Malcolm X is still misunderstood – and misused. Fifty-five years after his assassination at the Audubon Ballroom in New York, we still get much wrong about Malcolm X

by Omar Suleiman, Al Jazeera:  https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2020/2/21/malcolm-x-is-still-misunderstood-and-misused

Image: Al Jazeera

Every semester in which I teach a course on Muslims in the Civil Rights Movement at Southern Methodist University, I give my students a selection of quotes from both Martin Luther King Jr and Malcolm X and ask them to guess who said what. So for example, I will posit the following two quotes and ask for their proper ascription:

“Ignorance of each other is what has made unity impossible in the past. Therefore, we need enlightenment. We need more light about each other. Light creates understanding, understanding creates love, love creates patience, and patience creates unity. Once we have more knowledge (light) about each other, we will stop condemning each other and a United front will be brought about.”

“The majority of white Americans consider themselves sincerely committed to justice for the Negro. They believe that American society is essentially hospitable to fair play and to steady growth toward a middle-class Utopia embodying racial harmony. But unfortunately this is a fantasy of self-deception and comfortable vanity.”

And every single time, they have been unable to identify the first quote as belonging to Malcolm, and the second to Martin. But it is not just a few students that have gotten it wrong. The American education system and most mainstream portrayals of Martin and Malcolm have been simplistic and sanitising.

Martin is the perfect hero who preached non-violence and love, and Malcolm the perfect villain who served as his violent counterpart, preaching hate and militancy. The result is not just a dishonest reading of history, but a dichotomy that allows for Dr King to be curated to make us more comfortable, and Malcolm X to be demonised as a demagogue from whom we must all flee. Reducing these men to such simplistic symbols allows us to filter political programmes according to how “King-like” they are. Hence, illegitimate forms of reconciliation are legitimised through King and legitimate forms of resistance are delegitimised through Malcolm X.

Malcolm was never violent, not as a member of the Nation of Islam, nor as a Sunni Muslim. But Malcolm did find it hypocritical to demand that black people in the United States commit to non-violence when they were perpetually on the receiving end of state violence. He believed that black people in the US had a right to defend themselves, and charged that the US was inconsistent in referencing its founding fathers’ defence of liberty for everyone but them.

Malcolm knew that his insistence on this principle would cause him to be demonised even further and ultimately benefit the movement of Dr King, which is exactly what he had intended. Just weeks before his assassination, he went to Selma to support Dr King and willingly embraced his role as the scary alternative. In every interview, in his meeting with Dr Coretta Scott King, and elsewhere, he vocalised that the US would do well to give the good reverend what he was asking for, or else.

But he never actually said what the “or else” was, placing a greater urgency on America to cede to King’s demands. Malcolm had no problem playing the villain, so long as it led to his people no longer being treated like animals. And while King may have been steadfast in his commitment to non-violence, the thrust of Malcolm fully served its purpose.

As Colin Morris, the author of Unyoung, Uncolored, Unpoor wrote, “I am not denying passive resistance its due place in the freedom struggle, or belittling the contribution to it of men like Gandhi and Martin Luther King. Both have a secure place in history. I merely want to show that however much the disciples of passive resistance detest violence, they are politically impotent without it. American Negroes needed both Martin Luther King and Malcolm X …”.

But it was not just that Malcolm and Martin had complementary strategies to achieve black freedom, they also spoke to different realities. Malcolm spoke more to the Northern reality of black Americans who were only superficially integrated, whereas Martin spoke to the Southern reality where even that was not possible.

Malcolm also spoke to the internalised racism of black people that was essential to overcome for true liberation. As the late James Cone states, “King was a political revolutionary. Malcolm was a cultural revolutionary. Malcolm changed how black people thought about themselves. Before Malcolm came along, we were all Negroes. After Malcolm, he helped us become black.”

That is why, despite the diminishing of Malcolm in textbooks and holidays, he has been consistently revived through protest movements and the arts. He has lived through the activism of the likes of Muhammad Ali and Colin Kaepernick, inspired the black power movement, and been an icon for American Muslims on how to exist with dignity and faith in a hostile environment.

