Proposed work in the state of Oaxaca ( en espaņol )

for about one year starting in Fall 1999, by George Salzman

My motivation

Since about 1970 I have regarded the development of the Science for Humane Survival course and my research as parts of a single project: achieving the possibility for all people to live in humane circumstances in a world that is not being destroyed by human activities. Of course it's a daunting goal, but when one is aware of the dehumanization of people in many parts of the world (including "third-world" parts of the U.S.), and the destruction of vast portions of the biosphere, it seems to me inescapable that the only truly rational response for a thinking person is to work for constructive change.

Perspective from the viewpoint of physics

The most difficult intellectual challenge for me has been to learn enough about a fairly wide range of problems so that an attempt to formulate possible changes comes within reach. Obviously physics can contribute significantly to our understanding at a very basic level, because nothing happens -- absolutely no process whatsoever occurs -- without a transformation of energy. The ability to manipulate energy in its many forms is probably the most significant factor in the material development of industrialized societies. But it is an ability whose application has brought many problems, none more important, in my view, than the widely prevalent idea that as much as possible all physical labor ought to be replaced by machines, automated to the greatest extent possible. The profligate use, the squandering of energy sources, most extreme in the U.S., makes possible one of the most (perhaps the most) inefficient agricultural systems in the world, as measured by the nutritional calories obtained per unit of total energy expended.

Of course we often hear of the efficiency of American agriculture, how much food a single American farmer produces. But in order to maximize the productivity per unit of the farmer's metabolic energy spent, the cost is not only great expenditure of non-metabolic energy sources. The industrialized agricultural system, with its reliance on heavy machinery, intensive irrigation systems, chemical inputs, and storage, refrigeration, transportation and distribution infrastructure, favors vast monocropping operations. The rate of loss of topsoil in the continental U.S. is monumental, a long-term threat to the viability of the system. Depletion of the Ogallala Aquifer looms over the wheat belt as mammoth center-pivot irrigation systems powered by electric pumps go ever deeper for the water. The largest source of surface water pollution is not U.S. industry but runoff from U.S. agriculture.

There are also many other problems. I list a few examples: 1) As China moves towards industrialization, we can expect a replay, on a much larger scale, of coal-fired environmental disasters already demonstrated in Birmingham, in the Ruhr, in Czechoslovakia, in Pittsburgh, in Silesia. 2) There is "the population problem", so avidly placed at the top of the list of major threats by Paul Ehrlich's group, "Zero Population Growth." In fact, the accelerated growth of the total population is a problem. 3) The loss of rich fishing areas, as factory-scale fish harvesting vessels reduce marine populations, is well documented, for example, by the destruction of the traditional economic life of Nova Scotia. 4) Large-scale industrial logging of the world's forests is another component of the threat to the biosphere.

All of these developments are made possible by, though are not necessary consequences of, the uses of science and technology to manipulate, in increasingly sophisticated ways, the transformations of energy. For example, mining conglomerates now use satellite surveys to locate likely areas for exploitation. The misnamed "information age" developments are deployed to speed up the rape of the earth.

Physics has more to contribute to our understanding of the destructiveness we see being practiced by so-called Western Civilization. In addition to energy per se and its transformations from one form to another, with which all branches of physics are concerned, the physics of thermodynamics in particular provides, I believe, the most profound basis for understanding, scientifically and on a macroscopic scale, what is wrong, fundamentally wrong, with the contemporary fixation on power and speed. Before being more explicit about the science, it's worth keeping in mind that one does not need to be grounded in science to appreciate the wrongness of this fixation. The down-to-earth Nebraskan newspaper editor and publisher, Norris W. Alfred, chose for his paper's logo, "Slower is Better." While that is of course an overstatement, because slower isn't always better, what Alfred's claim on the masthead of the Polk Progress was clearly intended to assert is that slower ways of doing things deserve to be considered. He was dead right in that perception.

Max Planck (1858-1947), a towering figure in the revolution in physics during the period from the end of the nineteenth century until perhaps 1925, lectured for many years on thermodynamics at the University of Berlin. In his classic book, Treatise on Thermodynamics (still published in English translation by Dover Press) he gives an elegant development of the entropy function. The concept of entropy is more subtle than that of energy, but it has much to say about the effects of various processes. In contrast to the first law of thermodynamics, which states the existence of an energy function for a thermodynamic system, and, if the system is closed, that its total energy is constant regardless of the processes of change of the system, the second law states the existence, for a system in thermodynamic equilibrium, of an entropy function, and, if the system is closed, that its total entropy always increases if the system undergoes any real process. It is a statement about the inevitable irreversibility of real processes. Highly irreversible processes mean large increases in entropy, and correspond to large increases in disorder. Planck enumerated several processes that produce significant increases in entropy, including all chemical explosions. In fact, all explosive processes produce it.

