ARE WE finally waking up to the fact that our way of life - what we call our civilization - cannot last forever?

For years I have been telling anyone who will listen (and that's not many) that the whole idea of infinite economic "growth" is absurd.

There is only a certain amount of countryside to build houses on, only a certain amount of natural resources to exploit, only so far that we can go in raping and pillaging the earth before we have ruined it beyond the point of repair.

There have been plenty of people saying the same thing in a much more articulate and informed way - people like the American green philosopher John Zerzan, the controversial Ted Kaczynski and other voices of what is called the primitivist movement.

But they have always been regarded by mainstream culture as real extremists whose message - that we have to dismantle our entire industrial society if we are to survive as a species - is simply beyond the pale.

But now I detect change in the air. This seems to have been brought on by the current economic meltdown, which has opened many people's eyes to the fact that the capitalist system is far from stable and that our comfortable modern lives are highly precarious.

The financial crisis itself does not spell the end of civilization, of course, but I suppose it has given a sort of taster of the way things are likely to pan out over the next few decades.

And it has reinforced awareness that what we are witnessing is a general pile-up of a number of crucial long-term issues that are all coming to a head at the same time.

Climate change has been on the agenda for a while now, but wider environmental impacts are also registering more strongly on the public mind.

Take this report posted on the BBC website on October 29: "The planet is headed for an ecological "credit crunch", according to a report issued by conservation groups.

"The document contends that our demands on natural resources overreach what the Earth can sustain by almost a third.

"The Living Planet Report is the work of WWF, the Zoological Society of London and the Global Footprint Network.

"It says that more than three quarters of the world's population lives in countries where consumption levels are outstripping environmental renewal.

"This makes them 'ecological debtors', meaning that they are drawing - and often overdrawing - on the agricultural land, forests, seas and resources of other countries to sustain them.

"The report concludes that the reckless consumption of 'natural capital' is endangering the world's future prosperity, with clear economic impacts including high costs for food, water and energy."

Our nature-wrecking civilization has been built on oil, which is used for everything from plastics to fertiliser, as well as fuel, and without the impossible dream of everlasting oil supplies we cannot have the everlasting economic growth on which the industrial vision depends.

The theory of Peak Oil has been lurking under the media radar for some years now and, after years of denial and ostrich-like head-in-the-sand activity, this is also now apparently being faced up to as a reality.

Says a report in The Financial Times: "Output from the world’s oilfields is declining faster than previously thought, the first authoritative public study of the biggest fields shows.

"Without extra investment to raise production, the natural annual rate of output decline is 9.1 per cent, the International Energy Agency says in its annual report, the World Energy Outlook, a draft of which has been obtained by the Financial Times.

"The findings suggest the world will struggle to produce enough oil to make up for steep declines in existing fields, such as those in the North Sea, Russia and Alaska, and meet long-term demand. The effort will become even more acute as prices fall and investment decisions are delayed.

"The IEA, the oil watchdog, forecasts that China, India and other developing countries’ demand will require investments of $360bn each year until 2030.

"The agency says even with investment, the annual rate of output decline is 6.4 per cent.

"The decline will not necessarily be felt in the next few years because demand is slowing down, but with the expected slowdown in investment the eventual effect will be magnified, oil executives say."

With the Daily Telegraph reporting that "a global shortage of oil within five years poses a bigger threat to the UK than terrorism", it looks as if Peak Oil is finally being taken seriously.

The result of all these factors seems to be that it is at long last becoming acceptable to say publicly that we have messed things up, that "progress" was a lie all along and we are going to have to think again about the way we are heading.

A fascinating article in The Guardian compares the collapse of Mayan civilization with what is happening to us today.

It quotes anthropologist David Webster as saying: "Their population growth was like driving a car faster and faster until the engine blew up. Look at us. I'm 65. When I was born there were two billion people in the world, now we're approaching seven billion. That's extraordinary. The western conceit is that we can have it all - and call it progress. I'm glad I'm not 30 years old. I don't want to see what's coming in the next 40 to 50 years."

