On Change and Being Stuck

Watched this amazingly inspiring video a week ago, and since then have been thinking a lot about making changes. Changes in my own life, changes in the greater world around me. The message isn't particularly new for me, but really had an impact, and I urge anyone coming across this page to watch it.

So I'm trying to figure out what I'm really going to do. I keep running into this problem of feeling utterly trapped. I've felt this way ever since I came of age, out of the egocentric world of the child and teenager. I guess around age 18, especially after 9-11. Started getting into politics and bigger issues, trying to understand this system in which we live, and trying to figure out my place within it, and finding very few good options before me.

I know I've talked a lot on here about living the change, saying stuff about opting out of the system as it is. But man, how? How can people operate outside of the system? If you don't play by the rules, you don't get to eat. If you don't work, then you don't get to sleep indoors. They got us by the short and curlies.

One example I know I've thrown out there was gardening. Want to grow a garden? Well, you have to own land, but homesteading is so far from what most people are capable of, it's hard to imagine it happening. I mean, for those who can afford to buy land, often they buy it in town near their job. They have a house, not property. A huge building of outsized proportions, a weight around their neck, often, because we've become accustomed to such foolishness. And to really be free of the system, you can't just grow a token garden out back, a few tomato plants and maybe some lettuce, beans, and cucumbers. You need to plant a sizable amount of land (in terms of an acre or more) and have a host of skills that few people really have anymore: food preservation, crop rotation, what to do about plant disease and pests, and maybe tending livestock, among much else. I'm talking about farming, and farming requires a lot of knowledge.

And that's just for food. What about everything else we need? Clothing, shelter, transportation, medical care, etc etc. How to opt out of all that? I mean, they own our lives, whoever "they" is, if there is a "who" besides the inhuman system itself... they own our lives because they own the means of sustaining our lives. I say again: you dont work, you don't eat, you don't sleep indoors, you don't get to go to the doctor, you lose every which way. How can you fight back against such a thing? You can put out your recycling, consume less, you can try to elect better leaders, take your money out of the banks, but in the end, youre going to go to work every day because your stomach demands it, and more importantly, your children's stomachs.

I think often of Grapes of Wrath, which I know is a novel but it's such a vivid image of the Depression, and seems accurate from what I've read. And not just the Depression, but the way the union battles went for decades back then, the brutal fight it was. Brutal not just because Power fights you on it, but because you have to sit there, watch your children cry because they're hungry, while you strike and picket. What a thing to do! Most men would work for the lowered wages, rather than strike and get nothing. The only ray of hope is that, in spite of those horrible stakes, people did it anyways. They fought back, they suffered, but they did what they had to do.

But here we're talking not about just getting more workplace rights, fairer laws and economic practices, but a whole new economic paradigm. We don't have a clear goal, like better wages, the 8 hour workday or the 5 day work week, or an end to child labor. It's hard to even know where we're trying to go.

So I just don't know. I'm constantly inspired by these sorts of videos, books, ideas, but never know how to proceed. The edges of this problem are just out of reach. I can't imagine any way to have a real impact on the sort of paradigm shift I'm referring to, and can imagine even less a mass movement in this direction. I don't want to give into despair, but I feel like I've been stuck for the last 11 years and it just plain sucks.

Book: A Canticle For Leibowitz; and the Nuclear Question

I just finished reading A Canticle For Leibowitz, by Walter M. Miller Jr. It is a remarkable book, a classic in science fiction writing (though it really doesn't strike me as too sci-fi). Though it was first published in 1960, the style of it seems like something that could have been written today; the storytelling is superb, somewhat satirical, and there's an almost absurd sense to it, verging on comical, but not in a ridiculous way. Maybe more in an existential way, but don't take that to mean it's some dense philosophical novel. It's very readable and accessible, despite the oft-used Latin, which is usually explained, or otherwise just there for atmosphere. The novel does, though, have important underlying themes-- namely, the cyclical course of history, the conflict between the church and secular society, and of course the nuclear threat. For, this book is about a post apocalyptic world slowly rebuilding itself after near annihilation in the mid-20th century. The book is in three parts (Fiat Homo, Fiat Lux, and Fiat Voluntas Tua), each set roughly 600 years apart. 

