Permaculture Institute of Australia
Confessions of a Permaculture Aid Worker, Episode 10: Peppi in Malta
Ring a Mate
Only Two Months to Go Until the Next Biggest Event in Permaculture
Morocco Observations, Past, Present and Future – Part II
Weekly Linkfest – Edition 008
Property Rights and Public Accommodations
Copyright 2010 by Ernest Partridge. Published here with permission of the author.
In the early sixties, the young black students in the South had had enough.
Enough separate drinking fountains, enough all-night drives because no motel would provide a room, and enough refusal of service at restaurants and lunch counters.
“Screw this,” they said, and so they sat at Woolworth’s lunch counters anyway, where they were taunted, spat upon, beaten, and arrested.
The white restaurant owners resisted, most notably one Lester Maddox in Atlanta who stood at the door of his Pickrick restaurant, axe handle in hand, threatening to use it on any black citizen who might attempt to enter. Enough white Georgia citizens were sufficiently delighted by Maddox’ act of defiance that they elected him Governor of the state.
But the students persisted, organizing “freedom rides” throughout the south, where they were joined by supporters of all ages and races from around the country until, at last, they prevailed. In 1964 the Congress of the United States passed the first Public Accommodations law, which stipulated:
All persons shall be entitled to the full and equal enjoyment of the goods, services, facilities, and privileges, advantages, and accommodations of any place of public accommodation, … without discrimination or segregation on the ground of race, color, religion, or national origin.
Today, the right of all persons to access to motels, restaurants, transportation facilities, etc., is settled law and is accepted throughout the land by most citizens.
“Most,” but not all. Among the remaining dissenters is Rand Paul, a libertarian and the Republican candidate for the Senate in Kentucky.
Racial discrimination in public facilities is morally wrong, Paul agrees, and those who disapprove have a perfect right to boycott establishments that discriminate.
But the property rights of the owners, he insists, are sacrosanct. And however much we might deplore and protest the owners’ decision to refuse service on the basis of race, the facilities are still private property and the owners have the indisputable right to do with their property as they wish.
The Myth of “Absolute Rights.”
The moral center of libertarian dogma is a triad of rights: the rights to life, liberty and property. William Bayes (348) expresses the dogma with admirable clarity:
Where do my rights end? Where yours begin. I may do anything I wish with my own life, liberty and property without your consent; but I may do nothing with your life, liberty and property without your consent….
This proclamation is accompanied by a qualification – the so-called “like liberty principle:” You have “the right to live your life as you choose so long as you don’t infringe on the equal rights of others.” (Boaz, 59). As we shall see, this qualification proves to be the undoing of libertarian absolutism.
An unyielding defense of property rights runs afoul of an inescapable moral conundrum: anyone who holds more than one moral principle must face the possibility of a conflict of principles, whereby one principle might have to yield to another. I call this “the moral relativism of conflict.” And as Charles Frankel wisely pointed out, the person who attempts to escape this dilemma through an unyielding adherence to one and only one principle is not a moralist, the correct description is “a fanatic.” Moliere’s “Misanthrope,” whose single moral precept was to never tell a lie, is the classical example of a fanatic.
For example: If you are asked directly by a Mafia hit-man the location of his intended victim, do you tell the truth? In fact, in defense of the target’s “right to life,” you are morally required to tell a lie. In fact, the law so stipulates, for if you tell the truth you will be charged with being an accessory to murder. A scene from the sixties movie “Dr. Strangelove” exemplifies another such conflict: Is it permissible to steal coins from a Coke machine in order to make a phone call that saves the world from nuclear annihilation?
Libertarians cannot escape from this “relativism of conflict,” for they insists upon not one, but at least three fundamental principles: the rights to life, liberty and property.
And yet, David Boaz, in his Libertarianism – A Primer, proclaims that “Fundamental rights cannot conflict. Any claim of conflicting rights must represent a misinterpretation of fundamental rights.” (Boaz, 89) Boaz offers no defense of this dogmatic pronouncement.. Small wonder. It is indefensible. Talk to a libertarian for a few minutes, and if he affirms that all persons are entitled to equal rights (the “like liberty principle”) and if that libertarian has even a modicum of moral rationality, he must yield on this point. For consider:
Is there an inviolable right to establish a hog farm on one’s property in a residential area? Such a “right” degrades the property values of one’s neighbors.
Is there an inviolable right to own a tactical nuclear weapon or to manufacture explosives in one’s basement? This violates the neighbors’ right to life.
Is there a right to run past a “No Trespassing” sign to rescue a drowning child or an infant in a burning building? The law permits such exceptions; it is called a “defense of necessity.”
Is a person permitted to steal a loaf of bread to avoid starvation? To condemn such an exercise of one’s “right to life” is too much even for the dogmatic libertarian. Yet David Boaz’ evasion of this trap is curious, and ultimately inconsistent. On the one hand, he writes that “[property] rights cannot apply where social and political life is impossible,” (Boaz 86) which is to say that property rights are not absolute. And yet, earlier in the book (37), Boaz, citing John Locke, writes that the rights to life, liberty and property are “prior to the existence of government – thus we call them ‘natural rights,’ because they exist in nature.” This latter pronouncement would seem to indicate that because property rights are “prior to government,” a starving person is never justified in saving his life and that of his family by stealing the property of another. But does not the libertarian also insist that the right to life is also “prior to government”? Thus the libertarian offers no resolution to this conflict between the rights of life and property.
Which brings us, at last, to the right of access to public accommodations.
