Editor’s note: This is a difficult concept to understand. The reason is because we have been taught the opposite all our lives. Taxes don’t fund spending. The spending must be done first so that taxes can be paid. So it is not tax and spend, it is spend and tax. Our taxes don’t fund anything. That is why nobody asks how are we going to fund the military. Money is a government issued tax credit. Its value is derived from the violence that may be necessary to collect the tax. The government creates money by giving it to people for goods and/or services(guns or butter). Which then gives those people the ability to pay the tax. People accept the money out of fear of that violence. The tax collector has to be paid or promised to be paid before they perpetuate that violence(police). The money must be created first so that people can pay their taxes with it. It is spent into existence. Taxes create the necessity for money. A “deficit” just keeps score of how much extra money the government paid to people but was not collected as taxes. Much like beyond a certain point, how much money you have is just keeping score. The government cannot run out of its own money. Just like a baseball game has no limit on the score. What a government spends(creates) its money for are political decisions which are only constrained by the physical “resources” of the living planet.
The government must raise funds through taxation or borrowing in order to spend. In other words, government spending is limited by its ability to tax or borrow.
With government deficits, we are leaving our debt burden to our children.
Government budget deficits take away savings.
Social Security is broken.
The trade deficit is an unsustainable imbalance that takes away jobs and output.
We need savings to provide the funds for investment.
It’s a bad thing that higher deficits today mean higher taxes tomorrow.
How does civilization collapse? First slowly, then suddenly. Civilizational complexity solves human problems. – (Joseph Tainter) Maybe that is a solution in search of a problem. Never asking, just because we can does not mean that we should, e.g., technology, splitting the atom, agriculture.
The pioneering research by one of the founders of economic anthropology is essential for understanding the social and institutional processes that gave rise to money as we know it.
The late 19th century saw economists, mainly German and Austrian, create a mythology of money’s origins that is still repeated in today’s textbooks. Money is said to have originated as just another commodity being bartered, with metal preferred because it is nonperishable (and hence amenable to being saved), supposedly standardized (despite fraud if not minted in temples), and thought to be easily divisible—as if silver could have been used for small marketplace exchanges, which was unrealistic given the rough character of ancient scales for weights of a few grams.[1]
This mythology does not recognize government as having played any role as a monetary innovator, sponsor, or regulator, or as giving money its value by accepting it as a vehicle to pay taxes, buy public services, or make religious contributions. Also downplayed is money’s function as a standard of value for denominating and paying debts.[2]
Although there is no empirical evidence for the commodity-barter origin myth, it has survived on purely hypothetical grounds because of its political bias that serves the anti-socialist Austrian school and subsequent “free market” creditor interests opposing government money creation.
Schurtz’s Treatment of Money as Part of the Overall Social System
As one of the founders of economic anthropology, Heinrich Schurtz approached the origins of money as being much more complex than the “economic” view that it emerged simply as a result of families going to the marketplace to barter. Surveying a wide range of Indigenous communities, his 1898 book, An Outline of the Origins of Money, described their trade and money in the context of the institutional system within which members sought status and wealth. Schurtz described these monetary systems as involving a wide array of social functions and dimensions, which today’s “economic” theorizing excludes as external to its analytic scope.
Placing money in the context of the community’s overall system of social organization, Schurtz warned that anyone who detaches “sociological and economic problems from the environment in which they emerged… their native land… only carries away a part of the whole organism and fails to understand the vital forces that have created and sustained it.”
Looking at Indigenous communities as having preserved presumably archaic traditions, Schurtz viewed trade with outsiders as leading wealth to take an increasingly monetary form that eroded the balance of internal social relations. Schurtz deemed the linkage between money, debt, and land tenure to lie beyond the area on which he focused, nor did he mention contributions to group feasts (which historian Bernard Laum suggested as the germ from which Greek obols and drachmas may have evolved).[3]
The paradigmatic forms of Indigenous wealth were jewelry and other items of personal adornment, decorations, and trophies, especially foreign exotic products in the form of shells and gemstones or items with a long and prestigious history that gave their wearers or owners status.
Thorstein Veblen would call the ownership and display of such items conspicuous consumption in his 1899 book, TheTheory of the Leisure Class. They had an exchange value, as they do today, but that did not make them monetary means of exchange. Schurtz saw many gray areas in their monetization: “Beads made of clay and stone are also crafted by Indigenous people and widely used as ornaments but rarely as money.”
At issue was how a money economy differs from barter and from the circulation and exchange of useful and valued items in a social economy. Was Indigenous exchange and wealth pre-monetary, an archaic seed that led to money’s “more ideal forms?”
Schurtz’s Distinction Between Inside-Money and Outside-Money
Exchange with outsiders was typically conducted by political leaders as the face of their communities to the outside world. Trade (and also payment of tribute) involved fiscal and social relations whose monetary functions differed from those of the domestic economy but ended up dovetailing with them to give money a hybrid character. Schurtz distinguished what he called outside-money from inside-money, with outside-money ultimately dominating the inside monetary system.
“The concept of money,” he wrote, originated “from two distinct sources: What functions as the foundation of wealth and measure of value for property and serves social ends within a tribe is, in its origins, something entirely different from the means of exchange that travels from tribe to tribe and eventually transforms itself, as a universally welcomed commodity, into a kind of currency.”
Inside-money was used within communities for their own exchange and wealth. Outside-money was derived from transactions with outsiders. And what was “outside” was a set of practices governing trade outside the jurisdiction of local governance.[4]
Schurtz’s distinction emphasized a characteristic of trade that has continued down through today’s world: the contrast between domestic payments subject to checks and balances to protect basic needs and navigating status hierarchies but (ideally) limiting sharp wealth disparities, and exchange with outsiders, often conducted on islands, quay areas, or other venues socially outside the community’s boundaries, subject to more impersonal standardized rules.
Throughout the ancient world, we find offshore island entrepots wherever they are conveniently located for conducting trade with outsiders.
These islands kept foreign contact at arm’s length to prevent mercantile relations from disturbing the local economic balance. Egypt restricted foreign contacts to the Delta region where the Nile flowed into the Mediterranean. For the Etruscans, the island of Ischia/Pithekoussai became the base for Phoenician and Greek merchants to deal with the Italian mainland in the eighth and seventh centuries BCE. North Germans seem to have conducted the Baltic amber trade through the sacred island of Helgoland.
“The emergence of specific internal monetary systems is always supported by the inclination to transform outside-money into inside-money, and to employ money not to facilitate external trade, as one might assume according to common theories, but rather to obstruct it,” Schurtz concluded. In his chapter, “Metal as Ornament and Money,” he pointed out that it was foreign trade that led metal to become the primary form of money. “While most varieties of ornament-money gradually lose their significance, one of them, metal-money, asserts its ground all the more and finally pushes its competitors out of the field.” He added that: “Metal-money made from noble metals is not a pure sign-money, it is at the same time a valuable commodity, the value of which depends on supply and demand. In its mature form, it therefore in itself embodies the fusion of inside-money with outside-money, of the sign of value and valuable property with the means of exchange.”[5]
This merging of inside- and outside-money is documented already in the third millennium BCE in the Near East. Silver-money was used for long-distance trade and came to be used for domestic enterprise as well, while grain remained the monetary vehicle for denominating agrarian production, taxes, and debt service on the land, and for distribution to dependent labor in Mesopotamia’s temples and palaces.
