The world’s resources are limitless. I’m not joking. In a world of finite materials – and a finite 88 keys on a piano – resources are no more limited than are melodies and harmonies. Even if we stick to the Western musical scale, we will never run out of tunes. This is because tunes are not raw materials, somehow just there, waiting to be discovered: they come into being with the creativity of people.*

The same is true of resources. I’ve just discovered this wonderful phrase:

Resources Are Not, They Become

It was coined by economist Erich Zimmermann and has since been taken up in argument against the persistently rearing ugly head of Malthus (e.g. brilliantly by Thomas R. DeGregori [1]). No matter how many times Malthus has been disproven – by humanity’s ingenuity, and famously in more recent times in the Simon-Ehrlich wager – still he keeps popping up in various forms, currently in the guise of environmentalism. It’s boring to have to keep on defending humans from this conservative, misanthropic idea, but it’s all the rage at the moment, so I guess we have to.

The difference with today’s Malthusians is that they do not target the poor and the Africans and the Indians, as Malthusians once did. At least, they pretend not to. Their main target is the Western lifestyle, with its supposed over-consumption. But this leads them to attack the poorer countries’ efforts to develop too, for example in their opposition to the construction of dams to control the effects of monsoons in India or the use of GM crops in Africa. In their view of the world, people are better kept in their place, in small numbers at the mercy of nature. People are always the problem.

My Cat’s Electric Blanket Once Belonged to Alfred Russel Wallace’s Grandmother

I believe that people are not the problem, but the solution. People are not drains on society but contributors to it, and the more people there are, the more ideas we generate. The concept behind Resources are not, they become is that resources are not found but created, by the application of ideas. Petroleum was not a resource for the people of the neolithic. It only became one when we learned how to get it and use it, and when we had a need for it. Likewise, it will no doubt cease to become one when we work out how to use something better.

Like music and language, human society is open-ended. There will always be new music; in language there will always be novel phrases that make sense (I submit this: “my cat’s electric blanket once belonged to Alfred Russel Wallace’s grandmother”); and there will always be new resources. The ever-changing ideas and techniques of people continue to remake the world and society. It is simplistic and ahistorical to see the world’s resources as an ever-dwindling cake.

I think the big problems are under-development and poverty. And this of course means that policies are partly to blame. In the decades following Malthus India was seen as a lost cause, with a population growing so fast that it could not possibly sustain itself. Indeed, famine was celebrated by many in Britain as a natural check on over-population (incredibly, that odious idea lives on here and there even now). In the event, after suffering seven famines under British misrule, it was technology and complementary policy that ensured that, today, India has been famine-free since independence in 1947, even while the population has grown unimaginably.

I conclude from all this that policies seeking to prevent development – for example, calling a halt to the Gibe III dam in Ethiopia or banning GM crops – are, potentially, profoundly bad for humanity; and therefore that ideas and campaigns promoting such policies should be vigorously challenged.

Note: I’d like to provide some context here by adding that, by most measures, things are getting better for people throughout the world, as summarized in this collection of graphs from New Scientist.

*If you’re inclined to pick apart the analogy, how about this: the keys represent chemical elements, chords represent raw materials (there is a certainly a sense in which basic harmonies were discovered), and melodies and chord sequences (thus incorporating time) represent resources. I think that works, even without bringing in microtones.

[1] Resources Are Not, They Become: an Institutional Theory, Thomas R. De Gregori, Journal of Economic Issues 21, 1987, included in Evolutionary theory in the social sciences, Volume 4 by William M. Dugger and Howard J. Sherman.

Further reading:
The Simon-Ehrlich Wager on Wikipedia
The Doomslayer by Ed Regis, Wired 5.02, February 1997
The Post War Intellectual Roots Of The Population Bomb by Pierre Desrochers and Christine Hoffbauer in The Electronic Journal of Sustainable Development
No to Neo-Malthusianism at Spiked Online

I listened to a Radio 4 programme on the Great Man-Made River project in Libya. For the moment at least, you can listen to it here. It’s the mother of all water engineering projects, and as I’ve said before in this blog, I have an odd fascination with this kind of thing. Apart from anything else the project is beautifully simple, audacious and progressive. According to Unesco it’s the largest engineering scheme currently being carried out in the world, and it has also been described as the eighth wonder of the world. From where I sit in mean little Britain, which made such a cynical fuss about the Channel Tunnel and the Scottish Parliament building, it’s very inspiring.

