Who Are You?

In class, Ousmane had us write in response to the prompt, "What defines your personal identity, and what does community mean to you?" This is what I scrawled:

I am a member of the human community in general and a member of a not-yet-existent/fledgling tribe in particular. Humans, of which community, as I said, I am a part, have great capacities for acquiring and using knowledge, for using consciousness and consciences, for empathy, ingenuity, sensibility, improvisation. Sometimes groups within the larger human association (species) squander these innate capacities and so any Cartesian legacy for being `thinking things` becomes nearly meaningless, without substance/grounding, for if a `thinking thing` presumes its own logic and rationality but in actuality acts without any sensibility or awareness of surroundings, for planetary, social, and tribal community contexts, then such actions essentially counter and reverse any intuitive logical capacities such `thinking things` innately (apparently) possess...(to be continued, especially since I`ve been thinking a lot about different framings of "sense," "rationality," and "logics" as groundwork for my upcoming thesis work)...

We then discussed in groups what national identity and community identity meant in our lives, what definitions we could come up with. In my group, we drew out the communal natures of traditional villages formed by the early pilgrims and colonists in the United States, long before it ever became known as such. Because so much of the value of community has disintegrated in the United States in favor of extreme individualist values, we kind of had a difficult time drawing out such examples of community identity in relation to the country that we live in and call home. We thought of small churches, going back to the first evangelical communities in Israel and Greece, how a certain concern for others and community experience were valued highly, as they were in American churches before we went through the more recent proliferation of mega-churches. It even used to be common in the United States, especially in times of greater scarcity, such as during the World Wars, to ask around in one`s neighborhood for some sugar or salt, or other staples and basic supplies, but today dependency has dwindled to the point that it`s hardly okay to ask a neighbor for anything. People often don`t even know their neighbors by name.

Ousmane said after these writing activities, very elegantly and yet very simply, something to the effect of, "No one person is completely isolated." He also gave us a quote from Kofi Annan in class:

"What makes a community? What binds it together? For some it is faith. For others it is the defence of an idea, such as democracy [or the fight against poverty]. Some communities are homogenous, others multicultural. Some are as small as schools and villages; others as large as continents...What binds us into an international community? In the broadest sense there is a shared vision of a better world for all people...Together we are stronger."

When I looked it up, I discovered that the version we`d been given was slightly abbreviated and edited (as evidenced by brackets and ellipses above). Here is the full version of the excerpted quote I found within a full text by the former U.N.-Secretary General, titled "The World Community Often Fails to Act Together, But It Can and It Should":

"What makes a community? What binds it together? For some it is faith. For others it is the defence of an idea, such as democracy. Some communities are homogeneous, others multicultural. Some are as small as schools and villages; others as large as continents. Today, of course, more and more communities are "virtual", discovering and promoting their shared values through the latest communications and information technologies. What binds us into an international community? In the broadest sense there is a shared vision of a better world for all people, as set out, for example, in the founding Charter of the United Nations. There is our sense of common vulnerability in the face of global warming and the threat posed by the spread of weapons of mass destruction. There is the framework of international law, treaties and human rights conventions. There is equally our sense of shared opportunity, which is why we build common markets and joint institutions such as the United Nations."

Later, I was reading Daniel Quinn`s Providence: The Story of a Fifty-Year Vision Quest, and I found these passages with very similar themes, all of which make me feel very content to remember the simplicity of our connectedness, such the remedy that it is to feeling overly isolated and alone (Yes, he seems to stress some words unnecessarily, but I never said that I always agree with his mode of writing):

"Actually, it's plainly written in their lives. It's plainly written in the general community to which they belonged: the community of life on this planet. Anyone can read it. You just have to look.

Every creature born in the biological community of the earth belongs to the community. Nothing lives in isolation from the rest; nothing can live in isolation from the rest. Nothing lives only in itself, needing nothing from the community. Nothing lives only for itself, owing nothing to the community. Nothing is untouchable or untouched. Every life in the community is owed to the community--and is paid back to the community in death. The community is a web of life, and every strand of the web is a path to all the other strands. Nothing is exempt. Nothing is special. Nothing lives on a strand by itself, unconnected to the rest (Providence: The Story of a Fifty-Year Vision Quest by Daniel Quinn, Chapter Eleven, pages 147-148)."

Keep reading: Who Are You?...

What "Ecovillage" Means in Senegal

Much of this is copied from my notes so quotes and many phrasings can be attributed to our Tufts professor, M.Z.!

The goal of the recent proliferation of Ecovillage Movements has been to create ecovillages and sustainable communities which, by their own nebulous definitions, are meant to achieve a state such that they are sustainable on their own. Oh, how this folds in on itself! Do we perpetually insist on defining terms with the defined word used in the explanation? In my Permaculture course, Bill Mollison gave a much more satisfying definition of sustainability, which I can share with you in the future. He also shared with us a long tirade about the majority of people who rally around the term "sustainability" and don`t actually have any idea about its meaning!

She essentially began with a graph, which she referred to as the "World Model Standard Run." A google search turned up this carbon copy. The graph basically depicts the ideas of carrying capacity, "overshoot" (such the technical term that it is!), and consumption. What she had to say about it was merely that "There was no big bang; When we passed carrying capacity, there was no boom (because we had fossil fuels). We didn`t realize we were headed for disaster." She did, to her credit, leave room for some self-questioning: "Is it true? Do we know? But there is a possibility we`re in some deep trouble."

We talked about how Africa is huge (We were informed that the land mass of Africa would fit the combined land masses of Argentina, U.S., New Zealand, India, China, and Europe, perhaps more, but this needs further substantiation. She showed us an image of this, but it couldn`t have been to scale; I think it was just intended to convey the idea!). Also, another student mentioned that U.S. maps during the cold war magnified the U.S. and the Soviet Union to emphasize their conflict so Africa doesn`t look so big (also needs some background research - anyone up for the challenge?). Anyhow, in spite of (perhaps because of, but I`m skeptical!) its largeness, Africa has been rather isolated (although when the Sahara was still habitable 10,000 years ago...Here, she made a sideways reference, sort of, to the fact that agriculture made it uninhabitable by about the time of 4,500 years ago. Gee, imagine that! Fertile Crescent turning to "totalitarian agriculture" and depleting/gobbling up the resources of the planet! More research needed here, as well!) and so has changed at a different, less dramatic pace with the onslaught of colonization and the Industrial Revolution. Of course, most of Africa is somehow defined by its relationship to such forces, but the rate at which its many "Leaver" tribes have declined in prominence has been much slower than elsewhere around the globe (take the Americas for a counter-example!).

Speaking of the confluences of what many have simplified into dichotomies of East and West, South and North, those disparate dispersions of that "one right way to live" across the globe, we discussed a South African ecovillage, Tlholego, which I was surprised I had never heard of before (then again, when I stumbled on Pun Pun, I was equally shocked it hadn`t come up sooner). Tlholego was supposedly built on a European model, which means the guiding principle was "Let`s look to the past," but because it was styling itself also after European fashions, they didn`t do this very well. Yes, it`s in South Africa, and they have mixed indigenous tribes with disgruntled city-dwellers, blacks and whites, but they`ve also based much of their ecological efforts on science, overlooking the potential of existing techniques (hence reducing the cost and time inputs of research) and even intuition/instinct.

This brings me very nicely to this astonishing moment from our class. M.Z., our professor, mentioned that the BBC website has reconstructed how the British and Irish lived 2,000 years ago, taking painstaking efforts to explain and illustrate the methods, the materials, and the details of everyday life. But right here in Senegal, people live (exactly or almost exactly) the same today!

In Senegal, GENSEN (Global Ecovillage Network-Senegal), they have approved 45 low footprint villages in 10 regions (2 zones with 7 regions: nord = Dakar, Thiés, Diourbel, St. Louis, Fatiak; sud = Kolda, Casamance), with 31, 500 population, much of which longs to return to "the golden age." Out of this 31,500, perhaps 315 can say what an "ecovillage" is. Around this point, M.Z. stated, "GENSEN believes that the colonial (system) leaves them in unnecessary conflict," referring I believe to villages and ancient traditions and the "Western"/"Taker" way. (A note on terminology: I`ve spent a lot of time preoccupied with the right and wrong words, but it seems so clear to me at this moment that it doesn`t matter that much. We are not supposed to have a vocabulary to explain monstrosity (monster cultures and all they engender) because we aren`t supposed to have monstrosity. But out of hundreds of thousands, all we needed was one. And we got that one. And now we`re stuck explaining how one devoured the majority of hundreds. - Though of course some declined on their own.)

A telling moment in class was related to NGOs. Our professor quoted a man from Burkina Faso: "Why won`t they let us work for our own villages?!" The system doesn`t work well now; top-down formal villages cost a lot of money, and there is no interest by imported outsiders in the villages they are imported into. That man won`t want to be there. Besides, villagers are suspicious. Whereas if he`s from the village, this shifts a lot. He has interest, he has the villagers` trust; good things happen.

One of the things that she brought up in class that was most mind-boggling for me was the mere notion of "TWO SOCIAL CONTRACTS" (which is how it looks in my notes). It solves all kinds of dilemmas I`ve been dealing with in my head, avoiding having to work them out with others who can only see one trajectory of history that pits tribal law in the primitive "dark ages" and written law as a godsend, a salvation. It cuts out this trajectory by showing how both function entirely by different political means and mechanics they can hardly be thrown together on a clear line. They function in entirely different planes, and the disintegration in tribal law that was succeeded by a long nothingness and followed by written rules such as the Code of Hammurabai (see The Story of B for discussion of tribal law and "Taker" law) explains how these two entirely distinct notions of government and social functioning could be so incompatible and dissimilar, entirely unrelated (think skewed, in terms of geometry!).

One such social contract is that which M.Z. placed within the "Global Market System" (though Quinn and I would broaden it to "Taker" culture in its long and winding history): -Primary economic units are government & private organizations. -Employment services and distribution of goods are monetary exchanges. They are regulated to include nepotism. - Everything is (strictly) MONITORED. ...There is a legitimate conflict of interest (in Senegal?) with the realities of life support systems; 29% of the Senegalese population had jobs in 2007; there is much corruption, many are underpaid, many in higher ranks are (untrustworthy?).

