Confronting Scarcity

A Preliminary Die-Off?

2011-01-06T20:21:00.001-08:00

I was as stunned as you to read earlier this week about the fish die-off in Arkansas, as well as the 5,000 dead birds that greeted the small town of Beebe, Arkansas on New Year's Day.

No connection between the two events, of course.

I was shocked that there wasn't any thorough explanation of the bird deaths, except "loud noises...shortly before the birds began falling," supposedly from New Year's fireworks. A bird expert said there was a chance they flew up scared and slammed into roofs, awnings, windows, and branches, 5,000 birds suddenly and mysteriously committing mass-suicide in terror.

I wonder why I've never heard about bird kills in the wake of fireworks or thunderstorms before. I've seen a lot of fireworks shows, and a lot of thunderstorms. I've never seen 5,000 black bird carcasses littering the road.

In the same story, 500 red-winged black birds were found dead in Southern Louisiana on the same night.

And now, I open CNN to find 2 million fish have died in Chesapeake Bay.

Goddamn.

"Cold water stress" is the source of the kill, an expert says. Due to climate variation? Is a subtle environmental impact hitting wildlife first, as the roar of an approaching tsunami sends cats, dogs, rodents, and birds scrambling for higher ground?

Looking at this map from the Atlantic Monthly, it's clear that these sudden kills are happening all over. If I were a public health official, and these marked reported outbreaks of a disease, I might say we had the makings of an epidemic.

Walk to your river. Say a prayer over it. Pick up a piece of trash. And if you live anywhere near a site of these die-offs, go find out and tell us what's really happening out there.

Fish and wildlife biologists be damned.

The Vegetarian Myth

2010-08-11T15:55:00.000-07:00

Ever since reading John Robbins' The Food Revolution, I have had a deep interest in the relationship between diet, human health, and the health of the planet. Although never going so far as to disavow meat eating completely, I replaced my cow's milk with soy milk, grilled tofu instead of chicken, and swore off factory-farmed meat for good, content that my diet was now in line with my desire for a long, healthy life and a healthy environment.

The notion that plant-based diets are healthier, more humane, and more sustainable than meat-based diets is bolstered by a wealth of statistics so widely cited as to seem almost undeniable. For instance, the fact that it takes more water to produce one pound of beef than one pound of grain would suggest that eating beef is wasteful in an era of diminishing fresh water supplies. And what's more, couldn't all of the grain going to feed livestock instead be used to feed starving people in the developing world? Not to mention all of those pesky waste products and methane gas emissions from animals backsides that are polluting our waterways and changing our climate. Most of all, as anyone who has read a description—or, god forbid, seen footage—of the inside of a slaughter house can readily attest (see Jonathan Safran Foer's Eating Animals), industrial meat production is far from humane, if not unremittingly cruel.

CAFO's, rainforest destruction, hormones, antibiotics, overgrazing, E. coli 0157:H7, mad cow disease, salmonella, obesity, heart disease, colon cancer, diabetes—the indictments of the Standard American Diet (SAD) are extensive, and hardly contestable. Knowing all of this, I approached Lierre Keith's book, The Vegetarian Myth: Food, Justice, and Sustainability (PM Press, 2009), with trepidation and lots of skepticism, certain there was no way anyone claiming to care about "justice" or "sustainability" could argue in favor of eating meat.

The "vegetarian myth," as Keith terms it, largely consists of different variations of the arguments cited above, which she breaks down into three main vegetarian rationales: moral vegetarianism (killing animals is wrong), political vegetarianism (eating meat is socially unjust and unsustainable), and nutritional vegetarianism (eating meat is unhealthy). Putting aside the fact that Keith's arguments are directed more towards radical vegans than vegetarians, her attempt to provide "a full accounting, an accounting that goes way beyond what's dead on your plate" (p.3) is relevant to people of all dietary persuasions, and vital for anyone concerned about the impact their food has on the world.

Being inclined to agree with the political vegetarians, whose qualms with meat eating are summed up nicely by Jim Motavalli's question, "So you're an environmentalist? Why are you still eating meat?", I was eager to see how Keith attempted to untangle the web connecting industrial meat production to global resource depletion, famine, and environmental destruction. In fact, she attempts no such thing. "My first argument against the political vegetarians isn't an argument at all: it's an agreement," she writes. "Factory farming is a nightmare from every angle: ethically, ecologically, nutritionally." (p. 99)

But then again, so is agriculture, an activity "more like war than anything else." (p.36) The problem with political vegetarians, according to Keith, is that the diet they regard as more earth-friendly is based on annual grains—monocrops of corn, soy, rice, and wheat—that "require the felling of forests, the plowing of prairies, the draining of wetlands, and the destruction of topsoil." (p.100) If everyone were to adopt the conventional vegetarian diet trumpeted by good-natured environmentalists like Motavalli and Robbins, then "everyone in a cold, hot, wet, or dry climate would have to be dependent on the American Midwest, with its devastated prairies and ghostly Limberlost, and its ever shrinking soil, rivers, and aquifers." A truly just and sustainable food system would depend on enhancing biodiversity, not destroying it. It would also be local. She counters Motavalli with her own radical question: "So you're an environmentalist: Why are you still eating outside your bio-region?" (p.102)

The concept of a local food system, or a "foodshed," is central to Keith's argument against the supposed greater sustainability of vegetarianism. Living in the Rocky Mountains of the American West, I am well aware of the miles my food has to travel to reach my plate. The growing season here is abysmally short, and must be supplemented by the drawdown of groundwater supplies, an ecological subsidy that probably won't outlast the current century. When I eat wheat, I am eating the soil of devastated grasslands at least 600 miles away, and if I were still residing in Japan, a country which imports nearly 60% of its food (mostly wheat, corn and soy from the American Midwest), that distance would be absurdly higher. But bison, antelope, elk—the wild foragers native to my bio-region—are able to transform inedible cellulose into edible meat. To truly eat sustainably, and to support increased bio-diversity and the health of my landbase, would I not be better off eating a grass-fed bison steak than tofu grown, harvested, processed, packaged and shipped from thousands of miles away?

According to Keith, the answer is an unequivocal yes.

To the argument that the grain used to feed one cow could instead feed fifty hungry people, Keith reminds us that ruminants, like cows and other grazers, aren't supposed to be eating grain, but grass. And when it is grass, not grain, that cows are eating, the ratios of water use shift dramatically, from 2,500 pounds to 60 pounds of water per pound of meat. And she is quick to add that "an antelope, a buffalo, a bighorn sheep, a zebra, or a camel would be better suited to those biotic communities—and the water per calorie and water per nutrient ratio would further outstrip wheat." (p. 102-103)

Ultimately, while Keith's arguments for both the morality and nutritional viability of eating meat are going to have different significances for different readers, at the core of her book is a plea for a new, radical food philosophy that places importance on local, ecologically diverse systems—"perennial polycultures"—rather than on annual monocrops. "The absolute bottom line is: what methods of food production build topsoil while using only ambient sun and rain? Because nothing else is sustainable." (p.126) The failure of modern food ideologies is that they are adopted by "food-consuming industrial producers in urban areas" who are ignorant about "where our food comes from, what its necessary inputs are, and what toll it's taking on the landbase." (p. 122)

Although vegetarianism presents itself as a ready antidote to the destruction wrought by our diets, so long as it remains based on annual monocrops—and thus on the ecosystems it invades and the oil and water it consumes—it is not enough. Of course, to those who eat industrial meat, I will continue to preach the values of giving it up, especially if they call themselves "environmentalists." But if there is anything to be taken from reading The Vegetarian Myth,it is this plea to know more, to not settle for industrial agriculture—"the foods of displacement and destruction"—over industrial meat, and to eat what can be produced from your own particular foodshed on an annual solar income. As Keith writes, "What grows where you live? Ask it, and you'll see. To answer, you will have to know the place you live." (p.56) This is a formidable challenge to a generation as alienated from our resident ecosystems as we are. But it is also unavoidable. Whether you choose to eat meat or not, it's hard not to agree with Keith that "what grows where you live?" could indeed be one small question that could save the world. (p.57)

An American Experience: The Great Mall Opening

2010-08-07T07:52:00.000-07:00

A piece in the LA Times caught my eye today as one more clear indication that Americans are living in what Chris Hedges terms an "Empire of Illusion." There might be an economic crisis going on, two wars, an oil spill in the Gulf, looming oil, water, and food crises, but the headlines continue to be littered with celebrity scandals, sports news, hi-tech wonders, and other diversions that keep us insulated from the outside world.

The triumph of the spectacle over the real is to be expected in a time of national identity crisis. As Americans are confronted daily by signs that they have not inherited the "Brave New World" that was promised to them by technocrats and pundits, illusion becomes the only refuge to insulate a steadily eroding sense of identity.

As Hedges writes in the July/August issue of Adbusters, "When a culture lives within an illusion it perpetuates a state of permanent infantilism or childishness. As the gap widens between the illusion and reality, as we suddenly grasp that it is our home being foreclosed or our job that is not coming back, we react like children."

Nothing exemplifies this retreat childishness and illusion than a good old Mall Opening.

As the article notes, "hordes of shoppers" gathered before the opening, some even camping out to receive free gift cards.

One woman described it as "a classic American experience: the Great Mall Opening."

The mall features several upscale retail outlets, and no one seems to suspect that sales at this mall will be less than spectacular. No matter how dreadful things in the outside world may become, there will always be people willing to exchange hours of work (either theirs or someone else's) for consumer goods made in some foreign sweat shop.

It is telling amidst the bleak economic reports of the past two years to see so many people flock to a mall opening. From the looks on their faces and their clothing, most of these people appear to be the same people who would suffer the most from an economic downturn. Or rather, they appear very different from the types who would shop at Louis Vuitton or Nordstrom's.

Were they out just to get some free stuff? To savor, in the twilight of a steadily waning civilization, a last glimpse of abundance, a taste of the "American experience"?

A simple fact of dying empires--Rome, for instance--is that as imperial prestige wanes, as social conditions crumble, as personal dramas assume more prominence than national or televised ones, illusions reassert themselves with a kind of desperate urgency, in the hopes of somehow keeping the charade of grandeur carrying on a little bit longer.

The arts become more engrossing, more spectacular, more "eye-popping," like the 3-D films in our multiplexes, like the Blue-Ray experience or X-Box 360 games.

We will continue shopping, even after our money--as individuals, as a civilization--has run out. Some day we will visit our malls as burned out museums, mausoleums holding the artifacts of the culture that never was.

A Scarcity of Imagination

2010-06-23T11:32:00.000-07:00

While having a chat over a few beers with a young city planner last night, I came to some rather disheartening conclusions about the state of the imagination among our bureaucratic class in America. I realize it may not be fair to generalize on the basis of one person in one small town, but the lack of overall transformation and demand for reform in all cities nation-wide has me convinced that she represents a greater trend in the planning and public administration field.

I have seen this same resistance to innovation in people who run non-profits who are under or just at thirty years of age. They have a lot of energy and intelligence, but no vision, no drive, no thirst for lasting, systemic change. Granted, it requires a lot of research and broad-mindedness to envision public policies or economic development plans that do not conform with the trajectory of the past six decades of fossil-fueled growth . . . but with the current recession and the absolute lack of vision from the political class, I keep hoping for real alternatives from people in my own generation, only to receive a resounding "NO!" in response.

So many wonderful innovations are beginning to manifest across the U.S., mostly in those regions with the largest share of economic distress, that I can't help seeing why a place like Southern Oregon couldn't find something to emulate in these new approaches. Local currencies, regional foodsheds, staunch resistance to franchises and box stores, property laws that allow squatters to improve abandoned property, co-ops, street festivals, marijuana dispensaries, micro-wind/solar/hydro operations, rooftop gardens, film screenings, bikeshares--the list goes on and on.

But when people in a place of effective power--especially those born past 1980--assume the position of the older generation, saying such measures are "impractical," "difficult," or "too idealistic," then where do we stand?

When groups devoted to localizing the economy and food system cannot create a compelling argument for needing to do so, then what good is that organization?

A socially, culturally, and economically depressed former timber town such as I've lived in for the past two years has ample models of cities facing similar distress who are re-designing themselves out of their current dysfunction. Detroit. New Orleans. Galesburg, Illinois. Even Cleveland, Ohio.

It would be really wonderful if a young person in a position of relative authority with the city or the group devoted to all things local would take on a Transition Initiative that attempted to localize the economy not from a standpoint of "creating jobs," but from necessity. Whether or not the innovative approaches taking off across the country are practical does not seem to be a consideration for the people undertaking them; the fact that in the current economic and ecological climate a localized economy is vital to a healthy, human future appears to be sufficient unto itself.

When Despair Isn't Dark Enough (or, the Hope Beyond the Mountain)

2010-05-21T15:03:00.000-07:00

As the economic and ecological crises deepen, hope for change continues to wane and a growing cynicism can be noted in the socio-political discourses of the day. How have things gotten this way? How has History marched so resolutely towards a fate that is dire, for both human and non-human communities?

The quest for a solution to all the converging crises of the 21st Century can be quite debilitating, especially for someone who has taken an unbiased reckoning of just how deep and manifold those crises are. But the people behind the new Dark Mountain Project are trying to go beyond paralysis towards a re-envisioning of our culture, a culture beyond civilization and beyond collapse.

Their book hasn't been published yet, but it promises to be an interesting shake-up in the literary world. Or a good read, at least. The list of authors alone is promising, and their "Eight Principles of Uncivilisation" have some very critical points that very few in the mainstream have yet to acknowledge.

Chief among those is: "We reject the faith which holds that the converging crises of our times can be reduced to a set of‘problems’ in need of technological or political ‘solutions’."

A group of thinkers, writers, poets, artists, all emerging as a group with a Manifesto to say to everyone, "Stop! This isn't working! The system as it is isn't going to take us anywhere!" seems like a valid and exciting enterprise to me.

We need to reckon with the problems confronting us, as they suggest. And they are not mere "problems," but vicious spiritual cancers that are directly related to our world-view. All the pontificating of the pundits on television and the radio, the senseless blather of politicians and bureaucrats, none of it has reckoned with the fundamental problem of our world-view, which declares that the Earth exists to be used by human beings to further their material ends.

