“The Age of Exuberance was necessarily temporary; it undermined its own foundations.” (“Overshoot: The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change”, William Catton, University of Illinois Press, 1980, p25).

Neo-liberalism is “an ideology related to vulgar ‘social Darwinism’ serving the interests of those in power” (“Cultural Imperialism” ed. B Hamm & RC Smandych, Barnes & Noble, 2005, p245).

“The hidden hand of the market will never work without the hidden fist – McDonalds cannot flourish without McDonnell-Douglas, the designer of the F15. And the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley’s technologies is called the US Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps” (“The Lexus and the Olive Tree: Understanding Globalization”, New York Times international columnist Thomas Friedman, 1999).

  “The Iraq war was just the first of this century’s ‘resource wars’, in which powerful countries use force to secure valuable commodities, according to the UK Government’s former chief science adviser .Sir David King predicts that with population growth, natural resources dwindling, and seas rising due to climate change, the squeeze on the planet will lead to more conflict” www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/feb/13/resource-wars-david-king February 2009).

“So, for those of us living now at the beginning of this new millennium, the question is the same: ‘What sort of world do you want to live in?’ Do you want to live in a world where, increasingly, economic and physical wars are fought over water and energy and access to other resources, where starvation and poverty are even more prevalent because the people at risk have destroyed much of the biodiversity that gave them the ability to exist, never mind live?” (“Biodiversity: a beginner’s guide”, John Spicer, Oneworld, 2006, p160).

In the current global crisis, we stand at another critical juncture of choice for the future. With mounting challenges of social injustice, growing resource constraints, endangered ecosystems, peak oil, global warming, and other interrelated problems, what has been called the “problematique humaine” is increasing in intensity and urgency (e.g. see some of the prescient predictions and pre-emptive recommendations in “Mankind at the Turning Point: The Second Report to the Club of Rome” by M Mesarovic & E Pestel, Signet, 1974). Across the planet, many societies are stressed by a combination of economic and environmental conditions. So do we try and live more fairly and sustainably, sharing the world’s resources as equitably as we can; or instead continue to contribute to the conditions for deepening conflict? Certainly, meaningful change is going to be very hard. We need to propel our so-called political leaders firmly from the rear!

So much of what is happening now was foreseen over a generation or more ago. Ironically, some of the leading seers were farsighted capitalists, concerned both for the future of the planet and its inhabitants. Globalisation threatens human implosion (or explosion!). But the warnings and predictions of the Club of Rome and others were swept aside by mainstream capitalism and its rush to ultimate self-destruction. The more equitable and sustainable systems proposed by the Club of Rome, the Worldwatch Institute, and other like-minded groups were mostly ignored. Not all recommendations might have been appropriate by any means but the general import would have made for a much better world today, especially given sensitivity and responsiveness to increasing knowledge. For example, the “North-South Commission” headed by former West German Chancellor Willy Brandt, recommended in 1980 that “an international strategy on energy” should implement an orderly transition “from high dependence on increasingly scarce non-renewable energy sources”.

The capitalist catchphrase for recovery from the current economic conundrum appeals to signs that seem to suggest new “green shoots”. These “green shoots”, of course, have nothing to do with a genuine greening of the world economy. Instead, they only represent a return to business more or less as usual. In Aotearoa/NZ, the new National Government has clearly signalled its priorities (and delusions!) with the appointment of former National Party Leader and Reserve Bank Governor, Dr Don Brash, in July 2009 “to chair a taskforce advising the Government on how to close the living standard gap with Australia by 2025” ( Press, 31/7/09). Brash’s appointment had already been anointed and blessed by the Big Business Roundtable.

Unfortunately, if always so very predictable, global finance and capital in the form of the big foreign banks and transnational corporations (TNCs) are still dictating the terms of the eagerly sought economic recovery, both here and overseas. In the US, Wall Street’s interests and rules prevail ( http://lists.essential.org/pipermail/corp-focus/2009/000324.html). Even some economists dedicated to traditional capitalist economic growth like Nobel Prize winner Professor Joseph Stiglitz can be scathing about American market manipulations and Wall Street’s toxic messages: “Neo-liberalism” and “Free market ideology turned out to be an excuse for new forms of exploitation” ( Here's the next updated one for Stiglitz: www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2009/07/third-world-debt200907 ). As a consequence, Stiglitz fears that China and other “developing” countries are likely to reject the democratically regulated market model which he sees as necessary for progress and the elimination of world poverty.

Assaulting Aotearoa/NZ

Certainly in Aotearoa/NZ, the Big Business Roundtable, the Rogernomes, ACT, the hard core of the National Party, and various associates knew, and know even more today, about the social costs of neo-liberalism - that their policies create an underclass and other social problems. Hence the ongoing move to a more repressive legal order. When he was National’s Minister of Finance, Bill Birch’s ruling maxim - openly expressed - was that the price of rapid growth was worth rapidly growing inequality; and now the wheels are falling off.

Brash has expressed the current Government’s grossly blinkered world vision in these terms: “NZ is facing its biggest challenge since World War II in trying to catch up with Australia’s productivity and income levels” ( Press, op. cit.). Rejecting “the view that NZ would always lag Australia because this country lacks Australia’s vast reserves of mineral wealth, he cited an Organisation of Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) study that found NZ was the ‘second-richest country in terms of natural resources due to abundant farmland, natural gas reserves, and vast fisheries’” (ibid.). Never mind, of course, that these resources are already showing severe and accumulating strain from narrowly focused economic “development”. For example, a recent “State of the Nation” report by Statistics NZ has indicated our lack of real sustainability ( Press, 31/7/09; Sunday Star Times, 9/8/09). The Government is wilfully blind. Furthermore, it has already markedly modified Brash’s outlook on minerals.