Schurtz also questioned whether the dominance of metallic money emerged spontaneously in many places or whether there was a diffusion from a singular origin, that is, “whether a cultural institution has grown in situ or whether it has been transferred from other regions through migration and contact between societies.” The diffusion of Mesopotamian weights is associated with silver points to its diffusion from that region, as does the spread of the region’s practice of setting interest rates simply for ease of calculation in terms of the local fractional arithmetic system (60ths in Mesopotamia for a shekel per mina a month, 10ths or percentages in decimalized Greece, and 12ths in Rome for a troy ounce per pound each year).
Checks and Balances to Prevent the Selfish Concentration of Wealth
What does seem to have developed spontaneously were social attitudes and policies to prevent the concentration of wealth from injuring economic balance. Wealth concentration, especially when achieved by depriving cultivators of their means of livelihood, would have violated the ethic of mutual aid that low-surplus economies need as a condition for their resilience.
Viewing money as part of the overall social context, Schurtz described “the social transformation brought about by wealth” as a result of monetizing trade and its commercial pursuit of profit, or “acquisitiveness”:
“[E]veryone is now compelled to join in the competition for property or he will be pulled into the vortex created by one of the newly emerging centers of power and property, where he will need to work hard to be able to live at all. For the property owner, no temporal limit constrains his view on the perpetual increase of his wealth.”
Schurtz characterized the economic mentality as a drive for “the unlimited accumulation of movable property,” to be passed on to one’s children, leading to the creation of a wealthy hereditary class. If archaic societies had this ethic, could ancient civilizations have taken off? How did they prevent the growth of wealth from fostering an oligarchy seeking to increase its wealth at the expense of the community at large and its resilience?
Schurtz reviewed how Indigenous communities typically avoided that fate by shaping a social value system that would steer wealth away from being used to achieve predatory power over others. He cited numerous examples in which “immense treasures often accumulate without reentering the transactions of daily life.” One widespread way to do this was simply to bury wealth. “The primitive man,” he wrote, “believes that he will have access to all the goods given to him in the grave, even in the afterlife. Thus, he too knows no bounds to acquisition.”
Taking his greed and wealth with him to use in the hereafter prevents hoarded wealth from being inherited “and growing into a dangerous instrument of power” by becoming dynastic; ultimately operating “on the belief that the deceased does not give up his rights of ownership but jealously guards over his property to ensure that no heir makes use of it.” A less destructive removal of wealth from its owners was to create an ethic of peer pressure in which individuals gained status and popular acclaim by accumulating wealth to give away. Schurtz wrote:
“[R]emnants of the ancient communism remain alive enough for a long time to effectively block attempts to amass as many assets as possible in a single hand. And in places without an actual system of debt and interest, the powerful individual, into whose house the tributes of the people flow, has indeed little choice but to ‘represent’ by way of his wealth: in other words, to allow the people to participate in his indulgences.”
Such an individual achieves philanthropic renown by generously distributing his possessions to “his friends and followers, winning their hearts and thereby establishing real power based on loyal devotion.” One widespread practice was to celebrate marriages, funerals, and other rites of passage by providing great feasts. This “extraordinary… destruction and squandering of valuable property, particularly livestock and food, during those grand festivals of the dead that evolved out of sacrifices and are, among some peoples, not only an effective obstacle to the accumulation of wealth but have turned into economic calamities” when families feel obliged to take on debt to host such extravagant displays.
Religious officials and temples often played a role in such rituals. Noting that “money, trade, and religion had a good relationship with one another in antiquity,” Schurtz cited the practice of donating wealth to temples or their priesthoods. But he recognized that this might enable them to “gain dominance through the ownership of money” under their control.
“The communist countermeasures against wealth generally do not endure,” Schurtz wrote. “Certain kinds of property seem to favor greed directly, especially cattle farming, which can literally turn into a hoarding addiction.” He described communalistic values of mutual aid as tending to break down as economies polarized with the increase in commercial wealth.
Schurtz also noted that the social checks on personal wealth-seeking did not apply to economies that developed a “system of debt and interest.” Wealth in the form of monetary claims on debtors was not buried and could hardly be redistributed to the population at large, whose members typically were debtors to the rising creditor interest.
The only way to prevent such debts from polarizing society was to cancel them. That is what Near Eastern rulers did, but Schurtz’s generation had no way of knowing about their Clean Slate proclamations.
Starting with the very outset of debt records c. 2500 BCE in Sumer, and continuing down through Babylonia, Assyria, to their neighbors, and on through the early first millennium BCE, rulers annulled financial claims on agrarian debtors. That prevented creditors from concentrating money and land in their own hands. One might say that these debt cancellations and land redistributions were the Near Eastern alternative to destroying material wealth to preserve balance. These royal acts did not destroy physical wealth but simply wiped out the debt overhead to maintain widespread land tenure and liberty for the population at large.
Canceling agrarian debt was politically feasible because most personal debts were owed to the palace sector and its temples or their officials. Royal Clean Slates seemed so unthinkable when they began to be translated around the turn of the last century that early readers hardly could believe that they actually were enforced in practice. François Thureau-Dangin’s French translation of the Sumerian ruler Enmetena’s (c. 2400 BCE) proclamation in 1905 was believed by many observers to be too utopian and socially disruptive to have been followed in practice, as was the Biblical Jubilee Year of Leviticus 25.[6]
But so many such proclamations have been found, extending so continuously over thousands of years—along with lawsuits in which judges upheld their increasing detail—that there is no doubt that these acts did indeed reconcile the accumulation of monetary wealth with social resilience by blocking the creation of predatory oligarchies such as those that would emerge in classical Greece and Rome and indeed survive into today’s world.
Monetary Innovations in the Bronze Age Near Eastern Palaces and Temples
Economic documentation in Schurtz’s day was able to trace monetary practice only as far back as classical Greece and Rome. There was a general belief that their practices must have evolved from Indigenous Indo-European speakers. Marcel Mauss would soon treat the gift exchange of the Kwakiutl tribe of the Canadian Pacific Northwest (with their competitive one-upmanship) as the prototype for the idea of charging interest. But monetary interest has a specific stipulated rate, with payments due on specific periodic dates set by written contracts. That practice stems from Sumer in the third millennium BCE, along with silver (and grain) money and related financial innovations in the economic big bang that has shaped subsequent Western economic evolution.
Money’s function as a standard of valuation did not play a big role in Schurtz’s survey. But subsequent archaeological research has revealed that money’s emergence as part of an overall institutional framework cannot be understood without reference to written account-keeping, denominating debt accruals, and fiscal relations. Money, credit/debt, and fiscal obligations have all gone together since the origins of written records in the ancient Near East.
Near Eastern fiscal and financial records describe a development of money, credit, and interest-bearing debt that neither the barter theory nor Schurtz’s ethnographic studies had imagined. Mesopotamia’s “more ideal” money evolved out of the fiscal organization of account-keeping and credit in the palaces and temples of Sumer, Babylonia, and their Bronze Age neighbors (3200–1200 BCE). These Near Eastern economies were larger in scale and much more complex and multilayered than most of the Indigenous communities surveyed by Schurtz.