At bottom, their eighth principle holds the promise of a sunrise after this dark, long winter of the soul (and of society): "The end of the world as we know it is not the end of the world full stop. Together, we will ﬁnd the hope beyond hope, the paths which lead to the unknown world ahead of us."

Even if "the world ends," it is not, and never could be, the end of the world. Life will go on. And hopefully human life as well. And--if we get to tipping this thing over fast enough--hopefully a lot more life will be left than if we keep carrying on with our heads in the sand.

Or maybe I'm wrong. There's probably no way to avert the crisis, and this is just one more artistic wreath to mount upon the tombstone of humanity. Well, if it be just that, let it at least be compelling, and beyond that . . . beautiful.

Shell-Shocked

2010-05-20T14:42:00.000-07:00

I haven't written for about a month now, and it came to me last night what may be the reason why. I think I'm suffering from some kind of PTSD-like trauma-induced haze following the start of this massive oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico.

It's out there, spewing oil into the sea with nothing to contain it, washing up onto the fragile marshlands of the Louisiana coast as of today, and there seems to be nothing I can--or we can--do to stop it.

As with any great environmental catastrophe, the media has turned to hand-wringing and finger-pointing as the crisis deepens and intensifies. Our culture of guilt seems geared towards blaming someone, and the blame gets passed around in endless cycles like a game of hot potato. BP is now saying the Federal Government has been negligent in its failure to adequately respond to the crisis. The Federal Government says BP should have had some contingency plan in place for just such a disaster, while most acknowledge that the absence of Federal regulations requiring such a contingency plan might explain why there was no such plan in place.

Blah, blah, blah. More people talk and an aquatic ecosystem succumbs daily to the encroaching swells of an oily annihilation.

Hair collected in salons across the U.S. to be used to soak up oil are instead sitting in warehouses on the coast. BP, while using the plastic booms, has also been treating the spill with "oil dispersants," which are nearly as toxic as the oil itself. The EPA, in recommending that BP use the "least toxic" dispersant possible, acknowledges that all dispersants are toxic and we are simply treating poisons with more poison.

So I'm numb. I want every off-shore drilling rig shut down and dismantled. I want every oil executive crucified on the steps of Capitol Hill. I want every "drill here, drill now," fatheaded Republican toolbag doused in the toxic sludge washing into the Lousiana wetlands and set on fire, so we can use their bodies as a searchlight to retrieve pelicans from the muck at night.

Most of all, I want everyone to acknowledge that even the most high-tech solution to solving our energy problems, our food problems, our land use problems, our waste problems, our toxification problems, no matter how "sophisticated" that technology may be, is only going to be one more agent of ecocide when our system of rapidly increasing complexity starts to cave in on itself.

The bottom is beginning to fall out. This bubbling geyser of ancient sunlight is a harbinger of the dark things to come.

The Coming World War

2010-04-17T12:02:00.000-07:00

No, that is not a photo of a bombed out village in southern Iraq, nor of some devastating crater from an earthquake that decimated a village in Mexicali. It's a photo of U.S.-based Molycorp's rare earth metals mine in Mountain Pass, California.

(Their website has some really top-notch greenwashing for your comedic enjoyment.)

The picture comes from an August, 2009 article in Wired magazine about China's stranglehold on the rare earth metals market, those crucial, hard to find elements that are a necessary component to every hi-tech device we people of the 21st Century have come to require.

It's hard to believe, but the stage is currently being set for a large geo-political conflict over the sourcing and distribution of these metals, which are found in everything from iPods and cellphones, to laser-guided nuclear weapons.

Forget "peak oil" and the coming oil wars. (Well, one could argue that the peak has passed and the first wars have already been launched.) It looks like rare earth metals are the resources to watch to keep your thumb on the pulse of global politics.

In an ironic twist of affairs, these metals are also needed for--ahem--green technologies, as this New York Times article points out. So not only is a steady supply of rare earth metals important to keep our military up-to-date, but we need these open pit mines to see that we can put our economy on the sustainable path that Paul Krugman argued for two weeks ago.

What's more, Japan, long known to be a manufacturer of sophisticated technology, is setting the stage for a showdown, along with China and the U.S., for the world's last remaining reserves of rare earth metals. Rare earth metals expert Jack Lifton made the case at "one of Asia’s largest annual investment forums" that consumerism is "doomed," and that a resource war between China and the U.S. is "inevitable."

Wait--so you're telling me that the whole delicate geo-political balance is going to come crashing down over iPhones and GPS tracking devices?

And you're also telling me that green industries, like windfarms and solar panels, are leading to the collapse of the whole consumer-industrial mega-economy?

Open pit mines the size of Delaware might be one problematic side of the Technotopian economic model, but a nuclear holocaust is a whole new ballgame.

If you haven't read the article about Jack Lifton saying "consumerism is doomed," I highly, highly suggest that you do. It really puts a new slant on people hoping to find economic salvation through expanded growth in "technologies industries," especially so-called "green technologies," doesn't it?

The Scary Truth About Your iPhone

2010-04-11T14:50:00.000-07:00

If you're like me, the transition from stationary home telephones to a society of mobile communication devices (remember the PDA and pager?) struck you as an unwelcome leap into a not-too-glorious future. While the techno-fetishists were touting the wonders of being instantly accessible to everyone you know (and even some you don't), people like me were closing their ears and crossing their fingers just hoping the hand-held digital revolution would pass and something a little more durable would follow in its place.

But--Alas!--we Neo-Luddites were all-too-naive! Rather than vanishing, the cell phone revolution took off (as we knew it would), compelling some of us, myself included, to stow away our atavistic notions of the primacy of face-to-face communication and get with the "new face of the Now."

But some distant premonition continued to tell me things were not as they should be. Technological Progress couldn't be the completely unequivocal good it was pumped up to be. Where was the hidden cost? Who was on the receiving end of our rapid ascent to a Technotopia?

Few people know about the immense ecological and social costs that result from producing the goods of High Technology. Cell phones are a great looking-glass through which to view the morally murky world of international trade (or "globalization") and all of the mining, processing, manufacturing, shipping, distribution, and marketing madness that goes into putting these delightful devices in our hands.

The detrimental impact of the mining of Coltan on the republic of Congo has been documented extensively by an ongoing series of BBC reports (which have had not the slightest impact on cell phone use and consumption). Coltan demand impacts both human communities and the non-human communities that live in the regions with coltan mining operations.

Every time someone purchases a cell phone, they are under-writing the cost of this wholesale destruction. This is the "global market" in its uncensored form, a maelstrom of externalized costs that are hidden by the marketing schemes which sanitize our consumption and blind us to the true impacts of our "advanced" way of life.

Perhaps no corporation has been more successful at sanitizing the violence and penetrating our collective psyche than Apple, which is featured in this week's Time magazine.

Yeah, I know. Steve Jobs IS a genius. Apple is a company whose products even I love. That little Apple makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside, just like it does to you. Their products are hip, cute, and seductive, and exhibit a kind of subconscious pull. But as this short article from Mother Jones points out, all is not so bright and fuzzy as the logos and commercials might make it seem.

I won't spoil the fun of clicking on the little flash apps on your own by revealing here what great realizations are in store for you. But the copious list of labor rights violations, armed militia funding, destructive environmental practices, and outright corporate skulduggery should hopefully lead you to question your own (and more importantly, Apple's) (and even more importantly, Steve Jobs's) role in the impoverishment of whole nations, communities, lives, and ecologies every time you slide that little arrow to the right and start tap, tap, tapping away.

Beyond Hope

2010-04-10T12:56:00.000-07:00

A friend shared with me a recent op-ed by David Brooks at the NY Times entitled, "Relax, We'll Be Fine," and it was such a charming blend of nationalism, triumphalism, technotopianism, and modernist myopia that I felt it perfectly exemplified the impoverished level of discourse in the U.S. about the true challenges of the present century.

Take a look and read it. Maybe Brooks' "orgy of optimism" will resonate with you. He, too, like our friend in an earlier post, seems to be a "realist," which means he is willing to ignore the ubiquitous fallout from our "orgy of consumption" of the past 100 years (itself a consequence of an optimistic and boundless faith in "Progress" with a capital 'P') for the sake of preserving some shred of hope for the future.

Now don't get me wrong. Hope is good. More than that, I'd venture to assert that it is a necessity, hard-wired into our DNA as a prerequisite for survival. As an organism that lives or dies by its ability to predict the future, Homo Sapiens would crash on the rocks of despair if we didn't have at least some sense that continuing our existence were a viable and valuable enterprise.

But to say that adding 100 million people to the U.S. by 2050 will produce a population of "enterprising and relatively young" Americans is not only an empty statement, founded on pure speculation--it's also dangerously irresponsible.

What kind of stress will an extra 100 million put on our food system? Where is the growth going to take place? If it is in the Sunbelt, as he seems to hint, then we're on a collision course with ecological reality which is already facing a coming water crisis and certainly lacks arable land for local food production. (Just check out National Geographic's spectacular new water issue for more details!)

I do, however, appreciate his insinuation that suburban America will see a revival of localism and community. But if this is just going to happen magically by a surge in numbers, and not from a true emerging ethic of community support, then we may just be crossing our fingers and hoping it comes out well in the end.

Touting American competitiveness might seem like a compelling argument, especially when you marshall official statistical evidence to support your claims. But competitive at what? What are these statistics NOT telling us? What does 'competitiveness' truly mean, and does that have a meaning that is relevant to life or solely to the GDP and foreign investors?

What I really would like to know is where all of this hopeful rhapsodizing get us? Does it make us see America any clearer? Does a hopeful prediction about the coming 100 million do anything to dispell the growing sense of uneasiness and dread about the path we are headed down?

I suspect that Hope, as it is offered here, does nothing to help clarify the two things Americans today really need help clarifying:

What challenges are facing us in the current century, socially, economically, ecologically, politically, and spiritually?
What can and should we do to best meet those challenges head on?

Rather than offering Hope at no cost (which is really just an argument for 'business-as-usual'), we need a to go beyond hope, beyond despair and dread even, to face the specters of resource depletion, rampant pollution, or climate catastrophe head on.

When has the media ever offered despair? As Christopher Hedges writes in his excellent article in Adbusters, chronic optimism is a malady that "allows men and women to behave and act like little children, discredits legitimate concerns and anxieties. It exacerbates despair and passivity. It fosters a state of self-delusion . . .it has perverted the way we view ourselves, our nation and the natural world."

A Cursory Reading List

2010-04-07T16:42:00.000-07:00

I was recently asked by several people at a presentation we hosted here in Roseburg to provide them with a reading list of books that would touch upon subjects such as Transition, Permaculture, urban agriculture and community gardens, resource scarcity, environmental issues, and activism. I have done so on a public forum so others who were not at the gathering will be able to access this list, as well as add on certain works they think may have relevance to the subjects below.

This list is by no means exhaustive, and is comprised mostly of the works that I am able to produce off the top of my head; they are also, therefore, those which had the greatest impact on me when I read them. A couple of them I have not read, but find that they are so relevant to the subject that they may appeal to someone else with the time to read them!

There are links to the books' Amazon pages, but that does not mean I expect people to purchase them from the Web! Check to see if your local used bookstore doesn't have a copy, and if not, they may be willing to order one for you.

I may put up descriptions of the different books in the next few days, but barring that, I will say that all of these books are very crucial and well worth the read. I would, however, recommend The Transition Handbook, What We Leave Behind (and other works by Derrick Jensen), Masanobu Fukuoka (the Japanese godfather of Permaculture, or "do-nothing" farming), David Orr, Wendell Berry, and Bill McKibben as the best "thinking" books in this whole set.

Happy reading!

The Transition Movement and Community Change:
The Transition Handbook, by Rob Hopkins
The Transition Timeline, by Shaun Chamberlain
Future Scenarios: How Communities Can Adapt to Peak Oil and Climate Change, by David Holmgren
Deep Economy: The Wealth of Economies and the Durable Future, by Bill McKibben

Permaculture:
Permaculture, A Designer's Manual by Bill Mollison
Gaia's Garden: A Guide to Home-Scale Permaculture, by Toby Hemenway
The One-Straw Revolution by Masanobu Fukuoka
Permaculture: Principles and Pathways Beyond Sustainability, by David Holmgren

Gardening and Urban Agriculture:
Guerilla Gardening: A Manualfesto, by David Tracey
The Urban Homestead, by Kelly Coyne and Erik Knutzen
Food Not Lawns: How to Turn Your Lawn Into A Garden and Your Neighborhood Into A Community, by Heather Coburn Flores
Gardening When It Counts: Growing Food In Hard Times, by Steve Solomon

Food Culture and Food Politics:
The Food Revolution, by John Robbins
The Unsettling of America: Essays in Culture and Agriculture, by Wendell Berry
What Are People For?: Essays, by Wendell Berry
The Contrary Farmer's Invitation to Gardening, by Gene Logsdon
The Omnivore's Dilemma, by Michael Pollan (Basically an up-to-date synthesis of W. Berry)
In Defense of Food, by Michael Pollan

Ecoliteracy and Environmental Issues:
A Green History of the World: The Environment and the Collapse of Great Civilizations, by Clive Ponting
My Name is Chellis and I'm in Recovery from Western Civilization, by Chellis Glendinning
A Language Older than Words, by Derrick Jensen
You Are Here: Exposing the Vital Link Between What We Do and What That Does to Our Planet, by Thomas Kostigen

Waste and Sustainability:
The Nature of Design: Ecology, Culture, and Human Intention, by David Orr
Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things, by William McDonough and Michael Braungart
What We Leave Behind, by Derrick Jensen and Aric McBay

Peak Oil and Resource Scarcity:
The Long Emergency: Surviving the End of Oil, Climate Change, and Other Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century, by James Kunstler
Powerdown: Options and Actions for a Post-Carbon World, by Richard Heinberg
The Party's Over: Oil, War, and the Fate of Industrial Societies, by Richard Heinberg
Beyond Oil: The View from Hubbert's Peak, by Kenneth Deffeyes

Water Issues:
Blue Gold: The Fight to Stop the Corporate Theft of the World's Water, by Maude Barlow
Water Wars: Privatization, Pollution, and Profit, by Vandana Shiva
Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water, by Mark Reisner

Cynicism Masks Itself As Realism

2010-03-14T13:49:00.000-07:00

Living in the modern era, especially as a citizen of the United States of Freedom, necessarily entails a host of contradictions for anyone dissatisfied with the prevailing order of things. Social and environmental activists often participate, to one degree or another, in the system of domination or exploitation that they are hoping to reconfigure and reorganize, to the delight of those who support the status quo.

