John Robbins: "The New Good Life - Living Better Than Ever In an Age of Less"

Excerpts from an interview with John Robbins, scion of the Baskin-Robbins family, about his new book, at OpEdNews:

"I believe there is a hidden blessing in the economic crisis, in the necessary return to reality from a make- waste society. Many of us know, at some level, that we have become caught up in something deeply out of balance, that we are going way too fast, that we are speeding past too many of the things and moments that could really matter. Many of us sense that life is too precious and too precarious to live the way we are living...

"I knew how high ice cream is in saturated fat and sugar, and I was coming to see the link with heart disease… It was disturbing to consider that people might suffer more heart attacks as a result of the company's meteoric growth.

"In 1967, my uncle Burt Baskin, my father's partner in the company, died of a heart attack. A big man, he was only fifty-four years old. I was overwhelmed with grief for the loss of my beloved uncle and increasingly troubled by the existential dilemma I was facing.
I asked my father if he thought there might be any connection between the amount of ice cream my uncle ate and his fatal heart attack. "Absolutely not," he snapped. "His ticker just got tired and stopped working."

"It was not hard to understand why my father wouldn't want to consider that there might be a connection. By that time he had manufactured and sold more ice cream than any other human being who had ever lived on this planet. He didn't want to think that ice cream harmed anyone, much less that it had anything to do with the death of his beloved brother-in-law and business partner. But I could not keep from wondering.

"My dad had groomed me since my earliest childhood to one day succeed him at Baskin-Robbins. The company was expanding rapidly, with annual sales in the billions of dollars. But despite the considerable lure of great wealth, I felt called to a different way of life, one whose purpose wasn't focused on making the most money but on making the biggest difference. Every new generation has an instinct to step out on its own, but what was stirred in me felt somehow much deeper than a stereotypical father-son generational split.

"As a teenager, I had read the writings of Henry David Thoreau, who challenged the relentless pursuit of money and social status. "I love to see anything," he wrote, "that implies a simpler mode of life and a greater nearness to the earth." Seeing people too often make themselves what he called "slaves to the acquisition of money and things," he suggested that "a man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can do without."

"Thoreau's books inspired me to think about topics that were never discussed in the household in which I grew up--issues such as the importance of contact with the natural world, self- reliance, personal conscience, and social responsibility. Meanwhile, I was living in a home with an ice cream cone-shaped swimming pool and a soda fountain that offered guests all thirty- one flavors. My father was proud of his Rolls-Royce and the many expensive classic cars he collected. His yacht was named The 32nd Flavor.

"If money was all that was needed to make a person happy, I would have been jubilant. But I wasn't, and my distress kept growing stronger. I had the distinct impression that even though humanity now had the potential to live upon this earth with more ease and comfort than had ever been possible in human history, we were collectively moving farther and farther away from that possibility.

"I thought that Gandhi was right when he said that there is enough for everyone's need, but not for everyone's greed, and so it pained me to see how often money was becoming the goal of our lives, rather than a tool in service to our ultimate goals...

"One of the reasons I wrote "The New Good Life" is to provide people with simple, easy and inexpensive suggestions on how to raise their quality of life while lowering their cost of living, and at the same time lowering their ecological footprint. The book is filled with hundreds of ideas, many of them counter-intuitive.

"Learning to live with respect for ourselves, respect for others, and respect for the whole earth community is no easy task in a culture that has become as out of balance as ours has. We have literally become out of phase with the deepest needs we have as people and as citizens of our dear planet earth..."

read the complete interview at OpEdNews

Billionaire Koch Brothers Financing Climate Confusion: Vertically Integrated Strategies vs. Scientific Concensus

(This is an excerpt from an article in the current New Yorker Magazine. The full article, entitled "Covert Operations- The Billionaire Brothers Who Are Waging War on Obama" can be seen online here)

"Charles Koch seems to have approached both business and politics with the deliberation of an engineer. "To bring about social change," he told Doherty, requires "a strategy" that is "vertically and horizontally integrated," spanning "from idea creation to policy development to education to grassroots organizations to lobbying to litigation to political action." The project, he admitted, was extremely ambitious. "We have a radical philosophy," he said.

"In 1977, the Kochs provided the funds to launch the nation’s first libertarian think tank, the Cato Institute. According to the Center for Public Integrity, between 1986 and 1993 the Koch family gave eleven million dollars to the institute. Today, Cato has more than a hundred full-time employees, and its experts and policy papers are widely quoted and respected by the mainstream media. It describes itself as nonpartisan, and its scholars have at times been critical of both parties. But it has consistently pushed for corporate tax cuts, reductions in social services, and laissez-faire environmental policies.

"When President Obama, in a 2008 speech, described the science on global warming as "beyond dispute," the Cato Institute took out a full-page ad in the Times to contradict him. Cato’s resident scholars have relentlessly criticized political attempts to stop global warming as expensive, ineffective, and unnecessary. Ed Crane, the Cato Institute’s founder and president, told me that "global-warming theories give the government more control of the economy."

"Cato scholars have been particularly energetic in promoting the Climategate scandal. Last year, private e-mails of climate scientists at the University of East Anglia, in England, were mysteriously leaked, and their exchanges appeared to suggest a willingness to falsify data in order to buttress the idea that global warming is real. In the two weeks after the e-mails went public, one Cato scholar gave more than twenty media interviews trumpeting the alleged scandal. But five independent inquiries have since exonerated the researchers, and nothing was found in their e-mails or data to discredit the scientific consensus on global warming.

"Nevertheless, the controversy succeeded in spreading skepticism about climate change. Even though the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration recently issued a report concluding that the evidence for global warming is unequivocal, more Americans are convinced than at any time since 1997 that scientists have exaggerated the seriousness of global warming. The Kochs promote this statistic on their company’s Web site but do not mention the role that their funding has played in fostering such doubt.

