Chapter 20. The Earth’s Capacity to Sustain Developed Economies

Part III: External Trade: Sharing Technology with the World: Democratic-Cooperative-Capitalism Birthing Superefficient Capitalism

20. The Earth’s Capacity to Sustain Developed Economies

[The minerals in concentrated] deposits in the earth’s crust, and the capacity of ecosystems to absorb large quantities of exotic qualities of waste materials and heat, set a limit on the number of person years that can be lived in the “developed” state, as that term is understood today in the United States. How the limited number of person years of “developed” living will be apportioned among nations, among social classes, and over generations will be the dominant economic and political issue for the future. World population has grown at around 2% annually, doubling every seventeen or eighteen years…. [For a sustainable, respectable world standard of living], births should equal deaths at low rather than high levels so that life expectancy is long rather than short. Similarly, new production of artifacts should equal depreciation at low levels so that durability or “longevity” of artifacts is high. New production implies increasing depletion of resources. Depreciation implies the creation of physical waste [and consumption of resources], which when returned to the environment, becomes pollution.1

Currently, the most effective way to control population is to raise a society’s standard of living, provide access to family planning, and provide security for old age. Successful social and family planning was demonstrated in Kerala, one of India’s poorest regions, which has a birth rate half that of other low-income countries.2

Kerala’s per-capita income is only 60% that of India as a whole. Yet when it comes to meeting the needs of the people, Kerala is strikingly ahead of the rest of India, proof that there can be enough resources for a quality life for everyone. It has enforced progressive land reform, and brought about major social benefits precisely for the most disadvantaged. Infant mortality in Kerala is 27 per thousand compared to 86 per thousand in countries at the same income level. Life expectancy in India is 57 years, in Kerala 68. Elementary and secondary schools operate in practically every village as well as health dispensaries, fair price shops, bus stops, and all-weather roads. This is a far cry from village life in the rest of India.3

The developing countries of China, Sri Lanka, Colombia, Chile, Burma, and Cuba have a birthrate comparable to that of wealthy nations rather than the high rate of a subsistence economy.4 With the biggest population problem, China adopted a one-child policy with a 19% salary cut for those who ignored those guidelines. Although still increasing at the rate of 17-million per year in 1990 (a combination of too many young people and longer life spans), it is hoped that China’s population, and other heavily populated regions, will eventually stabilize, then, hopefully, shrink.

Each region should have its capacity to feed, clothe, and house its population while still protecting the world’s ecosystem mapped. A country’s capacity to sustain a population at a respectable standard of living while protecting resources and environment should be statistically analyzed. To reach those goals, family planning information should be universally available. Since most people currently depend on their children in old age, family planning requires that all elderly be guaranteed adequate food, fiber, and shelter. A reduction of one child per family will save a society far more than it will cost to maintain their elderly during retirement.

If it were demonstrated that a lowering of population would give a sustainable secure lifestyle as opposed to poverty without it, individuals would restrict their birthrate to reach that goal. If a reduction of population can be obtained in heavily populated areas while industrializing, the per-capita living standard will increase dramatically and assure acceptance of that policy. A steady increase in technological efficiency could double the amenities of life again and all without increasing consumption of resources or pollution of the environment. There will be great variation in potential depending on how high a living standard is reached for, what resources are used for housing (wood, soil, or salvage), what new technologies are developed, population increase or decrease, and so on. With those statistics common knowledge, goals can be set and reached.

Primary Concerns of World Industrialization

The hydrocarbons that produce much of the energy that fuels society were produced by hundreds of millions of years of plant life taking carbon dioxide out of the air to create those carbon compounds. The amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has increased 25% and it is estimated the world’s temperature has risen one degree during the 20th-Century. There is great concern that the burning of those fuels and the release of carbon dioxide and other gasses back into the atmosphere will create a greenhouse effect and seriously disrupt the world’s weather. Scientists’ primary concerns about world industrialization are:

