The sovereign's justice, circa 2500 C.E.

Nerrivik Harbor, Victoria Island province, Arctic Ocean. July 4, 2502 (old calendar).

Source file at http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:LeDiben_Harbor.jpg

13 High Summer, 2502

Report to the Sovereign Convention

regarding the Reformulary (Third) of National Jurisprudence

by James Asiaq Hernandez Washington

Investigator, Collaborative of Ecological Social Inquiry

Aurora University

Nerrivik Harbor, Victoria Island province

Arctic Confederation of America

Gentle ones, 

May this letter find the emissaries prosperous and well. Enclosed with this parcel you will find our most recent draft of chapters 1, 2, and 3 of the Reformulary, covering basic rights and obligations of the communities and of the beings entrusted to their care. 

Adhering to guidance from the convention, we have included in our foundational research the surviving legal records of the former United States of America and its successor polities. Although many records have been lost, substantial documentation exists for intervals between the declaration of United States independence in 1776 and the dissolution of the Third Constitutional Republic in 2132. We believe our inquiry has produced insights useful to the synthesis of a new legal understanding relevant to the needs of our own time.

Our existing legal culture, of course, differs radically from the ancient common law of England and its North American settlements. English law originated when Norman conquerors fused their own military-feudal institutions with tribal customs of the indigenous Anglo-Saxons in the centuries after 1066. The resulting legal system embodied the basic political philosophy of the Middle Ages: that government authority and legitimacy flowed ultimately from a monarch, ordained by the creator of the universe to rule over a people. The monarch was sovereign, claiming a monopoly on the use of force and therefore the power to make any decisions necessary for safeguarding the realm. Ultimately, the realm and its sovereign were the same. Over time, lords and parliament contested the king's power, but the theory of the king's justice as the expression of national sovereignty remained. 

The independence of Britain's North American colonies in 1776 created a wholly different political sovereignty. Inspired by precursors of the Greco-Roman era and the medieval Italian republics, the founding institutions of the United States located political sovereignty in the human population of the new federal republic. Although acknowledging diverse beliefs in a greater divine order to the cosmos, the new concept of sovereignty relied on human reasoning for legitimacy. It required that any authority exercised among human beings be done so only with their consent. The resulting government was, in time, the first of many in the carbon energy era to idealize democracy. 

The behavior of those governments in practice proved very different from the ideal. While fighting and defeating totalitarian adversaries in twentieth century Eurasia, the democratic powers created a global system channeling real political and legal power to a tiny fraction of the human population. An elite class of managers oversaw the capital and technology necessary for global society to function. Therefore, the politics and laws of that global society failed to attain anything close to genuine democracy, declarations to the contrary notwithstanding. 

Ultimately, this fundamental flaw destroyed the global capitalist order. By channeling resources and therefore political power to a tiny elite, capitalism created institutions immune to change when ecological cataclysm began. Enriching itself by destroying the biosphere, the elite had no incentive to take corrective action when fossil energy depletion, ecosystem collapse, and climate super-heating accelerated in the early twenty first century. Action to prevent collapse would mean ending the exploitation sustaining the elite's political power. And so the collapse came. 

Historians today endlessly debate whether the period of the most profound social disintegration, from the abrupt breakup of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet until the Renewal of the twenty third century, constituted a so called "Long Night." Lately, that era has been relabeled as the Long Fire, or the Long Twilight, or the Long Death.

All of these views acknowledge the continuation of cultural frameworks from the old world into the new era of a planet made wholly alien to its former self. In the Earth's new climate, human cities today congregate in the temperate Arctic Ocean rim and the the thawing river valleys of Antarctica. The former centers of population in the middle latitudes lie in ruins -- a vast expanse of desert and rubble across most of the Americas, Africa, and Eurasia. In this planet-encircling graveyard of nation-states, cities and civilization have become impossible. A dead zone encompasses most of our planet, ravaged by super-storms, extreme heat, and plant extinction that destroyed any possible basis for stable agriculture and infrastructure. Only at the newly thawing poles could temperate climate let the Renewal take place.

If the former world is passed away, ours still retains old beliefs in the rights of human beings against their ruling authorities. Many alternative political and legal systems have been attempted in the last century and a half of rebirth at the north and south planetary poles. Societies of northern Scandinavia, Murmansk, and the Urals have generally adopted the old Napoleonic legal architecture. The Napoleonic civil law tradition, of course, now bears the legacy of five hundred years of military regimentation, resource wars, and epic migration.

The same is true in the river valleys and Arctic ports of Siberia, thoroughly conquered by generational floods of Chinese. The Sino-Siberian civilization has evolved from a wasteland of simple warlord city states four centuries ago to an uneasy melange of political and legal traditions from across Asia today. Many of these traditions reflect the eco-pacifism of the Great Teacher of Islam, Rashid the Blessed, who converted millions of people on his twenty third century journey from Spain to Kamchatka. Still other Siberian nations practice Chinese neo-Confucian law or Hindu-Buddhist fusions. Patagonia and the Antarctic nations have generally adopted the Second Ius Commune of the Catholic Church.