The spatial characteristic common to all explosive processes is the existence of large spatial gradients, that is, large changes in the values of some physical quantities from one place to a relatively nearby place. For example, in an ordinary internal combustion engine, say gasoline or diesel, the explosive burning of the fuel-air mixture produces a large pressure difference between the inner and outer surfaces of the piston, and the piston "explodes" outward, delivering power to the crankshaft. This is, from an engineering perspective, desirable. But it also produces undesirable "by-products", pollution of various forms -- noise, waste heat, nitrogen oxides, particulate carbon emissions, and so on. To the extent that it is possible to substitute bicycles for automobiles (as was largely forced upon Cuba since the collapse of the Soviet Union and the eastern block Communist nation-states), a shift to reliance on "slower" metabolic energy would be better than continued use of "faster" non-metabolic, technological energy.

Other examples of obvious high-gradient systems abound. The giant dams constructed to transform gravitational potential energy of flowing water into electrical energy are mammoth engineering projects -- the Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtzee in China, the world's largest, the many dams of Hydro-Québec in Canada, our own dammed-to-death Columbia River, and many others around the world -- each is a stupendous engineering feat, and a source of great ecological damage. Here the sources of power come from the large vertical descents of great masses of water in feedstocks, at the bottom of which, with enormous pressure, the water spins great turbines attached to electric generators. The high gradients occur at the turbines, where on the feedstock side the pressure is very large while on the discharge side it is only atmospheric.

The misguided effort to "tame" the fusion reaction is another example of trying to get a lot of power from a high-gradient system. Fusion reactions have a legitimate role to play, and they do -- in the stars, where nature has "engineered" them by providing suitable low-gradient environments in which the nuclei are spatially confined in the cores of stars by enormous gravitational forces. Such enormous gravitational forces don't exist on the Earth, and so it is seen by some scientists as a great challenge to try to confine the plasma by ingenious magnetic "bottles." Towards this effort many many millions of dollars and scientific and technological efforts have already been wasted. It hardly seems necessary to mention the environmentally destructive effects of fission reactors, the "ordinary" nuclear reactors, which work with elements from the other, the heavy-atom end of the atomic table.

Why Oaxaca? The importance of communality

The above brief essay indicates the scope of my interests, and perhaps shows why it has been difficult for me to learn all I think I ought to know. How does my interest in Oaxaca fit into the picture? During my first visit to the state of Oaxaca, I was for a brief time in Guelatao de Juárez, a small town in the northern Sierra of Oaxaca, where I learned that in some mountain towns the communal form of social organization continues since long before the Mexican revolution. From my second visit to Oaxaca I learned from Paola Sesia that, for at least some towns, this form continues from the time of The Conquest. And from Juan Arelí I learned that in other towns it has existed for more than a half millenium.

Communality in various aspects of social life is an essential factor in the survival of the relative autonomy of these towns. Guelatao is a small town -- I would guess somewhere from 2-3 thousand inhabitants (the key on the map indicates only that it is less than 5,000) -- most of whom are Zapotecos, one of the 16 different indigenous groups that live in this state, the most ethnically diverse state of Mexico. In marked contrast to indigenous communities I saw earlier, on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota and in the highlands of the Mexican state of Chiapas, it seems to me Guelatao de Juárez has avoided the destructive effects generated by creation of ethnic divisions with privileges for some and privation for others.

On reservations in the U.S. ethnic divisions were initiated and nurtured by the Federal Government with introduction of "blood quanta", and different treatment of people with different quanta. The Pine Ridge reservation reeks of animosity between relatively privileged "breeds" (part white), and "bloods" (pure Lakota bloodlines), for many of whom privation is a fact of life. In Mexico the Federal Government, ruled for 70 years by the PRI, the acronym in Spanish for the Institutionalized Revolutionary Party, has privileged local leaders in return for insuring PRI electoral victories in their towns. In the Chiapas highlands, and in other parts of the state, the animosity between the PRI-privileged and the PRI-deprived now finds expression in the existence of groups of Mayas who are pro-, and others who are contra-Zapatista. The members of both groups are of course indigenous.

All three areas -- the Pine Ridge Reservation and the States of Chiapas and Oaxaca -- are poor in standard economic terms, but only in Oaxaca did I see hopeful signs of local communities where people are working together -- as community members -- towards finding a viable solution for their own future, a future that will not be owned by remote corporations or government agencies, a future that their community itself will have the major voice in determining (see the qualifying note added at the end of the statement). In Guetalao de Juárez there is an organization, Comunalidad, A.C.: una actitud para el futuro (Communality, [a] Civil Association: a disposition of courage for the future), engaged in educational activities. When I was first there I obtained a copy of "Comunalidad y Autonomía (Communality and Autonomy)", a collection of papers by Jaime Martínez Luna which explore various issues basic to autonomy, for example a paper about the role of the land base for self-determination, the need for cultural and juridical self-determination, etc. I am working on preparing an English translation because I believe the explorations of these papers are very important and I would like to make them widely available.