The other social contract belongs to African Traditional Societies: -Family, lineage are primary units -Cradle to grave social security is assumed by the hierarchical structure of kinship; friendship obligations; distribution system regulated by the hierarchy. -FAMILY is the strongest force (which cancels out any need for unwieldy governmental structures).

What the meaning of ecovillage in Senegal (and Africa in general, it seems) came down to was this: "Northern" ecovillages are trying to create sustainable lifestyles post-Industrial Revolution, whereas "Southern" ecovillages are trying to sustain pre-Industrial Revolution lifestyles (shortest, simplest route to sustainability; we have a handout that defines an ecovillage--and don`t take this for a final word because I`ll be providing multiple definitions until I can distill the clearest and most deserving definition--as "a village that works to preserve its traditions and its natural resources against poverty and degradation, while upgrading the living environment of its inhabitants. An ecovillage is seeking both preservation and modernization in four areas," which areas are 1) sustainable traditions, culture, religion, and values, 2) sustainable environmental conditions, 3) sustainable economics, and 4) sustainable society (the health, education, and safety of the whole ecovillage).). Some of us discussed in class how North & South are merely current popular jargon, that such language oversimplifies the realities and doesn`t capture nuances.

M.Z. asked us if we thought the isolated heritage of much of Africa, and its lagging behind the Industrial Revolution, seemed like a blessing or a disadvantage. It was clear in my head that this was just right, completely as it should be, because that meant more tribes had lost fewer integral components of their belief systems, lifestyles, etc.. But looking around the room and noticing what our professor stressed, it became clear that most people see it as a mixed advantage, which makes plenty of sense also. Moving along, at about this point in the class, she exclaimed, "Look at how the diagrams by the Europeans are trying to discover how to go backwards." And then, "Here is permaculture," showing some garden or one construction project. No, that was not permaculture. I don`t know if permaculture can be encapsulated in one image (I doubt it!). And though in the notes it sounds as though she might have been ridiculing the tendency to think in terms of "going backwards" I`m almost positive she stressed it in such a way as to say this was the goal, the thing people interested in sustainability aspire to. But this makes no sense. It is impossible to imagine we could go backwards, and those who do look nothing less than foolish. We can only go forward. So we go forward, with knowledge of the past, current innovation, and ongoing inventiveness. She did mention the following, which made plenty of sense in this context: "Here in Africa you can still find answers you can`t find elsewhere (`cause they`re still in the original version)."

Yet it apparently doesn`t raise any eyebrows here that the governing mentality is
"Think Globally. Act Locally." For education, transportation, and other "modernization" needs, it doesn`t seem to occur to anyone to look anywhere other than to the so-called Western world. So a group might claim to have in its interest the perpetuation of traditions and the urge to circumvent the ugliness of the Industrial Revolution, but the endpoint they want to get to is still the "modern" one, the appealing lifestyle seen on television (soap operas from the Americas being especially popular), just via a route that bypasses all the smog, congestion, and violence. Meaning: It doesn`t matter what inherent violence might lurk within that lifestyle; because it`s glamorous and convenient and healthy and sleek, everyone should strive for this one particular manner of existence. Perhaps the derailing happens in something as simple (and oh so unassuming!) as education. Tribal societies don`t need to have curriculum when learning is so interwoven with daily life and experience. Sorry, it`s kind of driving me crazy. Expect Providence references for a follow-up!

Keep reading: What "Ecovillage" Means in Senegal...

Local? Global? How Should We Live and Interact?

Written March 10, 2008, especially for Proseminar, on a topic both of interest to me and of relevance to the program. Not my most stunning writing, but decent enough in its clarity and simplicity...Nevertheless, this essay ends on a note that is very much central to a large component of my upcoming thesis work, gauge-ing various degrees of sustainability across the gamut of human societies (as much as possible, of course). Also, we discussed regionalism today in politics (hoorah!)...

“Now, it’s feeling like a small town with six billion people downtown at a little sidewalk fair in Earth Town Square. There are Germans selling Audis filled with gasoline from Saudis to Australians sipping Kenyan coffee in their Chinese shoes; Argentines are meeting Mongols over french fries at McDonald’s, and the place looks strangely tiny when you see it from the moon…” – “Earth Town Square” by Peter Mayer (singer/songwriter)

Community! As social creatures, we humans cannot extricate ourselves completely from our social surroundings. We come to know the world through them, and there is strong evidence to support the claim that we leave this world by severing our ties to our society. We cannot live alone with any degree of safety comparable to that enjoyed by, say, a band of foragers. We may define our community in different ways, yet the integral role of other people to our prospects for survival defines our relationships as essential to our lives. Could this also possibly be a sufficient way for us to define home?

Let us define community as a group of people living in close proximity and interacting with each other and their surroundings. This definition stresses interconnectedness, a concept borrowed from ecology, which, after all, applies to us humans as much as to other creatures. Our focus now shifts to the question of the community’s surroundings. Where does the community end and the external world begin? How large is the purview of the community? How large can a community grow before it ceases to be a community?

In other words, the question is how should we define local? By miles? By regions? National or physical geographic borders? Population? At this point, I become unsure. Much writing has recently been released on the benefits of local-scale economies and the scourge of their global-scale counterparts. Still another set of writers continues to vouch for the advantages of globalization, a world in which “Australians [sip] Kenyan coffee in their Chinese shoes; Argentines [meet] Mongols for french fries at McDonald’s.” This is the part where an exploration of the various texts, for and against globalization, would be quite useful. I would like to research the various arguments and see which ones make the most sense and which ones fail to address critical considerations. There are many related questions I would like to address— How global is globalization? If two countries are trading with each other and nobody else, does that really count as global? Should different regions maintain strong communication and contact, or should localization involve greater degrees of isolation? Should communities or regions struggling to maintain a local focus create a network amongst themselves? How much does interconnection affect the outcome for each individual community or region? To what degree should we trade outside of the local system? Does local entail being completely self-sufficient? What does remaining incompletely self-sufficient mean for everyone involved? Who is the self remaining sufficient? Local government? The family? The individual? And how will we define or measure sufficiency anyway?

William McDonough once stated his design standards in a TED Talk, “Our goal is a delightfully diverse, safe, healthy, and just world, with clean air, water, soil and power – economically, equitably, ecologically, and elegantly enjoyed.” I would like to examine how local and global focuses could contribute to the development of William McDonough’s standards. Would a local focus be in danger of becoming overrun by the tyranny of the majority? Would a global focus inherently counter the ideals?

Discerning the advantages of local or global systems is an intriguing question and very relevant to our time. How should we live? What will provide the best results for people? How should we interact? How does communication modify the course a local or global system takes? The questions proliferate. Because community has a crucial role in our lives, it makes sense for us to ask in what form or forms the community is most effective to us. The next question then becomes, “What are the primary functions of community?” How else would we define effectiveness if we did not understand what was supposed to be effective? In any case, questions about the way to define community, local, home, or global, and the way (or the extent to which) those systems should interact, are increasingly important in our contemporary world, where our sustainable behavior or lack thereof will reflect themselves in our own future. A final question, then, makes us wonder, “How does the concept of ‘our children’s future’ correlate to change? Can it be an effective inciting force, or is it an abdication of responsibility?” It seems we might find some direction in exploring the nuances of all these questions.

Keep reading: Local? Global? How Should We Live and Interact?...

Vision is Humble

SPOILER ALERT

Good After Dachau book review/synopsis

In After Dachau, Daniel Quinn’s mortifying novel of society 2,000 years down the road had Hitler been able to take over the world, the main character uncovers the truth and feels intensely compelled to share his findings, to goad everyone else to attention, consciousness, and remorse. But what he discovers, after a staged kidnapping intended solely to prove a single point to him, is that “no one cares.” This revelation liberates him to redirect his energies so that he is able to do something other than fret, feel trapped, and despise everyone in his society. He takes his energy and opens a bookstore/gallery, eccentrically selling old books seized during World War II (even spearheading publication of Anne Frank’s unearthed diary) and showcasing his fiancée’s Abstract Expressionist artwork (named Gloria, she is a black woman born in 1922 and killed in the final wave of exterminations of minority populations in the genocide, when it came to New York City, trapped 2,000 years later in the body of a crash victim, Mallory Hastings). The gallery opening is abysmal, precisely because no one cares, but little by little, with Gloria and Jason’s perseverance, it gains steam as its own radical protest. One evening, someone hurls a (flaming?) brick through the storefront. Someone cares.

Despite the odds, the horrors, the ghastly unearthed secrets, the guilt, the passage of 2,000 years, it turns out others in their society can feel threatened by the fact that their world is built on lies, that they are suddenly being accused and implicated in the horrific destructive actions that their way of life was founded upon. Despite the (unbearable weight, or light-weighted-ness) of history, the brick-thrower cared about something that happened 2,000 years before, and so did Jason. Both the brick-thrower, bent supposedly on either keeping the past a secret or defending his ancestors' inhumane actions, the atrocities they perpetuated, and Jason, bent on learning about and from the truth, have particular visions, mythologies, agendas that they want to propagate (create support for) in the world. Jason slowly attracts attention, the brick-thrower slowly nurtures (his or her) exacerbation/outrage/animosity. Their visions slowly grow, humbly. While most people (rightly) do not condone the ideology moving the brick thrower to action, they can wholeheartedly relate to Jason’s character and thinking. They too would be outraged if no one cared about something so earth-shatteringly monumental and de-stabilizing about their culture. They too would do whatever it took, persevering humbly, working slowly, little by little/poco a poco, to gain steam and support for their vision and perspective on life, on an ethical lifestyle change that addresses the dark history and breaks from it in a way that will hopefully prevent a similar future catastrophe.

The analogies Quinn is trying to draw in After Dachau are many. His writing in all his other novels and nonfiction concerns itself with the similarly dark origins of our own civilization. He concludes that “History is written by the conquerors,” that we are blind to the lies we’ve been told, the mythologies/rationales/ideologies, “stories we tell about how things came to be this way,” precisely because we know nothing other than these stories; presented with nothing else, we take our stories, our histories, to be the only ones there are, to be authoritative writings of how things came to be this way, we situate ourselves, plant our feet in the ground, to then discover how unstable things are -- well, that’s just not what we asked for, not at all what we bargained for, completely unacceptable. Yet Quinn has always had this as one of his best traits as a thinker, his willingness to take on the role of the gadfly, much the way that Socrates did in his time (the similarities between the two are striking; exploration for another day). All his writing is meant to expose the lies, the secrets, the hidden realities, the mythologies, those darknesses we are all reluctant, unwilling to see, for good reason—because then our world must enter through such dramatic upheaval, an upheaval we shirk from because we are so stunningly unprepared for anything of that magnitude.

