I'll start my response to Sally's challenge by commenting on this article which I pulled off the Ottawa Citizen's Internet Site on this fine Sunday before I go to church. After reading Ed's thoughtful piece, with many good comments, I was left feeling unsatisfied with his answer. Perhaps it is my apocryphal skepticism about the results of linear projections or perhaps I read too much science fiction as an adolescent, whatever. The fact that the population had doubled in my lifetime, that 6 billion consume a lot more than three billion has to be a fact that eventually impresses itself on the fabric of the Earth and our puny economic systems. The following article, I would maintain is but the beginning of the destabilizing forces about to be unleashed by El Nino on a world that doesn't want to react to them, but which will be forced to by the end of 1998. I have no doubt that these effects will create employment, whether it is paid for or not. We have created a finely tuned financial system in which much of the slack - redundancy has been taken out under the neo-cons guise of efficiency. What is left, works like a finely tuned piece of machinery and forgets the axiom of the weakest link. Any complex system is only as strong as its weakest link. Our weakest link in my opinion is the shift of income distribution from the income from work to the income from investment. And income from investment comes from constantly producing a surplus, i.e. profit. Should a significant number of agricultural, mineral and manufacturing systems start to fail because of the environment, the next thing to fail is the distribution of income through the speculation of increased profits which is what is currently stock and currency markets of the world. When economic systems fail, it has a domino effect, as all those with capital try to remove their capital and hoard it so they are in a position to capitalize by investing in shortages where capitalism really can make big profits. As the speculators, nice guys like you and me with a job managing a pension fund or a stock portfolio find themselves facing disaster, they will do what they have to do to protect themselves. If that means shutting down a pulp mill or closing an automobile factory, so be it, to them, their job is to protect the capital entrusted to them and to find somewhere, somehow, a way to make a profit. We only have to go back to the Middle Ages to see that hoarding, local warfare, rioting become the norm as the rich protect themselves with soldiers while the poor watch their children starve. Now if this seems very negative, the following article needs to be read and reflected on with much more insight than just information and "isn't that terrible, those poor people" which is the attitude of those not being affected. First and foremost, Mother Earth has its own needs which we have been happily violating under the guise of making life better for all of us. Bertrand Gross quipped in Friendly Fascism, "Ecological irresponsibility can pay - for the entrepreneur but not for society as a whole." Those farmers who started the individual fires now out control, did so for reasons that were economic- they had to clear more land to plant more crops to make more money so they could get on in the world. Second, we must remember that the current GDP method of determining the state of economic health will show healthy growth rates in all the countries affected, even if all the economic activity is just to return things to the current status quo and then after a time, we will be told these countries are not keeping up because their new GDP figures are not as high as the ones after the disaster. Third, though their desire to improve themselves is laudable in current neo-con thinking, and the fringe effects of their actions on millions of people were unforeseen, still to those experiencing them very real and where not part of their plans for their future. This is one of the side effects of self interest rather than communal interest and it has been going on exponentially since Adam Smith first laid out the rules of the capitalistic game. I might add that the rich in this case will suffer equally with the poor, which must be a disturbing thought - of course, they could always kick $250,000 into the pot and emigrate to Canada. The fact that many people believe that they saw something in the sky could lead to a mass religious movement or panic. The placebo of science, that it is just a light refraction, does not hold much weight when your mother has just died or children are crying all night because they can't sleep for the smoke inhalation. Also the majority of those people are not educated and therefore do not have much faith in our western religion of science - be prepared for anything, even Europeans at the turn of the century turned out by their tens of thousands in Spain because they believed the Virgin Mary had made an appearance. Next, we have to look at what is happening in relation to the carbon cycle and greenhouse gases. Burning wood releases carbon in two forms (my science is shaky so don't hold me to this), first in the form of a gas, carbon dioxide and secondly as soot or ash which is carbon particles. All this carbon was held out of the worlds atmosphere by life, living plants, fire releases it which upsets the balance between oxygen which we breathe and carbon dioxide which is not healthy for us. The soot, smoke and ash represent carbon which is in the atmosphere and now does two things, it holds more of the suns heat, warming the world and making such natural cycles as El Nino more extreme, while at the same time blocking sunlight which is needed for photosynthesis which creates plant life which we depend on for food. As this is the second, (at least) disaster, as reported in the article, George Bush's little adventure in the Middle East, by pissing off a madman by the name of Saddam, whom we at the world level have sanctified by gutting the powers of the UN - mainly through the efforts of the US in refusing to act with the world community while pretending to lead it - in the direction of its own self interest, of course. One has to ask the question of those who study these things, how many shocks can the Earth take of this magnitude before serious or irreparable damage is done? So now I can come back to Sally's challenge with an answer. The question is irrelevant. Much bigger questions have to be answered and of course, this may not be the forum do it as we are focusing on the effect (unemployment or under employment) rather than the cause. And if we start to examining causes, we will find ourselves moving away from the local effect to the global causes. If we examine global causes, we must talk of global solutions and we don't live in a global world politically. Politically, we live in a bunch of nation states, each trying to look after their own self interest and screw the global picture. However, we do live in a global economy - capitalism, which