And even in those claims to Malcolm as a symbol, Malcolm himself in the fullness of his identity is erased. In championing his movement’s philosophy, some seek to secularise him, intentionally erasing his Muslim identity. And in championing his religious identity, others seek to depoliticise him. This was a tension that Malcolm noted in his own life, saying: “For the Muslims, I’m too worldly. For other groups, I’m too religious. For militants, I’m too moderate, for moderates I’m too militant. I feel like I’m on a tightrope.”

Muslims too should be cautious not to sanitise Malcolm, as the US has sanitised Dr King. To restrict Malcolm solely to his Hajj experience is similar to restricting King solely to his “I have a dream” speech. Malcolm was a proud Muslim who never stopped being black. And while he no longer subscribed to a condemnation of the entire white race, he was unrelenting in his critique of global white supremacy.

Malcolm was consistently growing in a way that allowed him to not only champion his own people’s plight more effectively but to tackle a broader set of interconnected issues. And while history seems to posit Malcolm as his polar opposite, Dr King had begun to articulate many of the same positions that made Malcolm so unpopular.

In the words of the great James Baldwin, “As concerns Malcolm and Martin, I watched two men, coming from unimaginably different backgrounds, whose positions, originally, were poles apart, driven closer and closer together. By the time each died, their positions had become virtually the same position. It can be said, indeed, that Martin picked up Malcolm’s burden, articulated the vision which Malcolm had begun to see, and for which he paid with his life. And that Malcolm was one of the people Martin saw on the mountaintop.”

Perhaps it is time we ask why we only seem to celebrate one of them.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.

Wales’s “One Planet” policy is transforming rural life

by Oliver Gordon, Reasons to be Cheerful: https://reasonstobecheerful.world/one-planet-development-policy-wales-rural-sustainability/

Image: Reasons to be Cheerful

It’s a cold winter morning in deepest rural Wales and Cassandra Lishman steels herself to face dawn’s frosty bite. She wakes up her 15-year-old son and 17-year-old daughter and leaves the insulated warmth of their cobwood roundhouse. She feeds the dogs, lets the chickens out of the coop and ambles up the hill to smash the ice in the sheep’s drinking trough. Her daughter feeds the horses, and her son lights a fire to kickstart the house’s solar thermal heating. 

In the afternoon, she harvests leeks for dinner and cuts up a batch of pumpkins to put in the freezer - to make space she takes out some red-currants and starts the week-long process of making jelly. In the summer, there’ll be hours more work to fit in: gardening, running willow-crafts workshops, building cobwood outhouses. “Then there’s the maintenance of all the fencing, which is constant,” she sighs. “This life isn’t for the faint-hearted.”

Cassandra and her husband Nigel. (Credit: Cassandra Lishman)

In Wales, the average citizen uses almost three times their share of the world’s resources. But Cassandra and her family are part of a groundbreaking scheme launched by the Welsh government in 2011 that aims to address that imbalance. The One Planet Development Policy (OPD) and its predecessor, Pembrokeshire’s Policy 52, allow people to bypass tight planning laws and move to protected areas to live ecologically sustainable lifestyles. 

So far, 46 individual smallholdings have signed on to the programs, which require residents to sustain themselves using the resources available on land they inhabit. The policy aims to combat an array of problems: rising temperatures, soil degradation, rural depopulation, a rampant housing crisis and wasteful global supply chains. But at its most basic level, the OPD is an experiment to prove that, by limiting consumption and allocating resources wisely, ecologically responsible development is possible, even in pristine environments. 

“A bold and creative policy”

“It was a bold and creative policy when it was introduced,” recalls Dr. Neil Harris, senior lecturer in statutory planning at Cardiff University. “You can’t build new homes in the open countryside - it’s a big no-no in the planning world. So it went against the grain. In Britain, there’s been a strongly protectionist approach to the countryside since World War II. It’s considered a place for recreation and food production, but not a place to live. It’s an attempt to protect nature from sprawl. Other European countries have similar containment policies.”

