Subject: Individual versus Social Survival
I do not think the preoccupation with self-sufficient survival
scenarios is productive. Rather, it is only the natural response from
living within an economic system which has forced individualism to
become paramount, symptom that reflects the cause rather than the
solution.
For more than ten years I have held a half-acre of some of the most
productive rain watered garden soil, in Paris, Arkansas, where I
occasionally spend time. It is a place to contemplate the world, to
engage in physical labor, to eat from my own effort. It is my place
of failure, where I would finally go when the changes that I would
participate in are definitively beyond achievement.
There is no evolution in a dream that does not seek to go toward a
greater light, that withdraws. Even as there is no physical need for
people to now starve, it being rather the consequence of the economic
mechanism, there is no need for us to presume that dieoff of people is
a necessary consequence of the ending of the age of exhuberance. We
could survive well enough from a diet centered about soybean
derivatives, which need no nitrogen, if need be. It is rather, many
of our cultural habits that will most certainly be forced to dieoff.
Disintegration of society into small self-focussed family units has
historically often resulted in their being large sized according to
the greater perceived survival utility. It is within a wider social
environment where the extended family needs become fulfilled through
non-blood relations with others, that peer pressure could
intelligently induce the most rapid decline of population --if the
children of others are free to give me affection and interrelation, if
I feel that they will stand vigil at my deathbed with appreciation for
what I have done in life, then I do not so need offspring. It is only
within the wider social context that Great Change is possible.
I think there is need for a place where people can evolve new ways of
living together --where rewards from the sharing of the endeavor
surpass the pleasures of consumption. Where we can undertake serious
emergy analysis and computerized accounting of lifestyles, change our
lifestyles, perhaps become a wave making center that extends over the
world. Necessarily build upon the agricultural foundation of
civilization, make our own documentary television, get serious, get
serious. Perhaps we could start with a place that is virtual for
almost all but also real. That place in each country where present
trends are the stupidest in relation to the potential for sustainable
development-- www.stupidvalley.org.
Odum states that the planet is becoming a noosphere due to the
increasingly information-controlled shell of the earth, per
Vernadsky. I prefer the meaning given by Teilhard de Chardin, as that
of the layer of self-aware consciousness which envelops the earth; it
is modified by the sharing of information, but does not thusly become,
for it already is; the focus should be upon consciousness as opposed
to technological manifestations thereof. We, as the bearers of that
consciousness, in as much as we do not consider our collective
well-being but instead are compelled to deal with our individual
prosperity, constitute a sharding of that noosphere, which information
alone will not unshard. We do not yet envison how to change our
behavior so that our relation with one another and with the planet
becomes paramount --our primary relation with life is that of being
locked unto the tokens of the marketplace, and we are thusly separated
one from another, and from ecological integrity. For how can we care
for the earth when we do not yet consider the entirety of our species?
It is in a qualitative, quantum evolution of the noosphere that our
Way to sustainability lies, in the transformation of our social
organization.
Far better than to fear what we might lose in the transition, we
should look for the opportunity to create anew. There is substantial
argument for the abolition of advertising and everything that derives
>from it; for the abolition of the superfluities of production which
desparately look for a genuine reason to be, while being in reality
essentially only profit seeking. Transition from a time of throughput
growth to one of decline can mean that what was good, suddenly becomes
evil, now in need of being surpassed. Perhaps we might even find a
way to regain the openness of planetary surface space, where one can
easily journey here then there, without encountering so many places
where there is no welcome.
The peak of petroleum production is a freight train of Great Change
coming down the tracks. It requires only that we avoid being run
over, and instead get aboard. If we only struggle in isolation,
without the supporting presence of one another, surely weariness will
threaten with defeat.
Someday, maybe...
--
The individual can evidence no greater nobleness than to live their
short life as if it were but a portion of immortality upon the earth.
Steve Morningthunder
mthunder@gnu.org
mthunder@azstarnet.com
-- Anonymous, May 29, 2000