In contrast to largely self-sufficient communities, southern Mesopotamia was obliged to engage in large-scale and long-distance trade because the region’s river-deposited soil lacked metal, stone, and even hardwood. The region’s need for raw materials was far different from the trade and “monetization” of luxuries by the relatively small-scale and self-sufficient communities studied by Schurtz and hypothesized by economists imagining individuals bartering at their local market. In these communities, he noted: “The amount of metal shaped into ornaments almost always far outweighs the amount transformed into practical tools.” Mesopotamia’s trade had to go far beyond personal decorative luxuries and prestige commodities or trophy items.
An entrepreneurial merchant class was needed to obtain these raw materials, along with a specialized labor force, which was employed by the temples and palaces that produced most export handicrafts, provisioned corvée labor to work on public infrastructure, served as mints and overseers of weights and measures, and mediated most monetary wealth and debt. This required forward planning and account-keeping to feed and supply labor (war widows, orphans, and slaves) in their weaving and other handicraft workshops and to consign their output to merchants for export. Calculating the cost of distributing food and raw materials within these large institutions and valuing their consignment of goods to merchants required designing standard weights and measures as the basis for this forward planning. Selecting monetary units was part of this standardization of measuring costs and value.
This made possible the calculation of expected rental income or shortfalls, along with profit-and-loss statements and balance sheets. The typical commodity to be distributed was grain, which served as a standard of value for agrarian transactions and credit balances that mounted up during the crop year for advances to sharecroppers, consumption such as beer from ale-women, and payments to priests for performing ceremonial functions. Their value in grain was to be paid at harvest time.
The calculation of food rations for distribution to the various grades of labor (male, female, and children) enabled the costs to be expressed in grain or in workday equivalents.
Schurtz would have called this grain “inside-money,” and regarded as “outside-money” the silver minted by temples for dealing with foreign trade and as the basic measure of value for business transactions with the palace economy and for settling commercial obligations. A mina (60 shekels) of silver was set as equal to a corresponding unit of grain as measured on the threshing floor. That enabled accounts to be kept simultaneously in silver and grain.
The result was a bi-monetary grain-silver standard reflecting the bifurcation of early Mesopotamian economies between the agrarian families on the land (using grain as “inside-money”) and the palatial economy with its workshops, foreign trade, and associated commercial enterprise (using silver as “outside-money”).
Prices for market transactions with outsiders might vary, but prices for debt payments, taxes, and other transactions with large institutions were fixed.
Schurtz’s conclusion that the rising dominance of commercial money tended to break down domestic checks and balances protecting the Indigenous communities that he studied is indeed what happened when commercial debt practices were brought from the Near East to the Aegean and Mediterranean lands around the eighth century BCE.
Having no tradition of royal debt cancellations as had existed in the Near East ever since the formative period of interest-bearing debt, the resulting decontextualization of credit practices fostered financial oligarchies in classical Greece and Rome. After early debt cancellations and land redistribution by populist “tyrants” in the seventh and sixth centuries BCE, the ensuing classical oligarchies resisted popular revolts demanding a revival of such policies.
The dynamics of interest-bearing debt and the pro-creditor debt laws of classical antiquity’s creditor oligarchies caused economic polarization that led to five centuries of civil warfare. These upheavals were not the result of the coinage that began to be minted around the eighth century BCE, as many 19th-century observers believed, mistakenly thinking that Aegean coinage was the first metallic money. Silver-money had been the norm for two millennia throughout the Near East, without causing disruption like that experienced by classical antiquity. What polarized classical antiquity’s economies were pro-creditor debt laws backed by political violence, not money.
Conclusion and Discussion
Schurtz’s starting point was how communities organized the laws of motion governing their distribution of wealth and property. He viewed money as emerging from this institutional function with a basically communalistic ethic. A key characteristic of Indigenous economic resilience was social pressure expecting the wealthy to contribute to social support. That was the condition set by unwritten customs for letting some individuals and their families become rich.
Schurtz and subsequent ethnologists found a universal solution for reconciling wealth-seeking with community-wide prosperity to be social pressure for wealthy families (that was the basic unit, not individuals) to distribute their wealth to the citizenry by reciprocal exchange, gift-giving, mutual aid, and other forms of redistribution, and providing large feasts, especially for rites of passage.
This was a much broader view than the individualistic economic assumption that personal gain-seeking and, indeed, selfishness were the driving forces of overall prosperity. The idea of monetizing economic life under communalistic mutual aid or palace direction was and remains anathema to mainstream economists, reflecting the worldview of modern creditors and financial elites. Schurtz recognized that mercantile wealth-seeking required checks and balances to prevent economies from impoverishing their members.
The problem for any successfully growing society to solve was how to prevent the undue concentration of wealth obtained by exploitative means that impaired overall welfare and the ability of community members to be self-supporting. Otherwise, economic polarization and dependency would lead members to flee from the community, or perhaps it simply would shrink and end up being defeated by outsiders who sustained themselves by more successful mutual aid.
As noted above, Schurtz treated the monetization of wealth in the form of creditor claims on debtors as too post-archaic to be a characteristic of his ethnographic subjects. But what shaped the context for monetization and led “outside-money” to take priority over inside-money were wealth accumulation by moneylending and the fiscal and military uses of money. Schurtz correctly rejected Bruno Hildebrand’s characterization of money as developing in stages, from small-scale barter to monetized economies becoming more sophisticated as they evolved into financialized credit economies.[7]
And, in fact, the actual historical sequence was the reverse. From Mesopotamia to medieval Europe, agrarian economies operated on credit during the crop year. Monetary payment occurred at harvest time to settle the obligations that had accumulated since the last harvest and to pay taxes. This need to pay debts was a major factor requiring money’s development in the first place. Barter became antiquity’s final monetary “stage” as Rome’s economy collapsed after its creditor oligarchy imposed debt bondage and took control of the land.
When emperors were unable to tax this oligarchy, they debased the coinage, and life throughout the empire devolved into local subsistence production and quasi-barter. Foreign trade was mainly for luxuries brought by Arabs and other Near Easterners. The optimistic sequence that Hildebrand imagined not only mistakenly adopted the barter myth of monetary origins but also failed to take debt polarization into account as economies became monetarized and financialized.
Schurtz described how the aim of preventing the maldistribution of wealth was at the heart of Indigenous social structuring. But it broke down for various reasons. Economies in which family wealth took the form of cattle, he found, tended to become increasingly oppressive to maintain the polarizing inequality that developed. The same might be said of credit economies under the rising burden of interest-bearing debt. Schurtz noted the practice of charging debtors double the loan value—and any rate of interest indeed involves an implicit doubling time.
That exponential dynamic is what polarizes financialized economies. In contrast to Schurtz, mainstream economists of his generation avoided dealing with the effect of monetary innovation and debt on the distribution of wealth. The tendency was to treat money as merely a “veil” of price changes for goods and services, without analyzing how credit polarizes the economy’s balance sheet of assets and debt liabilities. Yet, the distinguishing feature of credit economies was the use of moneylending as a lever to enrich creditors by impoverishing debtors. That was more than just a monetary problem. It was a political creditor/debtor problem and, ultimately, a public/private problem.