1. Some of the warmest years ever recorded were in the last 25 years. “If the current trend of carbon dioxide, chlorofluorocarbon (CFC), nitrous oxide, and methane emissions continues into the next Century, this could subject the entire globe to an increased temperature rise of four to nine degrees Fahrenheit or more in less than 60 years…. A global warming of [this magnitude] … would exceed the entire rise in global temperatures since the end of the last ice age. If the scientific projections are correct, the human species will experience the unfolding of an entire geological epoch in less than one lifetime.”5
2. Of the estimated 10-million to 80-million animal and plant species on Earth (only 1.4-million of which have been scientifically identified), a minimum of 140 invertebrate species and one bird, mammal, or plant species are condemned to extinction each day. “Within [one] decade, we may lose nearly 20% of all the remaining species of life on earth.” That is a rate thousands of times greater than the natural rate.6
3. Chlorofluorocarbons have been in use for about 50 years. It takes 10 to 15 years for one CFC molecule to work its way through the atmosphere to the ozone layer. Once there, those molecules survive for a century or more and, theoretically, each CFC molecule could destroy 100,000 ozone molecules. This 1974 theory of Professor Sherwood Rowland was given credence when a British research team discovered a huge seasonal thinning of the Antarctic ozone. Scientists calculated a 10% ozone depletion in the northern latitudes over a 10 year period but were astounded when that level was reached in only two years and another ozone hole opened in the north. The increased ultraviolet rays that would reach the Earth, if that thinning continues (by 2001 it had stabilized), it is anticipated to cause cancers, harm to immune systems, destruction of some species of microorganisms, and thus, destruction of entire food chains.7
4. The human “species now consumes over 40% of all the energy produced by photosynthesis on the planet, leaving only 60% for all other creatures. With the human population expected to double early in the 21st-century [if limitations are not imposed], our species will be consuming 80% of the planet’s photosynthetic energy, leaving little or nothing for millions of other species, and in the process we will be destroying the stable mix of gases in the atmosphere.”8
5. Even if new oil finds equal to four-times the present reserves are discovered (which most experts consider unlikely), it will be only 50 years before the total exhaustion of all oil reserves.9
6. If 18% of the world adopted and attained the U.S. living standard of an automobile-throwaway society, it would consume all the annual resource production of the world, leaving nothing for the other 82%.10
7. The first law of thermodynamics says that, “Energy can be neither created nor destroyed. It can only be transformed.” The second law of thermo-dynamics says, “This energy can only be transformed one way, from usable to unusable.” This means that, do what we may, it is only a matter of time until the world’s resources are consumed. Albert Einstein pointed out that this law “is the only physical theory of universal content which I am convinced that, within the framework of applicability of its basic concepts, will not be overthrown.”11
8. To avoid the greenhouse effect, the world must reduce the burning of fossil fuels, reforest the planet to absorb the increased carbon dioxide, and reduce the release of harmful pollutants into the atmosphere, water, and soils.12 An ecological (resource depletion) tax should be placed upon those fuels and the money generated used to develop and install ecologically safe technology such as solar energy.13

Among scientists, as opposed to corporate-funded think tanks, there is no dispute. Global warming, ozone depletion, and species extinction is continuing and, if protective steps are not taken, will get rapidly worse.

Civilizations Collapse when Soil Fertility Collapses

In Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (2005) Jared Diamond addresses obscure societies all over the world which disappeared due to exhaustion of their soils. Greece’s once rich topsoil has eroded down to rocky subsoils. The currently barren North Africa once had lush forests with plentiful wildlife. The “fertile crescent” of the Middle East, the cradle of Western civilization due to its original high fertility, is now largely barren.

As William H. Kötke details in his study, The Final Empire, this pattern has continued historically through the destruction of the vast forests of Europe and then has followed the march of empire with European emigration to its colonies. The United States, for example, has already lost one-third of its best topsoils and the loss is accelerating on all other continents. The most recent figure, quoted in The Final Empire, indicates world soil loss is on the order of 25- billion tons annually and growing.14

Since their origins in Central Asia and Northern China the cultures of empire that term themselves civilized have collapsed their soils. One-half the area of present China was once covered with a vast temperate-zone forest. This forest was eliminated before recorded history by the expansion of the empires of China. For the thousands of years since, China has suffered some of the worst erosion in the world. The Yellow Sea is named for the surrounding land’s eroding yellow loess soils carried into it by the rivers.15

The empires of Sumer and Babylon in the watershed of the Tigris-Euphrates River collapsed after irrigated agriculture and overgrazing destroyed their land. Today one-third of the arable land of Iraq cannot be used because it is still saline from irrigation 5,000 years ago. The mouth of the Tigris-Euphrates River has extended itself 185 miles into the Gulf as the fertility of that hapless land washed into the sea. Every empire has run, and still runs, a net deficit of the fertility of the earth in order to sustain the unnatural growth and material consumption of its population.16 The cultural history of Babylon can be traced through time to the denuded Greece and to Rome, which eroded the ecology of that peninsula.

