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SATURDAY, JULY 20, 2019: NOTE TO FILE
Save Jordan Cove
Why and How
Eric Lee, A-SOCIATED PRESS
TOPICS: NOT BAU, FROM THE WIRES, DEGROWTH
Abstract: Jordan Cove on Coos Bay in Oregon USA is the proposed site of an LNG terminal and electric power plant needed to compress natural gas for long-distant transport to be turned into CO2, water, and heat to grow the global economy (for a time). Those who oppose the development project do so as usual, seemingly expecting a different outcome. Saving Jordan Cove needs to be seen as equivalent to saving the world system from BAU (business-as-usual) development.
COOS BAY (A-P) — Save the world, why and how:
Why: To end the BAU dynamic, the whole shebang, i.e. save humanity and the biosphere.
How: Understand that the pattern (as pulsing paradigm) of growth and empire-building is unsustainable.
Premises:
- All subsystems are composed of other subsystems (e.g. eukaryotes contain mitochondria); all subsystems are enfolded within other systems on up to Cosmos (as life, the universe and everything); all subsystems are interconnected, e.g. Jordan Cove and the biosphere, aka planetary life-support system.
- Our global socio-political economic system is fundamentally unsustainable.
- We are captured and being dragged along by a complex, powerful and remorseless dynamic (BAU) that automatically overcomes all attempts to stop it, e.g. (as thought experiment) imagine you are one of a cadre of commoners who, through some technology of rare device, could credibly threaten one thousand of the world's top leaders (nation-state, CEO, NGO, military, financial, media, legal, educational, celebrity) with certain death of each if they failed to cooperate to measurably slow the rate of economic growth down within a year—and then what? Expect them to fail or be replaced if any tried. Expect that even if ten thousand top leaders were to 'get religion' on their way to Damascus and were utterly (heart, mind, and alleged soul) committed to degrowing the economy without any external pressure or threat, then they too would pass away.
- If we don't put time and energy into understanding the dynamic, we are doomed to go with it, right to the final curtain
- That 'In Growth We Trust' is the de facto motto of the Euro-Sino Empire (for a time given that the growth paradigm is not remotely sustainable) as Al Bartlett noted.
Our economies are embedded in our societies. Our societies are embedded in the ecosystems and the biosphere from which we arose, and on which we are completely dependent. Our economic growth subsystem selects for short-term self interests having the unintended consequence of destroying the planetary life-support system in the long-term.
Conjectures:
- All prior empire-building complex societies failed to mold individual behavior into a plan of actions or avoidances that are oriented toward the maintenance of a viable equilibrium between Man’s demands and Nature’s resources, and so collapsed or 'faded away', or those that persisted into the 19th century have been assimilated into the current global fossil-fuel empowered technoindustrial society which also fails to place limits on growth as production and consumption with diminishing returns on investment in increasing complexity, for a time before the global empire follows the pattern of all prior empires. [The Past Lives of Humans]
- We subsystems (aka individuals) are what the complex technoindustrial society's 'rules of the game' select for. Behaviors, including verbal, that do not favor growth are not selected for, i.e. are thwarted automatically by the collective growth-is-good narrative and pursuit of short-term self interests of those who serve and are benefited by the economic system that selects for growth per the fourth law of energetics, just as metastasizing tumors do, for a time.
- Understanding that 'growth is the ideology of the cancer cell' or tumor automatically thwarts one's ability to serve the economy with enthusiasm, so one's prosperity (financial) will be selected against. Questioning the rules of the game alters them.
- Lack of enthusiasm for serving the SYSTEM leads to working to replace the Growth's Mandate paradigm with another, e.g. the Nature's Mandate paradigm.
- Understanding the complex, powerful and remorseless dynamic you are captured by and being dragged along by is what delivers you from it.
- When enough individuals understand and are delivered from the technoindustrial dynamic, who are 'as mad as hell, and not going to take this anymore!' and question assumed verities, question everything, the whole shebang, then they will self-organize per a new paradigm that embraces limits and descent (degrowth for a time), that excludes growth for its own sake and empire-building. New rules of the game will select for molding individual behavior into a plan of actions and avoidances that are oriented toward the maintenance of a viable equilibrium between Man’s demands and Nature’s resources.
'In order to change an existing paradigm you do not struggle to try and change the problematic model. You create a new model and make the old one obsolete. That, in essence, is the higher service to which we are all being called.' —R. Buckminster Fuller
Why Jordan Cove?