A lot power sycophants on both the Right and the Left (think Palin-supporting Tea Partiers on one side and Obama-is-God-and-the-State-should-help-everyone Liberals on the other, with the whole panoply of globalization-is-good techno-enthusiasts and middle-managers ranged between them) love to seize on this incidental collusion between radicals and the prevailing order as a glaring hypocrisy that ultimately discredits their arguments for radical change.

If you say you are against clear-cutting, the retort is: "Well, you use toilet paper, don't you?"

If you are against mountain-top removal coal mining, the retort is: "Well, you use electricity, don't you?"

If you advocate for a radical restructuring of society to slow the impacts of climate change, the retort is: "Well, you drive a car and fly in airplanes, don't you?"

I witness this irony on multiple levels and with many people whose work I respect in the environmental activist camp.

Several conservationists have iPhones and Blackberrys, which we know can be produced only through the strip-mining of precious metals, often in impoverished countries. Many of them also still eat factory-produced food, despite the vast amount of evidence that suggests that the industrialization of the food supply is just as detrimental to the total environment as clear-cutting, dam building, or mining.

I think what bothers me the most about this rhetorical tactic among most Americans I encounter is that it betrays a deep-set cynicism that has steadily invaded the minds of many of the younger generation, including many who are intelligent, gifted, and still relatively idealistic about "doing good for the world."

In a recent conversation with a new Americorps volunteer in this area, the topic of big business and corporatism was somehow brought up. The volunteer waxed enthusiastically:

"C'mon, guys, you can't say anything bad about big business. I mean, it's what's made this country great. Most of what I do on a daily basis wouldn't be possible if it weren't for big business."

[At this point, an activist/hobo friend of mine chuckled.]

"No, really. Look at this beer in my hand. It says 'Pabst Blue Ribbon.' Could I be drinking out of this if it weren't for big business?"

"Well, not that specific can," I said.

"Exactly. And neither would you. I'm a realist guys. I know we're not going to be able to change anything about big business. And if we got rid of it, a lot of people would all lose their jobs."

My hobo friend spoke up:

"Okay, this is good. Now, if I can use an analogy . . . Let's imagine we live in the society of Soylent Green. And in this society, the old people are led into chambers where they are drugged with hallucinogens and then gassed, and then processed into food. And the only food around is this processed food-stuff, called 'Soylent Green.' AND a lot of people our age happen to work in the manufacturing and processing of Soylent Green."

The guy patiently nodded.

"Then, two guys, say me and this douche-bag here--" (He pointed at me.) "--come along, eating the only food around, and say, 'Hey, this is fucked up! We're turning old people into food!' And then, if everyone in this society were to turn to us and say, 'Well, you eat Soylent Green, don't you?' And we say, 'Yeah, because if we didn't, then we'd all die.' And they say, 'Well, how can you complain about it if you eat it?' And we say, 'Just because we eat it or don't eat it doesn't change the fact that eating people is fucked up.' Would the fact that the people arguing against eating people were--given that it was the only food around--eating people too automatically discredit their argument?"

"Okay," he responded. "If this whole system is messed up then, what are we supposed to do about it? I'm a realist, I believe in working with what we have."

I couldn't help thinking that deep down this guy seemed to acknowledge that there is something fundamentally dysfunctional about the social and economic system here in America--but he just didn't want to be the one to deal with it.

"Realism," which entailed accepting all of the abuses of our current mode of life as fundamentally immutable, was really a cynicism which denied any and all possibility of change.

I thought to myself, if this guy were to be honest with himself about current detrimental realities, and about current prospects for change, maybe we could have true transformation in America. If all of the Technotopians in grad school and bureacracy--the 20-something, 30-something middle-class careerists who are bound to inherit the wreckage of the 20th Century--were to suddenly acknowledge their very real and palpable desire (and need) for a different way of doing things, we might be able to get somewhere.

But, as I told this Americorps member, it really begins with acknowledging that all in all things are "pretty fucked up" and our dependence on Soylent Green to eat isn't necessarily the most realistic--nor ideal--situation for us if we hope to live happy, healthy, and spiritually fulfilling lives.

(But then again, realistically, that's never going to happen.)

How Much Time Do We Really Have?

2010-01-31T18:21:00.000-08:00

I keep asking this question to myself over and over as I pass on through my days and the northern hemisphere spins further towards summer. Maybe it is having my birthday this past week, and so my eyes are looking harder and farther towards the future. Maybe the early thaw and spring-like briskness in the air is compelling a premature budding of my thoughts, before they have completely hibernated over the winter. Maybe I am anticipating events that will never come.

But an article in the Eugene Register-Guard this week gave me the hint that climate change could be hitting this bio-region a little harder than we anticipated. The realization that snowpack in the Willamette Basin is "less than half what it should be at this time of the year" struck me like a dull fist to the solar plexus. "Statewide snowpack is 66 percent of normal," said one commentator. And of course the article notes that this is going to be a problem primarily for irrigation, secondarily for hydropower generation, and lastly for . . . [ahem] . . . fish.

When climate change is discussed in the media we often see photos of collapsing glaciers and raging wildfires. But this is one of the starkest implications of a warming climate that very few people ever think to consider--the evaporation of freshwater supplies.

As the climate shifts, distributing rainfall in different regions in haphazard ways (like a snowstorm in the southern U.S. instead of in the Southern Cascades), regions dependent on snow-fed streams for their freshwater supplies are going to face a lot of challenges. I have seen charts and predictions based on up-to-date climate data and the future of rainfall in Southwestern Oregon does not bode to well for our rivers and lakes. Of course, this article is swift to blame this spell of warm weather on El Niño, rather than climate change (I rather feel bad for the guy).

In some ways, we can only cross our fingers and pray. But we could also do something about climate change if we really cared enough and sense the urgency. Listen to these updates from the NRDC:

"Pest infestations, driven by a warming climate, are taking a toll on the pine forests of the Yellowstone/Greater Rockies BioGem. In recent years, pine beetles have been spreading into whitebark pine territory, where it's normally too high and cool for the beetle to multiply. This insect has already ravaged 70 percent of the trees in some areas. The decimation of whitebark pine places further stress on Yellowstone's threatened grizzly bears, which depend on the trees' nutritious nuts to pack on their winter weight."
"Warmer waters pose a threat to Bristol Bay's [Alaska] salmon, the lynchpin of this complex system, which need cool waters to spawn and incubate their eggs. A drop in Bristol Bay's legendary salmon runs will in turn jeopardize grizzly bears, [who] depend on the salmon for food."
"One of the newest dangers to come to light is ocean acidification. As the Earth's seas absorb excess carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, they are becoming more acidic in the process. This changing ocean chemistry threatens tiny shelled animals, such as amphipods, tube worms, and crab larvae, which are vital links in the ocean food chain."

As the climate warms, the smaller things go first, and the wave of decimation stalks its way up the food chain. We feel quite safe today in our ivory tower of technology and science. We have practically dared the natural cycles to show us the meaning of "balance," through whatever means possible. First the salmon will go in Bristol Bay, and then the grizzly. We may not even notice the change, ensconced as we are in our cities, in our jobs, in our homes before the TV. Most likely we will worry about farm irrigation and hydropower generation before we even think about the well-being and sanctity of the ecosystem.

Something about this recent piece of news tells me the time may indeed be nearer when large swaths of the American population will begin to feel the encroaching effects of run away greenhouse gas production. Before that happens, though, those of us who are awake to the challenge that lies ahead must begin by mourning with our whole hearts those distant predators, and the smaller creatures that are their food, who are having their livelihoods swept away by our egregious consumption.

We owe something to the oceans that are acidifying, to the salmon that are disappearing, and to the grizzlies that are starving because of it. If we are not yet bold enough to act, let us at least speak, and encourage the great reckoning that must take place if our culture is ever to take the leap into the dark of a sustainable transformation. Because when all is said and done, we really don't have a choice. Keeping silent, poking our heads safely and resolutely in the sand, will not keep us safe for long.

Are We a Failed Species?

2010-01-05T15:35:00.000-08:00

I watched Woody Allen's most recent film, "Whatever Works," last night, and was impressed overall by the themes of misanthropy and neuroses that the film presents. Larry David plays a physicist plagued by his overweening knowledge of his own eventual decomposition, and lectures often about all of the grim realities about modern life.

He typifies a person that is too often associated with the "doomsayers" who hearken to the end of our cheap energy extravaganza, claiming at one point, "The human race is a failed species." Things seem so bleak to his character, Boris, that he sees the whole human experiment as a mishatched endeavor.

I often come across this perspective among many 21st Century urban dwellers, and increasingly among the young, fresh-out-of-college grads who have idealism when it comes to their careers and personal lives, but a exhibit a sense of destitution when it comes to the collective fate of humanity.

When I speak with them about the unfolding environmental catastrophes, or the coming energy descent, they often respond with short quips to the effect of:

"Yeah, it's just human nature."

"We're a destructive species."

"I think it's just built in our DNA to engineer our own annihilation."

I find this very unfortunate, and I think we need more clarity here about this so-called "human nature." A lot of the ailments David's character laments are decidedly modern, urban ones, tied to terrorism, plagues, health problems, obsessiveness, crime, and social decay. They would not exist in a traditional Native American society, or in any of the other thousands of land-based human communities that modern culture has squelched in its ascent to dominate the planet and become the one-world, global culture of commerce and consumption we inhabit today.

Daniel Quinn makes the case pretty clear in both Ishmael and The Story of B that "This Culture" is not the only one to have ever existed. Derrick Jensen, Chellis Glendinning, Paul Shephard, and several others have made the case as well. There have been countless human cultures, over innumerable generations, and each has manifested different human tendencies to differing degrees. There is no "human nature," only "human culture" which lays emphasis on certain aspects of human behavior.

We are not a failed species; we are living in a failed and failing culture, a techno-industrial civilization that emphasizes the rationalistic values of efficiency, utility, and production at the expense of everything living in this world.

One of the first steps to making a move away from this destructiveness is to acquiesce to the fact that we are NOT the only human culture that has ever existed, and neither are we the most adept at providing for human needs. We produce a lot of material wealth at the expense of natural and spiritual integrity. Many of the failures of the modern world are results of a failed world-view, and the primary foundation of this world-view is that civilization--cities, agriculture, standing armies, animal husbandry, employment, education, domestication even--is an unquestionable given in the landscape of human culture. "There is no culture without civilization"--a fact that anthropology (yes, we Westerns must rely on the most perceptive of our myopic sciences to justify a point) has refuted time and again.

And also, when a person protests the wastefulness of the extraction-based economic model, they are not decrying the fundamental traits of "the human race." They are not saying anything regarding the human species "as a whole." Much of what passes as the "human species" today are just the writing-reading-calculating breed who bathe in their own reflection and own cultural creations as though it were an ether bequeathed from the gods.

We decry the current moral-social-political order because it is a farce, and the farthest from the bedrock needs of the wild human spirit that one could possibly get. "Humans" aren't the failed evolutionary experiment; rational, technological civilization is.

But all of this is really a question of values. I hate assertions like "civilization is a failed experiment" because I feel like it deserves countless qualifications. Was Indian civilization superior to Western civilization, or was it not plagued by its own "outcasts" and blatant moral depravity? Has city culture ever yielded anything more for the human race than penury, servitude, and dependence upon a strong, centralized state? Do you value the increase in population provided for by modern agriculture just because you regard more people as "morally good"? Do culture and the arts make up for the great crimes--both humanitarian and ecological--committed to support an educated leisure and priestly class?

I hope more people can clarify for others that the "human race" that goes around denouncing itself for its own failures is not the only race that has ever existed, nor is it the only one that ever will. Others will come; others--post-technological, neo-aboriginal--are already on the way. As more of the current generation realize the countless unforeseen avenues open to the human spirit and human expression, maybe we will see the dawn of a "humanity" truly deserving of the name.

An Open Letter to Christians Everywhere

2009-12-23T12:52:00.000-08:00

This is a letter I recently sent to a family member, but I want to post it as a challenge to all Christians, conservative or otherwise, who think Conservation is some kind of "Earth-Worship" and antithetical to the Will of God. I happen to think there is a lot to be said for conservation in a cosmos organized as the Christians conceive of it, and that most Christians' hatred or ignorance (which often amounts to de facto hatred) of wild places and wild creatures is the farthest from any Divine Love or Christian Compassion that one can get.

The biggest battleground for conservationists remains the church, or moreso the hearts of churchgoers. In my daily experience, Christians are the most often to espouse a "Drill Here! Drill Now, Baby!" ideology, that puts human-centered desires (oil and the accoutrements of modern civilization) before the needs of natural systems that have sustained both human and non-human generations for millenia.

Here is an example that lays the case plain for all to see. According to this guy, the living Earth is the dominion of Satan, and Jesus came to save souls, not the planet. So curse, rape, pillage, destroy as much as you can my friends, so long as you pray and are faithful, you'll inherit a heaven free of ruin! How neat! How nifty! A religion to encourage the ongoing infantilization of whole leagues of people! "Don't worry, Daddy will come and pick up this mess for you . . ."

As it is now the Christmas Season and there's a lot of babble about remembering, as one billboard put it, "the first 6 letters of Christmas," I thought I'd share this letter and address to all the Christians out there who share with me the belief that "God Is Love."

P.S. The quote is from Dave Foreman's excellent Confessions of an Eco-Warrior.

__________________________________________________________________

Dear Anonymous Christian,

After our conversation the other day, I have been mulling over some of the reasons why, even in a God-centered Universe, defending wild places and protecting habitat for "wild life" would be within the purview of Christian service.

I think to Jesus's words about the "least of these" and how his defense of the voiceless among men finds a suitable corollary in wild places and wild creatures. Is "environmentalism" (though I honestly hate the term, and will touch on that more later) a pantheistic cult to put Earth-worship at the center of our lives, and exalt man's place in the universe above all things God-directed? Or is it instead an attempt to force an unredeemably anthropocentric (that is, man-centered) culture to come to terms with the physical and spiritual consequences of our civilized myopia? And is such an attempt not somehow allied in its very biocentricity with the creative force at the center of all life, with the Creator himself?

