondent for the New York Times, writes, "The Taliban take care to see that foreigners, especially non-Muslims, are kept away from stonings and amputations, which the Taliban leaders describe as religious occasions not to be witnessed by non-believers."

Within Taliban-controlled Afghanistan there exists little opportunity for dissent. As Nancy Hatch Dupree, who has closely followed the plight of Afghan women, says, "The refugee women who have come forward to lead and participate in programs that challenge the Taliban status quo are dedicated and courageous. Even beyond the borders of the country, verbal abuse from ultra-conservatives is certain and physical abuse is often threatened."

The city of Peshawar, on the Pakistan side of the Khyber Pass, is home to nearly one million Afghan refugees, who have been arriving in a steady flow since the Soviet occupation in 1978.

Peshawar is a frontier town, not much changed for centuries, save the massive influx of refugees and the town's almost total economic dependence on the arms and drug trade. Pathan tribesmen stroll through its streets with loaded rifles slung over their shoulders, their faces half covered by the loose ends of their turbans. Most business is conducted in what has always been called the "Thieves' Market".

On the city's busy streets, emaciated horses struggle to pull buggies filled with passengers, and three-wheeled taxis buzz through the traffic with scant regard for pedestrians. Beggars squat on the roadside like birds perched on a wire. Children and dogs lurk like vultures around dumpsters waiting for fresh garbage. Along the railroad tracks close to the market, heroin and opium addicts gaze vacantly up at the blazing sun. Destitute refugees linger outside the heavily guarded gates of aid-organizations.

At the edge of town, down a dirt road beside a river filled with sewage and rotting garbage, lies one of Peshawar's 175 refugee camps, where 180,000 families live in squalor, humiliation, and despair. Some have waited as long as twenty years in the tent camps allotted them by relief agencies, others have long since taken down their tents and built mud huts in their place – abandoning any hope they once had that their exile would be temporary.

A few malnourished kids let our jeep through to the camp. I see a maze of mud walls, all the same brown-gray color. Small entranceways covered by weather-worn curtains define each family's miserable little enclave. I start walking through the endless labyrinth of silent alleyways. Wherever I turn I can feel children's eyes peering at me from around a curtain. Occasionally, a group of youngsters appears behind me and offers to pose for a photograph. Otherwise, the streets are deserted. Whatever life there is is concealed behind the mud walls. You sense that days, months, years drift by and nothing, absolutely nothing, happens or changes. Time has really stopped here. The refugees wait, their lives wasting away in stifling boredom, for an end to an endless war.

Most of the younger generation have never seen their own country, although it lies just over the mountains on the horizon. These children may know that they are Afghan, but they long ago lost their proud heritage. Nor have the Pakistanis seen fit to adopt them. They live, without a future, as outcasts on the desolate fringes of a foreign backwater.

Hundreds of thousands of women languish in these camps, some of them widows, others simply waiting for their husbands to finish trying to solve Afghanistan's internal problems. Many of these women are educated, some highly educated, with degrees and doctorates in fields like education, journalism, literature, and law – professions that are potentially valuable to their country. But their skills are spurned. Instead, they sit in tents or mud huts baking the bread on which they subsist, talking quietly amongst themselves, and fanning their babies to sleep, to relieve them from the stifling heat and the flies.

Few women dare get involved in work, even with the relief agencies operating in Peshawar, since interaction with men in the workplace will anger or embarrass their husbands and male relatives and tarnish the family honor. Mostly, however, they fear verbal or physical abuse from the local male-dominated Afghan authorities.

A few refugee projects are aimed at producing income for women, especially widows, who have to provide for their children. The women who have dared join these projects come from many different backgrounds, some educated and some with no schooling at all. All risk their lives and honor in choosing to work. For most it is simply the only way to survive and feed their children. For others it is also a matter of principle and protest.

Hashemi Noorghan, a mother of five, works at a sewing project organized by the Danish Committee for Aid to Afghan Refugees (DACAAR). She is the sole supporter of her immediate family in Peshawar and her extended family in Kabul. DACAAR is a 12-year-old sewing project whose members are trained and paid to produce traditional works of needlework and embroidery for sale overseas. DACAAR's objective is to provide Afghan refugee women with an income-generating activity within the accepted constraints of Afghan culture and environment, to support themselves and their families with dignity and pride rather than charity or aid. For the women involved in this project, their motto is, "Pulling a thread for survival". Asked what she thinks about the current political situation for women in Afghanistan today, Hashemi, replies, "This question always makes me very sad, because we cannot have an opinion about the situation in our country. We cannot say anything, and we cannot protest."