Most of North Africa—which once had great forests, broad grassy plains, rich in flora and fauna—became a desert. Both the Greek and Roman empires used the then-healthy soils of North Africa as their “breadbasket.” Cities that once were ports for shipping products to the old imperial centers are five and 10 miles from water as the fertile soils that once produced those exports settled into the Mediterranean Ocean.17 Before the rising Muslim societies cut Europe off from the light soils of their African breadbasket, there was one vast forest the width of Europe nourished by those heavy soils. That vast forest built ships, smelted ores, warmed homes, and was burned down so the land could be farmed.

The history of industrialized cultures can be traced through the deforested lands and exhausted soils of Europe, across North America, and now through the deforestation of the tropical forests of South America, Africa, and the Pacific islands. During the expansion of the American empire, the great forests that lay between the Allegheny Mountains and the Mississippi River (enough to have produced a set of fine hardwood furniture for every family then on earth) were burned to clear the land for farming. Soil scientists estimate that one-half the topsoil of the Great Plains has been exhausted since agriculture began there barely 150 years ago.18

Industrial agriculture has learned to create artificial fertilizer from petroleum feedstock so that it trades off biological energy for a finite amount of hydrocarbons. In many areas the soil is exhausted and without such inputs would grow nothing. Modern industrial agriculturists say this is no problem as all they need soil for now is to prop up the plants. Thus nearly half the population of the planet eats food produced with artificial fertilizer processed from petroleum.19 The exponentially exploding population of civilization is out on the proverbial limb with a diet provided by a steadily declining, finite supply of petroleum.20 Coal can provide those chemical fertilizers for a while longer but that too will eventually be exhausted and there are many minerals and other nutrients being lost that are not being replaced.

Erosion, desertification, toxification, and nonagricultural uses had consumed one-fifth of the world’s arable land as we begin the 21st-Century. Another one-fifth will go by 2025.21 If democratic control of society can be accomplished and human society can be agile enough, this situation can be turned around. Permaculture, a complex method of edible landscape design with a wide variety of perennial plants, can rebuild soils and slowly restore ecosystems while growing more food per acre than modern industrial agriculture.22

In his 2005 book, sure to become a classic, Jared Diamond addresses three successful Permaculture societies: The highlanders of New Guinea protecting their soils and ecosystem for 46,000 years; the tiny South Sea island of Tikopia doing so skillfully for 3,000 years, and Japan doing so successfully for 300 years.23 We have much to learn from these cultures.

Bio-intensive gardening using particular varieties of plants, detailed by the Ecology Action research center at Willits, California, can feed one person on one thousand square feet of soil in perpetuity without robbing any other ecosystem of humus. All composting material is grown on that thousand square foot plot. There are hundreds of Permaculture projects around the world and groups have come from all corners of the world to learn these skills at workshops in Willits.24

By outlining the enormous waste of subtle monopoly capitalism and plunder-by-trade and demonstrating the efficiencies of democratic-cooperative-(superefficient)-capitalism we have taken the positive view that humankind will realize the folly of current trade structures (plunder-by-trade), current exclusive titles to natures wealth (as opposed to efficient conditional titles), and restructure peaceful and efficient conditional titles and managed free trade.

But William Kötke’s new book, Garden Planet: The Present Phase Change of the Human Species, starts with the assumption that their will be a massive die off when the earth’s resources are exhausted and it is his belief that only Permaculture societies will survive and it is they who will heal the earth and produce the new humankind that progressive thinkers have dreamed of for centuries.

Jared Diamond’s book addresses both those many massive social die offs over and over for thousands of years, the few Permaculture examples that survived, and this book is about an entire world culture hell bent for self destruction and how to avoid it.

For balance, we highly recommend Jared Diamond’s and William Kötke’s work. If history is any guide, these authors are right, there will be that massive die off, and the sooner Permaculture is understood and practiced the better the chances it will be their descendents who will repopulate and repair our mother earth.