I believe I need more scripture to back up my argument. But I want to make clear first off that what is often touted in the media as "environmentalism"--I think of Glenn Beck or other Fox Newscastsers and their depiction of "environmentalist wackos"--is really more truly called "reform environmentalism," in that it seeks to reform the over-arching society to include a little bit of regard and respect for the sanctity of places where man does not dwell. This environmentalism does not seek to do anything to over-turn the man-nature dichotomy that has arisen during the 2,000 year reign of Christian civilization. It does not question the fundamental right of men to manipulate their world as they see fit, for the sake of enhancing their comfort, convenience, or creative capacity, rivers, mountains, oceans, deserts be damned.

What role do wild places play in the Book of Books? Often we read of prophets, seers, and the Savior himself heading out "into the wilderness" to seek insight into the One True God. Does this mean that God is the Trees? Of course not! But, does this mean that the Spirit dwelleth most potently where man dwelleth not? Indeed. That means the Spirit would much rather speak to one, move one, arouse one to faith-based action when standing by an untainted river than sitting before the TV.

In a mere 200 years we have managed to subdue this continent to the will and whim of European notions of Historical Progress. 2 million dams have been erected on rivers that only knew the barriers of fallen ancient trees and beaver houses. Here is a good tale to relate to our children, which reminds one of the tale of the Garden of Eden, and yet was here, on this continent, not more than 4 or 5 generations ago:

"Only 150 years ago, the Great Plains were a vast, waving sea of grass stretching from the Chihuahuan Desert of Mexico to the Boreal Forest of Canada, from the oak-hickory forests of the Ozarks to the Rocky Mountains. Bison blanketed the plains--it has been estimated that 60 million of the huge, shaggy beasts moved across teh grassy ocean in seasonal migrations. Throngs of Pronghorn and Elk also filled this Pleistocene landscape. Packs of Grey Wolves and numerous Grizzly Bears followed the tremendous herds.

"In 1830, John James Audobon sat on the banks of the Ohio River for three days as a single flock of Passenger Pigeons darkened the sky from horizon to horizon. He estimated there were several billion birds in that horde.

"At the time of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, an estimated 100,000 Grizzly Bears roamed the western half of what is now the United States. The howl of the wolf was ubiquitous. The California Condor sailed the sky from the Pacific Coast to the Great Plains. Salmon and sturgeon populated the rivers. Ocelots, Jaguars, and Jaguarundis prowled the Texas brush and the Southwestern mountains and mesas. Bighorn Sheep ranged the mountains of the Rockies, the Great Basin, the Southwest, and the Pacific Coast. Ivory-billed Woodpeckers and Carolina Parakeets filled the steamy forests of the South. The land was alive.

"East of the Mississippi, giant Tulip Poplars, American Chestnuts, oaks, hickories, and other trees formed the most diverse temperate deciduous forests in the world. In New England, White Pines grew to heights rivalling the Brobdignagian conifers of the far West. On the Pacific Coast, redwood, hemlock, Douglas-fir, spruce, cedar, fir, and pine formed the grandest forest on Earth.

"In the space of a few generations we have laid waste to paradise. The Tall Grass Prairie has been transformed into a corn factory where wildlife means the exotic pheasant. The Short Grass Prairie is a grid of carefully fenced cow pastures and wheatfields. The Passenger Pigeon is no more; the last one died in the Cincinatti zoo in 1914. The endless forests of the East are tame woodlots. The only virgin deciduous forest there is in tiny museum pieces of hundreds of acres. Fewer than 1,000 Grizzlies remain. The last twenty-five condors are in zoos. Except in Northern Minnesota and in Montana's Glacier National Park, Gray Wolves are known merely as scattered individuals drifting across the Canadian and perhaps the Mexican borders. Four percent of the Coast Redwood forest remains, and the ancient forests of Oregon are all but gone. The tropical cats have been shot and poisoned from our Southwestern borderlands. The subtropical Eden of Florida has been transmogrified into hotels and citrus orchards. Domestic cattle have grazed bare and radically altered the composition of the grassland communities of the West, displacing Elk, Bighorn Sheep, and Pronghorn, and leading to the virtual extermination of Grizzly, Gray Wolf, Cougar, and other "varmints." Dams choke most of the continent's rivers and streams.

"Nonetheless, wildness and natural diversity remain. There are a few scattered grasslands ungrazed, stretches of free-flowing river, thousand year-old forests, Eastern woodlands growing back to forest and reclaiming past roads, Grizzlies and wolves and lions and Wolverines and Bighorn and Moose roaming the backcountry; hundreds of square miles that have never known the imprint of a tire, the bite of a drill, the rip of a 'dozer, the cut of a saw, the smell of gasoline.

"These are places that hold North America together, that contain the genetic information of life, that represent the eye of sanity in a whirlwind of madness."

Now I realize that was quite a list of the alterations that have been made to the North American landscape since the arrival of European Culture and European Syphilization. But I think consciousness of the vast transformations (deformations) our culture has exacted on the natural landscape is sorely lacking among "modern" Americans. How many actually remember the Passenger Pigeon? Billions that blotted out the light of the sun for days! What a living monument to the power and abundance of the Creator! And with what impunity did we trap, club, net, shoot them for the sake of their feathers that made a neat addition to hats for fashionable women in New York, Paris, London, Milan!

Of course to everyone living through these years, this march of destruction was seen as "Progress." But I have been puzzling for days about how I could convey to the lot of modern Christians our deep-seated responsibility as believers to care and provide for these lesser denizens of the Earth. I think of Noah, who was enjoined by God with the task of saving two of every living creature for protection from the flood. God didn't save just man! And this lends itself to the interpretation that the non-human means something to him, and perhaps should mean a lot more to us. If you accept the timeline of science, it's believed that we are now living through the 6th largest extinction event in the history of this planet . . . Only this time, and for the first time ever, the annihilation is not at the hands of a super-volcano or a meteor, but of another species, humanity itself!

Having been born as a generation to a world paved over and dammed, a world depleted of large predators and thousand-year-old trees, it's easy for us younger ones to feel a deep sense of loss, of disenfranchisement, of our experience of life on Planet Earth. Although a lot of conservationists tout the need to preserve bio-diversity in order to keep evolution going, I moreso see it as a matter of divine respect--here we have inherited a planet with billions of creatures, each one designed by God, only to eliminate their habitats, hunt, trap, kill them, or consign them to viewing cages at the zoo? Surely "Compassion" demands more of us, and Love can surely encompass more than a Love of Man and his technological inventions. Also, the life-support systems on Planet Earth are very intricate, stunningly so, and to dismantle them systematically seems foolish. The Colorado river no longer reaches the Ocean; the Gulf of Mexico has a 10,000 square mile "dead zone" (Where NOTHING lives) due to chemical run-off from the Mississippi. Am I to think that the Good Father in Heaven, who sculpted the Colorado, who filled the Gulf of Mexico with diverse sea and air life, feels no compunction at Man's technology hazarding these living systems to a point of veritable (and terrible) collapse?

It's not really about paper towels, though I loved your joke the other day. It is more deeply a spiritual battle that is waging on the physical plane. What is humanity's relationship to the non-human? Is it one of respect? Benevolence? Utility? Disregard? Ambivalence? Malice? What value do we accord ancient groves of 300 ft. tall trees? Purely economic? Is there spiritual insight to be gained from studying the subtle intricacies of the Creator's very own handiwork? Or are we consigned to studying God from the pages of books and under the fluorescent lights of modern church buildings?

I have searched my soul for the answer. I have prayed, and I have wandered, and a kind of conclusion has come to me. There is good work to be done for the sake of the More Than Man. Without a world beyond man, how are the young today ever to envision a World Beyond Man?

Too often these reform environmentalists find their one issue, be it paper towels, global warming, oil drilling, what have you. But often that allows the media to obfuscate the real point, which is what value do we accord to wild, uninhabited, unutilized wild places? Is the Wild where we can truly come closer to the silence needed to hear the voice of the creator? To witness, in living metaphor, the genius of his love? I believe so. But as long as people ignore this burning question, we will continue to elevate man as the Lord of Earth, and the Determiner of his Own Destiny, and we will have to witness the coming fall from this great technological tower of Babel.

For now, I remain allied with truth, with the spirit, and with the wild. Something tells me its the right thing to do. In the same way Noah was ridiculed, I'll take the conceited admonitions of other believers, skeptics of a dangerous truth. What else can I do?

I am sending this without edits, and in love. God Bless you all have a Merry Christmas!

Love,
Hud

Generation Fallout or Generation Transition?

2009-12-16T16:13:00.000-08:00

Today was a good day.

It's good to meet friends, and students, and colleagues, and know that everyone is working to make things better, healthier, more wholesome and more resilient.

On the topic of resiliency, there is a great video here of Rob Hopkins, founder of Transition UK, talking about a new, solutions-based approach to coping with the challenges of peak oil and climate change. Rather than feel despondent over the collapse of the extraction-based economy of the 20th Century, Hopkins and other Transition-ers view the coming collapse as a chance to unleash our creativity--a bold conclusion, and a necessary one for a species that has based its social life of 6,000 years on a faith in historical progress.

One of the more interesting points he makes is how incredibly fortunate we are to have lived in the Era of Abundance. Yes, there were genocidal and ecocidal holocausts. Yes, there was mass-deprivation and gross inequality between the haves and have-nots. Yes, our connection to the natural world was eroded, and our communal and familial bonds were fractured, often beyond repair.

But haven't we learned something from all of this, through all of this? Wasn't the peak of energy production also a fantastic explosion in human spiritual and creative energy? Didn't humanity finally confront itself in all of its brilliant, myriad manifestations and have to acknowledge that, indeed, the world is round? I am glad to be part of Generation Fallout, the first generation to have to pay MORE for energy than ones preceding it, to have higher infant mortality rates and less nutritional intake than their parents.

The image of the Oil Age as a great peak is sometimes better represented by a descending curve, such as we find in this picture. The Age of Oil was one in which we lost ourselves, our families, and our culture to the great homogenizing influence of Technological Progress. We are emerging from the Great Descent; we get to relish the great coming together and great imagining that must happen to us as individuals and as a culture if we are to get out of this mess intact.

Actually, having deep admiration for the principles of biocentrism, deep ecology, and primitivism I find it hard to be so patently celebratory of the wonders of the modern age. But it is quite a fascinating one to live in, and it had enabled my little white, European soul to encounter realities that would have been inaccessible to it just a century ago. Primitivism itself is a modernnotion--it represents nothing less than the movement of Western culture and academia towards an appreciation of the 10,000 cultures that perished beneath the march of our impeccable One World Culture.

So yeah, I guess Hopkins is right about it having been a pretty wild time to live. I enjoyed going to Europe and Asia, and I am glad to have been able to skip out on Polio or crop failure. We are fortunate and we are blessed, but we have also been denied many other things. The Transition Movement still ascribes to this Eurocentric faith in historical progress, but it does it with an ecological conscience. History, and our historical sense, is with us whether we like it or not. And most critiques of time, progress, and history are often rooted in the very historicism they attempt to deconstruct. It's simply one of the ironies of being white, modern, and aware of all that has been destroyed, erased, and lost.

Check it out. Hopkins' talk is informative and uplifting, a nice antidote to my usual "half-empty" despair.

Voila!

Let the Feast Begin!

2009-12-13T10:29:00.000-08:00

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

2009-12-11T06:44:00.000-08:00

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

2009-11-22T09:20:00.000-08:00

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

2009-10-26T09:19:00.000-07:00

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

2009-08-16T23:27:00.000-07:00

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

2009-06-23T13:28:00.000-07:00

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

2009-06-18T15:51:00.000-07:00

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.

Institutional Inertia and its Antidote

2009-06-12T14:21:00.000-07:00

I work for an institution. It is the penance I pay for wanting to exist on this planet. Being human, being vulnerable to the elements, I need shelter. I need food. I have chosen to secure these--as well as a portion to pay off my outstanding student loan debt--by working for a non-profit charter school.

I should amend that. The institution I work for is a registered 501(C)3 non-profit.

The very term "501(c)3" gives me chills.

We have been having meetings these past few days to mark the closing of the school year. We have been discussing several vital topics which get right to the heart of our mission as educators, such as:

1.) What is Education?

2.) What are the values we want to transmit to our student body to ensure their successful growth into secure, free-thinking human beings?

3.) Given that the global economy has entered a phase of terminal decline, if not total collapse, what are the strategies we must take as 21st century educators to revamp the prevailing educational paradigm for a post-oil, post-industrial future?

As you can imagine, it was an invigorating debate.

Discussions centered on the difference between centralized, industrial education--such as is found in large, prison-like high schools and colleges--and place-based education, which makes the land one inhabits an intricate participant in learning, if not the very focal point of learning itself.

There was a moderator to the debate, but he rarely interjected with his own views during discussions; rather, he sat quietly, making notes on the board of interesting ideas and practices that we could implement in the coming year to make our school more coherent in terms of vision, ideals, and approach to the classroom.

Everyone was engaged.

When someone made a poignant remark, people responded.

There was the moment when one teacher suggested finding strategies to make our school less dependent on fossil fuels for field trips and other excursions, and another teacher was quick to add that an all-staff commitment to using less fossil fuels in our personal lives would set an example for our student body.

Everyone agreed. A few teachers waited afterwards organizing carpools.

I had never seen such an outpouring of creative energy in such a formal, fluorescent-lit setting. The School Director encouraged everyone to participate vigorously in the debate and add their own views.

The direction our school takes in the coming years, he said, is something we all help steer. Our thoughts, our vision, our creativity are all crucial to the school's growth and success.

And not success as conventional schooling would have you define it, he added. Success is not what the technocrats in the education establishment call "student achievement," nor is it measured by "test scores"; rather, it is the extent to which our school grows to serve the community and the local landbase, the extent to which we as teachers inspire our students to conceptualize a communal life of resilient food systems and vibrant local culture forged from the ashes of our current alienating way of life.

It was great, really.

I only wish it were true.

The truth is, I have a crippling anxiety about working as a functionary of a multi-level institution. I cringe at the terms of technocracy: "skill-set", "inventory", "buy-in", "student achievement", "funding streams", "institutional viability", et al.

And when sitting in a meeting of reluctant technocrats, of mid-level bureaucrats fulfilling the call of the industrial juggernaut to increase the ranks of young workers, my mind--like most of theirs--completely shuts down.

