community-based, non-corporate, participatory media
community-based, non-corporate, participatory media
A Science Department for the G20 Protest
by Ezra Niesen
Friday, Aug. 14, 2009 at 1:58 AM
tylermaudib@yahoo.com (email address validated)
Some of the scientists who discovered global unsustainability have been pioneering new approaches to science and education. This is a holistic approach to science that begins with the recognition that people are a part of the environment, not separate from it. You can teach it to yourself and use it to support the protest.
audio link: 
MP3 at 6.4 mebibytes
Some of the scientists who discovered global environmental unsustainability 40 years ago have been pioneering new approaches to science and education ever since then. The information you need to win the environmental/anti-globalization/everything else revolution has been discovered and can be found in books written for people with high school educations that can be ordered used through Amazon, if not checked out of your local public library. With them, you can use your own education infrastructures to teach people real environmental science, you can attack the Empire’s education infrastructure perfectly legally, you can win a lot of support for the revolution in schools and among parents, and you can set up a legal defense in advance for anyone who gets arrested that the Empire won’t be able to touch.
This is a holistic approach to science, which begins with the recognition that people are not separate from the environment, that everything is connected in one way or another, and that everything is important. The connections among some things are easier for us to perceive than the connections among others, which is why we have different branches of science in the first place. The challenge to a holistic approach to science has been discovering perspectives that allow information to be transferred directly from one field of science to another. Which is why some of the most talented scientists have been searching for, and finding, those perspectives. Consilience, by E.O. Wilson is an introduction to holistic science.
The five most critical books you need for a radical science department are:
Entropy, by Jeremy Rifkin. Mr. Rifkin discovered a perspective that connects physics, economics, and the environment. The Second Law of Thermodynamics states that everything wears out eventually. For non-living things, that’s a direct process. Living things, on the other hand, have the unique ability to regenerate themselves for a while, until they die. That means the only foundation for a sustainable economy is one that uses the cycles of life to convert soil nutrients into things people can use. That means worldwide localized organic agriculture and sustainable forestry and fishing. And hunter-gathering for people who still live that way. We have a long way to go to get there from where we are now, but every economic decision people make either is, or isn’t, a step in that direction.
The Limits to Growth—The 30 Year Update, by Donella Meadows, Dennis Meadows, and Joergen Randers. This is the most recent sequel to one of the founding books of global environmental science. You don’t have to read the original to understand this one, because they repeat all the critical points from the original Limits to Growth. Humanity’s environmental impact is increasing faster than anyone, including politicians, can anticipate intuitively. The same is true for any species. With weapons, agriculture, and medicine, we have eliminated predators, competition with other species for food, and disease as limiting factors on our population growth—temporarily, anyway. These scientists discovered global unsustainability mathematically by comparing the rates of population growth, resource consumption, and pollution to the world’s supplies of natural resources. The numbers they had as of 1968 showed global environmental disaster and billions of deaths by famine, plague, and resource wars in the 21st century. By 2002 they had a lot more numbers to work with and a lot more powerful computers, and the numbers still showed the same thing.
The Selfish Gene, by Richard Dawkins. This is a perspective that connects chemistry to biology. Every chemical reaction that happens in biology contributes, in one way or another, to the replication of the gene that began that chemical reaction. Species evolve to fit their environments because the genes with the highest survival rates make the most copies of themselves and the others die out. Since this discovery was made, other people have figured out how it applies to the environment and human psychology.
The Revenge of Gaia, by James Lovelock. The Gaia Theory is a perspective that connects chemistry to biology to ecology. The Revenge of Gaia is a sequel to his original Gaia, which again doesn’t require you to read the original to understand. In the same way that the lifecycle of an organism and a species is a stable pattern of genes replicating themselves, the food cycles of an environment, the water cycles, carbon cycles, and every other cycle of nature fits together to form one really huge stable chemical reaction, which is the global environment. The combined natural cycles support each other. Anything that humans do to the environment affects cycles of the environment. Anything that breaks down cycles of the environment, breaks down the environment, period. If we break down too many environmental cycles too far, the remaining environmental cycles won’t be able to support each other anymore, and the entire environment will break down. The environment has only just begun to retaliate for what we’re doing to it. And we need the environment a lot worse than the environment needs us.