In the tiny outposts of Australia and southern Africa, a variant of the Anglo-American common law survives. The common law lives on in Arctic North America as well, still faithful, in spite of epic changes, to ideals of human dignity and limited government. Those ideals predate the collapse of half a millennium ago.

For all of this diversity, today's plethora of legal-political systems share a common historic legacy. Formed in the generations since the collapse, they have all abandoned the human-centered political sovereignty of the old world. They did so because that kind of sovereignty brought the old world to an end. In its place, the source of today's authority and law rests not in the divine power of kings or the reasoned will of the people but in the transcendent forces of nature itself. The Gaian matter-energy exchanges of this planet have become the sole legitimate source of power and justice in human societies.  Religious and secular people differ on whether Gaia is literally conscious. All agree that we live of the mercy of her power, or its, forever.

And so we render fealty therein, in fact and in law, for the remainder of human existence on this planet. Our constitutions, our parliaments, our executives, and our police reflect the hard won wisdom of five centuries.

Our purpose now is to use this legacy for the benefit of ourselves and our posterity. We have it in our power to make the world over again. And so we will.

Afternoon musings, on constructing an optimistic scenario for the human future

Earth, viewed from Apollo 8 spacecraft in orbit of the moon, December 24, 1968

When thinking about the collective future of the human race, you have to envision the planet Earth as one big computer simulation. In your mind's eye, picture a giant blue sphere populated by seven trillion bustling little actors called "humans." Each one of them sucks energy and raw materials from the huge material infrastructure smothering the blue sphere. That infrastructure, in turn, extracts extra-mondo-stupendously-gigantic flows of energy and raw materials from the sphere. The bustling bee-hive of humanity strives desperately to maintain the planet-smothering engine of production. They know they can't live as they now do without it, so they maintain it, even though it poisons and destroys ecosystems with its waste, super-heats the climate with more waste, and strips the spherical planetary subsurface of finite minerals and metals.

All of this normally happens beyond our everyday perception, but if you picture it all as one big game, you understand how it works. It's one planet-sized machine consuming what it needs to keep going. As long as it does keep going, we continue to live the way we do now.

Simulation of planetary human infrastructure, seen from Earth orbit at night

But it can't keep running. It simply can't. When you run the simulation forward in time, to the year 2100 and even further out, far into the new millennium we've just entered on the Christian calendar, you come up with only a single outcome.

Overshoot.

While details of the scenario may vary from one play of the game to the next, the result is always the same: infinitely growing consumption outstrips a finite stock of resources. The humans run out of stuff they need to keep the planetary infrastructure running properly. Without it, the greater part of the human population dies, circa 2050-2200. Population stabilizes at a much lower level by the twenty third century or so, with much lower technology and living standards. Medieval, by today's standards.

That's what we face if human consumption of materials, emission of wastes, and damage to the climate continues unabated. The resource base and climate will be too heavily damaged to keep the human infrastructure going and human population expanding. There won't be enough food, water, and energy, and so increasingly more humans will die each year than are born. Population crashes, machine stops. Maybe this die off can be delayed a few decades. But it doesn't really matter. On our current path, based on existing social institutions, cultural norms, and economic systems, the die-off can't be stopped.

 The terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day: planetary infrastructure failure

Mainstream policy-making and planning, of course, doesn't accept this. Or even think in terms that come remotely close to acknowledging that such an outcome is possible. The people who control the infrastructure today simply assume the planet-sized machinery will keep running. They don't know how to think about the machinery as a finite thing dependent on finite inputs. So they practice what amounts to magical thinking, about specific problems in isolation from each other. Based on the unacknowledged assumption that the inflow of energy and materials necessary for problem-solving will continue, indefinitely.

I have friends and associates who work in mainstream policy settings. Mostly in health care or academia. They write about health care reform or U.S. policy in Afghanistan as if climate change, peak oil, or resource depletion aren't relevant or don't exist. My sense is that my policy wonk buddies are about as anxious to discuss resource limits in a serious way as I am to bother with 9/11 conspiracy theories. Probably for the same reason: because such a viewpoint seems so amazingly weird (and likely to be expressed in an off-putting way), that taking time and energy to deal with it simply isn't worth the trouble.

Still, I need to find ways to make a hairline fracture in the armor of denial. I'm about to enter a three year professional degree program in environmental law. Which means I'm deliberately injecting myself into a mainstream setting where "out there" views face extremely tough going, to put it mildly. My goal in the next three years, and beyond, will be to express what I really think about the global situation in a way that won't automatically result in eye-rolling dismissal.

I want to communicate the reality of ecological overshoot as something that is (A) inevitable and (B) survivable. We can't stop it, but that doesn't mean we should all just blow our brains out. It means all of our policy paradigms are obsolete, but we can construct new ones. The future we imagined isn't physically possible, but planning is still necessary, hope is not pointless, and the human story is worth following through to whatever awaits. We need a different vision of the world to come after us. One that accepts both ecological reality and the human yearning to make gentle the life of this world.


I think, on better days, that I'm on my way to fashioning a futurescape that works for me. I've been thinking about this stuff for 23 years -- since watching James Hansen testify on climate change to Al Gore's old committee in the United States Senate, on a burning summer day during the drought of 1988. On that day I had intimations of an apocalypse other than the nuclear inferno that haunted my imagination growing up. The world, it seemed, would still end in fire, just not the one delivered by ICBMs. There are many possible ends to the world, but we always imagine only one.