During the time I spent in Peshawar this past summer, I encountered a few brave women who have decided to actively speak out against Afghan patriarchy. One of them is Fatana Ishaq Gailani. Gailani, admittedly, comes from a more privileged background than the destitute women of the camps; she is related to the Afghan royal family. She came to Peshawar 19 years ago and has devoted her life for the past 11 years to the cause of Afghan women. In 1992 she founded the Afghan Women's Council, and in 1995, against the orders of the Afghan government, she traveled to Beijing to address the International Women's Conference.

Gailani has managed to establish a health center which, with no outside support, provides free vaccinations and medicine to up to 70 patients daily, and a school for 900 refugee children. Despite the danger, risking her life at times, she is not afraid to express herself and to talk freely of the work she is doing. From behind her chiffon veil, she says bittersweetly, "I believe that women must wake up and work for peace. They must talk about their future and the future of their children."

"In this time of computers and technology, old ways have returned to Afghanistan," Gailani laments. "I am working for the future. We cannot look back at the past." Even though she is considered extremely liberal in her own country, she still respects the traditions and the customs of her people tenaciously. She wears her chader, and she prays to Allah several times a day. "I believe I am a good Muslim," she states confidently. Indeed, Gailani maintains that the women of Afghanistan are good Muslims by their own convictions, and that they do not need the Taliban to force them to act conservatively and behave appropriately. "Women will always respect these traditions out of principle, regardless of Taliban laws. I look at photographs of my grandmother and my great-grandmother and they were always veiled in their chader. I am also veiled in my chader and so is my daughter and my daughter's daughter when the time comes. We know about being good Muslim women. Nobody needs to tell us."

In Peshawar, I also met Dr Sana Ul Haq Ahmadzai, executive director of the Committee for Rehabilitation Aid to Afghanistan. He is one of the handful of Afghan men who believe that the edicts of the Taliban concerning women have gone too far. "We are working hard to implement programs within women's society. This is not an easy task, but it can be accomplished, with compromise of course." Ahmadzai firmly believes that, "It is always possible to influence a human being. The Taliban have mothers and sisters too…"

He takes out a photo-album and proudly points at a photograph capturing the very moment in which a Taliban is handing over a pay-check to a woman who has set up her own poultry farm. "It's all about compromise," asserts Ahmadzai. "I asked the local Taliban leaders whether I could set up a poultry training course for women in a village, and we struck a deal: one hour of intense Qur'anic studies gives us four hours of poultry training." Shah adds, "Women play a great role in society even when they are forced to stay at home. What we need to do is to have more meetings with the Taliban and more exchange of views."

"My understanding of Islam is different from the fundamentalists'. Islam is not for harming its followers. It is a hopeful and optimistic religion." Ahmadzai's point of view reflects the position of more moderate Afghans, men who respect their womenfolk yet still believe there are certain limits to what a woman can and cannot do. He believes that one day the situation will improve for women, but until then women must be patient and wait until Afghanistan solves its internal problems. "The Taliban are fighting for survival right now. Once they have something in their stomachs, they will want a social life too."

I began to realize from my discussions with both women and men in Peshawar that the situation inside Afghanistan cannot simply be attributed to Islamic fundamentalism. Reza Shah-Kazemi, of the Pakistani newspaper The Dialogue, says, "Taliban attitudes towards women are parodies and, ultimately, inversions of Islam. The enforced laws have much more to do with the stern customary codes by which the ethnic Pathans live than with Islam. Unfortunately, the Taliban's treatment of women in Afghanistan reinforces the prevailing notion that women in Islam are oppressed by men, not despite the religion of Islam but because of it."

According to Ashgar Ali, author of The Rights of Women in Islam, "Cultural prejudices have played a big role in denying women their rightful status. The purdah still observed by Muslim women in parts of south Asia originated in the feudal era when the ruling classes wanted to protect their womenfolk from others and hence kept them under strict seclusion. But this has nothing to do with the spirit of Qur'an. All that the Qur'an requires of women is that they dress in a dignified manner and not display their sexual charms."

The attempt by the Taliban to restore a patriarchal system that existed for centuries is to a large extent a reaction against the materialism that they believe corrupted the culture during the Communist era and in its aftermath. But we would be wrong to expect that the ordeal of Afghan women can be solved by any restoration of western values.

The vast majority of Afghan women have little or no education and are resigned to their fate. We can, and should, however, encourage and support those women and organizations who have the courage to speak out against Taliban atrocities. By serving as propagandists and role models, such women are the only hope for giving Afghanistan what it really needs: a basic educational system that provides literacy and basic skills to all.