The Director talks. We listen.

We listen, but only half-heartedly, and rarely are we given an avenue to interject our opinions. Opinions, when they are voiced, are mumbled outside in the hallway on the way to the bathroom:

"This shit sucks, man."

"Why the hell do we have to sit through this?"

"I could shoot myself."

"I'm just glad I have my i-phone."

The modern bureaucratic institution, though compiled of individuals with their own goals and ideals--some of whom are extremely forward-thinking and discontent with the status quo--eventually acquires a life of its own, a life anathema to all spontaneity and open discourse.

We see this with businesses, social services, governments, schools. We see this with international aid institutions, universities, environmental organizations even.

The bureacratic institution easily loses focus on its ostensible goal--in the case of my employer, educating at-risk youth--and settles into working solely to extend its own lifespan, to find new sources of funding, to keep itself afloat. No one dare question the overall goal itself, or how it is best achieved amid the changing circumstances of our current historical era, with its diminishing biodiversity and rapidly increasing human population, its changing climate and decreasing energy supplies.

Creativity is crushed, to the extent that even those with fresh ideas find themselves pitted against entrenched practices and the comfort of those higher up on the hierarchical chain. Most people--if they are human--feel stifled by the air of the institution, by the protocols it follows, the rigid guidelines it imposes on the infinitely dynamic processes of idea-generation and idea-sharing, yet few have words to express it.

Their voices, and the thoughts that give birth to them, have been silenced for too long, crushed out by dull lectures in classrooms through adolescence, by television and movies, video games and mass spectacles and alcohol since then. This is one more instance of boredom to press through before they get to drive home and watch reality TV. Before they get to sit back, relax, and crack open a beer.

And nothing ever changes.

Nothing ever does, they sigh.

The ultimate tragedy of modern institutions is that it is only through standardization that groups of civilized human beings appear to be able to get anything done. Without the hierarchical structure of a bureaucracy, a motley group like ours would function like a chicken with its head cut off. Although everyone I work with seems to resent our director for his dull facilitation of what could otherwise be productive meetings, no one dare challenge his power openly for fear of being censured by the group.

The age-old longing for a slave master over-powers our burgeoning creativity and we submit, willingly, to the logic of subordination.

We present ideas to our director like hesitant bards reciting poems before a magistrate. If his brow twitches, we know we may have gotten through. But in practice, we find his vision is lacking. He sees "funding streams," not potentialities. Nor does he see the futility of fighting to keep an institution afloat within a civilization that is fast approaching ecological calamity. The burdens of driving our institution weighs him down with the practical necessity of fitting our educational paradigm within the over-arching paradigm of industrial-technological civilization, so that he cannot question that civilization, he cannot peer at the roots and see just how rotten they are.

His job--like all of ours should we choose to operate within this extractive economy--depends precisely upon his willingness to not see, to remain oblivious, to keep civilization chugging along into the next quarter, next year, next decade.

Who can even begin to question the proper course of education for our youth without reckoning with the very real global crisis we now face?

The only antidote to this appears to me to be a radical denial of hierarchy, wherever we find it. Meetings may need moderators, but who says these must function as anchors miring us in the mud of practicality? Moderators should be open circuits that help transition ideas from the conceptualization phase to the development phase, not walls into which they fly and collapse dead to the floor.

Moderators need not be directors, either. In fact, the denial of hierarchy is best practiced by having anyone willing to moderate a meeting. All employees can function as moderators, so long as collective agreements are made as to how the meeting should function.

Is this ideal of institutional anarchy achievable? I think that with proper vision an institution can unite itself around a collective mission that draws its power not from "directors," "middle-managers," or "facilitators," but from the creative heart slumbering inside each of its members.

But institutional anarchy will always threaten the bedrock logic of institutionalization, which proclaims that human energies must be standardized, rigid, calculable. It is an oxymoron, but if we were all to come to terms with the very real prospect of ecological and economic collapse within the next decade, it would suddenly become imperative that we start re-thinking all of our paradigms--be they educational, agricultural, political--with or without the support of our leaders.

Education and Its Discontents

2009-06-04T11:45:00.000-07:00

The 9 month school year is a vicious torture created by foolish bureaucrats years ago, and yet we stick to it, not questioning.

Think about the human soul,
Think about the seasons,
How in summer the soul blossoms,
how you walk for hours,
play for hours,
run for hours,
travel, journey, traipse,
without wondering about the time.

And then in the fall, we enter our
school rooms, black dungeons,
we join the others who've had
their own peculiar journeys.

We don't discuss anything about our lives, our feelings, those infinitely minuscule developments and diversions that our soul has taken in the time passed. We walk into a room, and we sit.

And we look out the window. And outside the sky turns greyer.
The sun leaves us, slowly, and the earth grows cold.
And inside, we keep ignoring everything, as the vibrancy and life of the summer seems farther and farther away.

School is a terrible, terrible thing.
For those who hate it, it's painful, it brings terror, nausea, fear, dread.
There are those who have felt the dread before, and those who have not.
Those who know the terror of Sunday evenings when the light turns a melancholic blue... The belly aches, the rush to finish homework, the agony to "get ready" for bed.

The sun goes down, and slowly, silently, all Play exits the world.

We lose that Play more and more as we age.

"Time to go inside!"
"Time to sit down!"
"Time to watch a movie!"
"Time to read!"
"Time to bed!"

Something in us rebels against that soporific Siren, wooing us to sleep. But the schoolmasters charter us to go to the schoolhouse and sit, as our youths die with the dying of each summer, the dying of each day.

Imagine the child of any creature, the youth of any age, being put into a stockade while the hormones and visions of immaturity still rage within their fevered blood--what would come of them?

The child of the bear, in chains,
The child of the wolf, in a lunch room,
The child of the deer, set before a TV screen,

Imagine the sadness of bears and wolves and deer swept each morning inside just such a cage,
for it is a cage,
and we are wild creatures domesticated,
raised in nets and kept on display,
we are names on a ledger,
budget dollars on a page,
we are a source of revenue for the State,
we keep the politicians in power,
and keep the mega machine of Progress chugging along,

Imagine a beast so blind as to will its own servility,
Imagine a beast so afraid that having the world open to it, rushes back inside its cage,
Imagine a beast watching the sun in the shadows it makes through the blinds,
Imagine a beast that eats cereal shipped in by a truck, a beast that devours whatever calorie source it can get its teeth into,
a beast that can't outrun the weakest of its own kind.

Imagine an animal that NO LONGER RUNS.

That says, to its youngest, liveliest: "NO RUNNING."

Inside, you must not run.
Inside, you must sit down.
Inside, you must stay put.
Inside, you must fold your legs, and wait.

It is a sad thing that having engineered such a cruel, unjust system, that crushes the will of the wildest and robs them of their fangs, that we then sacrifice the best of our reformers to working within this tottering, deceitful facade. We seem to lack the creativity to cast the whole thing to the devil and let a new education rise from its ashes. We seem afraid to simply open the doors to our cage and . . . walk free. There's something about the boundlessness of the "Real World" that frightens us, even our teachers. Even the brightest, strongest of us would rather have our teeth pulled and refitted by the State than risk getting a cavity. The cruelest of us would rather be declawed. We're worried about what we might do to ourselves, or what might be done to us--we haven't the courage of real criminals who simply do as the moment demands of them.

The cage is safe. The meals come on time. The rent is always due at the 4th of the month, and the gas and water soon after. We PAY for our portion of the ecological debt. We get money and give it out to get our portion of the future Mid-Western desert, our taste of the dwindling Ogalalla. We've got to eat, don't we? Who can argue with that? We've got to have our car, right?

How early we take on this identity as civilized, caged creatures, creatures raised for cities, for conversations, for computers, like hogs in a feedlot. Shoot 'em out, fatten 'em up, and throw them on the platter for the mechanical death droids of progress. Shoot us full of antibiotics and send us out into the "real world." Put us behind the wheel of a car so we can get a "real job." Get us away from nature, away from experience, away from every other, away from ourselves. Put me in a tiny box, plug me full of downloaded (or pirated) music, and make me feel groovy.

Get a load of this future. It feels good, doesn't it? This is what we set our students up for, and the 9 month calendar assures us of this. Any growth had during the summer is washed out in the first few weeks of government food. The abstraction from nature continues, accelerates, and we shed off any of those claws, fangs, horns, those dreams, talents, aspirations, that may have germinated over the summer months. We chug them through the winter, when the days are shortest, the nights longest, and the perils greatest.

In the winter, the soul really can lose itself. Christmas comes and the year opens--family, presents, friends--and school is out. Resolutions are made, things begin to come together again as the scars of the fall semester begin to heal--and then it re-begins. The masquerade. The death dance. And it plugs on and on and on and on, until June.

June! Pretty soon, the countdown for summer vacation BEGINS.

Do you see the irony? All hope, joy, peace, patience, endurance, fortitude, grace, fullness, begins with the thought of that summer sun, of the moment school is over and we can re-emerge into the light, when that new dawn of the post-adolescence period is over and we can run freely-- but not to college! No, no more of the torture! We instill in our wildest a hatred of learning, because learning is most dangerous for them! If they were to truly grow into consciousness of THEMSELVES it would be our undoing! We would all run for the hills! If their voices ever spoke truly, truthfully, if purpose ever ruled their tongue... WOW!

What would be left to the guards manning the fortresses of futurity? How could they withstand the assault? A tidal wave of energy would bust the banks of every river, every avenue, street, channel, canyon... There would be no end to the wrath, and beyond the wrath, renewal. A gigantic tide shifting under the forces of intergalactic energy... Moon, Sun, Earth aligned, human hearts aligned, shaken, but now aligned. That great last moment of greatest friction when the new order almost locks into place, that great moment of greatest upheaval, of challenge, of cruelty, of confusion, which precedes any great coming together, any reunion-- that is where we now stand.

7 days until the end of School! Forever!

(Forever?)

Back from the Brink

2009-02-11T12:17:00.000-08:00

In the book, Night by Elie Wiesel, the opening scene describes an old Kabbalist, Moishe the Beadle, who disappears for months after boarding a train car bound for an unknown destination.

I find Moishe's predicament similar to mine. Although I have not boarded a train to a death camp, nor have I witnessed horror first-hand, I identify with the way he is treated once he escapes from a mass grave and makes his way back to his main village.

Moishe wanders through the village, shouting: "Jews, listen to me! That's all I ask of you. No money! No pity! Just listen to me!"

His message was one of danger and despair, and Wiesel notes how Moishe's enthusiasm led to people calling him mad. Who could be so enthusiastic in such normal times as the early 1940s? Everything was still going on with regularity. The sun still rose and set at the appointed hour, children still played in the streets. And now, this old man appears, warning them of impending doom . . .

He had to be mad, right?

If only the Jews of the small town of Sighet had listened. If only they had, for one moment, let the perilous import of Moishe's declarations penetrate their bubbles of contentment.

As a friend commented on my last post, Moishe's message wasn't "hopeful enough." He didn't pander to the innate sense of optimism and fear of the unknown. He had just returned from the brink of death, and witnessed a scene of senseless annihilation. He was no longer living anymore, he says. Something in him had died.

It is difficult--nay, downright impossible--for those burdened with an awareness of imminent peril to make their message palatable.

So we smile, and we wave, and we hum a happy song . . .

Coping With Collapse

2009-02-10T08:12:00.000-08:00

People who are close to me have often commented that I have a penchant for "being gloomy." I have always seen this as simply having an excess of consciousness--I can't enjoy anything that this modern world has to offer, without remarking on the diminishing resource base that provided it, or the third-world workers that were enslaved to make it.

Well, despite finding my observations annoying, no one ever thought to ask me how I deal with this excessive knowledge of the destructive nature of modern civilization.

Until the other day.

I think people like to silence us "gloomers" because we bring to mind certain things people would rather remain ignorant of. Believe me, I know first-hand that considering the absolutely irreversible trends of our culture--its total disregard for the integrity of natural systems and of the human soul--can lead to a bleak outlook on life. The globe is desperately overpopulated and we are nearing a breaking point in terms of how much we can take from the natural world to convert into economic gain. Even our history, which we once liked to look back on as the "glory days" of intrepid American individualism, has over the years revealed itself to be filled with errors, oversights, assumptions, and downright petty ignorance.

But I don't rant about this stuff because my goal is to knock people off of their high-horse of "Progress with a capital P." It's because I feel in the very depths of my soul that coming to grips with the imminent peril facing us all is useful, necessary, and the only means we have of finding a path to the other side of modernity--to that vast and open plateau of spiritual fortitude, communal grace, and environmental sustainability.

How do I cope with the grief that my knowledge of the approaching end of industrial civilization entails? How do we, as a common humanity, face this dread that gnaws at us in our loneliest hours that something with our current way of occupying this continent is not right? That it began in bloody conquest of a pristine land from native hands, and that it will end in a bloody mess as the mountains are levelled, the prairies desertified, and the aquifers extinguished in one last consumptive burst of self-gratification? What keeps me moving along, keeps me hopeful, joyous even, content to face the approaching tsunami head-on?

I answered the questioner that it has only been through digging deeper, asking more questions, seeking a more perfect portrait of our failures as a species and as a civilization that has given me any sense of stability. It's weird, but when reality starts to crack around you, the only salvation left is to shatter it to smithereens. So, microwaving plastic containers--something I used to frequently do--releases carcinogenic particles into my food? Well, what else is going to kill me? How many industrial pollutants are there out there? It becomes a sort of morbid fascination with the dark side of modernity, as nearly as fascinating as the techno-enthusiasts of the 1950s must have found their predictions of a future infinitely more comfortable and infinitely more serene.

We must turn our minds, our hearts, our very souls into wellsprings of destruction, we must cut through the ecclesiastical shrouds of tradition, hope, superstition, and "optimism" that keep the death dance of civilization chugging along, if we hope to keep ourselves intact in the next century. We must transform ourselves into incarnate natural disasters, into walking hurricanes and singing tsunamis, into talking tornadoes and earthquakes of song. If disaster is on the horizon, if famine, plague, and privation creep up behind us as we sleep, then let us confront this scarcity head-on and not shy away from the terrors of the unknown.

