The CHOICE:
Networking for Altruism Among a Global Citizenry
or
Global Starvation and Extinction
(A Collective-Altruist Manifesto)
There is a global catastrophe on the horizon of the not so distant future of the Homo Sapien-Sapien. “Every year, 15 million children die of hunger” (Oracle ThinkQuest). According to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, 15,000 people die of malnutrition daily- 10,000 of which are children; therefore, it is very likely that by the time you have finished reading this paper, 35 children will have died from one of the easiest to cure ailments of society, starvation. In a new era of technological, cultural, and intellectual opulence, this must be regarded as a symptom of a fatal disease within our global society. The often-ignored disease, which plagues the current failing global society, is a practice of primitive, and destructive, principles and habits that drive the desires for private ownership, transnational corporatism, and a deregulation of what corporations can get away with in respect to the environment, people across the world, and the lobbying practices in legislation. One must realize that the aforementioned symptom combined with continuing and ongoing overpopulation, topsoil erosion, desertification, deforestation, fresh water scarcity, mineral and oil depletion, and a growing frequency of species extinction and mass deaths, will lead to a terrifying and inhospitable world perhaps absent of human life. To save the future of humanity on Earth, measures must be taken now. Three such measures that can ensure humanity further passage in time: Individual and communal, not-for-profit, farming communities that operate on a local level with a global consensus; second, the global banning of petroleum-based and other chemical-based herbicides, insecticides, and other carcinogens, which toxicify our water streams, atmosphere, land, and bodies; and third, the equal distribution of Earth’s resources, especially food, to all of its inhabitants. It is common knowledge that people have difficulty with rationality and higher thinking when they are hungry or starving. It is after we solve the problem of global starvation, via common ownership and affordable food, that we can solve other pressing problems in the world.
Breathe deeply, truly open your eyes for a moment and free them of any splinters before reading on. Imagine a world in which all individuals are members of a global network of self-sustaining collectives, driven directly by each individual’s contribution to a global society, in accord with the biosphere. Imagine that this is so, in the sense that not-for-profit farming and gardening communities operate on a local level with a global consensus, while composed of well-educated individuals who commonly share the Earth as a community. If everyone who lives on arable land cultivated his or her own food, we obviously would be able to cure the world of its starvation epidemic. However, large portions of people do not live on land with enough water or the other needed qualities necessary to cultivate and farm the land. Thereinlies the reason why the regions of the world with food surpluses, such as the United States, must cure their overweight and obesity epidemics by freely, and equally, distributing enough food to feed everyone in regions suffering from famine and malnutrition. Put more simply, implementing state and local community programs to build global awareness, which practice sustainable communal farming and gardening projects throughout neighborhoods, parks, vacant lots, and business building roof-tops, interlaced with direct-democratic principles could very easily sustain the vegetative food requirements for the diets of those residing within the developed world.
While the citizens of Earth who reside in developed nations contribute to growing crops within their local communities, the farms that currently exist must continue to exist to supply food to impoverished people whom are without the means to grow their own food as the appropriate measures are implemented to end world hunger. Such changes include the termination of industrial farming, and re-implementation of natural pesticides and fertilizers, coupled with essential free-range and organic principles. Such changes must also include giving nature back any land that is not required for the further sustainment of the current human population. Another key element for the ensurance that people no longer go starving would be the immediate, and gradual, reduction of the human population. This gradual downsizing can occur via outlawing couples from having more than two children, while providing incentives to families that adopt orphans. To paraphrase Derrick Jensen, writer of Endgame and recipient of the Eric Hoffer Book Award, regardless of today’s corporate and World Trade myths as to why we cannot feed everyone in the world, even the most conservative of estimates show that the world as a whole, produces enough food to feed everyone at least twice a day. Even in 2011, with the primitive agriculture and trade processes practiced, there is enough food to feed everyone, which is precisely why everyone should have the birthright to never suffer from malnourishment, undernourishment, or starvation. Two meals a day may be stretching it to some, hence the reason that the citizens of Earth must immediately renew and rebuild from the local to the global level and up, with “food and land for all” as the premise to the future the New Man.
