Systems and Individuals: Taking a Stand
Extract from Empty Plates Tomorrow? – Systems and Individuals: Taking a Stand, or why it is worth battling for change even if for years public opinion does not appear to shift.
The power of inertia
The Farmers Weekly is one of the UK’s top publications for agriculture. In the 1970s, when I was a reporter there, the executives were suspicious of such concepts as sustainability, organic methods, and low-energy production. The advertising manager sighed deeply when I wrote a piece about farmers who were trying to be self-sufficient, because he, and most of his colleagues, saw them as old-fashioned Luddites, refusing to acknowledge the benefits of market-oriented commercial farming. There was still the residual feeling that the food shortages of the Second World War must never be repeated, and farmers thought that government would always want to ensure food security. The emphasis then was on raising productivity, no matter what the environmental cost. The major chemical and petroleum companies paid handsomely for full-page advertisements, and they sponsored thick supplements about raising productivity.
Farmers in the 2000s are less certain. The faith in growth has gone, hundreds of thousands of farmers have given up. Farmers Weekly now treats organic<!–[if supportFields]> XE “organic farming:and Farmers Weekly” <![endif]–> farming as a valid technology, and questions the government’s complacency over food security. An editorial column[1] before the 2005 General Election referred to politicians’ lack of interest in UK agriculture:
“a mindset typified by these questions: Why bother with home-produced food when we can jet supplies across the world, using subsidised fuel, at less cost? (Forget pollution). Why support the UK farming industry when there are others worldwide willing, even anxious, to supply us with cheap food? (Don’t worry about food security, dubious human and animal welfare standards or global environmental degradation).”
They were important points, but they did not influence the election, or subsequent policy, because the Cabinet does not see food security as an immediate priority.
Yet the magazine has not stopped agitating for change. May 2006 saw the launch of its “Local Food is Miles Better” campaign. The aims were to “spread the food miles<!–[if supportFields]> XE “food miles:and Farmers Weekly” <![endif]–> message to five million people; to win coverage of the campaign research in the broadcast media and national and regional newspapers; and to garner the support of celebrities such as Rick Stein”,[2] one of Britain’s leading chefs. The campaign reflected a new determination, by the magazine and its farmer readers, to influence public policy.
Change, though, always tends to lag behind the need for it, because of the drag of vested interests, and of inertia.
Frozen in the headlights
The causes of resistance to change are hard to counteract.
First, lack of intelligence. On a galactic scale, we humans may be rather lowly. We don’t know, which rather proves the point. We have a tendency to act, though, as if we were masters of our environment, instead of integral components of it.
Secondly, the will to power, as explained by the 19th century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche:
“The manner of this lust for power has changed through the centuries, but its source is still the same volcano… What we once did ‘for the sake of God’ we now do for the sake of money”.[3]
The will to power has many cloaks to disguise it – such as nationalism, revolution, socialism, capitalism, even altruism – but in virtually all human societies some members seek to control, and then maintain control, over others. To maintain overt control in a 21st century society means having weapons at one’s disposal, an army (or, lower down the hierarchy, a mob or a gang). Those in power have – or think they have — a vested interest in maintaining the status quo, as changes could challenge their authority. The will to power is also expressed in multitudinous covert ways through propaganda, often given the appearance of ‘common sense’, which the powerful can manufacture with surprising ease.
Bertrand Russell, the 20th century English philosopher, explored the ways in which mass opinions are created. In Power,[4] he wrote:
“…a creed never has force at its command to begin with, and the first steps in the production of a wide-spread opinion must be taken by means of persuasion alone”.[5]
Russell saw three stages in the creation of mass opinion, which one can call ‘common sense’ because mass opinions are by definition widely held. First there is:
“pure persuasion leading to the conversion of a minority; then force exerted to secure that the rest of the community shall be exposed to the right propaganda; and finally a genuine belief on the part of the great majority, which makes the use of force again unnecessary”.[6]
Beliefs that Russell calls irrational can thus become the general opinion, if there is sufficient propaganda on their behalf.
