Let the Feast Begin!

Our civilization has outgrown us, it is too big for us. In order to keep it running we need more people, and more resources to feed those people, and more places to take those resources from. We keep running, running ahead to the next place, the next land, the next conquest. But our universe cannot infinitely expand because we live on a finite planet; our civilization is a parasite eating itself up.

Of course, on the surface, everything is fine. The mail still comes everyday. The TV comes on, hums in the distance. We breathe clean air. We have transportation. We are the happy multitude.

We don't worry about bombs falling, lungs collapsing. We happy, earnest, healthy ones have the fullness of the world at our disposal. We can eat, drink, and be merry, with no thought of tomorrow, as the heat, and the cold, and the sickness set in—as economies crumble around us, steamrolled on our path of progress—as the Maldives drowns—as whales rush up, dead on the shores of our gutted seas—as the scientists plot new schemes of control—as the landfills fill, and the dams damn—all of us running like blind, frightened horses, as these vague specters of collapse eat away at the borders of our contentment.

We have expanding trade vortexes, growing garbage patches in the sea, falling forests, rising houses, deadened neighborhoods and dead-end streets cluttered with vacant mansions. More, More, More is all the machine asks for—for above all, the machine asks that it be put to work.

Use me, the machine asks. Make your life easier.
Join me, the machine-culture asks. Let me make your life easier.

I AM HEAVEN ON EARTH.
MORE STUFF, MORE PLEASURE.

More pleasing sensations: prolonged, expanded, lengthened, engorged. The machine-culture is a metaphysical erection of the ego, riding itself over nature, through nature, making her his own.

This feels good, do it.

Our acts take on this orgasmic tinge as we use each moment as a vessel of self-gratification.

It feels good, so do it.

We masturbate, listen to iPhones, drink sweet stuff, sit, relax, tune out. We see movies, play video games, walk/pet animals. Every moment the suburbanite lives, the child of suburbia lives, is instant gratification.

Welcome to the dungeon of a pleasure infinitely prolonged.

Welcome to modernity.

Words of Wisdom

As our generation confronts a physical landscape denuded and a mental landscape increasingly caged, corralled, and controlled, it becomes more and more difficult to maintain a vision of our world the way it used to be, that is, abundant, wild, and free.

We breathe the air of civilization from birth--the air of cities, of car exhaust and corroded plastic, of grease on the electric range and boiling milk in the microwave. Our visual horizon is ensnared in a panorama of large, man-(and woman-)made obstacles--cellphone towers and power lines, four-lane roadways, vacant buildings, gaudy box stores and immense, electric signs.

These modern, civilized encumbrances have an insidious effect on the life of our consciousness. Increasingly we struggle to think beyond the walls of the city, to envision realities not cloaked in steel, concrete, or glass. "Creativity" today denotes good web design; art has been sublimated to the values of corporatism, profit, development, and growth. Architects conjure new spaces increasingly more alienated from the spontaneous, organic character of the natural world.

Our nightly dreams unfold in urban environments. Our passions are wed to the city, to joining some comedy troupe in Chicago or LA, or playing live shows at some club in New York. Less and less are we able to see the rivers, the mountains and plains, the coastlines and deserts that remain the foundation of any healthy, functioning human community. We live in a world completely of our own making.

I thought of this today as I discovered a passage from Dave Foreman's "Confessions of an Eco-Warrior" in which he profiles the necessity of maintaining ties to our animal and earthly heritage in the midst of our highly technological and destructive civilization.

He writes:

"Society has lobotomized us. Our social environment today can work as a drug, like soma in Brave New World, to keep us in line, to sedate us, to remove our capacity for passion. Robots do not ask questions. Free men and women do. Wild animals cannot be ruled; they can be domesticated, yes, they can be broken, but then they are no longer free, no longer wild."

How are we to regain our lost connection to the Earth, to our Natural Environs, to our Instincts, our Intuition, our Primal Matrix (in the words of Chellis Glendinning), our Primitive Heart, with wild places being diminished, minimized, crushed, squandered, and "developed" day after day?

