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Preface
An intellectual journey always
has a beginning. It is possible the
journey recorded in this book began in my earliest memory -- a
memory of golden sunshine and of being a child small enough to
play sheltered among the massive white and blue hydrangea bushes
in my yard. The sun is warm, and I feel contented and companioned
by all that is around me. I think this is where my religious feelings
first joined my feelings for nature. I have always felt connected in
some profound way with the ultimate transcendent dimension of
my life whenever I have allowed myself to experience the mystery
and majesty of the created world.
I am grateful to my strong Southern Baptist religious heritage
which fostered my connection to the transcendent dimension of life
and also my perception of nature as the foundational communication
of the Creator God. I am also grateful to my experience of
motherhood which has powerfully motivated me to anticipate and
care deeply about the time of my children and grandchildren on this
planet. A journey also has companions. I know it is not fashionable in
today's feminist climate to say it, but many of my most significant
companions on this intellectual and spiritual journey have been
males. Male writers usually have nurturing women, but women writers
seldom have nurturing men to sustain them. My husband David has
nurtured my body and spirit, affirmed my thinking, and
constantly
rejoiced in my selfhood as I have pursued these concerns. I have
been fortunate to be part of this constantly stimulating and
emotionally energizing colleagueship for the more than twenty-two
years of our marriage. David edited this book, typed the final
manuscript for me, designed the book itself, and finally used a word
processor to typeset the book. I am grateful for his sharing my
commitment and making this a "labor of love."
This book also would not have been written without the
nurturing space provided by a four-year seminar about "Critical
Choices for the Future," led by Carroll Wilson at the MIT Sloan
School of Management. This seminar first introduced me to the
limits-to- growth issues in late 1972. It was David who first
suggested I join them. It was my friend Scott Paradise who first
encouraged me to focus in my writing upon "the woman's
perspective" I had found myself articulating in the seminar. And
finally it was Carroll Wilson who had set the affirming atmosphere
of the seminar, so that we all supported and encouraged one another
as we explored "new think" about a sustainable future.
The stages by which first insights became a full-length book were
nudged along at critical points by my dear friend Fontaine Belford.
I had written my first major paper on the subject, "The PsychoSexual
Roots of Our Ecological Crisis" in December 1974, and her
affirmation that this was important thinking encouraged me to
press on. I expanded that original paper for a project we were
working on together -- and it was she who challenged me to think
and write about alternatives to the present view of things.
I have also been companioned for the last seven years by numbers
of extraordinary women in the Theological Opportunities Program
at Harvard Divinity School, whose
depth of personhood
in their
mid-life blossoming gave me new insight and awareness of the
different journey of a woman's life. Our students at Williams
College, when we were visiting lecturers in the Environmental
Studies Program during the fall of 1977, were most helpful in testing
out various lines of thought.
And I cannot forget my male as well as
female colleagues in the U.S. Association for The Club of Rome.
Their interest in and openness to these issues has led to continuing
discussions in the Association about "The Masculine/ Feminine
Dimensions of the Global Problematique."
The fatal flaw of Keynesian economics is that
they are based on Malthusian premises: there is a surplus which
has to be consumed, and Keynes is unable to distinguish between
productive and parasitical ways of doing this. In more recent
times, the Malthusian outlook has been promoted with great
success by the sinister Club of Rome, founded by Alexander King
and Aurelio Peccei. The Club of Rome sponsored that infamous
hoax, the 1968 Meadows and Forrester Limits to Growth. This
fraudulent study took a snapshot of the then-known reserves of
the main industrial commodities, and then simply extrapolated
when these would be gone, based on the current rate of
consumption. Almost forty years later, not one of these dire
predictions has come to pass, and known reserves of many raw
materials are greater than they were in 1968.
In 1971-1973, the long period of world economic expansion
associated with Franklin D. Roosevelt's Bretton Woods system and
postwar economic reconstruction came to an end in a series of
monetary crises that destroyed the most successful monetary
arrangement the world had ever seen. Since 1971-73, long-term
economic growth in the main industrial countries has been cut in
half: from about 5% per year to about 2.5% per year. This, plus
the later push for deindustrialization, is the main reason why
living standards in the US have declined by about 50% over the
same period, and the costs of essential services like health
care and education have gone into the ionosphere. After 1971-73,
we are no longer dealing with a normal economy, but with an
increasingly sick one.THE FAKE OIL
SHOCKS OF THE 1970s
Building on the lies of the Club of Rome and the Limits to
Growth, Wall Street, the City of London, and the Federal
Reserve, backed by the Seven Sisters Anglo-American oil cartel,
decided to jack up the price of oil to save the dollar while
making western Europe and Japan foot the bill. This cynical
maneuver was associated with Henry Kissinger's Kippur War in the
Middle East of October 1973. After the hostilities began, the
Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) announced
an Arab oil boycott. In late December 1973, the OPEC speeches
had become the pretext for a 400% increase in the price of oil
carried out by banks and speculators in the commodity trading
pits of New York and Chicago. OPEC was blamed, but OPEC was
never the real cartel. OPEC was largely a Potemkin cartel. The
real cartel were the Seven Sisters. Without the connivance of
the Seven Sisters and their Royal Dutch Shell/British Petroleum
leadership, none of OPEC's antics could have been made to stick.
In reality, there had been no reduction in oil deliveries to the
US. In December 1973, oil-bearing supertankers of the leading
oil companies were put into a holding pattern on the high seas
because storage facilities were already full to bursting with
crude. But that did not stop greedy speculators from bidding up
the price.