Nella Mohammadzai, a 23-year-old Afghan high school graduate, was my translator for most of my interviews with women in the camps. She spoke excellent English, but otherwise seemed badly traumatized. She and her family fled to Peshawar in 1992. Like other upper-class Afghan girls, Nella had been denied the freedom to make friends. She spent her entire life inside her family compound, doing little but cleaning the cages of the families' flock of pet doves, parakeets, and partridges. One day, she tearfully recalled to me how, years ago, as a child, her family would go on picnics in the country, but as landmines started to litter the landscape, the outings stopped. Nella's mother, Mohibi Tooba Mohammadzai, a worldly woman who attended university, taught her four daughters the value and importance of education. "But when the Taliban took over, my daughters could not even go outside, let alone to school. We are strict with our children, but I want my daughters to help people later on in life. We are also good Muslims and we respect Islam, but I do believe that my daughters have a right to an education."

One intensely muggy day last summer, I asked Nella if she'd walk with me to the old Thieves' Bazaar to take photographs. Taliban edicts regarding women walking unaccompanied do not apply in Pakistan, but she agreed only reluctantly. On the crowded streets, our chaders clung to the sweat on our foreheads. I could feel beads of moisture trickling down my back. It was difficult to breathe. The air thick was with dust. I felt Nella's hand fumbling to find mine. Grabbing it, she wouldn't let go. She was obviously terrified of being outside. We linked arms and walked on, but I noticed how she kept her eyes glued to the pavement to avoid eye contact with anybody who passed.

After I left Pakistan I stayed in touch with Nella. She told me in one of her letters that she had contacted a member of the international aid community in Peshawar, asking if her English skills could be of use. Somehow, she next wrote, doors had opened, and she had been offered a job with the BBC in Pakistan. She is now a full-fledged reporter, with a new lease on life and a clearly and strongly articulated goal to set an example to the women of Afghanistan. "Please don't keep quiet for your own life and your sisters," asserts the new Nella confidently. "Fight for your rights and, if Allah permits, you will be successful in your life. Universally, all women must help each other, because our union will mean our freedom and our kindness will be our weapon against evil."

Robert Kaplan is the author of Balkan Ghosts and The Ends of the Earth: A Journey at the Dawn of the Twenty-First Century. The first American journalist to foresee the conflagration in the former Yugoslavia, his influential cover story a few years ago for Atlantic Monthly, "The Coming Anarchy," depicted a dire 21st century filled with uncontrollable regional conflicts and crime-filled megacities. Here, in a talk given at the recent Millennium Conference hosted by Lapis and the New York Open Center, he casts a penetrating eye at the future.

Our particular age was probably best described by an early 20th century Italian political theorist, Antonio Gramsci, who said that the old order is dying, the new order has yet to be born, and in the interregnum, all sorts of morbid symptoms appear. I will be focusing on morbid symptoms. I’m going to start with a very detailed description of two countries, far apart on the earth. One is Pakistan, and one is Mexico. And then I’m going to breathe out those descriptions into a more worldwide paradigm. Let’s start with Pakistan.

If you were a Wall Street fund manager, and you went to Pakistan every year on business, and you knew the country very well, had your own contacts, what would you see? Well, each year you went there, you would see more and more computers, more and more fax machines, more and more Kodak one-hour development stores, more and more designer restaurants that cater to an expanding Pakistani middle-class, and more and more middle-class kids—the sons of your business associates who seem very much like Americans. You would wonder, well, what’s the problem here? The problem here is just a small part of a much larger picture. Here’s part of a larger picture: take Karachi, Pakistan’s biggest city and business center. Less than one quarter of its garbage is disposed of daily. There is a 25 percent unemployment rate and a probably 40 or 50 percent underemployment rate. Karachi has nine million inhabitants—one million of them live in shanty towns. In southern Pakistan, in the area of Karachi and Sind province, there are about a million drug addicts. Every year for the past ten or fifteen years, during the monsoon season, there

are more and more weeks when there’s no electricity; more and more weeks when there’s no water service—their infrastructure is broken down. And all this occurs as Pakistan long ago presaged Russia’s biggest crime state. Russia would have a long way to go to reach Pakistani’s standards. Also there’s a big deterioration of public order throughout the country. What I’ve been describing is what people refer to as state capacity—the ability of a state to function in the most basic ways, supplying sanitation, water, electricity, etc.

