Cross Posted from Prayforcalamity
by TDoS
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The vernal equinox has come and passed and with it the official start of spring is here in the northern hemisphere. Across the countryside Jane Magnolia trees have awoken. Their hundreds of fingers each cupping rose colored blooms like candles, as if they were so many tiny lavender hands offering up communion to the sun. Daffodils peer out of the hillside clearings like periscopes or perhaps yellow gramophones all playing a song of rebirth to call back the songbirds and honeybees. The energy sequestered in the root-balls and mycelium mats as the land went to sleep the last few months has begun surging upward, and it is hard to not feel it flowing through me as I walk my land taking stock of which fruit trees and berry bushes are producing buds. A good friend of mine, and mentor, once told me that I am doing well if I can establish two fruit trees per year. Looking at my spread of apple trees, it looks like I am on track to have done well in that regard. My partner does all of the work to care for our bee hive, and after donning her protective veil for a spring inspection, she reported to me that the hive is in great condition. I have heard it said that bees surviving the winter is what converts one from a bee-haver into a bee-keeper.
Our garden calls for much attention, and each week I spread a truck load of wood chips on the walking paths, which were first covered with flattened cardboard. Hopefully this effort will buy me a few years of relatively weed free walkways. Mint is returning with a vigor, and the strawberry leaves are vibrantly green. Kale, spinach, beets, and parsnips have been seeded, and I am keeping a keen eye for the first asparagus shoots. This year I have to grow significantly more food than I have in the past, as my partner is returning to work full time and I will be staying home during the week days with our daughter. In the short term we will have less money, but I will have more time to attend to tasks around the homestead. Walking through the garden brings me such a deep sense of calm as I talk to the plants and lose myself in my many tasks. Starting seeds is a great way to practice slowing oneself down, especially small seeds that tend to stick together like those of tomatoes and carrots.
I find myself happy as the sun tans my shoulders and a red tailed hawk cries from its nest somewhere high up in the trees behind me.
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February was the warmest month in recorded history. The record it broke for such crowning glory had been set in December. February temperatures saw the Earth cross the two degrees centigrade above pre-industrial average barrier that has been established as a hard danger zone by climate scientists. It was an anomaly, for now, but one that is likely to rear itself again and again. The most dramatic warming has been in the Arctic, which bodes ill for jet stream patterns as well as summer sea ice coverage. Time will tell if we see our first ice free Arctic this summer. Somehow the magnitude of the crisis of climate change still seems to evade most general discourse despite the pomp and show of the electoral season now in bloom in the US. There are lots of grand promises being hurled at the public about bringing manufacturing jobs back stateside. If that is not the dictionary definition of cognitive dissonance then I do not know what is. Industrialism long ago set us on a crash course with calamity, and now that the calamity has begun to rain down upon the world in the form of mega droughts, fires, famines, and super-storms, those angling for positions of power are promising more industrialism.
Of course, it is not even a job in a factory per se that most Americans dwelling in the rust belt actually want, it is a secure living situation. They want their basic needs met in a way that does not leave them uncertain and wrecked by stress month after month. It is a culture of production organized and operated through the machinations of capitalism that requires that people work a job in order to have these needs met in such a satisfactory way. When politicians say “Jobs!” it has become a Pavlovian response for the middle, and formerly middle, classes to come salivating like starving dogs to desperately pull a lever in their favor. They forget that first the food, and the land, and the ability to provide for oneself had to be taken away before they could be forced to work jobs for these things. A great deprivation preceded the creation of job economies whereby everyone was made to punch a clock and become the automaton of some civilized production scheme in order to have enough to eat and a place to sleep at night. This deprivation now long forgotten, people have no memory of themselves as anything but workers, and so they beg for work.
Neo-liberal capitalism may be the dominant platform by which this scheme is globally enacted, but it is merely the software that operates on the hardware of the civilized model of human organization. It is key to recall that ecological decimation was the order of the day long before the advent of capitalism. Forests had been clear cut from the Levant, through Greece and across Europe and the UK as civilization marched across the ancient world, slashing and burning its path to conquest and dominion over greater and greater expanses of the Earth. This pattern was repeated globally where ever civilizations formed. The Maya deforested the jungles of the Yucatan Peninsula long before Europeans brought their particular version of civilization to the continent and eventually ran head first into the consequences of such short sighted actions. The Aztecs, who may have created one of the more arguably “sustainable” cities in Tenochtitlan, did so on the backbone of war, expansion, tribute, slavery, and human sacrifice. Sure, they recycled their human excrement for crop fertilizer in their Chinampas, but they also relied on the growth of the territory that they dominated through blood shed. Food, firewood, and other material goods flowed into the city from outlying tribute towns where common people had to work to not only provide for themselves, but to pay a quarterly tribute to the city center of the empire.