He instructs in Ishmael or Story of B to “Teach 100. If you cannot teach 100, then teach 10. If you cannot teach 10, teach 1” (though I can't seem to locate this quote). Vision is humble. Vision, he believes, is the most drastic, inciting force, the most rife with potential to turn everything, every last aspect of our cultural reality, on its head. Yet people are slow in coming around to it. God knows how much opposition I have to deal with in advocating for Neo-Tribalist thought and vision. Vision must be humble in order to survive disillusionment, discouragement, loneliness, isolation, but it will be all worth it, apparently, because one day, utter silence and solitude skips ahead many years in one breath, and a brick is sent through a wall; one day, there is a sudden transformation from silence to momentum (think Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point, and the magic number - is it 125?), and many people turn to the vision because it suddenly makes sense, matters, is worth caring about, even if it is only because it offers a simpler way of living than an increasingly unlivable, harder to continue, lifestyle. Vision must be dedicated, must be perseverant, sturdy, and as such, humble vision will be less liable to crack than a volatile, impatient mentality powering an individual’s experience of the vision.

The use of art as radical protest is an intriguing component of the story. Quinn does not in any way condone what he calls programs (in My Ishmael, he includes intentional communities as such a misguided program…more on that later!). I think many protests and social movements he sees as programs in this regard, as ineffective movements that are not nearly as transformative or radical, altering, as their constituent movers and shakers think they are, which is why I found it interesting that he included similar methods in After Dachau. I think he was making a delicate distinction that any methods used to perpetuate a new vision, to educate others, even if they resemble other social movements, if they use activist art and methods, are still unique by virtue of their driving force, vision - the flowing river that overpowers the flimsy sticks or programs stuck in its path.

Quinn prefaces the entire work with a note on his complete and utter lack of support for ideas of rebirth, past lives, and reincarnation. I found this intriguing, fascinating, humorous, and all, when I first opened the novel. I see many similarities to my fear/disinterest/suspicion of New Age ideas and practices, a bias I’ve been meaning to explore in writing (what’s the difference between supporting a Buddhist praying with a singing bowl and a New Age-y practitioner or dabbler co-opting the practice for their own spiritual fulfillment/journey/whims? – think Andrew Bird’s “Heretics”: “What a crack!” – See what I mean? How do you tell?). A lot of sorting must be done to clear up the unattractiveness, the prejudice, and the merits or detriments of New Age-ism…Also a project for another day! Until next time!

Keep reading: Vision is Humble...

Environment as Home, as Whole

As part of defining environmentalism and radical environmental politics for my unwieldy Prosem/potential thesis project, I wanted to start with a discussion of environment and what it is about environment that people can get riled up about, what incites people to political action with intense feeling. After our most recent Prosem session, I had a discussion with one of my friends in the class about conceiving of the utter devastation caused to our planet over time, but especially since the incipience of industrialization, and about ways of understanding this depletion of resources, this havoc, so completely, in its grand scale, so much so that particular behaviors result and certain actions are taken to change that regrettable reality slowly, starting at an acutely personal level. She was worried that she couldn't picture water scarcity and water wars, especially affecting her, because water flows so freely, amongst regions, and so resource shortages of water are only evident in large scale, at least at present. But she admitted she already turns off the shower to lather, that she thinks about these things, that she's very aware of the issues. So it seemed that the real issue was conceiving of all environmental problems as a whole, viewing the environment holistically, seeing the connections, and therefore finding behaviors that can address these issues through multi-pronged approaches, covering several issues through one action, simplifying the intricate map of environmental havoc into a plan of action that is realistic, understandable, not quite so overwhelming as the problems themselves, in order that by not being overwhelming itself it won't go the way of the apathy that only contributes to the problem itself. I didn't know how to summarize such a simplification, where to start, so I'm picking up with the writing I did a month and a half ago, that I might eventually extract the main points, find the embarking point I can use when talking with others, without going speechless because I don't even know where to begin. With a note of caution that this is composed mostly of convoluted half-notes, here, then, is that earlier writing...

On Environmental Concerns. Due to the nature of human environment, that confluence of factors pertaining to the quality and safety of the air, water, soil, plant (matter) and animal species we encounter, weather patterns and geologic forces and formations that act upon and restrict us, as well as the quality and pattern of these factors when recombined by humans into our built environments, the politics, activism, ethics, and concerns issuing thereof/”therefrom" must address the totality of these factors, must take into account not isolated aspects but the whole of the unique sphere where they converge and form this very fascinating confluence, this wholeness, entirety, this entity, a swirling biosphere, that gives us life, nurtures and nourishes us.

The holistic approach I propose must be meticulously detailed, no doubt. In the process of outlining/elucidating/describing the necessary changes to our outlook, our mindsets (who is our?), changes we must make in order to strive toward this holistic approach, and introducing it into the mainstream environmental discourse on concerns and their accompanying policy suggestions, so as to influence/redirect the future dialogue about, and current flow of, environmental discourse, I hope to address the up-til-now, as-of-now silent issues and unnoticed-or-unknown philosophies of human (and) environment, to change the flow of discourse on this thoroughly weighty subject. I hope, also, to bridge the canon of Western philosophy and the young, seedling cannon of primitivist writing/ideology/thought, and especially to patch current intellectuals’ potholes/shortcomings/gaps on the topic of (radical) environmental politics.

What is radical environmental politics or what should it be, should it include, should it mean? Technically, taking into account the essence of the etymological anatomy of the word, it has to do with roots, which by definition then places the purview of radical environmental politics with the nutrient-channels that nourish living organisms/systems, which is a delightful allegory for contextualizing our discussion. Either it is a politics from the ground up, from the grass roots, or even better, it is a politics concerned with the very nourishment that categorizes/ epitomizes/encapsulates/ bases/roots/positions/situates the human environment totality/wholeness in its live-giving, nutrient solution; in its own definition, its most appropriate context, it essentializes our initial term, reduces it down to its essentials, the nourishment that is the core of human environment, of its meaning.

Often, due to the fairly recent phenomenon of greenwashing, we hear sound bytes from politicians and interviewable activists, those acceptable by the commercial media, who discuss singular focuses that cannot, in fact, be separated from the totality of human environment and the concerns that it generates on the whole. For instance, you might hear Barack Obama (or T. Boone Pickens, for that matter-- take your pick) discussing alternative energy in the form of wind power; Al Gore supra-publicizing global warming (Is it for his own gain? But how? Think harder if you don’t see it!); PETA protesting animal rights abuses; elementary school classrooms creating naïve posters about saving water or not polluting the air; protesters trespassing on military bases in attempts to protest nuclear armament and space warfare strategy conferences; mainstream supermarkets, including the not-really-a-supermarket infamous chain, Walmart, introducing organic/green living sections into their layouts; Apple Computers boasting the remedied/lowered/mediated/reduced/mitigated toxicity of their re-released iPhone product; or any famous office supply chain raving about their 10% post-consumer waste recycled paper products. None of these are actual accomplishments or that pressing of concerns (since the real priorities are more systemic, more likely to address multiple issues at once).

What are the implications of this view? Well, for one thing, guilt-laden middle class, moderately educated consumers, corralled by this guilt-weight into precisely programmed product/consumption decisions, can drop that weight, free themselves of the guilt, and no longer face the seeming necessity of their anxiety/worry/fear of impending environmental doom, as the supposedly logical next step in the unfolding/progression of culminating and ever-worsening environmental catastrophes and disasters appears to be. But, if this is the end result for the nascent “worrying class,” the renunciation of their ever-upward-spiraling anxiety, how should we feel? And what should we be prioritizing? How can we adapt our thinking to both the immensity/immediacy/gravity and the truth of the situation to best suit/facilitate the development/brainstorming of solutions? What are the real issues, the meatiest solutions, the most relevant concepts/thought processes/thought patterns/communication frameworks/mindsets we must elucidate, study, analyze, focus on, employ, utilize? How do we best respond, think, and act on the contemporary environmental situation, especially if it doesn’t hold any weight aside from that which we (however naïvely or unnecessarily) assign to it?

Since my concern doesn't entirely pivot around the accuracy or urgency of the issues that the prominent voices of the greenwashing movement bring up, I am still interested in discussing the role and force of global warming, recycling, alternative energy, toxicity of electronics, organic food, frugal lifestyle, etc.. But because I have been corrupted by philosophers from an early age, I see immense value in revealing the assumptions implicit in these alarm-causing issues (Cradle-to-Cradle design points out that recycling is just pointless downcycling; global warming alarmism relies on excluding scientific findings that look at geologic time, at the cyclical nature of Ice Ages, and that aren't compelled by a fear of any change to contemporary lifestyles to show that life on earth will end if, say, we don't buy carbon offsets--life on earth as we know it in our culture might end, but that really isn't such a big deal, in fact is perhaps a blessing; raw food advocates deny that cooked food was ever beneficial to peoples inside or outside of destructive civilization, etc.). If we start there, we actually have a stabler foundation from which to work because we aren't basing our actions on bogus notions.