The work I want to do

As the initial brief essay indicates, my conviction is that we must find a way to organize human society that is different from the current dominant system. To me this means first of all a searching critique of the values around which the societies that comprise "Western Civilization" are structured, for it is these societies that are wreaking mayhem throughout the world. Working in Oaxaca will give me an opportunity to learn about the values of some indigenous cultures, and how they are applied in the social organization of the everyday lives of people. Naturally I will continue to make information available from the Science for Humane Survival course as printed materials, and, as I have begun to do more recently, as articles from the course on this website. I also want to  prepare a Spanish version of the course.

Note added: At the grassroots level efforts by local people to shape their own lives and communities are of course very widespread throughout the world, and that is a source of hopefulness. What I wanted to emphasize about Oaxaca in particular is that there are towns in which a strong sense of communality continues to be a major bond that prevents the development of antagonistic groups vying for political power. The communities have not been split along economic or political lines, primarily because their adherence to their traditional indigenous usos y costumbres uses and customs has prevented it. Organizing political parties is not part of their cultural tradition.

Bibliography

The list here is not meant to be comprehensive, rather to indicate the variety of materials that have contributed to the development of the Science for Humane Survival (SfHS) course. The course bibliography, which does not include all the following items, is in the SfHS folder of this website.

Arendt, Hannah, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1973, Harcourt Brace.

Ayres, Robert U. and Nair, Indira, "Thermodynamics and Economics", November 1984 issue of Physics Today, American Institute of Physics.

Bronowski, Jacob, "Science and Human Values", December 29, 1956 issue of The Nation.

Carson, Rachel, Silent Spring, 25th anniversary edition, 1987, Houghton Mifflin.

Collier, George A., Basta!: Land and the Zapatista Rebellion in Chiapas, 1994, The Institute for Food and Development Policy.

Commoner, Barry, The Closing Circle: Nature, Man, and Technology, 1971, Bantam Books.

Danner, Mark, "The Truth of El Mozote", December 6, 1993 issue of The New Yorker.

Futuyma, Douglas J., Science on Trial: The Case for Evolution, 1983, Random House.

Galeano, Eduardo, Guatemala: Occupied Country, 1969, Monthly Review Press.

Gilje, Paul A., The Road to Mobocracy: Popular Disorder in New York City, 1763-1834, 1987, University of North Carolina Press.

Harden, Blaine, A River Lost: The Life and Death of the Columbia, 1996, W.W. Norton.

Jardine, Matthew, East Timor: Genocide in Paradise, 1995, Odonian Press.

Kropotkin, Petr, Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution, about 1970, Porter Sargent Press.

Lappé, Frances Moore, Diet for a Small Planet, 1991, Ballantine Books.

Matthiessen, Peter, In the Spirit of Crazy Horse, 1991, Viking Press.

Menchú, Rigoberta, I, Rigoberta Menchú: An Indian Woman in Guatemala, 1984, Verso Books.

Mumford, Lewis, The Myth of the Machine: The Pentagon of Power, 1970, Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich.

Planck, Max, Treatise on Thermodynamics, translation of the 7th German edition, 1990, Dover Press.

Rampton, Sheldon and Stauber, John, Mad Cow U.S.A.: Could the Nightmare Happen Here?, 1997, Common Courage Press.

Robertson, Paul M. The Power of the Land: Identity, Ethnicity, and Class among the Oglala Lakota, 1995, Ph.D. Thesis in Cultural Anthropology, Graduate School of the Union Institute.

Ross, John, The Annexation of Mexico: From the Aztecs to the I.M.F., 1998, Common Courage Press.

Shattuck, Roger, Forbidden Knowledge: From Prometheus to Pornography, 1996, Harcourt Brace.

Smith, J. Russell, Tree Crops: A Permanent Agriculture, 1953, Devin-Adair.

Storer, John H., The Web of Life, 1956, Signet Science Library of New American Library.

Sweeny, Robert, "The Costs of Modernity: The Role of the Human Sciences in the Present Crisis Facing Newfoundland", paper at April 1995 Conference on Culture, Technology and Change in the Americas, Tampa, Florida, Univ of South Florida.

Zwingle, Erla, "Ogallala Aquifer: Wellspring of the High Plains", March 1993 issue of The National Geographic magazine.

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