1. 12 January 2007

    People, Land, and Community

    693 days ago

    Collected Lectures of the E.F. Schumacher Society

    A nice set of ecological/economical/environmental lectures on how we ought to deal with the disaster that has befallen the earth. I think these are all posted to the internet in case you might want a closer look.

    I agree with most of the ideas here, but don’t really see being able to jump from mainstream american life into bioreigonally/sustainably/old-fashioned homstead culturing my own patch of earth for the rest of my life. I really like the idea of breaking down the gigantic structures of society into locally comprehensible bits, but then how the hell would I be able to order shit off amazon.com?

    Kirkpatrick Sale – The Colombian Legacy

    For there is no longer room to doubt that now, five hundred years later, the subcontinent of Europe – and all the continents it has peopled and all the cultures it has touched – represents a society in crisis, a crisis, like the previous one, of spirit as much as of substance. The industrial world, the European-culture world, of which this nation is a preeminent example, is sickly, miserable, melancholic, anguished, without a faith to believe in, institutions to trust, or values to rely on, victim of the disease I have called “affluenza,” the frenzied amassment of packages and products to the point where not only is the survival of the human animal in real question but the survival of all oxygen-dependent species and indeed the living earth itself. We have as a culture subscribed to the theory of progress – it is time to cancel that subscription. 17

    Affluenza is a token way to frame the West today. I’m not convinced that more is better – but surely what we have today is impressive! But is it worth the tremendous distress we’ve put upon the earth to obtain it.

    Winona LaDuke – Voices from White Earth

    Industrial language has changed things from being animate, alive, and having spirit to being inanimate, mere objects and commodities of society. When things are inanimate, “man” can view them as his God-given right. He can take them, commodify them, and manipulate them in society. 28

    If you look at the legal system in this country, you will find that it is based on the idea that Christians have a God-given right to dispossess heathens of their land. This attitude goes back to a palpal bull of the fifteenth or sixteenth century declaring that Christians have a superior right to land over heathens. 32

    John McClaughry – Bringing Power Back Home

    Merely going to the polls every two years or four years to cast a ballot for one or another television personality who happens to be running for office is a pretty cheap version of citizenship. Voting on a state referendum question, as Californians are famous for, is also a fairly insubstantial form of citizenship.

    By citizenship we mean active participation in public affairs at a level such as the town or neighborhood where the individual’s contribution can be appreciated and can count for something. The small human community, celebrated by Aristotle and Lao Tzu, the place where you belong and where you recognize those who belong and those who are strangers, where the good of everyone is tied together in an interconnected web that is ruptured only at the peril of everyone in the community – that is where citizenship resides.

    By contrast, in a society that is planned to be “specific in requirements, uniform in standards, and tough on delinquents1,” you are no longer a citizen but rather the subject of a central power. Once we become subjects, we lose those sparks of humanity and democracy and freedom that have made this country such a great country in world history. 137

    Ah, wouldn’t it be nice.

    1 Declaration of some governor of Vermont:

    Our governor, a rather liberal and well-meaning woman who wants good things for everyone, gave a speech last January in which she called for “a new era of planning” for our state. Her words in describing the new era were that it will be “specific in requirements, uniform in standards, and tough on delinquents.” It could have been Benito Mussolini in Milan in 1922.

    Wendell Berry – People, Land, and Community

    To know nothing, after all, is no more possible than to know enough. I am only proposing that knowledge, like everything else, has its place, and that we need urgently now to put it in its place. If we want to know and cannot help knowing, then let us learn as fully and accurately as we decently can. But let us at the same time abandon our superstitious beliefs about knowledge: that it is ever sufficient; that it can of itself solve problems; that it is intrinsically good; that it can be used objectively or disinterestedly. Let us acknowledge that the objective or disinterested researcher is always on the side that pays best. And let us give up our forlorn pursuit of the “informed decision.” 144

    What works poorly in agriculture – monoculture, for instance, or annual accounting – can be pretty fully explained, because what works poorly is invariably some oversimplifying thought that subjugates nature, people, and culture. What works well ultimately defies explanation because it involves an order which in both magnitude and complexity is ultimately incomprehensible. 150