So the Government and Brash’s task force are looking forward to 2025. A report published in 2008 by the US’s National Intelligence Council (NIC), entitled “Global Trends 2025: A Transformed World”, projected some key trends significantly different to its earlier more upbeat “Global Trends 2020” report produced when the US was still in a rather triumphalist mood. Broadly speaking, the latest NIC study assumes a multipolar future whereas the earlier one assumed unipolar American supremacy. Again the latest report projects tight and growing energy scarcity in comparison with the previous report. These comments are relative in that the trends cited were also foreshadowed to a degree in the earlier study. But significantly more instability, uncertainty, and conflict are anticipated in “Global Trends 2025”.

At this stage in my exposition, the relevant point is that even officially sanctioned US predictions about the fairly short term future have had to be substantially modified within a few years in order to address greater challenges. Furthermore, the NIC’s report was obviously finalised before the current economic crisis and all its long-term implications really hit home. Consequently, we cannot only predict that the findings of the Brash taskforce will be in tune with corporate guidelines, but that his report with its limited purview will conveniently sidestep many of the global forces that will increasingly impact on Aotearoa/NZ’s prospects. As Murray Horton so aptly puts it: the Government’s only response to the crisis seems to be: “Let’s dig a bigger hole!” ( Watchdog, 121, August 2009, http://www.converge.org.nz/watchdog/21/01.htm). Indeed, Energy & Resources Minister, Gerry Brownlee, wants to do this quite literally in trying to catch up to what he sees as Australia’s mining success. The Brash Taskforce duly reported, in November 2009, with 35 entirely predictable Rogernaut recommendations. The Government rejected them as too extreme. Ed.

Western capitalism is caught between its increasingly empty rhetoric about future prosperity and the dynamics of the real world relentlessly closing in on it. The age of affluence is over. The contradiction of international economic interdependence and growing competition for resources is undermining the cooperation required to cope with global warming and other common problems, and to genuinely address the need for sustainable development. Many millions of people have always been marginal to the interests of capitalist globalisation. But, today, a range of factors is making for the revival of attitudes and views that could plunge humankind into a social abyss, and we can see some incipient indicators of them in Aotearoa/NZ. The globalist fantasy of a new Auckland “supercity” is just one significant indicator of this process ( see John Minto’s article elsewhere in this issue on the supercity. Ed.) It means the exclusion of Maori from decision making and the corporate subjugation of the interests of lower income people in general.

A number of analysts have viewed free market ideology, especially its expression in neo-liberalism over the past three decades, as a form of what can be called “social Darwinism”, or at least a closely associated ideology (e.g. “Cultural Imperialism”, op. cit; “The Liberal Virus: Permanent War and the Americanization of the World”, Samir Amin, Pluto Press, 2004). A variety of views and approaches can be either identified with, or related to social Darwinism (“Social Darwinism”, Peter Dickens, Open University Press, 2000). For this article, I shall take the meaning of “vulgar social Darwinism” as central. This can be defined as: “an ideology enjoining competition within society or between societies, and the ensuing ‘survival of the fittest’; and/or the actual practice of such policies”. Margaret Thatcher, as Prime Minister of Britain, once notoriously said there is no such thing as society!

Views consonant with social Darwinism, besides market neo-liberalism, include certain versions of Malthusianism*, Ayn Rand-type individualist libertarianism, and even Rightwing versions of anarchism. Some are markedly more extreme and callous than others. Capitalism, in general, is predicated on the basis of enormous exploitation of both people and the environment with the Western way of life and its deeply rooted inequalities dependent on this process at work across the planet. Moreover, nowadays, “counter-terrorism” can well be directed at suppressing the “egalitarian tide” in the West itself, which “remains a place of great inequality and injustice, despite its apparent commitment to popular rule” (see ch. on “Terrorism” by Conor Gearty, in “The Future Now: Predicting the 21 st Century”, ed. J Gribbin et al, Phoenix, 1999, quote p235). * Malthus was an 18 th Century English cleric who identified over population as a major cause of poverty and advocated brutal solutions to it. Ayn Rand was a 20 th Century philosopher and writer who expounded extreme individualism and laissez-faire capitalism. Ed.

Social Darwinist ideology arose in the 19 th Century. The first major proponent was British sociologist, Herbert Spencer. Much of Spencer’s thought was quite complex. Besides free trade, he actually advocated the democratically liberal institutions of a free press and universal suffrage. Yet these were part of measures designed to help eventually eliminate the unfit in a long evolutionary process (“Social Darwinism”, op. cit, pp23/24). Weaker peoples – i.e. the poor, “inferior races”, etc. - would all go to the wall. “In an argument which prefigures some contemporary neo-liberal thought, Spencer actively supported what he called ‘private beneficence’, spontaneous forms of welfare given by individuals and groups to one another” (ibid, p23). Such is the welfare system so largely prevalent in the US today. The Obama Administration is now trying to reform the system there to some extent, especially the awful health sector. This reform is in the face of the economic downturn and rabid, Rightwing fear-mongering fostered by vested corporate interests, the Murdoch media empire (especially Fox News), and co. But, here, in Aotearoa/NZ, the National government is moving instead to adopt much of the traditional style and substance of the US welfare system, with a long term privatisation programme, an open door for foreign investment, and the promotion of private charity.