Restoring the World’s Soils and Ecosphere

Some scientists have concluded the only way to absorb increased carbon dioxide emissions, besides cutting back on fossil fuel burning, is to reforest the planet. In an experiment, a section of barren North Africa was fenced off from sheep and goats and planted to grass. That forage grew beautifully and stabilized the once-blowing sand. Grass grows in rich soils while, with even less rain, shrubs and trees grow in poor soils, so forests in suitable climates and soils will do well also. The Baltistan region of Pakistan went beyond those experiments and in parts of this desert region “there is a sea of green” where the local population has planted trees. If these impoverished people can be financed by a small Dutch aid program, the vast oil wealth of the Arab world can finance the restoration of Middle Eastern and North African soils. China, with its dense population and low per-capita income, plans to reforest 20% “of the entire land mass of the country”25

A cooperative effort by a team of scientists, agronomists, engineers, and doctors in Gaviotas, Columbia, took title to 25,000 acres of that nation’s worst soils and started rapid restoration of those desolate areas. To their surprise, in the shade of planted trees a part of the Amazon forest that had been destroyed so long ago it had disappeared from social memory started rapidly sprouting upon those barren Los Llanos plains.26

Moshe Alamaro, a graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, perfected a method where 1-year-old trees are grown in biodegradable, aerodynamic, pointed cylinders containing the required moisture and nutrients and which plant themselves at the rate of 800,000 trees a day when conveyor belted out the rear of airplanes.

Once wars in a region are abandoned and industrial capital provides consumer products and tools, these people can replant their grasslands and forests. The initial grasses can be seeded to hold down the soil and then ecological restoration teams can begin locating the grasses, forbs, and shrubs to complete the restoration of a region’s natural ecology.27

With care, local and regional ecosystems can be restored and grazing can continue. However, this cannot be done using the present corporate-controlled agricultural system. The many different species of grazing animals (deer, elk, bighorn sheep, pronghorn antelope, bison, et al.) consume different species of grasses, forbs, bushes, and even trees. Therefore, a natural ecosystem is cropped evenly, is not damaged, and can produce more meat per acre than a system of pasturing cattle. In a recent study on the African Serengeti plains, “An untouched savanna [was found to be] capable of an annual production of twenty-four to thirty-seven tons of meat per square kilometer in the form of wild animals while the best pasture-cattle system in Africa can yield only eight tons of beef per square kilometer per year.”28 (Most prairies will have a much smaller differential) Eliminating native species destroys the balanced ecology and pasturing and introducing cattle leads to overgrazing of the grasses that are holding down the soil upon which the entire ecosystem depends.29 If a preponderance of tree and shrub species has not become extinct, the complete ecosystem of forests can also be restored. Using the new science of Ecoforestry, a new forest can be guided toward its maturation while being selectively harvested.30

With desertification threatening one-third of the planet and increasing global temperatures from increased carbon dioxide levels, forest restoration is of urgent concern.31 Using soil-based materials for homes is cheaper and more efficient than lumber, so timber cutting can be reduced to a sustainable level while those forests are rebuilding. Homes of rammed earth, stone, straw bale, and fired adobe with a ceramic interior have been demonstrated to equal or surpass wood frame buildings in cost, structural strength, warmth, and safety.32 The second most intensive consumer of forests is paper. As we discuss below, society can be even better informed through electronic databases than through printed matter. Society can do away with disposable diapers and other timber-wasting social habits or it can produce such items from hemp and kenaf.33

There are great economic benefits from forest restoration: expensive hydroelectric reservoirs do not silt up as quickly; there is less need for expensive filtration plants; floods are reduced; forest soil holds the moisture and grows more timber and shrubs; long-dead springs will come to life and currently dry stream beds will run year round; fish would return to those new streams; the retained water is expired back into the atmosphere and increases rainfall both upon that forest and on regions downwind; mushrooms, berries, medicinal herbs, and many other products and animals to enrich a society will increase; and, of equal importance, a reforested earth, along with other conservation measures, could pull carbon dioxide out of the air to stave off the potential of the feared runaway greenhouse effect.

Extinction of plant and animal species makes it impossible to rebuild the original ecosystems which logging, grazing, and burning have destroyed. Soils that once grew a rich forest ecosystem and are now eroded to bedrock cannot be rebuilt within any useful time frame. Soils eroded to subsoil can be planted to shrubbery and a few hardy trees, but will take many centuries to rebuild topsoil that will support flora and fauna similar to what once grew there.