Now look at the demographics. Karachi had 400,000 people in 1947, and I said it has nine million now, and in fact it expands by 400,000 every year. Pakistan adds the equivalent of another Karachi—nine million people—to its population every 2.3 years. Within this increase, there is an exponential increase of job-aged youths—numbers of teenagers, young males especially. There are not going to be enough jobs or schools for these kids. And Pakistan has company:

It’s those kinds of things which are far more telling about the future of the Middle East than any peace negotiations that may or may not be going on between Israeli elites and Syrian elites and Palestinian elites.

The amount of suitable farm land for a rural inhabitant in Pakistan will be cut in half between now and the year 2010. Sixty-five percent of the farm land is already over-irrigated and is waterlogged with too much salt in it, affecting productivity. The water table itself in Pakistan is depleted apace, and it’s probably likely that Hindu-Muslim strife over the next few decades will be aggravated further by a fight for water resources and massive deforestation, which leads to floods and other water availability problems.

Pakistan is a decomposing and overloaded state that each day, every year, each month gets harder and harder to govern by conventional means. By conventional means I mean a centralized government in one place with an overburdened, calcified bureaucracy. Before Benizir Bhutto was deposed, she was not the symbol of female empowerment in the Muslim world. She was the symbol of something far more insipid and banal. She was the symbol of a prime minister who cannot cope, because the problems were already too great, too vast for any normal conventional government to be able to satisfy its people, or to buy them off. But what about those designer restaurants, the fax machines, and the Kodak one-hour development stores that I mentioned above—what’s happening to those? The Karachi stock market is still going up, but as the state collapses, the expanding and thriving middle-class (which is why the stock market is still doing well), finds more and more ingenious ways to build a bubble around itself. In other words, if you’re in a villa and your electricity system breaks down, you buy a power generator. No more water? you dig a well. The police force is no longer confident or dependable; you hire private security guards, use cell phones—things like that. Thus the state is less and less necessary, provided the middle-class is confident and big enough and expanding, and meanwhile, this middle-class, which is building itself up around a collapsing state, is finding more and more links through electronics with middle-classes in China, and the United States, and Europe. So it’s very much like the medieval age, where you had European aristocracies who had more in common with each other than with their own peasants in their own country. Of course, provided a distribution network still exists, the country can implode—it can dissolve—and outside investors can still make money. The best example of this I saw was Coca-cola in Liberia. There may have been a civil war going on, but you could always find cold Coca-cola.

So it didn’t hurt Coke’s business at all, the fact that Liberia was at war. In other words, the world is a very complex place—different things, different trends going on at once, and depending upon which trend you’ve tapped into, you’ll get a positive or negative scenario.

Let’s go to Mexico now. Mexico is not nearly as extreme a case as Pakistan. In fact what makes Mexico so important has nothing to do with the peso prices or who assassinated Colosio, or all the things that hard-news journalists are obsessed about. What makes Mexico important is that it’s the ultimate subtle, middle-of-the-road example of a failing state. It’s not extreme like Pakistan or sub-Saharan Africa, nor is it as bureaucratically insufferable as China or India, nor is it a success story, like Thailand or some other places. It’s your middle-of-the-road place. If you want to see what the developing world is like and what it’s going to be like. Mexico is a good mid-range example.

Mexico’s population growth rate has been coming down rather well for the last few decades, but still, two million Mexicans are added to the population each year, and much more important than that, about a million Mexicans are added to the workforce even after you subtract retiring people who can no longer work. Mexico’s real unemployment rate is around 25 percent. Most economists will tell you that for Mexico merely to tread water, to find decent jobs for these one million workers each year, Mexico’s economy is going to have to grow around four percent, maybe five percent a year. But, according to economists, the best that Mexico can hope for, on the average, is about a three percent growth rate. Wild-eyed optimists and some editorial writers say that Mexico is climbing its way into the first world. That would mean creating good jobs for these one million new workers and many of the others—and demands an economic growth rate of about nine or ten percent. However, the only countries that are growing at that rate are either in East Asia or in the southern cone of South America.