Dissent leads to change, surely? Often just the opposite: dissent can reinforce existing systems rather than change them, by functioning as a safety valve, removing angry steam that has built up inside a system. The many demonstrations against the Iraq War of 2003, for example, made some participants feel better for being able to register a protest, but neither US nor British government policy changed at all. Instead, governments promote the ‘democracy discourse’ – the message that we are lucky to live in a democracy where we can make our views known. The ‘common sense’ view that we live in a democracy takes us back to Bertrand Russell’s observations.
The failure of dissent to achieve change can weaken opposition to the point of apathy, allowing government rule-bending to descend into corruption. Take the issue of unrecorded loans to the UK’s Labour Party. The loans were revealed in March 2006, after the Lords Appointment Commission had refused to endorse Labour’s nomination of health and fitness entrepreneur Chai Patel for a life peerage. It soon emerged that Mr Patel, whose Priory clinics offer recuperation and detoxification to burnt-out celebrities, had lent the party £1.5 million. Until that point the loan was undisclosed, unknown even to the party treasurer, Jack Dromey, the deputy general secretary of the Transport and General Workers Union and husband of the minister of state for constitutional affairs, Harriet Harman. The law required political parties to publicise GIFTS but not LOANS – and so Labour went shopping for loans, using the unstated possibility of future honours as currency. A life peerage brings a seat in the upper house, the House of Lords. The Lords Appointment Commission was the only barrier between a loan and a peerage, and commission members were not aware of loans made by political nominees – until Chai Patel made his public. This forced Labour into more disclosures. Three more lenders – property developer David Garrard, curry manufacturer Gulan Noon, and financier Barry Townsley – also had peerage nominations blocked by the Appointment Commission. By late March, Labour had disclosed previously unrevealed loans totalling £14 million. They included £1 million from Rod Aldridge, executive chairman of Capita, a company specialising in government contracts and handling around a third of the work outsourced from the public sector. Rod Aldridge resigned on March 23rd 2006, although maintaining that the loan was not linked in any way to his business activities. The money was spent on the 2005 General Election campaign, thus helping to return Labour for a third term. The public’s response to this catalogue of dubious deals was a weary resignation, an acceptance that whatever regulations are in place, clever lawyers will find ways to bend them. So apathy reigns. At this point even the theory of democracy, let alone the practice, is in danger of disappearing down the drain.
It can be very convenient for politicians if the populace can’t be bothered to ask awkward questions. Life in industrialised countries in the 21st century is like an early cinema newsreel come to life, busy people rushing around so fast that there is little time to question the real point of it all. Debt is a good mechanism for keeping people hard at work. Publilius Syrus, who came to Rome as a Syrian slave, wrote in the first century BC: “Debt is the slavery of the free.” Consumers, as market economics labels people, are saddled with huge debts in both the USA and UK. Once people are in debt, they lose their economic independence, and with it a great deal of their capacity to challenge the power holders in society. At the end of March 2006 individuals in the UK owed £1,182,293 million in secured and unsecured debt, which averaged out at £45,534 per household. Unsecured consumer credit within this total came to £6,389 for each household. The debt problem is far worse in the USA, where at the same time, March 2006, unsecured consumer credit came to $19,100 (£10,524) per household.[7] The US market for mortgages, the principal form of secured debt, is driven by interest-only and negative amortisation loans. The latter entice borrowers to pay less interest than is actually due. The missed interest is rolled up and added to the capital to be paid off at the end of the loan. The Economist reported[8] that in California, in the first half of 2005, more than 60 per cent of new mortgages were interest-only or negative amortisation. The National Association of Realtors estimated that in 2004 over 40 per cent of first-time purchasers and a quarter of all buyers paid no deposit at all. In addition, many were buying speculatively. According to the association, 23 per cent of all houses sold in 2004 were bought by investors, and a further 13 per cent were second or additional homes. So at least 36 per cent of houses bought in the USA in 2004 were speculative investments.