However, where there is still some topsoil left, grasses take hold quickly, and—with controlled grazing—start the centuries-long job of rebuilding those soils. Replanting ponderosa pine forests where there is still soil will start rebuilding the soil immediately and they will mature enough in 50 to 100 years for selective harvesting. Douglas fir, redwood forests, and equatorial rain forests will also start building soils immediately and can be harvested very selectively as they grow, but they will require three to five-times longer to reach climax maturity.

An ecosystem rebuilding time-frame is measured in centuries yet nature starts building topsoil and repairing the ecosystem damage done by 5,000 years of abuse as soon as man stops mining those soils through harvesting the covering flora and fauna. Roadway cuts stayed barren for decades when left for nature to heal yet eco-scientists have learned to establish soil-building grasses and vegetation on those barren and rocky subsoils in 1-to-3 years. So establishing a viable soil-building ecosystem on most eroded soils is very practical. Once that first soil-stabilizing vegetation is established, eco-scientists can replant the species which once grew there and, so long as humans let that ecosystem rebuild and when rebuilt does not over-harvest, nature will do the rest.

The replanting of grasses and reforestation south of the Sahara would reverse the march of that desert, which is now moving south at the rate of 10 miles per year. Only by such protection of the environment can the future of these indigenous people, and all people, be protected. If those grasslands and forests are restored, this would soften regional temperatures and climates.