Admittedly, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 curtails the absolute property rights of the owner of a motel or a restaurant, etc. But the act does so to affirm and protect the rights of liberty and the pursuit of happiness of those who would otherwise be discriminated against. For racial, religious, or other discrimination is a fundamental insult to the dignity of the affected individuals and a validation of their second-class citizenship. This is intolerable in a civilized society. The libertarian agrees: “The ethical or normative basis of libertarianism is respect for the dignity and worth of every (other) person.” (Boaz 97)
By defending the right of the owner of a public facility to deny access “on the ground of race, color, religion, or national origin,” the libertarians repudiate their proclaimed adherence to the “like liberty principle” and they betray an absence of that most fundamental of moral sentiments, empathy. In other words, they fail to comprehend what it is like to be the victim of discrimination.
Martin Luther King’s elaboration of this point, in his “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” is unsurpassed in its force and eloquence:
Perhaps it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging darts of segregation to say, "Wait." But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate filled policemen curse, kick and even kill your black brothers and sisters; when you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society; when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six year old daughter why she can’t go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see ominous clouds of inferiority beginning to form in her little mental sky, and see her beginning to distort her personality by developing an unconscious bitterness toward white people; when you have to concoct an answer for a five year old son who is asking: "Daddy, why do white people treat colored people so mean?"; when you take a cross county drive and find it necessary to sleep night after night in the uncomfortable corners of your automobile because no motel will accept you; when you are humiliated day in and day out by nagging signs reading "white" and "colored"; when your first name becomes "nigger," your middle name becomes "boy" (however old you are) and your last name becomes "John," and your wife and mother are never given the respected title "Mrs."; when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at tiptoe stance, never quite knowing what to expect next, and are plagued with inner fears and outer resentments; when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of "nobodiness"–then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait. There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over, and men are no longer willing to be plunged into the abyss of despair.
The Upshot
As a youngster, I was taught that virtue in the individual and justice in the state consisted of the triumph of good over evil. But then I entered the university and studied philosophy, where I learned that the moral life is not as simple as that. For, in addition, virtue and justice can also consist in making the optimal forced choices among several competing “goods” or among several necessary evils – what moral philosophers call “tragic choices.” These include engaging in a defensive war to resist aggression, performing an abortion to preserve a woman’s life, stealing food to avoid starvation, and requiring the owner of a motel or a restaurant to serve all customers regardless of their race, religion or national origin.
It is all well and good for citizens to engage in lofty abstractions as they discuss moral principles and political rights. As a practicing philosopher, I would be the last to decry such an activity.
But, as Aristotle taught us, morality and politics are, in the final analysis, practical. They are about the conduct of our lives and the ordering of society in specific, particular, day-by-day circumstances. Thus moral principles and political rights must have application to ordinary particular life experiences. Otherwise, they are of no use to us, merely “sounding brass and tinkling cymbal.” Accordingly in the arena of ordinary day-by-day life, moral dogmatism and absolutism have no place.
Thus it was that Martin Luther King, when confronted with the charge that “the law” must be upheld without exception, answered not with competing abstractions but with a bill of particulars – with a list of specific indignities and insults that the afro-American must face every day.
Put simply, it is not enough to have the will to do what is right. One must also have the practical intelligence to know what is right. And, in ordinary life, the application of abstract moral rules has consequences that often impact competing rules. Just as the ecologists have taught us that due to the complex interrelationships among organism, “you can’t do just one thing,” the morally sophisticated citizen must constantly ask the ecologist’s question: “and then what?” (Hardin)
Like Lester Maddox in 1964, Rand Paul today has failed to acknowledge the complex ecology of morality, as he insists that absolute property rights must allow the owner and proprietor of a public facility to discriminate if he so chooses. And also, typical of the dogmatic libertarian, David Boaz fails to acknowledge the ecology of morality when he proclaims, without a shred of supporting argument, that “fundamental rights cannot conflict.”
Yet it is just this kind of unyielding fanaticism that is polluting our civic and political discourse today. If the American republic is to survive the polarization of today’s politics, we must, on both sides of the political divide, learn to pause and think through the implications of our moral precepts and our rhetoric. And the ultimate test of those precepts and that rhetoric must be in the laboratory of our practical everyday experience.
Libertarians and other dogmatists to the contrary notwithstanding, fundamental rights and abstract moral precepts can and do conflict. Accordingly, if one affirms, as both the liberals and the libertarians affirm, that we must respect the dignity of each individual and that each person’s rights must be consistent with the equal rights of others, then it clearly follows that property rights are not absolute and that the public accommodation law of 1964 is correct:
All persons shall be entitled to the full and equal enjoyment of the goods, services, facilities, and privileges, advantages, and accommodations of any place of public accommodation, … without discrimination or segregation on the ground of race, color, religion, or national origin.
References:
- Bayes, William W. (1970). “What is Property?”, The Freeman, July 1970, p. 348.
- Boaz, David (1997) Libertarianism – A Primer, The Free Press.
- Hardin, Garrett (1985), “An Ecolate View of the Human Predicament,” Filters Against Folly, Viking.
Why Permaculture Design?
What (and not) About that Natural Pool Conversion on the Gold Coast?
Permaculture Design Multimedia Course
BP Target of “Irresponsible Act”
PDC Interview, Part 3: Chef Aureliano
Crises of Capitalism
Solving All the Problems of the World – in a Garden
This video can be downloaded in high resolution from Vimeo (see ‘About this video’ section on lower right side’).