Such is the way with cities. Goods and raw materials flow in and waste flows out. Cities harvest the natural wealth of outlying areas, and this model is now global, with powerful nations harvesting the material wealth of poor nations. No matter how desperately people may want to believe in the idea of the “sustainable city,” it is a contradiction of terms. Austin, Texas proclaims itself “America’s most sustainable city,” yet every day truckloads of food make deliveries while truck loads of garbage and waste are removed. The city depends on dammed lakes off the lower Colorado river for water which will one day fail to support the city’s growing population, and which in the present deprive down stream communities. According to 2010 data, households in Austin spent the most money on gasoline relative to other American cities. And Austin continues to grow, to cover more of the land in concrete preventing the recharging of the Edward’s Aquifer and demanding more energy for cooling as the city can have over one-hundred days in a year that breach one-hundred degrees fahrenheit.
A recent study calculated how much food the city of Seattle could produce based on how much solar radiation falls on its potentially farmable locations, including parks, rooftops, and yards. Even selecting crops that grow well in Seattle’s climate conditions the study’s authors determined that the city could provide only one percent of its food needs. If the streets and sidewalks were ripped up, the number could rise to two or three percent, but the city would lose functionality. After all, even if day to day travel was carried out on foot or on bicycle, deliveries with diesel powered semi-trucks would still be necessary for everything the city’s inhabitants required, from clothes, to air conditioners, to building materials, and of course, the other ninety-eight percent of the food they could not produce for themselves.
Sustainable living and cities are not compatible. This is not a matter of ideology. This is a matter of hard material reality, and suggestions that somehow 3D printing or vertical farms or a population fed a steady diet of algae shakes will be just the miracle we need to upend hard material constraints are at best, petulant whimpers of those who have become accustomed the vast wealth of selection that living in a first-world city provides, or at worst, Kubler-Ross stage three bargaining, hoping that somehow, by some stretch of compromise we can sustain the unsustainable.
But we can’t. Not without expansion. Not without tribute. Not without an exploitative power dynamic and flows of violence that may or may not be visible from the comfortable confines.
—
Hot coffee is a miracle, or damn near one. Every morning millions of Americans have a cup or two of hot coffee, the beans of which were grown in Columbia, or Ethiopia, or Hawaii. Maybe those Americans have tea grown in India or a banana grown in Peru. They pull on shoes made in Vietnam and perhaps ride their bicycle made with bauxite mined in Australia on a road paved with bitumen from Alberta. Perhaps these Americans stop off at a local food co-op or farmer’s market where they purchase some locally grown kale. They take pictures of the fresh eggs at the market with their iPhone which has a slew of globally sourced components buried within it, and they post this photo online with the help of a network of satellites and tag it with some cute caption about sustainability.
When the average American city dweller thinks about urban living, they likely think of the comedy clubs, the used book stores, the fusion restaurants, or the bars. They fail to think about the global hegemony of the United States military and how a worldwide network of bases has laid the foundation for dollar dominance. Most of the American or European or Australian or Canadian city dwellers who stammer on about generating green, sustainable cities are not picturing the mega-cities of the world like Dakha or Rio de Janeiro. Millions of children living in the squalor of slums and favelas, tin roofed shacks and human waste littering the streets and waterways are not what the white first worlders are picturing in their minds when they declare the supremacy of urban existence. Even the relatively lucky people in Hong Kong or Manila live in crammed, small apartments set inside concrete towers that resemble prisons more than anything else.
The wealth extracted from around the planet by western powers over the course of centuries, a process which went into overdrive in the twentieth century, has absolutely skewed the perceptions of those average citizens who reside within these conquistador nations. Like Tenochtitlan, the US and its neo-liberal capitalist crony nations exact tribute from the global poor. We may not adorn ourselves in exotic feathers and obsidian jewelry, but our sneakers and our jeans and our lattes and our cellphones will never be sustainably sourced and manufactured within the footprint of our home city limits. It is just not possible. We can have civilization, or we can have a livable planet, but we cannot have both.
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Phosphorous leaches from agricultural and manufacturing sources into water ways. Eventually it alters the chemistry of these waterways creating the conditions that support toxic algae blooms. Power plants are often built along waterways. Coal fired plants have been using rivers such as the Ohio as a waste dump for decades. Radioactive tritium has been leaching into the groundwater from the Indian Point nuclear plant in New York, and the leak is getting worse. The Turkey Point nuclear power facility is leaking waste into Biscayne Bay just outside of Miami.
Often when I discuss the destruction wrought by civilized existence, the first critique hurled in my direction is that, “We cannot go back.” On this point, I agree. We cannot go back because civilization has greatly destroyed the ability of so many natural systems to harbor life. Industrial civilization will decay and fracture in the coming decades and centuries. I do not know how this process will play out or how long it will take to complete, but I feel that I could safely suggest that several generations from now the people who are making new ways of living will curse the stupidity and greed of those who poisoned the water. They will wonder what demons possessed our hearts with such a dark poison that we could so callously wipe out the other living beings who we rely on for survival.
In the dry wastes a young girl will dig for tubers amongst a backdrop of drought ravaged trees and the charcoal remains of those that burned in the previous season. Seeking a nourishing root she finds the bric a brac of our brain dead culture; a plastic fork, a beer can, rubber testicles that once swung from a pick-up truck’s trailer hitch. Yee haw.
