Competition or cooperation

Last Thursday I read a column in the International Herald Tribune. The columnist, an American reflected over that when he was lecturing in Paris, students saw solidarity as the antonym to competition, while where he came from monopoly was the first choice. I think the observations contains more than a simple difference in culture or language. The French apparently saw the fierce (economic) competition as opposed to solidarity.

For me I would have selected cooperation as the antonym to competition. That is, we can solve problems, or exploit opportunities not only through the model of competition, but also through cooperation. The platform for the (capitalist) competition is the market. The platform for cooperation can be society in the form of state but also in the form of civil society organisations.

In real life, I don't think the choice is the either/or but both or all three. We certainly need comptetition (and diversity) but no progress is made in human society without cooperation, and without solidarity progress might be immoral, without heart.

A problem today is the competition has been given supremacy as an ideology. Yes it is an ideology with its own fundamentalists, and they are as scary as other fundamentalists.

Small is not only beautiful - it is productive as well

Recently I had the pleasure of moderating a seminar at the Royal Swedish Academy of Agriculture and Forestry in Stockholm. It was about how organic farming can meet the challenge of climate change. It was an interesting seminar, which showed how complex the reality is, and that there are no simple solutions. The seminar had a very wide approach to the issue and included aspects not only of bio-diversity but also about social diversity, one farmer, Anders Lunneryd, explaining how immigrants are working with vegetable production at this farm as own enterprises.

In essence niches and border zones are very important for biodiversity and for resilience. Not only diversity, but also productivity is often a lot higher in border zones, just think about coasts or waterholes in the desert, or the farmland-forest border. In permaculture and agro-forestry such border zones are created. I remember what Tor Nörretranders wrote in The User Illusion (Märk Världen) about how the modern civilization tries to make thing predictable, how there are no straight lines in nature and hardly any in old cultures while the industrial society is full of them. With science and technology we strive to make things predictable and repetitive (and there is no coincidence that my thesaurus says that boring and monotonous are synonyms to repetitive). While what we think is beautiful is almost never predictable and repetitive. Esthetically we seek complexity all the time, not chaos, some order is actually preferred by or senses.

For a new farming system, for a new relationship between man and nature but also for a future society we should seek diversity and complexity. It is also in this line of thought where one can find a rational argument in favour of that “scale matters”. I have always had sympathy for “small is beautiful” as Schumacher said, but I found it hard to provide solid arguments for why that is. With this perspective of border zones, complexity and diversity also points to that small may not only be beautiful, but also productive.

This is perhaps an interesting example of a border zone. Kids laughing and swimming in pool in the main square of Asuncion, the capital of Paraguya, which I recently visited. The main squares in these former Spanish colonies are mostly very strict, but here it was all relaxed, like the whole town.

Workers Safety in Addis Abbaba

No comments....

Biofuel in many shapes

I have been on a trip to Ethiopia and Zambia. Discussed biofuel in both places. Biofuel comes in many shapes and forms and I don't think it is appropriate to take a firm stance against or for biofuels as such.

It is quite clear that biofuels as such does not have the potential to replace all oil used. Not even for todays transport and even less with the growth of economies and population. There is simply not enough land for that. At the same time that can hardly be an argument biofuel. With that logic all alternative sources of energy useless as none of them will be enough - alone. Then there is this complaint that biofuels increase food prices or creating a lack of food. I have been arguing against this argument before and this year we see how little truth there is in that argument. Last year when food prices spiked many blamed that on biofuel. But today when the wheat price is almost falling through the floor, where are all these voices? What do they say now?

Of course, there can be such a competion, in the same way as there can be competition between animal feed and food, between tobacco and food, between wool and food (sheep raising for wool were allegedly the main reason for the big Irish famine, rather then potato blight as often said), betweem cotton and food, between roads and food (as most roads are built on prime agriculture land). But humans have always produced biofuels and bio energy: Firewood, charcoal, horses and oxen for traction etc. In Sweden some fifteen percent of our land was used to feed horses before.

In Zambia I visited Bruno's Jatropha (see picture), a local entrepreneur that has raised some 1 million Jatropha seedlings. His idea is that smallholders grow it as a hedge row along their fields. He says that 1 million hectare of Jatropha would satisfy all Zambias energy needs. Zambia as a land-locked country without oil is in a desperate need of energy. During my visit they run out of petrol, and that happens quite often. Zambia has plenty of land that can be used for Jatropha or other biofuels, such as ethanol from cane.