How the Mind Works, by Steven Pinker. Evolutionary psychology is the study of how human evolution created our brains and how our brains make us think. We have survival and reproductive instincts like every other animal species, and we have a much greater ability to imagine, remember, and communicate than any other species. Every decision any person ever makes is a decision that the individual believes will maximize his or her genetic survival in that situation, just like every animal makes every decision. The problem is that we naturally perceive some things about the world better than others, and some things we don’t naturally perceive at all. Every decision we make is the best we can think of based on the information we have to work with at the time, but that results in our making decisions that benefit us in the short term but have unexpected long term effects that can harm us. Hence the greenhouse effect and the rest of the environmental crisis.
If you read any books about real science, you can recognize these five discoveries in the background. If you read anti-science books that are disguised as science, you can recognize that these discoveries aren’t part of what you’re reading. Real science books about the environment talk about things inevitably breaking down, how humanity’s population growth and resource consumption is making them break down even faster, how evolution creates cycles that counteract breakdowns, how the survial of those cycles depends on the cycles either staying in balance or being able to rebalance themselves when they’re destabilized, and how people always make the best decisions they can think of but make mistakes as a result of misperceiving their situations. These five books show how those discoveries were made. If you skip past science writers’ application of these discoveries to specific topics and learn how the discoveries themselves work, you can distinguish between real science and fake science propaganda much more easily.
I don’t live in the Pittsburgh area, and I won’t be able to come to your event. However, my website is a much, much, more extensive version of this article. With these five books you could set up a radical science department on your own, without visiting my website. My website exists to save you a hell of a lot of work. As wonderfully egalitarian as it would be to believe that there’s a radical activist in every city who’s as good at science as I am, has the educational background necessary to do what I do, and has been working at it as long as I have, well let’s just say those are very long odds. The laws of physics work the same way in Pitt as they do in Phoenix though, and you’re the ones who are having a G20 meeting in your city, not me.
As I said, a local radical science department could do a lot in support of independent education infrastructures, in support of legal defense groups, to stir up support for the anti-globalization/environmental/general progressive movement either independently or in support of anyone else who is already doing that, and to attack the Empire’s education structure perfectly legally.
The importance of independent education is obvious.
For legal defense: The U.S. Constitution was written before the Theory of Evolution or the Laws of Thermodynamics were discovered. That means our government was founded by people who had fundamental misunderstandings about biology and physics, which means human behavior, the environment, and economics. Capitalism is an economic system founded on the right (for some people) to control resources. But the control of resources depends on removing them from the environment. But we all need the environment for the life support it gives all of us. That means that a secular government of, by, and for the people must recognize a healthy environment to be the rightful property of everyone. That makes Capitalism and secular government mutually exclusive, but both of them are written into the Constitution. That means the Constitution is self-contradictory. That means it can’t be used to answer the simple question of whether anti-globalization activists did, or didn’t, break the law.
Every anti-globalization activist is obeying the law that says that every animal on Earth always uses what they know to try to survive, reproduce, and protect those they care about. Our government was founded by people who didn’t understand that, and who had no way of anticipating the environmental crisis. You are making your decisions based on an understanding of the environmental crisis. (And even if you’ve had some misunderstandings, the concept of global environmental crisis all by itself is more of an understanding than the Founding Fathers had.) So if your judge has a problem with that, tell him to learn some biology! If that doesn’t work, you can call any biology professor in America as an expert witness, if you know the right questions to ask.
(By the way, all the police you’re going to be facing have sworn to defend the Constitution. But because of its inherent self-contradictions, no one can defend it in the long run. Global environmental disaster means a lot of crime, violence, and eventually food and water riots. The police have been tricked into serving on the front lines of that, and they already are.)