As hard to swallow as it may be to capital and exploitative proponents, it is the responsibility of every member of the species to ensure the continuation of the species as a whole. To establish a future society in which what benefits the individual benefits humanity, each individual must recognize that the individual is an essential member of a society that cannot function unless it practices principles of collectivism and altruism. “Three billion people in the world today struggle to survive on $2 USD a day. One out of every eight children under the age of twelve in the US goes to bed hungry every night.” (ThinkQuest Library Statistics) With the global starvation epidemic already at the doorstep of the current richest nation on Earth, the illusive days of the capitalist dream of unlimited growth and so-called free trade are over as the realization of the reality we live in sets in. That reality is that Earth is a finite entity with finite resources, which need to be sustainably extracted, recycled, and distributed among all individuals throughout all regions and communities throughout the world. “Unlimited growth is the philosophy of the cancer cell. This potent epigram utilizes biological imagery to make a point repeated by an ecological critic of modern life: that within the biological context, humankind and its products have only two choices- to be a health-giving part of the biosphere, or to be a plague upon it.” (David Oates, Earth Rising, p. 75) Consequently, today’s capitalist model of “food for profit,” or leverage by one party over another, must be cast aside into the past, as it is outdated and has become a virus that is killing the planet and famishing two-thirds of the human species. No one should ever go to bed hungry because they do not have enough play money to purchase the food freely provided by the Earth beneath their feet. Food is not a luxury; it is a necessity to the sustainment of all life, importantly provided not by corporate and state powers, but by Mother Nature.
To paraphrase Derrick Jensen, once again, future generations are not going to care about which economy was the greatest in the world at one moment in time; rather, they will care first and foremost about whether or not today’s generations leave behind a better world capable of sustaining life. Though many within the stable regions of the world have failed to realize that the current economic, social, and government systems in power are failures and have been so since their inception, the collapse of civilization could very easily occur within the next fifty years unless revolutionary change occurs on every echelon of the global society now. Revolutionary change must occur now- global starvation and extinction rates necessitate it. “The developed world contains 28 percent of the world’s population (including the homeless and impoverished in such areas), but consumes two-thirds of all grain production, and three-quarters of the world’s fish catch. Unless inequities such as these are eliminated no amount of charity, no matter how generous can ever solve the world food problem.” (Catherine Lerza, Food For People, Not For Profit, p. 218)
There is no other way to save everyone unless the species comes to its senses as a whole, and evolves a system of altruism. “It is not yet realized by the peoples of the (developed) nations of the West that their high standards have been and are in part continuing to be achieved by a massive exploitation of the world’s total resources and a concomitant accumulation of capital” (Georg Borgstrom, Food For People, Not For Profit, p. 217). “We owe the opulence of everything we have in the world to the system that currently exists” is the droning recitation of many proponents of capitalism, corporatism, privatization, state-corporatism, neo-feudalism and various other primitive inhumane systems based on power grabs and servitude. And this, almost religious, recitation of capitalist glorification, is far outside the lines of reality, due to the fact that humans are no longer cave men struggling through harsh environments, and they can easily ensure that everyone is well fed. With every patent, technological advance, growing understanding of the world, and all other trait that characterizes the better side of humanity, it is particularly bizarre as to why humans on an individual and collective level have not come together as a whole to provide, altruistically, for the whole.
What does it mean when one third of the world’s humans suffer from under-nutrition and another one third suffers from starvation at the end of the course of every night, while one third of US Nationals go to sleep obese? What does it mean when your neighbors and other fellow citizens of a single planet cannot come to the consensus that it is not okay to simply let someone die when you have the power to save their life? “In Africa and Far East, 25 to 30 percent of the population suffers from significant malnutrition, the UN estimates.” (Food for Profit, pg. 217) What does it mean when the very people who worked under the sun all day, cutting the threads that later became the shirt on your back, cannot keep their children from going hungry? Typically, like most Americans, one does not ask these questions, because, one typically does not care and is unaware. While an obesity epidemic plagues the United States with one third being morbidly obese, a starvation epidemic is rapidly growing throughout the lower 80 percent of the human population, especially the proletariat. The starvation epidemic threatens to continue to spread throughout the world until it severely affects everyone, unless the appropriate preventative measures and countermeasures are implemented now. To save the future from global starvation, take the money that you would waste on the convenience of fastfood, and use it instead to buy seeds and livestock of your own. To save the world from starvation, we must all form altruist networks of communes and collectives in which we equally distribute and trade our seeds, drugs, and food.
Since the beginning of Man, the first instinct within us all in the morning after rising from our slumbers has been to find food inorder to prevent the starvation of our families and communities. As we grew in our understanding of the natural order of all things, we organized and governed ourselves with a central unifying principle of agriculture, in which we cultivated the Earth to ensure the survival of society. Contrary to popular corporatist, capitalist, and fascist rhetoric, there is no evidence of any form of capital exploitation via land and food control during the Quatenary Period, the period in which humans are believed to have first spawned into the natural realm of things. Though there may have always been an exertion of one’s power over the will of the general masses, food has always been something to revere as a gift from the gods and the Earth. Seeds were once used as a form of currency, but food was never used as a means of control on the level that it has become in today’s world. Today the majority of people throughout the developed world have become disoriented consumers as cogs of capital, consequently blindly accepting the state-capitalist market as all knowing and the only option to maintain a successful societal and economic growth rate. This absurdity could not be further from the truth, because another world is always possible.