Participants on a ‘One Planet Experience’ course building a livestock barn. (Credit: Tao Wimbush)

The OPD policy in Wales is one of the rare exceptions to this rule. It comes with stringent restrictions requiring applicants to prove they can live within a set of defined environmental limits. To qualify for the scheme, there are four requirements. First, each household must use only their global fair share of resources, which has been calculated by the Welsh government as equivalent to six acres of land. Second, applicants must show that within five years this land can fulfill 65 percent of their basic needs, including food, water, energy and waste. Third, they must come up with a zero-carbon house design using locally sourced and sustainable materials. Finally, they must set up a land-based enterprise to pay the sort of bills - internet, clothes, council tax - that can’t be met with a subsistence lifestyle.

Cassandra’s smallholding, Plas Helyg, where she lives with her husband and two children, is nestled in bucolic Pembrokeshire in southwest Wales. It’s part of the Lammas eco-village, a 70-acre site that had previously been earning £3,000 (USD $4,100) a year from sheep grazing but now serves as home to nine OPD households. The Lammas received planning permission in 2009 under the county’s Policy 52 for low-impact living, which was subsequently scaled up into the national OPD policy.

A resident delivers milk to her Lammas neighbors by dogcart. (Credit: Tao Wimbush)

Plas Helyg gets all its electricity from its own solar array and the village’s shared hydropower. The lion’s share of the household’s heating comes from burning its own wood; the hot water comes from solar. Around 30 per cent of the family’s food comes from their land - they grow vegetables and fruit, and keep chickens for eggs and sheep for meat and wool. All their water comes from a local spring.

The household’s land-based enterprise involves growing willow, and the family harvests around 2,500 trees each year in order to make baskets and sculptures or sell cuttings and bundles. On the day we spoke, a customer was picking up an order of willow from Cassandra, so she bundled the branches her son had cut the previous day into ten kilogram parcels and dragged them down the drive for collection. She also had an Etsy order for a willow heart, so she soaked some twigs in gelid water and fashioned the malleable wood into shape before heading off to the nearest post office. For extra money, she holds willow-craft workshops for the local adult learning association. 

A house at the Lammas eco-village. “There can be tension between affordable living and sustainability, but in the OPD we have an exemplar of low-impact, low-cost development,” says one government minister. (Credit: Tao Wimbush)

From a regulatory perspective, someone applying for OPD planning permission needs to first prove their smallholding will come within the OPD limits within five years. From that point, the household must prove it is maintaining those standards by completing annual monitoring reports for the local council.

“In the annual report, we record how much food we’ve produced, how much willow we’ve sold, how many workshops I’ve done, etc.,” Cassandra explains. “We estimate how much firewood, water and electricity we’ve used for the year. We record all the animals’ costs as well, and our transport costs and biodiversity actions. And at the end of that we provide two figures, using general market prices, for how much we’ve produced and how much we’ve consumed.” According to Cassandra, for a family of four, those “basic needs” amount to around £10,000 (USD $13,700) a year; meaning an OPD household would need to produce equivalent to £6,500 (USD $8,900) either “of or from the land.”

Low-impact, low-cost development

Although its numbers remain small, the OPD policy is widely lauded as a success. It’s allowed a number of committed individuals to pivot to a more planet-friendly existence in a relatively affordable manner - Plas Helyg cost £30,000 (USD $41,100) all in. “There can be tension between affordable living and sustainability, but in the OPD we have an exemplar of low-impact, low-cost development. That’s exactly the kind of thing we want to support,” says Julie James, Minister for Housing and Local Government.

The interior of one of the village homes. (Credit: Tao Wimbush)

But the policy hasn’t been without its critics. In November, councilors in Carmarthenshire called for the OPD to be reviewed and potentially put on hold, citing resentment among locals who were finding it difficult to obtain planning permission to build homes on their land for their families. “Some of the early planning approvals for OPD smallholdings were at appeal, which suggests a degree of local political resistance to the policy,” says Harris. 