From many endings, one: hypothetical asteroid impact

In any case, the apocalypse is here, not to be denied. Sometimes life is like that. The biopsy comes back and the results are not what you wanted. But there they are. What now?


Here are some of the still disconnected, mostly abstract fragments that float in my head when I try to imagine what will one day emerge from the apocalypse we have made, that will define the remainder of our time in this life.


1) Steady state economics. For the last five hundred years, human institutions dominated by the conquering societies of the West have assumed endless economic growth is not only possible but is the only conceivable basis for a free, humane way of life. We know now, or soon will, that such growth actually isn't possible. A few notable thinkers, like political scientist Thomas Homer-Dixon and economist Herman Daly, have dared to voice the unthinkable. Once their realization becomes the dominant mode of thought in social power centers, humans will face the task of building totally new economies. We will have to use energy and materials only at the rate nature replenishes them. We'll have to limit our production of machines and gadgets, restricted by the amount of accessible raw materials left in the ground, by our ability to keep existing devices repaired, and by the salvaging of parts from the former industrial societies. No more endlessly increasing production, from ever more numerous factories, fed by expanding transportation nets and by mining operations devouring ever greater mountains of ore from the Earth. If you're lucky enough to have an electric stove in your dwelling in the twenty second century, you'll have to keep it running for decades, because there won't be a new one rolling off the assembly line. Ever.

2) Post-capitalist political economy. The breaking of supernaturally-based authoritarianism as the dominant organizing principle of human societies in the centuries after 1500 was one of the most important developments in the 200,000 year history of our species. Among our intellectual achievements, this monumental break with the past ranks alongside the development of literacy, music, and mathematics. But we flatter ourselves that the replacement of theocratic monarchy with capitalist parliamentary systems represents the end of social evolution. It doesn't. Capitalist parliamentary systems centralize control of resources -- and therefore politics -- in a tiny, elite few. This few lives in luxury, while everybody else lives in shit. One guy in a corporate headquarters can destroy an entire town by deciding to move a factory overseas; the town turns into a poverty-ridden hell hole while the peasants overseas turn into industrialized slaves. The town and the overseas slaves never got to vote on their own destruction. So much for "democracy." But the destruction of capitalism's ecological foundation will at least give our species the chance to develop a new, more humane way of distributing resources and making economic decisions. In a society that accepts resources as finite, ethics will require what's available to be distributed equitably, much as democratic political theory demands the equitable distribution of political power. There is a word for democratic decision-making applied to achieve equitable distribution of both resources and political power. That word is "socialism."

3) Spiritual pluralism. Societies based on equitable distribution of limited resources will need to be buttressed by compatible belief systems about the ultimate nature of reality -- i.e., by religion. Over the last two thousand years, the most expansionist human societies have been dominated by two monotheistic religions: Christianity and Islam. Both of these religions, in their dominant forms, claim that all other visions of ultimate reality are false. It is possible, however unlikely, that the ecological devastation of expansionist societies will discourage imperialistic religions. That result could transform Christianity and Islam, but also nurture the less missionary traditions of other cultures, such as Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, animism and more. Or, maybe we'll see a diverse patchwork of new and old faiths, more attuned to the reality of limits, to economies and societies centered on preservation rather than expansion.


4) Large-scale non-carbon electricity. Civilization as we know it depends on electricity. Not oil or coal or natural gas but the primal stuff that zapped Ben Franklin's kite. If we can find a way to generate decent amounts of it, we can still have a future not made purely of stone knives and bear skins. We may not have endless energy for infinite economic growth, but we could still fashion a decent, finite flow of electricity for a few essential purposes. The key is to generate electricity from a renewable source with abundant energy yield, reasonable maintenance costs, zero carbon emissions and manageable waste streams. Wind, hydro, and solar sources get the most attention, but we will need others. One promising candidate, according to Thomas Homer Dixon, is deep geothermal electric power. This technology involves drilling miles into the Earth's surface and injecting water into the depths, where the natural heat of the Earth's crust generates enormous amounts of steam for turning electrical turbines on the surface. The technology is enormously expensive and fragile today, but it exists, and might be further developed, in the right circumstances. We will need to investigate such possibilities, and deploy them consistent with available resources, in the years ahead.

5) Organic, locally distributed farming. Civilization is based also on agriculture -- artificially cultivated food supplies able to sustain a population living primarily in cities. Whatever the grandiose claims of certain ecological radicals, human populations will not willingly return to hunter-gather lifestyles. So we will need farms to feed our populations. Today's farms depend on fossil fuels to run the mechanized equipment, fertilize the fields, and control pests. Since fossil fuels are finite in quantity and super-heating the atmosphere, that's the end of that. New agriculture will be needed, quickly and cheaply. Organic farming, based on simple, low-tech methods, is the easiest alternative that can be introduced on a planetary scale. It will be more labor intensive, meaning that future societies -- even with continued widespread use of renewable electricity -- will incorporate food cultivation into everyday life far more pervasively than most people imagine today. Cuba offers a glimpse of this future. When Soviet oil shipments ended in 1989, the country faced starvation. It rapidly converted to organic, low-tech agriculture, on fields not only in the countryside but on city rooftops and vacant lots. I'm willing to grant that genetic engineering and other high tech methods might be in the mix of agricultural techniques, if they don't overtax limited supplies of energy and materials. But in the future, the best solutions will be those that are cheap, easy, local, and renewable. On that basis, organic will trump gen-engineered, every time.