While social Darwinism found fertile soil in Victorian England, it was in America that it really found its home. White racism has always been an obvious strand of social Darwinism, and this was enforced of course in the US well before the actual articulation of the latter theory. There was the ruthless suppression of Native American peoples, coupled with African enslavement for the plantation economy of the southern states. Later, views apposite to class warfare came to flourish as the western frontier was finally settled by European immigrants and raw capitalism let rip within society. “The ideas of the age were tailored to fit the rich barons. Economists, journalists, educators, and writers who rushed to do them honour found a strikingly plausible rationale in Darwinian biology and Spencerian philosophy” (“The American Political Tradition and the Men who Made it”, Richard Hofstadter, Jonathan Cape, 1967, p165). In the US, for a host of historical reasons, the Left has always been very weak in relation to the Right, although a strong case can be made that fullblown fascism has only been thwarted due to the resistance of the black human rights movement, and other progressive groups ("Obama and the Revolutionary Moment without Revolutionaries" by Horace Campbell, The Black Commentator, 15/1/09, no. 307 ).

As indicated early on, however, concern about the danger of conflict for the future and thus the need for greater, even relatively radical, cooperation can sometimes cut across the political spectrum in Western society. Take the specific example here of Sir David King’s warning, as cited above. These days King is the Director of the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment at Oxford University, hardly a Leftist institution. Formerly, when in government, he tried to persuade the Bush Administration in the period before the Iraq War to adopt more climate friendly policies, and so reduce its fixation with non-renewable fossil fuels. He warns of climate change fuelling “a scramble for commodities, in particular scarce resources” ( www.climaticoanalysis.org/.../sir-david-king-predicts-a-century-of-resource-warsbut-could-a-global-green-new-deal-save-the-day/ ). As a consequence, King rejects the path of consumerism in the 21 st Century “when resource shortage is our biggest challenge”. Instead, he calls for fundamental changes to the global economy and society.

But the global scramble for the natural resources that underpin the world economy is already well under way, with powerful rich “developed” or big “emerging” economies, and their TNCs, reaching out to try and grab what they can as fast as possible. For sure, gathering conflict over resources reaches from the Arctic to Antarctica (“Geopolitics: A Very Short Introduction”, Klaus Dodds, Oxford University Press, 2007). In the short term, the poorest and most vulnerable peoples are going to suffer horrendously unless humankind can find a positive way forward. In the longer term, nobody will escape the fallout.

Professor Leon Fuerth, co-author with John Podesta and former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Director, James Woolsey, of the “The Age of Consequences: The Foreign Policy & National Security Implications of Global Climate Change” (Centre for Strategic & International Studies [CSIS], 2007), foresees the danger of widespread class warfare “as the wealthiest members of every society pull away from the rest of the population” (quoted in “Climate Wars”, Gwynne Dyer, Scribe, 2008, p23). In his scenario, Fuerth goes on to say: “Governments with resources will be forced to engage in long, nightmarish episodes of triage: deciding what and who can be salvaged from engulfment by a disordered environment. The choices will need to be made primarily among the poorest, not just abroad, but at home” (ibid, pp23/4). As a graphic example, he points to “the organisational and spiritual unravelling that was Hurricane Katrina. At progressively more extreme levels, the decisions will be increasingly harsh: morally agonising to those who must make and execute them – but, in the end, morally deadening” (ibid, p24).

It’s Official: The Era Of The Resource War Is Upon Us

The sub-title immediately above is the opening line of an article by Professor Michael Klare, sometimes billed as the “pre-eminent” analyst on resources and war ( www.globalpolicy.org/component/content/article/198/40119.html ). Sir David King’s warning about resource wars echoes an earlier one by British Defence Secretary John Reid as described by Klare (ibid.). Tellingly enough, the latest worldwide scramble for natural resources was triggered above all by the Anglo-American illegal invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq in order to try and secure oil and gas reserves under cover of the so-called “War on Terror”. The US has long set the pace for consumption in all categories. “The largest increases between 1975 and 2000 were in metals and minerals and fossil fuels” (“EarthPulse: State of the Earth 2010”, National Geographic, p72). “23% of global energy is consumed by the US”, comprising only 5% of the world’s population (ibid, p70).

Analysts as contrasting as George Friedman, founder of private American intelligence agency Stratfor, and international affairs commentator Gwynne Dyer can agree that a perceived threat from China was a factor behind the illegal invasion of Iraq in 2003. This motive was especially driven by Donald Rumsfeld and Condoleezza Rice ( President Bush’s Defense Secretary and National Security Advisor, respectively, at the time of the 2003 Iraq invasion. Rumsfeld later lost his job; Rice became Secretary of State in Bush’s second term. Ed.). Friedman, a neo-imperialist hawk, in his mixed exposition of disingenuous commentary and chillingly cynical realpolitik analysis, acknowledges that a successful invasion of Iraq “would give the US a global empire that was unprecedented in history” (“ America’s Secret War: Inside the Worldwide Struggle between the US and its Enemies”, Abacus, 2004, p270). In relation to China, the Bush Administration wanted to constrain a potential rival’s access to energy sources, so retaining world hegemony (“The Mess they Made: The Middle East after Iraq”, G Dyer, Scribe, 2007, p64). These days, the CSIS and other agencies, backed by the CIA, Pentagon, and State Department, closely monitor what they call “the vital triangle” involving the Middle East, the US and China, and the resultant power plays with all the shifting tensions between accommodation and conflict. Russia’s geographical control of important metals and minerals has long been another major Western concern, as has its increasing influence on market forces.

Meanwhile, the enormously brutal, wasteful, and expensive Anglo-American militarist venture goes on in the Middle East/Central Asia with a shift of focus back to Afghanistan, the initial Western conduit into the resource war in this region ( www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Oil_watch/Resource_War.html). With the commitment again of our Special Air Service (SAS) soldiers, NZ has dedicated itself further to the fruitless pursuit of the American Dream (Nightmare!) and addiction to oil.

