As I watch bombs drop in Gaza, rockets fired back across the Israeli boarder, and the media debates “acceptable civilian casualties,” it gives me the feeling that our culture may be twisted beyond hope. After 10,000 years, our culture has still not found a way to resolve conflicts without war. We are beset today by numerous unprecedented threats, and all we can think of doing is either killing our neighbor or shutting of their natural gas supply.

This has inspired me to list the top reasons why our culture cannot be saved and should be replaced by something better. Our essay turned into a community effort of Culturequake friends and writers. We hope you will find something here that resonates and inspires you to bring change in whatever way you are best at. With no further ado, here are the Top Ten Reasons to dump our culture and move on to a better way of living.

1. 1.We do not treat the earth as a scared place. Christianity for example sees the earth not as a sacred place, but merely as a way station where humans are tested to see whether they are worthy of heaven or hell after death. If the earth were a sacred place under Christianity, then humans would not have a place in it because humans are not sacred. You are born to die to go to a better place. In Christian theology we are all born sinners; we do our best to approach holiness.
   
   In contrast, animism sees the earth as a sacred place and sees humans as having a place in a sacred place. Humans are just as holy as oak trees, birds, or mushrooms; all species are valued the same.—Daniel Quinn, the C-Realm Podcast, Episode, 88.
   

2. 2.After 10,000 years, our culture has not been able to create peace, health, happiness, or general welfare for humans and all other species. We just keep inventing new ways for a minority to control the majority and to concentrate wealth. Infinite growth on a finite planet is also physically impossible. We continue to consume precious nonrenewable resources and soon begin to runout in an event called “peak everything.” Consumption by 6.8 billion has put humanity into an ecological carrying capacity overshoot of 20 percent. We are sawing off the branch we are standing on. However, because of our short life span or environmental generational amnesia this does not matter to most people. People have never experienced what the world was like during their grandparents or even parents early lifetimes. This is a major stumbling block to cultural change coming to the masses.
   
   Even if you follow all the rules, your job, education, skills, retirement, and savings are no longer secure. Knowledge and wealth are deeply stratified. Security is no longer provided by our new “no growth” or “powering down” economy. Debt is slavery. We make things to get things instead of giving support to get support.— Chuck Burr and Karen Taylor.
   

3. 3.The paved surfaces will crack and plants and trees come up to help humans depave. We need these lands back for food production, wildlife habitat, and flood control. Apart from the deadly car and truck fleet on the roads now killing off the Earth's sweet climate and slaughtering humans and many times more animals—there are other problems caused by asphalted and concrete surfaces: walking on them is hard on our feet, knees and back.  Additionally, when there's ice one slips; that doesn't happen nearly so easily on natural ground. And cars pack the snow down to create icy conditions as well as filthy slush. Depaving is joyous, and includes removing useless lawns.  The Depavers, my old band, was fun and has bequeathed to posterity tunes with lyrics for the task at hand: liberate the Earth!—Jan Lundberg
   

4. 4.If I had an inclination to let our culture die to let another be re-born, I'd simple walk away from the beast. Because most people are disenfranchised our culture goes wrong. There are so many people with absolute power over  everyone else that, by propagating the notion that it's perfectly OK for anyone to justify doing harm to somebody else, we live in semi-assault mode for far too much of our days.  The system has also made it impossible to live without cash. You cannot get food, clothes, or get around without freely flowing currency at hand or the click of  a mouse. Currency dependent sharing systems, like guns, draw more than their share of disasters.
   
   In the U.S. you become enslaved for 40 years of  work capitalizing someone else's dreams just for the chance to own a roof over your head. The odds favor the capitalist at a cost to the rest of us.  In the rest of the world it is worse, - we say 'but you cannot even get a mortgage out there...". But at least outside of the mortgage grid, any capable man can live well, off the radar, and well enough to build and manifest a proud home for their grandkids in but a handful of years.  Without capital, you can't be free of the cash based indemnities system's gray zone of pseudo slavery.  Authority should, by definition, be empowered to do no more than distribute the wealth blood of the land.  Authority bent on accumulation and gaining the right to accumulate more soon shifts astray of it's human base of simple moralities.  As long as obeisance to that pattern is a strategic choice, we'll seldom know gaia.—John Cruickshank
   