"In a 2002 memo, the Republican political consultant Frank Luntz wrote that so long as "voters believe there is no consensus about global warming within the scientific community" the status quo would prevail. The key for opponents of environmental reform, he said, was to question the science- a public-relations strategy that the tobacco industry used effectively for years to forestall regulation. The Kochs have funded many sources of environmental skepticism, such as the Heritage Foundation, which has argued that "scientific facts gathered in the past 10 years do not support the notion of catastrophic human-made warming." The brothers have given money to more obscure groups, too, such as the Independent Women’s Forum, which opposes the presentation of global warming as a scientific fact in American public schools. Until 2008, the group was run by Nancy Pfotenhauer, a former lobbyist for Koch Industries. Mary Beth Jarvis, a vice-president of a Koch subsidiary, is on the group’s board.

"Naomi Oreskes, a professor of history and science studies at the University of California, San Diego, is the co-author of "Merchants of Doubt," a new book that chronicles various attempts by American industry to manipulate public opinion on science. She noted that the Kochs, as the heads of "a company with refineries and pipelines," have "a lot at stake." She added, "If the answer is to phase out fossil fuels, a different group of people are going to be making money, so we shouldn’t be surprised that they’re fighting tooth and nail."

"David Koch told New York that he was unconvinced that global warming has been caused by human activity. Even if it has been, he said, the heating of the planet will be beneficial, resulting in longer growing seasons in the Northern Hemisphere. "The Earth will be able to support enormously more people because far greater land area will be available to produce food," he said.

Read the full article at NewYorker.com

Anak Agung Gede Agung: "Calamity" of Overdevelopment in Bali

Striking glimpses of the effects of rapid, often unregulated over-development in Asia occasionally show up in our news streams in the States, like China's recent 100 km-long traffic jams, lasting, in some cases, weeks.
But what is happening to the tiny "paradise island" of Bali is particularly poignant and distressing, a focused   microcosm in which these forces are overwhelming a tiny island's ancient and venerable culture. Tourism is still increasing, now with many from China (PRC). Lately we've heard of a rabies epidemic (93 people dead, 110,000 dogs killed), a dengue fever epidemic (2771 cases in the first three months of 2010), deadly gangsterism,  and murders of tourists by migrant laborers. But these are only the most dramatic symptoms, below which lie a raft of problems brought about by the exploitation of Bali's people and culture for industrial-scale tourism, in the process creating a wild west of unregulated speculative development.

Here is Anak Agung Gede Agung, a member of the Gianyar royal family, former Indonesian Minister of Societal Affairs, a graduate of Harvard and Leiden University in Holland and the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, writing for the Jakarta Post Sept 6:
Bali last year had 5.75 million foreign and domestic tourists, which is almost twice the island's population of 3.9 million (the ideal population based on the environmental support capacity is 1.5 million).


"All of Bali's 48 beaches have undergone acute erosion, so much so that its coastline has lost 181.7 kilometers of land this last decade, which amounts to 41.5 percent of the island's total shoreline. In one year alone, in 2008, the satellite data showed that Bali lost 88.6 kilometers of its beaches, caused mainly by massive disregard of zoning and coastline laws.


"This last decade, the average temperature in Bali rose from 28 to 30 degrees Celsius to 33. This is caused mostly by an increase in population density.


"The number of hotel rooms, excluding those in the fast mushrooming villa complexes, has shot up to 78,000 while the optimum number is 22,000, as indicated by the survey commissioned by the government.


"A hotel room consumes on average 300 liters of water per day. With 78,000 rooms, this amounts to at least 23,400,000 liters of precious water used daily by the tourist industry.


"The result is a massive shortage of water in various parts of Bali and acute seepage of seawater penetrating inland, with sea levels rising by 50 centimeters in most coastal areas in Bali.


"Massive illegal logging is occurring in the forests of West Bali, endangering the island's few national parks. Since 1983, Bali has lost 25,000 hectares of its forest, indicating a drastic reduction of one fifth of its forest reserves within a 20-year period.


"Around-the-clock traffic jams are now an everyday phenomena in most parts of Bali, especially throughout the regencies of Badung, Gianyar, Tabanan, Buleleng and the major highway around the whole of the island.


"Bali has lost on average 1,500 hectares of lush agricultural land per year to the tourist industry over the past 30 years. Considering Bali's small land mass, this is an enormous alienation shift.


"In its place comes a hotel, mall or restaurant that every day exudes an alien way of life, fast replacing the indigenous culture.


"While the biodiversity erosions are caused by an overuse of natural resources due to an influx of tourists and changes in lifestyle are severe enough, the cultural erosion caused by the land alienation are more critical as they lead to the rapid extinction of the Balinese custom, tradition and identity.


"Why has such a calamity befallen Bali? The answer lies in the government, both at the central and provincial levels, together with the tourist industry's over-focus on Bali . . ."

 -Anak Agung Gede Agung   

Labor Day message from Robert F. Kennedy

Bobby Kennedy said this in a speech on Labor Day 42 years ago:

"Too much and too long, we seem to have surrendered community excellence and community values in the mere accumulation of material things. Our gross national product ... if we should judge America by that - counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for those who break them. It counts the destruction of our redwoods and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl. It counts napalm and the cost of a nuclear warhead, and armored cars for police who fight riots in our streets. It counts Whitman's rifle and Speck's knife, and the television programs which glorify violence in order to sell toys to our children.

"Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education, or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages; the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage; neither our wisdom nor our learning; neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country; it measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile. And it can tell us everything about America, except why we are proud that we are Americans."

(thanks to Alan Grayson for forwarding this excerpt)
(Listen to the original audio of this segment)