Coming Back to Tell You More

My Bohemian Neighborhood

On Monday evening, out in the shade of a basswood tree, I finished Karel Capek's War With the Newts. When I first picked it up and began reading, I skipped the introduction to go straight to the story, and so I was expecting something other than what I found in the book's pages. Finally, about halfway through the book, I turned back to read the introduction. What I'd expected, you see, was some kind of roman à clef, a fictionalized account of political events of the post-WWI period in Czechoslovakia, and I wondered how much, if anything, I would understand of the story. Well, it isn't that at all.

Capek's scope is broader, his vision wider, and both plot and characters are much more original (I'm guessing) than any thinly disguised series of events between the two world wars would exhibit. I mean, a colony of surviving prehistoric newt-like creatures bred as cheap labor that eventually become "civilized" enough to overtake the world? Really?

Given that Capek was of the same generation as Kafka, it is astonishing how well the warnings of this very innovative novel speak to our twenty-first century world. Suspicion and fear of the Other, of course, are nothing new in human life. Today's unblinking focus on globalization, however -- the insatiable hunger for global markets, ruthless competition for faster, higher profits and ever-cheaper labor, the resulting instability and upheaval and terror in one part of the world after another -- all these facets of our world today can be found in The War with the Newts.

The story begins with a Dutch ship's captain who encounters the "creatures" off a South Seas island. Natives are afraid of them and call them "devils," but the captain sees possibilities in their ability to dive for pearl-bearing oysters, and especially in the little value the creatures place on the pearls. He trades them knives for pearls, after a while other tools for pearls, and the newts (not yet called 'newts' in the story) quickly gain an advantage over their one natural enemy, sharks.

It is the sea captain's meeting with a "captain of industry" that unleashes the eventual Newt Age upon the world. At first all is positive, everyone seeing nothing but an enlargement of prosperity -- for humans, anyway, if not for enslaved newts:

Real self-respecting men of the Newt Age will no longer waste their time pondering about the substance of things [questions of religion and philosophy]; they will only be concerned with their quantity and mass production. The whole future of the world lies in the continuous increase in production and consumption; therefore there must be still more Newts to produce and to devour still more.

Shallow-water, ocean-living creatures, the newts' special skill is in constructing dams offshore, and so they are shipped around the world and set to work building land, so that countries with ocean shoreline might increase their territory. Worldwide trade in newts is big money, uncomfortably like slave trade. Although of course those trading in newts and buying them as laborers insist that the newts are very well treated, groups form to agitate for newts' education (they quickly acquire languages) and rights. International conferences are held, international agreements hammered out by nation-states, but the newts are citizens of no state, and so no state feels obliged to negotiate with them directly. The newts, however, multiply much more quickly than the humans....

When Captain Van Toch first comes to the door of G. H. Bondy to discuss the opportunity awaiting anyone with the foresight to exploit the clever newts, Bondy's doorman, or porter, Mr. Povondra, might have turned him away. Van Toch was not known to Mr. Povondra and had no appointment. But for some reason he sees the visitor in, a very small decision that has very large consequences for the entire world and the future of the human race. And so, for several years, Mr. Povondra is an avid reader of newspapers and collector of clippings about the newts.

Mr. Povondra received day by day whole bales of documents in all the languages of the world, of which especially the papers printed in Cyrillic or in the Greek alphabet, in the Hebrew, Arabic, Chinese, Bengali, Tamil, Javanese, Burmese or Taalik script filled him with pious respect. "When I only realize," he used to murmur over them, "that all this would not have been without me!"

He is proud to have had, though a person very modestly placed, nowhere near centers of political power, a pivotal role in world history. With later events, his pride becomes regret, but there is no going back.

Capek's manner of telling his story borrows generously from nonfiction. He uses the format of newspaper articles in some sections, quotes from propaganda, scientific papers and presentation, and he makes extensive and occasionally hilarious use of footnotes. Some footnotes go on for several pages and take on the feel of short pieces of fiction in themselves.

Why is Capek's novel (he also wrote plays) nowhere near as famous as the works of Kafka? In the final chapter of The War with the Newts, the author argues with himself:

"...Listen, do you really want to let the whole of mankind perish?" 