The issue was whether a ruler or civic public checks would steer the rise in monetary wealth in ways that avoided the creation of creditor oligarchies.
Most 19th-century and even subsequent economic writers shied away from confronting this political context, leaving the most glaring gap in modern economic analysis. It was left to the discovery of cuneiform documentation to understand how money first became institutionalized as a vehicle to pay debts. This monetization was accompanied by remarkable success in sustaining rising wealth while preventing its concentration in the hands of a hereditary oligarchy. That Near Eastern success highlights what the smaller and more anarchic Western economies failed to achieve when interest-bearing debt practices were brought to the Mediterranean lands without being checked by the tradition of regular cancellation of personal nonbusiness debt.
Credit and monetary wealth were privatized in the hands of what became an increasingly self-destructive set of classical oligarchies culminating in that of Rome, which fought for centuries against popular revolts seeking protection from impoverishing economic polarization.
The devastating effects of transplanting Near Eastern debt practices into the Mediterranean world’s less communalistic groupings show the need to discuss the political, fiscal, and social-moral context for money and debt. Schurtz placed monetary analysis in the context of society’s political institutions and moral values and explained how money is a product of this context and, indeed, how monetization tends to transform it—in a way that tends to break down social protection. His book has remained relatively unknown over the last century, largely because his institutional anthropological perspective is too broad for an economics discipline that has been narrowed by pro-creditor ideologues who have applauded the “free market” destruction of social regulation aimed at protecting the interests of debtors.
That attitude avoids recognizing the challenges that led the Indigenous communities studied by Schurtz, and also the formative Bronze Age Near East, to protect their resilience against the concentration of wealth, a phenomenon that has plagued economies ever since classical antiquity’s decontextualization of Near Eastern debt practices.
Editor’s note: “Energy is, of course, fundamental to both human existence and the functioning of capitalism. It is central to production, as well as the heating and lighting systems that most people take for granted, and the energy sector is by far the single largest producer of greenhouse emissions.” A transition to 100% electrical energy will never happen. The percentage of electrical energy is 20%, of which 3% are “renewable”. Those figures have never been higher in well over 50 years. Also everywhere in the world, the development of “renewables” has and remains propped up by government support.
From a distance, the Ivanpah solar plant looks like a shimmering lake in the Mojave Desert(a death trap for migratory). Up close, it’s a vast alien-like installation of hundreds of thousand of mirrors pointed at three towers, each taller than the Statue of Liberty. When this plant opened near the California-Nevada border in early 2014, it was pitched as the future of solar power. Just over a decade later, it’s closing. Ivanpah now stands as a huge, shiny monument to wasted tax dollars and environmental damage — campaign groups long criticized the plant for its impact on desert wildlife.
“It was a monstrosity combining huge costs, huge subsidies, huge environmental damage, and justifications hugely spurious. It never achieved its advertised electricity production goals even remotely, even as the excuses flowed like wine, as did the taxpayer bailouts.
And now, despite all the subventions, it is shutting down about 15 years early as a monument to green fantasies financed with Other People’s Money, inflicted upon electricity ratepayers in California denied options to escape the madness engendered by climate fundamentalism.”
Instead of forcing coal and oil into obsolescence, we’re merely adding more energy to the system — filling the gap with “renewables” while still burning record amounts of fossil fuels. This is the real danger of the “energy abundance” mindset: it assumes that a limitless supply of “clean” energy will eventually render fossil fuels obsolete. In reality, “renewable” energies are not replacing fossil fuels, but supplementing them, contributing to a continued pattern of broad energy consumption.
Historian Jean-Baptiste Fressoz: ‘Forget the energy transition: there never was one and there never will be one’
At first glance, no one is waiting for a historian to play down the idea of an energy transition. Certainly not at a time of environmental headwinds. But above all, Fressoz wants to correct historical falsehoods and reveal uncomfortable truths. ‘Despite all the technological innovation of the 20th century, the use of all raw materials has increased. The world now burns more wood and coal than ever before.’
In his latest book, More and more and more, the historian of science, technology and environment explains why there has never been an energy transition, and instead describes the modern world in all its voracious reality. The term “transition” that has come into circulation has little to do with the rapid, radical upheaval of the fossil economy needed to meet climate targets.
In France, Jean-Baptiste Fressoz has been provoking the energy and climate debate for some time. He denounces the obsession with technological solutions to climate change and advocates a reduction in the use of materials and energy.
The cover of the French edition of your book says ‘the energy transition is not going to happen’. Why do you so strongly oppose this narrative?
We are reducing the carbon intensity of the economy, but that is not a transition. You hear very often that we just need to organise ‘a new industrial revolution’, most recently by US climate envoy John Kerry. You cannot take this kind of historical analogy seriously, this is really stupid.
The idea of an energy transition is actually a very bizarre form of future thinking, as if we would transform from one energy system to another over a 30-year period and stop emitting CO2. If it were to come across as credible, it is because we do not understand the history of energy.
But don’t we have historic precedents? Didn’t we transform from a rural economy that ran on wood to an industrial society with coal as the big driver?
This is an example of the many misconceptions of the history of energy. In the 19th century, Britain used more wood annually just to shore up the shafts of coal mines than the British economy consumed as fuel during the 18th century.
Of course it is true that coal was very important for the new industrial economy in 1900, but you cannot imagine that as if one energy source replaced the other. Without wood, there would be no coal, and therefore no steel and no railways either. So different energy sources, materials and technologies are highly interdependent and everything expands together.
So I guess you won’t agree either with the claim that oil replaced coal in the last century?
Again, oil became very important, but this is not a transition. Because what do you use oil for? To drive a car. Look at Ford’s first car of the 1930s. While it ran on fuel, it was made of steel, requiring 7 tonnes of coal. That’s more than the car would consume in oil over its lifetime! Today it is no different: if you buy a car from China, it still requires about three tonnes of coal.
You should also take into account the infrastructure of highways and bridges, the world’s biggest consumers of steel and cement, and that is just as dependent on coal. Oil drilling rigs and pipelines also use large amounts of steel. So behind the technology of a car is both oil and a lot of coal.
You suggest looking at energy and the climate problem without the idea of ‘transition’. How?
Focus on material flows. Then you see that despite all the technological innovation of the 20th century, the use of all raw materials has increased (excluding wool and asbestos). So modernisation is not about ‘the new’ replacing ‘the old’, or competition between energy sources, but about continuous growth and interconnection. I call it ‘symbiotic expansion’.
How do you apply this idea of symbiotic expansion of all materials to the current debate about the energy transition?
The energy transition is a slogan but no scientific concept. It derives its legitimacy from a false representation of history. Industrial revolutions are certainly not energy transitions, they are a massive expansion of all kinds of raw materials and energy sources.
Moreover, the word energy transition has its main origins in political debates in the 1970s following the oil crisis. But in these, it was not about the environment or climate, but only about energy autonomy or independence from other countries.
Scientifically, it is a scandal to then apply this concept to the much more complex climate problem. So when we seek solutions to the climate crisis and want to reduce CO2 emissions, it is better not to talk about a transition. It is better to look at the development of raw materials in absolute terms and to understand their intertwinedness. This will also restrain us from overestimating the importance of technology and innovation .