He ends on a poetic note, an uplifting one, that sends home the need for a spiritual overcoming if our generation is ever to come fully to grips with the needs (and desires!) of the natural world:

"We must break out of society's freeze on our passions, we must become animals again. We must feel the tug of the full moon, hear goose music overhead. We must love the Earth and rage against her destroyers. We must open ourselves to relationships with one another, with the land; we must dare to love, to feel for something--someone--else. And when that final kiss of life--death--comes, we mustn't hide, but rather go joyously into that good night."

Goose music and a little moonlit madness, anyone?

Generation Fallout

While walking through a thrift store in Portland the other day (hip, hip, hipster! capital of Oregon) a friend of mine looked around at all of the knick-knacks, the trinkets, the burned out television screens and pointless plastic smokeless ashtrays, and said, "The Sixties must have been an awesome time to be alive. Think about it--all of this technological junk floating around, convenience, with no thought about resource limits or ecological destruction . . ."

Yes, I thought. Damned are we to have been born at the end of the 20th Century.

This led me to think about my parents and grandparents, and most of their generation who live in the small town I live in, and how having been born in an Era Without Limits must severely limit their capacity to feel the urgency of the path of destruction our culture is now set on. I know many people in the older generation, who were ten to twenty years old in the 1960s, who seem content to go about their daily lives working jobs for meager paychecks until they can retire in the next decade. I think of the activists I have met in the past year, laboring away to stop Climate Change, Deforestation, Salmon Extinction, and how most of them will be dead when the bottom really begins to fallout--when all the salmon really DO die, when the Ogalalla auquifer dries and the Great Plains become the Great Desert, when the dollar caves in on itself, when our cancer rate goes from 1 in 3 to 1 in 1, when there are no longer streams fit for drinking, when corporations rule the world (Oh, wait, they're still around to see that one!) . . .

But still, I can't help feeling with my friend that we "young ones" are truly late born, born at the end of an era of cheap energy and seemingly abundant resources. Although as a whole our generation seems just as tuned out as our predecessors (more on that later), those of us who are contemplating a life after oil, or a life without water, or a life devoid of life, are really inheriting all of the consequences of our parents' and grandparents' blind devotion to the consumer ideal.

They have sown the wind--and we are reaping the whirlwind.

I picture an atomic bomb of mass industry dropped on the American continent, denuding forests, toxifying rivers, eliminating species, draining wetlands and aquifers, scraping sea beds, mutilating soil--and WE are the ones 50 years later inheriting the fallout from that early technological gamble.

How is it that many of us are still able to stumble along through the mass diversions of television and high-technology as though nothing has changed since 1950? How has college indoctrinated a new culture of consumption, careerism, and addiction to speed that refuses to question the consequences of its daily activity? How have we grown more alienated from the landbases and watersheds that support us, sustain us?

I think on a certain level we all have a foundational consciousness and premonition that the way of life we have inherited is broken, aged, and failing. Even the "friends" on Facebook posting pictures of their babies, and celebrating a college football victory, and boasting of new journeys to faraway places, and contemplating the wonder of newly married life--all of them seem to have a piece of sadness that they are hiding, a little bit of awareness that this way of life, this super-abundance, will someday have to end.

None of us can escape the warnings coming through daily on the radio and TV about food riots, rising tides, economic distress, and constant, agonizing conflict. Our mental environment has taken on the tone of crisis to reflect the ailing condition of our physical environment.

So I have coined a new term for anyone born from 1975 to the present: Generation Fallout.

The first generation to confront a landscape of diminishing possibilities, both ecological and material. The first generation to confront the future with dread, rather than with hope and excitement (some might note Spengler's talk in the 1920's of a similar condition, but the television/oil era of extravagant consumption did away with that . . . until now!).

There are several ways to keep the mill of delusion chugging along, pumping out new hopes despite the overwhelming evidence that the old hopes are dead. And I have no problem with hope and optimism so long as it is grounded in physical, and metaphysical, reality. But is the Green™ Movement grounded in reality? Does it take into account limits?

Will Technology save us in the end?

If we as a generation could accept our late-born status, and reconcile ourselves to the challenges we face--politically, ethically, materially, and, most importantly, spiritually--then we could really begin the work of building a new culture of grace and reciprocity from the ground up.

But this requires that we become exceedingly honest, both with ourselves and with each other. This means a lot of things, which I see so many people doing right now that it does give me hope. I've seen a lot of people transitioning from the sadness of realizing you live at the end of an era, to hope at realizing we live at the dawn of a new one.