The spreading and destabilising resource war in this region, let alone others around the globe, will help fatally bleed the Anglo-American empire, sapping values, freedoms, economies, and worsening terrorism in general, whatever its origin (see “Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic”, Chalmers Johnson, Henry Holt/Scribe, 2006, reviewed in NZ International Review, May/June 2008). Military Keynesianism* and imperial over-reach are draining human and material reserves. The age of barbarism looms menacingly. George Orwell’s “1984” is more relevant than ever to our predicament. TV1 is so imbued with propaganda that it still ritually parrots the phrase “War on Terror” even after the US Administration has given up the slogan! Opinion polls in the US show how most Americans endorse torture (e.g. Press, 26/8/09). High-tech, aerial “death squad” Predator drone and other attacks on some of the world’s poorest people are now routinely recorded and celebrated by the Western media. * Named after the theories of English economist, John Maynard Keynes (1863–1946) who advocated government spending on public works to stimulate the economy and provide employment. In this context it means a taxpayer funded welfare State for the military. Ed.

At the same time, imperially generated internal contradictions weigh on Britain with race riots and the growth of a dangerous neo-fascist movement. Even the British Police and Government are openly concerned (e.g. Press, 6/7/09). Given the “right” conditions, the notorious British class system is potentially very conducive to fascism. With the pervasive cultivation of insecurity and fear of the alien “Other”, any crime against human rights can become possible. In Aotearoa/NZ, there is a current revival of white racism with militia-style groups on the march (e.g. Press, 26/10/09). At a more upper class level, the Mayor of Whanganui, Michael Laws, has emerged as the vitriolic voice of social Darwinism, proposing a eugenics solution for the “underclass” he helped create when in Parliament ( Press, 30/10/09).

Internationally, Western mainstream media have conditioned a lot of their publics, including apparently much of the NZ populace, to the racist acceptance of State terrorism. So far this century, hundreds of thousands of victims have already died or been badly injured in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia (it has oil too!), and related theatres. In Afghanistan, mounting civilian casualties due to North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) blunders and callousness continue to alienate and radicalise local peoples. Western hypocrisy on terrorism is truly awesome. Invasive war is terrorism! For Friedman, a favourite “expert” of the American corporate media, since the peoples of the Middle East hate the US and its allies so much, the strategic aim is to cower these peoples comprehensively with militarist “shock and awe” (“America’s Secret War”, op. cit.). Yet the deepening Afghanistan/Pakistan war is now largely directed in the defence of a corrupt, ethnically based regime against a Pashtun nationalist movement, a civil war in fact; and as Gwynne Dyer has continually emphasised, NATO’s counter-insurgency campaign amounts to a quite useless and counter-productive exercise in the alleged suppression of anti-Western terrorism (“The Mess they Made”, op. cit, final chapter; Press, 15/8/09). The Pakistan regime is also exploiting the gas reserves of Baluchistan where it confronts another ethnically based uprising.

In 1991, former NATO commander, Sir James Eberle, explained future resource wars in these terms: “The new divide is not one of ideology, but of prosperity”. Military alliances would be necessary to ensure our access to resources in the Third World, thus enforcing the “norms of civilisation” about who should be the haves, and who should be the have-nots ( Listener, 8/7/1991, p15). The Anglo-American assault on Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, etc. once again demonstrates the validity of Frantz Fanon’s analysis of imperialist violence in “The Wretched of the Earth” (Penguin, 1963). “Capitalist exploitation and cartels and monopolies are the enemies of under-developed countries” (ibid, p78).

Significantly enough, even Afghanistan’s mineral resources have proved to be much richer than was formerly thought. Ironically, China, which is faced with its own Muslim separatist uprising among the Uighurs of the oil, gas and mineral rich Xinjiang province, has scored a deal to mine a massive lode of Afghani copper ( www.eurasianet.org/departments/insight/articles/pp112607.shtm ). Similarly, China has won out in a bid over India and Russia for a joint venture in a big Kazakhstan oil company on top of a gas deal with Turkmenistan ( Press, 1/5/09). It is also investing in the development of Iraqi oilfields, even provoking complaints from some aggrieved American oil interests about “foreign companies”! ( Press, 23/10/09).

In recent times, as well as a raft of deals and investments in Central Asia and the Middle East, China has made long term oil deals with Russia and Brazil, another big resource player. Turning crisis into opportunity, China has seized the time of global recession to step up its resource grab, thereby causing much angst in certain Western circles. Some of the media reportage on this is most revealing of Western imperialist assumptions, as expressed for instance in headlines like “China’s aid steals march on the West [in Africa]” ( Press, 14/10/09); and “Long march to the oilfields – The People’s Republic is launching an assault on Western resources” [ i.e. Third World resources!] ( Sunday Star Times, 11/10/09). Back in 1995, the first operative year of the World Trade Organisation (WTO), a Daily Telegraph commentator worried that with China’s growing food and oil demands: “They could devour the world” (reprinted in Press, 5/7/1995).

In recent years, indeed, global capitalist contradictions have been getting acute with Australia, for example, being confronted with Chinese allegations about spying, bribery and manipulations in the iron/steel markets by Rio Tinto executives. This controversy followed rejection of the bid by a Chinese State corporation to buy into Rio Tinto, the rapacious mining giant and majority owner of the Tiwai Point smelter. Statist and nationalist power is now resurgent in resource strategy, especially the energy sector (“Rising Powers: Shrinking Planet: The New Geopolitics of Energy”, Michael Klare, Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt, 2008).

From Africa to the Pacific, still pretty much an “ American Lake”, China is making inroads on the centuries old Western global control of land and minerals. It has joined the US and Japan in the extensive and intensive plunder of the resources of the Asia/Pacific region. In the Far East, the US has been trying to counter China with the remilitarisation of Japan, its unsinkable aircraft carrier there (“Nemesis”, op. cit, pp198-207). Yet even as they help try and offset some of the potentially adverse implications of China’s reach into the Pacific for the Western alliance, NZ Prime Minister John Key and Trade & Conservation Minister Tim Groser are banking at the same time on the two big industrialising nations of China and India to boost NZ prosperity far into the future. Again, the “Chindia” challenge too, as well as its evolving accommodations, has its own mounting rivalries, ranging from tension over the Chinese/Indian border to competition for Indian Ocean bases, as well as for influence and assets elsewhere.