Thus, Fiat Homo (Let There Be Man) begins in the 25th century. The country (we hear nothing of the other continents until part three), or what little is left of it, is nearly totally illiterate-- immediately after "the Flame Deluge" the people rampaged against learning, proudly calling themselves Simpletons and burning books, as well as killing scientists, and later, anyone who could read. Only the the surviving Roman Catholic Church, centered in New Rome (somewhere, seemingly, roundabout St Louis) maintains learning of any kind. 

The Church preserves scraps and remnants of books in a monastery in the Southwest Desert, run by the Albertian Order of Leibowitz, set up by Leibowitz (an electrical engineer of the 20th century) for just such a purpose during the book burnings. Compare to what the Irish monks did in the dark age after Rome fell. The monks copy the now largely incomprehensible but highly venerated, almost worshipped works of science in the 20th century, things like circuit diagrams and other texts and literature. They do this in the hopes that someday, someone will understand them and be able to rebuild to pre-Deluge science, technology and culture. 

The section focuses on Francis Gerard, a novice monk who finds, during a Lenten fast, an old bomb shelter containing a box that holds within it scraps that appear to be the property of Leibowitz himself, which eventually end up contributing to Leibowits being canonized as a saint. It's a hard life for Francis in the monastery, but the world outside is worse, full of monsters (genetic mutants) and roving bands of highwaymen and tribal folk. 

Fiat Lux (Let There Be Light) is set in 3174, in a time of building war between growing city-states of south-central "America" and the nomadic herders on the Central Plains, as well as a time of renewed abilities in science, including the rediscovery of electricity; rather like the European Renaissance. In the microcosm of the same monastery, we see the split growing between secular science and Church-run science growing, really the basic split between science and faith/morals. 

Finally, Fiat Voluntas Tua (Let Thy Will Be Done) is set in 3781. The world has progressed beyond even what the 20th century had, complete with space travel and even extra-solar colonies. That same monestary lives on, despite its duty to preserve the old knowledge being now unnecessary. There is a new cold war between the Atlantic Confederacy and the Asian Coalition. There are nuclear incidents, and the book culminates in ruminations on free will, good and evil, euthanasia, and again the cyclical nature of history, whether it is inherent. 

I have avoided giving many details so as not to spoil this jewel of a book for any of you who may wish to read it (highly recommended). I wish they'd had us read this in school, though of course, the Church vs Science/State issue would have been too risque for a public high school. But the discussions would have been enjoyable, I always liked classroom discussions like that. And the themes are important, and worth thinking about. That's probably why I've long been a fan of the dystopian and post-apocalyptic genres in books and movies. 

I have often though of nuclear weapons as humanity's greatest test. Well, not a test so much, as tests are administered from outside; more a situation that will really allow us to find out what we're made of. We either get a handle on our animal rage and control our apelike tribalism and hate, or else we die. Nuclear holocaust is not probably something we could survive, certainly civilization would not. And the idea that we'd eventually build up to this level, even if it took thousands of years, seems to me unlikely. 

For so many things to fall back into place, cultural, philosophical, technological, governmental, religious... sometimes it seems to me that high-tech civilization may have been a lucky accident. Like the evolution of humans itself-- the rise of such intelligent creatures depended on a lot of historical luck. If the climate in Africa hadn't changed from forests to grassland, we might still be howling in the trees. Or even if it had, but we hadn't adapted just as we did, we'd be extinct, or maybe just living like baboons, who also live in grasslands, quadrupedal and not all that bright. If (some of) the Greeks hadn't ditched the myths for that little window of philosophy they gave us, our society might never have been. Study the history of science, and you will see that this is so; the Chinese, Indian, and Islamic civilizations had science, yes, but never a Renaissance, never a truly secular, empirical culture. Until Imperial Europeans imposed it. There's no guarantee they'd have ever gotten there, though of course we'll never know. 