Of course there is totally another story if big biofuel projects chase people off the land, but that is no different then when they do that for producing rice or cotton. For those whose land is grabbed it makes little difference what the land is used for...

We must cut down on energy use. There are no silver bullets, not even solar energy will for a foreseeable future be enough. In theory it could but we look perhaps hundred years ahead for that energy party. Today we need to save.

A flamboyant

Just came from Zambia where the Jacaranda, Bougainvillea and the Flamboyant bloomed.

Tipping towards the unknown

- The human pressure on the Earth System has reached a scale where abrupt global environmental change can no longer be excluded. To continue to live and operate safely, humanity has to stay away from critical ‘hard-wired´ thresholds in Earth´s environment, and respect the nature of planet's climatic, geophysical, atmospheric and ecological processes, says Johan Rockström, Director of the Stockholm Resilience Centre. A group of 28 internationally renowned scientists propose that global biophysical boundaries, identified on the basis of the scientific understanding of the Earth System, can define a ‘safe planetary operating space´ that will allow humanity to continue to develop and thrive for generations to come. Read more about it on "Tipping towards the unknown"

I could not agree more. Thes girls and guys have identified nine critical boundaries, of which at least six are elaborated upon in depth in my Garden Earth book. I believe the disturbances in the Nitrogen cycle is likely to be one of the most critical issues.

The scientist write:
"Nitrogen and phosphorus inputs to the biosphere and oceans
Human modification of the nitrogen cycle has been even greater than our modification of the carbon cycle. Human activities now convert more N2 from the atmosphere into reactive forms than all of the Earth´s terrestrial processes combined. Much of this new reactive nitrogen pollutes waterways and coastal zones, is emitted to the atmosphere in various forms, or accumulates in the terrestrial biosphere. A relatively small proportion of the fertilizers applied to food production systems is taken up by plants. A significant fraction of the applied nitrogen and phosphorus makes its way to the sea, and can push marine and aquatic systems across thresholds of their own. A concrete example of this effect is the decline in the shrimp catch in the Gulf of Mexico due to hypoxia caused by fertilizer transported in rivers from the US Midwest."

Happiness or opression?

I saw this line of children in the streets of Stockholm the other day. First I thought they were cute. But then my mind drifted to the image of prisoners being brought to work by their wardens, or slaves marching towards a miserable life. There are several ways to see the same thing and we draw very different conclusions.

I hope you give yourself time to think about this image and the billion of people spending hours commuting in buses, trams, metros or endless car ques - or in assembly lines of the various sorts. Are we training free-thinking, happy people or are we adapting our children very early to a confined life? To a life in lines, straight lines.

Is Global Democracy Possible?

Yesterday I participated in a lecture and debate with Jan Aart Scholte, from Building Global Democracy, organised by the Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation. It was an interesting event and there was a lot of discussion afterwards. One of these "talks" that is so valuable for development of new ideas and perspective. Mr Scholte likened the global governance structure as a donut, with a large number of actors and nothing in the middle. Having said that he also didn't call for some global government to be put there in the middle. He also made a point of that business are not at all anti-regulation, on contrary they love regulations as long as they are made in their interest. I thought about the WTO as a perfect such example. The whole reasons to set up the WTO is to make rules that are good for business.

The most interesting aspect from my perspective is what other forms and institutions we can develop for governance than the (nation) state. Some people have a tendency to overplay the role of the nation state. They are called sovereigns but hardly ever are they sovereign. There are also on the national level a lot of other institutions that are competing with it for power. First we have the market, see my posting below. I don't think anybody disputes the strength of "the market" as an institution. But we have many more. In Sweden our municipalities have a certain degree of self-rule, i.e. the national government can't boss them around. Then we have a myriad of cooperatives or other ways that people associate to "govern" things that are important for them, e.g. a church, a landscape, water pipes or housing. Of course, in theory the nation state could forbid all these things, but in doing so it would both loose legitimacy and the foundation for its own existence. In addition nothing would work properly if all initiatives outside the state are oppressed. That is why dictatorships are not only bad from a democracy perspective, they are also bad for business and development.