While debt limits individuals’ freedom, the emergence of a business-politics continuum damages the liberty of whole societies. Business leaders pass through the door into politics, politicians benefit from lucrative directorships; the whissh of the revolving door heralds a global elite. Samir Rihani, a systems theorist, makes the point thus:
“There is now a revolving door between business and politics. This feature first appeared in the USA, but is spreading fast to other regions. This is not the same as the well established tradition for some business people to move into politics which has been in evidence for centuries. The corporate and political spheres have now merged together into one continuum. It is becoming progressively difficult to know when governments are acting on behalf of the people and when they are merely responding to business dictates. No overt direction is necessary; politicians are also businessmen and women in their own right”.[9]
Rihani cited, as examples, John Major, European chairman of the Carlyle Group after his years in 10 Downing Street as prime minister of the United Kingdom; and Kenneth Clarke, deputy chairman of British American Tobacco after serving as chancellor of the exchequer. The examples are too many to list, showing that the door is turning constantly. George W Bush was an oil man, his vice president Dick Cheney was chairman and chief executive of the defence conglomerate Halliburton for five years, and Silvio Berlusconi, premier of Italy from June 2001 to May 2006, is a media mogul.[10] The ‘revolving door’ homogenises the business and political elites into a single power bloc, making it harder for dissenting voices to make themselves heard.
Policy systems are like huge ocean liners, unable to change course quickly. Complex webs weave systems together. An intended beneficial change at one point in a system has unpredictable repercussions. Even if there were universal agreement for a planned return to sustainable agriculture, for example, the results would probably be quite different from the original ideas. This happened in Cuba, where food imports are rising despite the self-sufficiency programme implemented in the 1990s. Change is unpredictable — but the alternative is to do nothing and wait for a crash, like startled rabbits transfixed by car headlights.
Illusions of control
Gaia and the edge of chaos
James Lovelock is a British scientist who crosses subject boundaries. In an academic world that still values subjects as distinct accumulations of knowledge, scientists who stray into others’ territory tend to be regarded as somewhat eccentric. James Lovelock’s Gaia theory of the world, its climates, environments and living beings, as one highly complex system, was largely ignored by other scientists at first, and took about 30 years to become mainstream. James Lovelock, who was born in Letchworth, Hertfordshire, in July 1919, graduated in chemistry from Manchester University, moved into medicine and gained a doctorate from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. Over in the USA he taught at Yale, Harvard, and Baylor University College of Medicine. His inventions, numbering over 50, included an electron capture detector, effective for measuring air pollution. He started working at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration* (NASA) in the USA in 1961, investigating the possibility of life on Mars. Since 1964 he has been an independent scientist. The Gaia theory was first published as a hypothesis in 1972 in ‘Gaia as seen through the atmosphere’.[11] Since then, Lovelock has developed the hypothesis into a theory.[12] His books include Gaia: a New Look at Life on Earth (1982), The Ages of Gaia (1988), Healing Gaia: Practical Medicine for the Planet (1991), Gaia: the Practical Science of Planetary Medicine (2000), and The Revenge of Gaia: Why the Earth is Fighting Back – and How We Can Still Save Humanity (2006b). James Lovelock has also written some 200 scientific papers including several on medicine, biology and instrument science. He was honoured with a CBE* in 1990, and became a Companion of Honour* in 2003.
The systems view of the world, that Lovelock expounds, conflicts with the subject-centred education that most of us have probably received. Education split into subjects makes it harder for us to see knowledge as constructed networks full of holes and conflicts, as systems that humans influence and are influenced by. Homeostasis is a concept that few people encounter during their years of compulsory schooling, but is vital to an understanding of Gaia. Homeostasis is the self-regulation of critical variables to stay in equilibrium despite pressures to upset that equilibrium. Gaia theory suggests that the components of a system interact and self-organise into evolving structures. Complex systems tend to evolve towards a critical point, the ‘edge of chaos’. At this point, a small change[13] can propel the system into chaos, although a propensity to self-organise means that systems try to resist chaos that is highly destructive.
Homeostasis is, more colloquially, called ‘negative feedback’.[14] The appearance of chaos may sometimes be a necessary step in negative feedback helping a system return towards equilibrium. On the other hand, a chaotic situation may be worsened by ‘positive feedback’ when a change in one part of a system accelerates changes that take it into new territory, even over the edge into chaos.