I hope you’ll enjoy this clip. More, I hope it encourages you to dare to be different, and dare to have your work noticed. The garden we profile in the video above, as you’ll discover after watching it, has just won a national competition held by the Jordanian Department of Education – for schools who incorporate environmental projects into their curriculum. This means that thousands of schools, in what is arguably the most water-stressed country on the planet, now have the possibility to learn from this humble example of permaculture in action – and get inspired to do similar.
Special thanks to Lesley Byrne for her enthusiastic support, and to Nadia Lawton for her vision and determination to help her own people – and in so doing setting such an excellent example for us all.
A Fresh Look at Gandhi – Part II
Making the Case for Earth Repair Work
Privatized Hell
Editor’s Note: Some prefer to only talk about swales and banana circles, but I hope enough of you recognise that it’s economic theory, political policy and industry behaviour – and the educational curriculums in our schools that are tailored to appease all three – that have delivered us into this environmental mega-debacle, and that to escape it will require consideration on how to adjust our present invisible structures so they will nurture permaculture systems, rather than be their aggressive adversary, as they are today. There are a few amongst us, ‘libertarians’, who believe that dismantling government, along with the complete privatisation of everything – land, water, air, creatures, etc. – combined with a privatised court system to settle ownership disputes, is a recipe for success. What do you think?
Copyright 2007 by Ernest Partridge. Published here with permission of the author.
I
In colonial Philadelphia, firefighters were employed by private insurance companies which, of course, had financial incentives to minimize damage to their clients’ properties. Plaques with the insurance company’s insignia were placed on buildings, so that the fire fighters would know whether or not it was their “business” to put out the fires on the premises. (These plaques are often found today in antique shops). . If a fire alarm was answered by a cadre of fire-fighters from the “wrong” company, that was just tough luck. “Burn, baby, burn!” Many structures were lost while competing companies tried to sort out which was authorized to put out the fire. Many more adjoining structures were consumed by fires that were oblivious to property lines.
Occasionally, when the building’s insurance affiliation was in some doubt, competing fire companies would fight each other for the privilege of putting out the fire, resulting in more water aimed at fire fighters than at burning buildings.
Eventually, the absurdity and outright danger of this system led one prominent Philadelphia citizen to come up with the idea of a publicly funded and administered fire department.
His name was Benjamin Franklin: America’s first anti-free-enterprise commie pinko nut-case.
Fires, Franklin recognized, are not reducible to individual incidents affecting particular structures. They are public threats to communities at large. Accordingly, the task of fighting fires is appropriately assigned to municipal agencies, managed and financed by the community, which means, of course by the government.
Franklin’s subversive left-wing ideas were extended to include libraries, post offices, and public schools, and, if we are to believe some of today’s self-described “conservatives,” it’s been downhill ever since.
Strange, isn’t it? One might suppose that eventually, some principles and practices in our political order might be settled, once and for all — simply beyond rational dispute. No one is arguing for a hereditary monarch, with a “divine right” to rule over us. No one seriously supports the reinstatement of chattel slavery. No one believes that homosexuals, Sabbath workers and disobedient children should be stoned to death. (Well, almost no one – there are, after all, a few “Christian Dominionists” still at large).
And almost no one has questioned the wisdom of Benjamin Franklin’s establishment in Philadelphia in 1736, of the first municipal fire department in colonial America.
Not until now.
For after two hundred and seventy-one years of uncontested proof of the advantages of public fire-fighting institutions, this simple truth does not faze the libertarians and the regressives (self-described “conservatives”). Some of them are now proposing a giant step backward to privatized fire fighting. As Naomi Klein reports in The Nation:
Just look at what is happening in Southern California. Even as wildfires devoured whole swaths of the region, some homes in the heart of the inferno were left intact, as if saved by a higher power. But it wasn’t the hand of God; in several cases it was the handiwork of Firebreak Spray Systems. Firebreak is a special service offered to customers of insurance giant American International Group (AIG)–but only if they happen to live in the wealthiest ZIP codes in the country. Members of the company’s Private Client Group pay an average of $19,000 to have their homes sprayed with fire retardant. During the wildfires, the "mobile units"–racing around in red firetrucks–even extinguished fires for their clients.
One customer described a scene of modern-day Revelation. "Just picture it. Here you are in that raging wildfire. Smoke everywhere. Flames everywhere. Plumes of smoke coming up over the hills," he told the Los Angeles Times. "Here’s a couple guys showing up in what looks like a firetruck who are experts trained in fighting wildfire and they’re there specifically to protect your home."
And your home alone. "There were a few instances," one of the private firefighters told Bloomberg News, "where we were spraying and the neighbor’s house went up like a candle." With public fire departments cut to the bone, gone are the days of Rapid Response, when everyone was entitled to equal protection.
Privatized fire fighting? It was a lousy idea in Ben Franklin’s time, and it is lousy idea today.
Do we really need to explain why this is so? Incredibly, it appears that we do.