Personally, I will be campaigning for an official posthumous pardon to be issued forthwith to the Luddites - they saw all this coming, after all!

SERIOUS question marks about the British state and its commitment to democracy are raised by a fascinating report which appeared in The Guardian on Monday January 14.

It stated:

"The British government considered backing a rightwing coup in Italy in 1976 to prevent the rising Italian Communist party from taking power, recently released documents have revealed.

"Foreign Office planners wrote in May 1976 that 'a clean surgical coup' to remove the Communists from power 'would be attractive in many ways', according to documents obtained from the British national archives and published yesterday by the Italian newspaper La Repubblica.

"But planners concluded the idea was 'unrealistic' since it could lead to 'prolonged and bloody' resistance by Italian communists, a potential civil war and even intervention by the Soviet Union.

"At the height of the cold war, alarm bells were ringing in London as the governing Christian Democrats grew weak through infighting while Enrico Berlinguer's Communists edged closer to taking power in elections due to be held in June.

"'(Berlinguer's) entry into government would create a serious problem for Nato and the European Community and could turn out to be an event with catastrophic consequences,' Sir Guy Millard, the British ambassador to Rome, wrote in a memo quoted by La Repubblica. Officials argued that if Communist ministers joined the government, sensitive Nato documents would be sent to Moscow.

"A Foreign Office memo in April had listed options for tackling the Communist ascendancy, ranging from financing rival parties to 'subversive or military intervention against the Italian Communist party'.

"Fears receded as the Christian Democrats finished 4% ahead of the Communists in the lower house of parliament."

Or did they? It's hard to believe that a powerful right-wing network that seriously considered backing a bloody military coup d'etat would have any moral qualms about fixing an election...

In any case, what business did the British government have in trying to alter the course of democracy in Italy in the first place?

Articles like these provide an all-too-rare glimpse into the nefarious real world behind the comforting facade of pseudo-normality with which the mainstream media traditionally helps to  hide the crimes and hypocrisy of our rulers.

But it is interesting to note that The Guardian fails to mention that the 1976 British government considering backing a 'rightwing coup' in Italy was a Labour one!

An update. I have come across one or two (well, three actually) more interesting links on the Kenyan situation:

No Justice, No Peace!

Kenya Indymedia

CIA involvement in Kenya

THE MORE I read about current events around the world, the more I become aware of how little I actually know about what is going on.

A good example is the disputed Kenyan election and the bitter and bloody conflict it has provoked.

Following the initial reports suggesting possible electoral fraud on a huge scale, media reports switched to the line that the violence was basically tribal.

There was also a change in the official position of the USA. Initially a statement from the US Embassy in Kenya declared: "We ask all candidates to accept the Commission's final results and to urge their supporters to reject violence and respect the rule of law. Regardless of the eventual winners of this election, we call on Kenyans across the political spectrum to work together to advance democracy and national development."

But later, as various bodies inside and outside of Kenya condemned the way the election had been run, the US modified its position to one of vague concern about the democratic process - while falling short of condemning President Kibaki.

All this left me feeling a little uneasy. It looked horribly as if what had happened was that the ruling regime - realising it had lost the election - had fiddled the figures and then decided to use brute force to crush any popular uprising.

The way that the USA had instinctively supported the regime, and that our own media had been downplaying the political significance of what was happening, made me feel that the US and possibly the UK were in some way complicit in what was going on - protecting certain western commercial interests, perhaps?

Over the New Year, I watched the excellent film The Constant Gardener, based on the John Le Carre novel, which told a (fictional) tale of murderous big business involvement in Kenya, aided and abetted by British intelligence networks. 'Could there be some thematic link here?', I wondered.

But the trouble was - and still is - that I simply don't know enough about Kenyan politics to reach a fully informed verdict. Searching the internet for some analysis that probes beneath the purely superficial has not been much help, though I did find this short but intriguing account on a site called African Crisis:

"We had an election on December 27, 2007. The two presidential candidates were President Mwai Kibaki (a social democrat in the mold of Thabo Mbeki), and a Marxist named Raila Odinga (who is our Kenyan version of Jacob Zuma). Odinga studied Engineering in Communist East Germany in the 1960s, and has named his son Fidel Castro.