Systems are more than the sum of their parts, a critical point that tends to be ignored by those who argue that the behaviour of a system can be understood by observing the behaviour of the separate parts. Interactions between the components create new properties, ‘emergent’ properties, which cause changes to proceed in directions that cannot be predicted from observing the behaviour of individual parts. The phenomenon of the unpredictable emergent property means that we cannot accurately predict future events, or future environmental conditions. As Samir Rihani points out,
“…emergent properties ensure that the whole is more than the sum of the parts.”[15]
The Second Law of Thermodynamics proposes that any system left alone, without regulation, drifts steadily into disorder, i.e. shows increasing entropy. Homeostasis, or self-regulation, resists drift towards disorder. The concept of homeostasis in physical, chemical and biological systems has become orthodox science, but the idea that self-regulation also encompasses social and economic systems is not yet widely accepted. Roy Madron and John Jopling, the authors of Gaia<!–[if supportFields]> XE “Gaia theory:and democracy” <![endif]–><!–[if supportFields]><![endif]–>n Democracies: Redefining Globalisation<!–[if supportFields]> XE “globalisation:and Gaian democracies” <![endif]–><!–[if supportFields]><![endif]–> and People Power,[16] argue that only a world view based on understanding complex adaptive systems can contribute to solving social, economic and environmental problems.
“…thinking in systems terms means seeing whole systems; all human systems have a purpose; systems are self-organising and self-generating; all systems are always changing; systems go through various stages; systems sometimes get into a vicious spiral; and, while the imperative for change may come from outside the system, change takes place within it.”[17]
John Jopling’s co-author Roy Madron began to stumble towards the concept of Gaian democracy after linking James Lovelock’s Gaia theory with his own work on sustainable change in human systems. Madron’s and Jopling’s perceptions are developments in positivist social theory, a return to the social systems approach pioneered by Auguste Comte in his major works published between 1830 and 1854. Comte envisaged sociology as an advanced, highly complex science, and inspired a logical approach to philosophy that was adopted by thinkers including Kurt Godel in the 20th century. Godel’s Undecidability Theorem and Incompleteness Theorem proposed that some questions about systems are neither provable nor disprovable, based on knowledge of the constituent parts, and that knowledge of the component parts of a system does not equate to complete knowledge of the system itself. Computer scientist Alan Turing, seeing limits to computation, and mathematician Gregory Chaitin, recognising inherent uncertainty in mathematics, like Godel have an intellectual debt to Comte, but governments are reluctant to follow their example and admit to the inherent fallibility of human decisions.
Social systems theory
Comte’s works were brought to the attention of the English-speaking world by his contemporary and translator, Harriet Martineau, among others. Martineau wrote that:
“We find ourselves suddenly living and moving in the midst of the universe, — as a part of it, and not as its aim and object. We find ourselves living, not under capricious and arbitrary conditions, unconnected with the constitution and movements of the whole, but under great, general, invariable laws, which operate on us as a part of the whole”.[18]
Later social systems theorists include Herbert Spencer (1820-1903), Talcott Parsons (1902-1979), and Daniel Bell (b.1919). Herbert Spencer’s search for order led him to devise ‘Laws of Regulation’, the first of which states:
“The differentiation and elaboration of regulatory structures (concentration and consolidation of power) are an additive function of:
● The size and rate of growth of a population.
● The level of material surplus generated by productive forces.
● The volume and velocity of exchange transactions.
● The level of inequality and associated internal threat.
● The level of external threat from surrounding populations”.[19]
This law suggests that regulation will be heavy in a wealthy society, surviving on trade and struggling to accommodate its population, with high income differentials internally and external populations desperate to share in the wealth that is flaunted in front of them. The spate of new laws flowing from the UK’s New Labour government, at a time of incipient resource shortages and immigration pressures, suggests Spencer was close to the mark.
Talcott Parsons argued that the main social system has four subsystems: economy; polity; societal community; and the ‘fiduciary’ or cultural subsystem. Parsons’ four subsystems were linked, in his mind, by ‘double interchanges’, each being a dynamic mechanism enabling the subsystems to adjust to each other. The ‘double interchanges’ are another way of describing homeostasis. Parsons did not see humans as an integral part of the overall system and its subsystems, though, but as separate actors influencing and influenced by the systems surrounding them.