The scale of the challenge for an internationally cooperative, sustainable future is huge says the latest “Global Environmental Outlook” (GEO) report. Over 20 years ago, the World Commission on Environment and Development (the Brundtland Commission) produced its findings on the state of humankind and the planet, and the way ahead in the publication “Our Common Future”. In October 2007, the United Nations’ Environment Programme (UNEP) released its “GEO-4” which reviewed in detail the problems for sustainable development, looking back over the previous 20 years as well into the future out to 2050. While it found that there had been improvements in certain areas, “GEO-4” warned that: “There are no major issues raised in ‘Our Common Future’ for which the foreseeable trends are favourable”; and that this may actually threaten the very survival of humankind (see: www.unep.org/geo/geo4/media).

“On energy, the world faces a twin threat: inadequate and insecure energy supplies and environmental damage from consuming too much energy. Use of cleaner energy sources remains ‘minimal’ overall” (ibid.). Even the “GEO-4”, however, fails to truly register the underlying crisis: globalisation is ultimately absurd in its capitalist fantasy of industrialising the whole planet and creating ever more continuous materialist consumption; and yet the “GEO-4” projects globalisation well out into the future, at least into the middle or thereabouts of this century. At the same time, it also recognises the causes of many critical worsening environmental problems in the following summation: “These unprecedented changes are due to human activities in an increasingly globalised, industrialised and interconnected world” ( www.stopclimatechaos.ie/links/misc/ ). In this connection, too, “GEO-4” noted that trade was almost three times greater than in 1987.

Historically, capitalist accumulation has been driven by competition feeding on exploitation to extract “surplus value” [i.e. excessive gains for the relative few at the expense of the many] (“A Dictionary of Marxist Thought”, 2 nd ed., Tom Bottomore, et al, Blackwell, 1991, p4). Today, in the terms of human ecology, this process is increasingly complicated and compounded as well by real and growing resource scarcity and resulting competition along the lines of class, nation, ethnicity, region, and other social groupings. Despite this competitive fracturing process and its social Darwinist implications, however, the good news has been the growing capacity of the world community to curb violent excesses to some extent, at least until lately. According to the “Human Security Report 2005: War and Peace in the 21 st Century ”, deaths from conflicts plummeted from an average of 38,000 deaths per conflict in 1950 to 600 in 2002 (“Human Security Report 2005”, OUP; www.humansecurityreport.info & www.beyondintractability.org/booksummary/10644 ). In fact, various forms of violence declined markedly over this period.

If recent years have seen a significant setback with some dangerously destabilising conflict under way, we should take heart that this particular report found the single most compelling explanation for the positive changes it traced in the unprecedented upsurge of international activism, spearheaded by the UN and associated NGO initiatives. This has happened in spite of all the problems of effective UN operation in the wake of the Cold War. These days, international non-government organisations’ (NGOs) networking movements, often supported by the Internet-operative “Avaaz” organisation (“The World in Action” movement), campaign on issues like global warming, militarisation, human rights, fair trade, food security, and aid for the world’s poor ( www.avaaz.org/en). NGO and civil action seems to have picked up significant momentum. The central focus on the Global Climate Change Summit in Copenhagen in December 2009 will hopefully boost further such positive campaigning.

Beyond The Limits?

Compounding ecological constraints are constantly revising the interpretation and meaning of “sustainable development”, though the concept still, of course, eludes most economists. With regard to the latter point, it is worth noting the bizarre planetary projections of market materialist success by NZ economist Andrew Gawith and his assumption of the long term sustainability of a “huge” claim on the world’s resources due to rising populations and incomes in China and India, along with other countries like Indonesia and Russia. Gawith is a director of the influential Infometrics economics consultancy firm ( Press, 26/7/08). Clearly, Gawith has little inkling of any environmental constraints and related political considerations. He even blithely assumes the key factor for the future to be “the driving force of more people with higher incomes”, and, amazingly enough, dismisses things like “the higher cost of agricultural inputs” as just amounting to “passing events” in comparison. It really makes one wonder just what planet Gawith thinks he’s living on!? Infometrics dismissed the former Government’s stated goal of carbon neutrality in a report commissioned by the Business Roundtable and NZ’s oil producers ( Press, 6/2/08). Yet, ironically enough, another Infometrics director, Gareth Morgan, has acknowledged the reality of human caused climate change in his recently released book, “Poles Apart”.

Australia and NZ are continuing to press for a regional free trade agreement through the Pacific Islands Forum despite the damage such policies and practices have already spawned (e.g. Press, 13/6/07). A case in point is the harm inflicted in the Solomon Islands. Researcher Shahar Hameiri castigates the foreign control model imposed by the Regional Assistance Mission to the Solomon Islands (RAMSI) force, with its disruption to community relations, and its accentuation of inequalities there ( www.theage.com.au/articles/2006/04/23/1145730805256.html). In 2009, the NZ government is redirecting aid money to more closely implement NZ’s narrowly defined, self-interested political and commercial aims in the Pacific ( Press, 2/5/09). At the Pacific Islands’ Forum in August 2009 in Cairns, Australia: “Several NGOs, including fair trade lobby group Pacific Network on Globalisation” accused both NZ and Australia of “bullying” smaller Pacific Island nations on free trade ( Press, 8/8/09). Despite the standard denials, this condemnation was true to form as ever ( www.socialistworld.net/eng/2009/08/1501.html).