"Kibaki rigged the election with the support and encouragement of the West. Kibaki's government has a close working relationship with the American CIA and FBI agencies, as well as with the British MI6 and Israeli Mossad. Kenya co-operates with those organizations in fighting Al-Qaeda, which carried out terrorist attacks in Kenya in 1998 and 2002. On the other hand, Odinga has been critical of the way in which the Kenyan government and the West, have treated Kenyan Muslims accused of extremist ties. The vast majority of Kenyan Muslims (as well as most Kenyan tribes) supported Odinga.

"In the initial electoral count, Odinga had 4.3 million votes, compared to Kibaki's 3.7 million. Odinga carried 5 out of Kenya's 8 Provinces. But the Electoral Commission of Kenya announced Kibaki the winner with 4.5 million votes compared with Raila's 4.3 million. Kibaki received an additional 800,000 votes from nowhere. The West hailed Kibaki's victory, with the full knowledge that the election was massively rigged."

Does this have the ring of truth about it? Does anyone out there have any more information or analysis they can point me to? I'm dying to fill in all those yawning gaps in my knowledge and make some sense of what is happening over there!

DO YOU ever stop to think about the language used in media reporting and the political angles that can lie behind it?

A good example came in a report on the BBC website (December 4) about the kidnapping of five Britons in Iraq.

It stated: "The Britons - four guards and a computer expert - were kidnapped by Iraqi criminals disguised in police uniforms who initially took them to a Shia suburb."

When I read this line, I assumed from the word "criminals" that some kind of ransom was being demanded for the Britons - it is not unknown for local gangsters to take advantage of the chaos over there for their own purposes.

However, further down the article we read: "In the tape, filmed in front of a banner with a Shia emblem and dated 18 November, the kidnappers demand the withdrawal of British forces within 10 days - a deadline which has passed."

It is therefore clear that their purpose is purely political. In most contexts we would refer to people like the kidnappers as "resistance fighters" or "guerrillas", although the term "insurgents" seems to be preferred in Iraq.

But "criminals"?

This is the kind of language Stalin or Hitler used to describe their opponents, denying them even the right to be seen to have an opinion or a cause.

Does it really have a place in the kind of "objective" reporting we are told is provided by the BBC? What exactly is going on here?

STATES of emergency seem to be in fashion at the moment.

First it was Burma, where Buddhist priests were dragged off the streets and the public frightened into submission by the military regime, while the US and its allies looked on and tutted.

Then it was Pakistan, where judges were arrested, protesting lawyers attacked by riot police in the streets and protests crushed by the state, while the US and it allies looked on and tutted - only a little less loudly, because Pakistan is in fact one of the aforementioned allies.

And now Georgia has joined in the fun, declaring a state of emergency (with the usual bans on protests and so on) because, it seems, the opposition were getting too vocal in its criticisms of a "corrupt and authoritarian government that has mismanaged the economy".

In this country, we have been treated to a dire warning, by the highly respected head of our own secret police, of the thousands of terrorists in our midst and the prospect of yet more police powers to monitor and imprison anyone they take a dislike to.

The justification behind all this is that we are allegedly fighting a War on Terror, which is so broadly defined that it can be declared to be ongoing for as long as is politically convenient.

Because of this, we are told, we must be prepared to relinquish certain civil liberties and old-fashioned qualms about things like invading other countries or torturing foreigners.

I get the impression it wouldn't be difficult for the authorities to push this all up another notch and stamp out what's left of our right to privacy or free speech.

And at the same time as it happens here, it will no doubt be happening simultaneously in the USA, Australia, France, Germany etc etc.

Why not get it all over with now and declare a Permanent Global State of Emergency, PGSE for short, allowing our rulers to dispense with all that bothersome nonsense of pseudo-democracy and conditional free speech and to keep us under tight control in the ruthless, hard-nosed, jack-booted fashion that clearly fills them with thrills in their twisted power-lusting daydreams?