A User's Guide to the Crisis of Civilization: And How to Save It [Paperback]

This is probably the most important book you can read today if you want to learn about the greatest threats to humanity. It is full of facts, documents and testimony about the consequences of our food production shortfalls, energy shortages, financial instabilities, military/terrorist battles, the political moves to remove human rights from the general populous, and even about climate change. Its key strength is the peer reviews by a dozen world experts, inside and outside of power. The author deserves applause for bringing to our attention so many interconnected, on-going, accelerating processes. He reviews the issues already out there and adds some little-disclosed military and political agenda of consequence. He tries to connect the dots, and to some extent prioritizes the problems with analysis and suggested solutions.

The first chapter is so scary that it is likely many readers will not make it through the book. It brings together the facts and analysis on global warming that have frightened the Pentagon and all European governments since at least 2004. The prognosis is so bleak that all the other chapters seem trivial by comparison, though they cover some very dark problems (genocide, martial law for the masses, large scale detention camps, global dictators, another great depression, mass starvation, acute resource shortages). He could have reversed the order of the chapters to allow the reader to better prepare for the "big one", but he had his reasons.

The author develops a social and philosophical analysis which distills to a list of "key structural problems". These include monetary systems that impose ever greater debt, militaries that serve the aggressive desires of corporations to seize foreign resources, capitalism that collapses all dimensions to a single dimension (dollars) thereby squeezing out ethics, control structures that intentionally minimize wages in colonies to prevent those nations from becoming anything more than a source for raw materials, and defining nature as a resource rather than as a life support system. For the most part they are correct and unassailable. But he thoroughly skirts one key factor in the root cause of all of the great problems he covers: Over population. He strains to hold blameless the masses of humanity that have, of course, needed food, which needed farming, which needed land, which cleared the land of nature, which caused deforestation and species extinction and soil erosion. Over population has been a serious problem since 600AD when China started to experience collapses on its millet economy. By 900AD the rice paddy had doubled food production, so population started growing again, but at the expense of thousands of species cleared off the land forever. Europe was collapsing by 1350AD with food and wood shortages, so epidemics began. Europe was "saved" by the "discovery" of the americas, which were pillaged for 5 centuries, allowing Europe to grow populations even deeper into unsustainability. Because the author refused to do the homework on ecology (contrast with Jared Diamond, for example), he ends up romanticizing nature as some amazing fabric that can blissfully support 12 billion people (his number) with abundance of food, water, shelter, beauty and high consumption rates, even though at 7 billion humanity has already slaughtered off 80% of the nature we started with (UN Millennium Ecological Survey, 2005).

Of course one can choose a topic and decide what's out of scope for a given book. That's completely forgivable. But the very "analysis" he puts forth always stops right short of the effects of high populations, even while admitting strong dependence upon them. When the human population remained under the natural carrying capacity, none of the global crises he lists were even possible. They all emerge from the consequences of too many people for the earth to sustain. Only when there is "surplus population" above those that do the farming is it possible to build an army, build a metropolis, build a financial empire. In fact, overpopulation is a conscious strategy of those who covet power: Only when people are desperate are they willing to subordinate to a ruler - so make them desperate for food, water, and land via overpopulation. Farmers grow surplus food, the army comes to collect it and safe-keep it in the graineries, and then food is dispensed out only to those who do the king's bidding. That's where it all begins. Politicians gain power as people become dependent upon them. Most of the crazy politics we experience today are awkward attempts at dealing with the conflicts of resource shortages brought about directly by high population numbers. This in no way forgives all the war mongers from their murders, nor any of the other crimes the author so aptly discusses. It is not a question of "taking sides", blaming the poor or the rich. The greatest crime of the rich is exploitation. The greatest crime of the poor is over population. The greatest crime of the middle class is to enable the other two. Plenty of blame for everyone. Its just that we cannot fix a problem until we get to the root cause of it. That is why his fixes are so anemic - the root cause is missing, so there's no point of departure from which to build a strong, sound fix. This deficiency can turn an otherwise great effort into something grossly misleading to his followers and/or into something providing the fodder to his adversaries to discredit his work.

While most people of the world appreciate that harmony with nature is essential to sustainability, rulers don't want that message out there at all. So they have redefined cultures with nature regarded as something to be conquered, exploited, consumed; while "harmony with nature" was declared pagan and primitive. The author's avoidance of an ecological basis (which he admits is needed) leaves him arguing against a flawed ideology with yet another flawed ideology. With only one more good chapter, bringing in ecology/life_sciences as a basis for sustainability, and thus for ethics, the author could have shot down the current ideological flaws soundly, with science and a firm footing in a universal embrace of life on earth. But to do so he would have needed to bring in the concept of natural carrying capacity, and then step through the consequences of overstepping that bound, tracing the causal links down to the set of obscene problems that we are now wallowing in. Yes, this is three quarters of a great book!

Read this book. Yes, definitely! Then read a good ecology book to complete the story and plan a realistic course toward solutions.
Norm Dyer

In this mighty guide N.M.Ahmed analyzes the interconnection between the main aspects of the actual global human civilization crisis, except the world's demographic explosion or eventual pandemics. The dragon to be slain is neoliberal capitalism.