About 90 percent of the Coos Bay estuary has been developed since 1853. The proposed development of the Jordan Cove area, location of an LNG terminal and power plant at the end of a proposed 234 mile natural gas pipeline, will be per business as usual (BAU). That the gas will not flow forever (maybe 10 to 15 years) to be liquefied and shipped to Japan or wherever to be turned into CO2 and water vapor (plus energy to grow the economy for a time), is BAU. It is too late to save the 90 percent, here and elsewhere, so any proposed 'development' merits protest, but the Jordan Cove proposed development (environmental destruction to build another ruin) is exceptionally short-term, utterly lacking in foresight intelligence, and conspicuously insane and inane. Somewhere and somewhen a line will be drawn by those who can question premises (e.g. growth is good), and Jordan Cove is a candidate for the start of an anti-tech revolution.
So does 'anti-tech' mean 'Luddites of the world unite?' No, it means considering the possibility that technology can, long-term, do more harm than good to humanity and the biosphere. The claim that any limit to the use of technology is thinkable appears 'anti-tech' to Anthropocene enthusiasts, not to mention that any questioning of presumed human supremacy or exceptionalism will be viewed as anti-human by the servants of economic growth and 'sustainable' development.
A foundational myth of empire-building culture is that humans who build empires are different in kind from those who don't and from other mere animals. Human exceptionalism is an assumed given. Accepting this premise enables one to serve the growth hegemon with enthusiasm, and virtually all humanists living in industrial society accept the premise. Questioning it is profoundly revolutionary, leading to an alternative way of living, e.g. naturocracy.
So not Luddites, but those who would rather know than believe will unite. Inquiring minds will choicelessly develop a BAU alternative when the existential incompatibility between minds that would rather know than believe, and those that would rather believe what they want than know what-is is understood. Inquiring minds and believing minds are foundationally incompatible and will separate.
How Will Jordan Cove be Saved?
In the current paradigm we live on a planet for the taking by (and for) humans. Nature can be owned as private property. If an area is spared from economic development, it will be because it serves a competing use by humans, such as recreational, hence some old growth forest can be 'saved' from logging as some, a few percent, will be set aside for human recreational use.
So create an alternative use for Jordan Cove that does not involve its destruction as a natural area to serve industrial society. If enough citizens demand their right to use it, and their demands trump the demands of others to use it to provide income to a few for a time, then it will be saved from development per BAU.
What use is Jordan Cove? Another recreational area for people to divert themselves in as usual is not in short supply. A form of diversion that is less destructive than ripping about on ATVs is needed, such that only Jordan Cove will serve that need. Jordan Cove is both beautiful and biologically rich in wetland and estuary habitat, as some (most all biologists) will agree. It is also where goddesses go to listen to Mother, as some will believe. Knowest thou then: All women are would-be goddesses. Located in Jordan Cove is the Oracle Tree through which goddesses can listen to Mother. Goddesses and non-goddesses (e.g. men, children, dogs) may go there to consecrate the Cove as personification of Mother Nature.
Those who demand their right to listen to Nature or to consecrate the area that uniquely serves their need to consecrate Nature, must have access to make offerings having, to them, deep religious significance expressive of their life-driven concerns for humanity and the biosphere. Native Americans are not the only ones who have a religious connection to Nature. If enough people go to the area and consecrate it in non-destructive ways that involve trespassing on 'private property' to protest its pending destruction, a conflict of interest is created. If enough persist in so using the area, Jordan Cove could be saved from development. How many need to persistently consecrate the area? When a People's Consecration Park is formed, then enough will have been enough. Having established a People's Consecration Park, the first of many worldwide as the need to consecrate is illimitable, it can be expanded to include the North Spit, and why stop there?
Given the interconnectedness of the world system, one cannot save Jordan Cove without saving the world. As Henry David Thoreau noted: ‘What is the use of a house if you haven't got a tolerable planet to put it on?’ If BAU (e.g. transporting LNG to burn to grow the economy for a time) results in sea level rise such that there is no North Spit or Jordan Cove, then what is the use of stopping with the 'saving' of Jordan Cove or some other token bit of Nature? To save humanity and the biosphere requires stopping BAU, i.e. technoindustrial society, which Anthropocene enthusiasts will perceive as an existential threat to life as they know it, because ending BAU is all that.
As stated, the why of saving the world is 'To end the BAU dynamic' that we are captured and being dragged along by, which is to say life as we all know it and that, for a time, we depend on. If the current sheband is not remotely sustainable, then 'seek out the condition now that will come anyway', and sooner is better. Failure to change equals death squared. We are the SYSTEM we must protest. Replacing BAU rather than trying to reform it is 
evolutionary, is to not struggle to change the problematic model, but replace it, making the old one obsolete, i.e. non-existant. The action of stopping the growth hegemon (if it is stopped to lessen the risk of human extinction) has to start somewhere somewhen. Proposed: start with Jordan Cove ASAP.
The action needed has been envisioned. See A Day on the Beach. How the turning point, the transition from a humancentric to a naturcentric paradigm, plays out in detail is unforeseeable, but the consequences of not transitioning have a foreseeable outcome that no hu-man can find thinkable.