Today, also national governments are subject to international regulations and standards that they have to obey. Many of them are actually set by non governmental organisations. That is in particular the case for standards. They are by and large developed outside governmental structures. But it also holds true for technology in general and many business arrangements.

Realising that the nation state is only one of many forms for governance and seeing the existing reality in global governance, i.e. a whole pot of intergovernmental organisation, private sector organisations, business associatons, civil society, international courts etc., it becomes clear to me that a discussion about global governance can't look only, or not even mainly into the WTO and the UN. They surely have their role, and there is a lot to be done to make them work better. The UN system has increasingly engaged civil society, and I have personally participated in various UN processed and events (such as the Johannesburg summit 2002) as a civil society representative. The WTO falls even short of that. Already national governments are increasingly loosing legitimacy in the eyes of their citizens and intergovernmental organisation certainly have even bigger problems with legitimacy. e.g. the EU has a major legitimacy problems towards the citizens of the EU member states. This is one reason, but there are many more, for why I believe intergovernmental organisations will not be the most interesting actors for global governance in the future (I now think in decades and not in years). I believe we can see more interesting things for governance and democracy develop outside of those inter-governmental organisations, in the same was as we see more interesting innovation in governance outside the nation state.

Floating gardens

Adapting to climate change in Bangladesh

Much of the land in the Gaibandha district of Bangladesh is covered by water during the monsoon season, making it impossible to grow crops. Practical Action has developed a technology to allow farmers to grow food on flooded land. read more

One -extreme perhaps - example of how we can adapt to a changing climate. Reminds me of my nephew Victor who farmed on a boat and used shopping carts filled of dirt as substrate for the cultivation. It is all about adapting to the ecological conditions. The peoples and societies that can do that will be the winners in the future.

The state and the market - two competing institutons

In politics there is often a gap between those that want that a problem should be regulated by the state or by the market. The former are often socialist and the latter liberals, somewhat simplified. One can view both the state and the market as social institutions that regulate the relationship between people. Which institution you like the best may depend on how it is organised and which context you are in. The same person that is sceptical to market solutions may feel fully at ease and on an equal footing with the farmer from which she buys her organic veggies, and may think that it awful that the government forces him to keep her chicks inside because of bird flu or that he has to spend a lot of money to invest in a new packing shed for the veggies to comply with government regulations. And she that is against "big government" may demand that governments step in and take over bankrupt banks or support ailing car industries.Not to speak of that they often support big tax-financed repressive forces (military and police).

In shape and form the market and the state are very different. We, as citizens have very little access to the state, our role is to pay taxes and regularly cast a vote for who should rule us. The market on the other hand is a lot more participatory and at least in theory we are all equal (admittedly a bit theoretical). The market can be seen as a social network, and with that view the difference to the state is less. And it becomes even less when governments, like they increasingly do, take over the management methods and organisational principles from them market place; the language of the market place (we all heard government agencies speaking about clients and customers) and finally purchase a lot of its services in the market place.

The problem with the market is mainly that those that already have the upper hand, those with better information or better bargaining power gets a better deal most of the time and that the gaps tend to increase rather than decrease. Government take-over of markets have been disastrous most of the time, but the market take-over of government is almost as bad. The main challenge for the future lies not only in improvement of the workings of the market and improvements in democracy and finding the right balance between market and state. I believe it lies as much or more in the development of new institutions that will take over relevant parts of what is now done by either market or state.

Herein lies the real opportunity for change.

We are part of nature

Sweden yesterday inaugurated its first truly marine national park, the Koster sea.

Greenpeace protests against that local fishermen will be allowed to fish in the national park and they threaten to dump boulders to prevent trawling. We are speaking about a fishery of shrimp, crayfish, crab and lobster mainly. The local fishermen have been trained in how to fish in a sustainable way and they have had to amend their gear to suit the conditions. Greenpeace says that despite training once, in 2004, some fishermen had damaged a precious corral. I have not studied the details of the arrangement – and I am quite convinced that Greenpeace can be right in that observation but I don’t agree with their conclusions: There is no wilderness on this planet, there are no truly wild landscapes. From the African Savannahs and the Amazon rainforest to the archipelago in Sweden, the human being has been part of the landscape for millennia.