5. 5.We will have a chance [to flourish] when we respect the air, the water and the soil that sustains and supports us and all life. T'is very simple: we kill the living environment for whatever reason, greed, comfort, pleasure, riches, stupidity, bigotry, wealth or plain meanness; we kill ourselves—it is that simple. All other reasons don't matter, never did, never will.—Tony Pereira
   

6. 6.We need systems that fit and work for people rather than making people fit and work into a system that exists.  The current system serves no one really; no one “truly” benefits at the end of the day, as everyone is held back from progress and achieving our highest potential.—Vladislav Davidzon
   

7. 7.One reason we got to this sorry state of affairs, and it is a primary one, is that our land tenure system is structured in such a way as to create poverty and huge rich vs. poor gap, requiring workers to work longer and harder making things that are not really necessary for quality of life, or low quality items that are not durable.
   
   So we need to start over the what I call an "earth rights" ethic—which is both the ecological consciousness and the economic justice in land consciousness. Then we harness the power of these principles via public finance policy of "green tax shift" which includes both environmental taxes but actually more important capture of land rent of surface land for the benefit of all. All in all, if properly done, this would provide framework for localizing the economy and building sustainable, ecological towns and villages.—Alanna Hartzok
   

8. 8.Our culture is fundamentally flawed in being based on competition instead of cooperation and community. Arguments:
   a) Competition is a remnant of a world of true scarcity, where survival was secured by the process of eliminating those deficient in one survival qualification or another. Competition assured the survival of the fittest. In a world of developed sufficiency, the emphasis should be on stability, which is almost the antithesis of competition.
   b) Competition in an already established range of sufficiency merely encourages redevelopment, over-development and redundant development, serving to deplete the quality of what already exists in sufficiency, and to corrupt the sensibilities of those subject to its excesses.
   c) Competition alienates people from one another and is entirely disruptive of the humanizing qualities of love, friendship, trust and fellowship.—Irv Thomas
   

9. 9.The attitude of God-given “dominion” over all of creation, allied with “rugged individualism” are our culture's worst memes. These attitudes result in a lack of accountability and a attitude that we have the right to destroy as we please. Rugged individualism, often seen as "everyone for themselves,” is used to divide and conquer. We see it's use by corporations, citing “states rights” finding it much easier and cheaper to corrupt local officials than federal. It is also used to undermine efforts to work for the common good and to privatize publicly-owned commons.
   
   Underlying all of this is a pervasive attitude of “sanctimonious arrogance” or “unquestioning belief,” a human trait that is my personal definition of evil.  It is a cross-cultural attitude underlying the malevolent characteristics of all negative memes. The lack of intellectual humility will always be the most difficult and limiting factor in our attempts to change for the better. When we feel that we have certain knowledge, we drop a millstone in the road to discovery and the achievement of wisdom.—Marc Hulbert
   

10. 10.The number one reason to start afresh: The existing cultural paradigm is focused on the past and the future, ignoring the most substantial aspect of our reality—our presentness. We are all here together, along with our Source (whatever the name), in this moment. We must start, and move, from here.—Jim Prues
    

Its is good to get a number of different points of view. This process is an unveiling for those who are ready. The next step is to begin the journey to consider and then create alternatives to modern culture that will eventually allow us to begin to walk away.

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Visit www.culturequake.org to read the most updated version of this essay and to read the blog as a whole work, visit the Culturequake amazon.com book store, and learn more about the book Culturequake: The Fall of Modern Culture and the Rise of Earth Culture. Visit www.restorationfarm.org to learn what we are doing to grow new stories and cultures. ©2009 Chuck Burr LLC.

Notes:

Daniel Quinn
C-Realm Podcast, Episode 88

Jan Lundberg
Culture Change

John Cruickshank
Sunny John and the Hobbit House

Vladislav Davidzon
Ecospace Conscious Community

Irv Thomas
irvthom1@comcast.net

Richard Heinberg
Peak Everything: Waking Up to the Century of Declines

Marc Hurlbert
Fixing Air