Didn’t technological innovation bring about major changes?
Numerous new technologies did appear and sometimes they rendered the previous ones obsolete, but that is not linked to the evolution of raw materials. Take lighting, for example. Petroleum lamps were in mass use around 1900, before being replaced by electric light bulbs. Yet today we use far more oil for artificial lighting than we did then: to light the headlights of the many millions of cars.
So despite impressive technological advances, the central issue for ecological problems remains: raw materials, which never became obsolete. We speak frivolously about technological solutions to climate problems, and you can see this in the reports of the IPCC’s Working Group 3.
Don’t you trust the IPCC as the highest scientific authority on climate?
Let me be clear, I certainly trust the climate scientists of groups 1 and 2 of the IPCC, but I am highly critical of the third working group that assesses options for the mitigation of the climate crisis. They are obsessed with technology. There are also good elements in their work, but in their latest report they constantly refer to new technologies that do not yet exist or are overvalued, such as hydrogen, CCS and bioenergy (BECCS).
The influence of the fossil industry is also striking. All this is problematic and goes back to the history of this institution. The US has been pushing to ‘play the technology card’ from the beginning in 1992. Essentially, this is a delaying tactic that keeps attention away from issues like decreasing energy use, which is not in the interest of big emitters like the US.
What mitigation scenarios do exist that do not rely excessively on technology?
As late as 2022, the IPCC’s Working Group 3 report wrote about ‘sufficiency’, the simple concept of reducing emissions by consuming less. I’m astonished that there is so little research on this. Yet it is one of the central questions we should be asking, rather than hoping for some distant technology that will solve everything in the future.
Economists tell what is acceptable to power because it is the only way to be heard and to be influential, it is as simple as that. That is why the debate in the mainstream media is limited to: ‘the energy transition is happening, but it must be speeded up’.
The transition narrative is the ideology of 21st century capitalism. It suits big companies and investors very well. It makes them part of the solution and even a beacon of hope, even though they are in part responsible for the climate crisis. Yet it is remarkable that experts and scientists go along with this greenwashing.
Do you take hope from the lawsuits against fossil giants like Shell and Exxon?
Of course Exxon has a huge responsibility and they have been clearly dishonest, but I think it is too simplistic to look at them as the only bad guys. Those companies simultaneously satisfy a demand from a lot of other industries that are dependent on oil, like the meat industry or aviation. More or less the whole economy depends on fossil fuels, but we don’t talk as much about them.
That’s why it is inevitable to become serious about an absolute reduction in material and energy use, and that is only possible with degrowth and a circular economy. That is a logical conclusion of my story, without being an expert on this topic.
Degrowth is not an easy political message. How can it become more accepted?
I do not offer ‘solutions’ in my book since I don’t believe in green utopias. It is clear that many areas of the economy won’t be fully decarbonized before 2050, such as cement, steel, plastics and also agriculture. We have to recognise this and it means that we simply won’t meet the climate targets.
Once you realise this, the main issue becomes: what to do with the CO2 that we are still going to emit? Which emissions are really necessary and what is their social utility? As soon as economists do a lot more research into this, we can have this debate and make political choices. Yet another skyscraper in New York or a water supply network in a city in the Global South?
Once upon a timeless . . . the non-human Light-Beings of the Sun cast their rays like life-giving nets upon the waters and the lands of the Earth . . . and all beings stirred awake to do the day’s work (and play) . . . until the nighttimeless when all beings rested and then the stars would guide their dreams . . .
(“Buddha Resisting The Demons Of Mara”)
In the actual living-experience, there is no “happily ever after” because there is constant work and maintenance to do. While work and maintenance can sometimes be enjoyable, they aren’t end-of-rainbow-pot-of-gold ideal. Yet many people cling to the idea of such gold, of ‘making it big.’ And many cling to infantile delusions of a constant comfort zone.
Zen saying: Before enlightenment: chop wood, carry water; after enlightenment: chop wood, carry water.
In general, i’ve noticed that many people have an aversion to talking about or dealing with extremely difficult situations of which for this essay i’ll call such extremities, The Monster. The difficulty is understandable because The Monster is unpleasant and pokes at one’s trauma buttons.
The Merchants of Veneer refers to those who go to extremes to cover-up The Monster. The Monster is genocide, ecocide, deliberately induced fear and terror, violence and greed, all of which i consider as horrid manifestations of what Steven Newcomb refers to as “the domination system,” and what many know of as colonialism, predatory capitalism, totalitarianism, fascism, ad nauseam.
MONSTER: from Latin monstrum — inauspicious portent or sign, abnormal shape, “a derivative of monere ‘to remind, bring to (one’s) recollection, tell (of); admonish, advise, warn, instruct, teach.’”
Teachers and elders “advise, warn, instruct” peers and younger generations with ways to avoid monsters; forewarned is forearmed, and weaponry is not a necessity.
Also, one can figure out stuff on one’s own because typically there are signs or warnings before The Monster does dastardly deeds. I think of those signs and warnings as a pattern of mercy built into the universe.
When not heeded, however, and instead allowed to run amok, monstrums (abnormal shapes and signs) can take on a form — anything from falling down and hurting one’s self, to an addiction, to a river-polluting corporation, a brainwashing media, a flagrantly offensive military force, so-called green/renewables saving the world, AI, genocide, ecocide, and more.
Many of the modern monsters appear as the proverbial wolf in sheep’s clothing. Whether a fancy-car-driving televangelist, a clown pedophile, or a corporation that holds charity events with one hand while destroying natural habitats and cultures with the other — the concept is the same.
Many signs in the world continue to go unheeded, and so: many monsters need to be dealt with.
The deeper root of “monster” is men- “to think, mind, spirit, memory, sage, seer,” indicating that, as mentioned above, one has the ability to ward off monsters, to think ahead, to care for the mind and spirit of all beings.
But our Mother Earth knows that The Monster is running amok and, as Leonard Cohen sang, “Everybody knows that the boat is leaking / Everybody knows that the captain lied… / And everybody knows that it’s now or never” . . . Yet the big question then is: Why do so many choose to ignore?
Enter the Merchants of Veneer and their willing and ignorant minions. Those Merchants are masters of the slick surface level, from the looks real faux wooden cabinet to the media spectacle previews condoning and cheering on the War on Iraq and the Global War Of Terror, while conversely, not tainting the shine by not showing the genocide in Gaza. The Merchants of Veneer shine the shit-show to delusory perfection, and so slickly that masses of people go along with the bumpy ride by ordering an environmentally friendly seat belt rather than finding ways of smoothing the rode.
The Merchants of Veneer are the Public Relations division for The Monster. The PR includes the corporate media, global banking systems, consumerism, enforced religions, revisionist history and cherry-picked educational systems, and governments in bed with corporations aka fascism.
When telling people some tidbit i know, some of the history of America and Turtle Island, i’ve often heard people say to the effect, ‘It’s terrible what was done to the Natives.’ Yes, but then when i add that it’s still going on and cite a specific issue, they may shake their head in disgust, but don’t seem to find it as terrible NOW. ‘Why?’ I’ve asked the air, ‘Why do they avoid and turn away?’