Similarly as for the fishery the county administration states that farming will continue. The continued use of the land is a prerequisite for the maintenance of the cultural and esthetic values. Continued grazing is essential and it is desirable to increase the number of animals grazing.

It is a lot more important that we promote a connectedness and an active use of “the wild” than that we try to exclude all humans from interaction with it. Those against often claim that the economic value of “the wild” can be bigger if used for tourism than if used for production. That is perhaps often true, but there are many nuances here. And who says that economic value should be the yardstick in the first place.

- one is that the tourism itself, even if it is based on just observing can be very intrusive and probably disturb wildlife even more than commercial use. I have had the benefit of whale-watching in New Zealand and seeing the incredible wild life on the African Savannah. And in most cases it is like a crazy zoo, of cars or boats rushing from one site to the other, with drivers in constant radio contact to ensure “value for money”. The cars and the tourists seem to upset the wildlife more than the Massai herding their cattle.
- the other is that the wildlife tourism represent a consumption culture, a way of interaction with nature where we consume the experiences, but don’t interact. I enjoy this activity myself, but we should realize that it is not the same (true) nature experience where we live in/with the wild, where we get our livelihoods in the wild. And that part of human culture is essential and as endangered as the landscapes that go with them. The Innuit hunting seals are a lot better ecologically adapted than the city-dwellers that protest against it. The Massai herdsmen are a lot better ecologically adapted than the city vegan eating a global mix of a scientifically composed diet – and of course a lot better ecologically adapted than the city-dweller eating hamburgers at McDonalds.

Others claim that the wild has its own rights and that regardless of what we want and the economic values we have a moral obligation to let it be. Yes, but……

- As I explained above almost all landscapes have been influences by humans today, so whatever we considered to be “wild” is actually something that is the result of a long term interaction between a number of species and their environment, and in most cases the human has been a main actor to shape the environment. The Koster Sea would not be what it is without the humans. To throw us out is not the recipe to keep what is valuable today. To throw us out is to create a new “unhuman” landscape that never existed.
- Already some 5000 years ago we had expanded into almost all parts of the globe. And 200 years ago we farmed allover the place. As a matter of fact, humans have pulled back a bit lately in rich countries, that is why rural areas are depopulated and the number of deer and foxes are exploding and meadows are (re)converted to forests. Other wildlife invades our cities, e.g. seagulls are now abundant not only in coastal cities.
- Farming has been the biggest blow to wildlife since humans appeared. In the end it means that we shouldn’t have domesticated plants and animals, that we would still be 10 million hunters and gatherers on this planet. The expansion of farm land and pasture to 35-40 percent of the surface of the globe is without comparison the biggest habitat destruction. Many times worse then the logging in the Amazon (which is also driven by farming) or shrimp trawling in the Koster sea. Another story is that farming, and even more grazing, has created its own new precious landscapes, landscapes that we hold in very high esteem.

I strongly object to the rapid destruction of habitat for many species, and I think we humans must voluntarily reduce our impact on nature, but in the process of finding a sustainable relationship between man an nature, we would not only need to get rid of unscrupulous business tycoons. We would also be better off with fewer people having an idealistic view of nature, where the human being is seen as an alien. It is only by seeing the importance of the interaction between man and the rest of nature that we can find our way for the future.

Also we need to shed the idea of ecosystems being in some kind of static balance. They might be in some kind of balance (whatever that means) most of the time, but they are far from static, they change all the time. And humans are part of those ecosystems. This insight are in no way a justification for the current rape of the earth and the total disregard of other species. On contrary, it is an insight that shows the way for a future redefined relationship between (wo)man and nature.

Pathetic greenwashing

I see TV commercials for the new Sony Ericsson phone. The slogan is "Save the Planet in Style".

The only thing the ad offers in that regard is that the phone is made with recycled plastic. That is just pathetic!

I agree that many small steps and changes in our daily behaviour are important to save the planet, but the use of recycled plastic in a mobile phone deals with a very, very minor part of the environmental impact of the use of cell phones. The mobile phone network uses an awful lot of energy, the mobile phones are made of a number of nasty materials and uses rare minerals, the control of which are subject to wars (Congo), they are soaked in flame retardants, the batteries are an environmental problem, the radio waves are possibly dangerous etc. The constant shift to new models drives a crazy consumption and then we are supposed to have a good consciousness beacuse the thing is using recycled plastic. And even worse the slogan Save the Planet is used to sell the stuff. I have always had Ericsson and later Sony Ericsson phones (because my grandfather worked for them) but this kind of absurd greenwashing is hypocritical so I might consider buying another one.