The author frowned. "Don't ask me what I want. Do you think that through my will human continents are falling to bits, do you think that I wanted this to happen? It is simply the logic of events; as if I could intervene. I did what I could; I warned them in time.... I preached, don't let the Newts have arms and explosives, stop that hideous trade in Salamanders, well--you know what happened. They all had a thousand absolutely sound economical and political reasons why it's impossible. I'm not a politician or an economist; I can't change their opinions, can I? What is one to do? The earth will probably sink and drown; but at least it will be the result of generally acknowledged political and economic ideas, at least it will be accomplished with the help of the science, industry, and public opinion, with the application of all human ingenuity! No cosmic catastrophe, nothing but state, official, economic, and other causes. Nothing can be done to prevent it."

In Capek's novel the humans, by using newts to enlarge land for nations, diminished the shallow seas necessary for the newts' survival. It was only a matter of time before the exploding newt population demanded their seas back. The humans had dug their own grave.

Science fiction, political satire, dark humor, fanciful dystopia, innovative literature. War With the Newts is all that and deserves to be better known and widely read. If you don't believe me, here is someone else's pitch for the book.

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In a much happier frame of mind, we will visit freshwater shoreline on Thursday evening, beginning at 7 o’clock, when photographer Ken Scott and painter Kaye Krapohl come to Dog Ears Books to share their stories behind the beautiful book featuring their work, Leelanau Trek: One Shoreline, Two Visions. Please join us!

Morning Reading: Back for the Last Few Chapters

“Do you have time to read?” one of the first people in the bookstore door asked me this morning? Not so much here at work, I told her, but I get up early. This morning I read between 7 and 8 a.m., but I’m often up by 5 or 6 a.m. (more time to read) or occasionally up at 3 a.m. to read a while before falling back to sleep for the rest of the night.

(How could I sell books if I didn’t read them? When I told my sister once that I felt guilty about reading, she sternly told me to buck up: “It’s part of your job!” There’s another question behind that one, however: Why would I want to sell books if I didn’t read? For the challenge alone?)

Thursday was a surprisingly busy bookstore day, with annual visitors from Chicago, part-time residents from Pennsylvania, old Leland neighbors, and others who have become dear friends over the years. There were first-time visitors, too, as is often the case in summer. So when I woke in the middle of the night and thought about getting up to read on the porch, I managed to go back to sleep instead and not get up until the sun was up, too,

and that’s when I finished the final gripping chapters of Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity, by Katherine Boo.

The undercity in the book's subtitle is a slum called Annawadi, a makeshift settlement cheek-by-jowl with the official city’s modern airport and high-rise motels. Annawadi residents live in shacks built of whatever materials they can scrape together, and they make their lives pretty much the same way they build their homes, children sorting through garbage for recyclable materials they can sell to buy food for their families. Around the airport a tall fence plastered with advertising keeps the poor at a distance and hides them from international travelers, one floor covering advertised promising to remain BEAUTIFUL FOREVER BEAUTIFUL FOREVER BEAUTIFUL FOREVER ... FOREVER ... FOREVER ....

Katherine Boo spent three and a half years, with three different interpreters, interviewing residents of Annawadi for this book, determined to learn how ordinary low-income people, especially children, were navigating “the age of global markets.” Over and over, she found them improvising and adapting.

Behind the Beautiful Forevers is a nonfiction book, extensively researched, that reads like the most gripping of novels. We come to feel we know various characters intimately and share their struggles and defeats, hopes and dreams. Katherine Boo in her “Author’s Note” at the book’s conclusion writes:

Just as the story of Annawadi is not representative of a country as large and diverse as India, it is not a neat encapsulation of the state of poverty and opportunity in the twenty-first-century world. Still, in Annawadi, I was struck by commonalities with other poor communities in which I’ve spent time.

In the age of globalization—an ad hoc, temp-job, fiercely competitive age—hope is not a fiction.

Much else that reads like fiction in this book is not, for example, the boy Abdul’s musings about water and ice.

Water and ice were made of the same thing. He thought most people were made of the same thing, too. He himself was probably little different, constitutionally, from the cynical, corrupt people around him.... If he had to sort all humanity [as he sorted garbage] by its material essence, he thought he would probably end up with a single gigantic pile. But here was the interesting thing. Ice was distinct from—and in his view, better than—what it was made of.  