As I just described my interest in still addressing the disparate issues that alarmists of environmental doomsday will highlight to the exclusion of any other issues in the whole of the environmental system, including human actions resulting from resource shortages (such as initiatives for feeding the starving children across the globe or turning to violence in Haiti because of extreme deforestation), etc., I want to share the elements of environmental politics and policy I wish to address in my future analysis of what a holistic environmental approach to world problems will look like. These elements include any (and, I hope, all) of the following, and most likely others that will crop up as I go:

Guerilla gardening, environmental terrorism- as separate from; ecovillages, communes; landscaping – misguided efforts; going off grid; beekeeping- colony collapse disorder/die offs/g.e. crops/ Monsanto/ research university politics; tree sitting; women's cooperatives; over-population? assumptions, resources, exponential growth, etc.; reservations, national parks, wildlife preserves, adverse effects; local currency/timeshares; child care- child rearing; radical environmental education as resistance?; biking/commuting/etc., walking; plant medicine versus pharmaceutical giants/mega-corporations – patenting, resistance; water wars; deforestation; conflicts over resources; environmental racism; toxicity – e.p.a. – prioritizing – superfund sites – remediation or lack thereof, activism, politics associated with those touchy subjects; gentrification or white flight keep good housing from being affordable housing; lack of parks, good parks, safe parks, ecological parks, green spaces, in many places; suburbs; community gardens; community building-organizing; natural building versus building codes – what is safe; nuclear armament, proliferation, Nevada test site, protesting; government and Our Stolen Future- hormone disrupters; carcinogens, toxins all around us; shade grown versus not; fair trade, free trade, resources, social justice, economic justice, well-being, disparities, safety, etc.; religious intolerance and links to resource availability, conflict, first world/third world widening gap; trash – artistic responses – recycling – cradle to cradle – waste – design – cycle – interconnections – upcycling, etc., good design; nature deficit disorder versus attention deficit disorder, education, education facilities, education methods; over-harvesting of fish, wildlife; air quality, indoor air quality – circulation – “death chamber” office buildings; fast food; good, healthy food unaffordable (if unaffordable for anyone, something must be horribly wrong, no?--I have some ideas what that horribly wrong is...); mental health, psychiatric facilities, pharmaceutical companies; symptomatic versus allopathic medicine; peak oil; solar cookers versus wood stoves; biodiesel, ethanol- politics of, economics of, lack of sustainability but impulse actions because assumed benefit of sustainability?; e-waste; feminine hygiene product waste; drug trafficking and monoculture, economy, health, delusion; needless waste; nuclear power, "clean" coal, etc.; plastic-paper-glass packaging etc.; animal rights -- popular and unknown (hermit crabs killed for medicine, etc.); birth control; healthy, drug-free, safe, "human" birth; orphanages around the world, what forces create orphans, adoption and well-being, home, resources, family and opportunities; conservation; "invasive" species; “whole” foods; nutrition – supplements; vegetarianism and cars, carbon footprint reduction; natural disasters, bad design, humanitarian aid, inaction, callousness, responses, solutions, minimizing devastation, assumptions about human life, resources; global slave trade and resources, health, children, women, social justice, earth as home, earth as unsafe home.......

Keep reading: Environment as Home, as Whole...

Turning Twenty, Turning Pages

Two weeks ago I turned twenty. I wrote about it a some days before the event, and my writing then is still indicative of the feeling of urgency I have about it:

I’m turning old, as in twenty, soon. For the last four and a half years of my life, somewhere between one fifth and one quarter of my life, my days have been, in a way, side-swept/cheapened by a peculiar phenomenon called, I suppose, not getting over myself, not accepting incontrovertible forks in the road. It has got to stop. I cannot live any more of my life in that way. If nothing else, apparently I must make some kind of way for myself in the world, must have an outlook that builds me up as I go rather than undermining me at critical moments or multi-dimensionally.

After all, I have spent my adolescence fearing that I would be lonely forever. As it turns out, this is an unlikely prospect. I have dated three rather interesting and mostly pleasant guys (when dating them, at least) in the last five years, nevermind that two were related. I have no idea where I go from there, where the threads of various relationships will take me, but at least I've learned a lesson in the extremism of self-pity.

I want the next, mirroring twenty years of my life to look entirely distinct from the last, tragic set. It has taken a rather protracted amount of time to make that observation, but it really has been tragic, and it is not surprising I have suffered much melancholy as a result in that time (Ahem. Editor's note: This pronouncement is obviously pre-birthday biased in favor of emphasizing the negative). Many unhappy circumstances have shaped my life up 'til now; I have made a great many mistakes/social blunders, stepped on people’s toes, insulted many, lived my life in somewhat socially unacceptable ways…and I cannot forgive myself.

I have bitten my nails to the brink of extinction; I haven't done as well in academic situations as I might have wished; and as I said, I have made many choices differently than many people expected me to make them, the social unacceptability of which, of many of these behaviors/actions, constantly calls into question my justification for doing so.

I have challenged my worldview many times, feared and tried to avoid solidifying my views by the time I maneuvered out of my teens, but instead I do have some solid views, including some solid views on perpetually questioning those views, a quirk that might at least, for some time yet, help to carry a younger person's lack of stubbornness with me for several more years, at advantage to me against my less open-minded peers. I’ve had some strange, half-fortuitous, spectacular, entertaining, though mostly unusual, moments in my life, but the cumulative effect is utterly unfulfilling. And that overall tenor to my life is precisely what I wish to break with for the next twenty years.

So what exactly do I want to happen in those two decades? I want to return to Brasil, to work and live there. I want to have children and raise them unfailingly continuum. I want to travel again. I want to publish different kinds of works (as in different genres, for different audiences). I want to provide for other people the kind of hope, support, care, attention, love, assurance that I felt resentment for not having in mine, and why not? How great is it if I can create that which doesn’t exist, if I can take what dissatisfies me and do something with it to enhance the lives of others, making mine better in the process, especially in the satisfaction of knowing that some of my behavior helped to steer others away from the paths I’ve been down in the urban landscape of melancholy?!

I want to complete a triathlon. I want to be happy for the most part, counter to the emptiness (though not really sadness) of the last twenty. I want to defend my views/statements well, solidly. I want to love. I want to finally be able to cook delicious meals. I want to write something that I can be proud of. I want to stay on top of things. I want to be successful, productive, but not because I am in search of success. I want to design nurturing, restorative, life-changing landscapes. I want to be a role model, mentor, important person in people’s lives. I want to create communities and ecovillages. I want to bring people together. I want to heal places like Omaha. I want to forgive my family for their failings and then avoid them and their deleterious powers in my life. I want to feel at peace in my own skin, in my own world, with my own decisions, with how things turn out. I want to live fully, simply, joyously.

I have edited and changed some of that writing, but the bulk of it still defines how I feel and what I am striving for or towards. I still feel the same. The last twenty years were mostly not up to me but rather up to my family, which experiences for a large chunk of that time I resented for that very reason. But now it is clear, the next twenty are certainly up to me.

I don't have to go to school if I don't find it valuable or worthwhile. I don't have to move across continents constantly if it seems to me a peculiarly wasteful habit. I don't have to adopt my parents' misanthropic view of their neighbors, their acquaintances, their peers. I don't have to visit random places sporadically, erratically. I can build genuine, lasting connections with people and places. I can break a cycle of familial gloom and dysfunction because I can harness a knowledge unavailable to my mother and her mother, or my father's mother and father, because I can use an inner sensitivity my parents and their progenitors seem to lack. I can create something affirming, beautiful, vibrant, something they are not capable of, something that no mellifluous tinkerings and breathy pipings could--except, of course, if used in ways for good, for something beyond individualistic projects, avenues that they would never think to use. I sound so pessimistic and flippant, and of course there have been pleasant moments with my family, but the recurring attitudes and indications of their beliefs and priorities have seared into my memory. I think of all my mother's scowls, my father's jarring tones, my grandmothers' insensitive words, my aunt's superficial goals, and I see that this need to break off and protect myself from their vapid negativity was decided long ago. It's kind of like getting stuck with the wrong family for your entire life so far. And though I've been jealous of other people's family bonds in recent years, especially their ability to deal with the people who life brought together into socially-recognized families, I have found my surrogates and, more importantly even than having my own semblance of such a socially-recognized family, will create my own tribal family over time. I simply can't give up, which I'm liable to do off and on in the somewhat lonely interim.

The "I'm not getting any younger" mentality is really getting to me. I'm filled with a kind of power surge to get everything done now. Why not? To read voraciously, an art I've never mastered--my readings always slow, pained, and meticulous, and therefore intermittent, infrequently sustained; to write intensely, constantly, spilling my ideas out of my cluttered head; to create what I want to see in the world not forty years from now but at this very moment...I didn't expect turning twenty to be much more than a lamentable aging milestone. Yet here I am, uncovering an energetic potential for manifesting goodness and hospitality that wasn't accessible to me before. I just don't know how long it will last until I crumble into a paralysis of indecision all over again. I mean, I expect that from myself, to move cyclically through my tumultuous emotions. My only hope, then, is that the energetic periods sustain themselves longer and occur more frequently than the fretting, immobile ones.

So...how did I actually spend my birthday, you ask? Well, the day before my birthday, a Sunday, my boyfriend took me to a restaurant serving Portuguese/Brasilian cuisine. The decor of the place was exquisite! There were brilliant (as in brilla - Spanish; brilhante - Portuguese) murals on the walls, depicting social dances, fishermen at sea, couples at dinner. They were painted in very earthy hues, but the dancers had bright clothing in reds and whites. Just a lovely surrounding to situate myself for a birthday dinner. I had sardines (which I tried to share with Peter, but he's a picky eater!), caldo verde, beans and rice, and mariscada (Peter took a hilarious snapshot of me on his iPhone, with me wearing a silly and childish plastic bib with a goofy lobster printed on it). I've tried being a vegetarian before, but I struggle with finding a way to balance my anthropological interest in meat and fish and an ethical position about animal rights and shrunken ecological footprints (because apparently the greatest environmental actions we can take in our society are renouncing cars and meat, a view I'm starting to find more than a little problematic!). What I can say for myself is that Peter and I looked up on the iPhone Safari the list of good, bad, and so-so fish to eat/not to eat. Check it out here. Apparently, the Monterey Bay Aquarium keeps more detailed guides by region. Also, if you're ever in the disgustingly well-to-do Westchester County, definitely make sure to dine at Aquario.

I spent much of the week of my birthday working on a brand-new Bookstore Blog for my favoritest bookstore ever, aside from fixing up the bookstore's website pages (not updating time-specific information, however, since I'm so far away and no longer involved in the daily life of the store; though perhaps I should have made some long-overdue information changes...but I barely had enough time that week, as it was!). My favorite part, of course, being the visually rich Holy Hardware page. Buying local (even if local is a long-distance loyalty) definitely adds up. Buying from Amazon, not so much. I'm really excited to have some more time to add other fabulous features to the website, such as a mini-catalogue of our incredible selection of meaningful children's books, a record of our resources for those interested in simple living, as well as adding even more photos and product information to the site. The thing is, I'd have to go home for that (to take photos, to come up-to-date with changes at the store and with new titles and items, to hang out in one of my favorite spaces in the world, with some of my favorite people and dog, etc.), and oh, how much I would like to do so! I just don't know when that will be possible. And I crumble in jealousy for those well-off folks who don't even have to think twice about arranging flights home, for vacation, etc.. Maybe I'm beyond hope, maybe I actually can't change for the better?