Many communities across the Pacific region are today experiencing the sharp edge of a tidal wave of globalist mining fever; and this is continuing to a large extent even in a time of international recession with the big new players in the overseas minerals game like China, Brazil and India driving market forces. As the hunt steps up for accessible sources of minerals to fuel more globalisation, TNCs are making further inroads into traditional lifestyles and ways of livelihood.

The tragic irony of this kind of “development” is that it is so obviously short term and often very destructive, with such “progress” actually undermining sustainable means of living with the natural world. Moreover, all this large scale mining promotes societal energy and consumption demands on an unprecedented scale, greatly worsening the outlook for global warming and its impacts. These impacts include rising sea levels and dying reefs, adversely affecting long term food sources both on land and in the sea. Pacific Islanders in particular are set to suffer severely from all this.

Mining is the hard core of industrialism and the global capitalist system. A couple of my previous Watchdog articles surveyed the global mining impetus and its increasing impact on Aotearoa/NZ (see “The New West Coast Gold/Coal Rush: Globalisation And Commodity Resources”, in number 116, December 2007 www.converge.org.nz/watchdog/16/04.htm and “Undermining Our Future”, in 117, April 2008, www.converge.org.nz/watchdog/17/05.htm). Regionally, the overall framework for the new mining impetus has been provided by the Asia Pacific Economic Co-operation (APEC) “community”, consisting of 21 “Member Economies”. APEC was initiated by Australia under American and other big power stimulus in 1989. The agenda of APEC and some more recent Asia/Pacific groupings centres on the promotion and facilitation of free trade and investment.

In mid June 2004, the first ever meeting of APEC Mining Ministers took place at Santiago, Chile, coordinated in a Mining Industry Forum. This conference was engaged in doing the impossible – supposedly creating a programme for sustainable development on the basis of metals and minerals mining and application ( www.apec.org/apec/news___media/2004_media_releases/300504_apecminingministersmeetg.html). Australia’s then Resources Minister, Ian Macfarlane, “told reporters that the APEC mining ministers had agreed to examine the effects free trade in minerals and metals would have on the sector” ( www.bilaterals.org/article.php3?id_article=7147). He declared moreover that: ”We have taken the first step to achieving a long term vision of an APEC free trade agreement” (ibid.).

NGOs gave the APEC mining meeting at Perth in February 2007 a clear message on the yawning gap between the ridiculous rhetoric and reality. A joint news release from Oxfam Australia, the Mineral Policy Institute, and Mining Watch Canada on behalf of a broad NGO coalition expressed some key pertinent concerns: “Australian, Canadian, and US mining companies that persist in dumping billions of tonnes of toxic heavy metals such as mercury and lead into the rivers and oceans of some of the world’s poorest countries are causing irreversible environmental damage as well as driving human poverty” ( www.renewableresourcescoalition.org/news_updates8.htm ; See www.miningwatch.ca and http://www.minesandcommunities.org/ for information on campaigns, issues and countries).  

Plunder!

Some extant big mining projects like Ok Tedi, Porgera, Tolukuma and Freeport McMoran are notorious for the social/economic and environmental damage that they have caused. Ok Tedi is a copper mine in Papua New Guinea (PNG), while Porgera and Tolukuma are both gold mines also located there. Freeport McMoran, a copper/goldmine sited in the other half of the island that includes PNG - i.e. in West Papua or Indonesia’s Papua Barat province - is possibly the world’s most infamous mine. In similar style to such predecessors, US-based Newmont Mining Corporation, which took over Aotearoa/NZ’s Waihi gold mine in 2002, has been stirring up local opposition on the remote Indonesian island of Sumbawa with massive environmental damage from its Batu Hijau copper/gold mine, including extensive deforestation and the marine disposal of waste (“Gold: A Global Obsession”, National Geographic, January 2009, p44).

In Aotearoa/NZ, Newmont and other firms present their corporate image in terms of responsible, surgically refined operations, a message servilely echoed by our Government (“Fever”, Sunday, op. cit; Press, 1/9/09). Newmont is seeking to expand in the Coromandel ( it is a finalist in the 2009 Roger Award for the Worst Transnational Corporation Operating in Aotearoa/New Zealand. Ed.). The bigger the foothold that these TNCs can get in Aotearoa/NZ and so tighten their grip on local politicians, the wider comprador* elite, and the legislative system, the more entrenched, extensive, and damaging their depredations will become. * Comprador – local collaborators of colonisers, in this case the TNCs. Ed.

From the perspective of human development: “Industrialisation committed us to living again, massively, as hunters and gatherers of substances which only nature can provide, and which occur only in limited quantity” (Catton, op. cit, p32). This recognition of the limits to growth still flies in the face of the ruling paradigm, despite the imminent threat of global warming and ecosystem collapse with the resultant failure of human carrying capacity. Instead of the hunting and gathering of renewable biological “resources”, or the later practice of sustainable agriculture (as opposed to more harmful forms), industrialisation is dependent on the short term use of non-renewable resources, with constant momentum to aggressive competition and war, and so eventual collapse.

Catton observes that there are basically two methods of growth with regard to mineral resources: the takeover method and the “drawdown” method. During the earlier age of imperialist expansion, Europeans often simply took control of the resources they wanted. Later, those engaged in industrialisation have relied further also on what Catton calls the “drawdown” method whereby a finite resource is mined or exploited to the point of depletion, or the total energy input is no longer worthwhile in returns (ibid, chapter 2).

More generally, even if rewarding by conventional economic criteria, the drain on energy and water resources and overall damage to the environment can be immense from large scale mining. In Aotearoa/NZ, besides mining’s direct environmental impact, the sector is the biggest energy user among primary industries ( Press, 28/7/09). In recent years, in America’s Appalachians region, coal mining operations have been decapitating mountains and dumping the debris in waterways below (“When Mountains Move”, National Geographic, March 2006). While “sustainable mining” is clearly a contradiction in terms, corporate public relations has however been busy greenwashing the industry. Such claims now constitute a regular part of company mission statements and spin.