6) The return of muscle power and low-tech simplicity. In the future I imagine, modern technologies like electrical devices  will co-exist with age-old technologies based on manual labor. This will be most obvious in agriculture, where organic, labor-intensive techniques might be supplemented by electrically pumped irrigation water. But every aspect of human life will display the same mix of modern and pre-modern. That will mean technology left over from the age of capitalist industry will exist alongside the technology and methods of muscle and sweat. We will see far greater reliance on devices like bicycles, spinning wheels, and sail boats. Over time, this will lead to a collective feature of human societies: they will have certain high technology practices, but these will be few in number and extent, conserved for the most vital uses. If a town has steady electricity from a deep geothermal power plant, the electricity will be prioritized for essential community uses. For equipment in a hospital, for example. Or operation of essential farming technology, like irrigation pumps.

Future communities will not be able to waste energy by cabling it into thousands of individual dwellings for profligate private use in non-essential devices like washing machines, plasma television sets, and home computers. Laundry will be done by hand, most likely, because that's cheaper and simpler in resource terms -- albeit a pain in the ass by the standards of my own day. Plasma television sets won't exist, not just because scarce electricity is better used for other purposes but because petroleum-based plastics, plus circuits made of rare earth metals, will be extraordinarily rare and hence hyper-expensive. Same goes for the plastics and electronics in home computers. No doubt computers and electronic communication will continue to be useful. But computers and telecommunications will be reserved for essential services -- government, medicine, infrastructure maintenance, and so on. If a private citizen wants to use a computer or communications net, odds are this will have to be done in the post-2100 equivalent of today's public libraries and internet cafes. The internet itself, if it survives, will be dramatically reduced in scale and bandwidth, probably supplemented by good old fashioned radio, telegrams, and snail mail. Television, too, will be rare. Something seen in public squares instead of the living room comfort known only to your great, great, great grand parents.


7) Adaptation to a flooded, storm-ravaged, super-heated planet. The material culture of farming and communication and the rest of everyday life will unfold on a planet completely alien to the one we know today. Earth of the future will have a dramatically higher average temperature and sea level. Thus, the ecologies, agriculture, and settlements of today will be impossible. They will have to pick up and move to areas not blasted by heat, drought, floods, deforestation, and storms. The continental interior of North America, for example, will become too hot and dry after 2050 to sustain vast numbers of human beings. So the humans will have to migrate north, into the thawing Arctic regions of Canada. That future is inevitable, because the warming of the planet is now beyond control. If all fossil fuels vanished today, the warming would continue to be driven by non-human causes: Arctic methane emissions and general carbon cycle breakdowns. That warming, in turn, will drive additional deforestation, albedo loss from ice sheet disappearance, die off of carbon-absorbing ocean life, and smothering of carbon sinks in terrestrial soil and plants. All of this will drive masses of people to migrate inland from the coasts, as cities like New York, San Francisco, and Vancouver face a sea that will rise steadily for tens of thousands of years. The eventual sea level, millennia from now, might stabilize 80 meters higher than today, after the ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica have melted away. We're stuck with a super-heating, flooded planetary home, so the only thing left to do is plan accordingly, and save what we can.


* * * * *


So. That's all very general and vague. But useful, for me. It hints at a very different future than the one you'll find in, for example, a World Bank forecast. But it doesn't have to be hellish. It will have room for human beings. And, unlike the sort of future envisioned at the World Bank, it's based on what we can reasonably know about the actual conditions future human beings will face.


So what does it mean for those of us alive today? That we have a lot of work to do. And not much time.


Here we go.

Earth, seen from the International Space Station, July 21, 2003

Day 2: There must not be blood. An American city confronts peak oil, July 2015

Duke City Commonwealth.com
Saturday, July 4, 2015
9:15 p.m. MDT

Compiled from staff and volunteer reports.

 

1: Downtown Albuquerque, July 4, 2015

22 people are known dead and at least 200 believed wounded in Albuquerque in the last 24 hours, as protesters engage in running street battles with Albuquerque police and elements of the New Mexico National Guard.Casualty estimates come from sources at Albuquerque area hospitals.

All of the dead and injured reported so far are civilians. State government sources have not released casualty figures among police and National Guard forces. Eyewitnesses claim multiple instances of police or Guard personnel being hit by gunfire from street protesters.

Sympathy street demonstrations have broken out in Santa Fe and Las Cruces, although so far the demonstrations there have been peaceful.