Daniel Bell simplified Parsons’ concept:
“Daniel Bell contracted Parsons’ four subsystems into three ‘realms’: polity, culture, and the techno-economic structure, and considered why subsystems alter. His conclusion was that disjunction between realms is a structural source of tension in society and therefore the fulcrum of change”.[20]
Bell’s conclusion was another way of referring to the positive feedback that can shift a system to a new form, distancing it from systems that previously meshed with it.
Systems that are diverse and flexible have a better chance of adjusting to changes than systems that are rigid. Professor Michael McIntyre, in the Centre for Atmospheric Science, Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics at Cambridge University, argues that life as we know it depends on diversity. “Combinatorial largeness” is how McIntyre describes this diversity, “a number of the order of 1 with 10,000 zeros after it”, the theoretical number of states of the human genome. Rigidity, according to McIntyre[21], is a “recipe for vastly increasing the number of things that go wrong, especially in complex systems engineering like computer software and genetic engineering, and in medicine, in education, and in human societies themselves”.[22]
Applying this analysis to farming shows that modern agribusiness’s rigid philosophy of yield maximisation, supply chain control and business expansion makes the whole system susceptible to collapse, because it struggles to adapt to changing conditions. Samir Rihani explains:[23]
“…evolution is an open-ended process that involves small but effective adaptations by which the system tries to improve its chances of survival. In the first instance, however, the system must gather knowledge about its environment, including activities by other co-evolving systems. Intelligence helps, but is not necessary. Copious internal variety ensures that some elements will survive and prosper under the new conditions”.
They may not be human elements, though. Global systems include people as components, not controllers. James Lovelock’s Gaia theory, while accepting that people can alter systems, also proposes that human interventions are no different from system changes caused by other factors, in that any change can have unexpected consequences. Human efforts to try and impose mastery on any part of the physical or social environment are always likely to fail: our interventions can swamp the negative feedback that attempts to return systems to equilibrium, pushing them into chaos instead. Interventions and interactions can trigger unexpected consequences that may be catastrophic for some elements of the system – even for human survival in the case of the global climate system, perhaps. Humans have come to dominate the planet, giving an illusion of control, a mask of competence that shuts out the complexity that is essential to the evolution of life.
Pioneers for change
Lawrence Alderson: the Rare Breeds Survival Trust
British farming was marching down the road to rigidity when Lawrence Alderson founded the Rare Breeds Survival Trust in 1973. Farmers had been abandoning traditional breeds in favour of those able to produce high yields in high-input, high-output agriculture. During the 1970s the fields of Britain filled with black-and-white dairy cattle, the British Friesian and its close relative the British Holstein. The breeds they all but ousted included the Dairy Shorthorn, which can thrive in low-energy farming. The Dairy Shorthorn gives less milk than the Holstein or Friesian, but is an economical producer. That did not matter in the 1970s or 80s, but began to be significant again in the 90s, and in the early 21st century is an important attribute. Without the work of the Rare Breeds Survival Trust, the farm livestock gene pool may well have diminished so much that farmers would have lacked a choice of breeds with which to meet the new realities of farming in a world of limited and expensive energy.
Lawrence Alderson steered the trust through restructuring after the trauma of the foot and mouth disease epidemic in 2001, which resulted in the slaughter of ten million farm animals. Rare breeds were not exempt from the cull, imposed because the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs opted for slaughter over vaccination. The cull rammed home to the trust the need for a national gene bank, as insurance against the future loss of livestock breeds. The actor Richard Briers, a long-time supporter of the trust’s work, became the public face for an appeal to raise £2.5 million for a gene bank.
The British farm breeds that the trust regards as critically endangered include:
● Cattle
Aberdeen Angus, Lincoln Red, Northern Dairy Shorthorn, Shetland, Whitebred Shorthorn, Vaynol.
● Sheep
Boreray.
● Goats
Bagot
● Horses, ponies
Cleveland Bay, Eriskay pony, Suffolk.
● Poultry
Ixworth, Marsh Daisy, Old English Pheasant Fowl, Scots Grey.