For public support and attacking the education infrastructure legally: People get into positions of power in the United States by going to college. Everything I’ve told you about in this article is published in books written for people with high school level educations. But it’s not being taught in high school, and it’s barely even being taught in college. A radical science department could prove that the education system in America is leaving out critical pieces of information people need to understand why global warming and the rest of the environmental crisis is happening, and without people learning these things they can’t solve the problem. The education system in America is only teaching students how to kill themselves. That means that anyone who is a student, parent, or teacher (none of which I am, which is why I can’t do this so easily myself) can attack the Empire’s path to power at any time, anywhere, legally, and basically for free—as opposed to everyone depending on periodic ritualized demonstrations outside their giant meetings, which a lot of radicals have been trying to figure out how to move beyond.
You can click this link to download my free audio book, Planetary Biology and the Anti-Capitalist Revolution: http://www.betterthanfaith.com/newbookforanewworld/Anti-Capitalism.zip
If you prefer to learn biology on a farm or in a garden instead of at the library, here’s the English version of my free audio book Zapatista University: (I grew up in a farming town, I lived in Ecuador the year the IMF colonized Peru, and I live near the Mexican border now.) http://www.betterthanfaith.com/newbookforanewworld/Zapatista-University.zip
(Long Boring Middle Class Anarchist Majority Disclaimer: To those of you who dominate the Anarchist movement and Indymedia, with all due respect, it’s easy to believe that all reality is subjective and that feeling very strongly that something is true proves it really is true in some yet undiscovered dimension of reality, when your entire childhood was purchased at the mall. But I’ve never had that luxury. Neither has upwards of 5/6 of the human race. If you think that a trust-based relationship is supposed to exist between you and me just because of your emotional sensitivity, you have some serious misunderstandings about life outside the suburbs. To me, a bunch of emotionally sensitive middle class people who say they’re opposed to the government looks like a bunch of people who are going to run home crying when the going gets tough, and leave it up to the working class to finish the fight you started. And since we already live in a society dominated by people like that, there’s no point in working class people joining your political movement, because you’re not changing anything. By choosing to wage such an ineffective revolution, you’re validating the government and calling it Anarchy. What a joke.)
Planetary Biology and the Anti-Capitalist Revolution Chapter 1 part 2
by Ezra Niesen
Friday, Aug. 14, 2009 at 1:58 AM
tylermaudib@yahoo.com
audio link: MP3 at 5.4 mebibytes
Planetary Biology and the Anti-Capitalist Revolution Chapter 1 part 3
by Ezra Niesen
Friday, Aug. 14, 2009 at 1:58 AM
tylermaudib@yahoo.com
audio link: MP3 at 4.8 mebibytes
Planetary Biology and the Anti-Capitalist Revolution
by Ezra Niesen
Friday, Aug. 14, 2009 at 1:58 AM
tylermaudib@yahoo.com
planetary_biology.jpg, image/jpeg, 2400x2925
Zapatista University
by Ezra Niesen
Friday, Aug. 14, 2009 at 1:58 AM
tylermaudib@yahoo.com
zapatista_u_copy_2_.jpg, image/jpeg, 2400x2925
Restoring Science to it Rightful Place
by Ezra Niesen
Friday, Aug. 14, 2009 at 1:58 AM
tylermaudib@yahoo.com
restoring_science_disknowhite.jpg, image/jpeg, 1421x1421
My newest booklet and CD
Entropy
by Ezra Niesen
Friday, Aug. 14, 2009 at 1:58 AM
tylermaudib@yahoo.com
The Limits to Growth (original)
by Ezra Niesen
Friday, Aug. 14, 2009 at 1:58 AM
tylermaudib@yahoo.com
The Selfish Gene
by Ezra Niesen
Friday, Aug. 14, 2009 at 1:58 AM
tylermaudib@yahoo.com
The Revenge of Gaia
by Ezra Niesen
Friday, Aug. 14, 2009 at 1:58 AM
tylermaudib@yahoo.com
How the Mind Works
by Ezra Niesen
Friday, Aug. 14, 2009 at 1:58 AM
tylermaudib@yahoo.com
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