The Earth Hearing

by Daniel Plonix

  “Rather than present the complex totality of the dominant economic scheme,” said Aratta, “I will highlight its defects.

  “It is befitting to start off this discussion with the large-scale endeavor that was the forerunner of much to come. It took place a few centuries ago.” Aratta signaled to Puddeck.

  The man in violet briefly inclined his head. “It was a grand vision,” opened Puddeck. “It galvanized untold number of people and transformed the demographics of entire continents. It was something that truly mattered to the Earth people and drove them to extraordinary sacrifices. Countless gave their only life on Earth for its fulfillment. Ladies and gentlemen,” announced Puddeck and paused for the effect, “the goal was nothing short of adding sugar to marmalade and tea of the moneyed class in Western Europe.”

  Some of the commissioners chuckled at the triviality.

  “To that end, millions upon millions of enslaved people were ferried across an ocean and pressed into duty in vast plantations in the West Indies and Brazil. And let me assure you, there was nothing trifle about extracting and refining sugar; it was backbreaking, miserable, fraught with setbacks. And went on year-round.

  “With primitive tools, the laborers cleared the fields and planted sugar canes. The weeding work was interminable. If the canes survived the weather, the fire, the wind, and the foraging animals—then nine to sixteen months later, they were ready to be harvested. Cutting the canes was tricky, though. The timing had to be just right, and some canes reached maturation earlier than others.

  “The harvested stalks were bundled then made the journey by boats or oxcarts to the mill. This is where the enslaved were feeding the canes, day and night, into rollers—thus crushing the canes and extracting the liquid. The staff kept a crowbar and an ax by the rollers, so if a worker was caught in them, his mangled arms would be chopped off before the rest of the body followed the arms into the crushing rollers—thus preventing further damage to the costly sugar-making machinery.”

  The man in violet robe grinned but almost immediately sobered up.

  He continued, “The juice extracted from the canes was gathered and transported to the boiling house. Fed by a continuous train of carts bearing firewood, this was where roaring furnaces and bubbling cauldrons threw off intense heat waves and clouds of steam.” He reminisced, “At times, the boiling house got so hot, water had to be poured on the roof lest the shingles catch fire. As well as enduring the heat and the stench, the laborers were frequently burnt by the sugar.” Puddeck came out of his reverie and went on, “In the boiling house, the liquid extract passed through a battery of cauldrons heated to varying degrees. The process removed water and impurities, yielding a syrup-like substance.

  “This was followed by a lengthy cooling period in another building. Afterward, the viscose substance was poured into molds, and it hardened over the course of many days. Subsequently, water was poured over the sugar, repeatedly, week after week, to remove any lingering impurities.

  “Finally, the crystallized end-product was loaded onto ships for a voyage across the ocean, which took over a month.”

  Puddeck went on, “From the little wives at home to the entrepreneurs, everyone was on broad with the grand plan to sweeten tea with sugar, to spread molasses on bread, and to add it to porridge. Everyone was on board, except the workers. Hence, the refrain of the Portuguese, ‘Whoever wants to profit from his blacks must make them work well—and beat them even better.’ And beat them they did. With whips and hot irons, they drove the chronically hungry great masses of enslaved people. They fed misery and hardship of blacks on the front end and out came white crystals on the other end, to sweeten the day of the many, and to rot the teeth of the few, those truly fortunate to wallow in the pure extract.

  “I must say,” said Puddeck, “it is amazing what Terraneans can accomplish when they set their mind to it.”

  He bowed, his testimony concluded.

  “What about honey?” asked one of the commissioners.

  “Honey?” repeated Puddeck with uncertainty.

  “Your Graces,” said Aratta, “before sugar became big sugar, there was honey: the most common sweetener until that time in Europe. Selling honey in thirty-two-gallon barrels along with records of massive amounts of honey used annually in some monasteries are a testimony the volume was substantial across the continent. If memory serves me right, back in the day in England, honey cost no more than butter, which was cheap and abundant. In Paris, one could buy from street vendors honeyed gingerbread, Pain d’épices. And in Russia, they made cakes sweetened with honey.

  “The Europeans developed the tiered beehive, which accommodates the natural growth of the bee colony. They fashioned extensions, which allow harvesting the honeycomb without killing the bees. They also had good results with wintering colonies. In short, the technology and the existing resources could have scaled honey operations to accommodate any demand, really.”

  “Incredible. Why then go through with that horrendous sugar-production process, tyrannize people, and indirectly kill millions of enslaved laborers—rather than scale up honey production?”

  “This brings us to the crux of the matter, Your Graces,” said Aratta.

  “One can imagine a different economic setup, in which the industriousness, innovation, and experimentation that went into the mass production of sugar would have taken place among the beekeepers in Europe, increasing the production of honey, and making life sweet for all. Except that this was not the underlying economic system they’ve operated under.

  “Honey as a source of sweetener was superior in every meaningful respect but for two aspects eclipsing the rest: the consumption of sugar had a halo of status and the production of sugar lent itself to a pyramid setup, which allowed for few to amass power and prestige.”