He wanted to be better than what he was made of. In Mumbai’s dirty water, he wanted to be ice.

Abdul is a real person, and the image of ice was his. He wanted to have ideals and to believe in justice, despite his experiences with corrupt police and judges and hurried, overworked courts. And Abdul is only one of the real human beings you will meet and come to know in this unforgettable story.

“Would it make a good choice for a book club?” I was asked by the same woman who asked if I have time in my life to read. Definitely. Without a doubt. It is part of our real world of today, presented to us in human terms, in the lives of individuals with real names. Not surprisingly, it received for its Pulitzer-winning author a National Book Award for the year 2012.

Paper, $16

[The flowers in today's post, brought by friends Ed and Don, came from the U-Pick gardens in Omena, between Peshawbestown and Northport.]

Guest Blogger: Laurie Attends a Video Conference in Spain

My friend Laurie in Kalamazoo writes as follows:

All--

Here are notes I took on a video of an excellent Master Class speech given by Chilean economist and environmentalist Manfred Max Neef.  The talk was given at the International University of Andalucía (Huelva, Spain), on December 1, 2009. Says Wikipedia,  

Max Neef, in 1982, won the Right Livelihood Award, known as the Alternative Nobel Prize, for his work in poverty-stricken areas of developing countries. He has worked with the problem of development in the Third World, describing the inappropriateness of conventional models of development that have contributed to poverty, debt and ecological disasters for Third World communities.

Here’s a link to the video of the conference http://cuva.uta.cl/index.php?option=com_k2&view=item&id=1042:600-a%C3%B1os-de-un-mundo-sin-hambr

Below are the notes I jotted. (I apologize for any glaring errors – I was listening in Spanish and jotting in English.) Well worth reading. 

Laurie Kaniarz

THE WORLD ON A COLLISION COURSE


Manfred Max Neef


(Laurie’s Notes)



When FAO (Food & Agriculture Organization) announced in October [2009] that 1 billion people around the world are hungry, and it would take $30 billion in aid annually to save these lives, at the same time, 6 Central Banks (US, EU, Japan, Canada, England, Switzerland) injected $180 billion into financial markets to save private banks, and have continued to do so, so that, as of September 2009, they’ve injected $17 trillion into the private banks.  $17 trillion is enough to save the world from hunger for 600 years. Where is that money now?



(Regarding the law of supply and demand: there’s much more demand for bread than plastic surgery, more need for a cure for malaria than haute couture dresses.  We need a referendum: do we want to save lives or banks? There’s never enough for those who have nothing.  Always enough for those who have everything.)

This is the most repugnant news I’ve ever heard.

There’s a 4-way convergence:


1. Exponential climate change


2. The end of cheap fuel


3. Diminishment of genetic natural resources: fresh water, energy, forests, fishing, wildlife, subsoil, coral reefs


4. Gigantic speculative bubble – 50 times greater than the real economy (interchange of goods and services)



The causes of this convergence:


1. The predominant paradigm of present-day economics is that we tend toward economic development at any cost, and this stimulates corporate greed.


2. Devouring fossil fuels propels that economic greed


3. Promotion of consumerism as the road to happiness


4. Destruction of traditional cultures and values to improve the industrial economic model


5. Scorn for the planet with the production of waste



There is danger in this for the environment and society.  Global warming implies the loss of productive soils, storms, hurricanes, desertification – all having implications for the poorest people on the planet. All systems are dependent on fuels.  There will be a further diminishment of species by 50% in the next decades.

 We have to accept the limits of what the earth can handle.

 We must move from “efficiency” to “sufficiency,” and solve inequality, because without equality, peaceful solutions are not possible.  We must replace the dominant values of greed, competition and accumulation with solidarity, cooperation and compassion.  Adjust ourselves to lower levels of production/consumption, favoring local economies. LOOK WITHIN once again, rather than outward.



We’re in the 21^st century, trying to solve our problems with 19^th century economics, even though we no longer use 19th century physics, biology, anthropology, medicine, etc.