There is much to feel despair about in the world today. I find myself, when I allow myself to think long on it, almost totally stopped, knocked into inaction by thoughts of mass extinction, climate change, ecological rape, resource extraction run amok, chemical pollution, overfishing, dead rivers, the loss of the Amazon's forests, the slide in America and elsewhere towards fascism, overpopulation, famine and disease in the Third World, the widening wealth gap, even just the horrible environments we set up for ourselves to live in. But behind it all, and almost undiscussed, is the nuclear threat.

Oh I know there's the very public Iran debacle, and North Korea. Definitely both are a concern, and the fewer countries that have such weapons, the better. But North Korea having a few nukes with short range and pretty bad engineering, and Iran trying to attain them, worry me far less than the thousands upon thousands owned by the USA, Russia, and China, and to a lesser extent, the UK and France. Also quite worrisome are the Pakistani and Indian nukes, two countries that hate each other, and of course, little ol' war hawk Israel which almost certainly has them. With nuclear India and Pakistan on one side, and Israel on the other, you can see why Iran would want such weapons, though they deny it. 

I remember being taught in English class back in high school about foreshadowing: if the author, even in passing, mentions, say, a gun, chances are good that someone's going to use it eventually. This is my concern with nuclear weapons. Sure, the Cold War is more or less over (though Putin's Russia and quasi-Fascist America seem almost eager to resume it), and while it's been over 65 years since a full scale nuclear bomb has been used in war, the potential remains. The likelihood almost seems to increase, the longer we hold these missiles of death, hold them by the thousands. To say nothing of dirty bombs used by terrorists or rogue nations. 

Everything is on the line with this issue. I heard a quote not too long ago, something like "there is no ecological justice without social justice" meaning that social justice is more important. Makes sense in its way. You know, get the Third World, everyone really, educated, healthy, and stable; birth rates will fall, people won't have to denude their environment for sheer survival, etc. With the nuclear issue, it is made very clear: if we save all the forests and oceans, keep the whales and tigers and pandas alive, if we switch to clean energy and save the Appalachian hills, if we get Clean Air and Clean Rivers and more roadless areas and stop soil erosion... but go ahead and have a nuclear war, what the fuck does it matter? It's one thing for civilization to collapse from Peak Oil or Global Climate Change, but it's quite another to nuke ourselves into annihilation. 

Lastly, here's something weird I found out on Wikipedia. The USA's first nuclear test was named Trinity, and India's first was named Smiling Buddha. That these names would be chosen for the ugliest weapons the world has ever seen does not give me much hope. 

Growth

Is growth necessary? I've long thought of the growth economy as a problem, summed up so succinctly by Edward Abbey: "Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell." But I wonder, is there any other kind of economy? At least in a civilization? Sure, hunter-gatherers are extremely stable, but if you look at things historically, once agriculture began, and thereby this project of civilization, that is when change began. Change and growth. Earlier societies were largely changeless, in that they changed so slowly that it was imperceptible to a people with no memory storage devices besides their elders. If something took longer than a few generations to happen, it didn't happen at all, it was always so.

But with agriculture, now things start to move. Slowly at first, because there is less to build on. The wheel, domestic animals, new ways of building houses, the first villages, towns, cities, new forms of governance. But there is a definite movement of change, the civilizations, the cultures, the empires, always expanded, either into the wilderness or into neighboring tribes, and either by assimilation or by conquest. And of course recent history has shown an explosion in innovation, starting in the 1850s or so. Along with this, human populations are growing all the while. Now, I'm not saying it was a smooth increase for the last 10,000 years; obviously it was not. There were discrete civilizations all that time, which rose and fell and birthed the next.

But that's sort of my point. The rise and fall of civilizations: they form, expand, maybe plateau a while, then decline. It seems a natural pattern, and one senses that civilizations are almost living organisms themselves. Most things behave this way. Water rises and falls in waves, continents rise as mountains and fall with erosion (imagine watching that in a sort of geological time lapse, that'd be incredible!).

Certainly most life follows the growth/decline cycle, with the exception of bacteria, and maybe single-celled life, which seem to divide, grow to normal size, and divide again. Bacteria don't decline or die of old age, only from predation and environmental constraints. But higher life seems to embody this rhythm. Remember the cycles of population booms and bust in the lynx/rabbit relationship? The rabbits produce more young, and a few years later that change is embodied in a growth in the lynx population, which eventually eats up more of the rabbits, leading to their decline, then eventually the lynx decline as well... and on and on. Nature is stable, but in a dynamic way. They call it dynamic equilibrium, in that nothing ever gets an upper hand for good, but maybe for a while.