I'll try to keep up my spirits, my momentum and live within the exhilaration of having a hand in the crafting of the next twenty years of my life. If I'm lucky, I won't even recognize my current self, my current sour attitudes and sulking moods, my habitual languor and mediocracy, when I get there. I hope this new-found energy overtakes that prevalent sluggishness and that unnecessary pity-partying. And so a toast: To luck and momentum!

Keep reading: Turning Twenty, Turning Pages...

"We Don't Buy Adultery Offsets"

In Prosem today, when carbon offsets came up, I chimed in, "Yeah, we don't buy adultery offsets," and I mentioned that it's just a weird concept because of the implications. It doesn't make sense. Regardless, I, too, used to be a naïve supporter of this ridiculous notion, feeling guilty about my plane flight to Brasil three and a quarter years ago, knowing that I still needed to plant approximately 10 trees to make up for my carbon contribution or pay someone else to do it. I've since abandoned my support for the concept, and so have others, others who thought up the adultery offset idea for me:

Peter Schweizer's USA Today op-ed, "Offset Away Our Guilt: If we can buy 'carbon offsets' for our environmental missteps, why not for our others sins?"

Peter Schweizer's NPR interview

In trying to dig up (on google) the earliest comparisons of carbon offsets to adultery offsets, to try to figure out when I first heard the idea from my boyfriend, I not only found an interesting statement ("Critics of carbon offsets have compared them to the medieval sale of indulgences...Trouble is, the adultery is still committed, and the carbon is still pumped into the atmosphere. The only tangible benefit is that the sinner feels good about it.") at this Canadian Buddhist monk's blog (not bad of its own accord) but also this Media Matters article about a Fox News commentator who was making comparisons, along with a guest (also backed by a multi-million dollar corporation with definite interests in not changing the status quo on what might be causing climate change), of the two kinds of offsets as early as July 2007, which either means that Schweitzer snagged/nabbed the idea from the guest, Chris Horner, or was simply thinking along the lines of those critics who found an easy comparison to that severely out-dated commodity, indulgences.

The funny thing, of course, though certainly not at all out of character, is that the Fox News commentator bashed Al Gore for frequently buying offsets but abstained from criticizing his own boss, Rupert Murdoch, for intending to make Fox News Corporation "carbon neutral" by 2010--so it's all about whatever sells, right?, not about reality, both in Fox News Land and in Carbon Offset Land?

Incidentally...On the NPR website, I discovered an appalling thing. You can listen to just about any recorded NPR moment for free, straight from your computer, just as you could from your car or your alarm-radio or your living room stereo. But suppose you are deaf. You'd also like the benefit of accessing NPR's wealth of data, thanks to the feats of the digital age. You go to the NPR website and find news articles and talks you would like to be privy to. You click on the teeny black print, "Transcript," to the right. Then you suddenly discover that you must either choose to pay $3.95 for every story that interests you or pay for a $12.95 monthly subscription to their transcript services. How pathetic and cruel is that? If you can hear, NPR is free, but if you're deaf and have to pay extra expenses for all kinds of things as it is, NPR costs a fortune. Thanks, NPR, for making program-listeners automatically implicated in such injustices. I know that at least for election speeches, CNN will also provide transcripts of talks that are mentioned in articles on their website--free. NPR certainly accrues costs to pay for transcribers, but what about their web developers, their web-audio service providers, their broadcasting crews? They don't pass those costs along to radio listeners or web listeners. They use advertising. Hence, to force such hefty costs on deaf people ($155.40 a year) is ridiculously unfair, and I can't imagine any decent justification for their behavior. Obvious conclusion? NPR should offer transcripts freely just as they do audio.

Keep reading: "We Don't Buy Adultery Offsets"...

Postmodernism (question mark)

I recently was asked a very simple question that nevertheless blindsided me. I initially wanted to include my response here as a simple Q&A, but in the interest of the well-rounded dialogue I'm always talking about these days, well-rounded in that it is open and clearly communicated, I think I'd rather include the actual conversation, especially since it models so nicely the disclosure of motive that I'm so passionate about furthering in academic circles.

Actually, I've already written about this incident for Proseminar, stating,

"I wanted to hear about Dubois as a thinker and Reed’s perspective on him. Class discussion gave us a sense of Reed’s background, sort of, and then plunged into a definition of double consciousness (I liked one senior's answer that asking Rockers to define double consciousness was like asking us to define postmodernism; while I think double consciousness actually isn’t that hard to explain, I resonated with the assertion about postmodernism; a friend from the Midwest asked me to define it earlier in the week because she kept reading about it in anthropology articles but had no idea what it referred to; I penned, well, typed, an explanation, but I wonder if I even captured it at all, or accurately…planning on blogging the questions and my answers, as well as my concerns about the proper way to go about defining such a daunting term), and finally emerged with some dialogue about the canon."

The conversation, which, of all spaces, unfolded through facebook (uff):

Maria: "this is entirely random, and i'm sorry. late night + long paper + caffeine = are you a post-modernist?"

me: "Random entirely okay. Long nights, lots of homework, and caffeine = my life right now, too. I read a lot of writing for my classes that assumes a postmodernist viewpoint. I took a class on Foucault, and related thinkers get referenced a lot in class discussions (also at panels at the APSA politics conference I had to attend the first week of school). I did read and discuss a short piece by Bruno Latour the other day about actor-network theory--apparently we've never been modern? But I'm not really sure where I stand. I don't really know if I keep a fixed position with the different -isms. I try (trying being a hopelessly helpless kind of thing) to analyze arguments individually, on their own merits, logics, and weak points/strong points. I'm spending so much time figuring out what matters to me and what I think in relation to the swirl of thoughts in the world (academic and otherwise) that I can't say what I "am" as far as fitting into an -ism. But I can talk about postmodernism, sure."

Maria: "alright! to clarify: i have not the slightest idea what post-modernism is unless i happen to know it by a different term. far too early sunday morning i was reading an anthropology article that kept mentioning it, and i took a guess that you might know something about it! so if you don't mind, what is it?"

me: "Oh, okay. I'm still trying to parse it out myself, but let's see if I can do it justice. One of my entrance essays four years ago was about modernism and the experience of mystery, after all. This might take two installments--sorry I'm so wordy. The problem is that there are about a gazillion ways to define modern; apparently the Romans used the term. Most often, it refers to the period of the last 500 years or so since Columbus explored [or some other, more fitting verb?] his way to the New World. That powerful 1492 journey opened an era of biological genocide, colonialism, chattel slavery, independence movements, the Enlightenment, and the Industrial Revolution. Well, as if the havoc of colonialism and subsequently the colonized throwing off the oppressors wasn't enough drama, the Industrial Revolution gave us the machine gun and helped greatly to produce fleets of trains, planes, and cars, and lots of other brand new items. That's a lot of technology to shake up the world in a short time. And, well, it did.

Archduke Ferdinand is un-fortuitously shot, and off the countries of Europe go, galloping into the Great War, blaming each other for the tragic event. Ungodly amounts of people die. Thank you, machine gun creators (uff!). It's ugly, Europe's a mess, lots of post-traumatic stress disorder. Think Verdun, where plenty of bombs still haven't been dug up. Nobody really knows what happened, how it could be so horrible, what the world is coming to, how rationality, the greatness of Western civilization, could get us to this inhumane point. So you get post-traumatized artists taking up the banner of the German Expressionist art movement. You get Piet Mondrian and Neo-Plasticism. James Joyce's Ulysses. Intellectuals swearing off the apparent greatness of modernity because of the results. And then it happens again. Worldwide depression, widespread panic, Hitler takes advantage of it. The different methods used by the Nazis in the Holocaust are so deadly because of the technology. [Hitler’s staff is very efficient; they time the trains to maximize deportations. The killing squads tear through Poland in very little time.]

World War II, then, changes the nature of the widespread disillusionment. You get Existentialism, Hannah Arendt’s writing, the United Nations. Oh, and a bunch of people swear off God (Where was s/he amidst all this needless suffering and senseless violence? What is god’s ethic?). America emerges as a superpower, props up Europe, which is utterly devastated.

Whatever postmodernism means, as a reaction and casting off of modernism, in its nebulous forms of philosophy, art, literature, history, theory, etc., it attempts to dig deep, to uncover assumptions, to deconstruct, to expose the structure of institutions, to show what is a sham, to tell truths, to find meaning when there doesn’t seem to be much left in the world. Postmodern philosophers write about meaning, semantics, punitive systems, postcolonialism, sexuality, and a lot about power, about who has it, who has agency, and who it objectifies, makes voiceless."

Maria: "alright, that makes a lot of sense with what my anthro class did last week (theories on chimpanzee violence). it'll probably come into play this week, too--we're doing how morality vs. objectivity should be used in research. i love contentious issues classes! and a million thank-yous! i'm certainly not sure where i stand on any of it yet, but this is fun stuff."

me: "Yay! I'm intrigued... please, if you have a moment, will you share a bit about these theories on chimpanzee violence? I'm also interested to hear about your discussions of morality and objectivity as it relates to anthropological research."