 Economic “neo-liberalism” is a pseudo religion.  It conquered the world in a few decades, which religion [Christianity, Laurie?] couldn’t do in 2000 years.



Myth 1: Globalization is the only way to development.  Between 1960-1980, “don’t import what you can produce at home.” Between 1980-2000 this was replaced by deregulation, privatization, elimination of international trade barriers, and full openness to foreign investment.  Between ’60-’80, the poorest developing countries grew 2%.  Between ’80-’00, they had declined 0.5%.



Myth 2: Greater integration in the global economy is good for the poor. But it causes the poor countries to look outward rather than at their own people’s needs.  The 7 richest countries are 50 times richer now than the poorest 7.



Myth 3: Comparative advantage is the best way to ensure prosperity – “free world trade.” Prices can be lower, but 
costs to society & environment are enormous.



Myth 4: More globalization + more jobs. There are fewer jobs in countries of origin, more sub-employment in the outsourcing countries.



Myth #5: Globalization is democratic and transparent. Decisions about world commerce are made by unelected bureaucrats who work behind closed doors in Geneva [World Monetary Fund - WMF].  Their decisions cannot be appealed.  If a country that receiving translational investment has an inconvenient law, it must abolish the law. This affects the very idea of democracy if it has to adapt to the interests of the corporation. 

The WMF has no rules about child labor or labor rights.  All rules benefit the corporations.  Poor countries are prohibited from producing their own generic drugs, for example: they’re obligated to buy from transnationals. Africa has the resources, but can’t produce its own drugs.  The WMF is dedicated to ensuring that corporations govern the world.  Imports and exports are not between countries but between corporations.

Myth #6:  Globalization is unavoidable. ANYTHING arising from politics is reversible. What needs to be done is to take back local decisions that bring consumption back to the local market.  A human-scale economy.

New rules could be: 

- Profits flow back as much as possible to their place of origin.  Unsustainable – taking up huge amounts of resources – is transport over huge distances. In Chile, in the huge, state-of-the-art dairy producing region of the country, I unwrapped a butter packet that came from New Zealand.  It’s cheaper if you look at it from the point of view of an economist, but prices never tell the truth.  The cost of the environmental impact of shipping, to economists, has a value of “0.” Plus, the shipping was subsidized by New Zealand – also a value of “0.” The fact that local producers will go bankrupt – “0.” Same with energy: “This type of [alternative] energy is more expensive.” End of story.

But it’s only “more expensive” depending on how you make the calculation.  If you give value to the impacts, that which is deemed “more expensive” becomes cheaper. 

- Bring back safeguards to local economies with tariffs and quotas to avoid monopolies.

- Ecological taxes.  Taxes on energy use that causes pollution and negative impacts.  We’ve created a “fun” society and we pay taxes on that.  We should pay taxes on the bad, too. They tax you for working, for investing, but not for dirtying, polluting, destroying – you get to do that for free. You should be taxed for how many kilowatts you use rather than on how much you earn.  This would have a formidable impact on world economy.  They are doing this in Scandinavian countries.

- In Sweden, eco-municipalities receive the benefits of income tax, not the State.  You pay your tax and immediately see – and have influence on – how it’s used, in the place where you live.



I propose this new economy for the 21^st Century, with 5 principal postulates:



1.  The economy should serve the people – the people should not serve the economy.


2. Development has to be with/for people, not objects


3. Growth is not the same as development, and development does not necessarily need growth.


4. No economy is possible at the exclusion of the services provided by ecosystems.


5. Economy is a subsystem of a great system – the biosphere – and so permanent growth is impossible.



A fundamental principle value I propose to sustain the new economy:

 No economic interest, under any circumstance, should ever be held above the reverence for life on the planet.

 But what we have today is exactly the opposite of what I have postulated:



- We’re in a world in which each of us is at the service of economic interests, not the opposite.


- We identify economic development as who has the most cellphones, computers, etc.  The human being disappears in the process.


- There is an obsession with growth as the only measure, but growth is a quantitative measure, and development is a liberation of creative potentials.

 All living systems grow until they stop growing, but they don’t stop developing. We’ve all stopped growing, but we’re in this room [at the conference] because we haven’t stopped developing – more ideas, more information.  Growth has limits, development doesn’t.



