Organisational Theory/ The Amazon Burns!

 Jeremy Lent is proving to be an interesting and stimulating thinker.  This is from a recent blog post:  An attempt to answer the single relentless question to the current destruction of out planet's lungs and the extinction of many of the myriad non-human creatures living withing this unique environment.

HOW IS THIS POSSIBLE?

 'Of all the terrifying news bombarding us from the burning of the Amazon, perhaps the most disturbing was the offer of $22 million made by France’s President Emmanuel Macron and other G7 leaders to help Brazil put the fires out. Why is that? The answer can help to hone in on the true structural changes needed to avert civilizational collapse.

Scientists have publicly warned that, at the current rate of deforestation, the Amazon is getting dangerously close to a die-back scenario, after which it will be gone forever, turned into sparse savanna. Quite apart from the fact that this would be the greatest human-made ecological catastrophe in history, it would also further accelerate a climate cataclysm, as one of the world’s great carbon sinks would convert overnight to a major carbon emitter, with reinforcing feedback effects causing even more extreme global heating, ultimately threatening the continued existence of our current civilization.

Macron and the other leaders meeting in late August in Biarritz were well aware of these facts. And yet, in the face of this impending disaster, these supposed leaders of the free world, representing over half the economic wealth of all humanity, offered a paltry $22 million—less than Americans spend on popcorn in a single day. By way of context, global fossil fuel subsidies (much of it from G7 members) total roughly $5.2 trillion annually—over two hundred thousand times the amount offered to help Brazil fight the Amazon fires.

The Amazon is burning, while our global leaders do nothing. (Reuters/Ricardo Moraes)

Brazil’s brutal president Bolsonaro is emerging as one of the worst perpetrators of ecocide in the modern world, but it’s difficult to criticize his immediate rejection of an amount that is, at best a pittance, at worst an insult. True to form, Donald Trump didn’t bother to turn up for the discussion on the Amazon fires, but it hardly made a difference. The ultimate message from the rest of the G7 nations was they were utterly unable, or unwilling, to lift a finger to help prevent the looming existential crisis facing our civilization.'

WHO ARE THE POLLUTERS?

WHO POLLUTES THE MOST?

 

So the barbarous Saudi State now controlled by a murderer, runs a company called Aramco that, on it's own is responsible for 4.38% of global emissions.

 Twelve of the top 20 companies are state-owned and together their extractions are responsible for 20% of total emissions in the same period. The leading state-owned polluter is Saudi Aramco, which has produced 4.38% of the global total on its own.

Chevron topped the list of the eight investor-owned corporations, followed closely by Exxon, BP and Shell. Together these four global businesses are behind more than 10% of the world’s carbon emissions since 1965.

A SPLURGE ON AUDIBLE- BLEAK HOUSE WILL BE READ...FINALLY!!!

AN AUDIBLE SPLURGE!  Did you know you can replace your books on audible's easy exchange.  It's like an endless library!

1.   Richard Matheson - The Best of Richard Matheson 2.   Richard Matheson - Hell House 3.   Charles Dickens - Bleak House 4.   David Hepworth - A Fabulous Creation 5.   Joe Haldeman - The Forever War 6.   Olaf Stapledon - Star Maker 7.   Alfred Bester - The Stars My Destination 8.   Walter M. Miller Jr. - A Canticle for Leibowitz 9.   Gene Wolfe - The Shadow of the Torturer 10.   Robert Tressell - Ragged Trousered Philanthropists   Accompanying reference material (Download PDF) 11.   Larry Niven - Ringworld 12.   Richard Ellman - James Joyce

Outmaneouvering the Wall Measurers-Epistemological trench warfare in Modern Social Work and Mops-their uses and abuses