Maria: "it's your birthday tomorrow--happy birthday! my brother's birthday is tuesday; he wants me to get him an expensive [Nebraska] hat. weirdo.

the chimpanzee violence stuff is mainly centered around chimpanzee warfare, general primate infanticide, and other such violent displays and whether such behaviors are natural or caused by human influence/pressure. there's even one anthropologist who denies they happen intentionally at all. and, of course, it all ties in to theories of how human warfare and violence evolved, though my class didn't discuss those much.

as for morality and objectivity, postmodernists have a tendency to claim that anthropology, by virtue of devoting itself to the study of human meanings, cannot be objective and therefore is not a science. if it is not an objective science, then it must be a bunch of generalizations lumped together by selfish interests (Western, white, and male are common candidates) to be used for the domination and oppression of minorities.

because oppression and domination are bad, generalizations are also bad, and so is anthropological science. some take this further to say that anthropology therefore has an obligation to take an active political and moral part in deciding issues surrounding native peoples. others disagree. that's a pretty general overview; if you want to know more, [i have a link to the class's website...] or if you want a more detailed overall summary i can send you my reaction papers. they're probably fairly dry, but they cover all the bases in about 4 pgs. my personal stance on each is that chimpanzee violence is natural; human influence in the cases where it applies is only causing natural behaviors that were already evolved to deal with similar stresses. and morality is an objective science; its use of the scientific method assures this as much as it can ensure objectivity for any science.

and i find active political/moral participation in ethnic issues by anthropologists to be at best risky and at worst imperialistic. but that's just me."

The conversation turns more towards the status of anthropology at the end, which is a perfectly adequate topic on its own, which I've been meaning to explore in these virtual pages anyhow, but I will probably be writing more on that later, not now, since there is just not enough time and too much going on.

So? Have I adequately defined the background of the term? I doubt it, since I was mostly just pulling ideas from what I already (think I) know, not intensely researching its etymology and different uses of the term. How would you define it? What would you say must be included to properly contextualize the term postmodernism? A definition of modernism, perhaps, in order to distinguish post-? Which architectural, literary, and otherwise cultural milestones, which historical and scientific shifts must receive mention? How to explain it more simply, differently? What rhetorical devices to use to achieve this aim?

The concerns I mentioned in the beginning about accurate definition center around that constant companion of late, inadequacy. I think it's all too unfortunate that students feel too overwhelmed by disparate threads of information that they can't weave together definitions of the simplest terms. Though it's no good having someone presume that you don't know a term, it is even worse if you actually cannot put it into words, even if simply on your own time, not under heated pressure. Inadequacy's grip cannot paralyze students so completely that they cannot complete even the simplest of academic tasks, reciting definitions. I am not claiming this is in any way an easy feat; I struggle with it myself, but neither do I want Academia to zap me of all the talent I might have. My only other concern is the one expressed above. Because it's such an unprepossessing term that nevertheless refers to a very broad scope, what to include and what to exclude? How do you actually come up with a definition instead of a five-hundred page detailed history? To what extent does it matter what you include? At what point have you lost some sense of sanity, lost some of the word's actual meaning and reach, lost your respectability because you have in some way failed to be honest, failed to stay committed to the truth? And does that matter, either?

Keep reading: Postmodernism (question mark)...

Some Notes on Non-Exclusive Dialogue

Here are some notes that I penned (during tonight's talk) out of the motivation that keeps coming with my frustration:

Conditions for Non-Exclusive Dialogue:

• Simplicity, Clarity, Occam’s Razor applied to logic, sentence structure
  

• Logical foundation: use of arguments with premises and conclusion, not messy thoughts that contradict themselves and perhaps even go on to deny such contradiction, ever so presumptuously; the parliamentary debate system is useful for building this skill for strong, non-cryptic argumentation

• *Vernacular language preferred; specialized language will certainly exclude (I prefer this vocabulary because it doesn’t require what debaters call “spec knowledge,” special knowledge available to a select few)

• Changing the tide: dialogue that includes “normal” people (non-academics) has somehow been debased, degraded, been thrown out of favor, which is unfortunate

*Students shouldn’t feel stupid (my notes confound me even if I return to them an hour after writing them. I can’t remember, but I believe I started writing down this principle based off a related comment made earlier in the day, but nothing in my notes could possibly demystify this for me) and neither should non-students…if we ever want to achieve inclusion, expand the currency of ideas and their usefulness, and yield a smarter population, how would we accomplish that if the majority of people aren’t part of the conversation? There seems to be more potential in a kind of hive mind, lurking in community dynamics, in connection. The World Café technique calls it “collective intelligence,” something acquired by cross-pollinating focused dialogue with other conversations. The technique is incredibly well designed, but there must be other ways to achieve similar purposes, though I don’t think constantly holding cafés, one a day or one a week, would be a bad idea. It might finally bring out the genuine subtext from those withholding it when they speak; if people come into the process humbly, willing to work with its simple rules, then perhaps finally everyone will not only be on the same page, but also more efficient. Perhaps we will even, with a shared purpose, start working towards achieving something remarkable.

Keep reading: Some Notes on Non-Exclusive Dialogue...

Home as Conflicted Space

Does home dupe us in the notions of its safety, in assuring us about our impulses for cradling, cocooning, burrowing into that which will never harm us, never turn against us, that which will fortify us against the outside world, serve as our fortress? Or does it really unfailingly protect us from all things harmful just because it's home?

Then why did Anne Frank’s home in Amsterdam and the homes of so many millions of other European Jews prove unsatisfactory as fortresses to protect against the raids, the intrusions, the unfathomable acts perpetrated by the Nazis? (I apologize that I'm invoking Anne Frank to those who think her story is overtold at the expense of others, but that story clearly demonstrates this concept I'm outlining, and since so many people know it, it demonstrates that concept in a way people can picture). Why then did Anne’s family’s home have to be carved out of an attic apartment in an office building, and why again did that presumed fortress ultimately fail? Why, not as in "What could have led to this?" because that we already know, but why, as in "What is it about home that cannot save us from the horrific, cannot fulfill the functions we expect it to?". Is it simply because we imbue the home with expectations it cannot actually meet? Or what? What's the point of a home (the typical meaning of home, the physical kind, on a city block or a plot of land), if it just means being ultimately defenseless? There are so many human rights abuses and social justice issues (forced relocation of towns and villages; gang warfare, which seems usually to rage close to the homes of the gang members themselves and close to the homes of others in their communities and neighborhoods; domestic violence, for instance) that pivot around the home, that reverberate outward from problems at home (even if defined in numerous ways) or from problems at the most basic levels, comparable to the basic nature of the home, those pesky basic needs of nutritious food, abundant water, decent shelter, and adequate clothing. I'd like to explore over time how these spaces, that we expect to be comfortable and harmonious, become otherwise and how they can come back to homeostasis, to equilibrium.

Switching gears here to a different degree of concerns about home as conflicted space, why is the physicality of the home itself also potentially the cause of our deaths? Or, why is the body so fragile? If our bodies are our homes at the most immediate level (perhaps the most immediate level is actually the cell, the genetic code, the atom, the subatomic particle), and we work outward, why do we suffer, and why can it all end with one stroke? Why do freak accidents happen all the time in the home? What's the point of a completely unsecure home, of utter fragility, of the constant threat of breakability? Again, what's the point of being ultimately defenseless?

Our bodies are no protection. We can choke at the breakfast table on a mouthful of Frosted Mini-Wheats. We can dash our hopes and dreams by becoming immobilized, we can fall down from almost any height and falling at a bad angle, paralyze ourselves. We can risk our lives by filling our homes with objects of utility that also pose harms, threats to our safety. Technology seems so helpful until you electrocute yourself, until it catches fire, until it explodes, until it poisons the air you breathe and otherwise poisons the integrity of your body, your organs, your hormones, or even your DNA.

Kitchenwares and other items made of delicate materials such as ceramic and glass seem ever so helpful until they shatter and imbed themselves in skin, or until they start to fall and we feel liable to protect them, salvage them, keep them from injury, and in attempting to keep intact that which refuses to remain intact, to cooperate, we leave ourselves open to great dangers, and the unwieldy objects drop anyway, and in dropping, slice apart our tendons, and nerves, and main arteries, potentially fatal activities starting with simple, trite objects, making the home much more a contested place than it otherwise, harmoniously, appears.

The latter of these countless unfortunate incidents and freak accidents, in which the home ceases to be shelter and works against us, occurred in my home two months ago today. I had just worked my last full day at one of the coolest bookstores in the world, having celebrated my going away with my co-workers and bosses. My boyfriend and I came home sometime around 6 o'clock. I went to go load the pictures of the party and of merchandise (to eventually add to the store's website) onto my computer. Peter brought me a glass of water and then, since we were supposed to be moving across the country at the end of that week, decided, especially since I'd been bugging him about it, to go wash dishes so that he could pack them up. Some time later I hear a loud crash in the next room and think that perhaps it's funny, all kinds of kitchen items toppling in a domino effect. We'd dropped many things in our kitchen before. But before I can assume this is true, I hear Peter screaming my name at the top of his lungs, over the sound of the water, through the barrier of the wall. I throw open the door, and there he is, wide-eyed and gripping his wrist as tightly as possible, a sanguine pool covering the kitchen tile.

Now I'm rushing across the living room, grabbing the phone, dialing 911, running over to his stereo and turning off the music he was blasting to entertain himself while performing monotonous tasks in the kitchen. And now the guy on the other end of the phone is telling me to wrap a clean towel around Peter's hand--and insinuating that this might not have been an accident. A little too early to add insult to injury, don't you think? We're rushing down the stairs of our apartment and waiting for a firetruck to arrive (they always send firetrucks to our neighborhood for emergencies). Peter tells me, "If I pass out, you're going to have to apply pressure to my wrist, or I'll die." Now that I'm beyond sufficiently panicked, the crew arrives, and Peter's talking with them about all sorts of things, the injury, his pain, having them drive me to the hospital, amazingly talkative for being on the verge of death.

At the hospital, though our family and a friend arrive, it's four hours of hell. Peter's joking every moment that the medical students and doctors aren't torturing him. They apparently don't know how to bandage wounds properly and unnecessarily hurt him as they wrap too tightly, unwrap, and rewrap the wound additional times because they can't tell how badly it's damaged. They're ready to go through this tortuous procedure time after time, without either giving him painkillers first or letting the drugs sink in, so we learn early on about the limitlessness of their cruelty. By this point, we'd already assumed (somewhat intuitively) that he'd cut his major artery and nerve and so would need surgery, long before they officially came to the same conclusion and decided on surgery.