My hero, a man I consider the greatest thinker, Kenneth Boulding, said, “Anyone who thinks permanent growth is possible on a finite planet is either crazy or an economist.” [Kenneth Ewart Boulding (January 18, 1910 – March 18, 1993) was an economist, educator, peace activist, poet, religious mystic, devoted Quaker, systems scientist, and interdisciplinary philosopher. He was cofounder of General Systems Theory and founder of numerous ongoing intellectual projects in economics and social science. - Wikipedia]

No economy is possible at the exclusion of the services provided by the ecosystem.  The economy is a closed system that doesn’t relate to families or nature.  Economists think they don’t need to know about pollination.
 Growth can’t be infinite on a finite planet.  If I want to blow up a big balloon, I can’t blow it up bigger than the room I’m in.

There is a need for reverence for life. Too many people say, “Life doesn’t mean anything … as long as I can do business.” Millions of children are slaves. According to UNICEF and other organizations, in the 21^st century, there are more slaves in the world than when slavery was abolished in the 19^th century. Tens of millions of slaves, two-thirds of them children.  It doesn’t show up in the news.  “With so many kids in the world, who cares?”  Why doesn’t it show up?  SLAVERY IS GOOD BUSINESS – YOU CAN MAKE GOOD MONEY AT IT.

Don’t expect the solution to come down from Mt. Sinai.  It’s up to us.  It starts with each one acting according to his/her belief system and loves.  Don’t ask yourself, “But what can I do?”  That’s defeatist.  ANY ONE OF US can do something at any moment that could change history.

 Examples:  Gandhi got sick of being discriminated against as “colored.” He started out being a nobody, a lawyer, but defeated the most powerful nation on earth. Rosa Parks sat in the white section of a bus and said, “I’m too tired to move.” She was [considered] less than nobody, but sparked the civil rights movement.  They both acted according to their beliefs. 

This won’t happen to you if you always adapt to what you don’t believe in.  Don’t act according to what’s best for you – advice we all get – but what’s best for all.  We all get this bad advice – I’ve given it myself, and I apologize to anyone I’ve ever given it to: “You’ve got to see your goals clearly to know where you want to go.” If you look toward one fixed goal, you won’t see the people you trample on to get there.  It’s a miserable life if you do what you “should” rather than what you MUST do.  The way you can have a happy life is living according to your beliefs.



Here’s some better advice: Drift and steer in a state of alert/attention.  This doesn’t mean you’re at the mercy of the current.  Life is like surfing: you can’t decide where you’re going to end up on the beach because you can’t predict what the waves will do.  But if you’ve got all your antennae up, if you make judgments about what to do as each condition comes up, you’ll end up somewhere along the beach. 

Creativity encourages us to create a world in which we are all relatively happy.

People who know where they’re going never discover anything because they’re obsessed with where they’re going.  But “obstacles” are all the adventure.


Manfred Max Neef’s bibliography includes:

0.Max-Neef, Manfred A (1992) (pdf). From the Outside Looking In: Experiences in Barefoot Economics. Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation. pp. 208. ISBN 1-85649-188-9. http://www.max-neef.cl/download/Max_Neef_From_the_outside_looking_in.pdf. Retrieved 2011-02-15.

0.Max-Neef, Manfred A; Antonio Elizalde, Martin Hopenhayn (1991) (pdf). Human Scale Development. The Apex Press. pp. 114. ISBN 0-945257-35-X. http://www.max-neef.cl/download/Max neef_Human_Scale_development.pdf. Retrieved 2011-02-15.

0.Max-Neef, Manfred A; Paul Ekins (1992). Real-Life Economics: Understanding Wealth Creation. Routledge. pp. 432. ISBN 0-415-07976-4. http://www.gettextbooks.co.uk/search/?isbn=9780415079761. Retrieved 2011-02-15.

Laurie Kaniarz is a graduate of Kalamazoo College. She has lived and traveled in Spain and South America and is currently employed by Foods Resource Bank in Kalamazoo. FRB is not an emergency aid organization but works to move people in poor countries toward long-term, sustainable food security.

...old photo of Laurie and me in Leland's historic Fishtown....