New Mexico Governor Susanna Martinez has declared a state of emergency in Albuquerque, effectively placing the city under martial law. By the governor's order, a 24 hour curfew went into effect in Albuquerque at 4:00 p.m. today. Persons other than police, military, or emergency services personnel found to be present outdoors will be fired upon. The Speaker of the New Mexico House of Representatives, Democrat Raymond Lujan of Grants, has vowed to challenge the governor's emergency declaration in court.

Governor Martinez refused to comment on reports that she has asked U.S. President Mitch Daniels to deploy regular army troops to the state. Pentagon sources have suggested in recent months that ongoing combat operations in Mexico, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Venezuela would leave little manpower for suppressing domestic disturbances in the continental United States.

The violence in Albuquerque began yesterday, with a clash between protesters and police at a local supermarket that left five demonstrators dead. The protest was called by community leaders in response to the mounting food crisis in the city.

Street battles in the ensuing 24 hours suggest more than anger toward the police. Signs and slogans among protesters have denounced food shortages and high prices, also accusing local supermarket chains of cronyism in food distribution.

More than a dozen supermarkets were reportedly damaged in today's fighting. The South Valley Albertsen's store where the street battles began yesterday has burned to the ground. Fire department personnel trying to respond at the scene were met with automatic weapons fire from surrounding buildings.  

Gunfire from police during the day's violence was repeatedly met in kind by local residents. Protesters used automatic weapons, Molotov cocktails, and rocks to inflict a so-far unknown number of casualties on police and National Guard forces throughout the city.

 2: New West National Bank, near Coors and Central

One report claimed that an improvised explosive device (IED) destroyed a police patrol car in the South Valley, but the report remains unverified.

A source with an Albuquerque activist organization, speaking only under a guarantee of anonymity, claimed that the violence could soon escalate dramatically. According to this source, meetings of key community members at secret locations spent the day debating a coordinated response to the violence. The meetings apparently failed to reach a consensus.

However, one group favored escalating the so far piecemeal armed attacks on police and Guard units into an all-out armed insurgency. Members of this group include several veterans of the U.S. military, with combat experience in wars spanning the last fourteen years.

One veteran is said to favor massively destructive guerrilla style attacks. These attacks would use car bombs and other techniques faced by American forces in the ongoing global U.S. war to suppress Islamic insurgents and other "assymetric" opposition.

Other activists have reportedly gone so far as proposing an alliance with the city's gangs and drug cartels. 

A larger group, according to the source in Albuquerque's increasingly underground activist community, favors a peaceful resolution to the crisis. Under their proposal, the Archbishop of Santa Fe and other religious leaders would mediate an end to the confrontation. Albuquerque residents would pledge to abandon violence, while state and city authorities would accept formal, face-to-face talks with community leaders to address the ongoing food shortage and economic crisis.

 3: Central Avenue, downtown

The source who described this proposal emphasized the growing desperation of many ordinary citizens. "We've got unemployment over twenty percent. A lot of people are running out of food, and they've got sick family members who can't get care because they got no insurance. And the government is cutting people off from all kinds of help. Medicaid, unemployment, welfare. They're closing the schools. They say there's no water rationing but the utility is cutting people off anyway. And it's a hundred fucking degrees every day. Everybody's tired of it. Something's got to give. When people are desperate they can do anything."

The source who made these remarks self-identifies as a supporter of the peace proposal being discussed by activists. The source agreed to speak about the proposal, and the more violent responses under consideration, in order to head off a worsening of the current situation.

"But the government's got to give, too," the source emphasized. "They can't keep doing this shit to people. They've got to talk to us, about ways to start helping people. Organizing neighborhoods to start living a different kind of life. Because the old days, they aren't coming back. Wal-mart and partying on payday and going to the mall. That's done. The government's got to start helping people deal with that."

The source wouldn't offer a precise prediction of what will happen next. Nor would the source speculate on how the debate in Albuquerque's underground will go. The activist only repeated the need for action amidst growing economic collapse. "If this keeps up," said the activist, "things are going to get bad. We won't be a community no more. We'll be the resistance."


* * * * *

Public domain images from Wikimedia Commons:

1: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Dec2008-riot-komotini-1.jpg

2: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Commercial_Bank_(closer_shot)_(Athens_riots_December_2008).JPG

3: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Thess-riot-barricade-2.JPG

They say Albuquerque is dying: an American city confronts peak oil, July 2015

Duke City Commonwealth.com 
Friday, July 3, 2015
11:55 p.m. MDT

Albuquerque police opened fire on a crowd of demonstrators outside a supermarket early this evening, killing five people and wounding at least 11 others, according to police and hospital sources.

Incidents of rioting, vandalism, and arson have erupted throughout the city following the shootings at the supermarket. At least two police officers are known dead in the city-wide violence and four others wounded, according to a police spokesman. The number of dead and injured among civilians in the hours after the supermarket clash remains unknown, but numerous eyewitness reports say police have used deadly force repeatedly throughout the evening.

Today's outbreak of mass violence was believed to be the worst civil disorder in the state since New Mexico was occupied by U.S. military forces during the Mexican War of 1846-48.

Numerous, extensive fires have been reported throughout the Albuquerque metro area, affecting commercial and residential buildings as well as vehicles. The glow from the fires was visible as far away as Los Alamos, fifty miles to the north. 