He's in surgery for another four hours. Speaking of home, hospitals don't provide much of a home-like atmosphere for family members waiting for their loved ones to emerge from the operating room late at night. Eventually, the doctor comes in and tells us exactly what Peter cut (three quarters of the way through his major artery and median nerve, severing three tendons as well) and how exactly they reconstructed it all (opening the wound up to reveal a kind of triangle, zigzagging the cuts so that now Peter has a mark that makes everyone think of Zorro). When Peter does come bounding by in his hospital bed, we chase after him and his hurried nurse. He's loopy as hell from the drugs but still joking with his nurses. We run through the list of of Peter's medications (he's an amazingly unhealthy young guy) for the millionth time with the nurse, just as we had with the account of the injury (hospitals desperately need better methods of communication, of relaying information, than making the patient provide the same information several times). I stay with Peter while the family goes home for the night, we talk for a little while, and then I fall asleep in the stiff hospital chair. By the afternoon of the same day, we're taking Peter home to his parents' house, where he'll be comfortable, and I'm still dreading having to clean up the kitchen at our home. That night, after dinner with everyone, my friend and I drive to my apartment and attack the floor, the sink, the wall, and other stained areas with bleach. I try to do some other packing, to imagine sleeping the night in my own apartment, but all I can do is talk with my friends online about how shaken up I am. When Peter calls, we decide to have his dad come pick me up because I can't spend the night in my own house.

We set Peter up in occupational therapy to do flexor tendon exercises and delay our trip by about a week, and he starts to recover rather quickly, though one day he reacts strangely to the painkillers, yielding the perennially adorable groggy statement, "I love you...Cheesepuff!" (Cheespuff referring to his special, hospital-provided, bright-yellow foam arm rest). And by now, we've had a chance to talk over the whole ordeal, all the gruesome details. If nothing else, we most certainly know that the plate that broke in half and slid into his wrist just had it out for him. Still, the O.R. report comes back, stating, "He came in with a story of breaking a plate while washing dishes." A story, huh? No one trusts anyone anymore.

Ever since the evil plate enacted its vendetta against my boyfriend (of course the plate didn't actually have any agency; that's why we call it a freak accident--poetic license, thank you), I've been struggling with these notions about home as conflicted space. What meaning does home have on any level, as the code for our gene sequence, as our emotions, as our bodies, as our inhabited spaces, as our journeys, as our friendships, as our attachments, as our created communities, as our planet, if all of it is so fragile and destructible? Why bother creating when it can all be broken away? It's a very paranoiac view of the world, but as I'm still piecing through the trauma of that July night, I've got a lot of paranoia sitting on my shoulders. I don't like ceramic plates and other breakable items. I don't trust objects or very much of anything at all thanks to a very personalized Murphy's Law. How to counter these fearful notions about the home? How to create safety, or a sense of it, in the midst of a conflicted space?

Keep reading: Home as Conflicted Space...

The Permaculture Ethics of Landscape and Culture

(A final paper I originally wrote for my ethics class, December 2007.)

Ten thousand years ago, agricultural society sprang from the Fertile Crescent. Many thinkers (these include Marshall Sahlins, Jared Diamond, and Daniel Quinn) have argued in recent years that this was one of the most ridiculous pursuits in the history of the human species. I follow their logic, to such an extent that I have formed an understanding of humans essentially inextricable from their surroundings. We humans shape our surroundings but we are nothing if not malleable, and our surroundings influence our ways of living. Our landscape, the place we call home, and our culture are intertwined, and if our culture is based on the merciless destruction of that very landscape, our culture is based on a foundation that is already crumbling, and our culture will soon collapse, as well. If we place the focus not on the terrified response, “How do we save our presiding culture?” but on the question, “What basic tools do we need to move from collapse (of our culture) to a landscape (a place we can call home) that can sustain the presence of so many cultural refugees?” we will be much the better for it. I wish to offer the model of Permaculture in response to this question, with the added reassurance that we certainly have the tools available, we simply need to understand them better.

Care for the earth. Care for the people. Limiting of population and consumption. Further examination of these three principles makes it obvious that an overarching rule can be established, namely that, “The only ethical decision is to take responsibility for our own existence and that of our children. Make it now” (Mollison 1). These three principles combined, along with the overarching rule, form the whole of Permaculture ethics, a code established some twenty years ago by Bill Mollison and David Holmgren, two Australian horticulturists and designers seeking a better model for communities and a framework for sustainability. They established this model in Permaculture, a specialized design system that represents both permanent agriculture and permanent culture by incorporating all the edgiest practices of our time period—ecological landscape design, agro-forestry, sustainable agriculture, alternative energy, natural building, alternative economic models (usually localized economies), community building, and non-traditional education—into one field. Mollison and Holmgren grounded their new discipline of Permaculture in a simple code of ethics, which all Permaculture designers now share in common. But what makes these Permaculture ethics, well, ethical? I seek to defend in this essay, along with the conclusion that Permaculture can provide for the refugees of agricultural society where agriculture cannot, the ethical validity of the code of Permaculture ethics, especially as contextualized with other ethical theories and their principles.

Before exalting the merits of Permaculture, we should first consider individually each piece of the code of Permaculture ethics. If the only ethical decision to be made is to take responsibility for our existence and the existence of our children, why do we need the other three principles? Well, on its own, the directive, “take responsibility,” sounds awfully vague to me! Had Mollison and Holmgren stopped after writing down “the only ethical decision” they saw necessary for humans, they would have added nothing to the world in the way of solutions, much less environmental ones. Unless they wrote specific guidelines to sketch out what they meant by “take responsibility,” we might have the absurd case of people running around, monopolizing industrial agriculture, making millions of dollars a year while laying waste to the planet, saying they were taking responsibility for their futures and their children’s futures by securing assets to pay for their needs, and calling themselves “Permaculturists” on top of all that!

Lucky for us they did not do this, and now we understand responsibility to equate with care for the earth, care for the people, and limiting consumption and population. We might even find it advantageous to tack on a few more guidelines, an advantage which we will explore later. Care for the earth, an ethic defined as a “provision for all life systems to continue and multiply,” includes conservation of endangered plant and animal species, careful observation of natural processes, modeling the built human environment after any observed patterns we uncover in this way, and promoting polyculture over monoculture (Mollison 2). Care for the people, an ethic defined as a “provision for people to access those resources necessary to their existence,” manifests in ways such as eradicating the global slave trade, creating self-sufficiency in the community instead of providing the minimum charitable contribution, strengthening communication among individuals and groups so that anyone with new ideas will not be overlooked, and creating community-enriching attractions, such as museums, libraries, free schools, theatres, recreation areas, or restaurants stocked with local produce and goods (Mollison 2). Limiting population and consumption, an ethic that functions in such a way that “by governing our own needs, we can set resources aside to further the above principles,” comes into play in ways very distinct from the other two ethical guidelines (Mollison 2). It is realized in various instances, from education about fair trade to planning an alternative, un-materialistic holiday, such as a conscientious Christmas celebration, from the choice to live simply to an understanding of populations as a function of food supply. These ethical guidelines work together almost like fairy godmothers, illuminating the types of activity required in taking responsibility for one’s own future and that of one’s children.

The ethical code of Permaculture pertains to the contemporary ethical climate largely in an economical way. Supporting multi-national corporations such as Monsanto, which has a frightening monopoly on genetically modified crops, does not care for the earth, for seed and crop diversity, nor care for the people, for bankrupted small farmers defending themselves in court against Monsanto’s claims of unauthorized use of their patented seed, and doesn’t even limit population and consumption, for as much as Monsanto claims to have answers to nutrition problems across the world, there are healthier answers that do not involve ingesting as yet untested (on humans over time), brand new genetically modified foods, such as corn, tomatoes, soy beans, and potatoes, and that do not create further reliance on insupportable agricultural society. However, supporting a local independent bookstore, for example, can mitigate some of the damaging effects of our run-amuck society. Though local businesses cannot always offer the incredible sales or savings that online stores or big box stores do, they will, in a self-protecting way, invest money in other local businesses, so that each dollar spent there goes even farther in supporting the local economy. Also, local independent businesses have remained human-scale and are therefore less likely to treat customers simply as money-spenders but as unique people worth getting to know. In this way, they will respond to community needs and offer helpful services with ease and efficiency, without having to get approval from an almost endless chain of higher-ups. Most importantly, investing in our local economy overall helps make it our landscape, the place we call home, not just some landscape, some other being’s home.

If we buy all our produce, for example, from companies in California, we are laying waste to our own region. So much gasoline is wasted when items grown on industrial farms in Florida are trucked all the way to California and items grown on industrial farms in California trucked to Florida, big trucking ships passing in the night. It is a food system designed in a completely illogical manner, with industrial agriculture all over the place, even ruining our own region; even if the food we consume doesn’t directly come from the Midwest, something being produced in our region (in Nebraska and Iowa, that would mostly be the corn and soybeans to feed livestock across the country) inevitably has maintained in its essence the rest of the imbalanced structure. When we support small farms in our region, usually these farmers are thinking much farther into the future than those on the industrial farms, and so they are often turning to sustainable agriculture, providing options for Community Supported Agriculture (CSA’s), and forming into cooperatives (this is not confined to the more liberal coastal states, but is happening right here in the breadbasket of America).

Buying local is equivalent, then, not only to care for the people but care for the earth, as well. Local businesses are more likely to strive to improve the ecological health of their surroundings, their region, their landscape. But what about limiting population and consumption? By having to compete in an increasingly outsourced or globalized economy and by thinking of customers as people and not consumers who should “Buy, buy, buy!” local businesses take into consideration the limits of consumption that already exist, whereas the big businesses (which, it might help to point out, might have a headquarters in a place that would make them seem local, but they are not motivated by a devotion to their region) seem to think of growth as unlimited, even though this economic model is “an outmoded and discredited concept” (Mollison 1). Furthermore,

“It is our lives which are being laid to waste. What is worse, it is our children’s world which is being destroyed. It is therefore our only possible decision to withhold all support for destructive systems, and to cease to invest our lives in our own annihilation…Most thinking people would agree that we have arrived at final and irrevocable decisions that will abolish or sustain life on this earth. We can either ignore the madness of uncontrolled industrial growth and defence [sic] spending that is in small bites, or large catastrophes, eroding life forms every day, or take the path to life and survival” (Mollison 1).

In almost every conceivable way, Permaculture offers an ethical solution to the ailments of the economic system of our deluded agricultural society that assumes it can run itself on the resources of the entire world at a rate of exponential growth, which is impossible if we wish not to devour ourselves.

