ClimateWar

The WSJ - once a bastion of climate change deniers - recently published a feature lift-out explicitly acknowledging the threat of global warming and environmental crisis: The Need for Geoengineering.

 The authors solution is global, corporate, geo-engineering. The problem isn’t that we have not “engineered” too much, we have not “engineered” enough.

You can hear the same arguments from the far-right - and increasingly liberals and blue-greens - on all kinds of issues.

The problem isn’t with capitalism, or conservatism. The problem is that we haven’t engineered the planet enough. We haven’t been conservative enough, capitalist enough. The problem isn’t that we shouldn’t be fighting in Iraq of AfPak, the problem is that we are not fighting harder with more troops. 

The corporate geo-engineers are co-opting the momentum created by the climate change campaigners (with Al Gore the self-appointed saviour) and justifying a further expansion of human domination of the living planet.

Radical historian of science David F Noble calls this the Corporate Climate Coup (audio from Vancouver Cooperative Radio and and text from ZNET in a mashup at Permaculture TV)

1. Corporate Climate Campaigns: Denial vs Trade - Corporate Climate Coup - Part 1
   
2. Anti-Globalisation - Corporate Climate Coup - Part 2
   
3. Climate Commisars & Community Climate Campaigns - Corporate Climate Coup - Part 3

RAND corporation had a military analyst research and publish a couple of papers on the potential for perennial polyculture to be used to save the environment and create employment. Perennial Polyculture Farming: Seeds of Another Agricultural. Revolution?. (Research Brief)

His conclusion was that it might be difficult to find a place for perennial polyculture in todays market place.

However, with the growth of corporate “fair-trade” branding such as Mc Donalds fair-trade coffee, and the awareness raising of such movies as Food Inc, perennial polyculture will become a value-add for corporations looking for environmental sustainability and better branding.

A recent book, by University of Davis couple, have managed to “marry their separate fields to argue logically for the use of GM technologies to improve organic agriculture” Tomorrow’s Table: Organic Farming, Genetics, and the Future of Food

So the elements are being assembled for a McGaia future. A family friendly, geo-, genetic & socially engineered organic perennial polyculture planet.

Unless resistance and alternatives are created, such as worker-cooperatives, popular inquiries, community associations etc, a nested, fractaline organisation of work and community democracy, we will find that corporations are perfectly able to adapt and co-opt the techniques that have been nurtured by the permaculture and associated movements. 

As Mollison says, permaculture is more than a gardening system. Its about fair share, people and earth care.

Chomsky recently spoke Noam Chomsky on the Past 10 Years: Seattle ‘99 to WSF to Climate in ‘09 and said that it is up to us to decide if that extends to international solidarity and a global system of management that integrates and coordinates democracy in the community and the workplace from the bottom-up. 

We can choose between a hellish ecocide (ecological disaster), a McGaia sustainment (military-industrial sustainability) or a global framework of Gaia Permaculture. A framework which gives rights to all of nature, including the poor, and especially the living ecologies.

See also Monsanto and Gates Foundation in Africa, Stuffed & Starved etc

See Soils of War, GRAIN