But we also could use a little help from the early-born ones, who got to have a party at our (the future's) expense. They created a lot of wealth and now young people are graduating and can't find jobs. We can't build a culture with youth alone. So help--both fiscal and technical--is sorely needed. We need encouragement, mentoring, and leadership, so that we can confront the challenges that face us without any need to run away to hope in a distance, centralized authority.

So, all my OG's in the house-- where you at? Money, land, skills, housing, opportunities, anything. I am sure there are other orphans in a position similar to my own: no inheritance to look forward to, no property to sustain me in the end. Give us a safe haven, find a group of idealistic young people and let them have their way with your excess property and excess wealth.

Invest in the Future: Invest in Youth.™

A little to idealistic, perhaps!

Kunstler on the War Path

James Howard Kunstler, author of the notorious doom-and-gloom synopsis of our modern predicament "The Long Emergency," has posted a new piece about our current status as a nation on the path towards financial and social collapse.

He ends with this quote:

Americans look around and see nobody standing up for their interests. Their greatest interest is a vision of a fruitful society that they can help build and be a part of beyond the current wreckage of revolving-debt consumerism. It will have to be a vision based on fewer resources and on new arrangements for daily living. It will have to recognize losses frankly, and enable us to let go of things whose time is over, whether that is Happy Motoring, college-for-everybody, vast industries devoted to vanished leisure, or procedures geared to getting something-for-nothing.

Although we hear a lot about "recovery" these days, it's clear that we have not recovered from what Kunstler calls "a crisis of leadership," and what I'd even further call "a crisis of vision." The kind of "orgy of credit card spending" that, according to Kunstler, characterizes the past half-century of American development could only have come about by letting capital--and the love of money--trump culture and community.

We need a new vision of a world "based on fewer resources and on new arrangements for daily living," that's for sure. But is Washington going to provide that? Is anyone with a master's degree or Ph.D. going to suggest we actually scale back our civilization, both in terms of spending and actual, physical growth? (Of course, they'll counter with fancy arguments about how such a scaling back would lead to the deaths of millions, maybe even billions of people . . .)

No one in Washington, not Obama nor any of his economic advisers, is going to offer this new vision of a scaled-back, "zero-growth" society. And, as Kunstler notes, we can hardly count on our baby-boomer, liberal lefties to point a critical finger at the faulty premises of American development over the past fifty years (cheap energy, cheap resources, runaway deficits, etc. etc.).

We need leadership on the ground, it seems, to take this country back starting at the very roots of the problem.

Things Both Wild and Free: Religion (and the Farm) Comes Full Circle

Cultivation is pretty popular these days. With urban gardens, green roofs, and permaculture design courses becoming more and more vogue with the young, environmentally-sensitive left, it's easy for a lot of us to get carried away with the limitless possibilities of the human imagination and think that our salvation as a culture lies in converting more people to the cult of cultivation.

But in his essay, "Good, Wild, Sacred," philosopher/poet and man of the wilds Gary Snyder points out that the term cultivation has always been synonymous with the destruction of wild nature. "Good Land," in the sense that settlers of North America used the term, was land that was agriculturally productive. Only through a battle against all that crept into the cultivated area—plants deemed useless to humans (called 'weeds'), birds, insects ('pests')—was civilized man able to maintain a precarious hold on his own survival. Cultivation itself came to mean the very exclusion of these wild and unruly—that is, unpredictable and uncontrollable—life-forms from the landscape.

The holy man, who practiced spiritual cultivation, refined his nature by extinguishing the wild desires and animal yearnings from his heart, what Christians derided as "the passions," which so easily led one astray from the pastoral paths charted out by tradition. Cultivation, from the Latin root cultivare, denoted the end of all things both wild and free.

However, as it begins to dawn on agriculturalists and gardeners across the world that the manufactured and heavily managed monocultures of modern farming are waging a Pyrrhic war against the dynamics of wild nature, the notion that the food needs of the human community and the needs of vital, intact ecosystems might be able to cooperate in producing a viable system for survival on this planet is steadily gaining steam. Permaculturalists are pushing the rest of the food-producing community to take into account the intricate webs of interdependence and mutuality that characterize the local ecosystem in which they plan to grow food. Cultivation is steadily evolving—with deeper ecological knowledge, with more receptivity to the subtle fluctuations in climate and geography, with growing communion between civilized humans, their non-human neighbors, and the natural habitat that they share—to incorporate more aspects of wildness, and more principles of wild, uncontrolled nature, in human agricultural systems design.