    Wes Jackson – Becoming Native to this Place

    ...in a certain sense all we have to do is figure out a way to stay amused while we live out our lives as inexpensively as possible within the life support system. It’s what I call “the Mill-Around theory of Civilization”: if we can simply mill around and not expend too many resources, then we won’t do much harm to ourselves r the planet. The problem is, how do we learn to quit doing in a manner that uses up all the earth’s capital? Or stated otherwise, how do we make our vessel so small that it doesn’t take much to fill it? Should not this be our journey? 155

    I don’t know if I can agree with this – it seems a very depressed way of stating that we should harmonize with the land. The idea is the right one no doubt, but I can imagine no lack of ways to frame it better.

    Thomas Berry – The Ecozoic Era

    While we seem to be achieving magnificent things at the microphase level of our functioning, we are devastating the entire range of living beings at the macrophase level. The natural world is more sensitive than we have realized. Unaware of what we have done or its order of magnitude, we have thought our achievements to be of enormous benefit for the human process, but we now find that by disturbing the biosystems of the planet at the most basic level of their functioning, we have endangered all that makes the planet Earth a suitable place for the integral development of human life itself. 193

    Point number one in my cynical worldview: “Man we’re fucking this place up. Hey! TV shows!”

    The first condition is to understand that the universe is a communion of subjects, not a collection of objects. Every being has its own inner form, its own spontaneity, its own voice, its ability to declare itself and to be present to other components of the universe in a subject-to-subject relationship. 196

    Descartes, we might say, killed the Earth and all its living beings. For him, the natural world was mechanism. There was no possibility of entering into a communion relationship. Western humans became autistic in relation to the surrounding world. There could be no communion with te birds or animals or plants, because these were all mechanical contrivances. The real value of things was reduced to their economic value. A destructive anthropocentrism came into being. 197

    ...the Earth is primary and humans are derivative. The present distorted view is that humans are primary and the Earth and its integral functioning only a secondary consideration – thus the pathology manifest in our various human institutions. The only acceptable way for humans to function effectively is by giving first consideration to the Earth community and then dealing with humans as integral members of that community. The Earth must become the primary concern of every human institution, profession, program, and activity (including economics). 198

    The entire pattern of Earth’s functioning is being altered in this transition from the Cenozoic to the Ecozoic. We did not even exist until the major developments of the Cenozoic were complete. In the Ecozoic, however, the human will have a pervasive influence on almost everything that happens. We are approaching a critical watershed in the entire modality of Earth’s functioning. Our positive power of creativity in the natural life systems is minimal; our power of negating is immense. Whereas we cannot make a blade of grass, there is liable not to be one blade of grass unless it is accepted, fostered, and protected by the human. Protected mainly from ourselves so that the Earth can function from within its own dynamism. 202

    Kirkpatrick Sale – Mother of All

    It was not until the development of European science, from about the sixteenth century on, that this animistic conception of the earth finally gave way, to be replaced by one supported by the new insights of physics, chemistry, mechanics, astronomy, and mathematics. The new perception held – in fact it proved – that the earth, the universe, and all within it operated by certain clear and calculable laws and not by the whims of any living, thinking being; that far from being divine and omnipotent, these laws were capable of scientific prediction and manipulation; and that objects, from the smallest stone to the earth itself and the planets beyond, were not animate with souls and wills and purposes but were nothing more than the combination of certain chemical and mechanical properties. [...]

    ...[This particular world-view’s] ultimate governing principle – that humans should not merely understand but be capable of manipulation nature, and indeed, as Descartes put it for all of European science, be “masters and possessors of Nature” – became ingrained into not only the scientific but also all scholarly and most popular thinking in the Western world and now shapes the perceptions of our senses and the patterns of our psyches.

