Commodity Ecology

[Caduceus Mercurius]

I was doing an image search for the term "entheogenic retreat" (for no serious reason, it was for the picture association thread), and saw a peculiar image that vaguely resembled a spore print. It was this image:

I clicked on the image to visit the site, and while scrolling through the text I noticed another image also featured mushrooms.

Scrolling through the text I suddenly noticed the author considers "psychedelics/entheogens" one of 71 "commodity choices" (the 71 gills of the above image) that he will continue to discuss on his blog. I thought some of you might be interested.

He didn't write the blogs on psychedelics yet. What I find interesting is that he already separated hallucinogens (I guess he means deliriants) from psychedelics:

# 60. Stimulants
# 61. Hallucinogens
# 62. Intoxicants
# 63. Narcotics
# 64. Hypnotics
# 65. Psychedelics/Entheogens
# 66. Anesthetics

This is the address of the blog: http://commodityecology.blogspot.com/

About the author: Environmental sociologist Mark D. Whitaker is a comparative historical researcher on the politics of environmental degradation and sustainability. Toward A Bioregional State is his novel approach to development and to sustainability. He proposes that instead of sustainability being an issue of population scale, managerial economics, or technocratic planning, an overhaul of formal democratic institutions is required. This is because environmental degradation has more to do with the biased interactions of formal institutions and informal corruption. Because of corruption, we have environmental degradation. Current formal democratic institutions of states are forms of informal gatekeeping, and as such, intentionally maintain democracy as ecologically “out of sync

 

[Forkbender]

Nice! I'll definitely look into this.

 

[Caduceus Mercurius]

On Amazon the author sums up his ideas in the review section.

real strategies for implementing bioregional democracy
based on demoting real democratic corruptions and ecological tyranny

August 11, 2005
By Mark D. Whitaker

As the author, I can provide some background. Toward a Bioregional State began to be written in the year 2000 as a slowly growing series of ideas for both democratic faciliation as well as toward facilitating more geo-specific politics. To paraphrase the above book description, this geo-specific politics really is "already there--though only waiting to be organized."

As I wrote many consecutive other 'chapters' over the years, and maintained an open draft on a website, I got much encouragement from those with whom I shared the ideas.

Increasingly, as the vision for the bioregioanl state became clearer, it appeared as a wholesale overhaul of existing democratic theory justifications as well as formal institutional design principles to demote corruptions in practice that were left unaddressed 250 years ago when the European Enlightenment began to concern itself with formalized institutions of democracy as a replacement for royal states. However, building on this heritage and even improving it instead of removing anything, the assortment of strategic ideas in the bioregional state is based on adding different levels of checks and balances that focus on how political power abuses operate in practice to support environmental degradation instead of to support sustainability and how such abuses in turn operate in practice to demote democratic competition of parties instead of support it.

Thus, the bioregional state continued an interest in faciliating competitive party democracy as much as human health, ecological, and economic security. Soon, I found that 'theoretically' the main thread through all the additional checks and balances were coaleasing around was the demotion of the 'gatekeeping issue,' i.e., the demotion of the informal clientelism issue of power that destroys both competitive democracy as well destroys citizenship developmental feedback toward ecological security. That same issue of gatekeeping and clientelism in democracy takes the blame for supporting and expanding ecological and human health damage as well.

Thus, the issues of democratic faciliation and ecological security circled back on each other and were shown to be one in the same.

Standards of equal protection under the law demand that state frameworks address and integrate into checks and balances many ignored issues of informal power and ecological power--instead of thinking that simply setting up formal checks and balances by themselves automatically means democracy much less means sustainability.

As I got clearer on particular identified dark informal corruptions in the operations of all formal democracy, it became clear that the bioregional state aims to address corruption as a route toward sustainability, since the same democratic corruptions are directly related to environmental degradation which is connected with loss of sustainable jobs and increased health risks. Such corruptions have nothing to do with democracy at all. They are a novel ecological tyranny masquerading as democracy. And such an ecological tyranny is maintained and expanded by corrupt uses of formal institutions supported by ongoing democratic gatekeeping and ongoing political subsidization of environmental degradation.

In a nutshell, the issues that the bioregional state analyzes and provides solutions for are: gerrymandered districts, gatekeeping parties funded by the same people instead of representative parties competing for the voter, the politics that leads to corporate subsidies for environmental degradation, intentional demotion of sustainable practices when they compete with corporate-led political power, cold-blooded intentional destruction of more geographical and competive politics by dividing up such areas to "re-clientelize" them with redrawn districts that jury-rig the vote totals to destroy the competitive democracy, real live judicial outlawing of a whole class of lawsuits where people were "categorically disallowed by the court" to continue any class action suits to defend rivers against pollution; 'upstream' judicial frameworks totally isolated from any kind of purview from what goes on 'downstream' due to their isolated decisions; parties agreeing not to compete at all and instead battling only for the same small demographic of voters while agreeing to ostracize the larger ecological majority of voters; incumbent parties attempting to win by dividing up the opposition's challengers instead of attempting to appeal to the majority of voters to stay in power; on the ground agreements between so called rightists and so called leftists to protect ecological issues they share in common--while unresponsive national parties of "organized leftists" and "organized rightists" refusing to address the issue at all. All these corrupt examples are just a few of the many issues that the bioregional state addresses. At last count, there are over 60 different novel checks and balances to integrate into formal democracy proposed in the bioregional state.

For example of this ecological self-interest demoted by gatekeeping politics, did you know that from a poll reported in the magazine The Ecologist, upwards of 80% of the United States, with little difference between left or right, want their environmental laws seriously enforced, as well as strenghtened? There's more on that in the book.

Building on the implications of the first few strategic examples, I came to the conclusion that this "third force" in politics, the ecological self-interest, deserved to be formally enshrined as a check and balance against unsustainable developmentalism. This ecological self-interest is tangibly there in the history of all states past or present--as well as typically demoted by elites of many states of the present. However, it all depends on how particular formal institutions faciliate such ecological self-interest, or demote it. Toward a Bioregional State is toward a "comparative anatomy" of corrupt political power in practice that I think would be globally comparative and thus useful on how to solve and identify such corruptions in pratice anywhere. It serves as a reference for evaluating existing corruptions in practice that support an ecological tyranny, as well as serves as a means to solve them.

 

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33. war materiels

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