Differences

This shows you the differences between two versions of the page.

--- catastrophes [2018/05/19 05:28]
Richard Greeman
+++ catastrophes [2019/02/23 08:44]
admin [NARRATIVES]
@@ Line 125: / Line 125: @@
 But  the  rich and  the  politicians  heard  about  it  because  a  few  over-their-head  ecologists,  who  had decided  that  the  human race  had  done  too  much  damage  and  should  drown,  ratted  out  NOAH’s  plans  to  the  cops.So  the  politicians and  the  rich  folks  and the  police  came  running  with  their  guns to  take  what  the  workers  had  made  for  their own  use.    They  had lots  of  practice  at  such  theft,  since  that  is  their  day  job.But  this  time,  their  plans  to  seize  the  ships  for  their  own  use  were  pretty  obvious,so  it  made  it  easier  for  the workers  to  know  what  to  do.  They  fought  back.    When  most  everybody  and  everything  were  on  board,  they sent  a  herd  of  aurochs  running  down  the  pier  to  shove  the  attackers  back.And  so  NOAH  sailed  off  with  great  hopes,  leaving  the  rich  and  the  politicians  beside the  collapsing  levees  in their  designer  galoshes  and  silken  raincoats—trying  to  make  life  jackets  out  of  bales  of  End-Run  stock.  After some  weeks  on  the  waters,  NOAH  and  the  people  and  animals  and  plants  landed.  They  built  monuments  to the  aurochs  for  giving  their  all,  and  to  the  workers  of  NOAH  for  saving  all  but  the  aurochs.
 === Now ===
+== Restoring the Earth ==
+Little by little the natural order was re-establishing itself on earth. In the agricultural countries of the South, the peasants had taken back the good lands expropriated by invaders and used to cultivate luxury products for export to rich countries. These export commodities —coffee, tea, cocoa, sugar, bananas, spices – had been produced by the labor of impoverished natives reduced to semi-slavery. Their children had ended up in horrible favelas, bidonvilles, slums and urban projects where they lived on garbage. In the name of “free markets,” rich monopolies had ruined peasant markets by flooding them with produce at the lowest prices. That unfair competition was subsidized by the “democratic” governments that offered gross subsidies to big agro-business enterprises.
+In Africa today, there are museums devoted to the 'chocolate children'. Pathetic huts, child drawings, photographs and recorded interviews bear witness to a common early 21st Century practice. It was a memorial of the sufferings of parents too poor to feed their own children who ended up selling them to manpower merchants and never seeing them again.  These merchants sold them to cocoa cultivators who starved them while making them work endless hours picking cocoa  to fulfill contracts with the multinationals. Companies like Nestlé resold these chocolates to children in industrial countries at prices twenty to a hundred times the cost of production. Interviews revealed that none of these children had ever seen, much less tasted a chocolate bar.
+During the planetary Emergence, these poor peasants of Africa, Latin America, and Asia organized and struggled to take back their traditional lands. Their first goal was to become  self-sufficient nutritionally by planting traditional subsistence crops. At the same time on part of the land, they  continued to farm the sugar, cocoa, coffee, spices and other commodities that city workers like to eat, to use for trade. Women had long provided the labor and commercial savvy for agriculture in Africa, and now their energy and experience was united as they took the initiative long monopolized by male profiteers and armed thugs.
+Regular trade or barter was re-established spontaneously from the very beginning of the reconstruction period. Sailors and aircrew who brought emergency relief and the technical aid for things like irrigation and communication, didn’t return home with their planes and boats empty. They filled them with good things for workers of the world’s metropoles. Railroaders, truckers, sailors and aviation crews had played a primordial role by bringing aid. After medication and food came tools with teams of aid-workers and technicians working in cooperation with local assemblies. They helped the peasants dig wells, construct cisterns and irrigate. They helped push back the hunger, thirst, and diarrhoea that had for so long tortured the Billions in the south of the planet.
+Thus the natural rapport between city and country was re-established almost spontaneously in outbursts of solidarity, mutual help and cooperation. For the first time in five imperialist centuries, nobody was dying of hunger either in the rich fields of the earth or in the slums of great opulent cities.
+Today in 2117 we live on a planet where vast desert lands have been reclaimed through irrigation and the revival of long-dormant native seeds, where new forests have been planted to halt erosion, prevent desertification, and absorb CO2 while releasing oxygen, where animal and vegetable waste matter is recycled as nature fertilizer, where permaculture techniques have replaced chemical fertilizers and pesticides, where small farmers flourish and provide fresh, healthy, seasonal produce to local markets which also serve to unite communities, etc, etc.
+Yet all this was not only possible, it was already actually happening in a century ago on a small scale in the interstices of capitalist society, visible elements of the new world growing within the old.
+We now look back in horrified amazement at the world of 2017 — a planet of continued enclosures where forest people were exterminated and forests cut down to graze cattle for McDonald's burgers, where peasants were legally deprived of the right to plant their own seeds and forced to buy them from global monopolies like Montsanto, where peasants routinely committed suicide to escape the overwhelming burden of debt, where traditional subsistance farmers in Mexico
+were ruined by the dumping of huge amounts of cheap industrially-produced corn into local markets, where vast factory-farms, owned by banks and conglomerates, were making billions transforming inputs of petroleum-based chemical fertilizers and pesticides into mega-tons of uniformly tasteless produce designed to attract the eye and to remain salable for weeks after harvesting, where agricultural products were transported thousands of miles to markets at a huge cost in carbon pollution, where monopolistic distribution chains paid farmers ridiculously low prices for their produce and suck up enormous profits overcharging customers, where nearly half of this excess produce went to waste in the 'advanced' while famines raged across half the world, where food riots out periodically broke out in Asia, and where the extraction of petroleum for industrial agriculture and the clear-cutting of forests for profitable luxury crops like palm oil contributed massively to global warming and impending climate catastrophe.
+==== Catastrophes II ====
+[[catastrophes2|Catastrophes Writing Project II]], March 3, 2019

Future Historians

User Tools

Site Tools

Differences

Page Tools