Privatized fire fighting is inefficient. Several separate and uncoordinated fire crews struggling to save separate individual homes are far less efficient than a large, integrated and strategically organized “army” of fire-fighters. Add up the costs of manpower, equipment and losses to the fires, and the latter, coordinated, effort will always win, hands down. This will be so, even if every structure in the area is “protected” by one or another private company of “responders.” Imagine, for example, a street in which a line of houses is insured and protected, sequentially from left to right, by the fire crews of Acme, Inc., Gecko, Inc., Good Hands, Inc., Acme, Inc., Gecko, Inc., Good Hands, Inc. – then add a few more companies, in random order, as you continue down the street. See what I mean? It’s far less expensive and more efficient if one agency is protecting the neighborhood as a unit. But more significantly, this example demonstrates that:
Privatized fire fighting is ineffective. The approach described above – several independent companies protecting individual homes, randomly situated – is comparable to opposing an invading army with individual local police and sheriff departments. An invading army attacking with an integrated force and battle plan can only be defeated by an opposing army with a superior integrated force and battle plan. Supply lines, effective use of available equipment, deployment of personnel, geographical contingencies, must all be taken into account by the opposing generals as they plan attacks, defenses and counter-attacks. Indefensible lands must be yielded and their populations abandoned so that forces might regroup on defensible terrain. Command decisions must be communicated intact through the company commanders to the individual soldiers. Decisive advantage is enjoyed by the side with the accurate “Big Picture” of the entire battle, a “picture” that changes as the battle evolves.
Similarly, the massive wildfires that ravaged southern California in October and November, 2003, and again last month, had to be responded to strategically – with a consideration of available resources, of terrain, and of priorities. “The Big Picture.” Thus a dozen homes, located beyond a defensible fire line (a road or a stream), might have to be sacrificed so that several hundred might be saved. Structures close to water sources and to open roads have higher priority than other structures that are isolated and offer poor means of escape for the fire fighters. The wealth or the insurance arrangements of the respective owners are irrelevant to the strategic planning of the fire fighters.
Community pre-planning and preparation are also essential to disaster management. For example, last month, in the “Grass Valley” fire near my home, the mansions of the "have mores" at Lake Arrowhead were protected by the removal of a million and a half dead and diseased trees by order of the “big government” U.S. Forest Service, and by the local government requirement that flammable brush be removed from the modest homes of the “proletariat.” Cooperative community action combined with a large-scale coordinated response by professional fire-fighters saved the day, as the fire was contained to 1200 acres and the loss of about two hundred out of ten thousand homes.. “The California Wildfires and Right Wing Smoke”).
In contrast, a private fire crew, “contracted” to save this particular house at 1234 My Castle Circle (not 1232 and not 1236), has no “big picture” in mind. The total concern of the crew is this house, and this house only.
Clearly, it’s a helluva way to fight a fire.
The miracle of privatised water – where water actually
flows uphill, towards money….
Privatized fire fighting is immoral. The determined regressive might reply that the neighborhood could avoid the “this house but not that house” problem by agreeing to hire a single private fire fighting company. (However, there would remain the “this neighborhood but not that neighborhood” problem. But let that pass). All members of the neighborhood would then be required to pay a fee to the company – “required,” because those who might otherwise not pay would nonetheless be at least partially protected by the fee-payers, i.e., they would be “free riders.” Hence a "coercion" (and implied "theft of property") detested by Ayn Rand and the libertarians.
But this scheme puts the “regressive” neighborhood perilously close to installing a public fire department. What’s in a name? Call the neighborhood a “town,” the fee “taxes,” and the fire company a “fire department,” and what is the practical difference?
There is this difference: because of the high fees (due to the inefficiency problem, above) the neighborhood described here would have to be comprised of very wealthy home owners. And having paid exorbitant fees for individual fire protection, they would not be inclined to pay taxes to support city, county and state fire fighting agencies. In fact, San Diego County was ill-prepared for the fires of last month, due to successful tax-cutting proposals by anti-tax, anti-government conservative Republicans.
Accordingly, a privatization of fire protection, along with other emergency management services, increases and solidifies the stratification of society into the “have-nots” and “the have-mores.” “I have mine – you’re on your own.” The community then encompasses the neighborhood, but no more. Beyond the neighborhood is another country. Gone is the civic friendship that binds a nation together – the “equal justice under law,” the shared covenant enshrined in the founding documents of the republic, the sense that the national economy is a cooperative venture comprised of indispensable components: workers, investors, managers, and government.
Instead, we have George Bush’s “ownership society,” wherein today the wealthiest one percent of the population owns more than the bottom ninety percent, and that “ownership” of the oligarchs is increasing. (See "Divided Decarde: Economic Disparity at the Century’s Turn"). Included in that one-percent of the country effectively “owned” by the “have-mores” are privatized fire and other emergency services, the media, the courts, private armies, the paperless touch-screen machines that count our votes and the secret software that compiles election returns, and, finally, via lobbyists and campaign contributions, the Congress of the United States.
This concentration of wealth and this privatization of essential public services and government functions are both symptoms and causes of a failing democracy and a disintegrating nation.
II
Are There Public Goods?
"Government is not the solution," Ronald Reagan proclaimed in his first inaugural address, "government is the problem." Accordingly, the libertarian right contends, virtually all economic and social institutions are better managed when privatized and unregulated. According to this libertarian theory, the greed (i.e., “profit motive”) of investing private individuals is, in virtually all cases, mystically transformed into the optimum public good. The exceptions are the police, the military, the courts and the legislatures which, they concede, are properly confined to “the public sector.”
But is it just possible that old Ben Franklin had a point? Are we not all better off now that the fire department doesn’t look first for the insurance medallion on our homes before they turn on the hoses? Isn’t the function of the military to defend the country – all of us, rich and poor, male and female, white and “other” – from foreign enemies, rather than enrich the industries that supply the armed forces? And shouldn’t the members of Congress represent the public at large, and not the private corporations and individuals that finance their campaigns?