1: Downtown Albuquerque, July 3, 2015

At 10:00 p.m. this evening, Albuquerque Mayor Darren White issued a directive establishing a near-total dusk-to-dawn curfew throughout the city, effective immediately. In a written statement, the mayor officially authorized police to use deadly force at their discretion to enforce the curfew. Police and emergency services personnel are exempted from the curfew. The mayor's office and police have ordered all other city residents to stay in their homes or businesses for the duration of the curfew.

The mayor has reportedly asked New Mexico Governor Susana Martinez for National Guard assistance. Information to that effect comes from sources with the City Council who asked to remain anonymous. Eyewitness accounts of troop carriers moving south on Interstate 25 between Santa Fe and Albuquerque could not be immediately confirmed.

The demonstration and shootings which triggered violence across the city took place at the Albertsen's supermarket on Isleta Blvd SW. At about 6:00 p.m., several hundred local residents began to gather in the parking lot outside the store. South Valley community groups had called for the demonstration the previous day, in response to accusations of hoarding, price gouging, and favoritism against the store's corporate management. The crowd size soon swelled to 2,000 or more, according to eyewitnesses.

Police appeared on the scene at about 7:00 p.m. At least two dozen patrol cars and several SWAT teams were reported gathering on the fringes of the demonstration. Two police helicopters patrolled the airspace in the neighborhood as police ordered the protesters to disperse via loudspeaker. The police warnings came at about 7:15 p.m. The sound of gunshots was heard soon thereafter, according to eyewitnesses. Police and community leaders each accused the other of firing first.

Organizers of the Albertsen's protest say police opened fire indiscriminately, without provocation, pouring dozens of rounds of live fire into a dense crowd of demonstrators. "They just started shooting at anything," said Albert Romero, President of the South Valley Coalition of Neighborhood Associations.  "There was no cause for it, none at all," Romero said, his voice breaking. "These were peaceful people going hungry. What the hell are we supposed to do?"

Deputy Police Chief Joseph Vigil said in a statement to media that police were fired upon by gunmen within the crowd and "used legitimate, appropriate force to defend themselves and stabilize the situation."

Emergency room personnel at University of New Mexico Hospital confirmed five deaths by gunshot wound among victims treated at that facility. Eleven other victims of the Albertsen's violence were treated for various injuries. Four of these are said to be in critical condition. Officials at university hospital and other medical centers reported scores of additional victims as violence spread across the city. Health care providers say precise numbers of dead and wounded are impossible to estimate, owing to "the fluidity of the situation," as one hospital administrator put it. 

2: Barelas neighborhood, Albuquerque, July 3, 2015

Tonight's riot at the Albertsen's supermarket, and subsequent violence, comes amidst an acute worsening of the national economic crisis in recent weeks. Local food prices have spiked dramatically, as they have across the nation. Economists blame poor agricultural output in much of the world and the latest explosion in global oil prices. After declining to $110 per barrel late last year, oil closed today at an average price of $272 on global commodity exchanges. Gas at the pump in Albuquerque hit a new record this week, according to the American Automobile Association, averaging $9.61 per gallon.

A seemingly endless litany of national economic woes has worsened the picture. Relentlessly increasing unemployment has fueled an eruption of mass poverty unseen in the United States since the Great Depression of the 1930s. The nation's official unemployment rate stands at 19.7%, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, with the New Mexico jobless rate reported at 22.3%. Meanwhile, draconian fiscal austerity at the local and national level has cut social services such as food stamps, Medicaid, and unemployment relief.

The crisis has exacted a grim toll in Albuquerque and around the state. Food shortages, once unthinkable, have become a fact of American life in the last year. Skyrocketing oil prices have driven up costs for fertilizers, pesticides, tractor fuel, and other petroleum-based essentials of industrial farming. Soaring transportation costs have bankrupted trucking companies and kept food from reaching supermarket shelves in sufficient quantity to keep up with demand.

Meanwhile, New Mexico's drought emergency enters its twenty fifth consecutive month. Governor Martinez has repeatedly urged voluntary residential and commercial water conservation measures, to little apparent affect. Today's high temperature of 111 degrees Fahrenheit marked the eleventh time in the last thirteen days that the temperature has broken the century mark.

So far, authorities in Washington have warned state governments to expect little in the way of federal assistance. President Mitch Daniels says other national needs must take priority, including the ongoing U.S. budget crisis and military operations in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Vice President Mike Huckabee, speaking at Kirtland Air Force Base in Albuquerque last week, promised that essential national security facilities in New Mexico would remain untouched by the nation's fiscal emergency.

Democratic Senate Minority Leader Jeff Bingaman of New Mexico has called on the Daniels administration to institute food rationing and subsidies for the middle and working classes. So far, White House officials remain cool to any such move toward what a National Economic Council staffer called "failed big government policies our nation can ill afford in the present situation."

Albuquerque citizens have reacted with growing anger and frustration to food shortages at local stores. Albertsen's, in particular, has faced accusations of favoritism. Community activists say the supermarket chain continues to sell food at bulk discounts, directly from wholesale distribution centers, to corporations, government officials, and wealthy individuals. "It's outrageous and it's immoral," said Miranda Begay, a neighborhood coordinator for the Albuquerque Transition Network. Referring to Albertsen's management, Begay declared, "We've got families on the verge of starvation everywhere in this city and they're selling food at cost to people who have everything they could ever want."