“But generally these tensions have been solvable,” says James. And as the policy has gone on, there’s been an increasing acceptance of it. The OPD community has done a lot of outreach - led by its volunteer advocacy group, the One Planet Council - to demonstrate their low impact, and to show that their new produce and services could provide a boost to local economies. “That’s won most people over,” says Harris.

An education event at the Lammas Community Hub. (Credit: Tao Wimbush)

Cassandra remembers the initial distrust of the Preseli Hills residents when the Lammas first arrived. “It’s a very Welsh-speaking area and there was a feeling we would dilute the local culture and language … But that completely disappeared in a year or two. It really helped that our children went to the local school and learned Welsh.”

“There’s no going back”

Looking forward, the policy is “absolutely here to stay,” says James, and the current government is looking to apply some of the things it’s learned from the program to its wider housing plans. OPD has been part of the inspiration for the Innovative Housing Program, where the government provides grants and loans to de-risk novel sustainable-building methodologies so that people can invest and scale them up. The government then uses the most successful methods in its standard social-housing construction and retrofitting. 

Constructing Cassandra and Nigel Lishman’s stable. (Credit: Cassandra Lishman)

The government also recently changed Welsh development policy to stipulate that all new developments on public land must consist of 50 per cent social housing and 50 per cent from a mixture of tenures, including cooperative housing, community land trusts (CLTs) and shared equity schemes. “There’s nothing to stop us doing a One Planet development as part of a CLT or a cooperative model,” says James (CLTs are community-run, nonprofit landholding organizations that help low-income buyers obtain homes). “Those kinds of affordable housing finance models would make the OPD lifestyle available to a wider segment of the population. There’s a CLT in Solva, Pembrokshire that’s doing just that.” 

Equally, the policy sets a perfect template for other small countries that have general constraints on development in their countryside, posits Harris. In England, the counties of Dartmoor and Cornwall are using the OPD framework to put in place similar initiatives, and countries such as Ireland and New Zealand are exploring the policy’s potential.  

Building a timber-frame roundhouse. Wales‘s Minister for Housing and Local Government says the OPD Policy is “here to stay.” (Credit: Tao Wimbush)

For Cassandra, the OPD life has been a tough but fulfilling experience. She remembers the hardship of moving, with a 14-year-old disabled son and two small children, to an empty field with nothing to their name - no electricity, no shelter but an old truck and a small yurt, and having to collect water with a wheelbarrow from a local tap. But would she do any of it differently? Not a chance.

“Once you’ve lived like this, there’s no going back. I love living close to the elements, I love living with the sun and the water as my electricity, I love growing my own food and trees, and being in touch with the earth. It’s such a nourishing and joyful existence.”

Water injustice runs deep in Australia. Fixing it means handing control to First Nations

by Sue Jackson, Francis Markham, Fred Hooper, Grant Rigney, Lana D. Hartwig  and Rene Woods, The Conversation: https://theconversation.com/water-injustice-runs-deep-in-australia-fixing-it-means-handing-control-to-first-nations-155286

Image: The Conversation

It’s widely understood that rivers, wetlands and other waterways hold particular significance for First Nations people. It’s less well understood that Indigenous peoples are denied effective rights in Australia’s water economy.

Australia’s laws and policies prevent First Nations from fully participating in, and benefiting from, decisions about water. In fact, Indigenous peoples hold less than 1% of Australia’s water rights.

A Productivity Commission report into national water policy  released last week acknowledged the demands of First Nations, noting “Traditional Owners aspire to much greater access to, and control over, water resources”.

The commission suggested a suite of policy reforms. While the recommendations go further than previous official reports, they show a lack of ambition and would ensure water justice continues to be denied to First Nations.

Water plays a fundamental role in the cultural, spiritual and physical well-being of Indigenous people. Shutterstock

No voice, no justice

First Nations people have almost no say in how water is used in Australia. This denies them the power to prevent water extraction that will damage communities and landscapes, and in many cases means they’re unable to fulfil their responsibilities to care for Country.

It also means First Nations are excluded from much of Australia’s agricultural wealth, which is tied to access to water for irrigation.