is self interest of those who control, seek or use capital. However their self interest is very narrow and focused on their personal accumulation of more at the expense of the rest. So to summarize my rant, I am coming to believe that our current unemployment causes are systemic to the systems of economic thought that we utilize and our powerlessness is the fact that we live in a global environment managed by boundried nation states who cannot and will not relinquish authority to a global political body. Like the Titanic, our ship of state is about to run into the iceberg while the Captain and the crew are basking in self congratulatory praise and the passengers are enjoying themselves in their respective classes. Going among the passengers, it is impossible to focus their attention on the possible problem, they are deciding important things like what wine to have for dinner and who's making it with who. The officers and crew, are secure in their professionalism and are not about to have an outsider redefine their responsibilities and the owners of the ship are confident that even if the Captain, crew and passengers are lost through some accident, they are safe due to due to their ownership and wealth and could easily build another ship for future profits. With this sort of setup, the only change will come after the disaster. Saturday 27 September 1997 Descent into darkness A doctor examines patient at a health clinic in Jambi, on the island of Sumatra LONDON - It is the world's largest and most deadly "pea-souper," a dense, acrid fog that has blanketed not just whole cities, as happened in London in the 1950s, but a huge area of Southeast Asia. >From the fleshpot beaches of Phuket in Thailand to the southern Philippines, the islands surrounding the Java Sea and even Papua New Guinea, the poisonous smog envelops an area that is home to more than 70 million people. The tourist guides describe the rainforests of south Sumatra and Kalimantan as the "lungs of the Earth." But those lungs are now aflame and spewing out clouds of smoke, choking and frightening the young and old, frail and healthy as it spreads across the map. Everywhere the symptoms are the same: watering eyes, a heavy, shortness of breath, itching skin, a tickle in the throat and the feeling of being about to choke. The bitter smell of smoke pervades everything. The lack of sunlight - one wakes to a morning mist that never clears - oppresses the spirit. Soot cakes furniture indoors, covers clothes in grime and flavors the food. Drinking water has an unpleasant aftertaste. One can wash, but the dirt soon returns. People stay indoors, windows and doors shut tight. The streets are deserted. As one householder explained, at the beginning of last week they could see the houses on the other side of the road. Then only the road was visible. Finally, the road disappeared. Pollution-related illnesses are believed to have already killed hundreds of people. But the smog appears to have played a major indirect role in the loss of many other lives. Two ships collided in the Straits of Malacca on Friday with the loss of 29 crewmen; an Indonesian jet crashed in northern Sumatra, killing all 234 people aboard. In a region whose self-confidence has been severely shaken in recent weeks, the smog has been interpreted in the region as another symbol of disaster. Currency crises and slumps on the stock markets in several countries showed that the "Asian Tigers," some of the world's fastest-growing economies, are no longer roaring. The skyscrapers in the Malaysian capital of Kuala Lumpur, symbols of the region's wealth, were barely visible last week. The Petronas Twin Towers, the world's tallest building, was just a ghostly form in the mist. The whole region appeared to be in the grip of an apocalypse. One Malaysian newspaper was overwhelmed by calls from people fearing that they had seen something extra-terrestrial in the heavens. What they had in fact witnessed was the refraction of sunlight by smoke particles in the atmosphere. Claude Martin, director-general of the Swiss-based World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), described the situation as worse than a regional emergency, more "a planetary disaster." Some environmental experts say the fires raging in Borneo are a greater threat to world health than the inferno that gripped the Gulf oilfields at the end of the war against Iraq. That was a case of arson, a parting gesture by Saddam Hussein's defeated armies. These fires were also started deliberately, but not out of vengeance. Farmers and plantation owners were burning brushwood and forest to clear the land. But the fires have gone out of control - the peat soil is also aflame - fueled by tinder-dry conditions, the result of the region's worst drought for 50 years. That drought is believed to have been caused by the disruption to the world climate caused by El Nino, the movement of a vast mass of warm water in the Pacific. Malaysia has sent reinforcement firemen to help put out the fires in neighboring Indonesia, but the blazes seem certain to burn for a long time yet. Only prolonged monsoon rain can put them out. But the prospect of a downpour seems remote. The peat swamp forest could smoulder for months to come. Borneo's lowland tropical rainforests are some of the richest ecosystems in the world. Elephant, deer and tigers are under threat. The orangutans may be driven out of the forests. The long-term impact on the health of the countries in the grip of the haze - Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, the Philippines, Singapore, Papua New Guinea and Thailand - is impossible to gauge. City-dwellers in South-East Asia already breathed a noxious cocktail of car-exhaust fumes and industrial waste. Those with existing respiratory illnesses, eye and skin irritations and heart complaints will now find their conditions severely aggravated. But those hitherto free of such diseases may start developing them. The beaches of southern Thailand have been plunged into semi-darkness; the consequences for the country's tourist industry could be disastrous. And with factories throughout the region having to scale down activity, the world economy could also be hit, with prices rising in the electronics industry, which the region dominates. There seems little that the authorities can do. One Malaysian minister suggested that two million people should be moved out of harm's way, but this idea was dismissed as impractical. Another proposal was to sprinkle water from the skyscrapers to dissolve the soot. Many people have resorted to the few countermeasures available to them. They lock themselves indoors whenever possible and the price of surgical masks has more than doubled since the smog descended. GATEWAY | FRONT PAGE | CITY | SPORTS | BUSINESS | NATIONAL | WORLD | EDITORIALS ENTERTAINMENT | YOUR MONEY | INTERNET | COLUMNISTS | CLASSIFIED Praise or criticism? 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