Permaculture ethics have a useful framework to offer as an ecological matter, as well. In our consideration of the ethical benefit Permaculture design provides for ecological problems, we should tack on two additional ethical principles under our umbrella rule of “take responsibility.” These two new principles come from William McDonough and Michael Braungart’s book, Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things:

1) “Once you understand the destruction taking place, unless you do something to change it, even if you never intended to cause such destruction, you become involved in a strategy of tragedy. You can continue to be engaged in that strategy of tragedy, or you can design and implement a strategy of change” (44).

2) “As long as humans are regarded as ‘bad,’ zero is a good goal. But to be less bad is to accept things as they are, to believe that poorly designed, dishonorable, destructive systems are the best humans can do. This is the ultimate failure of the ‘be less bad’ approach: a failure of the imagination. From our perspective, this is a depressing vision of our species’ role in the world.

“What about an entirely different model? What would it mean to be 100 percent good?” (67).

With these five ethical guidelines in place (care for the earth, care for the people, limiting population and consumption, a strategy of change, and being 100 percent good), we can observe how these ethics would be ecologically valuable in a city like Omaha, a city that is plagued by its Superfund status from Asarco’s lead contamination. Care for the earth means healing the contamination by removing the lead, the contaminant, while care for the people means making everyone aware of the problem, providing resources to residents in the affected area, evaluating and treating poisoned children, and creating forest gardens, orchards, or community gardens in the treated areas to give the community a vision of hope and sustainability in place of the grim vision of pervasive contamination and ruin. Limiting population and consumption here can be viewed in its alternate phrasing, “Share the abundance,” which means once the contaminated area is healed and planted over with perennial goodness, all the members of the community may take part, sharing in the celebration.

Thus, a strategy of change is the vehicle by which people decide that if poisoning the population didn’t work last year or the year before that and if it won’t work the next year or the year after that, then noticing this pattern and not doing anything about it is the strategy of tragedy and devising a wholly unique, relevant solution is the appropriate thing to do, in this instance, creating orchards and gardens for posterity, as an act of responsibility for the future that we, along with our descendants, will live in. Finally, the ecological applicability of the overarching ethic to “take responsibility” will follow the pattern of being 100 percent good, by not succumbing to the lie that the only thing we can do is curb our ridiculous behavior, to “reduce, reuse, recycle,” but rather by daring to think that we can craft an entirely different future based on good design, that will then prove to be 100 percent good to its very roots. In our Omaha example, this 100 percent goodness would take the form of re-conceptualizing our entire city model and framework and rearranging the elements of the city to work for ecological wellness instead of destruction, to eliminate the need for the “reduce, reuse, recycle” philosophy by eliminating waste from the functional structure of the city.

The other two ways in which Permaculture ethics are extremely useful are cultural and spiritual ways. In the groundbreaking work on child development, The Continuum Concept: In Search of Happiness Lost, Jean Leidloff explained much of our agricultural society’s psychological devastation as a function of child-rearing. In an interview, she explained the basis of her antidote:

“The two words that I've arrived at to describe what we all need to feel about ourselves, children and adults, in order to perceive ourselves accurately, are worthy and welcome. If you don't feel worthy and welcome, you really won't know what to do with yourself. You won't know how to behave in a world of other people. You won't think you deserve to get what you need” (Mercogliano).

For me, this approach seems to combine easily with the rule, take responsibility for your existence and your children’s existence. It is much easier to take responsibility for our futures if we stop hitting ourselves over the heads and acknowledge our worth and the necessity for what we have to offer. We can then go out and follow the guidelines of Permaculture ethics from a place of stability, confidence, and ingenuity.

This cultural background is closely linked with a spiritual one. The spiritual stability I think is useful from the vantage point of Permaculture ethics comes from Daniel Quinn’s writings, in which he details the spiritual model of animism as an antidote to dominating and subjugating the earth to agriculture. When we acknowledge the benefits of viewing every element of our planet and everything on our planet as having a spirit, we can not easily maintain a relationship, based on domination, to all those spirits, to the coal and the Redwoods, to the buffalo and the Missouri, to trees or to people. In his collection of animist stories, entitled Tales of Adam, Quinn gifts us with Adam’s insight:

“‘You’re wrong,’ Adam replied. ‘A certain kind of lion would do that, and I would track it down and kill it, because it’s a lion gone mad, a lion that kills whatever it sees, beyond need. It’s thinking: “If I kill everything I see, then the gods will have no power over me and will never be able to say, ‘Today it’s the lion’s turn to go hungry, today it’s the lion’s turn to starve, today it’s the lion’s turn to die.’ I’ll kill everything in the world so that I alone may live. I’ll eat the hare that would have been the fox’s, and the fox will die; I’ll eat the antelope that would have been the wolf’s and the wolf will die; but I will live. I shall decide who eats and who starves, who lives and who dies. In this way, I shall live forever and thwart the gods.” And this madness makes the lion into a murderer of all life’” (13-14).

This theme recurs in Quinn’s work, with the clear analogy running from lion to human (Quinn has written in The Story of B that “We are not humanity,” meaning the whole of humanity cannot be confused for the human victims of agricultural civilization, which he has dubbed Taker culture), the sort of human that lives in agricultural society. Agricultural societies carry with them an Ethos not apparent to anyone in the society, in the form of the concept that humans have the special privilege to decide who (or what) lives and who dies. Quinn’s character, Adam, makes it clear that this is not a workable Ethos. What Adam ultimately implies is that each individual should respect the Law of Life, defined as “how it was done from first to last, no two things alike in all the mighty universe, no single thing made with less care than any other thing throughout generations of species more numerous than the stars,” and not mistake herself for a god, for one who can decide who will die and who will live (Quinn 5-6). The directive of respecting the Law of Life and not intervening with life and death we can therefore append quite smoothly to the initial three ethics of the Permaculture code.

Finally, let us establish a seventh ethical principle in this ethical code. An argument for the essential quality of our evolving universe was put forth in the first of Jason Godesky’s Thirty Theses, a work interwoven with much of the philosophy of the environment I have discussed so far. He writes, “We can suppose another form of consequentialist ethics, like Mill’s Utilitarianism, but with a different measure of ‘good.’ It is not happiness, but diversity that should be our measure. Diversity of life, of thought, of action” (Godesky). The Principle of Utility becomes “The Greatest Diversity Principle” and replaces the old Utilitarian decision-making model. Bill Mollison’s emphasis on polyculture, Daniel Quinn’s emphasis on a multiplicity of tribes (instead of one monster culture, Taker culture), and McDonough and Braungart’s emphasis on a strategy of change, on good design and intentionality, all model themselves after the evolutionary advantage of diversity.

We see how Permaculture ethics match up to Utilitarian ethics, but what of other ethical theories? Certainly, Aristotelian ethics claim that humans have virtue when they flourish from functioning well. Those ethics hinge on the function of man as a rational being. What if we were to revise those ethics to hinge on the function of humankind as an ecological being, to relate to its landscapes in ways that support the ecological balance? That would certainly match up with the Permaculture ethics. Moral relativism flippantly discards any decision-making models other than those established by the individual, whereas Permaculture ethics, though it remains up to the individual to establish her definition of taking responsibility, has a set of guidelines to direct individuals on the ecologically-stable, moral path. Kantian ethics may be too inflexible to have much in common with Permaculture ethics, but one could argue for the directive to “take responsibility” that it is its own categorical imperative. Permaculture ethics are therefore not entirely unprecedented or incomprehensible; they even share certain elements with long-standing ethical theories.

We have seen that in these various contexts of economics, ecology, culture, and spirituality, as well as in the context of other ethical theories, the decision-making rule provided by Bill Mollison and David Holmgren holds true. So now we have one overlaying ethical directive, under which we have the following seven specific ethical principles or guidelines, all closely linked:

Overarching Ethic – The only ethical decision is to take responsibility for our own existence and that of our children’s, which existence is worthy and welcome.

1. Care for the earth.
2. Care for the people.
3. Limiting of population and consumption (Also: Share the abundance).
4. Respect the Law of Life and do not mistake yourself for a god, for one who can decide who will die and who will live.
5. Design and implement a strategy of change if aware of current destruction.
6. Be 100 percent good if desperate for reversal of current processes.
7. The Greatest Diversity Principle: Maximize Diversity and Minimize Homogeneity OVERALL.

With these principles and this ethical code, our over-arching rule has a well-defined context. It becomes possible to apply, without being confused with agriculturalists, industrialists, and economists who see the whole world in terms of commodities that will provide unlimited economic growth, without consequences in the ecological fabric of our landscape, our home-place.

From the work of many visionaries and from the assorted examples presented
here, we start to shape an image of a culture on its last legs, faltering to keep its cultural Ethos hidden from all the humans in its grip (so that they can’t discover the irrationality and un-sustainability of its premise, that humans have the power to decide what should live and what should die). In our examination of Permaculture, we see an alternative, a horticulture-based culture that will be far from the evolutionary ideal but that could probably hold the weight of all the refugees of agricultural-based culture when it collapses. Through Permaculture, perhaps those of us participating in the culture that went so far astray ten thousand years ago can make the first few steps on the way to regrouping ourselves into the tribal configuration that has proven so workable for us throughout the history of our existence. We need only to take responsibility for our existence and that of our children.


Bibliography

Godesky, Jason. "Thesis #1: Diversity is the primary good.." The Anthropik Network. 19 July 2005. The Anthropik Network. 8 Dec 2007 thesis-1-diversity-is-the-primary-good/#>.

Hemenway, Toby. "Is 'Sustainable Agriculture' an Oxymoron?." Toby Hemenway – Ecological Design and Permaculture. May 2006. 1 Dec 2007
.
McDonough, William, and Michael Braungart. Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things. 1st ed. New York: North Point Press, 2002.

Mercogliano, Chris. "An Interview with Jean Liedloff." An Interview with Jean Liedloff. Journal for Living. 1 Dec 2007 .

Mollison, Bill. Permaculture: A Designers' Manual. 2nd ed. Tyalgum, Australia: Tagari Publications, 1988.

Quinn, Daniel. Tales of Adam. Hanover, New Hampshire: Steerforth Press, 2005.

Keep reading: The Permaculture Ethics of Landscape and Culture...