16
treatise by Henry George (Progress and Poverty: An Inquiry into the Cause of
Industrial Depressions and of Increase of Want with Increase of Wealth: The
Remedy). They are good and useful pledges which strike not only at economic class
warfare, of the rampant inequitable divides forever growing among people, communities, and nation states, and of the suffering and silent indifference by most.
That silence is recorded in so many realizations, angrily repeated, by proponents of
change; change that can exist somewhere between the extremes of increment and
revolution.
But in that span of so many appeals for a constructive future, phrases, intentions,
and deeds are easily weaponized in the political sphere, turning ultimately to the
worst of walkouts on the planet, namely, human distraction with its own woes and
inequities. Kin altruism defies interdependency, the heart of biological sustainability. A species that has invested solely in itself, on the pretext of survival, utilizing an
entirely arbitrary if cunning mechanism, money, the Geary-Khamis dollar, or that
international PPP—purchasing power parity
10
—meant to envision fair metrics amid
differing values of the same product or system from nation to nation. Countless
models of PPP have been extrapolated, including The Economist’s Big Mac Index,
a specific metric intended to reveal what the overall costs of said hamburger are,
including the entire regional supply chain endogenous sunk (fixed) cost; labor, land,
distribution, and the expenditures associated with the sum total of environmentally
depreciating footprints (e.g., packaging, fuel and transport, other extractive components, water abstraction, pollution), as well as its foreign exchange rates, from country to country.
11
But Bloomberg more than merely mentioned India and methane. He singularly
pointed to their respective importance in terms of the general wellbeing and likely
mid-term scenarios for the health of the planet. His democratic competitors showed
no interest.
Yet, to any ecologist, India—the largest, most polluted democracy in the world,
with a dreadful animal rights record, despite its much-touted worship of cows; a
local population that will eventually surpass that of China, at around 1.5 billion
denizens—represents an environmental tipping point. As does methane, one of the
most aggressive of all greenhouse gasses, at least 80 to 100 times that of carbon
dioxide. These two categories of human trespass upon the natural world, India and
methane, are emblematic of the Anthropocene, a topic central to ecological paradox,
to the full psychoanalytic survey of those causes and consequences of human distraction and narcissism, which take from the planet, rather than helping her; and are
core to the varied message construct of this book, just one more grappling in real
time, between the dust and ash that, at least metaphorically, encinctures all of those
129,864,880+ other book titles.
10 “International Dollar Geary-Khamis Define, Examples Explained,” Business Case Web Site. 24
February 2016.
11 See “What is the Big Mac Index?” by Justin Kuepper, The Balance, International Investing,
November 26, 2019, https://www.thebalance.com/what-is-the-big-mac-index-1978992, Accessed
February 20, 2020.
2 On the Nature of Paradox
treatise by Henry George (Progress and Poverty: An Inquiry into the Cause of
Industrial Depressions and of Increase of Want with Increase of Wealth: The
Remedy). They are good and useful pledges which strike not only at economic class
warfare, of the rampant inequitable divides forever growing among people, communities, and nation states, and of the suffering and silent indifference by most.
That silence is recorded in so many realizations, angrily repeated, by proponents of
change; change that can exist somewhere between the extremes of increment and
revolution.
But in that span of so many appeals for a constructive future, phrases, intentions,
and deeds are easily weaponized in the political sphere, turning ultimately to the
worst of walkouts on the planet, namely, human distraction with its own woes and
inequities. Kin altruism defies interdependency, the heart of biological sustainability. A species that has invested solely in itself, on the pretext of survival, utilizing an
entirely arbitrary if cunning mechanism, money, the Geary-Khamis dollar, or that
international PPP—purchasing power parity
10
—meant to envision fair metrics amid
differing values of the same product or system from nation to nation. Countless
models of PPP have been extrapolated, including The Economist’s Big Mac Index,
a specific metric intended to reveal what the overall costs of said hamburger are,
including the entire regional supply chain endogenous sunk (fixed) cost; labor, land,
distribution, and the expenditures associated with the sum total of environmentally
depreciating footprints (e.g., packaging, fuel and transport, other extractive components, water abstraction, pollution), as well as its foreign exchange rates, from country to country.
11
But Bloomberg more than merely mentioned India and methane. He singularly
pointed to their respective importance in terms of the general wellbeing and likely
mid-term scenarios for the health of the planet. His democratic competitors showed
no interest.
Yet, to any ecologist, India—the largest, most polluted democracy in the world,
with a dreadful animal rights record, despite its much-touted worship of cows; a
local population that will eventually surpass that of China, at around 1.5 billion
denizens—represents an environmental tipping point. As does methane, one of the
most aggressive of all greenhouse gasses, at least 80 to 100 times that of carbon
dioxide. These two categories of human trespass upon the natural world, India and
methane, are emblematic of the Anthropocene, a topic central to ecological paradox,
to the full psychoanalytic survey of those causes and consequences of human distraction and narcissism, which take from the planet, rather than helping her; and are
core to the varied message construct of this book, just one more grappling in real
time, between the dust and ash that, at least metaphorically, encinctures all of those
129,864,880+ other book titles.
10 “International Dollar Geary-Khamis Define, Examples Explained,” Business Case Web Site. 24
February 2016.
11 See “What is the Big Mac Index?” by Justin Kuepper, The Balance, International Investing,
November 26, 2019, https://www.thebalance.com/what-is-the-big-mac-index-1978992, Accessed
February 20, 2020.
2 On the Nature of Paradox