The fact is that collapse is happening already. It has been for quite sometime. Cuba is already "beyond oil." As I write this, there are community gardens in Africa built by squatters who steal their water from the government and live their lives off the grid. There are places where the aquifers have already run dry. There are homes that have been broken for generations, communities that have been ruptured for decades, and whole nations that have been hotbeds of unrest since the beginning of history.

The human spirit lives on, it perseveres, it steels itself in the midst of deprivation--indeed, it knows itself best when material comforts are furthest from it, and I have no doubt that a new awakening lies hidden, like a meaty kernel, inside this coming century which reveals only a forbidding guise to us right now.

I keep going on because I have a shovel, and I have soil, and I have students, and I am digging in. I keep going because I have found a little ecological niche for me to attempt to repair and restore the scars left in the wake of our European civilization. I keep going, because it is noble to keep going, it is noble to be without fear, it is noble to seek to heal our great rupture from the natural world. The wound is some 10,000 years old, and it is still growing, as surely as the Pacific Ocean is still widening the gulf between Asia and the Americas. But a great, cosmological wound, such has been inflicted upon all of us by massified schools, massified communities, massified churches, and massified consumption, needs a whole host of healers who are capable of digging in.

Friendship: A Renewable Resource

2008-12-11T21:47:00.001-08:00

As the economic crisis in our country and across the world deepens, I find myself trying to find personal connections between what I hear in the news and what's going on in my friends and family members lives. I woke up this morning to the voice of Carl Levin, the Democratic Senator from Michigan, pleading for the bailout of the Big Three automakers. He said if the bailout didn't go through, our country would find itself confronting a crisis of a magnitude not seen since the Great Depression.

What a thought to wake up to, eh?

Well the reality appears to be as true as it is daunting. Big companies like Yahoo and Sony are announcing big layoffs. Even NPR, which was broadcasting the news of the new job cuts, announced its own job cuts, due to a lack of corporate contributions. The mass of capital that once flooded this country is drying up, like the water in the Ogallala Aquifer. The pain of the crisis is trickling down with a rapidity to make any Reaganite reach for his rosary.

But what's in store for me, I wondered, and for those I love?

On a whim, I called an old friend tonight. She is a single mother of two beautiful daughters. I asked her how she's doing.

"Well, not too good," she said. "Actually, I'm probably in the worst financial straits I've been in for as long as I can remember."

She told me about the struggle to find enough money to pay for the apartment, the car, and food to feed her family. And now, on top of all that, Christmas is on the way--that means more work at work, and more money needed to meet more expenses.

"We just put our Christmas tree up yesterday, and the girls were excited, but it didn't feel like Christmas," she said. "We bought a plastic tree last year, and it just doesn't have that smell of the holidays, you know?"

I asked her about her job. She's a butcher at a major chain organic supermarket.

"I spend my days surrounded by testosterone and blood," she laughed.

But really, when it came down to it, things weren't all that funny.

"The corporation is coming up with a lot of new, pointless slogans. Now they're all about 'Creating Value for the Customer,' or some such bullshit. They had a pep talk meeting a few nights ago--it lasted until 11 pm and I had to be at work at 5 am the next morning--about increasing sales for the holidays. It's all they really care about. And you know what? Not a one of them could do the job that I do. They walk around, pointing out things--Like this one guy, a big Regional Supervisor, told me I didn't have enough turkey breasts in our cold case, and I said, 'I'm a little busy now, could you grab it for me?' and he just shrugged his shoulders at me and walked off."

She paused.

"I guess that's just the hierarchical nature of things."

For years both she and I have talked about the dead-end our civilization is headed towards. With the bleak headlines rolling in day after day, our predictions (or premonitions) are increasingly proven true. I asked her if she's thought about what it will take to weather the crash, and whether or not she was readying herself as it advanced.

"Well, I know on one level I hate the company that I work for now, but if the shit ever hit the fan, I know that if I killed an animal I would know how to skin it, gut it, and cut it up. If it came down to it, I'd at least have that skill, and that's valuable. But I got into a big argument with a friend of mine the other day about this very same thing."

"What did you say?" I asked.

"Well, we were arguing about what would happen if suddenly America was cut off from this system of global trade--if we couldn't count on shipping in all these things cheaply from other countries. His main argument was that North America is such a great big continent, that there is no way we couldn't produce everything we need to live."

"And what did you say to that?"

"I said that, sure, I agreed with him on the one hand--North America is a massive chunk of land, and we can grow just about anything. But take, for instance, oil. Our farmers have been growing crops with oil--"

"--Tractors, fertilizers, pesticides," I said.

"And shipping," she added, and continued, "for so long, that not even our farmers could probably even grow food without oil. Not to mention basic manufacturing. We're pretty defenseless on that front."

"And then," I said, "your friend fails to ask what exactly he means when he says, 'America will survive.' By 'America,' does he mean the bankers and investors--the moneyed classes--who are quite content as things are? Those who will continue to have the money which will permit them to employ a young, creative single-mother at a grocery store cutting flank steak for the meager price of 12 dollars an hour so that they can take home $5,000 a week? Is this a system that we're all really crossing our fingers for to survive?"

"Exactly," she said. "There are so many questions that most people aren't willing to ask. There's always been this voice in the back of my head that told me not to buy into everything completely, to have a way out. I mean, yeah, let's face it: I hate my job. Not that I don't like doing the work I do, but I hate who I do it for, and the conditions I do it in. But I have to feed my children, right?"

I didn't ask her about her daughters, knowing that conversation could open up whole new vistas neither of us were ready to confront. But her comments verified a suspicion I've had for some years now about the industrial economy here in America, how it works, what drives it at the individual level. Most people hate their jobs, to some degree--or at least the conditions under which they feel compelled to do it. But the necessity of supporting themselves or their families--the necessity of survival--makes wage-slavery an acceptable, if inwardly begrudged, choice, perhaps the only one open to us at this "high stage" of "civilized development."

My gloomy reflections aside, it felt good to talk to someone who stands outside this unfolding drama of collapse and sees the intricate mechanisms driving it--the abundant energy (oil), the fiercely enforced hierarchy (capital), and the total dependence of modern America on globalism to survive (technology).

Hanging up with her, I thought to myself: "We are nothing without our friends. And if things continue to get worse, I would be blessed to have companions like her--and like so many others--on my side. Like-minded, like-hearted, ready to confront the trials of our generation head on . . ."

She could gut a deer for me any day.

Centrifugal Bumble-Puppy Anyone?

2008-11-22T10:58:00.000-08:00

When we think of the host of dilemmas that confront humanity today--the pollution of air, water, and soil; the ongoing devastation of old-growth forests and over-harvesting of the seas; disappearing bio-diversity; exploding populations; ballooning personal and national debts; the misapplication of technology to the problems of everyday life; marketing and mass communication that utilize group psychology to manipulate the mass; a growing disaffection from the natural world--perhaps the greatest challenge then appears to be that of seeing that the awareness of these problems somehow reaches the average person.

There are too many obstacles, too many distractions, too many blinders that render even the desire for such truths nil. I am reminded of Aldous Huxley's character in Brave New World who responds to the main character's ponderous reflections by saying: "Oh, why don't you just go play a game of Centrifugal Bumblepuppy?"

We prefer the game, the spectacle, the adventure, the rush, the emotion--synthetic or not--made available to us by our self-indulgent culture. I have noticed that in America the preferred distractions seem to segregate according to gender lines: men prefer sports, cars, action films, video games, while women take refuge in arts and crafts, baking, design, style, clothing, and food. Age is also a factor, of course. I emphasize gender here only to underscore the fact that these diversions are overwhelmingly programmed just as surely as are clear-cut gender distinctions, absorbed slowly through that one diversion that appeals to all, television.

When the very substance of a culture, its raison d'etre, is illusion, diversion, and gratification, how can democracy survive? I say "survive," but reading the history of America one can not help but doubt if democracy has ever existed. Today, although the major media is awash with coverage of the "Financial Crisis," the average American finds themselves confronting a crisis that is not national, but personal. There is no refuge to be found in learning the sad truths behind our corrupt governing apparatus. Who of us, beholden as we are to a homicidal economy which requires war, ecological destruction, and low-wage Third World labor to maintain its egregious momentum, would want to willingly disrupt the flow of our allegiance to this economy by questioning its underlying premises?

Speaking to the mother of one of my students the other day, I slipped up and spoke too baldly about the "Financial Crisis" currently embroiling our country in one of the worst economic downturns in recent American history.

I said, "What they don't want to report in the major media is that it is in the interests of the financiers on Wall Street, and the world's banking system as a whole, to experience a periodic withdrawal of credit from the market. Credit dries up, factories close down, and suddenly you find yourself with a surplus of labor. The thing about unemployed people is they'll do anything for a job, and usually for whatever pay they can get. Morals go out the window. I wouldn't be surprised if both Wall Street and Washington--at least the current regime--were happy to see unemployment rise, and insecurity grow, because that makes both the American worker and the American citizen more malleable, more open to suggestion, more willing to trust their leaders with whatever course they choose to take."

She looked at me awestruck, her face growing more terrified as I spoke.

"Wow, you really are gloomy," she said.

And of course, with the way things are now, I suppose it's in her best interest, as a psychological organism, to not consider the gloomier side of things. That's the last thing Americans like to do. We are the incurable optimists, even if that optimism includes the unspoken death wish that this economy, and the system of militarism, global inequality, and violence that supports it, must continue to the very end.

As things stand now, we may need a little "gloomy realism" to get our communities in a secure position for when the ship really goes down. But the major media certainly is not going to go near the subject of collapse--if not because it would require too much nuance to explain the full situation, then simply because gloom does not sell. Not the kind of gloom that throws the whole value of the civilized enterprise into question, at least.

The gloom of the financial crisis, however, sells. Not only is it impossible to understand, and therefore supplies a kind of background, nefarious gloom like "Global Terrorism," but it too, like terrorism, brings with it the insinuated valuation that this American system of ours is really worth saving at all.

The Plagues of Egypt

2008-07-22T19:08:00.000-07:00

When I pause to consider the quite interesting convergence of problems confronting us at the beginning of the 21st Century, I think my first response is always to think "there's got to be a way out." Technology will find a way, human ingenuity will find a way to get us through this mess of over-population, dwindling global water supplies, decreasing supplies of arable land, and the great quandary this presents to food production across the globe.

But what if that's not the case? What if that's the wishful thinking of the children of a dying civilization, whose loved and needed guardian lies wheezing on the deathbed, terminally ill, beset by far too many tumors and cysts for any operation, any treatment, to be ultimately successful?

There's an article in the International Herald Tribune about the way Egypt and other Middle Eastern countries are confronting the food crisis that really seems to underscore this point. Reading it is like reading the tale of a family coming to grips with its absolute insolvency in the face of a great, accumulated debt--in this case, ecological debt. They are struggling to find a way to pay this off by borrowing ever larger and larger sums, in the hopes that this will somehow buy them enough time to prepare for the Great Disaster.

The problem is quite simple: the populations of Egypt and other nations in the region have outstripped the available capacity of their landbase to provide enough food for them to eat. Beyond that, these countries have been importing food from the world market, some, as the article notes, up to 90 percent. With global food prices on the rise, these countries are scrambling to maintain food security by increasing production.

Yet it's not as easy as simply increasing domestic production, notes Alan Richards, a professor of economics and environmental studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. "The countries of the region are caught between the hammer of rising food prices and the anvil of steadily declining water availability per capita," he states.

This means that they are caught between converging scarcities of cheap, globally traded food--perhaps due, in part, to the scarcity of cheap fuel?--and the scarcity of water supplies.

But it's not as simple as that.

The Egyptian population has exploded since 1950, and is set to double by 2050. In order to accommodate the growth in numbers, housing has spilled out onto the fertile plains of the Nile Delta, replacing arable land with housing developments. The Aswan Dam, which lies on the Nile, also restricts the yearly flow of silt downstream with the yearly floods. Fertility of even the best soils has been declining. This has left Egypt and other Middle Eastern nations with very few options, all of which rest on a heavily technology-based approach and themselves are marginal and temporary at best.

One option, as the article notes, is "to grow crops for which they have a competitive advantage, like produce or flowers, which do not require much water and can be exported for top dollar." This is the basic, conventional World Bank approach to development--"export-led growth." But it rests upon huge monocultures of things like "produce or flowers" which ultimately deplete the fertility of the soil; it rests as well upon the assumption that global trade will remain feasible in an era of rising fuel prices. Even with this approach, the countries run the risk of their "top-dollar" products not being purchased on world--i.e. European, i.e. neo-colonial--markets, and not having enough money to purchase imported food.

The other option is to use money to extract as much productivity as possible. Elie Elhadj, a Syrian writer, says: "You can bring in money and water and you can make the desert green until either the water runs out or the money."

Both options represent the "intensify and postpone" approach to confronting scarcity. It proposes doing more of what's been done previously, and to a more energy-intensive degree. Throw in fertilizer (synthesized using tons of water from the Aswan Dam on the Nile, while water from Nasser Lake evaporates at approximately the rate of 1/6th a year), water (running out, but who cares?), genetically-modified seeds (thanks Monsanto) and eat while you can, while you have the money, and the water to generate the electricity to make the fertilizer, and the fuel to import the seeds and everything else you can't produce on your own.

Where does that leave a country like Egypt? In the primary phases of eco-collapse. There have already been food riots. 20 percent of Egyptians already live in poverty. Who would tell a whole nation that there simply is no way to reverse the desperate trends, given continuing rates of population growth and loss of arable land?

I still believe the ability of Permaculture to turn the desert green is being ignored to our own peril. There are other ways that are less energy intensive and more human intensive; there are technologies that recognize the fundamental importance of natural systems in maximizing productivity while maintaining the critical balance between human societies and the natural world.

Will people ever listen to the voices of people like Bill Mollison or Dave Holmgren? Not so long as it's business as usual, it seems.

Confronting Scarcity

2008-07-03T20:32:00.000-07:00

We Americans are in for a rude awakening. For the past 60 years—and few are old enough to remember any further back than that—we have had survival handed to us on a platter. Industrial modes of food and commodity production filled our supermarkets and department stores with a superfluity of goods unheard of in the history of civilization. If we were hungry, we threw a dinner in the microwave and it was ready in minutes; if we were thirsty, the faucet was a few steps away, or the water fountain, or the vending machine. The era of intensive labor on the farm or in the factory was over; survival didn't require much effort anymore, just a steady paycheck and an automobile.