Endnotes

1. Herman E. Daly, Steady-State Economics (San Francisco: W.H. Freeman, 1977), pp. 6, 7, 17. Back to text
2. Richard W. Franke, Barbara H. Chasin, “Power to the (Malayalee) People,” Z Magazine, February 1998, pp. 16-20; Bill McKibben, “The Enigma of Kerala,” Utne Reader, March/April, 1996, pp. 103-112; Arjun Makhijani, From Global Capitalism to Economic Justice (New York: Apex Press, 1992), pp. 133-34. Back to text
3. Franke and Chasin, “Power to the (Malayalee) People,” pp. 16-20; McKibben, “Enigma of Kerala,” pp. 103-112; Harry Magdoff, “Are There Lessons To Be Learned?” Monthly Review (February 1991), p. 12; Richard W. Franke, Barbara H. Chasin, “Kerala State, India; Radical Reform as Development,” Monthly Review (January 1991), pp. 1-23. Back to text
4. Frances Moore Lappé, Rachel Schurman, Taking Population Seriously (San Francisco: Institute for Food and Development Policy, 1990), p. 55; James P. Grant, “Jumpstarting Development,” Foreign Policy (Summer 1993), pp. 128-30. Back to text
5. Jeremy Rifkin, Entropy: Into the Greenhouse World, (New York: Bantam Books, 1989), pp. 8-9; Robert Goodland, Herman E. Daly, Salah El Serafy, Population, Technology, and Lifestyle (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 1992), pp. 8, 10-14. Back to text
6. Lester R. Brown, State of the World, 1992 (New York: W.W. Norton, 1992), pp. 9-13; Goodland, Daly, and Serafy, Population, Technology, and Lifestyle, pp. 10-14. Back to text
7. Sandi Brockway, Macrocosm USA (Cambria, CA: Macrocosm USA, 1992), p. 3; Goodland, Daly, and Serafy, Population, Technology, and Lifestyle, pp. 8, 10-14; Christian Parenti, “NASA’s Assault on the Ozone Layer,” Lies of Our Times, September 1993, p. 22. Back to text
8. Jeremy Rifkin, Biosphere Politics (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1992), pp. 73, 173. Back to text
9. Rifkin, Entropy, pp. 119-20, 226. Back to text
10. Ibid, p. 233. Back to text
11. Ibid, pp. 59, 80-81, 143, 273; Goodland, Daly, and Serafy, Population, Technology, and Lifestyle, 27-28. Back to text
12. Rifkin, Entropy, pp. 8-9, 59, 80-81, 119-20, 143, 233, 226, 273; Biosphere Politics, pp. 73, 173; Brown, State of the World, 1992, p. 9. Back to text
13. William Greider, One World, Ready or Not (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997), pp. 460-62, 465-67. Ecological tax reform, pollution taxes, or resource depletion taxes are essentially the same thing (Brown, Flavin, and Postel, Saving the Planet, Chapter 11). See also, Barry Commoner, Making Peace With the Planet (New York: Pantheon, 1990), especially pp. 47, 97; Jack Weatherford, Indian Givers (New York: Fawcett Columbine, 1988), Chapter 5. Back to text
14. William H. Kötke, The Final Empire: The Collapse of Civilization and the Seed of the Future (Portland, OR: Arrow Point Press, 1993). Back to text
15. George Börgstrom, The Hungry Planet: The Modern World at the Edge of Famine, (New York: Collier Books, 1972), p. 106. Back to text
16. Erik P. Eckholm, Losing Ground: Environmental Stress and World Food Prospects, (New York: W.W. Norton, 1976), p. 94. Back to text
17. Edward Hyams, Soil and Civilization (New York: Harper & Row, 1976), p. 69; David Attenborough, The First Eden: The Mediterranean World and Man (Boston: Little, Brown, 1987), p. 169; J.V. Thirgood, Man and the Mediterranean Forest: A History of Resource Depletion (New York: Academic Press, 1981), p. 62. Back to text
18. William L. Thomas, Jr., Ed., Man’s Role in Changing Face of the Earth, vol. 2 (Chicago, Ill: U. of Chicago Press, 1956), p. 510; David Sheridan, Desertification of the United States (U.S. Government Printing Office, #334-983: Council on Environmental Quality, 1981), p. 121. Back to text
19. Jonathan Turk, Janet T. Wittes, Robert Wittes, Amos Turk, Ecosystems, Energy, Population (Toronto: W.B. Saunders, 1975), p. 123. Back to text
20. William Robert Catton, Overshoot: The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change (Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1980). Back to text
21. Norman Myers, General Ed., Gaia: An Atlas of Planet Management (Garden City, New York: Anchor Books, 1984), p. 40. Back to text
22. Bill Mollison, Permaculture: A Designers’ Manual (Tyalgum, Australia: Tagari, 1988). Back to text
23. Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (New York, NY: Viking, 2005), Chapter 9. Back to text
24. John Jeavons, How to Grow More Vegetables than You Ever Thought Possible on Less Land than You Ever Imagined: A Primer on the Life Giving Biointensive Method of Organic Horticulture (Berkeley, CA: Ten Speed Press, 1991). Back to text
25. Lester Thurow, Head to Head: The Coming Economic Battle Among Japan, Europe, and America (New York: William Morrow, 1992), p. 223; Jeremy Rifkin, Entropy: Into the Greenhouse World (New York: Bantam Books, 1989), p. 220. Back to text
26. Alan Weisman, “Nothing Wasted, Everything Gained,” Mother Jones, March/April, 1998, pp. 56-59; Alan Weisman, In Context (No 42, 1995), pp. 6-8. Back to text
27. Stephanie Mills, In Service of the Wild: Restoring and Reinhabiting Damaged Land (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995); John J. Berger, Ed., Environmental Restoration: Science and Strategies for Restoring the Earth (Washington, DC: Island Press, 1990); William E. McClain, Illinois Prairie: Past and Future: A Restoration Guide (Springfield, IL: Illinois Department of Conservation, 1986) Back to text
28. Jonathan Turk et. al., Ecosystems, Energy, Population (Toronto: W.B Saunders Co., 1975). Back to text
29. William Kötke, The Final Empire (Portland, OR: Arrow Point Press, 1993), p. 36. Back to text
30. Alan Dregson, Duncan Taylor, editors, Ecoforestry: The Art and Science of Sustainable Forest Use (Gabriola Island, BC: New Society Publishers, 1997); Michael Pilarski, Restoration Forestry: An International Guide to Sustainable Forestry Practices (Durango, CO: Kivaki Press, 1994) Back to text
31. A Report by The International Institute for Environment and Development and The World Resources Institute, World Resources 1987: An Assessment of the Resource Base That Supports the Global Economy (New York: Basic Books, 1987), p. 289. Back to text
32. Michael Potts, The Independent Home: Living Well with Power from the Sun, Wind, and Water (Post Mills, VT: Chelsea Green, 1993); Athena Swentzell, The Straw Bale House (White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green, 1994). Back to text
33. Atossa Soltani, Penelope Whitney, Ed.s, Cut Waste, Not Trees (San Francisco, CA: Rainforest Action Network, 1995); United States Department of Agriculture, First Conference on Kenaf for Pulp: Proceedings (Peoria, IL:USDA, 1968). Back to text

This is a chapter from the book, Economic Democracy; The Political Struggle for the 21st Century. Visit that link for more information about the book.