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Economics for the people: "In addition to saving on imports of diesel of fossil fuel origin and curbing pollution, the point of the plan is to promote social development by boosting smallholder agriculture."

RIO DE JANEIRO, Oct 26 (IPS) - The physic nut tree, which has a lifespan of over 40 years, is resistant to drought and benefits small farmers, is a potential source of biodiesel in Brazil, as is the babassu, a coconut palm from the eastern Amazonian region.

Socio-economic units will not only have to fulfill peoples social and economic needs, but also their cultural aspirations. Culture denotes all sorts of human expressions. Culture is the same for all humanity, though there are differences in cultural expression. The best means of communicating human expressions is through one's mother tongue, as this is most natural. If people's natural expression through their mother tongue is suppressed, inferiority complexes will grow in their minds, encouraging a defeatist mentality and ultimately leading to psycho-economic exploitation. Thus, no mother tongue should be suppressed.

Back at the turn of the millennium, the local government I was working for asked community members to contribute their vision of the municipality in the year 2025. As an environmental planner, I attended the community's presentations with some interest.

One group that responded was a gifted- students' club from an elementary school. In their envisioned future, they imagined a community with only indoor parks. Beyond these parks, there would be no trees, no plants, no birds, and no animals. Freshwater would be gone, because lakes and streams would either be dried up or too polluted to support life; drinking water would have to be created from desalinization plants on the coast. In the future these children predicted, universities and colleges would be closed because everyone would learn -- alone -- through their personal computers.

The Ministry of Mines and Minerals says it may lift the ban on asbestos mining. It is ignoring the views of exposure victims, informed recommendations of public sector medical experts, and mounting evidence of an asbestos disease epidemic emerging in developed countries. The rationale to permit mining is hollow, writes Gopal Krishna.

For the past century, human beings had the agricultural capacity, the technology and the organizational skills to feed every last person on the planet. Yet, marching along into the 21st century, 80 percent of the world's population lives in absolute poverty - economically defined as missing one or more of the five fundamental necessities of life, i.e., food, clothing, shelter, health care and education. Millions of people have died of neglect, disease, malnutrition and starvation. In large part they have died because precious funds went instead to feed the war machine, also called euphemistically as "military expenditures" or "milex." More recently these costs are referred to not even as military expenditures but as "defense expenditures." This change was wrought in 1947 when the extant Department of War was renamed to Department of Defense. George Orwell referred to these nefarious terminological twists as "doublethink" and "doublespeak."

The driving force behind the Cold War, which was continued by Ronald Reagan through the 1980s and continued to the extreme with 9/11, was fear. If a government can manage to instill high levels of fear into the populace, that government can do anything it wants, in the name of alleviating that fear. Hence the American people always said 'yes' to wars.

The next image of the future which is increasingly gaining adherents is that of global collapse. This image is constituted in various discourses. The first is the economic. In this perspective, the world economic system's inability to deal with increasing levels of inequity (within nations and between nations), the international debt load, and rising speculation in the global stock markets will lead to a global collapse of epic proportions. Areas integrated into the world capitalist system will be particularly hard hit; those areas that are self-reliant will manage, though. This image is also constituted in the language of the return of the Vengeful God. Because Man has tampered with nature (through technological development--genetic engineering, space exploration, overindustrialization), nature is now striking back--we can't escape our collective karma. What will result is environmental catastrophes such as the Greenhouse effect, earthquakes, nuclear meltdowns, water shortages, and other wonderful things one can ponder while one falls asleep at night. Religious groups, in particular, are eagerly awaiting this event, or series of events. For many it is the Armageddon, the return of Christ, the Madhi, or Amita Buddha. It is the collapse of the hope and promise of the science and technology revolution, of the rationality of the enlightenment, and of liberal democracy. While some imagine this collapse as leading to the arrival of heaven on earth, most see this world as that of the rise of the worst of humans, a post-nuclear society ruled by the mighty.

A few days ago a journalist asked me my views about the destructive effectiveness of atom bombs and their future reaction on the human race. Ordinarily, I do not have any contact with journalists. But I did give a reply to this question. I said, "Human strength is much more powerful than the strength of atom bombs." Therefore, to think that atom bombs will annihilate the human race is nothing but to defame human intellect and psychic power because atom bombs are the creation of human beings. Human beings are the creators of atom bombs, so how can atom bombs destroy human beings?

This new era, however, for Sarkar is not one that pits spirituality against science. Sarkar believes that technological development controlled by non-capitalists, by humanists, will lead to increased economic growth, intellectual development and social equality. Sarkar, in fact, sees the development of technology that will have "mind" in it, that is, technology that will have some level of self-awareness. Most likely this will result from developments in artificial intelligence. Sarkar also forecasts that once full employment is reached, and once the untapped potential of humans, individually and collectively, is increasingly realized, instead of massive unemployment because of productivity gains from robotics, we will simply reduce our work week, such that "one day, we may only work five minutes a week. Being not always engrossed in the anxiety about grains and clothes, there will be no misuse of mental and spiritual wealth. [We] will be able to devote more time to sports, literary discourses and spiritual pursuits."22 Struggle then will largely be in intellectual and spiritual realms; in the constant effort to reduce the gap between the finite and the infinite, between the present and the ideal future.

NAIROBI (AFP) – A baby hippopotamus that survived the tsunami waves on the Kenyan coast has formed a strong bond with a giant male century-old tortoise, in an animal facility in the port city of Mombassa, officials said.