  “Elaborate please,” said one of the commissioners.

  “For centuries prior, sugar had been regarded as a rare and exotic addition to the diet, one that separated the prestiged few from the riffraff many. Then there was the other reason. Sugar refining held the potential for few to make a killing in a pyramid-type economic structure. It offered people the chance to become filthy rich, and with it the ticket to enter the exclusive club of decadence and high status. In contrast, beekeeping was too…diffused, democratized. Across Europe, people of little means could have constructed and set up beehives and sell honey. With tens of thousands of honey harvesters, it would have been hard to become a honey tycoon.

  “It’s not that so much money gushed out of the sugar refineries, but it was highly concentrated. This allowed a few people to strike it big—and drove numerous people to have a go at it.

  “As is inherent to pyramid type schemes, many who pursued the dream of making it led a life of misery and suffered a commercial failure. They persevered through the crushing humid heat of the tropics, the cockroaches that scurried across their quarters, the mosquitoes that sucked their blood, and the chiggers that burrowed into their skins. They died off in droves from yellow fever and from rum inadvertently laced with lead.

  “Some who had a combination of enterprising spirit, ruthlessness, and luck did clamber atop the sugar economic heap. These fortunate ones commissioned the construction of imposing sprawling houses. They gorged themselves nightly on suckling pigs, turkey hens, muttons, and washed it down with wines and rum. They paraded around in suffocating, fashionable clothing in the tropical heat. They were the un­disputed avatars of success.

  “All of this does not get any more removed from community bonding, self-actualization, ecological considerations, and general welfare of society. In subsequent centuries, social conventions have tempered some of the exploitations and the vulgar displays of avarice. The fundamentals, however, have remained unaffected: negative externalities, privatization of shared resources, and capital flowing upward to the tip of the monetary pyramid.”

  “Are the active pursuits of
riches, fame, and prestige the driving motivation of most people on Earth?”

  “Your Grace, for the vast majority, these aspirations are just the giant, beckoning neon sign in the sky they live under. For most, ‘life creeps in a petty pace from day to day toward a dusty death.’ You will find them toiling in agriculture, retail, and food preparation. You will find them laboring as office clerks, sales representatives, and truck drivers.

  “Even so, people do not grumble much. It is maintained if they slave away yet acquire meager material possessions, they ultimately have no one to blame but themselves.”

  The presiding chair said, “I understand there are those worse off. In fact, we are informed slavery is alive and well on Earth.”

  “Indeed. At present, there are a few tens of millions of slaves: coerced to make bricks in Punjab, prospect for gold in Brazil, provide sex services in Venezuela, process fish in Bangladesh, cut sugar canes in the Dominican Republic, crawl into mine shafts in Ghana, beg in the streets of Albania. Slavery is no longer the significant investment it once was. These days, you recruit’em, use’em, and discard’em—as needed. Little reason to invest in their upkeep; there’s always a fresh stock of impoverished, vulnerable people who can be preyed upon. Slavery is also no longer tempered by government regulations or social norms, as was the case in some societies in the past.

  “Please understand,” said Aratta, “everything else being equal, the marketplace prefers wage slaves. That is to say, people who are motivated to seek out the taskmaster, ferociously competing for the privilege of working long, dreary hours. And people do just that if the employer’s pittance is the only route through which they can provide themselves with life necessities.

  “In a clothing factory in Gazipur, Bangladesh, the rural migrants toil from morning to midnight. The women are slapped, cursed, and yelled at to work faster. Always faster. In Arkansas, United States, in a chilly, greasy poultry processing plant, some people wear diapers as the opportunities of being granted bathroom breaks are far and few. The bruising, monotonous work must not be stopped. In Puglia, southern Italy, tomato pickers labor under a harsh sun for twelve hours, seven days a week, without breaks, and living in makeshift camps with no access to medical services. In the Gulf states, some of the foreign maids are forced to work from 6:00AM to midnight and are provided insufficient or spoiled food. Labor conditions of this economic class range from dreary and unfulfilling to downright atrocious, at which point the employers may install a suicide net around the building, as in an electronics factory in Shenzhen, China, for those workers who attempt to jump off and put an end to it all.

  “But back in the day, far fewer people participated in the global economy. Most of the land on Earth was not owned, and people had access and could live off it.

  “This is why the Iberian colonial settlers in Latin America had to coerce the Amerindians, and later the Africans, to do the grueling work of processing insane amounts of sugar: labor that held no value, meaning, or appeal to the ordinary villager. This is also why many escaped—and could subsequently become self-sufficient. There were still vast tracts of land beyond the control of the nascent global economy.

  “In the centuries to follow, a profound transformation has taken place. Rural communities have been rendered peripheral, hollow. And hundreds of millions have been flocking to the cities, becoming wage slaves.

  “Case in point is the makeover that came about in the United States,” Aratta said.

  “Economically viable farms had been the lifeblood of rural America. However, a few decades ago, the ground started to fall from under as small, diversified, family-run enterprises were driven out of business by colossal mechanized operations. And thousands of small farming communities have withered. The social upshot has been catastrophic, but such costs don’t compute in the dominant economic system on Earth.