The issues
Climate change: a 6 'C temperature rise could wipe out all life on earth.
Energy scarcity: `peak oil' could lead to permanent high oil prices and new energy wars.
Food insecurity: industrial farming ravages the environment and denudes the soil. Vertically integrated food oligopolies are undercutting the livelihood of subsistence farmers.
Financial instability: financial liberalization and deregulation provoked a worldwide economic and banking crisis to be solved by the government (the taxpayer).
International terrorism: is linked to the world's over-dependence on oil. It is sponsored by Western intelligence in order to destabilize strategically important countries and to redesign actual geographical maps.
Political violence: its `normalization' by the `deep State' could generate `Police States' and curtail seriously civil liberties.

Neoliberalism
Neoliberal (`pure market') policies are unable to recognize long-term human costs by focusing on short-term profit maximization for a super-wealthy oligarchy (an imperial social system). Economically, it drives actually nearly exclusively on oil energy. Its ideology is based on unlimited growth and consumption maximization.

Structural reforms
On the political front, there should be more real democracy (decentralization of power) through community-lead governance.
On the economic front, there should be sustainable (not unlimited) growth.
On the social front, there should be new mechanisms for more equal wealth distribution, land reform and widespread private ownership of productive capital.
On the financial front, there should be a monetary reform based on interest-free loans (only fees for banks) for productive and innovative investments.
On the energy front, there should be large-scale investments in decentralized renewable energy technology (solar, tidal, wind, bio-fuels, geothermal, hydro-electric).
On the agricultural front, there should be smaller localized organic agricultural enterprises.
In one word, there should be a new human model through a cultural reevaluation of the human lifestyle.

Comments
The author could underestimate the demographic explosion which he sees steadying at around 10-11 billion people.
Some of his Marxist concepts are debatable at least. The class struggle is only one element in the history of mankind. Other extremely important elements are power (see below), nationalism (the nation-State) or advances in medicine (vaccines, the pill), chemistry (fertilizers, plastics), technology (atom bomb, computers) or industrialization (spinning wheel, injection engine).
Man's nature (his genetic basis) doesn't change under altered production conditions. All people are materialist consumers (of cars). A class is the sum of its members, nothing less, but also nothing more. There are no `good' (proletarian) or `bad' (capitalist) genes. People use their own `class' for personal benefits.
Capital (investments) runs after profits, not the other way round: (dwindling) profits running after capital (and its organic components).
Having power means having a bigger chance (also genetically) to survive. E.g., in one European country nearly all its inhabitants are descendants of the dukes of Burgundy. In a capitalist system, power means money (capital); in a totalitarian system, power means being a (one) party chief, in a military dictatorship, power means being a general; in a theocracy, power means being a High priest; in a clan, power means being an `uncle'.

N.A. Ahmed wrote a highly necessary book, presenting (sometimes nearly utopian) solutions in order to save our planet. It is a must read for all those who want to understand the world we live in.

Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed, Executive Director of the Institute for Policy Research and Development, points out that 1.4 billion people live in extreme poverty. More than 3 billion live below the poverty line of having less than $2 a day. 1.3 billion have no access to clean drinking water. 2.6 billion lack basic sanitation.

He notes that the World Bank argued, in defiance of the facts, that "Globalization generally reduces poverty because more integrated economies tend to grow faster and this growth is usually widely diffused ... Between countries, globalization is now mostly reducing inequality."

But this is a most uneven book. The chapters on terrorism and militarisation are informative, being based on Ahmed's earlier books Behind the war on terror, on the Iraq war, and The war on truth, on the US use of al-Qaeda. However, the chapters on climate and energy are poorly-argued, the chapter on food production is brief and weak, and the conclusion is just idealist wishful thinking.

He cites the 2002 US National Academy of Sciences report on climate change which warned tautologically, "Abrupt climate changes were especially common when the climate system was being forced to change most rapidly." It proceeded, illogically, "Thus, greenhouse warming and other human alterations of the earth system may increase the possibility of large, abrupt, and unwelcome regional or global climatic events."

He points out that the US state funds Pakistan, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States, which all fund al-Qaeda. The US state uses al-Qaeda for false-flag operations to foment sectarian conflict to break up states, as in Iraq, Libya, Syria and Iran.

The US state also uses criminal gangs. Using Pakistan, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states, it runs the drugs route from Afghanistan through Turkey and the Balkans to Western Europe and the USA, often using NATO planes. The CIA runs the top Afghan and Pakistani drug traders. Ahmed quotes Dennis Dayle: "In my 30-year history in US Drug Enforcement Administration and related agencies, the major targets of my investigations almost invariably turned out to be working for the CIA."

Ahmed finishes by writing that global crises will conveniently "render existing national and international politico-economic structures increasingly irrelevant ..." He concludes, "grassroots communities ... will lead the way to the new world." But tiny means cannot achieve vast goals.

After his entire book has proved how lethal capitalism is, Ahmed backs private property, open markets, `a legitimate role for private enterprise in developing productive resources that are considered to be publicly owned', and `universal individual and community ownership'. He carefully opposes socialism and central planning.

He completely ignores the working class and trade unions. No wonder that Pluto Press, run by the Socialist Workers' Party, is content to publish this idealist, anti-working class book.

Obviously, the world is not safe in capitalism's hands. But after all Ahmed's huffing and puffing, capitalism would be quite safe in his hands. In every country the working class has to take responsibility, take charge.