Weeds are no longer fought with the trowel, but instead smothered with mulch, or crowded out with a cover-crop. Insects and birds are no longer seen as pests to exclude, but visitors to include, with a nod towards the ecosystemic benefits their interactions might produce. In fact, the very notion that a garden, or cultivated area, exists solely for the sake of human usage is withering more and more with each day. Wildlife Garden, Food Forest, Edible Landscape—whatever term these new forms of cultivation choose to go under, the outcome is largely the same: that which was formerly exluded (to the pain and exhaustion of so many generations of growers) is now allowed to enter the 'cultivated space,' so that the inscrutable workings of nature can create living landscapes out of the man-made deserts of ages past.

As with our cultivation of the land, so too with our souls. To cultivate the spirit—as the holy man or priest once did—is no longer an industry of exclusion and renunciation; passion, wildness, intuition, emotion, all of those frightful weeds the 'holy' ones among us once sought to uproot, are encouraged to not only flower, but to prepare the ground—as most weeds so often do—for the sowing of larger, hardier, and more resilient seeds. Weeds are pioneer species, and as such love the open, sun-baked soil between our garden rows. They flourish where the gentler, more aesthetically pleasing or more palatable species would never journey. The wildness of heart that the revered sages of the past tried to eradicate—is it not preparing to unleash itself with a fury hitherto unknown to civilized man?

Our task is no longer eradicating wildness in order to cultivate the spirit—but neither is it eradicating cultivation so that the spirit will run wild and free. Having been tethered from birth to the umbilical cord of modern civilization, and to the cultural eyeglasses of the modern age, the resurgence of wildness in our hearts requires a modest, and unintrusive, cultivation. Like the permaculture designer, we must yield in some ways, and guide in others, so that the re-emerging wildness can fully take hold, and eventually unleash a spiritual reawakening deeper, and more longlasting, than anything else in the history of human civilization.

We cannot hope to retrieve the wildness of those peoples who truly lived in concert with the land, nor can we hope to resurrect them. Our only salvation lies in a deeper plunging on, and a greater awakening of the wildness that still lives within us. For though we may be occupiers of this continent, with an empire extending across the globe, somewhere, deep within our breasts, lies a hidden, and unextinquished, flame of humanness that draws its lifesource from the earth, and more directly from the landscape we inhabit.

Freedom, Love, and Revolt

I was reading a passage by J. Krishnamurti today, and felt it deeply underscored the importance of maintaining a perspective of radical negation towards the values and practices that dominate the globalized, technologized world of today.

He writes:

"Life is very beautiful, it is not this ugly thing that we have made of it; and you can appreciate its richness, its depth, its extraordinary loveliness when you revolt against everything--against organized religion, against tradition, against the present rotten society--so that you as a human being find out what for yourself is true . . . To live is to find out for yourself what is true, and you can do this only when there is freedom, when there is continuous revolution inwardly, within yourself."

It was Nietzsche who wrote that a philosopher must be the "bad conscience of his times." Those of us who strive for a world of spiritual and political freedom must be courageous enough to cultivate a healthy critique of "common sense."

This is why we question the sanity of the larger society.

This is why we doubt the reasoning of those in power.

This is why we challenge all signs of authority, whether spiritual, political, medical, or scientific.

This is why we cringe when some techno-enthusiast touts bio-fuels or some other techno-fix as the great solution to keep our precarious civilization from running itself into the ground.

It is the task of the educator, Krishnamurti argues, to:

"create an atmosphere of freedom so that you can live and find out for yourselves what is true, so that you become intelligent, so that you are able to face the world and understand it, not just conform to it, so that inwardly, deeply, psychologically you are in constant revolt; because it is only those who are in constant revolt that discover what is true, not the man [or woman] who conforms, who follows some tradition."

How does our educational system function today?

I think Krishnamurti's depiction is still accurate, though it is decades old. Little has changed in the era of Industrialism:

"The world is torn by conflicting beliefs, by caste and class distinctions, by separative nationalities, by every form of stupidity and cruelty--and this is the world you are educated to fit into. You are encouraged to fit into the framework of this disastrous society; your parents want you to do that, and you also want to fit in."