Mexico is going to become poorer and meaner each year, and in addition, more and more Mexicans are going to want to come here. In fact, the aging of the baby boomers will probably necessitate the Hispanization and Asianization of America anyway, because we’re going to have to import large numbers of workers just to produce the taxable income to support baby boomer pensions in 20 or 30 years’ time. What’s most interesting about the population growth in Mexico is that it’s geographically unbalanced. Northern Mexico: two kids per family, like here; southern Mexico has a Central American growth pattern—four, five, six kids per family. And this is part of a larger story. Northern Mexico is little by little falling into an American prosperity sphere: Chihuahua, south Texas, Sonora, southern Arizona. But in the south, Guerrero and Chiapas and other places where similar problems (concerning the environment, population, demographic, and ethnic splits), that I spoke about in Pakistan, exist to a lesser degree. So while southern Mexico is slipping into a kind of Central American chaotic pattern, northern Mexico is being absorbed into us, and in the middle you have city-state Mexico City, where you have millions of people in shanty towns and an increasingly restive and acquisitive and difficult-to-satisfy Mexican middle-class accustomed to Wal-Marts and ATM machines, who the Mexican government finds harder and harder to satisfy.

In Mexico you also have brown zones—places where government rule doesn’t really exist, where the police have basically been taken over by drug people. There is a mixture of big corporations and drug money, with actually quite reasonable economic growth rates, but all going in a kind of amoral trend. The real future of Mexico is this: an Aztec tributary state system of weak fiefdoms forming alliances with each other. In other words, before Mexico had a strong central government, you had, during the Aztecs, a strong government around Mexico City and the Aztecs had alliances with various other Indian groups around the country. We now enter this new roiling phase of Mexican history, which we have not seen since the early part of the century during the protracted Mexican civil wars and revolutions. At that time, when the US military had to send an expeditionary force to chase down Pancho Villa, Mexico was a sideshow. It was 15 percent of our population; Mexico now has more than one-third of our population. America, for 200 years has more or less managed to escape from history, but I don’t think it can any longer, and I think Mexico will be the agent of history that brings America back into the same problems that European nations have had for the last two centuries.

If you think I’ve chosen some extreme examples, let me note that 31 of 46 sub-Saharan African countries rate lower on the United Nations Scale of Human Development than both Pakistan and India. That means the figures and scenario I drew from Pakistan would be much much worse for two out of every three sub-Saharan African countries—let alone Mexico. (Mexico is like Sweden compared to these places.) Of the one-third of sub-Saharan African countries that do rate the same or better than Pakistan in terms of the barometer of variety of indicators—literacy, infant mortality, etc.—most of those are either tiny, off-shore islands 100 or 150 miles off the African mainland or they’re adjacent to South Africa.

The political scientist Paul Kennedy calls Mexico and Pakistan swing states or pivot states—regional powers in a very unruly phase of transition. They could recover, they could also go under. Other examples are India, Indonesia, Brazil, South Africa. We’re very insecure about South Africa. We want to believe the best is possible—that’s why we put a lot of emphasis on the personality of Nelson Mandela, a lot of emphasis on the truth commission, all these moral questions. But there are some things—again I’m playing the role of the pessimist. According to the security consulting firm Kroll Associates, South Africa is the most violent, criminal place on the planet outside of declared war zones, with a murder rate six times that of the US and five times that of Mafia-ridden Russia. It’s the world’s newest major transshipment point for narcotics. In terms of the water table, worse and worse each year. Population growth rate has come down dramatically, but it is still way too high. (Remember, when population growth comes down, it helps a lot twenty years from now, once the number of people being born reach their own childbearing age and there’s a lot less of them to produce children. But it doesn’t really make a difference for the next ten or twenty years.) So South Africa is an example of an unwieldy swing state, where even such a gifted and talented social engineer as Nelson Mandela finds it harder and harder, not easier and easier, every day, each month, each year merely to cope, merely to govern.

So far we’ve seen the collapse of the most marginal states in terms of their population and their affects on their particular regions: Tadzhikistan and Somalia, Liberia, Haiti, a few other places. With all due respect, these are marginal countries. However, there have only been maybe six or seven of them that have really gone under. Think of that: six or seven marginal countries, out of 193 countries in the world, and yet that has been enough to immobilize decision-making bodies in London, in Washington, in the UN. We simply don’t even have answers for this. Now imagine if in the next few years or decades, instead of six or seven, we had nine or ten. Or imagine we still had not six or seven, but one that was a major regional power-pivot state, like Nigeria, with 100 million people. Somalia only has about eight million people, but Nigeria is urbanized and is in a much worse situation than I just described for South Africa. So you see the problem we’re getting into. Within an extremely fragile society whether it’s an agrarian medieval one, like Rwanda, or a more sophisticated regional power like Mexico, all you need is one event, or series of events, which fissures that critical social mass that causes upheaval. Had Wall Street investors paid more attention to the environmental problems in Chiapas, they may have been slightly less surprised at what followed with the peso crisis and all of that.