To be fair to Sony Ericsson they are not alone. My daily newspaper Svenska Dagbladet features an article that tells me how I can fly to Thailand with a good consciousness, by offsetting carbon emissions. Corporate Responsibility and other sustainability schemes are popular in the most dirty segments of our businesses, not to speak about in the bank sector which is more to blame than any other sector for facilitating irresponsible consumption.

It is of course better to offset carbon emissions when flying and to use recycled plastic for the mobile phone than not to do it. But the truth of the matter that this kind of "greenwashing" just keep us on consumption patterns that are not sustainable. Consume less is still the best recipe for "saving the planet" (an expression which in itself is stupid - we are not threatening the planet, our behaviour is rather threatening the survival of the human being). No Corporate Responsibility programs or Global Compacts or voluntary Carbon trading will change that. And companies that wants to be relevant in the future world surely have to do a lot more than that.

Garden Earth – a study in political ecology and economic democracy

There is no land left to settle, the last frontier we have left to civilize is ourselves. (Jewel).

Garden Earth looks at human society from several perspectives. It avoids the trap of using just one lens for making sense of the world. The main themes examined by Garden Earth are ecology; society and its power relations; the market economy; and technology and energy. And it takes the long view. In this way it is the opposite to the current flow of books on climate change; the financial crisis; the food and agriculture crisis or peak-oil. It does, however, help make sense of these present day problems and also offers a path for future developments.

Garden Earth looks at the history of human society, how it was shaped by ecological and social conditions. As an example, it shows the importance of trade for our ecological adaptation. People might believe that trade emerged as a means to make profit, but the reality is that trade is what enabled us to populate areas were some essential resource was missing. Garden Earth discusses the reasons for success – and failures – of civilizations, and it explains how and why capitalism developed in Western Europe despite the fact that just 300 years earlier Western Europe was an impoverished part of the world.

A main focus of the book covers the technical and energy development “complexes”. This includes the first use of fire, how animal energy was harnessed traction and transport, and the use of wind for trade and for new conquests. Up to the mid eighteenth century wood was the main source of energy, and that led to intense pressure on the forests; large tracts of Europe and other developed parts of the world were deforested. Coal changed all this. In the short run it saved the forest. In the long run, however, it paved the way for an enormous expansion in energy use to a level where each human use energy resources corresponding to the manpower of thirty, forty people. This has enabled the situation to develop where more than 40 percent of the land surface is used for food production and for our cities, and where more than a 100 percent of the total production capacity of the planet is used annually – clearly not a sustainable situation.

In early societies it was obvious that more energy had to be produced than was consumed, otherwise humanity could not have worked and reproduced. With the introduction of fossil fuel this all changed. In the modern day, some 15-150 times (figures vary considerably depending on how they are calculated) as much energy is used to produce our food than we get from it. This is an extremely inefficient system!

In general, it is only in recent centuries that humans have been motivated by material wealth and economic gain. This one-sided emphasis on material wealth, growth and profit was a forceful driver for the development of the modern market economies, and it has created unprecedented productivity and wealth. It has also contributed to the increase of human rights and liberation of women and other oppressed groups compared to the preceding feudal societies. But it has also come with a price. The price is depletion of natural resources; squeezing out other organisms and ecosystems to such an extent that we are endangering our own survival; causing climate change and chemical and medical contamination, to mention just a few. Further, there is no evidence that this growth has delivered more human well-being. Is not well-being that we should be striving for rather then GDP figures?

Our society faces many challenges. On the one hand, the pressure on natural resources, in particular all the ecosystem services and on the other hand poverty and inequality. Our society has no mechanisms to value the services of nature. This has led to large scale depletion. One way of dealing with this is to “liquidate” these resources and services, e.g. with carbon payments or payment to farmers for environmental services. There is a certain logic to this approach, but it also means that we are using the same system that actually created the problem, that is, capitalism, to fix it. Is that wise? Capitalism and market economy have gradually expanded to bigger and bigger sections of our life: from markets for goods, then to labour and soil. Later on financial markets – buying money for money – developed. Lately there has been a large scale “marketization” of social capital, when public goods have been transferred to private ownership and management. To let nature itself – the air we breathe, the water we drink – be managed by markets seems like a very risky venture.