Boom and bust, the way of the world? That is my question. It seems to be an inherent feature of nature-- nature meaning the process of existence, not some "thing" apart from mankind, a usage I am more and more switching to. You can appeal to the concept of yin and yang and be done with it. So you can see my concern. I've long been interested in and read much about sustainability-- though often what is to be sustained is not specified by such speakers and writers. For myself, I'm about sustaining not the current mode of civilization, complete with superhighways and space shuttles, but some mode of life that keeps alive and well human happiness and wellbeing, meaning of course living in tune with the rest of our environment. I for one do not see "subsistence" as inherently negative, as if we always need to be in a state of progress, though again, to what we are to progress towards is never defined-- therefore we are a ship without a port to sail for, eternally lost and merely thrashing about the planet in a gluttonous, terrified rage. But I digress.

Can we have sustainability? Is stasis always to be in the backwaters, the stagnant pools far from the main flow of Life? Is it inherent in all Being to expand and contract? If one culture decides to go the sustainable route, is it then doomed to be overrun by the cultures that do not so choose? Is there a way off this treadmill? I mean, we can't simply forget the last 10,000 years' worth of knowledge. We aren't simple hunter-gatherers anymore, we know farming on vast scales, transportation at incredible speeds, mass communication all around the globe. We can't simply go back, if only for the simple fact that there's too many of us. We're stuck working within the constraints of what we know, i.e., civilization, lest we perish.

Yet to continue with civilization is to perish as well, as we seem to be on a collision course. I've long thought of nuclear weapons as an opportunity, a litmus test for humanity: either control our violent streak, or die. It is far beyond such simple concepts now, as we threaten to topple the entire biosphere. We hack at mountains for the coal, we drill deep into the crust for the creamy nougat center of oil, we burn, burn, burn everything in sight, swallowing everything in our path towards progress: forests, cultures, oceans of fish, entire rivers, and millions of lives in our wars. Extinctions are peaking at a frightening rate. Horrifying.

A lot of times you'll hear from the environmental crowd, especially some of the Deep Ecologists, that humans are a disease, a cancer. I think that is ridiculous, and am in line with Daniel Quinn and others who see that it is civilization that is the problem. And perhaps it is only our concept of being separate from the rest of the world, the ego divide, dualism of city and country. The concept of civilization itself, and its counterpart "nature." Dualism everywhere destroys a clear understanding of reality: look at the Occupy movement. I sympathize with it and I'll explain why in a moment, but clearly the evil and greed in the 1% is present in the 99% just as much. The only difference is, in the 1% it is magnified by sums of money and power far above what the 99% has access to when we try to put our schemes into effect. In the end, the world can never be saved by political action, only by everyone killing their ego and opening their eyes in an enlightened state. But, as this will never happen, I must support this movement that at least tries for evenness and fairness. Yet therefore also do I dwell in despair. A corrupted means will never attain an uncorrupted end, and we are all corrupt. This is why communism failed, and why capitalism also failed.

So we seem to be doomed, and our happy talk about sustainable civilization is a sad joke, an oxymoron gone unrecognized. Growth and expansion seem inherent, and of course that means decline and collapse. I know I harp on this a bit, but it is obvious that we have overshot certain limits and are basically in the position of the Coyote: we have run over the cliff but haven't looked down yet, floating on a fading illusion and moments away from a fall. And there's nothing we can do; like Wiley E., technology isn't going to save us, and it's actually part of what put us here. Or our misuse of it, based on our clouded worldview.

I welcome your thoughts on all this: the concept of growth vs. stasis, as well as what I consider the imminent collapse of [our] civilization. This is something I'd love a discussion over. Also, as I've changed the blog around a bit, feel free to comment and critique the design as well. Note also that I've added some links there on the right: especially relevant to this post is The Dark Mountain Project, which I will hopefully talk about in an upcoming post.