The issue turns on the question of whether or not there are such things as “public goods” – in fact, on whether there is such a thing as a “public” (or “society”) at all. Dame Margaret Thatcher, Ronnie Reagan’s favorite Brit, apparently didn’t think so when she famously wrote “There is no such thing as society, there are only individuals and families.” (Thatcher)
As noted above, fire protection is clearly a public good, since fires are without conscience and completely oblivious to the concept of property or property boundaries.
The absurdity of uncompromising privatism and market absolutism is on full display when applied to environmental policy. The libertarian Robert J. Smith writes:
The problems of environmental degradation, pollution, overexploitation of natural resources, and depletion of wildlife all derive from their being treated as common property resources. Whenever we find an approach to the extension of private property rights in these areas, we find superior results. – Privatizing the Environment," Policy Review, Spring, 1982, p.42-3, my emphasis
It thus follows that I own, not only my property, but also the atmosphere above it and the ground below it. Can I then prohibit fly-overs by aircraft? Can I sue if the inflow to the aquifer beneath me is contaminated? Who, then? Are the “owners” of the insects that pollinate my orchards entitled to charge me for the service? The mind boggles. And it gets even worse (as I elaborate in Section III of my “With Liberty for Some”).
The privatization regime being proposed by the libertarians and the GOP is inherently unstable, unequal, and eventually oppressive. Wealth and power act in behalf of and enhance wealth and power, ever loosening the constraint of checks and balances, as it proceeds to absorb government and make it an instrument in behalf of wealth and power. The statistics tell it all: today, the average CEO of a Fortune 500 company earns in half a day, what his median worker earns in a year (a ratio of 500 to 1). Twenty years ago, the ratio was 40 to 1. Today, one percent of the US households own almost 40% of the nation’s wealth – twice that of the 1970s. ("Divided Decarde: Economic Disparity at the Century’s Turn"). With the coming abolition of taxes on estates, dividends and capital gains, that inequality can only accelerate, as Leona Helmsley’s maxim — “taxes are for the little people” – achieves full realization.
Furthermore, the privatizers’ celebration of “competitive enterprise” is essentially hypocritical. Capitalists hate competition, as they relentless strive to build monopolies and crush their competitors. All that stands in their way are anti-trust laws and the courts – which is to say, government.
But let us stop well short of the deep end. Privatization and free enterprise, constrained by popular government, are fine ideals, the applications of which have undoubtedly yielded great benefits to mankind. Moreover, government regulation can often be excessive and a damned nuisance to the private entrepreneur. Private enterprise should surely count for something. But not for everything. Adam Smith was right: “the invisible hand” of the market place can, without plan or intention, “promote … the public interest.” But we put ourselves in great peril if we fail to acknowledge “the back of the invisible hand” – the tragedy of the commons – whereby the unregulated pursuit of self interest by the wealthy and powerful becomes parasitic upon, and eventually destroys, the well-ordered society of just laws, common consent, and an abundance of skilled and educated workers who produce and secure that wealth.
Both the radical anarchism of the Busheviks and the communism of Lenin and Stalin share the attribute of uncompromising dogmatism: in both cases, these are doctrines which are assumed, apart from experience and common sense, to apply to the real world, fully formed and fully ready to be imposed upon that reality. These are dogmas for which pragmatism and corrective feedback have no part. Both libertarianism and communism err in proposing extreme, simplistic and doctrinaire prescriptions for conditions that are necessarily complex: communism by condemning all property, and libertarians by condemning all public governmental functions, other than that of the “watchmen” (police and military) and the courts. (Cf. “Two Lessons from Russia” ).
The complex arena of human economic and social behavior has no place for such simplistic dogmas. Throughout our illustrious and prosperous history, the United States has developed a society and an economy that is a splendid mix of private enterprise, civic association and public service. We have learned how to progress through the trials, errors and successes of countless policy experiments, all leading to refinements and compromises amongst competing parties and interests, with the excesses of both government and private interests constrained by the rule of law and finely honed checks and balances.
The regressives have no use for these complexities, caveats and constraints. They are comfortable in their assurance that they already have all the answers. All that remains is for them to serve their corporate sponsors, and, as GOP activist Grover Norquist crudely puts it, drown the beast (namely our constitutional republic) in the bathtub.
With that demise we will see the end of Social Security, Medicare, Head Start, the Environmental Protection Agency, to just begin a recitation of a very long list. Vouchers will drain support and funding from the public schools, and the crippled social services will be forced to attach themselves to religious organizations in order to qualify for “faith-based” funding. The privatized replacements for the current government social services – the insurance companies, the HMOs, the private schools, etc. – will, of course, have as their prime objectives, the enrichment of their stockholders and corporate officers, rather than service to the public. And oversight and reform of these private institutions will be out of reach of political institutions: elections, legislatures, and the courts.
This will be a very different country, virtually unimaginable to most American citizens today, but familiar to those who are acquainted with third world kleptocracies in Central America, Africa and Asia.
This will be a country that the public at large will not want. But when, to their great regret and sorrow they discover this, it will be too late to turn back.
The founders of our republic, let us never forget, recognized the inalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness (rather than simple “property”).. Furthermore, they acknowledged that “to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.” And among the six functions of government enumerated in the Preamble to our Constitution are, “to insure domestic tranquility” and “to promote the general welfare.”
This government – our government – is what the Bush and his supporters wish to “drown in a bathtub!” They desire this, firm in the conviction that a disconnected aggregate of self-serving private individuals, in absolute control of their private property, will serve us better.