I think I should explain exactly how population is an indirect aggravator of already existing ethnic tensions. Take Rwanda. Rwanda is a country where the average woman gives birth over eight times over her entire adult lifetime. But if during the last 30 years the average woman in Rwanda was giving birth only two or three times, then imagine just not how many less people there would be, but how much different families would be, how much different social relations would be, how much different politics would be. Because what are politics except the most blunt, macro indicator of interpersonal relations on the street level? Population will never cause upheavals. All it is is an aggravator, an indirect background noise for already existent problems in the society. In the future cultures are increasingly going to be thrown back on their own strengths and weaknesses, and some will generate the requisite social or technical ingenuity and overcome the problems of too many people to feed, too little water to drink, etc., and so what? There is going to be increasingly less that the West can do, because foreign aid budgets, regardless of who is in power in Washington and elsewhere, are going to stay static or decline because there’s probably going to be less income coming in due to aging populations

in the West. Meanwhile third world populations in an absolute sense go up.

In terms of policy, what can we do and, more importantly, what can’t we do? I want to compare for a moment Russia and Africa. Africa has a population 3.75 times that of Russia—almost four times larger than Russia. Russia has a population which is 99 percent literate; the population of sub-Saharan Africa has a much much lower literacy rate. Yet we can have a good argument about whether foreign aid really has any pivotal effect on Russia’s destiny—and the very fact that you can have that argument would show how little chance foreign aid has ever really had to have a pivotal effect on sub-Saharan Africa’s destiny. In other words, the destiny of these territories is going to be determined by worldwide economic factors, by how those cultures themselves change and evolve. They’re not going to be affected much by whether the United States Congress gives five billion or one billion dollars to specific regions each year. During the cold war we had a policy that was mainly oriented towards getting the Red Army out of Eastern Europe. We didn’t try to change anyone’s culture, or anyone’s history. Eastern Europe already had high literacy rates, low birth rates, and many areas of it had already been through a Western enlightenment. Even in cases where we intervened in the third world, we were just trying to replace a left-wing dictatorship with a right-wing one—again, we weren’t trying to change cultures.

But now I find that both neoconservative Reaganites on the right and liberals on the left have far more ambitious motives, and I believe tragically that neither side is being realistic. They want to change the historical personality of whole populations. You can put a gun to a country’s head and say, don’t sell missiles to Iran, but you can’t put a gun to the head of the Haitian people and say, act daily from now on as if you had been through a Western enlightenment. Act daily, from now on, as if you had been through the more modern and enlightened form of French colonialism, rather than the premodern morbid form, which you were consigned to because the French left Haiti in 1804. This is why we’re going to find ourselves very disappointed in terms of our ability to affect change. Does that mean we do nothing and become isolationists? No. What I would recommend is rather than try to prop up democracies in individual countries, our aid program should be aimed at bread and butter regionwide programs aimed at gradually reducing population rates, gradually improving soil, and placing a great deal of emphasis on women’s literacy. The very modest object would be to stabilize the environmental and democratic situation in places like sub-Saharan Africa in, say, 15 years rather than 30 years. Although this may seem a far too conservative goal, I think it’s the most we can do—but that at least we can do. The problem is that these very programs are under threat every time we have a military intervention that either fails or even is perceived to have failed. In the wake of Somalia came drastic cuts in women’s literacy and other programs throughout sub-Saharan Africa. Moral considerations are enough to get the troops there, but if there are any casualties, there’ll be a need for an intersection of morality and strategic interests. The world may be moving, as I believe, from nation states into a global community, but we’re not there yet. We are still in a world where the most powerful nation states are the main actors, and we have to be very attentive to how they have behaved over the last two hundred years. That’s going to show us how they’re going to behave over the next ten or twenty years.

Let’s move on in our journey. The Middle East. Middle East peace negotiators, whether Arabs or Israelis, are going to have decreasing control over their own societies as populations go up and as a lot of these tired, calcified infrastructures and semilegitimate governments throughout the Muslim Middle East find it harder and harder to cope. Take Egypt for example. It gets poorer each year when you measure GDP versus population growth rate. As Egypt undergoes a very unhealthy form of urbanization, increasing religiosity is required to provide the social milieu that holds crime rates down and the society together. People have been flooding into cities in Egypt and in Syria and other places in very unhealthy ways. Yes, you can walk through these cities in the middle of the night with a wallet full of money and nobody is going to rob you, although throughout history, most of the time, increasing urbanization results in an upsurge in crime. That has not happened in the Muslim world—an almost a crime-free society. What’s happened there is a counterbalance. As people leave the servitudes of their rural villages and flood into cities where they’re among strangers, where they’re exposed to all these temptations, they need something else. And that something else is an increasing religiosity, increasing religion. And the irony of this is that this increasing religious climate provides a very fertile petrie dish for the emergence of disease germs in the form of terrorist cells. So terrorism is like the ironic upshot of having low crime rates in the urbanized Muslim Middle East, that is, you don’t get one without the other, take your pick. Meanwhile, Gaza’s population doubles every 14 years; Syria’s population doubles every 18 years. Within these increases again you have exponential increases of young male youths without jobs, who are not going to school, and these are the explosive elements. These are the elements that could undermine any peace deal and which in fact may make any peace deal somewhat irrelevant. What is the Middle East going to look like in ten or twenty years? I think it’s going to look like Mexico in many ways.