Our society and the capitalist market economy have failed in creating wealth for the many. Big parts of humanity are as poor today as they were fifty years ago, despite unprecedented growth worldwide markets. We have failed to create an equitable society. In addition, the economic system, supposedly managing itself through the “invisible hand”, is in constant need of corrections and controls, simply because it doesn’t work as it is supposed to.

The capitalist economy and its associated values – such as the vision of constant growth – were perhaps appropriate for a world bent on expansion and colonization. But we have now colonized what there is to colonize and spread ourselves over all parts of the globe. Even if economic growth is still possible (we can always create new ‘virtual’ globes on the internet, can’t we?), biological, physical and geographic growth isn’t. Therefore, we need new values and paradigms. Most likely we also need a new economy and new forms of social capital. Population growth also needs to be checked.

We have changed the globe so much that Nature can’t make it without us anymore and more and more wild life is dependent on us for its survival. There is no point in looking back to the time when we were equal to the elk, the carrot and the sheep. Today, whether we like it or not, we must act as gardeners for the whole Garden Earth. And we must manage the planet as a garden, as our garden.

The views above include some of the essential discussions of the book, Garden Earth. It is currently a 400-page book in Swedish, due to be published later this year. En English version is under production. Publishers are welcome to contact me...

Bicycles and sun

Increased use of bicycles in the cities would be valuable to save energy, to save life, to reduce congestion and thereby increase speed, to reduce noise and not the least to make people more fit. There are several reasons for why people don't take the bike. A few don't even know how to do it, but mostly it has to do with comfort and convinience and a bit of safety. Separate bike paths or streets dedicated to cyclists are two good things. In cold and rainy climates rain or snow are real hurdles. A roof over the bike path could increase the interest a lot. That might not work well in the city centres for both practical and estetical reasons, but in the outskirts and suburbs a roof on top would be great. And it would be even better to put up photovoltaic cells on top of them, perhaps even integrated in the roofs. In this way we would both promote increased use of bicycles and more solar energy, and use "dead" surfaces for energy production. Obviously pedestrians should also have access to these. Construction companies could perhaps make covered bike path modules that they could easily "roll out". A lot better use of society's money than support to destructive technologies such as the car industry.

Zunia

I am a bit lazy now and write nothing new. Instead I refer my readers to some other interesting sites. Today Zunia org, a well developed source of environment and development news on the net.
http://zunia.org/

Should we seek to save industrial civilisation?

Instead of writing my own thing here I refer you to a rather interesting exchange of ideas between George Monbiot and Paul Kingsnorht
http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2009/08/18/should-we-seek-to-save-industrial-civilisation/

Are we doing the right thing?

It has been raining a lot here lately. And the flowers in this pot were almost suffocating from oxygen deficiency as the soil was saturated with water. So we used an old umbrella as a "rain shelter". It was a practical quick fix. Was it a good solution?

There were perhaps two other possibilities: 1. stopping the rain or 2. improve the drainage. Of those alternatives the first is perhaps a bit megalomaniac and would have enormous consequences on all other things. But the second alternative is quite feasible. It is actually a better solution than the umbrella (but not at all as fun to make a picture of).

When thinking about this I remember a story of an Indian ruler that was annoyed over that the ground was uneven and hurting his feet. He ordered that the earth be covered by skins to make it smooth and nice to walk. One of his advisors modestly suggested that the problem could perhaps be dealt with by cutting pieces of skin and fit to the feet of the people, i.e. making sandals.

Seeing the actions taken agains climate change or other challenges in the world, I sometimes wonder if we really take the right measures, or if we put umbrellas over our flower pots or cover the earth with skins?

Why should organic be regulated but not Fair Trade?