In the New South Wales portion of the Murray-Darling Basin, for example, our research found Indigenous peoples are almost 10% of the population yet comprise only 3.5% of the agricultural workforce. First Nations also own just 0.5% of agricultural businesses and receive less than 0.1% of agricultural revenue.

First Nations people enjoy only a tiny portion of Australia’s agricultural wealth. Alvin Wong/AAP

Piecemeal water reform

The National Water Initiative – a blueprint for water reform signed by all Australian governments in 2004 – committed to consulting with Traditional Owners in water planning, accounting for native title rights to water and including cultural values in water plans.

The Productivity Commission report said progress towards these commitments “has been slow and objectives have not been fully achieved”.

The report contains several welcome recommendations, including that:

• a new water policy be devised, with a dedicated objective and targets to improve First Nations access to water and involvement in water management

• the recently formed Committee on Aboriginal Water Interests “co-design” new provisions relating to First Nations’ water interests, and have direct dialogue with water ministers

• a First Nations-led model of water reform be adopted, centred on the concept of “cultural flows”. This concept calls for substantial increases to First Nations’ water access and more control in decision-making.

The Productivity Commission recommended a First Nations-led model of water reform. Richard Wainwright/AAP

Cause of injustice ignored

Sadly, the Productivity Commission does not address the structural problems underlying inequities in Indigenous water rights.

In particular, it wrongly assumes policy success should be measured in terms of efficiency and the integrity of water markets, rather than justice for First Nations.

Water sold on markets goes to the highest bidder. This rewards large agricultural enterprises and others who historically held land and water rights, gained through the dispossession of First Nations people. And it penalises First Nations peoples who are unlikely to own productive farming land, or who don’t always wish to use water for irrigated agriculture.

In some cases, poorly funded Indigenous organisations have traded away their water rights to keep afloat, and will find it near-impossible to buy the water back. Our research shows this pattern drove a 17% decline in Indigenous water holdings in the Murray-Darling Basin over the past decade.

The commission’s recommendations rely heavily on policy architecture and legal foundations that fail First Nations.

For example, in 1998 the Howard Government legislated to  exclude water infrastructure and entitlements from parts of the Native Title Act. This means that infrastructure and licensing can proceed without negotiation with native title holders.

The Productivity Commission overlooked ways to correct this injustice – such as the Law Reform Commission’s proposal to change the law so native title holders can benefit from commercial use of water.

The commission’s response to conflict over developments such as dams is also inadequate. Rather than transfer final decision-making power to First Nations groups, it proposes that developments be more “culturally responsive”.

This will not protect cultural heritage. Case in point is the NSW government’s plan to raise the Warragamba Dam wall, creating a flood that threatens more than 1200 Indigenous cultural sites. Statutory protections are needed to head off such proposals.

The Warragamba Dam plan threatens Indigenous cultural sites. Shutterstock

Stronger models for reform

The United Nations’ Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples is clear: Indigenous peoples should have the power to decide on development proposed on their lands and waters.

An agreement between the Ngarrindjeri nation and the South Australian government in the lower Murray River region  shows how even modest rights can both empower Traditional Owners and lead to successful environmental management.

The agreement enables a co-management approach where authority in developing natural resource management policy is shared. Unfortunately, reforms of this type are beyond the ambition of the Productivity Commission report.

Addressing water injustice also requires returning water to First Nations, such as by buying back water entitlements and guaranteeing cultural flows in water plans. The Productivity Commission outlines how this might occur, but falls short of recommending this vital measure.

The current policy framework has allowed some advances. But if water justice to Indigenous peoples is to be realised, changes to policy and laws must go far deeper.

How working less could solve all our problems - really

by Rutger Bregman, Ideas.Ted.com: https://ideas.ted.com/how-working-less-could-solve-all-our-problems-really/

Image: Stocksy

Shorter workweeks could help reduce accidents, combat climate change, make the genders more equal, and more, contends historian and author Rutger Bregman.

Had you asked the greatest economist of the 20th century what the biggest challenge of the 21st would be, he wouldn’t have had to think twice.

Leisure.