Syria, Iraq, and Iran all have very tired dictatorships. The Syrian regime has put history on hold for 20 years, but it’s still not a real country. Iraq is a carapace of tyranny, that hides a hollow core underneath. Iraqi dictators have been in power since the British left, but none have lasted as long and have been so overwhelmingly authoritarian as this one. There’s a tight governmental structure on top and tight families structures at the bottom, but all the civic institutional associational ties, which makes civil society, have been destroyed right in the middle. So the next time there’s a change in government in Iraq, there’s going to be real upheaval.

The Iranian government, aside from Turkey and Israel, is ironically the most democratic in the region, but that doesn’t mean much. Able to plant bombs on airplanes abroad but it can’t raise the price of fuel more than two or three cents without parliament bickering for nine months about it, the Iranian government is internally very weak. The last time an Iranian government collapsed, the population in Iran was half of what it is today, with half the level of urbanization. Turkey too. In Turkey two peoples—Turks and Kurds—are fighting for the same land mass. The Turkish secular political establishment is totally bankrupt, out of ideas, and has nothing left but personality battles between the various leaders, and that has allowed a minority fundamentalist regime to take power. The only thing that holds stability together in Turkey is the military. Without the military there would be no democracy. It’s something people like to cheer about but the fact is it’s a facade. As all these dictatorships in the Arab world go, and as Turkey evolves more, we’re not going to have the kind of total dissolution that we’ve seen north in parts of Central Asia, because the Middle East is an area where you have real consumer mentalities and consumer economies developed (which was not the case in the former Soviet Union), and that allows for more stability.

Two decades from now, we could look back upon the period of the Arab-Israeli wars and the West’s wars against the mullahs of Iran and Sadam Hussein, and see it as kind of a romantic sepia-toned age. When the good guys and the bad guys were easy to discern, when the conflicts were very bifurcated, one ethnic group—Arabs—versus another—Jews. Where it was a relatively simple world, where our national interests were relatively simple to figure out. It’s going to be a much more thankless and complex Middle East in the future. In looking at the world, keep in mind that violent upheavals will not so much be generated by poverty but by development of success, which leads to expectations that can never be met. That’s the key to all the instability in the future. It’s not poverty; it’s precisely the world economic growth rates that are driving upheaval in many of these places. Again, that’s why both the optimists and pessimists are right. Pessimists are talking about cataclysm; optimists are saying but look at these growth rates. There’s no contradiction; one in fact is causing the other. Many of the worst problems are occurring precisely in the parts of the world that have been the most successful economically. Remember two years ago there was a plague in the city of Surat, northwest of Bombay? Surat is one of the most successful places in India. It’s so successful that workers were flooding in from poor areas, finding jobs, building shanty towns, and the sewage system was overwhelmed, because it’s another case of failing state capacity. As I said in Pakistan, the government couldn’t cope. The sewage system was overwhelmed, they had an unusually hot summer and the two things contributed to the plague.

So a third world success story, as businessmen actually call it, means a third world country in the most fragile, volatile phase of development. What’s really happening is this: yes, the middle-class is getting bigger and yes the rich are getting richer—but so too are the poor. When the poor leave their traditional rustic villages, where on an economic graph they were not earning an income, and they move into shack towns outside the city, getting industrial jobs on an assembly line, they are earning an income, which they didn’t earn before. Bang! It’s a third world success story. Income rates go up. But suddenly these low-wage earners are filled with yearning ambition and they’re even harder to satisfy than they were when they were poor. Before they had no ambition—now they’re full of ambition and they find themselves cheek to jowl everyday in urban settings with people of other ethnic groups. So it’s this very success, this very creation of new subproletariats outside of third world towns that contributes to all the instability.