The trust is concerned about the viability of almost 80 breeds in all – breeds that used to be important elements of the British farming landscape, but whose numbers dwindled in the rush to ‘modernise’ farming. Thanks to the trust, the gene pool of British farm livestock is much wider than it would otherwise have been. Lawrence Alderson and his fellow enthusiasts made a difference. The old breeds have definite advantages in a low-energy world: it is the world for which they were bred.
Lawrence Hills and Alan and Jackie Gear: the Henry Doubleday Research Association and the Heritage Seed Library
Crop diversity is vital too. The important Heritage Seed Library for vegetables has its origins in the work of two men: Henry Doubleday and Lawrence Hills, again highlighting the catalytic role of individuals. Henry Doubleday was a 19th century Quaker smallholder who introduced Russian comfrey into England. Lawrence Hills saw comfrey as something of a miracle crop, and it was always a central element of his organic garden at Bocking, Essex. In 1954 he launched a research association into comfrey specifically and organic gardening generally, and called it the Henry Doubleday Research Association. After 30 years the Bocking site was no longer large enough for all the organic growing that the association wanted to do, and in 1985 Lawrence and his wife Cherry, and their assistants Alan and Jackie Gear, moved to 22 acres at Ryton-on-Dunsmore near Coventry in Warwickshire. The Gears took over the management of the gardens, which by 2006 were a national centre for organic gardening, and the home of the Heritage Seed Library.
The library dates from 1975, and keeps over 800 varieties of rare vegetable seed. The ‘adopt a vegetable’ programme is rather like the ‘adopt a donkey’ schemes common in donkey sanctuaries. Adopters pay £12 a year to fund seed production of the variety they choose. Early in 2006, there were many to choose from, including 22 pea varieties, 32 tomatoes, 13 climbing French beans and nine broad beans. Old varieties have characteristics that we may need again one day – and they bring diversity to the standardised world of supermarket vegetables. Commercial seed production is controlled by a small number of companies who focus on a restricted range of varieties, thereby reducing bio-diversity. The Heritage Library depends not on corporations, not on government, but on individuals in the mould of Henry Doubleday and Lawrence Hills.
While the UK government has not shown much interest in preserving crop seeds, in Norway the government announced, in 2006, a plan[24] to construct a vault in its Svalbard archipelago in the Arctic, in which to put seeds from around the world to protect them from catastrophes. The vault will help ensure a diversity of food plants for the world in future, rationalises Norway’s agriculture and food minister Terje Riis-Johansen.
Lady Eve Balfour and Patrick Holden: the Soil Association
The Soil Association, carrying the standard for organic farming, owes a huge debt to one individual: Lady Eve Balfour, niece of the Conservative prime minister Arthur, later Lord, Balfour. Eve Balfour, born in 1899, studied agriculture at Reading University, and then farmed at Haughley in Suffolk. She argued that healthy individuals needed excellent food from living soil that was full of organic matter, micro-organisms, and soil conditioners like earthworms. Her views, influenced particularly by the nutrition pioneer Sir Robert McCarrison, and the agriculturist Sir Albert Howard, were dismissed as ‘muck and magic’ by the agricultural establishment, especially after the Second World War, when farming was rushing into the industrial petrochemical age. In 1943 Eve Balfour’s book The Living Soil was published, and two years later she invited 60 people of like mind to meet with a view to forming an association to encourage healthy soil for good food and sustainable farming. The Soil Association was the result, and its first meeting was in London on May 30th 1946.
Today in 2006, the Soil Association has its headquarters in Bristol, and Patrick Holden has directed it since 1995. Farmers Weekly ranked Patrick Holden at no.10, sandwiched between the chancellor, Gordon Brown, at nine and the chef and food campaigner Jamie Oliver at 11,[25] in its ‘Top 20 Power Players’ list, published on January 20th 2006, saying:
“The organic champion has driven the organic movement since the early 1970s, steering it from its image of muck and magic to its position today as a multi-billion pound industry….”