In the summer of 1930, just as the Great Depression was gathering momentum, British economist John Maynard Keynes gave a curious lecture in Madrid titled “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren” — in other words, for us. At the time, Madrid was a mess. Unemployment was spiraling out of control, fascism was gaining ground, and the Soviet Union was actively recruiting supporters. 

Speaking in a city on the precipice of disaster, the British economist hazarded a counterintuitive prediction. A hundred years from then, he said, humankind would be confronted with the greatest challenge it had ever faced: what to do with a sea of spare time. And he anticipated that within a century the Western standard of living would have multiplied to at least four times that of 1930.

His conclusion: In 2030, we’ll be working just fifteen hours a week. We are long past due for the fulfillment of this prophecy. Around the year 2000, countries such as France, the Netherlands and the US were already five times as wealthy as in 1930. Yet nowadays our biggest challenges are not leisure and boredom, but stress and uncertainty. Why are we working so much? 

In notable experiments by Henry Ford and W.K. Kellogg, it’s been found that productivity and long work hours do not go hand in hand. In the 1980s, Apple employees sported T-shirts that read, “Working 90 hours a week and loving it!” Later, productivity experts calculated that if they had worked half the hours, the world might have enjoyed the groundbreaking Macintosh computer a year earlier.

Consuming less starts with working less — or, better yet, with consuming our prosperity in the form of leisure.

There are strong indications that in a modern knowledge economy, even working 40 hours a week is too much. Research suggests that someone who is constantly drawing on their creative abilities can, on average, be productive for no more than six hours a day. It’s no coincidence that the world’s wealthy countries, those with a large creative class and highly educated populations, have also shaved the most time off their workweeks. And working less could actually solve many of the world’s greatest problems.

Working less could reduce stress — countless studies  have shown that people who work less are more satisfied with their lives. In a recent poll conducted among working women, German researchers even quantified the “perfect day.” The largest share of minutes (106) would go toward “intimate relationships.” “Socializing” (82), “relaxing” (78) and “eating” (75) also scored high. At the bottom of the list were “parenting” (46), “work” (36), and “commuting” (33). The researchers dryly noted that “in order to maximize well­-being, it is likely that working and consuming (which increases GDP) might play a smaller role in people’s daily activities compared to now.”

Could working less even slow climate change? Turns out, yes. A worldwide shift to a shorter workweek could cut the CO2 emitted this century by half. Countries with a shorter workweek have a smaller ecological footprint. Consuming less starts with working less — or, better yet, with consuming our prosperity in the form of leisure.

Since long workdays lead to more errors, shorter workdays could reduce accidents. Overtime is deadly. Tired surgeons have been found to be more prone to slip­ups, and soldiers who get too little shuteye are more prone to miss targets. From Chernobyl to the Space Shuttle Challenger, overworked managers often prove to have played a fatal role in disasters. It’s no coincidence that the financial sector, which triggered the biggest disaster of the last decade, is absolutely drowning in overtime.

The countries with the biggest disparities in wealth are precisely those with the longest workweeks.

Working less could reduce unemployment. In times of recession, with spiking unemployment and production exceeding demand, sharing jobs can help to soften the blow. Researchers at the International Labour Organization have concluded that work sharing — in which two part-­time employees share a workload traditionally assigned to one full-time worker — went a long way toward mitigating the effects of the 2008-2009 recession on workers.

Gender equality could come closer to being a reality.  Countries with short workweeks consistently top gender­ equality rankings. The central issue is achieving a more equitable distribution of work. Not until men do their fair share of cooking, cleaning and other domestic labor will women be free to fully participate in the broader economy. 

Nowhere is the time gap between men and women smaller than in Sweden, a country with a truly decent system in place for childcare and paternity leave. And paternity leave, in particular, is crucial: Men who spend a few weeks at home after the birth of a child devote more time to their wives, to their children, and to the stove than they would have otherwise. Plus, this effect lasts — are you ready for it? — for the rest of their lives. 

Research in Norway has shown that men who take paternity leave are then 50 percent more likely to share laundry duty with their wives. Canadian research shows that they’ll spend more time on domestic chores and childcare. Paternity leave is a Trojan horse with the potential to truly turn the tide in the struggle for gender equality.