Albertsen's representatives have denied those charges. They say the ongoing shortage of food staples results purely from high fuel prices and global market conditions in recent months.

An investigation by Duke City Commonwealth.com, published in a series of reports in April and May this year, documented at least five apparent instances of bulk discount sales to corporate customers by Albertsen's employees.

Mayor Darren White's office has indicated that maintaining order will be his top priority in responding to the economic emergency. "People have to know that the government's going to keep the peace," he told worshipers last Sunday at New Hope Evangelical Church in Albuquerque's Northeast Heights. "Without law there can be no liberty," the mayor declared. "And liberty is one thing we're going to keep in this hour of our country's greatest peril."

Community activists have taken a different tack, emphasizing grassroots engagement for social justice as the key to a prosperous future. Environmental, labor, and religious groups have organized an array of grassroots, non-governmental efforts for economic relief over the last three years. Governments at the city, state, and national level face bankruptcy, but local initiatives have tried their best to fill what seems a growing gap between public resources and public needs.

Albuquerque Transition Network's Melissa Begay tried to sound a note of hope about the future. "There's so much good that we could do," she said, as television coverage of this evening's violence unfolded in her Barelas area home. At an an impromptu meeting with fellow activists in her living room, Begay said, "Neighborhoods are starting to come together, to help each other. We've got teams of master gardeners teaching the basics of urban farming. We've got teachers passing on real trades and real skills that people are going to need to take care of their families. Carpentry, mechanics, you name it. We can do so much. The city could help, if they wanted to. They should be helping us instead of killing us."

Others in the community reacted to tonight's events with disbelief and despair. Only blocks away from the meeting of activists at the home of Melissa Begay, a bleeding man comforted his two children while their family-owned hardware store burned nearby. The man, who asked not to be named, said he'd been wounded by gunfire from Albuquerque police. A bloody wound to his shoulder had been patched with a makeshift bandage.

"I never seen the like," he said. "Never here, anything like this. I fought in Waziristan for this country," he said, referring to service in the Pakistan war with the United States Army. "I thought this kind of stuff only happened in other places."

Where does he think we go from here?

The man paused, watching the fire burning across the street. "They say this is the end times, you know? That maybe this is it. They say Albuquerque is dying. And the world too, you know? But if this is the way it's going to be, then maybe I don't want it all to go on, right? Maybe it's all better to just let it go."

* * * * * *

Public domain photos from Wikimedia Commons:

1: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:School_burn.JPG

2: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Riots_Paris_2007.jpg

Future Histories Past

It won't be immediately obvious how this post relates to climate change and peak oil, but bear with me. While plodding through mindless paperwork today at my job, I noticed that tomorrow is August 4. That date struck the random chord of a childhood memory. That memory is of a war that never happened, which began -- in a universe that might have been -- on August 4.

The war in question was described in a certain book that scared the holy bejeebers out of me when I read it around age 11 (circa 1980):

This book, published in 1978, was written as if it were a non-fiction account, looking back from the year 1987 on a (mostly) conventional war between NATO and the Warsaw Pact. You probably don't remember the Warsaw Pact. It was an alliance of East European countries dominated by the now-deceased Soviet Union during the Cold War. For decades the Warsaw Pact massed armored divisions of the USSR and its satellites along multiple European frontiers with their adversaries, which were the United States and its West European allies of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). I grew up in a time when a war between the two European alliances seemed very plausible. I had nightmares about it. In the book whose cover appears above, the nightmare comes true.

Much of this blog is about imagining a possible future, by exploring a history that has yet to happen. Future history, for me, is rooted in events that we can see, because they're happening now. For as long as I can remember, I've loved losing myself in imaginary futures. In worlds that might be, history still to come.

Some of the worlds I imagined when I was younger frightened me. Yet I couldn't tear myself out of them. Terrifying though it was, I devoured General Sir John Hackett's story of global war in a hypothetical 1985. For young me in the year 1980 or so, five years hence seemed infinitely far away. Yet in a way, I lived in that imaginary future as much as I did the present. If not more. I spent hours reading books about World War III, or playing board games that tried to simulate it. On many a Saturday afternoon, my friends and I took command of NATO and the Warsaw Pact, pushing little cardboard pieces representing armored divisions across a map grid of Western Europe, resolving bloodless battles with the non-thunderous clatter of rolling plastic dice. We blew up the world many times over, while gorging ourselves on Doritos and Coke.

 NATO defends West Germany, in the 1983 game NATO: The Next War in Europe

(image from Board Game Geek)

Fortunately, I found at least equal pleasure in visions of a future that was somewhat less ghastly. When brighter fancies possessed me, I imagined adventures on alien worlds, far out in the great galactic dark. There, humanity had ended war and injustice among its peoples, turning instead to battling adversity together, out among the stars. I can thank Star Trek for visions like that. In my fantasies of Trekian interstellar adventure, I charted new solar systems and saved humanity from extinction by fearsome aliens, escaping with only a bloody lip and a torn shirt.