And the answer i get is the impetus for this essay . . . Not wanting to face The Monster, not wanting to make sacrifices with one’s comfort zone which is actually a comfort zone built on the discomforts of others, those who do the work and maintenance with no chance of a pot of gold rather lucky if they get a next meal.
“Every program of exploitation has an ideology bolted on to legitimate it to the world — but also to those benefitting: very few people want to look in the mirror and see a monster staring back.”
~ Matt Kennard, from his book The Racket: A Rogue Reporter Vs The American Empire.
Wake-up Call
The Buddha’s typical subtly serene smile is not one of “happily ever after. My interpretation from experience is that, in part, that serene smile has to do with maintaining one’s inner state of consciousness whether during good times or when facing The Monster.
Many years ago i had a transformative meditation experience, but the details escape me so i’ll attempt to convey the gist: One time meditating i began to see horrible, scary stuff, like scenes of a war. At first i thought: Is this my mind? What i have done? But then i realized i was simply supposed to watch, to witness, be brave enough to witness without flinching or running away, maintain my composure – subtly serene Buddha smile optional – and to allow space for whatever feelings that arose. This inner experience helped me learn to face The Monster, rather than turn a blind eye.
As the story of Siddhartha Gautama the Buddha tells:
Before becoming a Buddha, he saw Four Sights or Signs: aging, disease, death, and devotion to finding the cause of suffering, devotion to participating in the world rather than escaping from it.
And after he became enlightened he began to do the work of dealing with monstrums: “to remind, bring to (one’s) recollection, tell (of); admonish, advise, warn, instruct, teach” in an effort to help others to avoid or deal with The Monster.
(“his hands in the dharmachakra mudra gesture of teaching”)
As the story goes, before Siddhartha Gautama became the Buddha, the demon Mara tried to seduce him with beautiful women, then attacked him with monsters, then questioned the validity of his enlightenment.
“Then Siddhartha reached out his right hand to touch the earth, and the earth itself spoke: ‘I bear you witness!’ Mara disappeared. And as the morning star rose in the sky, Siddhartha Gautama realized enlightenment and became a Buddha.”
Each of us has the ability to touch Earth, not only with hands, but with the feet and heart and mind, and actions.
Each of us has the ability to be touched — how much better a mood i have when my day begins with seeing and hearing geese flying overhead.
Since the word “Buddha” means “awakened, to awaken to the natural law,” the Buddha-nature is not of any one individual rather a way of seeing, of being, of living in accord with Sun and Stars and all sentient beings here with Mother Earth. This Buddha-nature is beyond any box of religion and beyond any specific label of spirituality.
We as a species, as well as all species, are faced with a dual dilemma: stopping The Monster that is already in action, already running amok yet pretending with a slick veneer that everything is under control and things will get better soon. And warding off The Monster that is clamoring to get in on the destructive, sucking the life out of life action.
Instead of overreacting to The Monster and counteracting with violence, fear or greed, the experience of witnessing allows for the possibility of one’s inner nature and/or Earth guiding the next step.
Mankh (Walter E. Harris III) is a writer and small press publisher; he travels a holistic mystic Kaballah-rooted pathway staying in touch with Turtle Island. Mankh meditates, gardens, enjoys music and good humor.
Editor’s note: Environmental activism will only play a role in the lives of young people if adults are great role models and walk the talk. As custodians, we need to take the young out into nature to help them gain an appreciation for wilderness. So that they will want to protect the earth in the future. At the same time, many teenagers lose their connection to the natural world, because the lifestyle of our sedentary, technology-focused culture doesn’t give them any incentive to connect. Instead of investing in research for techno-fixes, we should find out how people will care more deeply about the planet’s ecosystems.
I used to think the top environmental problems were biodiversity loss, ecosystem collapse, and climate change. I thought that with 30 years of good science, we could address these problems, but I was wrong. The top environmental problems are selfishness, greed, and apathy, and to deal with those we need a spiritual and cultural transformation. And we scientists don’t know how to do that. – Gus Speth, Founder, World Resources Institute.
At the federal level, even recent Democratic administrations have proven unable to enact policy measures ambitious enough to bend the curve of carbon emissions (at least without “help” from COVID). Nor has technology been our salvation. Although they held promise to reduce the carbon intensity of our economic output, technological advances have been offset by Americans’ consumption habits, population growth, and the energy intensity of information-processing technologies.
With each passing year, the disconnect grows ever more stark between 1) the mounting scientific evidence that global climate disruption is happening now and 2) the inadequacy of collective action to control rising carbon emissions. We do not lack for effective solutions. Rather, society and its leaders lack sufficient will and caring about future generations to implement solutions that meet the challenge. Like it or not, we find ourselves in a long game with adverse climate and biodiversity impacts baked in for decades to come.
One resource that has not yet been adequately mobilized, however, is the innate human capacity for caring, compassion, and love. Compared to technology and policy innovations, little research attention has been devoted to what makes people care enough to adopt pro-nature attitudes and behaviors and to support environmental policy initiatives that affect their lifestyles.
At the same time, people are increasingly disconnected from the environment they are being asked to help protect. The physical and psychic disconnection is due in part to urbanization and sedentary lifestyles, exacerbated by the explosive increase in time spent interacting with the physical world through a small two-dimensional screen.
To combat what some call “nature deficit disorder,” parents, schools, nonprofits, and governments have long offered a wide range of nature-based experiences for young people. Some are structured, such as outdoor education programs, forest schools, green schoolyards, community clean-up and tree-planting projects, and scouting. Others are unstructured: climbing trees, foraging, hunting, and having pets. The Children and Nature Network (C&NN), a national nonprofit that tracks and supports childhood nature activities, has documented that such activities yield significant immediate psychological, physiological and emotional benefits to participants.
But do nature-based experiences also result in their young participants developing pro-environmental attitudes, behaviors, and activism in adulthood? Given currently adverse environmental trajectories, this is clearly a question with high stakes. To explore linkages between childhood nature activities and adult environmental activism, I reviewed recent research in this field on behalf of C&NN.
Findings suggest that instilling a love for the natural world in young people does offer hope for future generations becoming better ancestors than the present one. Early experiences in nature can lead to feelings of connectedness, which can then lead to pro-environmental attitudes, and ultimately pro-environmental behavior. Many studies suggest that nature experiences and connection to nature in childhood are vital to pro-environmental behaviors in adulthood.
The link between time in nature and connectedness to nature is often explored retrospectively by asking adults to recall their childhood nature experiences. Studies taking this approach have documented significant relationships between childhood nature experience and ecologically conscious behavior later in life. These findings underscore the importance of ample time in nature during childhood. However, there are nuances that suggest various factors may result in individual variation.
For example, early experiences that stimulate emotional responses to nature create a deeper bond than purely information-based experiences. Emotional bonds with nature offer a pathway for inspiring future environmental action in adulthood. While cognitive understanding and environmental knowledge may influence behaviors, investigations have established stronger connections between emotional feelings for nature and increased care for nature through pro-environmental behaviors. A program that brings inner-city teens from New York into the Adirondacks for both learning and hiking inspires some participants to pursue subsequent environmental education and careers.