Just about to leave.  I've made it!  Nearly!  7 hours to go!  I can do it!
This experience has plumbed new depths of value-clashery with the hierachons and I see how we are practically aliens speaking entirely different languages based on completely different epistemologies.  It's no longer about the words, it's about actual MEANING...not what the words mean but MEANING itself.  It's an Ontological nightmare and it's coming for all of us.  It's the Lone Epistemologist and his faithful Sidekick-Onto, come riding into town on Elephants, packing Foucaultian canons in their leather saddlebags
The 'why are we here?’ stuff.
What this means for me is yet another insight (possibly) into the fractured professional world of Social Work.
Give a fool a ruler and he will happily measure all the walls and doors endlessly and record minute change in great detail.  It will not occur to measure what is happening within the walls because that is quite subjective and quite complex and requires DIALOGUE focused by KNOWLEDGE and EXPERIENCE.  Imagination? Creativity?
There are two or even three cultures operating in children's social work and at odds with each other.  In fact in a fight to the death. (Really?  Isn't that 'fight to the death' stuff just you assuming your omniscient view?)
First there is the cult of measurement, what is also being called quality assurance and audit which is measuring the walls dressed up as a useful activity. (It is a useful activity dude!)   Then there is the related target-driven results-oriented performance management which constructs new sets of relationships based on wall measuring data.  (It's like you think consideration of results is stupid! It's absolutely vital!)
Then there is the traditional, necessarily beleaguered, social work neuromancers who chaotically dance in the spaces between poverty and power, creating havoc for the wall measurers and tearing down their walls and rebuilding them chaotically in devastatingly new shapes.  These are the social workers/artists who are the professional monkey wrench throwers.  The high end saboteurs who short circuit the organisation in astonishingly creative ways.  The anarchist advocates who infiltrate senior positions all the better to lay waste, then rappel off the skyscraper chuckling like mad ninja commandos.
They are the lost professional field commanders who spend their entire lives on active service and under fire and who have become the greatest leaders of small groups in action that have ever been seen.  Managing impossible levels of data and human complexity minute to minute with immense grace.
This is the social work I live and love.  The social work of rebellion and revolution.  Highly skilled and talented mercenaries in the service of poor children.  Fighting without mercy to give children in poverty the edge they need against the machine that seeks to condemn them to a life without hope.  Fighting the soulless bureaucrats and robots who mindlessly carry out the machine's tasks without question and who now believe themselves to be in charge...but who are actually...foolishly and busily...measuring the walls.
Then there is the herd mentality, 'the flock jostling nervously in their cage.'  This is the culture of 'not knowing what's going on', or maybe the 'we don't know what's going down man!'
Wading through boggy ground and hoping for a city on the hill.  Wading through glue without a clue.  Minions.  Unguided missiles.  The blind leading the blind.  Drone pilots.  Apathetically apolitical and seeking communities of resistance-but against what?  For what?  Only felt dimly, like the early signs of toothache.  Intimations of pain-to-come.  We watch the ice cream melt and pool on the floor in stupefied fascination, and study all the facts about mops and their uses and practice all the skills of high end technical moppery.  Polish and wax our mop handles.  Scan the horizons for new mop designs.  Carefully replace and repair the mop fibres.  Never leave home without our mop.  Categorise mop skills into arcane groupings-theoretical and practical moppery and classes of skills too-devise Aristotelian labelling systems of Einsteinian complexity translated into fetishised numerological texts only translatable by elite colleges of the Society of Mopperology who, for a handsome fee, will train your sheep to enter their pens happily.
A child asks 'why not just stop the ice cream melting' and is pelted with cream buns amid howls of laughter, bundled into a waiting hot air balloon and flown to a residential re-education centre just off the Australian coast and run by G4S.
'Animals' by Pink Floyd is the soundtrack in our heads.  Border collies chase their tails.  We watch out nervously for wolves...Shepherd crooks rob banks happily and commit daylight robberies.
An old man with a sign saying 'Eat Me!' scorns passers by.  Sirens sound among the hills.  Boots are on the streets.

A magical fountain, atop which Her Real Majesty stands waiting for Alice to unlock her prison of stone with the appropriately translated runes.

REVIEW- 'CLEAR BRIGHT FUTURE' BY Paul Mason

Paul Mason is a treasure-no doubt about it.  He's a Northener-that always helps!  But he is widely read, deeply thoughtful, of an original cast of mind, and dedicated to humanity.  He is also a great journalistic writer with all the advantages and the flaws of such-meaning, a too ready acceptance of his sources which he plunders with little scepticism or a willingness to subject to hard academic analysis and most disturbingly for me, he creates a most awful blaming analysis of Nietzsche for individualised selfishness and nihilism that, as a keen reader of this remarkable philosopher, I find unpalatably shallow and indicative therefore of a shallow analysis of the work.  True-a reading of the awful 'Triumph of the Will' cobbled together by his psychopathic Nazi-sympathising, mate of Hitler- Sister, Elisabet, would lead one to deduce that Nietzche proposed a fascistic analysis of the Superman supporting a Nazi totalitarianism, but in fact, nothing could be further from the truth of his philosophical system which supported genuine love and engagement with humanity.  Nietzsche was at pains to constantly point out that political control leads us to barbarism and so we must take individual responsibility for our life's MEANING.  I offer no defence of his tragic misogyny other than to say it is rooted in his personal flawed experience of relationships and his natural 'turn' to a 'tragedic' interpretation of his relationships no doubt encouraged by his Wagnerian associations with Richard and Cosima which also ended in tragedy but have a beauty derived from the meeting of great but flawed minds.
Whatever, Paul Mason has written a book full of fire and well worth reading as an explanation offering some understanding of: potentially viable solutions to, our current pre-apocalyptic dilemmas.  I would also urge a radical defence of the non-human being!