In the "COMMUNICATION FROM THE COMMISSION TO THE COUNCIL, THE EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT AND THE EUROPEAN ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL COMMITTEE, contributing to Sustainable Development: The role of Fair Trade and nongovernmental trade-related sustainability assurance schemes" from EU Commission of 5 May, the commission "Reiterates the importance of maintaining the non-governmental nature of Fair Trade and other similar sustainability schemes throughout the EU. Public regulation could interfere with the workings of dynamic private schemes." I could not agree more. The EU has had a similar approach to environmental labelling, where it does run an own scheme, but it has not regulated or banned other environmental labelling schemes.

BUT it is very hard to see the logic why the EU thinks that organic labelling needs regulation. Fair trade labelling, eco labelling and organic are all sustainability labelling schemes and the arguments for staying out of regulation are the same for all of them. When the commission says:
"Regulating criteria and standards would limit a dynamic element of private initiatives in this field and could stand in the way of the further development of Fair Trade and other private schemes and their standards." this is equally true for the organic sector.

There will be scandals and fraud without a regulation - but they are there also with a regulation...

Shrinking marginal benefits of globalisation?

One can discuss if not the marginal benefits of globalisation and international competition are decreasing over time.

The first international trade was ecologically motivated, i.e. populations and cultures in one part of the world lacked locally available critical resources, such as flint, bronze, salt etc. So trade was an ecological adaptation totally essential for human survival.

Gradually trade has been more and more motivated by profits. Free trade and competition and in particular the lowered prices for transport from mid 1800s led to a global division of labour. A division of labour which similarly as the division of labour in the family, within a company or within a society has two functions: one is the increased efficiency in the production and the other is a increased stratification of society with increased inequality and more hierarchy. This is also what we can see in the world today, where some countries are locked in a poverty trap. And despite the promotion of globalisation as a solution they have not benefitted at all.

It also seems that globalisation itself has the effect of gradually reducing the accrued benefits. The theory in favour of globalisatoin is about competition between companies and innovation plays a big role. Innovations are now global. An innovation in Japan can result in a production in Mexico exporting to Scandinavia. This is also linked to increased standardisation on all levels from production to management. There is very little space for innovation on the production level and even when there is innovation it can be applied everywhere. This also means that there is actually little money and profit to be made in the production as such. The money to be made is upstreams, i.e. in the patents and downstream, i.e. in the marketing and branding. It is no coincidence that most successful companies have no own production any longer.

For the production proper the comparative advantages are now mainly about salaries and other components of human and social capital, as all other factors are more or less the same all over the globe (this is based on the low transport costs based on too cheap fossil energy). A factory in Thailand may very well be owned by a company from India, have an American manager and using technology from Singapore. Therefore it is not the own resources of that company that makes it different from their competitors. It is the Thai labour force and the Thai makroeconomics that shall compete with India, Germany and Brazil.

If this analysis is correct it means that it is not companies or entrepreneurs that compete with each other, but it is political systems and states that compete. States can compete by distorting the game with subsidies (such as OECD countries support to its farm sector) or by investing in human or social capital (e.g. by eductions) or by creating a good "business climate" (law and order, less red tape). And one can wonder, why it is wrong that countries compete by spending their resources where they think they make most use? The question is if we perhaps do more harm that good by trying to standardise how countries operate, wether it is done by the EU, the WTO or other mechanisms?

God and nature

Mostly, the emergence of religion is explained by the need of people to have the mysteries of the world explained to them and to understand how the human being interacts with nature. Perhaps that is true, I don't know and I don't think that there is any way to verify that assumption. But looking at the monoteist religions of today it is hard to see that link.

I think that the role of religion has a lot more to do with society and our relations among ourself, than about our relationship with nature. The early animist and polytheist religions were a lot more "democratric" and some of them included some kind of worship of nature. Gods were like people, they quarreled and fought with each other (like the Greek gods or the Nordic ones). Things changed with the introduction of the monoteist, omnipotent and judging God. Both in regard to the relationship to nature and the relationship between God and (wo)man.

In these religions, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, there is very little about nature and the place of the human being in the world, and there is very little about all these scaring natural phenomena that religion is supposed to explain. Of course one can find passages in the Bible which are about nature - such as the creation- but they are really few compared to what is about the human being, society and God himself (or herself if you prefer).

Of the ten commandments in the Bible seven are about how we relate to each other and the other three about how we relate to God and to religion itself. I think that shows quite clearly the societal nature of religion.