In the sixties, during oil exploration in Libya’s part of the Sahara desert, they found vast quantities of underground water in fossil aquifers. As it turns out there are four major underground basins, three of which combined contain 35,000 cubic kilometres of water. That’s 35,000,000,000,000 cubic metres (what’s that, 35 trillion?)

Scratching a living from the desert ain’t much fun, so around 1980, “The people of Libya under the guidance of their leader, Colonel Muammar Al Qadhafi”, began looking into the possibility of accessing it. The Great Man-made River Authority was created in 1983 to organize the project, which was mainly about getting the water from the aquifers all the way to the populated coastal regions on the Mediterranean in the north of the country. The solution was simple: huge pipes.

The importance of the project for the development of Libya’s society can hardly be overstated. To create a thriving agriculture from a desert land is a beautiful thing, and despite the scepticism in the Western media – a few years ago I read a newspaper article that described it as a vanity project of Gadaffi’s that was doomed to failure – it has worked. Phases one and two are complete. Phase one provides two million cubic metres per day along a 1,200km pipeline to Benghazi and Sirt. Phase two delivers a million cubic metres a day to the fertile Jeffara plain, and to the capital Tripoli. Phase three is now in full-swing.

I don’t understand the attitude of the Western press. Here’s a quote from a website about the project which describes what I’m on about:

London and Washington circles were apoplectic about the opening of the new Libyan water project. The London Financial Times ran criticisms of the project from Angus Henley of the London-based Middle East Economic Digest. The pipeline, he said, was ‘Qaddafi’s pet project. He wants to be seen as something other than the scourge of the West.’ The Financial Times called the project Qaddafi’s ‘pipedream,’ stating that critics may be awed by the engineering involved, ‘But they regard the dream as a monument to vanity that makes little economic sense in a country where the U.N. Development Program says 94.6% of territory is desert wasteland.’

Am I missing something? It is precisely because Libya is mostly desert wasteland that this project is important. And as to the economic argument, here’s the quantity of water per Libyan dinar obtained for each of the available options:

(Great Man-Made River Authority )

Also online you can find the results of a study carried out by some American water engineers, which supports the economics of the project: The Great Man-Made River in Libya, Does it Make Sense? (PDF)

Listening to the radio program, several things were apparent. The people overseeing and working on this project have an innocent love for their work. They are engineers making life better for the people: sometimes it is just that simple. And they had an openness about the project which the journalist hadn’t expected in this demonized country. Also, it’s both an international effort and strongly Libyan: they’ve taken expertise from around the world (even American), and used it to learn from and develop their own self-sufficient expertise, to realize this very Libyan dream.

The river is a new lesson and an example in the struggle to achieve self-sufficiency, food security and true independence. No nation that depends on a foreign country to feed its people can be free. The Great River is a triumph against thirst and hunger. It is a defeat against ignorance and backwardness. It reflects the determination of Libyans to resist colonial pressure, to acquire technology, to develop, to improve their lives, and to control their own destiny in accordance with their own free will.

Ali Baghdadi

It got me to thinking about Libyan society, which is referred to by the Libyans as a democracy, in contradiction to our common understanding of the word. The theoretical basis is set out in Gadaffi’s Green Book, the full text of which is presented quite nicely at this site.

According to the website of the Great Man-Made River Project, the project was implemented by the people:

…the decisions for the implementation and funding of The Great Man Made River project were made at the grass roots level by the basic people’s congresses that were then compiled and made into laws by the General Peoples Congress. The project is funded directly by the Libyan people in the form of levies on fuel, tobacco and international travel etc.

On the surface it sounds like a good system to me.

Now, I am aware of the concerns about human rights in the country. Currently there is a foreign medical team there under penalty of death (see the Wikipedia article), and there has been much political repression, including assassinations of dissidents and exiles. The Berber minority was mistreated and derided for decades, and there doesn’t seem to be a place for freedom of speech or freedom of the press.

I certainly do not want to dismiss all of that, so I hope I don’t seem glib in saying that the theory on which the system is based strikes me as good. Gadaffi says that electoral democracy is not democratic at all, because it is so indirect. The solution is direct democracy, in which all participate in the study and debate of issues and policies confronting the nation. Partcipation as opposed to representation. This is the Athenian model, and was possible in city-states because of their small populations. But to implement it on a large scale requires the following set-up:

First, the people are divided into Basic Popular Conferences. Each Basic Popular Conference chooses its secretariat. The secretariats of all Popular Conferences together form Non-Basic Popular Conferences. Subsequently, the masses of the Basic Popular Conferences select administrative People’s Committees to replace government administration. All public institutions are run by People’s Committees which will be accountable to the Basic Popular Conferences which dictate the policy and supervise its execution. Thus, both the administration and the supervision become the people’s and the outdated definition of democracy – democracy is the supervision of the government by the people – becomes obsolete. It will be replaced by the true definition: Democracy is the supervision of the people by the people.