Working less could also reduce inequality. The countries with the biggest disparities in wealth are precisely those with the longest workweeks. While the poor are working longer and longer hours just to get by, the rich are finding it ever more “expensive” to take time off as their hourly rates rise. 

Nearly a hundred years ago, our old friend John Maynard Keynes made an outrageous prediction — he understood that the stock -market crash of 1929 hadn’t called curtains on the entire world economy. Producers could still supply just as much as they had the year before; only the demand for many products had dried up. “We are suffering, not from the rheumatics of old age,” Keynes wrote, “but from the growing­ pains of over-­rapid changes.”

Today, the dream of a shorter workweek has been trampled — there is hardly a politician willing to endorse it, even with stress and unemployment surging. Yet Keynes wasn’t crazy. In his own day, workweeks were shrinking fast and he simply extrapolated into the future the trend that had begun around 1850. So imagine that the leisure revolution were to gain steam again in this century. Even in conditions of slow economic growth, we could work fewer than 15 hours a week by 2050, and earn the same amount as in 2000. If we can indeed make that happen, it’s high time we start to prepare.

 True leisure is as vital to our brains as vitamin C is to our bodies.

First we must ask ourselves: Is a shorter workweek what we want? Pollsters have already asked people all over the world this question, and the answer is “Yes, very much, please.” When US scientists surveyed employees to find out whether they would rather have two weeks’ additional salary or two weeks off, twice as many people opted for the extra time. 

And when British researchers asked employees if they would rather win the lottery or work less, again, twice as many choose the latter. Plenty of evidence points to the fact that we can’t do without a sizable daily dose of unemployment. Working less provides the bandwidth for other things that are also important to us, like family, community involvement and recreation.

And the second question is: How can we manage to work less? We can’t all just go ahead and switch to a 20-hour or 30-hour workweek on our own. Reduction of work first has to be reinstated as a political ideal; from there, we can curb the workweek step by step, trading in money for time, investing more money in education, and developing a more flexible retirement system and good provisions for parental leave and childcare. It all starts with reversing incentives. 

Currently, it’s cheaper for employers to schedule one person to work overtime than to hire two people. That’s because many labor costs, such as health care benefits, are paid per employee instead of per hour. And that’s also why we as individuals can’t just unilaterally decide to start working less. At the end of the workday in almost every office you can find exhausted staff sitting at their desks aimlessly browsing the Facebook profiles of people they don’t know, waiting until the first of their coworkers has left for the day. Breaking this vicious circle will require collective action — by companies or, better yet, by countries.

True leisure is neither a luxury nor a vice. It is as vital to our brains as vitamin C is to our bodies. There’s not a person on earth who on their deathbed thinks, “Had I only put in a few more hours at the office or sat in front of the tube some more.” Sure, swimming in a sea of spare time will not be easy. A 21st-century education should prepare people not only for joining the workforce, but also, and more important, for life. And we can handle the good life, if only we take the time.

Excerpted from the new book Utopia for Realists: How We Can Build the Ideal World by Rutger Bregman. Reprinted with permission from Little, Brown and Company, a division of Hachette Book Group, Inc. © 2017 Rutger Bregman.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Rutger Bregman is a Dutch historian and staff writer of The Correspondent, a journalism platform for unbreaking news. Bregman's new book Humankind will be published in June 2020.

Nature: how do you put a price on something that has infinite worth?

by Tom Oliver, The Conversation: https://theconversation.com/nature-how-do-you-put-a-price-on-something-that-has-infinite-worth-154704

Image: The Conversation

There’s a new nature conservation strategy in town – and it means business. During the 1970s, 80s and 90s the main tactic to protect wildlife was to highlight the plight of charismatic “flagship” species (remember the WWF Save the Panda campaign?). Since the millennium, however, a new strategy backed by major conservation organisations such as The Nature Conservancy is to price the benefits that nature provides.