Aotearoa/NZ has depended for much of its material success to date on the application of both methods of mineral resource growth identified by Professor Catton. The most graphic example in which these methods have been combined is the country’s participation with Australia, under the umbrella of British imperial control, in ripping off the Pacific’s phosphate reserves. Australian and NZ agricultural success and so prosperity, if temporary enough, have been rooted in such exploitation. “When supplies of this mineral from the Pacific Island of Nauru were exhausted, that island was abandoned and forgotten by the companies and countries which exploited it” (“Chance for NZ to take a democratic stand”, John Minto, Press, 30/7/07; also see “Nauru: Paradise Lost”, Press, 21/4/04).Then for a while until early 2008, Australia further exploited Nauru as a refugee detention centre, especially for refugees from the Anglo-American/Australian war to secure Middle Eastern/Central Asian oil and gas. Banaba Island ( Ocean Island) was an even more grossly ravaged casualty of phosphate resource rapine since almost the whole indigenous population was uprooted. NZ now gets most of its phosphate by arguably stealing it, however indirectly, from the Saharawi people of the Western Sahara (ibid, 30/7/07). Western Sahara is under Morocco’s illegal usurpation and the object of UN intervention. Both the takeover and drawdown methods are operated by Morocco and those who benefit from this situation.

During the recent commodity boom, phosphate prices were riding high, and fertiliser supplies were tight worldwide. Many commodity prices have picked up once more. The world economy is now locked in a commodity trade trap, a fluctuating cycle of rising prices choking back any spurts of intermittent growth, a global condition of stagflation again as in the 1970s. Most readily accessible sources of the minerals underlying modern industrial society are on track for eventual significant decline or drawdown, with even relatively imminent shortfalls of some minerals. In 1988, Edward Goldsmith and Nicholas Hildyard, pointed out that mineral shortages “should begin to occur early next century”: “ Battle for the Earth: Today’s Key Environmental Issues”, Mitchell Beazley Publishers, p180). Their prediction is spot on. Minerals such as gold, silver, tin, lead, zinc, copper and cadmium have been getting harder to mine.

For instance, declining gold deposits mean that: “Most of the gold left to mine exists as traces buried in remote and fragile corners of the globe. It’s an invitation to destruction” ( National Geographic, January 2009, op. cit, p43). The price of gold in dollars and suffering has never been higher and two thirds of the demand for gold is just for jewellery. Concern is also rising over the future availability in the early 21 st Century for copper, cobalt, nickel, platinum, tin, titanium, chromium, columbium, and tantalum (“Rising Powers, Shrinking Planet, op. cit, pp56/7). Copper and cobalt are due to peak in supply very soon (ibid.).

The US, China, Japan and other big countries are going after minerals in poorer countries where there is a lack of regulatory capacity and so lots of environmental damage and social disruption. There is “spiralling damage caused by mining” while TNCs enjoy low wages, lax environmental and safety/health regulations, and only moderate royalties at best (“The Real Cost of Minerals”, William Laurance, New Scientist, no. 2669, 16/8/08, p16). Africa is being plundered again, with the prospect of poor people being abandoned on “a continent of empty holes” (“Rising Powers, Shrinking Planet”, op. cit, on “The Global Assault on Africa’s Vital Resources”). The “resource curse” has plagued the majority of Africans with only greedy oppressive elites in cahoots with foreign interests benefiting from corporate energy and mining depredations (ibid; “Bottom of the Barrel: Africa’s Oil Boom and the Poor”, Ian Gary & Terry Karl, Catholic Relief Services, 2003; “Curse of the Nigerian Oil”, National Geographic, February 2007).

As the latest big predator country, China is guilty of aiding the Sudanese regime and its brutal repression of human rights in exchange for extracting oil, as well as similar practices in Zimbabwe, Nigeria, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Guinea, and other African countries, treading a well worn neo-colonialist path (“Rising Powers, Shrinking Planet”, ibid; The Press, 14/10/09). In Latin America, one of China’s key target minerals is lithium, now prized for electric car batteries. “The desolate, sun baked deserts of southwestern Bolivia are poised to become the energy battleground of the 21 st Century, with China and Japan staking early and aggressive claims in the great lithium land grab” [ more revealing selective Western morality here!] ( The Press, 16/6/09). Among other uses, lithium also has electronic, alloy and nuclear applications. Coltan (columbite-tantalite), like lithium also used in mobile phones and other electronics, has already marked a bloody trail throughout the Congo River basin in Africa with perhaps most of it destined these days for China. From the Congo to Iraq, too, there has arisen a deeply disturbing trend to the systematic violent abuse of women and children.

Peak oil is of course looming as the most dramatic and important example of a mineral in shortening supply (“Out of Gas: The End of the Age of Oil” by David Goodstein, WW Norton & co, 2004). As Professor Goodstein well warns: “Civilisation as we know it will come to an end sometime in this century unless we can find a way to live without fossil fuels” (ibid, p123). Let alone the problem of global warming! One obvious irony has been the sight of nations staking claims to Arctic oil and gas given the opening now provided by the melting ice in this region (e.g. “Arctic Landgrab”, National Geographic, May 2009). Professor Klare avers: “To sum up, if global energy behaviour continues along its current trajectory, the risk of crisis, economic trauma, and conflict on a staggering scale will increase” (“Rising Powers, Shrinking Planet”, op. cit, p243).