Doomsday Preppers

Anyone ever seen that show Doomsday Preppers? At first I thought it would be pretty hokey, but I watched a few episodes last night and it wasn't filled with crazies like I though it would; not completely anyway. Of course, that may only speak to my own craziness, given that I agree with the general principles these people are after: being prepared, being self sufficient, getting off the grid and mostly independant of society.

The first guy featured, living in Phoenix, had converted his swimming pool into a fish pond and aquaculture garden. He covered it over into a sort of greenhouse, and keeps hundreds of tilapia in the deep end pool, the rest of it being drained and full of vegetables. The water in this system is recycled, and much of the process depends on duckweek, your typical pond scum, which is great for the fish and chickens, and not bad as a protein shake either. Urban homesteading, right up my alley.

The guy was worried about a coronal mass ejection he thinks will occur this year, and has for him and his wife and two kids, gas masks and suits, stored food, bug-out bags, evacuation plans, etc. Pretty well thought out. There were many other people featured, many with a slant on defending their home, family, and stores, including one guy who was a little off the deep end, with his spider holes and special ops background. One hippie from the 60's bought an old missle silo and turned it into a pretty nice home, but also with food and water stores, the original barbed wire fences, security cameras, and an automatic rifle in the closet.

Which brings me to the point. I watched these shows with interest, but also with a bit of disagreement. These people have little faith. That whole thing about look not to the morrow. But I'm not really talking about religious faith, but the faith that things will be all right. It's a lesson I've learned in my own life, a sort of trust in the universe. That sounds naive, and I can't really help that... it is what it is. So let me supplement that view.

Some of these families had almost a year's worth of food and water stored in their basement caches, all this gear, and so forth. I'm very much for preparedness and such forward thinking is not lost on me, but, what if the issue isn't a coronal mass ejection, a huge economic collapse, or a nuclear winter (and who the hell really wants to survive a nuclear winter anyways?) but something you haven't planned for? What if your survival depends on abandoning your stores, bugging out for somewhere else? It would be hard to leave such an investment of time and money behind. This is called inertia. It's like how we all sort of know building suburbs is ruining the country, but how can we abandon 60+ years of investment and development? Psychologically, that's hard.

Furthermore, these people storing canned foods and manufactured ammunition and all this stuff, they're not becoming independent at all. They depend fundamentally on society by doing that, they haven't learned the real skills of survival. Some of the folks were growing food, true, but only one guy the show featured really took it to its logical endpoint. This guy lived in rural Maine, eats (fresh) roadkill, makes and uses simple but effective hunting weapons (throwing sticks, hatchets, bows), and is teaching his kids real survival skills.

This is real independence. I mean, what are you going to do when your canned goods run out, or some roving gang steals them? Naturally that last point is why all the guns, and I'm not against having something put aside, nor am I against guns; but I think it would be better to throw your time and energy into learning skills than on hard assets like food, ammo, and so forth. Carry your survival cache in your head, and you're truly free.

The rest depends, yes, on faith. Faith and luck. No one knows what the future might bring, what kinds of problems will come up. The most prepared can die from the smallest oversight, while the naive massman might just make it through. You can't plan for everything, and in the end, you know what they say: "the best laid plans of mice and men often go awry." Or if you prefer the more modern take, "if you want to hear God laugh, tell him your plans."

Flexibility, creativity, knowledge, and ability. These things are not widely developed these days, as people sleepwalk through their lives, doing their often menial jobs, watching TV, playing games on their iPhones, and generally not thinking about the big picture. We lock into a role and drift with it as long as possible, as long as the money is good and life is easy.

Think it can't happen here?

Lastly, I must mention cities. Cities to me feel like they'd be death traps should a sudden collapse come. They already roil with barely surpressed rage and desperation, the more so the larger the city. Who knows which way it would be directed in a catastrophe; I like to believe that in general, people would be good to each other and help one another out, but eventually, hunger and thirst will make people do terrible things. And with the general lack of real communities, again, the more so in the big cities, but also in the small towns, it might end up feeling like it's every man for himself. That's where you get your apocolyptic Hollywood flicks from.

