The problem

Several weeks ago, I went to a presentation by the beehive collective, in which they told the story of the dark and sordid relationship between the US and Colombia - the "war on drugs," which is an excuse to go in and control the country economically and politically, greatly harming many innocent subsistence farmers when the US accidentally destroys the wrong fields (because it's hard to get the address right from 500 feet up in the air). They went into incredible detail about all of the bad shit that happens there because of "us". The basic message is globalization = bad; local community sufficiency = good.

I watched a documentary last night that I picked up from the library called The end of suburbia. It introduces the coming (or present, if you've been to the pump lately) crisis of peak oil. The rate of production of oil for the world will peak within the next decade, if it hasn't already. This means that the age of cheap energy is over. The lifestyle we developed during that age of cheap energy will no longer be able to be fueled or otherwise sustained. There is no scalable, cheap, fast solution. But we will continue attempting to expand our economy as we always have, an economy completely based on oil and its byproducts. And our economy (our global economy) will crash. The movie says this will end suburbia. I say this will end urbia as well (a.k.a. cities::civis::civilization). I'm looking forward to the possibilities such an involuntary powerdown will open up.

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I watched another documentary earlier tonight, outside, projected on a screen on the side of a building, at New Roots urban farm, called The future of food. The issue here is genetically modified foods, and how they're fucking with the lives of family farmers (because of the patenting of life, and its uncontrollable reproduction and spread to land where the farmer hasn't paid the patent fee. Monsanto is evil.) and with the ecosystems they are introduced to. The scariest part to me, besides what GMOs could be doing to me allergenically, was the idea that terminator seeds (seeds genetically modified to commit suicide - to produce infertile seeds in the next generation, tieing the farmers to the company that makes the seed forever) could cross-breed with wild plants and spread the suicide gene throughout an ecosystem. I cheered when they talked about superweeds overcoming the Roundup herbicide (that the industrial farmers then kill with something similar to agent orange that is known to cause cancer (*cheering dies down*). Everyone outside of North America is scared shitless of GMOs (the governments and the peoples). They are watching Americans to see when they start dropping dead. The documentary goes on to highlight the organic "counterrevolution." The film barely touched on the environmental impact of monocultural farming methods. That's left for another movie, I guess.

Or a book! I recently read Garden Planet, by William H. Kötke. This book is very readable (not quite as intense and detailed as Final Empire). It covers how civilized humans are killing life on earth and how to create a new human culture that will allow humans to gain "biological legitimacy" in basically being worthy of continuing to exist as a species on this planet. I'll just list all of the ways in which we are raping the earth: global warming, the dying oceans, the vanishing soils, desertification, deforestation, water exhaustion/polluting, species extinction, and the human population disaster. More devastating (from my perspective at least) than the economic collapse is the environmental collapse. Humans can live quite well (thrive, actually) without functioning monetary economies, but they can't very well thrive if the earth is too sick to continue to provide food for them. We are omnivores, so there would have to be nothing edible left alive in order for us to starve to death, but such is a possibility with how badly we are screwing up everything we touch (and we, as a global culture, can't keep our grubby little hands off anything). The solution Kötke provides in building a new human culture is based on, guess what!, ecovillages. And the use of permaculture. I was ready for this book. It fit exactly into the path I was already planning to go down. Sometimes people recommend books for me to read because they fit very well into the path they are going down (not me). So while I thought this book was great and think that everyone should be aware of what it has to say about the future of the human species, I will not recommend it to everyone to read. You will not appreciate it until you are good and ready to appreciate it. You will not change until you are ready to change. (And I know the same can be said of me from your perspective, re: things like God, growing up, getting a job).

But the problem is deeper than even the impending collapse of the environment. It is much more personal. Civilization has made us all sick through the core - soul sick. Even if the economy or the environment never fell apart, it would still be imperative to start to heal. The crises ahead are a great opportunity for such healing to take place, but they are not a prerequisite. We learn as children, as babies, from the very beginning, that we are isolated in this culture, alienated, alone. Our needs are not met at all, and so we learn that to survive we must fend for ourselves independently and not trust anyone else. Instead of loving each other, we distrust (a.k.a. fear, lack faith), and that distrust, that inability to understand each other in our uniqueness, leads to hate. We hate those different from us, but in a myriad of ways, we also end up hating ourselves. We become isolated from ourselves. We split within ourselves and become unendingly conflicted. As my self-taught psychologist friend, Devin, has shown me, we need to heal the mind/body split. (I can take no credit for this last paragraph. It's all Devin.) This is "the problem" that I want to "play" on (as opposed to work on) my whole life. I invite you to play on it with me, when you're ready.

Tags:

• capitalism
• civilizaton
• collapse
• community
• ecology
• food
• parenting
• religion
• unschooling
• work