Are you willing to allow these radical anarchists to try out this bold experiment on the rest of us?
If not, then what do you propose to do about it?
Further reading:
Soil Carbon – Can it Save Agriculture’s Bacon?
A Callout to All Permaculturists on the Gold Coast, Queensland
Morocco Observations, Past, Present and Future – Part I
Written by Alex Metcalfe. Photo credits to Alex Metcalfe, Asiya Brock, Helen Evans and Houssa Yacoubi.
The view from the course site ‘Ourthane’ which means ‘gardens’
Background
In 2004, during my first visit to Morocco, one night in the desert with the full moon at its zenith I climbed an enormous dune with Francois and Vincent, two Québécois I had met on the bus journey south.
Ascending that great pile of sand, every step forward seemed to take us three steps back. Our beleaguered progress was painfully slow. The nameless mountain of sand we were climbing stood far above neighbouring dunes to shelter a small and equally anonymous oasis a few hours slow and ponderous journey by camel from Merzouga, a small, one road collection of pisé houses and auberges that sit amidst the bleak and stony Hamada. The only movements to catch the eye was the shimmering heat rising from the Earth and the tall, thin and spectral twisters that listlessly faded into existence only to fade out again, as if exhausted under the unforgiving glare of the desert sun from the effort of giving form to the eddying winds of the Hamada.
Earth bricks dry at the oasis of Oaroun near Guelmime, southern Morocco
In the midst of that seemingly abiotic plain lay the Erg Chebbi. A favourite with tourists and travellers, this patch of Saharan dunes seem to have wandered off from the true Sahara to the south, or from nearby Algeria, in search of a new home. It was this nomadic patch of sand that I found myself surveying while my companions and I stopped to catch our breath after reaching the summit of the great dune. The entire scene that lay before us was coloured an iridescent midnight blue – a sea of sand frozen in time, bathed in the milky glow of the full moon.
What had really struck me as I travelled the length of the country was how different the many parts of the country actually looked and felt. The Mediterranean coast and the Rif Mountains, the Atlantic coast, the middle Atlas and the east, Marrakesh and Central Morocco, the Souss, the Anti Atlas and the Western Sahara are all unique in their peculiarities of climate, endemic species and subsistence patterns. I was surprised at how green much of Morocco can be and how much food is grown in the mountain valleys by the tribes who live there. Visiting the old cities of Morocco you feel a great sense of the grandeur of antiquity. Palaces, tombs and Kasbahs abound.
Courtyard garden, el badi palace, Marrakesh
Ceiling detail, el Badi palace – it took Artisans 14 years to complete their work
After piecing together the order of the dynasties who built them, that either swept into Morocco with the green tide of Islam or erupted from within, I began to look at the wider landscape and what it could tell me about how it had been used. Which land use strategies had fallen into disuse and which were still being practiced? How much had human activity shaped the country as I saw it now? How did Morocco look and function a hundred, five hundred or even a thousand years ago and which elements and consequently functions/ecosystem services had been lost. During my first visit these questions were still only in an embryonic form and despite my enthusiasm for Permaculture, I didn’t have the right eyes with which to comprehend what I was seeing. I wasn’t ready to understand the relationship between humans and the land holistically.
Once I began to think about the historical ecology of Morocco, and after experiencing the most heartfelt warmth and genuine hospitality of its people, I found I was irrevocably and unashamedly hooked.
Calf at the Tuareg camel souk, Guelmime
What is truly remarkable about that desert experience is how, despite reflecting what is often depicted as the archetypal Moroccan adventure, it represented an incredibly myopic vision of the country – a classic case of ‘the map is not the territory’. I had been sold an arid land of desert and Kasbahs; inevitably Morocco is a far more complex and rewarding place than I had previously understood it to be. I feel it important then, that I provide some general information on Morocco, the challenges the country faces and to clearly demonstrate why Permaculture aid projects, such as that being undertaken by the Permaculture Research Institute and Tribal Networks, are appropriate responses.
Exhausted, salted land. Biomass burned after harvest. Guelmime.
Morocco’s 2,008km (1) coastline stretches along the Mediterranean in the north, round past Tangiers and down alongside the Atlantic to Tarfaya in the south. Depending on which map you happen to be using, La Guera at the southernmost tip of the disputed Western Sahara region can be considered the southern limit to Morocco, in which case this extends the country below the tropic of cancer by approximately 280km and bringing the total length of the country’s coastline to around 3,500km (2). With such a vast coastline and with much of its economic activity being primarily fishing and tourism, clustered around coastal areas, Morocco is particularly vulnerable to predicted rises in sea levels.
The two mountain ranges of Morocco – the Rif, where I had travelled in 2004, and the Atlas (where Tribal Networks arranged the first PDC in Morocco) – feature prominently not only in the topography of the country but also in the national psyche. The Rif Mountains skirt the Mediterranean for most of their 290km, home to fiercely independent tribes that have resisted attempts to subdue their independence at every turn throughout recorded history.
The Atlas Mountains act as a dividing line between the two main climatic zones, the Mediterranean northern coastal regions, and the southern interior which borders the Sahara. As in many countries throughout the world that have suffered successive colonial occupations, these two mountainous regions have long been strongholds of Berber tribes, their traditions and culture.