The trouble is, in real Libya this is just one side of things. In practice, it is not the theory on which the society’s organization is based, because overseeing everything you have the Revolutionary Committees, headed by Gadaffi and the military, with unlimited powers: a revolutionary dictatorship that refuses to wither away. So despite how attractive the system of democracy may look to a socialist or anarchist, it cannot be taken to be all-encompassing and the country in general cannot be taken to be truly democratic. But if the democratic aspect of the system were to be all-encompassing, and the military dictatorship done away with, it would be a true democracy.

Further reading:

Great Manmade River Project:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/4814988.stm
http://www.galenfrysinger.com/man_made_river_libya.htm
http://www.water-technology.net/projects/gmr/
http://www.unesco.org/water/ihp/prizes/great_man/gmmrp.shtml

Summary of the Green Book: http://www.country-studies.com/libya/the-green-book.html

Human rights:
http://web.amnesty.org/library/index/engmde190022004
http://members.tripod.com/~sijill/

3. Mujahideen who protect new Taliban recruits must inform their commander.

6. If a Taliban fighter wants to move to another district, he is permitted to do so, but he must first acquire the permission of his group leader.

9. Taliban may not use Jihad equipment or property for personal ends.

11. Mujadideen may not sell equipment, unless the provincial commander permits him to do so.

They’re running a tight ship over there. Any army worth its salt knows how to organize itself and keep discipline. There’s even some measure of protection for those who might otherwise incur the undisciplined wrath of the Taliban rank and file:

14. If someone who works with infidels wants to cooperate with Mujahideen, he should not be killed. If he is killed, his murderer must stand before an Islamic court.

And they have mundane moral standards like anyone else:

15. A Mujahid or leader who torments an innocent person must be warned by his superiors. If he does not change his behaviour he must be thrown out of the Taliban movement.

(Although you do wonder, given what we know about them and what they’re fighting for, who exactly counts as “innocent” and who doesn’t.)

16. Mujahideen are not allowed to take young boys with no facial hair onto the battlefield or into their private quarters.

So far, so reasonable. But things get more interesting around rule 24:

24. It is forbidden to work as a teacher under the current puppet regime, because this strengthens the system of the infidels. True Muslims should apply to study with a religiously trained teacher and study in a Mosque or similar institution. Textbooks must come from the period of the Jihad or from the Taliban regime.

This shows their wish to smother secular knowledge, including the banning of standard textbooks.

25. Anyone who works as a teacher for the current puppet regime must recieve a warning. If he nevertheless refuses to give up his job, he must be beaten. If the teacher still continues to instruct contrary to the principles of Islam, the district commander or a group leader must kill him.

In other words, anyone teaching in a secular fashion, which is any teacher working for the state, should be stopped, if necessary by murder. If they are to brainwash the coming generations – or as they might see it, prevent the infiltration of the poisonous sacrilegious ideas of the degenerate Western infidels – then this is understandable.

26. Those NGOs that come to the country under the rule of the infidels must be treated as the government is treated. They have come under the guise of helping people but in fact are part of the regime. Thus we tolerate none of their activities, whether it be building of streets, bridges, clinics, schools, madrases (schools for Koran study) or other works. If a school fails to heed a warning to close, it must be burned. But all religious books must be secured beforehand.

This is strikingly alien to us, and what is shocking is the blend of reasonableness, efficiency and fundamentalism. For any of the bizarre Islamophile “socialists” out there who romanticize this kind of behaviour as legitimate resistance, make no mistake: theirs is not an enlightened anti-imperialist struggle. It is a struggle to impose a primitive inflexible dogma on the Afghan people, thereby rejecting all of the acheievements of the past 300 years: freedom of the press, freedom of expression, secular education, equality for women, and so on, the absolute minimum universal values that a socialist should be defending, I would’ve thought. But, alas, socialists have forgotten about universal values and have become trapped in the contradictions of multiculturalism and relativism. That is, there isn’t really any such thing as socialism any more. The word is used for historical and biographical reasons, not because of the continuity of principles.