Another problem with growth rates is that they’re so crude they’re almost worthless. Take Ghana for instance. Ghana is a West African success story. What does that mean? It means it’s got maybe a six percent GDP growth rate. But on the coast, on the Gulf of Guinea, in Accra, and other places, the Ghanaian middle-classes’ income is raising maybe ten percent a year. In the interior, in the north, where there’s overpopulation, soil depletion, etc. etc., wages have actually been going down. That is one of the reasons why in 1994, after the Assistant Secretary of State here called Ghana a West African success story, almost on cue there was massive ethnic violence in northern Ghana, where over a thousand people were killed. They were being killed not because the Assistant Secretary of State was wrong, but because he was right. It was a West African success story, and this economic upheaval was causing more income disparities between people rather than less. Capitalism is the bull in the china shop with history. Precisely because it’s capitalism it cannot be controlled. You’re never going to have even, stable growth and that’s why if you’re going to predict where there’s going to be trouble in the future, don’t look at the basket cases. Look precisely at the places a lot of people consider successes and have their hopes on. That’s why I’m so worried about South Africa. South Africa does have that level of growth, does have that level of investment, but it’s got all these other indicators that are just going right through the floor. Remember something about democracy. If democracy doesn’t deliver the goods, if it doesn’t deliver reasonable growth rates within a reasonable period of time, something else will replace it, simple as that. Either a new form of quasi-anarchy or quasi-tyranny or something—but it has a statute of limitations built into it. That’s why world growth aggregates are deceptive. They represent the beginning of knowledge, not the end of knowledge. Think of the world as sort of a gawky, six-foot adolescent, 13 years old, with a lot of pimples on his face. That’s the kind of economic stage were at; this was the economic stage Iran was at in the late seventies. Prior to the Iranian Revolution, Iran had just gone through the highest, quickest rates in income growth of any country in world history as long as statistics had been calculated. The average Iranian had seen his wage double from the mid-sixties to the overthrow of the Shah. Then suddenly there was a slight economic downturn and boom, upheaval. That incredible fast-forward economic growth created a massive subproletariat flooding out of villages into the cities that suddenly was harder to satisfy. During a brief moment, when there was a brief depression and overloading of the economy, the Shah suddenly found he was without the economic wherewithal to bribe his own people. Then—boom—you had an upheaval. In terms of world growth rates, the world is like Iran at the end of the late seventies. By the way, according to the UN, the impressive world growth rates are being driven by just about 15 countries or so. And we know where those are, mainly in the Far East. Eighty-nine countries have seen their living standards go down over the last decade.

Let me bring up another issue here. I’ve noticed that both liberal and conservatives like to make fun of and trash Lee Kuan Yew, the President of Singapore. He seems to make everybody uncomfortable and insecure, because here is a guy who is an authoritarian dictator who puts monitors in toilets so you get a fine in the mail if you forget to flush. But in the 1960s Singapore was as poor as many of the places in Africa I’ve spoken about—as poor as Pakistan—yet now, it’s rated number one by the world business community as the place with the highest quality of life to do business. It’s easy to talk about democracy and authoritarianism in the comfortable surroundings of New York, but if you’re someone from the third world who otherwise just wants to get up in the morning and get to work without groups of thugs in khaki uniforms carjacking you or assaulting you, Lee Kuan Yew doesn’t sound so bad. All I’m saying is, don’t automatically be assured that democracy is going to be the best system every place all the time. The jury is still out on that. I’m not a pessimist, I’m an optimist. I just think the next 30 or 40 years are going to be quite difficult for about eighty countries or so. I believe that human beings are destined to feel a real sense of common community, even a sort of earth-wide patriotism. And if you just look at social evolution, you’ll see this: In prehistory you just had tribal conflicts, people coming into contact, fighting and the loser ran away to somewhere else. Then you had river valley civilizations and once the river valley civilizations got a bit too big, then they started to split up into subgroups, by class, ethnicity, whatever—like subcells dividing out from a main cell. Then we saw nations and patriotism, so we’re in the beginning of a very long-term unwieldy transition. Over the next few decades, as the earth’s population doubles from 5.5 to 11 billion people, a world community of sorts will emerge, but at the same time states are going to dissolve, in many cases, into regions. (We see this in Italy.)

All this should be very disorienting and disconcerting for those happy with the nation state as it already is. We’ve been blessed, living in a nation state that is probably one of the most functioning in world history, for a reasonable period of time. People tend to see change as very disconcerting, but remember that nothing is stable in history. The old order is always dying, the new order is always yet to be born, and all ethics are always ethics of transition. And optimism and pessimism are merely reflections of how one views change.