Understanding the land use patterns and the movement of the many tribes and peoples in Morocco are no simple matter. Communities that seem well established may actually have originated elsewhere. Patterns of subsistence may have changed many times as tribes migrated across the country. Some sedentary tribes are in fact long established whilst others may have settled more recently and many were nomadic for at least part of the year moving with their flocks from lowland to highland pastures. Certain tribes used to speak Berber and now speak Arabic whereas for other tribes they began speaking Arabic and now speak Berber. What is clear is that of the 31,627,428 (3) Moroccans, 99.1% are of Arab-Berber ethnicity. Berber, or Tamazight as it is increasingly becoming referenced as, is only in recent years gaining more respect as a language and as a respected core element of Amazigh culture. There are a few Tamazight language newspapers and television broadcasts. Yet despite some positive developments and comprising at least 45% of the population, Imazighen (plural of Amazigh) are still, for the most part, socially and economically marginalised (4), suffering high illiteracy rates and chronic under investment in historically deprived areas (5).
Harvesting wheat in the Souss
The main environmental issues faced by Imazighen are deforestation, erosion, water resource depletion, erratic rainfall and subsequent flash flooding interspersed with prolonged periods of drought and the dumping of raw sewage into water courses.
Deforestation
Deforestation in morocco merits close attention not only as an environmental catastrophe as it does anywhere in the world but because of the colonial narrative upon which much of modern thinking on desertification and deforestation is based. All of this has demonised, displaced and disrupted indigenous land use methods in Morocco for the last hundred years.
Sparsely wooded foothills. Is this a natural or entirely manmade landscape?
Authoritative commentators such as the 16th century travel writer Leo Africanus writing in his ‘A Geographical History of Africa’, and historians of antiquity; Herodotus, Pliny, Procopius, Strabo and Ptolemy have all been quoted time and time again to support the now dominant view of North African historical ecology when in fact the conventional environmental history of North Africa most widely
…accepted today was created during the French colonial period. Before the conquest of Algeria, North Africa had been most commonly depicted in French and European writings as a fertile land that had lapsed into decadence under the “primitive” techniques of the “lazy natives.” (6)
During this period the Arab chronicler Ibn Khaldoun was often selectively quoted so as to racially stereotype Arabs and Berbers as destructive and therefore undeserving of their own lands.
In less than two decades, there emerged a colonial environmental narrative that blamed the indigenous peoples, especially herders, for deforesting and degrading what was once the apparently highly fertile “granary of Rome” in North Africa. The declensionist story that quickly developed was used throughout the colonial period to rationalize and to motivate French colonization across North Africa. This narrative and its utilization reached their apogee between 1880 and 1930, precisely the period during which colonial activities caused the most deforestation. (7)
It has now been established that until approximately 1000 BCE forest cover varied considerably from region to region throughout the Mediterranean and the Middle East (8). The physical evidence available today such as carbon-14 dated pollen core analysis suggests ‘that there has been a long history of a comparatively treeless landscape with a dynamic and migrating vegetation’ (9).
Morocco has in fact been the subject of more paleoecological research than any other country in North Africa. Whilst there is evidently disparity between depletion of natural forest cover and new cover provided by replanting initiatives, modern data suggests there is no definitive overall pattern of massive deforestation on the order of the frequently claimed 50 to 85 percent over the last two millennia (10). Some species such as the deciduous oak declined sharply around three thousand years ago probably due to climatic conditions however other species have increased in number, with minor fluctuations, including oaks, cedar, juniper, pine, and other trees.
Forests cover 5 814 000 ha, made up of 63 percent deciduous species (holm oak [Quercus ilex], cork oak [Quercus suber], argan [Argania spinosa] and Saharan acacias [Acacia spp.]) and 20 percent conifers (cedar [Cedrus spp.], thuya [Tetraclinis articulata], juniper [Juniperus spp.], pine [Pinus spp.], Atlas cypress [Cupressus atlantica] and fir [Abies spp.]), while the remaining 17 percent are low formations (scrub and secondary species)… (11)
There are reforestation initiatives in Morocco, ‘planted forests cover nearly 500 000 ha and are expanding at an average annual rate of 8 percent’ a year however this is ‘well below the optimal rate (15 to 20 percent)’(12) for maintaining a basic, functioning level of ecosystem services.
In the U.K where we replant and manage (the efficacy of which is debatable) what forest cover we have left, deforestation still wreaks ecological havoc. The 2007 flash floods cost the U.K over £3 billion with scores of people yet to return to their flood damaged homes. Moroccan plantations, even if implemented as part of a well designed system, cannot replicate the ecosystem services provided by natural forest cover overnight. Land repair takes time. Permaculture design aims to facilitate and speed up the natural process of regeneration by creating the ideal conditions for the land to heal itself.
It is important to balance research and established opinion with indigenous knowledge and personal intuition. In researching for this article I found many supposedly authoritative sources echoing the colonial narrative despite finding contemporary academic studies that provided data to the contrary. It is clear that though Morocco is the most highly forested country in the Maghreb it is suffering from deforestation and environmental degradation. Undoubtedly there are multiple threats to forests in Morocco; felling for timber and fuel (for home use and particularly for Hammams) and non coppice based charcoal production. Yet in accepting without question the flawed and defunct colonial fiction of Morocco’s environmental history we perpetrate the further demonization of Imazighen. The very people we need to work with and learn from in order to repair damaged landscapes in Morocco.
Erosion
Erosion around a seasonal watercourse. High atlas.