We must continue asking questions, the kinds of questions that no one wants asked around a dinner table, among family or friends. We must do this, because to not do this is to cultivate fear, and fear is the absence of love as well as the absence of freedom.

It is by no means a comfortable position to act as "the bad conscience of the times." Unfreedom, a life of dependence--on gadgets, on money, on self-willed delusion--would be far more comfortable.

This is why unfreedom is so heavily celebrated in our culture. This is why we strive for the newest gadgets, the biggest televisions, the roomiest houses, the most luxurious cars. This is why "comfort" and "convenience" are the most celebrated values of modernity.

If the inward revolt is quelled, if the fires are put to rest while we are just old enough to imbibe commercials on TV, what risk remains of a living, outward revolt to those benefiting from our destructive civilization?

This is preemptive war on the spiritual front.

So let us cultivate a little sweet revolt, my friends, a little healthy criticism, a love of danger and taste for discomfort, to keep our lives loving, open, and free.

Urban Armageddon

The city has claimed our minds, and our memories.

Modern culture--the arts, music, film, all forms of abstraction and symbolic thought, the modern imagination itself--has been taken captive by the urban landscape, hemmed in by its convenient borders and ruled, ordered lines.

All disaster stories today revolve around an urban apocalypse, one in which countless urban inhabitants suddenly find their lives imperilled by a catastrophe of immense proportions. New York attacked by the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man, L.A. ransacked by aliens, Tokyo pummelled by a giant dinosaur from the sea--always we find urban man cast in the role of victim (and notably, this victim comes from the wealthy, first world), starving for food, wandering amid ruins of a "once glorious and bountiful civilization."

This urban fetishism is central to our worldview as civilized human beings. Concrete torn up and overrun by weeds or tidal waves are supposed to instill a tragic fear in us from a very early age, so that we do not doubt the legitimacy and necessity of the civilized enterprise once we have entered adulthood.

In all things, the modern human being must identify first and foremost with the manmade world, must draw sustenance from it, yearn for it, as a leaf yearns for sunlight and a root for rich soil.

The disasters we conceive of in our collective imagination are always disasters of the city, as though there could be no viable future for humanity without an indefinite perpetuation of our towering landscapes of glass, concrete, and steel.

Why do we wish for a new world to be erected upon ruins?
What draws us civilized back,
again and again,
to our domesticated environments,
and away from the bounteous land?

The vast expanse of nature is a torment to us;
we have inherited the unconscious scars of our ancestors,
whose gross ineptitude in eking out a meager subsistence on the European continent plagued them with scarcity and want, and ultimately led them to a lifestyle of warfare and pillage.

Our ancestors, the Greeks, Romans, Indo-Europeans,
the civilized--
found not only subsistence, but abundance,
through conquering those peoples who derived their livelihood from living in concert with the land.

We have inherited their ineptitude,
and thus the thought that this system of entitlement
and minimal duress could somehow,
suddenly be taken from us--
by calamity,
by tidal wave,
by asteroid, earthquake, typhoon,
by flood, drought, dust storm, plague,
by famine, firestorm, invasion, nuclear attack
--acts upon our most hidden,
most unconsious,
and most fundamental
fears as civilized beings.

This explains, to some degree, the recent fascination we see in both the major media and small, urban news outlets with the depressed economy, with peak oil and climate change, among people who are not necessarily concerned with the broader ecological crisis resulting from our culture's (mis)treatment of the natural world.

It is our fear as petroleum dependent creatures wed to a global chain of supply and demand, and not necessarily as creatures in search of a reawakened connection to the natural world, that motivates us.

In the end, what even the most enlightened of us seek is often no more than a perpetuation of this system of privilige, and the attendant comfort we have come to require for survival during our 12,000 year divorce from the land.

Few of us are wild enough to see fecundity in the rubble,
to hear bird song in the silencing of the machine,
to wed ourselves to the tidal wave,
the earthquake,
the tornado and typhoon,
to find joy in the image of cities inundated by water,
human culture buried in the dust,
windows cracking, steel skyscrapers collapsing,
as angry volcanoes blot out the light
of a distant,
merciless sun.