Like, take grocery stores: they don't keep a lot of food in stock, thanks to "just in time deliveries" from far off places. The shelves could be emptied quickly by those who get their early. After that, what is a New Yorker, or Chicagoan, or Angelino to do? Try to trap the few remaining squirrels and songbirds? Doubtful. They're going to first try to grab what supplies they can, but generally you'll see people heading for the hills. Yet, how many will even know what to do once they get there? Think of the people living in Phoenix, there's no resources there, especially water, the most frightening limiting factor of all.

Personally, I doubt we're going to see a sudden catastrophe like many on this show predict or at least plan for. I think the system will fall, but will fall slowly, crumbling bit by bit. The bigger they are, the harder they fall, but also slower, because there will be many small, if insufficient supports and "solutions" to slow the descent.

But of course, you never know.

Don't just sit there, DO SOMETHING!

My last two posts have been circling a central issue that I feel underpins a lot of what's going on in the world. Energy. Energy is central to the functioning of economies and states. Naturally, by energy I mostly mean fossil fuels, and especially oil.

Well, there's this thing called Peak Oil. It's a multifaceted issue, but the long and short of it is, as with any limited resource, there is a production peak. After half of the oil is gone, it becomes harder and more expensive (in terms of money and energy investment) to get the rest out. What remains is lower quality, and harder to get (deep water, for example, or in or smaller reserves). So, you plateau a while as the market struggles with it, then the long slide down of production begins, while the line of expense goes ever up. Eventually the two lines cross and it takes more energy to get than to use, and it becomes not worth going after... this happens long before all the oil is actually used.

I'm reading now that oil peaked in 2006, putting us in the volatile plateau area. We're massively fucked. Consider:

With the immense petroleum input that goes into modern agriculture (fertilizer, herbicides, pesticides, tractors, transit...), food prices are going up and will continue to do so. Thus the unrest in the Arab world these days. They want freedom and an equal share in their economies, but driving it is the need for affordable food. Adding to that are other systemic problems, like depleted fossil aquifers, wasting food for making ethanol (gotta keep soccer mom's SUV and joe sixpack's pick-up going!).



Goodbye soil,
goodbye future.



That alone should make us worry. Food is life, after all, and we aren't ready to jump into a local, organic food production system. The sooner we start the better. Modern agriculture is ruining the soil (what doesnt blow or wash away), which is a crime against the generations to come. This is one of the top issues in my opinion.

This reality of Peak Oil also helps explain the two wars we have going on (it's the oil, stupid!). It helps explain the power grabs and corruption in our government, and the endless recession we've fallen into, which I personally doubt we'll ever climb out of. The point is that the system is in chaos, and probably falling. Those who can are scrambling to grab what they can, it's looting at the highest levels. Peak Oil isn't the only variable in all this, of course; the system is complex. But it's a major one.

So. As I mentioned at the end of my recent post on unions, the system looks like it's going to crash. No other state or economy so depends on fossil fuels as does America's. We live too far from our jobs, from grocery stores (which are themselves too far from food sources), and from clean water (clean water? what's that?). We have paved over miles and miles of prime agricultural land. The suburbs were built on and depend on cheap oil/transportation, as does trade and manufacturing. Part of the housing bubble's collapse might be a growing if yet unconscious awareness of the coming death of suburbia. Our jobs are largely service jobs now, and do not create tangible goods or wealth. In fact, the growth economy and globalism seems to be in its death throes, which is very good for the long term but very painful for the short term. Do the words "die off" mean anything to you?

This is part of why I think getting into sustainability is vital. It's half environmental ethic, half awareness of the end of western civilization as we know it if we aren't proactive. Sounds extreme, but surely a Roman in the year 400 would have said the same of his Empire. Yet just 100 years later, Rome, at least in the West, was a memory as the so called Dark Ages began.

I don't really want another Dark Ages, and I'm sure no one does. But to avoid it, we have to wake up and realize that we are not going to be saved by a miracle technology or fuel source or some other deus ex machina. We have realities to face. We need to stop being lulled by the politicos and economists who are blind, stupid, or corrupt. The storm is coming, and praying for blue skies won't save us. We need to prepare. Large systems fall slowly, and we can help soften the blows, but we need to start yesterday.