Childhood nature experiences are not the only path to pro-environmental behavior in adulthood. For example, an urban environmental justice or climate justice advocate might have grown up in a household that placed a high value on social justice more generally.
Overall, despite a growing body of research, this field of study is not as robust as the above question demands. Significant research gaps and methodological deficiencies persist. Empirical evidence is stronger for correlative than for causal relationships.
The challenge facing both outdoor educators and environmental advocates may be less about designing initiatives to instill a newfound love for nature than about how to retain humans’ innate tendencies to do so. At an early age, children demonstrate compassion towards each other, other animal species, and even to non-living entities. Children come into the world with the capacity to experience curiosity, wonder, and (especially at an early age) a less sharp distinction between themselves and their surrounding world. At an early age, children demonstrate the capacity to develop moral relationships with both sentient and non-sentient nature. (My then three-year-old son befriended a chicken pinata at the start of a birthday party, a friendship that did not end well.)
Creating opportunities for exposure to nature may help nurture such instincts and prevent them from withering as kids develop to adulthood. Implications for adults may thus be to focus less on fostering connections with nature than on getting out of the way of children’s “natural” tendencies. Relatedly, connection to nature tends to drop off during the teen years, suggesting that nature experiences need to be designed and targeted to teens’ developmental stage.
The pathways by which children in Western societies feel connected with nature are often different than in indigenous societies. In place-based societies that depend on natural resources for their sustenance, survival depends on practices that evolve from long-term experience in responding to the natural world. Stewardship norms and behaviors become established in children through demonstrating traditional livelihoods in which older children and adults play strong teaching roles. One largely untapped opportunity for Western society is to elevate wisdom about relationships with the natural world that are contained in indigenous traditions.
One challenge in designing nature-based initiatives is that opportunities for young people to connect with nature are becoming more constrained. Disrupted climate patterns may make it less pleasant to be outdoors, especially in ever-hotter summers. Young people today are precluded from forming connections with aspects of the natural world that have already been lost or altered from shifting baselines (insect and bird populations, white Christmas, etc.). Risk aversion and legal liability result in rules limiting the range of acceptable childhood activities — like tree-climbing or unsupervised outdoor play.
If we expect the next generation to do better than the present one at protecting our precious blue marble, however, we have an obligation to help them as much as possible. That means equipping them with a suite of nature-friendly technologies and policies. It also means providing them with experiences that form the basis for an emotional and moral commitment to protect what they love.
Photo by U.S. Department of Agriculture/Public Domain CC0
Editor’s note: This is not a DGR sponsored event. While we may not agree with all of the analysis, this event may offer some useful points into understanding the disease of wetiko. DGR knows that the only way to secure the future of life on the planet is to dismantle civilization, which is the source of the dominant culture’s behaviours. This can not be accomplished through individual lifestyle and behaviour change. But it can be accomplished by joining together with like minded people that hold the commitment to fight against the destruction of the planet that is done in the name of “progress”.
Will Changing Behaviors Secure the Future?
Tuesday, March 12th, we will be discussing how to shift the Growth economy toward an economy which serves people and ecosystems first.
A Zoom and face-to-face gathering will take place at the Kanata Legion (70 Hines Road, Ottawa, Canada) on Tuesday, March 12th. The meeting, with Zoom, begins at 1:00 pm (EST) with short panel presentations setting the theme, followed by discussion. It will be preceded for those in the area with social time and bring your own lunch. Doors open at 11:00 am. The event will be recorded and added to CACOR’s YouTube channel.
This session is hosted by Values Committee of the Canadian Association for the Club of Rome (CACOR) and is inspired by: World Scientists’ Warning: The behavioural crisis driving ecological overshoot; Joseph J Merz, Phoebe Barnard, William E Rees, Dane Smith, Mat Maroni, Christopher J Rhodes, Julia H Dederer, Nandita Bajaj, Michael K Joy, Thomas Wiedmann, Rory Sutherland, 2023. The panel will consist of Andrew Welch and Mike Nickerson, facilitated by Lalith Gunaratne with introductions by Gabriela Gref-Innes.
The Starting Theme:
Even with CO2 reduction and renewable electrification of everything, we still have to deal with the Growth based system that is overwhelming Earth.
Humankind needs to pioneer new values and cultural forms that are not dependent on continuous Growth.
Some Questions to consider:
What are the psychological and other reasons that society adheres to the “Growth Everlasting” ideology ?
How is that ideology being sustained ? How is commercialization and marketing hijacking human impulses and public domain.
How might we work with humanity’s underlying motivations to secure long-term well-being in response to the problems of growing past Earth’s ability to sustain us ?
Meeting details:
As with CACOR’s previous gatherings, doors will open at 11, with a $5.00 charge to cover the cost of the room rental. You can bring your own lunch or something to share with the group. Coffee and tea will be available and the bar will be open for wine and beer sale. Plenty of free parking is available.
Hoping you can join us,
Yours, Mike N.
A world at peace and in balance with the environment is hard for our minds to grasp, but it is not beyond the capacity of our hearts to experience and to hunger for.
Editor’s note: The mining industry is one of the most significant human rights violators in the world. Mines are one of the most dangerous and hazardous places to work. People do not willingly let go of their subsistence economies to work in mines and quarries. They have to be forced to do so. One of the ways mining companies do that is by taking away the means of a subsistence economy. This is the story of many mines across the world. In this piece, we bring to you a story from Tuscany, Italy. It traces out the history of marble quarrying in the Mountains of the Moon (Apuan Alps), and the struggle by local communities against the quarries.
Four of us set out from Florence, with dawn beginning to light up the waters of the Arno, for Carrara, city of marble, sea, quarrymen and anarchists.
Where the global marble business has stolen the ancient commons of the local inhabitants with the complicity of political forces of the right and left, and every year extracts five million tons of irreplaceable limestone: some 80% is scrap used as calcium carbonate CaCo3, a filler in paper, glass, plastics, paint, beauty creams, but above all, toothpaste.
We are going to attend a crowded conference to which every local councillor had been invited, yet not a single one had the courage to show up.
You may not know that in the northwestern corner of Tuscany there is a mountain range, unique in Europe, a mere 55 kilometres long, that has nothing to do with the nearby, smooth Apennines: the range is that of the Mountains of the Moon, known today as the “Apuan Alps“, because of their craggy peaks – from the Pania della Croce I looked over the Tyrrhenian Sea from Elba on the left to Corsica to beyond Genoa on the right, nearly to France.
Picture by Claudio Grande
Those mountains were raised from the bottom of the sea floor, by countless billions of tiny uncelebrated lives of creatures with calcareous shells, corals, molluscs, and fish with their bones. It took them some three hundred million years, till all their seaworld was thrust up into the sky.
“Full fathom five thy father lies,
Of his bones are coral made,
Those are pearls that were his eyes,
Nothing of him that doth fade,
But doth suffer a sea change,
into something rich and strange,
Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell,
Ding-dong.
Hark! now I hear them, ding-dong, bell.”
Those flickering underwater lives became the world’s most renowned source of marble.Marmo di Carrara…
A world of peaks and caves and underground cavities like the Antro della Corchia, but like many others no one has yet explored, something like what Gimli spoke of in the Lord of the Rings:
“My good Legolas, do you know that the caverns of Helm’s Deep are vast and beautiful? There would be an endless pilgrimage of Dwarves, merely to gaze at them, if such things were known to be. Aye indeed, they would pay pure gold for a brief glance!’