    And if at the end of the twentieth century we see the earth as a static and neutral arena that is alterable by our chemicals and controllable by our technologies; if we see ourselves as a superior species, to whom is given the right to kill off as many hundreds of others as we wish and “have dominion over” the rest; if we believe we have the power to reorder earth’s atoms and reassemble its genes, to contrive weapons and machines fueled by our own invented elements and capable of plundering its resources, befouling its systems, poisoning its air (perhaps irretrievably), and altering its eons-old processes to suit our wishes… if this is our condition, it is so because, far from calling into question the scientific view of the universe in these past four centuries, we have accepted it virtually in its entirety. It has become the foundation and sustenance not only of our various social systems – education, agriculture, medicine, religion, energy, communication, transportation – but of our most basic economic and political institutions as well.

    To be sure, the scientific world-view is not without its values, its uses, its triumphs even, and I think we may want to call the world a better place for our knowledge of hygiene, say or radiotelegraphy or immunology or electricity. But its shortcomings, its failures, its calamitous dangers have by now become obvious, and it is surely sage to say that the path of sanity, perhaps survival, is to regain the spirit of the ancient Greeks, to once again comprehend the earth as a living creature. We need to recover the sense, as Schumacher puts it in Good Work, “that man is the servant of this world, or at least a trustee,” a concept that has been “organized out of our thinking,” as he puts it, “by the modern world,” and we must listen to the two great teachers, one “the marvelous system of living nature” and the other “the traditional wisdom of mankind,” teachers we have “rejected and replaced by some extraordinary structure we call objective science.” And we must re-envision humans as participants and not masters in the biotic community, as only one among many species, special perhaps in having certain skills of information-gathering and communication but not for that reason superior to those with other skills – for the human being, a Mark Twain might have said, is different from other animals only in that it is able to blush. Or needs to. 218-220, phew

    David Orr – Environmental Literacy

    Finally, had Bok so chosen, he would have been led to question how we define intelligence and what that might imply for our definition of an “educated” person. From an ecological perspective it is clear that we have often confused cleverness and intelligence. Cleverness, as I understand it, tents to fragment things and focus on the short term. The epitome of cleverness is the specialist whose intellect and person have been shaped by the demands of a single function. Ecological intelligence, on the other hand, requires a broader view of the world and a long-term perspective. Cleverness can be adequately measured by SAT and GRE tests, but intelligence is not so clearly computed. In time, I think we will come to see that true intelligence tends to be integrative and often works slowly while mulling things over. Further, intelligence can be inferred, according to Wendell Berry in Standing by Words, from the “good order or harmoniousness of [one’s] surroundings.” In other words, the consequences of our actions are a measure of our intelligence, and the plea of ignorance is no good defense. Because some consequences cannot be predicted, the exercise of intelligence requires forbearance and a sense of limits. Ecological intelligence, in contrast to mere cleverness, does not presume to act beyond a certain scale at which effects can be known and unpredictable consequences would not be catastrophic. 241

    John Todd – An Ecological Economic Order

    Shakespeare: there are sermons in stones, books in the running brooks, and good in everything. 268

    Stephanie Mills – Making Amends to the Myriad Creatures

    Earth Manual – How to Work on Wild Land Without Taming it 286

    David Brower – It’s Healing Time on Earth

    We do not have a democracy in the United States. Any country where only half of the eligible voters are registered and where only half of those who are registered vote and where only half of those who vote like their choice is not a democracy. Any country that isn’t ruled by its government, that is ruled instead by the Fortune 500, isn’t a democracy. And any world government that is ruled by transnational corporations isn’t a democracy. yet such is the state of our national and global governments. According to my definition, a corporation is, right now, by law, a lawyer’s attempt to create something that can act like a person without a conscience. If you are a CEO or a member of the Board of Directors of a corporation that bypasses an opportunity for profit, you can be sued by the stockholders! There should at least be something written into law that says you can bypass it for sound social or ecological reasons. 290

    He makes a good allegory squeezing the 4.5 billion years of scientific history into the 6 days of biblical creation history. Humans didn’t come about until 1.5 seconds before midnight on the sixth day.

  2. 09 May 2006

    940 days ago

    Flower power - Vulnerable endangered species or environmental sleight-of-hand?

    Oppose massive commercial developments? Want beautiful green land in and around your city? Sow the seeds of endangered species on land threatened by development and there will be problems for the bulldozers.

    via Kjell Olsen940 days ago

  3. Also somewhat recently

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