During the 1970s, the idea that the leader of the Soil Association could be a ‘Top 20 Power Player’ would have been laughed right out of the Farmers Weekly office. Organic farming, according to the agricultural wisdom of the time, was so cranky as to be ludicrous. Without champions for organic farming and gardening like Eve Balfour, Lawrence Hills, Patrick Holden and Alan and Jackie Gear, and without pioneers for livestock diversity such as Lawrence Alderson, the resource base for food security and a sustainable agriculture would have been far weaker than it is, as the Age of Oil draws to an end. Individuals do indeed make a difference.
[1] Farmers Weekly April 22nd 2005, p.5, ‘A chance to make a difference’. Ref. Farmers Weekly.[2] ‘Put local food on the map’, Farmers Weekly May 12th 2006, p.20. Ref. Farmers Weekly.[3] The Essential Nietzsche by Paul Strathern, 2002, quoting from Nietzsche’s The Dawn, translated from Die Morgenrote. Ref. Strathern 2002.[4] Published in 1938.
[5] 1960 reprint p.93. Ref. Russell 1938.
[6] 1960 reprint, also p.93. Ref. Russell 1938.
[7] The Federal Reserve Statistics release G.19, May 5th 2006, gives the total for unsecured consumer credit as $2,161.4 billion. The number of households in the USA, according to the US Census Bureau, was 113.146 million, at the latest count in March 2005.
[8] ‘After the fall’, The Economist June 16th 2005. Ref. The Economist.
[9] www.globalcomplexity.org/Control%20by%20the%20Elites.htm, under ‘The model goes off the rails: the ‘revolving door’. Ref. Rihani accessed 2004.
[10] In 2006 Berlusconi’s business interests centred on Mediaset holdings, including the TV channels Rete 4, Italia 1 and Canale 5. He also controlled the advertising group Publitalia, the insurance and banking business Mediolanum, and video distribution companies Medusa and Penta. He exerted control over other stations including the state-owned RAI, and he owned AC Milan football club.
[11] Atmospheric Environment Vol. 6 p.579. Ref. Lovelock 1972.
[12] A hypothesis is an assumption, that can be tested against data from experiments, and from observations. A theory is a conceptual framework that explains existing observations and predicts new ones. Thus a theory is firmer than a hypothesis.
[13] ‘Strange attractors’ may trigger the positive feedback that can propel a system into chaos. See Complex Systems Theory and Development Practice by Samir Rihani, p.78. Ref. Rihani 2002. A strange attractor has a non-integer – i.e. fractal – dimension, or chaotic dynamics. Fractals are in between simple integer dimensions such as a one-dimensional line, a two-dimensional plane or a three-dimensional cube. Fractals are geometrical shapes or patterns made up of identical parts which are in turn identical to the whole overarching pattern.
[14] www.calresco.org/sos/sosfaq.htm. Ref. CALResCo accessed August 29th 2003.
[15] Complex Systems Theory and Development Practice p.235, my emphasis. Ref. Rihani 2002.
[16] Ref. Madron and Jopling 2003.
[17] John Jopling at the launch of Gaian Democracies: Redefining Globalisation and People Power, quoted by John Turnbull, www.wwdemocracy.nildram.co.uk/gaian_democracies/gd_launch.html. Ref. Turnbull 2003.
[18] In The Positive Philosophy of Auguste Comte, Vol.1 p.X. Ref. Martineau 1853.
[19] Quoted in J H Turner’s article on Herbert Spencer, p.87, in G Ritzer’s Blackwell Companion to Major Social Theorists. Ref. Turner 2000.
[20] Malcolm Waters’ essay on Daniel Bell, p.580, in G Ritzer’s Blackwell Companion to Major Social Theorists. Ref. Waters 2000.
[21] www.atm.damtp.cam.ac.uk/people/mem/papers/LHCE/dilnot-analysis.html. Ref. McIntyre 2000.
[22] As above, McIntyre 2000 p.3.
[23] Complex Systems Theory and Development Practice p.8. Ref. Rihani 2002.
[24] ‘Noah’s ark of seeds in Norway, The Independent, May 31st 2006. Ref. The Independent.
[25] The chef and school dinners campaigner Jamie Oliver was ranked 11= with Christine Tacon, general manager of the Co-op’s huge 74,000-acre farming operations. Farmers Weekly January 20th 2006 pps.16-20. Ref. Farmers Weekly.