The majority of the food consumed by those who shop in the generic chain stores of umbrella companies, such as Kohlberg, Kravis, Roberts (KKR) the owner of Safeway and a number of many other companies, possess GMOs and various carcinogens. The food in stores such as Safeway has most likely, at one point in time, cross-pollinated with artificially and genetically modified organisms, and unnecessarily experienced the contamination of cancer-causing pesticides, herbicides, insecticides and other synthetic materials. These accusations can and are substantiated on Monsanto’s own website, as well as numerous documentaries about Monsanto and other GMO food corporations (The World According to Monsanto, http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/the-world-according-to-monsanto). With the spread of desertification, top-soil erosion, fresh water loss, famine, disease, resource scarcity, oil and water wars, and other Earth shattering catastrophes becoming more problematic for future generations ahead, corporations of the agribusiness and governments have resorted to drastic measures- not to mention the drastic measures of cannibalism that the starving have resorted to in Liberia (The Vice Guide to Travel: Liberia. Dir. Andy Capper. <http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/vice-guide-travel-liberia). Such measures taken, during these turbulent times of overpopulation and resource scarcity, include the growing consolidation of control and private ownership of the powers responsible currently for food production and regulation, coupled with unyielding cooperation among states and corporations. And of course, as historically repeated, when state and corporate or marketing powers couple together, further deregulation, unemployment, ecological destruction, and starvation occur.
Advocates of corporate and state controlled food production may argue that this deregulated globalized network of transnational corporations is the reason we are capable of having such wonderful food variety selections among vegetables and fruits that were not originally sold during their non-seasonal periods. Nonetheless, human ingenuity owes nothing to corporate or state powers. For example, greenhouses, which first became popular and common structures throughout 13th Century CE Italy (or possibly earlier in the Netherlands) were not built because corporations or governments needed to a way to maximize profit income or to gain power; they were built to provide certain foods year-round and to serve various research purposes. What most individuals fail to realize in their childhood years, as they were unknowingly indoctrinated into the propaganda campaigns and rallies of corporatism and, especially, state-corporatism, is that the individual is the most important and most basic element of society, and that it has never been corporate or state powers behind the driving force to successfully progress into the future. The force that has always driven us forward into technological, agricultural, and social progress has always been gifted individuals working together on small, manageable levels. Thus, the cries of the desperate and hungry should not be directed to overinflated bureaucracies too large to move, but rather towards communities ready to begin a new way of living with the Earth. To end global starvation, everyone must do their part without the use of the very institutions that are responsible for ecological and social catastrophes in the first place. To save the hungry and the desperate we must break the shackles of transnational corporatism and bureaucratic red tape. We must stop living to gain leverage and capital dominance over our fellow citizens of Earth. Bryce Nelson, writer for the Los Angeles Times, explains in Big Farms Try Kicking the Chemical Habit that 30 years after various farmers discontinued the use of chemical or synthetic fertilizers, herbicides, and insecticides across the North American Continent, they have reported seeing great improvement in their crop yields. By replacing petroleum-based and other chemical-based products frequently used by factory farming corporations, with manure, fish oil, crop rotation, green manure, and a “natural balance” with insects, farmers effectively aid in the beginning process of detoxifying our streams, lakes, and bodies, as well as finding a symbiotic relationship between Man and Earth. “Ralph Engelken has been farming organically here for 13 years. He now farms 700 acres and says he gets yields and quality that are considerably higher than those of his chemical neighbors.” (Big Farms Try Kicking the Chemical Habit, Bryce Nelson). The powers currently established with oversight and control over the majority of the world’s food, have responded to countless stories like Ralph Engelken’s with hostility, unsubstantiated accusations of theft and deceit, and further lobbying for more government aid/incentives for their patented genetically modified organisms, which range from corn to pigs. The further coupling of patented life, land grabs, small farmer foreclosures and bankruptcies, and consolidation of corporate powers, will not fit well in a better future in which all land is commonly shared and communities effectively feed themselves with self-sustaining farming and gardening.
Imagine a world where the constant threats and growing realities of topsoil erosion, desertification, ecological destruction, fresh water depletion and toxic rivers and seas, have been averted and thus given rise to the possibilities of a brave new world. Undoubtedly some may label these words that support communities that care for the wellbeing of each of its individuals as naïve, wishful, or pipe-dreaming, nonetheless such people are proof of the pervasions that plague humanity. Such contrarians who do not wish to strive for a perfect society in which no soul goes to sleep hungry, are a testament to the destruction that submission and passive behavior beget when action is not taken to correct the wrongs and ills of the world. The front yards of every home, everywhere in the world, should not be filled with grass; rather they should and must be riddled with vines, fruit trees, vegetables and other life-sustaining assets. The choice of every citizen of Earth is either to network local altruist communes with global citizenry in mind, or a global starvation epidemic that will potentially render the human species extinct. Everyone can do their part simply, by planting the seeds to resist starvation today and educating their children about farming, gardening, and Global Citizenry.
Written By: Andrew R. Savage