Not all conservationists agree, as borne out by fierce debates  in a major international initiative assessing global biodiversity. Yet the idea is now mainstream, as evidenced by the high profile Economics of Biodiversity: Dasgupta Review  commissioned by the UK government and lead by the economist Partha Dasgupta.

Proponents of the economic approach argue that if we don’t give nature a price, then we essentially treat it as having zero value. In contrast, if we articulate value in monetary terms, then this can be factored into government and business decisions. Harmful costs to the natural world are no longer “externalised”, to use the economic jargon, and instead the value of “natural capital” is incorporated into balance sheets.

There is certainly some merit to this approach, as shown in  pilot projects where land owners are paid to improve water quality or reduce flooding. Although it’s worth noting that decisions can go the other way too, as occurred when a major airport and trade zone in Durban, South Africa, got the go-ahead when forecasted jobs and economic growth were deemed to outweigh the economic value of the environment  that would be destroyed.

Obviously, not all aspects of nature’s value can be captured in economic terms. Nature is also valued in ways that are spiritual, for example. This is fully recognised by advocates of the approach, who suggest their estimates simply convey minimum values.

The large city of Durban is found in an official ‘biodiversity hotspot’. Slow Walker / shutterstock

On the other side of the debate, concerns about monetary valuation relate to how it might undermine other aspects of nature protection.

To give an example, consider the EU-funded NatureTrade  project, in which computer algorithms are used to quantify benefits from nature (such as carbon storage, pollination, recreation) derived on someone’s land. Landowners are then helped to draw up a contract so they can be paid for these, in an auction the researchers behind the project describe as an “eBay for ecosystem services”. This may seem a great idea, but studies have found that many landowners already protect nature simply because it’s the “right” thing to do, and paying them “crowds out” these social norms.

A hierarchy of needs

Despite the debate, both viewpoints can in fact be complementary.

As an analogy, take psychologist Abraham Maslow’s idea of the hierarchy of needs for human development. These are often illustrated as a pyramid, with quantifiable physiological needs and security at the bottom, and the less tangible values of belonging, esteem, and transcendence at the top. A recent book reveals that Maslow intended improvement of all these aspects simultaneously (after all, what use is security and safety if we do not have hope and meaning?).

There is some debate over whether Maslow himself ever represented his theory as a pyramid. nmilligan / wiki, CC BY-SA

If we were to draw up a similar pyramid representing a healthy environment, at the bottom would be the bare essentials provided by nature, such as having clean air and water, and insects to pollinate crops. Higher up in the pyramid would be the benefits of nature for mental health, and the transcendental aspects which give purpose and spiritual meaning. Different types of people and academic disciplines focus on different layers of the pyramid, but we need them all.

Sometimes the language used by economists doesn’t help. The Dasgupta Review provocatively states: “Nature is an asset.” Yet the boundaries between our self and the natural world are more fuzzy than they may first seem, as I evidence in my book The Self Delusion. As Sigmund Freud realised in 1930, when we feel kinship with – or to use the non-scientific term “love” – something, then we don’t objectify it. Instead, boundaries disappear and it merges with our sense of identity. It is antithetical to many people to refer to a dancing swift, an elegant swan or friendly-looking robin as an “asset”.

Words matter, and there is also danger that such language of commodification can encourage psychological distancing. People who feel less connected to nature do less to protect it. This is why there is a growing movement involving organisations such as the RSPB (the UK’s largest bird charity), to restore a sense of connection to nature, especially in children.

Given the worry that commodification of nature will pollute our worldviews, the big question is whether we can restrict such parlance to domains of policy and business accounting (where it can arguably do some good). I think we can. Consider how human life is valued: in monetary terms by insurance companies and for medicine procurement by health services, yet still in terms of infinite worth to most of us. Just because monetary valuation is used in some sectors doesn’t mean it will flood across to all.

A diversity of viewpoints and approaches is essential to protecting nature effectively. The “economics of nature” are likely here to stay, but that does not replace the tireless efforts of those who have worked for decades to convey the awe-inspiring and transcendental value of nature. As the naturalist  Henry David Thoreau put it: “If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.”