Hey, environmentalist liberals! Here's a hint: IT'S TOO LATE!

Returning to that book report I wrote, my teacher only wrote a few comments on the paper, but one is important enough that I wanted to point it out. With the point at which I say that "my grand scheme to 'save the world' is simply to walk away from participation in those institutions that diminish diversity and learn about or create a new way of living that increases diversity," he responds "- How about joining the people trying to save it?"

(I thought that is what I was saying.)

But I understand that he is coming from a different angle. It is basically the angle of the liberal environmentalist. And the best way I know to respond to this angle is to simply point to an essay that could answer that question much better than I could right now- Ran Prieur's Thinking Through the Fall. I haven't referred to Ran's writing directly since I first mentioned him with regards to his essay defining violence.

expand to read the full post

That instance is actually a fun personal example of the butterfly effect. One night, back in late october, I was doing a random google search for "pacifism," and Ran's essay happened to catch my eye (if you do that search, you'll find it almost to the end of the page, if you have it set to return 100 results). I clicked on the link, read the essay, and thought it was really good. It was touching on just the kind of transient nature of the meaning of the word "violence" that I was trying to feel out as I began to question my pacifism. I shared the link to the essay with a few friends, and that's where it stayed for a few weeks. I wrote about the essay in my blog eventually. And then finally it dawned on me to perhaps explore other essays written by this author. And I did. I read many of his essays and then switched over and started to follow his blog on a daily basis, but only superficially, never following any of the links in his posts. At some point around Christmas, Sara and I were looking at the site together, and she was exploring every link possible, and the opportunity again dawned on me that I am not exploiting this resource nearly far enough. So then, as I began to go back and explore places Ran linked to, I quickly made my way to Anthropik, as Jason was still in the midst of finishing up his Thirty Theses and so was being linked by Ran every few days as a new thesis was published. I continued to thoroughly explore Anthropik then, adding it to my list of daily reads. One day in January, by chance, I came across a link to Hobopoet in the forum at Anthropik, and headed on over there. Here things start to speed up a bit. By this time, I am starting to add these daily reads to the sidebar here, and when I added Hobopoet, somehow, the very next day (if I remember correctly), Hobopoet had linked back to me! (my first big hit of blogger-to-blogger approval, btw). While all this general blogging merriment is going on, I have basically been pacified and beaten down into accepting the idea that I could go on for three and a half more years and get a degree in something or other. Still, I'm exploring, virtually, and I come across the link to Dancing Rabbit on Ishcon, again randomly, and link to it. And I know this is a little cheesy, but it all comes together, all these little happenstance events, with Devin. Remember that he found my blog through Hobopoet, which he found through Anthropik (probably the same way I did). He begins to open up a dialogue with me mid february, and by the end of march, I have again come alive and am chomping at the bit to be rid of the chains of school and start living. To change direction so as to not end up where I was headed. To actually have what I believe acted out in the way I organize and use my life every day. SO, the point was - a random google search led directly to my dropping out. So be careful what you google search!

Wow, so I got way off topic, but that's okay. It was fun. Anyway, I can't recommend Ran's essays enough, along with the rest of his site.


The corollary that follows my people pleasing addiction is that I am very apt to become dependent on people I perceive as role models or heros in my life. To quote a CrimethInc. Worker Bulletin, the most important question for the revolutionary is how to escape disciples and enable equals. I would like to start enabling myself. It's fine for me to learn from other people, but then I need to take what I learn and go out and live my own life, not live vicariously through the people I'm supposedly just learning from.

Sorry I went a little linkcrazy with this post. Don't know what came over me...

Tags:

• anarchy
• community
• civilization
• collapse
• ecology
• progress
• politics
• unschooling