The plan for the entire exercise had been
provided by Lord Victor Rothschild, the sometime head of a think
tank attached to Royal Dutch Shell, the dominant force within
the Seven Sisters oil cartel. The operation had been discussed
at a meeting of the self-styled Bilderberger Group of finance
oligarchs held at Saltsjobaden, Sweden on May 11-13, 1973. The
effect of the oil price hike was to create a massive artificial
demand for US dollars, thus effectively saving the greenback
from a short-term collapse which would have ended its role as a
reserve currency, and would have also ended the ability of US-UK
finance to loot the world using this mechanism. In particular,
if the posted price of oil were no longer expressed in dollars,
then New York and London would no longer exercise de facto
control over the oil reserves of the world. The 1973 oil crisis,
followed by petrodollar recycling from the OPEC countries to
David Rockefeller's Chase Manhattan Bank, kept the dollar in
demand and thus prevented it from being dumped. Of course, the
world paid the price for all this wizardry in the form of the
deepest recession since World War II.
In 1978-79, Carter and Brzezinski, acting in the service of
Brzezinski's lunatic thesis that Islamic fundamentalism was the
greatest bulwark against Soviet communism, toppled the regime of
the Shah of Iran. In line with this project, the U.S. also made
sure that the Shah was replaced by Khomeini, who embodied the
negation in toto of modern civilization. Having done so well on
the fake 1973-74 oil crisis, the New York and London finance
oligarchs decided to repeat the operation, this time using the
spectre of Khomeini's self-styled Islamic revolution. This time
prices went up by another 200%. When 1979 was over, it emerged
that world oil production had not fallen, but the prices stayed
up anyway. The 1979 doubling had more dramatic economic effects
than the 1973 quadrupling, since the world economy was much
weaker by 1979.
CHENEY WANTS $100 A BARREL OIL
When we see a book like Paul Roberts' The End of Oil being hyped
by Lou Dobbs on CNN, accompanied by a barrage of articles in the
controlled corporate media on this same line, we can see that an
Anglo-American consensus in favor of $100 per barrel oil is
developing. The rationale is not hard to find, and has little to
do with geological facts: the US dollar is once again in
terminal crisis, and oil at $100 per barrel would create a new
wave of artificial demand, making the dollar a little more
attractive for oil producers and others, and perhaps staving off
for a few more years the end of its reserve currency and posted
price status. It is reported that the center of the agitation
for $100 a barrel oil is, not surprisingly, the Vice
Presidential office of Dick Cheney, managed by the ruthless
neocon operative Lewis I. "Scooter" Libby.
As far as the substantive argument about oil reserves is
concerned, it is clear that oil should be used less and less as
a fuel, and employed rather for petrochemicals. It is also clear
that the internal combustion engine is now a technology that is
more than 100 years old, and is due to be replaced. However, it
is also clear that a growing world population and, hopefully,
increased levels of world economic development will require
greater energy sources. Every fixed array of human technology in
world history has always defined certain components of the
biosphere as usable resources, with the inevitable corollary
that these resources would one day be exhausted. Under such
conditions, the great imperative of human evolution cannot be
retrenchment and austerity, but rather innovation, invention,
discovery, and progress. If existing energy sources are
insufficient, then science will have to find new ones, without
ideological preclusions. Solar energy gathered outside the
ionosphere in earth orbit might be one future solution. The one
thing we must not do is to leap from a rising oil price to
coerced population reduction, since that represents the core
program of the Malthusian Anglo-American oligarchy, and has been
in place as a policy goal since Kissinger's infamous NSSM 200
[2] and the Global 2000/Global Futures campaigns of the Muskie
State Department under the disastrous Carter administration.
_______________
2. US National Security Council, "Implications
of Worldwide Population Growth for US Security and Overseas
Interests," National Security Study Memorandum 200, December 10,
1974. This document posited a "special US political and
strategic interest" in population reduction or limitation in
many developing sector nations because of potential competition
with the US for access to natural resources and raw materials.
This amounted to a strategy of thinly veiled genocide, and
facilitated US support for the murderous Pol Pot regime in
Cambodia.
--
"9/11 Synthetic Terrorism Made in USA," by Webster Griffin
Tarpley
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But finally it was the women's movement itself which provided
the strong intellectual current which flowed through my head in the
five years this book was gestating. I began my exploration of
feminism in 1972 in a seminar at the Episcopal Theological School,
"Women's Liberation and
the Value of Human Being," taught by
Olga Craven Huchingson. My graduate professional training in the
early 1950s and my subsequent life in the ministry had led me to
regard myself as already "liberated." I was not prepared for the
perceptiveness of the emerging feminist analysis of patriarchy.
When my concerns in the limits-to-growth field led me to ask,
How did we ever think it was all right for us to do what we have done
to nature? my readings in feminism and feminist theology began to
suggest some tentative answers to that question. Valerie Saiving,
Nancy Chodorow, Mary Daly, Rosemary Ruether, Elizabeth
Janeway, and more recently Dorothy Dinnerstein -- I am indebted
to them all through their writings. They have helped me step back
from some of the conventional assumptions of our culture to take a
new look at our "mythology of reality."
Ultimately, the problem of patriarchy is conceptual. The problem
which patriarchy poses for the human species is not simply that it
oppresses women. Patriarchy has erroneously conceptualized and
mythed "Man's place" in the universe and thus -- by the illusion of
dominion that it legitimates -- it endangers the entire planet. This is
the issue which in this book I am addressing.
My hope is that this book will help you join others in fashioning a
better way of thinking and living for yourself and for those who
come after you -- a way that can be sustained and renewed not just
for decades but for generations to come. I hope it will also leave you
asking yourself: "What additional assumptions are there which are
rooted in our male / female relationships and thus work quite
unconsciously in our collective minds to undergird (and perhaps
even conceal) what we are doing to ourselves, our world and our
future?
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