Here's a few interesting sites, blogs and otherwise, that I've been reading lately on this topic and others. I'll be adding them to my link list as well.
http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/
http://thurmanhubbard.com/
http://blog.sustainablog.org/
http://www.kunstler.com/index.php
http://www.ted.com/

Joining the Green Movement

The other day I discovered the website TED.com, a site that has tons of videos of talks and speeches by thoughtful, innovative people; I've been watching probably too many videos in my free time. I'll post links to some of my favorites at the bottom of this post. But this one I watched this morning:

Edward Burtynsky on manufactured landscapes

It's a long video for TED, but worth the time. It was interesting and in ways beautiful, but also hard for me to watch. All his images of China, and elsewhere, and the explosive growth, made me remember an article I read years ago, Humans as Cancer. Is there such a thing as explosive cancer? China would be it. But then, China is only the metastasis of Western growth models. It's a scary world we're busy making; it hurts my heart to look at it, to think about it.

I've long felt a despair of sorts, as far as environmentalism goes. For me, it has always been the major issue. I know on this blog I talk a lot about Zen and spirituality and such, but that's only so many words, probably useless to talk about. But the Green Movement, well, that's the big one. If ever there were a field I would go into, that would be it: sustainability, permaculture, deep ecology; these things thrill me, intellectually and practically. Spiritually too, I guess.

But I look at our culture and think it's a waste of time. Despair, not as an oppressive emotion (most of the time), but just as a knowing. We will never be able to transform into a sustainable culture, we are cancer. It stops me from acting, as I continually think it would be a waste of time to devote my life to these things, burnout and broken dreams the inevitable result. Better to escape to the hills, on a private off-the-grid homestead, in my own little corner of the good earth and hope the cancer doesn't follow me in. Fulfilling as that life could be in some ways, it is also apparent that this is supremely selfish.

It is the product of despair: the foolish humans cannot be helped, so fuck 'em. No use trying to fix a fundamentally flawed system, let it crash. It will crash, and what comes then will be an equilibrium-- but only because it was forced to be. We cannot engineer it, our thin layer of rationality cannot beat back the animal greed for more and more. It is a sad future I often foresee, akin to pondering the burning of the library in Alexandria centuries ago-- we will lose so many good things, advanced medical knowledge and ability, other advanced knowledge, democracy perhaps, and our one shot at having enough energy and reach to globally solve problems of hunger, poverty, and oppression through intelligent and compassionate connections and solutions. We may end up sustainable, but probably in the way that the Dark Ages were sustainable. Forced simplicity is poverty.

Growth for the sake of growth, Edward Abbey insightfully said, is the philosophy of the cancer cell. This is evil. There was potential, but it has been squandered. We grew, enriching a few people at the expense of the many, and of the wider biosphere to boot. If only we had grown compassionately, to bring a real "good life" not of material acquisition but of quality life to all. Used fossil fuel energy in moderation to piggyback us into a clean world, in tune with Nature, use resources conservatively and wisely, not, for example, to make products we use once then throw out (bottled water is an obvious example of such ridiculousness). We have been fools. Even the Green Movement, which I'd long hoped for but given up on, surprised me when it became popular... but it was quickly co-opted and ruined by consumerism, now become a cheap version of what it needed to be. Failure. Thus my despair.

A top-down goal is not what I want; those have a tendency to devolve into the totalitarian one-size-fits-all bleakness we see in evangelical religion and fascist states. The world is diverse, and needs a diversity of solutions. I know the value of and need for government and corporate action in all this, but I think the real change is going to come from the roots, organically; something that can be implemented in countless local variations. A network format, not a pyramid. Really, the model of the industrial revolution that brought us here: the individual entrepreneurial spirit, but put to something more than the profit motive. Which is really the ego motive: I want mine, and fuck all you others. But a wider goal, or shall we say vision, is needed first.

So, I watch these videos and feel inspired. I've occasionally met people doing these things, like on my AT thru-hike; in towns and on the trail, they were my first real contact with people who are doing the good things. And I still want to be involved in all that, in a hopeful future. Biomimricy amazes me, permaculture techniques and just the basic discoveries amaze me. The idea of networks, though I have little understanding of them, blows my mind. The stuff about using mushrooms and fungi, among other things, in biologically integrated technologies leaves me feeling giddy (the added thought that fungal networks may be conscious is a further thrill). Green roofs, alternative building techniques (cob, straw bale), community gardens, passive heating/cooling... all wonderful and exciting.