Her family boils caught rainwater unaware that it contains heavy metals which will be responsible for some of their eventual deaths. They will laugh, as people do, and they will tell cautionary tales about a long ago world in which people set the sky on fire.
Whatever gods there may be forgive us. We were drunk on oil and pictures of ourselves. We really wanted good jobs.
Sad but true. Requiem for evil passions and broken dreams. Those aware are left powerless and in horror to watch the demise of intelligence out of control destroying itself and it’s precious home, which could have been so wonderful if we had not gone mad with power. The love that could have saved us is cast aside, ridiculed, and constantly abused and invalidated. The pure in heart among us can only pray that the holocaust be rapid and thorough, cleansing the planet of the pestilence we have become.
May those of us awake in this nightmare find ways to still celebrate in small ways such love as still remains possible before this long and tragic story is finally ended.
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Indeed we have been a very destructive species for a very long time. It was not capitalism that killed off the mammoth, the Australian mega fauna and every other hominid species, but most likely it was man.
In a single campaign the Romans would level forests. Forty kilometers of wooden fortification for a single battle. Over six hundred large oaks for a single British warship (the Mary Rose)
Capitalism was not the start of human destructiveness, but it surely ramped up the pace.
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This is a common trope, the megafauna bit. Ignoring for a moment climate change removing key food sources for many of these animals while they began to be hunted, to compare this to civilization and capitalism is a false equivocation. Capitalism makes a commodity of everything, and puts a price on the neck of all living things. This is a paradigm destined to wipe out the world. Potential over hunting by tribes left open the possibility of learning and behaviorial change, as with the maori creating a culture that revered animal and bird life, after unintentionally wiping out large flightless birds.
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As I said capitalism ramped up the pace, and probably to the point of our own destruction. Eventually in Australia and New Zealand, nature and man came into balance. Capitalism and nature will not come into balance until the complete destruction of one or the other, or more likely both.
Previous climate change has caused many problems for the natural systems but add man into the mix and destruction of species is much more thorough. When man arrives mega fauna goes. Not once or twice, but repeatedly. Look up any extinction study over the last five years or so and it is man that is the common factor.
Pretty much all land mega fauna has gone. except for Africa. In Africa the mega Fauna had more time to adapt to changing man. Learned to fear man while there were sufficient numbers.
Capitalism makes all the destructiveness so very much worse. When the future of our own species has a price, we really have taken it too far.
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rabbiddoomsayer,
Are you an Aussie?
I’ve seen you comment a lot on Damn The Matrix & like what you write there.
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Yup, from the West
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For a very long time those who would later call themselves humans were simply a not too important part of the vast pattern of Nature. When however we became more intelligent and developed complex language, and tools – we became more powerful than any other species in the history of life on Earth. With this power came the possibility – some would say the certainty – of misusing it. We now had the ability to alter the whole long organic balance of Nature, and we did that. We are now living in an advanced stage of that ancient evolution of the intelligence/power dynamic.
Our problem today is that we are addicted to the things that are destroying us. Modern egos are attached to the short term highs that power makes possible, and unmindful of the long term price that these unwise behaviors inevitably exact. We are consuming in a wild orgy the limited resources necessary for our survival, and poisoning our environment in ways that threaten the integrity of the DNA structures that make continued life possible.
In our long history there have been those among us who were aware of our fatal course, and developed ways we could change ourselves so as to avoid the doom we have been unconsciously courting. Those ways have been called spiritual Paths. Our need now is to rediscover and recreate these paths in order to make their basic intent known to and doable by large numbers of us – before we die in the wastelands of our own obsessions….
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Judging by the number of comments you post about love and finding the true spiritual path being the solution to our predicament , I suspect that that could be your particular obsession. However,good luck to you.
Good essay, tdOs
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Thank you David, I take that as a compliment. Love takes all sorts of guises, and in the eyes of some it is all madness and obsession. But to me, a love that is true and deep and steady is more real than most of what passes for reality. Spiritual Love is about Truth and Beauty and dimensions beyond the shallow concerns of the materially oriented. If this be obsession, then it is a magnificent obsession….
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And I’m not the only one. There are others who deeply care about the murder of so many Beings on our world. Our love for this beautiful planet and the Beings on it is not simply a lust to consume and destroy more of it. Real Love transcends the selfish ends most are obsessed with, and focuses instead on a higher plane of values. I’m sure you know about this in your heart, but may need periodically to be reminded of it, like myself. We all have more than one operating system in this complex something or other which we seem to be. Not all the parts agree with each other. That gives us something interesting to work on – which is what real spiritual paths are about, as opposed to phony religious scams, which unfortunately abound.
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Although it is true that the gross and subtle aspects of reality are one, in manifestation some minds have power over some things. Our human minds gained power over many lesser intelligences – and thus were born the huge problems we now face. Our abusive management style is coming back to fatally bite us. A change of our relationship with all things ignorantly deemed to be other than ourselves is called for – or else….
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