In fact, we were so convinced that the age of the "Information Economy" was here for good that we did all that was within our power—or impotence—to shed survival skills that had been with the American people since the beginning. There is no American alive today who is not descended from some early pioneer—or abducted African—who had to withstand all the nefarious forces of nature to survive the complications of settling in an "uncivilized" continent. Disease, an unforgiving landscape, harsh winters, droughts, failed crops, and cities ridden with disease, not to mention the threat of banditry and lawlessness, all required the new Americans to possess a skill for adapting to the most adverse circumstances.

Those who survived those dangers populated this continent with its first generations of "new natives," and would present an ironic comparison to the American of today. Picture the computer geek set beside the sharecropper; the tattoo artist beside the millers of the Old West; the New Yorker of 1815 beside the New Yorker of 2008. Comfort has been bred into us as if it were a skill, as if the ability to choose an outfit that best accentuated our "personal style" was as important as being able to sew one together from motley scraps of fabric. We have forfeited pre-industrial skill for modern luxury. This was not, of course, a deliberate transformation, chosen by people in positions of power or by those who elected them. It took place incrementally, and never so rapidly as within the years following World War II.

Without a culture-wide knowledge of the land--such as that possessed by the Native inhabitants--to aid them in their survival, it was only through the steady advance of technology that the European settlers and their descendants were able to stake out a living on the continent of North America. Of course there were those hearty, fearless pioneers who struck out into unknown country and fended for themselves, but even a cursory examination of the history of the 19th Century is enough to reveal just how dangerous the wilds of America were. In a drastic contrast to today, 200 years ago death was not the exception, but the rule. Yet as the science progressed, and as the sheer reproductive capacity of early Americans proved itself sufficient to combat the high rates of fatality, our fledgling civilization began to take root, burrowing its way into the wilds like a cancer that no disaster or disease could shake off.

Once the 20th Century came around, a few great leaps in mechanical power allowed for a dramatic rise in the American standard of living. Assembly lines facilitated the expansion of corporations into trans-continental entities capable of fufilling the endless needs of a new and steadily expanding American middle-class—a mass which owed its flowering to the modern gifts of immunization and expanded food production. The rise of this mass in the first few decades of the 20th Century marked the rise to cultural prominence of a whole new species of American, one increasingly cut-off from any sense of natural life: the modern American.

During this convulsive period, there was one development which would fundamentally alter the character of American life well into the 21st Century. This development was more conclusive for the death of frontier survival skills than any other modern developments of the 20th Century: the mechanization of food production. Through the introduction of new machines, fertilizers, pesticides and weed killers into the repertoire of the American farm, farmers were able to produce more bounteous harvests without having to invest as many man-hours per acre. Suddenly a whole league of young farmers were able to abandon the farm for work in the city, and eventually the suburbs, while their work was replaced by bigger machines and larger chemical inputs into the soil.

By the time America entered the World War II, the flight from the farms for the factories was now an irreversible trend. Tragically, the over-application of chemicals and the mechanical plowing of the soil upset the natural balance which had allowed the soils of the Great Plains to resist erosion, and the Dust Bowl years commenced, forcing more farmers into debt and sparking a massive migration toward the cities. In the wake of this crisis, banks and growing food corporations were able to buy up the remains, signaling the death of the American family farm.

Aside from providing a much needed boost to the stalled American economy, the entrance of America into World War II had the unintended effect of unleashing a flood of technical creative power; we would see these discoveries mutated into an infinite array of new household products, into dish detergents, cleaners, bug sprays, air fresheners, deodorants, toothpastes, shampoos,and soaps, as well as that one material which would predominate in "modern life": plastic. One century earlier, everything in the home of an average American had consisted of wood, metal, or glass; now the home was a glistening display of gadgets and gizmos all derived from fossil fuels, from resources miles underground: blenders, microwaves, televisions, cd players, dvd players, computers, remote controls, picture frames, dish ware, utensils, garbage bins, ad infinitum.

As the latter half of the 20th Century progressed, the economy diversified, and expanded into markets overseas. Jobs in manufacturing went to other countries such as Japan and Mexico, and urban Americans migrated away from the cities towards a peculiar hybrid of the urban and rural landscapes—the suburbs. Despite the change in surroundings from a gray, impersonal city-scape to green, pastoral open-spaces connected by four-laned roads, the American entered the 21st Century decidedly more urban than ever before. The explosion of consumer goods following the end of World War II had expanded into a veritable cascade, an unceasing flood of new "must-have's" that in their almost immediate obsolescence served only to stimulate more demand.

Through all of this rapid technological transformation, it was understandably easy for Americans to forget their dependence on the natural environment for survival, and their almost complete ineptitude before the overwhelming grandeur of the land. Certainly the notion of a humanity completely at war with the natural world had been with the West for centuries, as part of both Judeo-Christian and Greco-Roman thought. But in the last quarter of the 20th Century one piece of technology was able to give this myopic, urban-centered world-view a tragic boost: Television. Along with all of the superior digital technologies that proceeded in its wake, television was able to capture the human mind while it was still young, inure it to the damage which separation from the natural world would inflict upon its own development, and create a whole generation of Americans—the office workers, architects, doctors, computer programmers, rock stars, filmmakers, activists, teachers and tattoo artists of the world—that were decidedly urban in their orientation, that considered life in the "real world" to be nothing other than life in a designed, articulated, manufactured world—the city.

Some techno-enthusiasts consider the value of a technology to be determined by the type of values that inform its use. If one has good intentions for a certain technology, this thinking holds, then that technology—barring some gross malfunction—can be put to good use. Ultimately this value is dependent upon the human agent who makes use of this technology. A hammer can be used to build solid shelters, or to murder people, this thinking holds. Television can be used to enlighten its viewers or to dumb them down, depending on the type of programming and the way it is presented.

Neil Postman, writing in the 1980's when television was becoming a permanent fixture in the average American home, disagreed with this line of thought. All tools possess embedded values within the very nature of their construction that limits the range of uses to which they can be put. A hammer, for instance, because it is large, sharp on one end, and heavy, cannot be used to throw play baseball. It is designed to hit things; whether that thing is a human head or a nail head is up to the user.

Information technologies, such as television, and later computers and i-pods and video games and cell phones and such, contain embedded values that tell their users stories about the environments they inhabit. Television tells me that life is something you can experience through a screen just as well as through my own physical activity. Cell phones tell me that communication is useful between humans separated by great physical distance, and even more so, that it is valuable.

What the hand-held digital explosion of the end of the 20th and beginning of the 21st Century (I almost wrote "beginning and end of the 21st Century," but I guess my subconscious desires were running away with me) did was convince a whole league of Americans—and not just Americans, but more and more humans worldwide—that the human realm is precisely where all value lies. That made objects are something we are supposed to enter into relationships with, and that these relationships are more valuable to us, and more acceptable, than, say, a relationship with a pond, a mountain, a wild animal, or a tree.

We have also been convinced that the technological revolution—something I'd say arose as a kind of final act of the Industrial Revolution—was a necessary, desired outcome, and something we would all be foolish to judge or speak out against.

But lastly, the most terrible, and perhaps most trying, aspect of this generalized myopia is that it has prevented us moderns from considering returning to simpler, earth-based ways of life. Every movie which we saw before we were five years-old inculcated in us the belief that electricity is a good and necessary thing, that appears with the simple flick of a switch. I, myself, was never told that the power in my Junior High School came from a nuclear reactor that was cooled with the water of a nearby lake, a lake I took trips to with my church on the weekends. Technology teaches us to use it, and to not question. Because we can, we should--this is the unspoken, imbedded ethic of technology.

As glimpses appear with an ever-growing frequency that the infrastructure of modern agriculture is at its breaking point—see: food riots in the Philipines, Bangladesh, and Egypt—as deforestation continues at a mind-numbing pace; as gasoline prices rise and along with it the cost of commodities; as fisheries show signs of collapsing worldwide; as industrial "animal production" expands into new markets, threatening new rivers with its waste and new populations with its health effects; as power grids are threatened by the push to cool buildings threatened by unprecedented heat—as all of this happens, what the technocrats in coporations, in government, in our schools, and in the media keep telling us is, "We need more technology!"

What technocrats won't tell us—because their jobs rest on the continuing propagation of a technologized civilization the world around (and this stands behind their trumpeting of the benefits of globalization despite its detrimental effects on traditional communities)—is that more technology is not going to get us out of this mess. In many ways it is technology that lies behind this mess: behind polluted rivers, deadened seas, desertified landscapes, severe climate change, over-population, alienation, and an inability to survive with our hands and simple tools and a knowledge of the land we inhabit.

What's going to get us out of this mess—provided we still have the time to do anything—is the effort of people to reclaim the natural landscapes they inhabit. Or rather, I should say, to let the natural landscapes they inhabit claim them. There has already been far too much claiming of nature by the human animal.

We need a mass abandonment of the mass media and the technocracy that informs its recommendations to make civilization "sustainable." Perhaps this seems too radical to some, and I am in no way near to reaching such a radical abandonment of the future, but in my mind daily I am throwing bits of it away. Until we can eat through the lies of technology and the technologized way of life, we can't help but be seduced by the promise of a new technocrat—er, um, president—that's going to "put us on the right path" and find a way to preserve the natural environment while "keeping the economy growing."

We need to accept that economic growth does not take place in a vaccuum, and quite often a country's GDP represents its ability to convert its own natural landbase (in the case of the "developing nations") or another country's (the preferred method of "developed nations") into profit. Books like Natural Capitalism and Cradle to Cradle --both great books--may suggest that there are ways to have a healthy economy and a healthy environment, but today signs seem to be saying that business is not going to make the transition on its own, and the corporate-backed government isn't going to push them into doing it no matter what citizens, watchdog groups, activists, or legal defense funds may do.

So it remains with individual citizens and individual communities to accept that the era of cheap food, cheap energy, cheap entertainment, cheap travel and cheap survival is coming to an end. Civilization is making its last stand, with America at its helm, and the bottom is falling out faster than we can get to the next election. But as long as people remain absorbed in their digital entertainment bubble, and alienated from their neighbors next door; as long as people rely on a political program or new organization or new elected official to save them, and not on their own efforts to re-learn the skills we've lost; as long as people consider technology an entitlement that must exist until the end of the century--or, more conservatively, even to the end of their lives--despite whatever costs it might have for the environment, and for future human and animal populations; as long as the imminent specter of ecological (and ultimately economic) collapse is not only denied, but aided, by those in government, in schools, in the media and business worlds, as well as by the large population of young, idealistic Americans pursuing graduate degrees—we can be certain that very little will change, and the coming era of scarcity will bring a great shock, both moral and physical, to the lifestyle of those of us who came of age in these times of plenty.

The Dead Zone

2008-06-17T18:32:00.000-07:00

There's an article in Time this week about the growing "Dead Zone" in the Gulf of Mexico. I first heard about the Dead Zone from a friend who had grown up in Cancer Alley (notice how this Wikipedia stub uses a quote from a report sponsored by Shell Oil to demonstrate that cancer rates are actually lower in the Mississippi Basin . . . hmmmm, makes you wonder) and had heard about the growing area of lifelessness in the Gulf due to the run-offs from farms along the Mississippi (though I imagine Monsanto could sponsor a study that shows run-offs of fertilizers and pesticides are actually good for our oceans).

I was surprised I'd never heard of the Dead Zone in news reports or classroom discussions. It seemed pretty alarming to me that a 7,000 square mile zone of the Gulf of Mexico was absolutely devoid of aquatic life.

The appearance of this article in Time strikes me as odd for two reasons: First, it appears as the featured story on CNN.com! How often is it that environmental news receives top priority in the corporate press? Although I guess executives realized this is what the public is hungry for these days, and the sensation evoked by such articles of an over-arching planetary crisis is much more tittilating than the hum-drum political scene now that Hillary and Obama soap-opera is at an end. Environmental disasters just plain sell these days. It's not like putting them on the front page is going to lead to any real measures to prevent the problem from expanding.

Which leads me to my second point. Although citing the failed attempt in the "waning days of the Clinton administration" to curb the run-off of agricultural pollutants from Mid-Western farms into the Mississippi river, this article fails to make the urgent connection between past efforts and this new one at hand: the Federal Government has no interest in seeing the Dead Zone shrink.

As the article clearly states,

The only sure way to shrink the dead zone is to reduce the amount of fertilizer running off those farms.

And reductions in fertilizer run-offs--barring any technocratic solution of sifting these out of the Mississippi River with "green-machines"--undoubtedly means reduced fertilizer sales for companies like Potashcorp, Mosaic, and Yara, each of which has been posting record profits in the midst of rising oil prices (hence higher pertroleum-derived fertilizer costs) and growing global demand.

The Time article ends with a call to re-examine the "pork-laden farm bill", stating:

Unfortunately, the dead zone isn't simply an environmental failure, but also a consequence of our national agricultural policy, which subsidizes farmers to grow vast, heavily fertilized quantities of corn and other grains. The pork-laden farm bill, which recently passed Congress over President George W. Bush's veto, will only worsen the problem.

Thus our only hope, it seems, is to wait for a new bill to be passed that will not subsidize farmers to over-tax their ecosystems to produce abundant, cheap corn. And yet, given that this Dead Zone has already expanded (see map above) after "environmental experts" pledged in 2001 to curb its growth, are we to expect that suddenly things will change? That Capitol Hill will suddenly get its head on straight about the disastrous impact our energy-intensive agriculture is having on river and marine ecosystems across America, and decide to take us in a more sustainable (read: less destructive) direction?

And this is precisely why this article falls short. After suggesting that we are facing a crisis of epic proportions in the Gulf ecosystem (it even notes, blithely: "And even if we can begin to reduce the future flow of fertilizer, repeated dead zones are having a cumulative effect, with smaller amounts of nitrates and other chemicals in the Gulf having a larger hypoxic impact than in the past."), it leaves us with your usual, run-of-the-mill technocratic solution: leave it to the Feds.

What about the corporations who profit from all this Death (with-a-capital-D)? What about the subterranean way by which such corporations go to seeing that farmers are subsidized to buy their products? What about how this fertilizer money--paid by the Department of Agriculture itself--is cycled back through the economy to get these same statesmen we are supposed to rely on re-elected? (Michael Pollan's analysis of the Farm Bill illustrates this point.)

