Media Clipping — April 4, 2001, The Halifax Herald

The Cats and Rats of Borneo

By Silver Donald Cameron

At the beginning of an upcoming TV program on – yawn – economics, Amory and Hunter Lovins of the Rocky Mountain Institute tell a sad but funny story. Soon after World War II, the Dyaks of Borneo were suffering from mosquito-borne diseases, so their area was sprayed with DDT. The mosquitoes vanished, but the roofs fell off the Dyaks' houses, because DDT also killed the wasps whose secretions held the thatch together. The caterpillar population exploded, and geckos ate the caterpillars, and cats ate the geckoes, and then the concentrated DDT killed the cats. Now the rats proliferated, creating an outbreak of typhus and plague. In the end, the World Health Organization had to air-drop 14,000 cats into Dyak territory.

You can hear the story on April 25 at 9:00 PM on Vision TV. The show is the fourth in a five-part series called "Reinventing the World," produced by Asterisk Productions of Victoria, BC. The first show – on food – aired April 4. "Work and Time" is on April 11, "Cities" on April 18, and the final show, "Cultivating Change," runs on Thursday, May 3. The series is hosted by Des Kennedy, a noted author, gardener and activist. Participants include such luminaries as Jane Jacobs, Frances Moore Lappe, Jeremy Rifkin, Bill McKibben, Maud Barlow and Stewart Brand (of Whole Earth Catalog fame). This is a star-studded cast.

The series displays some oddities, notably Kennedy's wild orange hair, and the fact that he seems to do a whole show on cities without ever leaving his rural retreat. This is slow-paced, thoughtful television, full of talking heads. But the heads talk well, and the series is important. It attempts to pull together many separate themes which *seem* disconnected, but aren't – just as the mosquitoes of Borneo were connected to its cats and rats.

The series shows us theologians who talk about work, urban anthropologists who finance the business ideas of the poor, chefs who went into organic farming because they no longer trusted the food they were preparing. By 2006, half the world's people will live in cities - so the future of cities is in large part the future of humanity. Can they be made sustainable? Many of us are grossly overworked, while others can't find work at all. Is this the way we want to live? Is food a commodity, or a right? Does purchasing stuff make us happy?

"Reinventing the World" enters our living rooms just as the protesters and the police prepare for their next bitter confrontation at the April 20-22 Summit of the Americas in Quebec City. Not for a generation have we seen angry people swarming the streets, as we did in Seattle, Prague, Davos and Washington, and the list of their outrages – *our* outrages, surely – seems endless: the gap between rich and poor, the vanishing welfare state, scary cities and vacant countrysides, the failing environment, the corporate war on democracy, adulterated food, patented genes, the looming energy crunch, the criminalization of protest, and much else.

"Reinventing the World" contends that all these issues are fundamentally connected, though not all the people involved in them realize it - yet. Uniting those people in an irresistible coalition, says Maude Barlow, is the top item on the democratic agenda. The show which probes those fundamental relationships is the one on economics.

The economy, says author David Korten, is a system of power which allocates resources. The basic unit in the economy could be the household, which is focussed on the total well-being of all its members - but instead it is the firm, which is focussed on the owners' profits. The non-profit sector, Maude Barlow points out, is usually ignored, but it actually employs more people than the private sector, and if it were a separate economy it would be the world's eighth-largest.

Our present economy, says Amory Lovins, evolved when resources were plentiful but workers were scarce. It extracts the maximum output from workers by mechanizing and minimizing their work, but it is wasteful of resources. Today, however, workers are plentiful but resources are becoming scarce. We need to seek more productivity from resources, not people. We need new instruments, like the Genuine Progress Index, the guaranteed annual income and the various alternative government budgets proposed by non-profit organizations.

Two values underlie the movement for change, says David Korten - life and democracy. We are ruled by unelected corporate executives who view the world simply as a storehouse of resources. Instead we need truly democratic governance which reveres both the earth itself and the people it sustains.

More than 30,000 non-government organizations in North America alone are working on these issues, notes author Paul Hawken, and they should start to think differently about themselves. They are not freaks on the fringe. They represent the future - and they will prevail.

Copyright © 2001, Silver Donald Cameron

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