  “The takeover by giant conglomerates has sapped not only the economic base from America’s rural communities but also their vitality. Often, the only hopes of the rural community for revenue are from hosting urban waste dumps and toxic waste incinerators. Often, the only hopes for jobs are from fracking and prisons.

  “Some small towns were converted to foul animal-factory towns. The concentrated feedlots produce vast amounts of manure and urine, which poison the air and pollute the water. From dignity, ownership, and livelihood, the landscape has become one of low paying, exploitative jobs, which many native locals want no part of. This has posed no problems, though. Migrants from poor rural territories have taken their place, bearing a very different set of expectations. Adding insult to injury, this has burdened the local municipalities with bilingual education, and the need for more law-enforcement services and public health care.”

  “Do the large-scale operations offer increased efficiency and hence lower production costs?” inquired one of the commissioners.

  “Not really,” said Aratta. “For instance, in the case of hogs, the economy of scale peaks at around one thousand heads, far below existing industrial-scale operations. In fact, concentrating vast number of animals imposes extreme demands on the land and on natural resources, from fuel to water. Indirectly, such a setup also requires more complex infrastructure and much longer supply chains.

  “Your Graces, a centralized operation is inferior to a decentralized one in almost every way that matters. The industrial and factory farming is a pyramid of gloom and woe with a glittering apex of capital. The net worth of one of the controlling agribusiness dynasties is estimated at over thirty billion dollars. Such concentrations of assets are the driving force behind the transformation of rural America.”

  The commissioners conferred in low voices.

  “You have touched upon an interesting point about access to land and control,” commented the presiding chair.

  “Your Grace, this is how it came to be that sharecroppers of varying stripes have been providing some of those who hold claims over sizable land areas with the fruit of their labor, making them well-off.” He pondered this for a moment. “Let me offer you an abridged, low-resolution account of what transpired in rural Guatemala and is pertinent.

  “Around 1950, approximately 2 percent of the population controlled 72 percent of Guatemala’s arable land, while 88 percent of the people held only 14 percent of the land. Almost half of the rural families had parcels too small to provide even the bare minimum needed for subsistence. Twenty-two owners controlled more agricultural land than about a quarter million rural families.

  “Enter Jacobo Árbenz, a newly-elected president of Guatemala. He aimed to affect a fundamental transformation in the circumstances of the vast majority of Guatemalan citizens.

  “The intent was to do away with the ‘feudal enterprise’ of many larger land estates. The intent was to distribute uncultivated, privately-owned land tracts among the great masses of peasants, many of whom had no recourse but to live as sharecroppers. During those years, the peasants were described as ‘barefoot, threadbare, badly clothed, exposed to the bites of vipers, always subject to the punishment of weather,’ while the great landowners ‘lived in the city, traveled through European countries, and played in Monte Carlo.’ The intent was to usher a capitalist-based, small-farm society with an emphasis on the individual farming family. To these ends, the government issued Decree 900.

  “The decree stipulated that all uncultivated, idle land holdings of more than 672 acres would be expropriated; uncultivated tracts between 224 and 672 acres may be expropriated under some conditions; and any smaller land holdings would be left untouched. The affected landowners would be compensated with agrarian bonds. The decree introduced a lifetime tenure system to prevent large landowners from simply buying back the parcels that were to be deeded to the peasants.

  “Concurrently, the government announced it would furnish a variety of crop seeds, tens of thousands of breeding chickens, and millions of tree seedlings to the beneficiaries of the refor
m. As a companion measure, a national bank was established to extend modest, yet vital, lines of credits to land recipients, helping them with their budding farming operations.

  “Yesterday, you heard a presentation about the economic model of strategic state capitalism, as exemplified by present-day China. Well, the agricultural reform in Guatemala was an expression of a state-led capitalism. In reality, all the economies on Earth are nudged or steered to some extent by their respective governments; it is but a matter of degree.

  “The immensely complicated social dynamics of rural Guatemala defy any simple account of what transpired next. However, overall, early indications were encouraging. Overall, things were looking up. A substantial number of rural Indians finally had, once again, unfettered access to the land and, with it, a chance to lead dignified lives. Or not.

  “A coalition spearheaded by the landed gentry and the urban middle class pushed back. CIA did its thing, the liberation forces made the president abdicate, and most peasants were chased off the land they had been recently deeded. A year and a half into the reform, it was all over.

  “It was blowback of epic proportions; in the subsequent decades, Guatemala sunk into darkness, transformed into a land of violence, repression, and mass atrocities. Tens upon tens of thousands of people were made to disappear.

  “The land-reform measure in Guatemala, Decree 900, was the unique convergence of factors and circumstances. Regardless, it underscores a few things of interest,” Aratta said.

  “Certain segments of humanity on Earth, or even whole countries, have raked in money not by being productive, but rather by the sheer claim over a natural resource within the territory they hold sway. This is how, back in the day, women in the island country of Nauru could afford to do their shopping in New York and Singapore; they resided on an island that at the time was rich with phosphate deposits.