‘And I would give gold to be excused,’ said Legolas; ‘and double to be let out, if I strayed in!’
‘You have not seen, so I forgive your jest,’ said Gimli. ‘But you speak like a fool. Do you think those halls are fair, where your King dwells under the hill in Mirkwood, and Dwarves helped in their making long ago? They are but hovels compared with the caverns I have seen here: immeasurable halls, filled with an everlasting music of water that tinkles into pools, as fair as Kheled-zâram in the starlight.”
The law that has been cast over the world in the last centuries knows only the faceless stateon the one hand, and privateproperty on the other: where private stems from the Roman idea of someone de-priving everybody else of something.
Both the state and private property were alien to the Commons of those who were bold enough to live in the mountains: shepherds, farmers and quarrymen of the marble that could be used for a pillar in Rome, then for a statue by Donatello or – much more often – for a gravestone to remember the dead: a friend of mine has a house at Minazzana, where Michelangelo, just 22, used to stop over, to select the right marble for the Pietà.
Some ninety years ago, one of the greatest and least remembered poets of the English language, Basil Bunting, came to live under the shadows of the Mountains of the Moon:
White marble stained like a urinal
cleft in Apuan Alps,
always trickling, apt to the saw. Ice and wedge
split it or well-measured cordite shots,
while paraffin pistons rap, saws rip
and clamour is clad in stillness:
clouds echo marble middens, sugar-white,
that cumber the road stones travel
to list the names of the dead.
There is a lot of Italy in churchyards,
sea on the left, the Garfagnana
over the wall, la Cisa flaking
to hillside fiddlers above Parma,
melancholy, swift,
with light bow blanching the dance.
Marble quarrying is by its very nature irreversible destruction. Basil Bunting could already hear the “well-measured cordite shots“, but before that came two thousand years of pickaxes hewing the rock.
The countless thousands of quarrymen who fell to their deaths, who were crushed as they rolled gigantic blocks of marble down the lizze, wheels made of tree trunks, could never regrow what they destroyed.
The first change came in the eighteenth century, when Tuscany’s most beloved ruler, the enlightened Pietro Leopoldo, suppressed the ancient custom of the death penalty.
But while he was at it, he also began to suppress the ancient custom of democracy; and started the privatisation of what had once been Commons, usi civici, domini collettivi, as they are still called today.
This was when a young man from Wakefield in England, William Walton, embodying the whole New World, arrived in the village of Serravezza:
“An active young man well versed in commercial and financial practices, young Walton is also gifted with a remarkable aptitude for solving organisational and technical problems and in this early period of his stay in Italy he looked around
in search of the most profitable industrial or commercial activity.”
“By 1866 Walton headed an industrial and commercial empire which covered all the aspects of marble production, quarrying, transport, sawmills, and sea transport to the customers”
British and French fought each other in a senseless war that led to the death of millions; but found themselves together in exploiting the Apuan Alps.
More on marble quarrying
Jean Baptiste Alexandre Henraux, a Napoleonic soldier charged with the task of stealing works of art out of Italy and bringing them to the Louvre, took the fine title of “Royal Superintendent of the selection and acquisition of white and statuary marble from Carrara for public monuments in France“.
In the very same years when the colonizers of North America were stealing land from the Native Americans, Henraux and his heirs opened 132 quarries, seizing possession of the commons belonging to the Comunità civica della Cappella “Civic Community of the Chapel”, so named for one of those places of worship where mountain people looking at the skies and feeling the icy wind, thank the saints for still being alive.
Today, the Henraux have faded out: in 2014, the company was bought out by CPC Marble & Granite, based in Cyprus,
“the major supplier of all finishing material to Makkah and Madinah Holy Mosques Expansions”
but above all, a member of the Binladen Group Global Holding Company: in 2018, Osama‘s less famous brother, Bakr, while in gaol for corruption, transferred his share to the Saudi government. So today, Anròas the locals quaintly call the Henraux company, is actually a part of the worldwide network of Saudi power.
People from Riomagno, Azzano, Fabiano, Giustagnana, Minazzana, Basati, Cerreta Sant’Antonio and Ruosina, to cite ancient names, dispossessed like the Sioux and Mapuche: it is curious to note how many Italians stand for distant peoples, yet know nothing about their neighbours. And how other Italians, who complain of Islamic invasion when a few immigrants come to pray together, fall silent when the Saudi government takes over slices of Italian land.
Fragments of Italian laws still recognise the basic principle underlying the Commons: that there is not only the bureaucrat versus the individual, but that what existed before both, also has rights: not the ‘it’ of the state versus the ‘I’, but we-our-people.
Today, the Comunità civica della Cappella is claiming back the stolen land.
And it has won cases in court.
So, the centre-right mayor of the municipality of Serravezza invented an agreement with the landrobbers, to give them almost everything, while leaving some woods in the hands of the Civic Community.
This decision required the approval of the representatives of the Civic Community, who of course were not willing to sign.
Then the Regional Government, in the hands of the centre-left party, found a way to prevent the Civic Community from regularly electing a board which could object to the decision of the centre-right mayor.
Corporations, faceless global acronyms, can today exploit not only the lands the commoners once owned, but also public lands, with what are called “grants“. Grants are for a limited period, but as they expire, the Regional Government has devised a creative way of greenwashing.
The commoners’ pickaxes left minimal waste; but the well measured cordite shots turned most of the marble into waste, currently 75% is allowed, in some cases, 95%.
However, if companies, instead of just leaving the waste on the ground in the great ravaneti which mark the territory, turn even that waste into profit for themselves as calcium carbonate for toothpaste and beauty cream, their grants are extended for years.
The rest of the waste becomes marmèttola, a fine white powder which enters the mysterious underground cavities of the Apuan Alps, where rainwater flows in becoming springs and lakes, and renders these waters undrinkable.
As everywhere else, global corporations seek local complicity.
First of all, speaking of employment. The local newspaper, reporting the conference we went to (or rather, “ecologists march on the Apuan Alps“), quoted a marbledealer in its title, “If we close down, we’ll all die here”.
Actually, the global corporations have cut every possible workplace, through technological innovation. With production at a level never seen before, employment is down to a few hundred people, against 20.000 employed some decades ago.
At the same time, marble blocks, instead of being processed locally, are shipped directly to China. However, the first cut is made in Italy, which is enough to make patriotic rightists feel all is well.
The Fondazione Marmo, the Marble Foundation paid for by the global dealers, pays for many local initiatives where a park becomes “green” and “inclusive” through planting some trees, marble statues speak of “peace“, “marble is on the side of women“, “marble for health“. And other Orwellian words which make every left-leaning heart beat happily.
Thousands of local people, in a small community, can be bought over this way, blending the donation of minor hospital equipment, with the mirage of jobs, with the idea of continuing the work of Michelangelo.
While the cancer rate in the area, unsurprisingly, is the highest in the region, as is the unemployment rate.
And of course, there will be no water in a few years, when all the springs have been poisoned, and no jobs when artificial intelligence has taken over even the job of the people who write obedient titles in the local press.