I'm not sure what the point of this post is, other than to notice in my psyche a lifelong fascination with things yet to be. And preferring them, whether interplanetary romance or apocalyptic nightmare, to the mundane world of the everyday. When I was a kid, I fought World War III to avoid mowing the lawn. Today, reading about peak oil and climate change seem preferable to time spent on the job. Which, I think, is possibly quite weird.

Tomorrow marks the twenty fifth anniversary of General Sir John Hackett's Third World War that never was. Sounds like a reason to party, does it not?

A post-script follows, detailing how Mr. Hackett's war turned out. Because maybe you want to know.

* * * * *

The Third World War: August 1985
By General Sir John Winthrop Hackett, British Army of the Rhine. Et al.

The end of the Cold War begins with several months of tension in Central Europe. In this scenario, the Soviet leadership is portrayed as extremely nervous about increases in US defense spending by second term President Jimmy Carter. Carter's successor, elected in 1984, continues the rearmament policy. Meanwhile, Moscow confronts a Communist Yugoslav government that has too long challenged Soviet supremacy in the international socialist movement. With its military superiority in Europe waning, the Kremlin decides to move from a position of strength while it still can. Soviet divisions roll into Yugoslavia in early July, 1985. 

Unfortunately, Soviet leaders have miscalculated. The Americans respond by frantically deploying a battalion of United States Marines into Yugoslavia, as a signal to Moscow that its invasion will not be tolerated. The Americans intend this move as a deterrent, not a prelude to war. But within hours the Marines find themselves engaged in full-scale combat against an onrushing typhoon of Soviet armor. Dramatic news footage is beamed around the world, showing United States forces blowing Soviet tanks to fiery molten chunks. The images are, in more ways than one, explosive. The Warsaw Pact countries begin a full military mobilization, and NATO responds in kind. In ports along the American east coast, U.S. Navy convoys start loading munitions and troops. The United States Air Force initiates a round the clock airlift of men and materiel to Western Europe.

It's the guns of August, one more time. The Soviet leadership decides to go for broke. Warsaw Pact forces smash across the inter-German border (between East Germany and West) in the pre-dawn hours of August 4, 1985. For two weeks, they drive NATO ground forces back, overrunning the north German plain, pushing into the Netherlands, and threatening to break the back of a frayed Western alliance. General Hackett's book serves up harrowing descriptions of West German cities being bombed, chaotic hordes of refugees fleeing before advancing Soviet troops, and the cities of Western Europe in flames.

But NATO armies hold, aided by France's decision to intervene in the war in full force. The Soviet offensive stalls, and NATO launches a counter-attack in the northern sector of the German front. British and West German forces make headway, reinforced by the rapid influx of fresh U.S. and French troops, forcing their Soviet adversaries back to regroup and dig in. The men in the Kremlin grow nervous. Their aura of invincibility has been pierced. The momentum of the war is shifting. The fragile puppet regimes of Moscow's East European satellites might, they fear, begin to unravel. Something will have to be done.

To change the geopolitical dynamic and lay the groundwork for a series of ultimatums against the West, the Soviet Union launches a strategic nuclear missile strike on the city of Birmingham, in the United Kingdom. The goal of the attack is to intimidate NATO and create a crisis of morale in Western militaries and populations, by raising the specter of Armageddon. Birmingham is annihilated in a sea of fire. The result, again, is not what the Soviets intended. An American retaliatory strike incinerates Minsk, in the Soviet republic of Byelorussia (today the independent country of Belarus).

And that leads to the end-game. Crowds begin to gather on the streets of East European cities, demonstrating against the war. And their governments. And their Soviet occupiers. Soviet troops in West Germany begin talking amongst themselves, glaring sullenly at their KGB enforcers. Some Soviet units on the German front roll to a stop, their guns going silent. Rumors begin to spread in the Soviet ranks of desertions, mutinies. The crowds in East European capitals multiply, sensing weakness, becoming an ocean of humanity, their chants thundering in the night. The phenomenon spreads within hours to the cities of the Soviet Union itself. In the streets of Kiev and Leningrad and elsewhere, gigantic teaming seas of human beings gather. They have glimpsed the end of the world and decided they will not let it happen and the time has come to pull their country back from the brink. The armed forces of the Soviet Union make no move to stop them. The officers and men sit and watch. Or they join the crowds.

The nations of the Warsaw Pact and the homeland of their Soviet masters are engulfed by the tide. What happened in 1789 and 1848 and 1871 and 1956 and 1968 is happening again. Whole populations in the streets, armies cowering as the storm gathers force. Revolution. How such a tumult will turn out isn't always clear. Except for 1789, the earlier revolutions ended in defeat when the ancien regime recovered, rallying its armies to cleanse the streets in blood. But in the revolution of 1985, the armies themselves see visions of  how their war will end -- in fires out of Hell, unleashed by the men who watch them every year from atop Lenin's tomb. And so the armies go home. Revolution wins the day. In the plains of Germany and around the world, guns go silent.

The Third World War ends with a cease-fire on August 20, 1985. The official dissolution of the Warsaw Pact and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics follow soon after that.

And the future awaits.