Whatever the solution is, I'm not so sure we should count on a Federal Agency to come up with it. We see what has happened since the last Federal resolution seven years ago. Moreover, is the crisis really just about declining "fisheries"? A symptom of the vastness of our problem seems to be the fact that environmental problems must still be couched in terms of their impact on human systems, such as the economy of Louisiana, to get any publicity at all.

Articles such as this, and the bureaucratic maneuvering they detail as potential signs of hope, are but cosmetic efforts to keep American citizens from realizing we've got a real crisis on our hands. Fertilizer and other large agro-industries will keep paying politicians, politicians will keep subsidizing farmers to produce more, farmers will keep applying lethal amounts of agro-chemicals, and the Dead Zone will keep growing.

A question posed frequently by writer/activist Derrick Jensen comes to mind, though I'm not sure of the answer: What are you going to do about it?

Thinking About Survival

2008-06-15T18:25:00.000-07:00

It's quite easy when contemplating the dilemmas facing us at the dawn of the 21st Century to retreat in one's mind to a mythological "Golden Era," a time when humanity lived in conjunction with the land and the problems of modernity were a thing of the future. Looking out at the world of today, you see massive, sprawling cities, bursting at the seams with human bodies and encroaching upon their rural hinterlands, spewing both biological and technological wastes. You see acre upon acre of fields laid barren, paved over to make parking lots for mega malls and sports stadiums; open skylines hemmed in by buildings and power-lines, where only pigeons and crows can survive; everything green and healthy cut into and mowed down, every open space plowed and furrowed and transformed into a landscape subdued by the human hand.

What have humans done? you wonder. What inspired this civilization of ours, and the countless individuals that operate within it, to alter their environment in such lethal ways—lethal not only to living organisms and the natural systems they inhabit, but to emotional and psychological health, to the soul itself?

We look out upon this landscape, and in our imagination it is in an instant demolished. The buildings are erased, the pavement cracked and over-turned, the power-lines and smokestacks all trampled; the world is reduced to its primitive state of infinitely complex simplicity. We picture our ancestors trodding these unpaved paths, while butterflies and other insects dance around them by the thousands, and the air is filled with birdsong. We wonder if there isn't a way back to this pristine world, to a world without borders, without nation-states and ATMs, without super-highways and asbestos, without biological weapons and nuclear waste.

Unfortunately for the great bulk of us moderns who can find something worth cherishing in this vision of civilization laid waste, the fact is that very few, if any, of us would be able to survive in a world devoid of the apparatus of modern civilization. We are a species of animal that relies on the acquisition of money to eat—and most of what we now eat is doused in pesticides and herbicides, shot full of preservatives, transported countless miles by fossil-fueled machines, and prepared by processes that gobble up more energy in an hour than our pre-modern ancestors might have used in a lifetime.

In fact, everything we consume as participants in the globalized, modern economy are products which have passed through countless hands before reaching ours. They are made-goods, end results of technological and economic networks that not even the brightest among us can fathom. Our clothing, our shoes and our cars; our music, movies and books; our food, vitamins, medicines, and cosmetics; our homes and appliances—not to mention the resources we use to power them—all come to us at the end of a long, almost mythical supply chain whose roots we would have to be either insane, or extremely well-funded, to trace.

If you stop to think about the unfathomable intricacies of modern commerce, it's hard not to sit back in wonder at the sheer vastness of it, and let out a gentle sigh of both gratefulness and apprehension. Everything is there, right in the shopping center around the corner, and for the taking so long as you have the magic paper to acquire it. Life has never been so sweet, so why all of the fuss about any tolls our current way of life may take on the natural environment or on the human spirit?

Indeed, the vast portion among us alive today, and to a growing degree the more recent one's birth date falls, were born at the expense of vast spiritual and environmental damage. We were hatched from landscapes increasingly more polluted, from resource pools dauntingly over-taxed, and thus owe not just our present lifestyle, but our very existence itself, to the nefarious power human civilization has acquired to distort natural systems to satisfy limited human ends. We are a race whose very life source is in antagonism to life itself; we owe our existence, ironically, to the death of the world around us.

It has become fashionable these days to urge people to think of the expense one's descendants will have to pay for the indiscriminate waste and destruction of our current civilization. We must think of the long-term threats to soil fertility that our present over-use of agricultural chemicals poses; we must consider the political instability of a future that was founded upon war and domination; we must be mindful of the compound problems which might develop from releasing the numerous untested, toxic chemicals we produce each year into our air and our waterways. And yet it seems so easy to forget that, whether we like it or not, we citizens of the 21st Century, we modern men and women, are all products of this toxic, chemical civilization; we draw our welfare from it, live off it, feed it and are in turn fed by it. We cannot pretend that sitting in our Starbucks or in our air-conditioned apartments writing about the dangers of nuclear waste or air-pollution is a virtuous way of life. We cannot seek to preserve the wild for future generations if we aren't willing to cultivate a little wild in ourselves—and sacrifice a large part of our mass-produced comfort in the process. Our world, if it is to re-adjust itself to the impact of human civilization, needs a humanity which has cast off the need for this civilization, which has re-created itself in the image of nature. However, given the fact that the holistic wisdom of the now extinct nature-based societies required many centuries to evolve, the great question still looms as to whether or not a society as alienated from nature as our own can effectively will itself to function naturally.

This seems a contradiction in terms. Can the human intellect, having divorced itself so completely from the operations of instinct, somehow re-integrate itself with the natural world? Can that little Pandora's box of human reason and reductionist ways of thinking find a way return to an almost pre-civilized, holistic view of life?

One wonders if the very foundations of modern civilization wouldn't thereby be jeopardized in the process. And as with our life-support system, so too with ourselves—we, the children of reason, whose idea of nature is perhaps no more than a weekend drive through the mountains or a stroll through Central Park.

Campaigning for the Environment

2008-05-26T19:09:00.000-07:00

As the campaign season chugs along quite steadily towards the November elections, media sources are increasingly more full of photos and video of the candidates criss-crossing the country in their blitz to occupy the oval office. With the vast percentage of us alive today having been born in the latter half of the 20th Century, we are quite accustomed to the shots of candidates boarding large buses or airplanes to head off to new campaign destinations, often crossing the country several times in a month. Some of those who have even backed a candidate for there alleged policy stance regarding the environment or resource conservation look on benignly as these "environment-friendly" candidates burn loads of fossil fuels and dump tons of carbon into the air in order to advertise themselves to the broader American public.

Perhaps I am the only one to see the irony in this? There have been a number of articles that I have come across which deride the gross expenditures incurred by the President with his flights on Air Force One across the country and the world, noting the fuel costs and the cost to the environment, which are both ultimately paid for by the American people. I wonder if the Democratic candidates Obama and Clinton are as conscious of their own cost to the environment with their leisurely flights across the country?

Granted, we live in the era of mass civilization and technological advancement, when the use of technology is treated with the same ambivalence as the use of our own limbs. But it just seems pitifully contradictory to me that American citizens who consider the "environment" or our dependence on "foreign oil" to be a major concern of theirs do not have the eyes to see the egregious waste and pollution that a presidential campaign entails?

There is a site where the carbon footprint of any mode of travel can be calculated. Although modes of travel might not be the greatest source of American carbon emissions, that doesn't mean they don't have a considerable impact on the biosphere. A meager input of 20 short flights and 10 medium flights produces a whopping 22,500 lbs. of carbon! Regardless of the effect this amount can have or not have on the climate as a whole, it seems worthy of note that this is 22,500 lbs. that wouldn't naturally exist in our atmosphere.

This is simply one of the embedded ironies of living in the modern world. Almost every activity we participate in, from those as mundane as showering and brushing our teeth, have a net negative impact on the biosphere and on our own health--from the chemicals washed down the drain and eventually into the river, or from the exposure to potentially carcinogenic fluoride day after day.

Peak Oil activists travel by fossil-fuel powered vehicles to argue that our society needs to "powerdown." Environmental activists use computers--presumably deriving their power from Nuclear or coal-fired power plants--to voice their message to the rest of the world. People hope to "save" the environment by simply polluting less, rather than consider the radical changes necessary to live a zero-impact lifestyle, in which all waste equals food.

Don't imagine for a second that I consider myself above these contradictions. I just think it's time we call them for what they are, and don't masquerade with feel-good solutions that in the end only postpone eco-collapse to a later date. If we allow ourselves to be deceived, and if we in turn contribute to the deception, we only insure that a better world will truly become impossible. Perhaps it's time to re-think our current, "Rather a half-solution than no solution at all!" approach and begin working towards the genuine, radical changes necessary to stop the wanton waste and destruction of our civilization.

And just maybe it's also time to re-think our expectations that presidential candidates visit states all over the country, and consider having televised debates take the place. Of course pollution would still result, which calls into question the whole notion of the Nation-state as an environmentally sustainable entity . . .

The American Mind of the 21st Century

2008-05-22T20:10:00.000-07:00

Reading accounts of the early 20th Century, I am often overwhelmed by the amount of intellectual fervor which animated those who lived during that momentous period in the evolution of human history. It was felt through all corners of the globe that society lay on the edge of a great and rapid transformation. The best minds of the age—a time when the term "intellectual" did not yet arouse mockery and suspicion—confronted without shame the great questions of the fate of human civilization. Not only in America, but in Europe and Latin America, in China, India, and Japan, spiritual leaders and scientists, artists and philosophers, were all at work trying to outline a social ethic which would withstand the terrible blows which the Century of Science was about to deal to both God and tradition.

In China, we read of the New Culture Movement, during which young students and professors undertook a general critique of the failures of the Confucian ethic and attempted to establish a new moral code which would guide China throught the modern era. In the end, radical iconoclasm devolved into doctrinarianism, and Communism claimed the allegiance of the most influential intellects of the day. A large part of this was due to the success of the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. In Russia, after years of strategizing, a cadre of intellectuals had succeeded in inspiring masses of people and wresting power from the ruling class, no small inspiration for intellectuals across the world who sought to amend the failures of civilization.

In Europe, a number of intellectuals were focusing on the largest problems of the day. The Great War left its mark on a number of thinkers who devoted their final years towards charting out a new Philosophy of Life which would fill the void left by the declining belief in the Christian God. Traces of this ambition are to be found in the later works of Henri Bergson, Sigmund Freud, Karl Jaspers, Jose Ortega y Gasset, Hermann Hesse, to name only a few. Reading their works, one can't help but think that some invisible thread tied them all together; whether it was the zeitgeist working mysteriously behind the scenes, or a general impression of the precarious state of modern civilization, what's certain is that they all possessed a common concern for how the spiritual condition of modern man would evolve through the coming century.

Today, in America, and in the "global" world as a whole, we live once again on the brink of a massive transformation. It is hinted at briefly in the major media, and a little more so on certain websites and books that somehow make it to the popular press. The death blow which modern science a century before dealt to God and traditional livelihoods, nature is about to deal to technological civilization itself. And yet, unlike that earlier period of transition, the intellectuals who are dealing with the most dire and pressing implications of the present crisis receive little or no press. American Progressives like John Dewey and William James filled lecture halls; Bergson, though now largely unremembered, was a celebrity in his day; Freud is still known by most people you pass on the street.

The sorry fact is that nothing of consequence for the fate of American civilization holds any weight for the American "intellectual"—better yet, academic technician—of the present-day. We have scholars devoted to weighing the causes and consequences of slavery, linguists who asses the phonology of pre-modern Japanese, historians who know the plight of a prostitute in South London between the years of 1507 and 1513—but how many minds in America are engaged in unravelling that inscrutable puzzle of how our tenuous civilization is to confront the oncoming disasters of the 21st Century?

A simple reason for this lack of devotion on the part of contemporary minds to problems of pressing importance is simple: denial. Specialized in that peculiar niche of theirs, those gifted with the intellectual inheritance of centuries find it easier to bury their noses in that landfill of old works and old deeds rather than gamble with the prospects of the future. Scientists, perhaps the only ones in former eras with the gift for foresight, have sacrificed their once broad-mindedness for specialized, technical skill. The ill effects of a few generations of specialization are so far-reaching that one must wonder if we still have any right to call today's scientific researchers "scientists," so greatly do today's specimens differ from the minds of former eras.

For the few intellectuals who are actively engaged in tackling the problems of the next millenia, often the case is the same as it was for the intellectuals that spawned the New Culture Movement in China—radical dogmatism rules the roost. One professor of anthropology is an Anarchist-syndicalist, the next a Green party chairman, while the head of the English department is a radical feminist with a soft spot for the Democratic party and a love for reality TV. After World War II, with the dogmatism of Capitalist Democracy deeply esconsed within the minds of those running Washington, it was only natural that the world's remaining intellectuals would turn away from spiritual or local solutions to the mass-minded campaigns which ruled the day. Just how much did the American mind—if I may be allowed to use such a quasi-mystical term—fracture during the past 40 years, as each intellect found for itself a political niche where it was comfortable, and from where it could hold its detractors in ill-esteem?

Sadly enough, two of the only great intellectual movements of the late 20th Century were Neo-Conservatism and the Neo-Liberal doctrine of free trade, if by the term "movement" one means only the ability of ideas to impress themselves upon reality. The rest of America's intelligensia were either busy sipping Lattes at Starbucks and reading the latest issue of The New Yorker, or were organizing campus rallies of 20 to 50 people to decry the contradictions of Bourgeois Capitalism.

In the end, with the execution of the Iraq War, the rising tide of Global Warming, and the lack of any collective discussion about approaching resource scarcity, one knows that American Intellectuals are either sleeping, or are already politically, and socially, dead. The ones most capable of assessing the moral compass of present decisions—the historians, social scientists, psychologists, philosophers—are far too immersed in digging up new facts about phenomenology or producing "original research" to keep the education-industrial complex going. For the first time in a century humanity—and America specifically—stand in need of a great self-reckoning, yet who is willing to answer that call? Where are our New Culturists? Where are the lefties willing to step out from underneath the blanket of political doctrarianism and asses the era's problems with a human eye? Perhaps this is why the word "intellectual" has received such a detrimental connotation over the years, because those to whom the term is applied are so far removed from the trends of mainstream society as to appear like silly caricatures, pigeons wearing peacocks feathers, whose research ultimately serves neither the corporation, nor the bureaucracy, nor society, but simply their own egoistic sense of academic accomplishment.