Around the Pacific Rim and across the ocean, communities are under siege by the incursions of global Big Mining, with Aotearoa/NZ now on the cliff edge too. From resistance demonstrated by the First Nations of British Columbia to Kanak protests (in New Caledonia) against Brazilian Vale Inco’s Goro cobalt-nickel project, indigenous peoples are vigorously contesting the latest wave of mining globalisation. A couple of projects can further exemplify the mounting threats of toxic waste dumping to the water resources and livelihoods of so many indigenous communities. One is the multi-billion dollar Goro Project, cited above, and another is OceanaGold’s Didipio multi-million dollar gold-copper project in northern Luzon, the Philippines.

The Goro Project, initiated for exports to China, is driven now by the Brazilian TNC, the French government, and the colonial elite. A community-based action group, Rheebu Nuu, is heading Kanak resistance to protect the immensely significant lagoon (largest in the world) and precious reefs (second largest system in the world), as well as other vital aspects of life. In 2008 it was said to be the largest metallurgical development under way in the world) . In similar fashion, in the Didipio area in Luzon, Australian-based TNC OceanaGold, which also has mines at Macraes, Frasers and Reefton in Aotearoa/NZ, has angered local residents, farmers, environmentalists, the Catholic Church, and small scale miners with the threat posed to vital watersheds feeding vegetable and fruit production, among a host of other concerns ( Kapatiran, number 29/30 May 2008: http://www.converge.org.nz/psna/Kapatiran/KapNo29n30/Kapart29n30/art134.htm). Oxfam Australia has been especially helpful in its ongoing support for the people affected and an international solidarity campaign has to date elicited some success. But OceanaGold is still exploring future prospects in the Philippines, and may proceed with the Didipio project, given the surge in gold prices ( Press, 31/7/09 & 16/9/09).

Back home in Aotearoa/NZ, the National government is looking to exploit an estimated $140-240 billion worth of untapped mineral resources (70% on Crown land). This would mean opening parts of the Department of Conservation (DOC) estate to TNCs and other mining companies, inflicting yet more harm on our supposedly celebrated clean green image. OceanaGold’s mine near Reefton is on the conservation estate and the company is looking to extend its operation there ( Press, 10/8/09). Canadian firm Kent Exploration is also reviewing the old Alexander river goldmine area near Reefton ( Press, 10/8/09 & 12/9/09). There are already 82 mining activities on DOC land and considerable prospecting under way. In the South Island, the Government is targeting the Kahurangi, Paparoa, and Fiordland National Parks. Gold, zinc, copper, nickel, and iron sands are of interest ( Press, 1/9/09). As feared, the TNC-driven Pike River coal mine in the Paparoas Range has set a precedent for large scale industrial intrusion into our National Parks (ibid.). More coal mining, backed by West Coast mayors, could help further ravage Aotearoa/NZ and the world! Similarly, oil prospects drive mining interest in the Fiordland area. Prime Minister John Key and Ministers Brownlee and Groser certainly think big.

Brownlee has such scary if clownish views that he not only says there are no substitutes for hydrocarbons, but is actually looking forward to 800 years of lignite coal mining and use (interviewed in “Fever” item on Sunday, TV1, 4/10/09). According to many leading scientists, our world is on the brink of anthropogenic* climate change disaster, but Brownlee not only wants to fiddle like mad emperor Nero with Rome burning, he also wants to heap coals on the out of control fire! It all demonstrates again that what concern the Government evinces about global warming is simply hot air. As the prophetic film on global warming warns, it is surely “The Age of Stupid”. Tim Groser, assiduously subverting his Ministry of Conservation portfolio, declares that the Government is “determined to see living standards rise in NZ” with the further undermining of our environment ( Press, 5/10/09). In terms of over-consumption and environmental impact, NZ has the sixth heaviest ecological footprint, with only Australia, the US, United Arab Emirates, and Canada ahead of us (“The Living Planet Report 2008”, World Wide Fund for Nature [WWF]). If current trends continue, humankind will be demanding two planets’ worth of resources by 2025 (ibid.). * Anthropogenic: human-caused degradation of the environment. Ed.

In 2009, Indian peoples in Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador and Guatemala have been vigorously protesting the externally imposed exploitation of oil, minerals, and water on their native lands (for more examples of such indigenous struggles see Pacific Ecologist 18, Winter 2009, p26). Aparicio Perez of the Farmers’ Union Committee in Guatemala said, “multinational companies are taking over natural resources which have long been the source of life for rural families” ( Press, 14/10/09). Parallel to the global grab for minerals is the similarly aggressive push by the rich and powerful to get control of land and other natural resources for food and agro-commodities, including biofuels. Powerful countries grabbing agricultural resources include China and Saudi Arabia. In many lands, this is just the latest phase in a long predatory process (e.g. for a detailed look at the Philippines see my article “The Growing Food Crisis And The Struggle For Sovereignty” in Kapatiran 32, October 2009, http://www.converge.org.nz/psna/Kapatiran/KapNo32/Kapart32/art149.htm ).NZ’s agricultural sector is part of this predatory process, especially in Latin America, as well as being subject in turn to increasing foreign control and alienation in various aspects of its domestic operation ( www.landgrab.org; www.grain.org; http://anypursuit.com/news/tiki-read_article.php?articleId=714; http://farmlandgrab.org/2607; www.oaklandinstitute.org; “Amazon: Forest to Farms: Battle to stop the Land Grab”, National Geographic, January 2007; “Wish you weren’t here: the devastating effects of the new colonialists” by Paul Vallely, The Independent (UK), 9/8/09).

In contesting the growing global challenges, including the new social Darwinism, that we now face, we need more effective networking and solidarity movements, both in Aotearoa/NZ and in linking with likeminded groups overseas. Effective networks of support are essential for indigenous and Third World communities combating TNC miners and agribusiness in the Pacific region, and elsewhere round the planet. This is all the more urgent and vital than ever before.