Erosion in Morocco is wide spread and highly destructive. Without forest cover to mop up run off in the highlands, seasonal and increasingly erratic rainfall careers unchecked through the landscape – causing flash floods which claim lives every year. Vital roads are regularly washed away and rebuilt and washed away. Some indigenous land use strategies that have been disrupted from the colonial period onwards can be seen as contributing to the erosion problem: concentrated as opposed to sustainable nomadic grazing, cultivation of marginal and brittle landscapes, timber extraction for fuel and charcoal production and the loss of the labour force needed to maintain traditional agricultural systems such as terracing. The over grazing of goats is often ironically singled out as a major hindrance to natural regeneration and as a major cause of erosion and soil depletion. Inevitably this is an overly simplistic account of the situation and an attempt to neatly parcel off the problem as yet another tragedy of the commons. However goats are an essential part of the rural economy throughout Morocco. Argan trees, a major economic resource, are browsed by goats and the nuts are traditionally processed only once they have passed through the animal’s digestive system. I have personally seen Carob trees thriving above a goat browse line. If managed properly as part of a considered conservation grazing plan, they are an essential feature of the landscape which can be highly beneficial to the maintenance of the systems they inhabit.
Water
Debris, left over a metre above water level by flash flooding
Water is becoming an increasingly scarce resource in Morocco. Over 80% of the surface water is used by agriculture, often in flood irrigation systems. In the south this is usually done under plastic. In marginal croplands the ground becomes heavily compacted and salinated. Once the use of chemical inputs becomes ineffectual the land is abandoned as worthless and cultivation is moved to another area. Up until the 14th century irrigation was provided where needed, apparently sustainably, primarily by the use of canals and diversions from larger water courses in lowland areas, and the diversion and redistribution of springs and rivers in mountain communities. A good example of an indigenous water management system is the Khettera.
Dave Spicer & Olivier Vuillemin investigate the Khettera at the
Brainseeder project near Guelmime
After the breakup of important economic centres, such as Sijilmassa (A.D. 757-1393) (13), which often acted as hubs for water harvesting and distribution, the Khatterat system was widely employed as a way of sustainably harvesting and democratically distributing water – predominantly in the plateaus, plains and deserts of Morocco. Khatterats are underground galleries dug at a gentle slope and intersected with deep service shafts. Khetterats draw water from an aquifer, often at the place where mountains meet the level ground in an alluvial fan, and can stretch over 20km to carry water to agricultural settlements such as Oases (14, 15). The Khetterat…
… management system … operates on the basis of utilizing a man-made gradient to draw water from aquifers. Water withdrawal in such traditional systems: (a) is achieved under gravity and without application of an external power source; (b) minimizes evaporation losses because water storage and transport is mostly underground; and (c) can only withdraw water which is available in the aquifer through natural recharge, avoiding any over-exploitation of groundwater resources. This traditional technology is a particularly effective system considering the water scarcity, weather conditions and low-level technology generally available in this region. In communities working together to maintain these systems, long-term benefits can be enjoyed by all without a major capital investment and with nominal operation and maintenance cost. (16)
Very Large disused Khettera, at the Brainseeders project site near Guelmime.
Evidently still the most hospitable place for plant life.
Socio-economic changes in Morocco have altered land use strategies and ‘globally important agricultural heritage systems’ (17) are being gradually abandoned in favour modern water management systems. As systems such as the Khettera fall into disuse, so declines the knowledge of how to manage and repair them. Major water infrastructure projects such as the construction of dams, have lowered the water table available to Khettera user communities. The green revolution and the subsequent introduction of petrol pumps have only served to lower water tables even further. (18)
References:
- http://earthtrends.wri.org/pdf_library/country_profiles/coa_cou_504.pdf
- http://www.theecologist.org/blogs_and_comments/Blogs/atlantic_rising/321827/atlantic_rising_adapting_to_climate_change_in_morocco.html
- https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/mo.html
- http://www.amazigh-voice.com/history.html
- http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2001/03/16/MN145053.DTL
(RESURRECTING THE GRANARY OF ROME — 2007, Environmental History and French Colonial Expansion in North Africa, By Diana K. Davis.) - http://www.ohioswallow.com/extras/9780821417515_chapter_01.pdf
ibid. - http://www.ohioswallow.com/extras/9780821417515_chapter_01.pdf
ibid. - http://www.ohioswallow.com/extras/9780821417515_chapter_01.pdf
ibid. - http://www.ohioswallow.com/extras/9780821417515_chapter_01.pdf
ibid. - http://www.ohioswallow.com/extras/9780821417515_chapter_01.pdf
ibid. - http://www.fao.org/forestry/country/57478/en/mar/
- http://www.fao.org/forestry/country/57478/en/mar/
- Moroccan Khettara Dale R. Lightfoot
- Lessons Learned from Qanat studies: A Proposal for International Cooperation – Iwao Kobori
- UNDERGROUND WATER GALLERIES IN MIDDLE EAST AND CENTRAL ASIA: Survey of historical documents and archaeological studies, Renato Sala, Laboratory of Geo-archaeology, Institute of Geology, Academy of Sciences of Kazakhstan
- Seeing Traditional Technologies in a New Light, Using Traditional Approaches for Water Management in Drylands The United Nations World Water Assessment Programme, Insights, World Water Assessment Programme Side publications series INSIGHTS United Nations, Cultural Organization
Edited byHarriet Bigas, Zafar Adeel and Brigitte Schuster United Nations University International Network on Water, Environment and Health (UNU-INWEH) - http://www.fao.org/nr/giahs/en/
- The Ground swell of Pumps: Mulitlevel Impacts of a Silent revolution, Francois Molle, Tushaar Shah and Randy Barker.