I just don't know how to get involved. I find myself drawn to organic farming/permaculture, through the WWOOF organization, and plan to try it out, if not this spring then next fall. Hopefully I can meet people who can point me in the ways I need to go. My problem is I have a great need to be outside, doing real work. I'm a paradox; I'm a "deep thinker" but for me, in the end abstraction is not an honest living. Too much sitting around thinking, not enough implementing. I want to be out there, in the real, doing the work. But also, I'm not an engineer, I won't be designing products or new technologies. I want to have my own land and live these ideas myself, but I think to limit myself to that is selfish and, well, lonely, futile. I want to have some impact on the world more than just improving a few acres of soil. Hope, I suppose, springs eternal, even in the face of terrible odds. I just don't know where or how to begin.

Neat videos:
Alex Steffen sees a sustainable world
Paul Stamets on 6 ways mushrooms can save the world
Janine Benysus: Biomimricy in action
Michael Pollan gives a plant's-eye-view
The Web as random acts of kindness
Christopher McDougall: are we born to run?

Pebbles and Burning Bridges

Reading this excellent post at a favorite blog of mine, as well as recent events in my own life, have me thinking about the future again. Right now I'm adrift. I had a job, moving and cleaning rental cars down by the airport, but ParkWest, the company who was doing this work for Enterprise, had its contract terminated. So we all got laid off, myself only a week and a half into employment. This is alright, the job wasn't great anyways, nor the pay. But it was something, useful especially since my truck needs some somewhat pricey repairs.

Now, I'm wondering, looking at all my options: Should I keep looking for work here in Dallas? I like being around my sister and brother-in-law. Should I WWOOF, and learn about farming? Should I go back to Florida, where I have residency, and try to go back to college? Should I just go piss away the winter in the desert, like a friend of mine is suggesting, then hike the PCT as I still intend to do?

Any choice I make rules out others. Right now I'm thinking work a few months, then PCT, then school. But It's a very hard thing for me though, because school means leaving behind the freedom of this more or less bohemian, hiker-trash lifestyle I've been living-- having adventures and trying to do the things I want to do. To saddle myself with a 3 or 4 year obligation, complete with massive loans (being in debt scares the shit out of me) is an extremely difficult move. I know it's the rational thing for me to do-- I know I'm better than the minimum wage jobs I'm looking at, and the future, though not guaranteed, is as it turns out pretty likely to occur. I'm not going to die next year, probably, even if the future to me still continues to look like a giant Void.

If I continue to forgo education, I may never climb out of this hole I'm in, yet how do I balance the fact that it's only a "hole" if one measures life by money and material success, a ruler I'm not prone to use? That's society's measure, not mine. I'm happy as hell out on the trails, with next to nothing. Mountains, sunshine, simple, down-to-earth people. It's all good. It's just the inbetween time, the winters and time spent saving for the next adventure, living in the slum that is modern life, around selfish, frustrated people that is so depressing for me. I have dreams of being a writer, and of having a little "homestead" and living more or less off the grid, the simple life.

But it's hard to live against the grain, being on the fringes, looked down upon, having your entire lifestyle put down constantly even by those close to you. It's also hard to live with the grain, and be so lonely and unfulfilled. But who knows? Maybe the choice to continue this life of "adventure" would lead somewhere great for me. Or maybe it will crush me. It's all so uncertain. As stated in the first link, he ripples from that pebble (choice) hitting the water will go out, and who knows what it will do out there.

What's both deeply frightening and madly exhilarating is to know that every decision we make, in every moment, is going to make more ripples, have more unforseen consequences. Ripples making ripples of their own. Every moment we live changes our possible futures, by closing some doors forever and opening others. How does one make rational decisions when the information needed is infinite, and the outcomes completely unknown?

I've never been decisive. The future is a wild adventure, enjoyed in the present. This is the cutting edge. And I'm afraid of burning bridges.