CULTUREQUAKE The Restoration Revolution

Cultural Enlightenment

Mon, 30 Jan 2012 10:55:32 -0800

Levels of expanded consciousness and cultural awareness form concentric rings with enlightened doers at the center out to the TV watching zombie masses on the outside.
Cultural Enlightenment ~ Culturequake
It takes connecting so many dots about the nature of our existence, our past, present and future to make it to the center that very few do. Once you can connect enough dots, can see them in your head and rotate the constellation of links, then visioning your journey to live you truth becomes effortless.
Classic enlightenment involves expansion of consciousness and dissolving the ego to realize our oneness with the universe. It is to step out of temporal and physical reality into nothingness and everythingness. We realize that we are not unique and that tens and hundreds of thousands of generations have lived lifetimes and have experienced every emotion that we ever will.
An additional level of enlightenment is now required, caused by modern culture. This new cultural enlightenment goes a step further through another doorway of unveiling to be able to see our constructed or consensus reality culture for what it is—a trap of our own making. By constructing a realty apart from the natural ecosystem we cut ourselves off from our ability to live with it, we become separated from the source of the divine and feel a sense of lack.
The illusion of free will is essential to the perpetuation of modern culture. People have to believe they are able to control their lives when in reality the suburbs are prisons without bars. Every job is wage slavery because the agricultural revolution locked up the food. If you don’t work, you starve. Fear is the control system which cuts us off at the knees and prevents us from engaging in true self-exploration and expansion of consciousness. Fear is the fuel for modern Taker culture.
Education is designed to break the individual and end creative thinking, “line up by manufacturing date, sit down, be quite and do what what your told.” Education programs us by downloading a control operating or belief system. It prevents people from connecting the dots to enlightenment by masking everything from our true history to the externalities of our actions. Religion lays the ground work for education with obedience to absolute authority. Cultural enlightenment sees through this trap and finds the way out.
Animism and the Fire of Life
Classic enlightenment appreciates for how thin the ice of consciousness that we skate on is. One recognizes how fragile, fleeting, and precious the fire of life is. We call this appreciation that our ancestors had before the agricultural revolution “animism.” All living beings experience reality to some level. Even plants “feel” sunlight and respond so it. One of the greatest tragedies of our Taker culture is it’s lack of empathy for all of our “relations,” and how it turns other species into resources to be consumed.
For me, my god has a small “g”. It can be killed with a bulldozer. It is the fire of life in the meadow. I know that the grass, deer, rabbit, bird, and soil are all one only separated by time. Birth, growth, death, regeneration—one. You can learn more about how the world works at a weekend gardening class on compost than from four years of seminary school.
I know how I am connected all the way back to the creation of the universe. The calcium in my bones, the iron in my blood and the carbon in my body all came from stars that lived and died before our sun was even born. I know I am made of star dust.
The Unveiling
The unveiling is like taking the red pill in The Matrix, seeing our constructed reality and its affect upon us and nature. You see new memes such as global warming, debt crisis and the end of growth are added to earlier anti-cultural memes such as pollution and overpopulation. Some are even expanding from peak oil to peak everything.
The unveiling is more than recognizing the many problems of our culture, it also connecting the dots back to how it began, why it succeeds and forward to the solution for the individual and wider community. For instance, we learn that our culture succeeds because it is easy; all you have to do to perpetuate it is consume.
Finding Your Own Key to the Door
Cultural enlightenment is more than becoming a history buff and understanding what memes makes us us. The trick is to understand the significance of this knowledge and to find a solution to it for you and your family.
Leaving the matrix or our consensus culture is a journey of a lifetime; it will happen in stages. Did Fukuoka go as far as he wanted? Those in indigenous culture are already on the outside; let’s hope they can stay there. We within the Taker culture have to find the doorway out. For me the next couple steps will be from traditional high energy organic farming, to low energy permaculture, to self built home to community tribe. From learning, to doing, to writing, to teaching.
But, once you find your way back to the original or the next story, every cell in your body will know it is right through greater resonance.
The Will ~ Doers
There are people who make things happen, people who watch things happen and people who ask what happened.
What good is knowledge if you do not live it? There comes a point for those who are ready to turn their journey into a life of action and example. It will take everyone’s contributions to expand the ring of consciousness: permaculturists, teachers, activists, depavers, reporters, bloggers, healers, on and on, everyone with their gift.
This tool of the Internet may be the long lever that has been missing. We are at the forefront of a complete media and cultural consciousness replacement. Fringe ideas like the Culturequake Blog are distributed globally free, are uncontrolled and non-underwritten. For instance, this blog has been read in 72 countries in the year of this writing.
Cultural Singularity
When we reach the tipping point where our culture dissolves away into may new stories, a cultural singularity will have been reached. It may take another 10,000 years to reach this point. It won’t happen soon because we are only beginning to realize that we have to find ways out of our Taker culture prison, let alone having to invent the alternative lifestyles needed to walk away.
You cannot knock the system and encourage someone to leave modern culture unless you have a working alternative.
What many people feel is about to happen is actually a mass unveiling. Today, our first world society is broken into thirds or rings. One third thinks things will continue to get better, growth is the answer, a technological singularity will save us. The second third can feel it in their bones that something is wrong but they cannot put their finger on it. The last third are a mix of everything from those starting to realize that growth is over, believing that going green will save us, doomers and even conspiracy theorists. Many are starting the journey to look first for answers and then for solutions.
Most doomers do agree that humanity will survive anything, adaptability is our skill. Conspiracy theorists have to realize that as long as our culture has a uniform set of invectives, any group of people who have never even met will appear to coordinate their efforts.
Those ahead of the curve are not gurus, they are just doers and teachers. We are the ones who have taken the risk to live our truth. We are the ones inventing in the alternatives. Most of our ideas will fail but eventually some will work and will open the doors wider for the others to follow.
Dedication
This essay is dedicated to the Culturequake community, our loyal readers, the new readers this month and to my mentor the Hobbit—Thank you.
Essays are less frequent during the farming season. We are working about six or seven days a week in the summer. People are right when they say it takes three years to get an organic farm going. It takes three to five years for fruit trees to yield and five to seven years for nuts. Thanks too everyone involved the project from teachers to cooks.
Also, the point of the Culturequake Blog is a journey of self-discovery living my truth. For the reader it should not be about the “latest essay.” It should be about connecting the dots, the body of work as a whole and writing your own next chapter.
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Chuck Burr founder of the Southern Oregon Permaculture Institute and Restoration Seeds in Ashland, Oregon. info@culturequake.org. ©2012 Chuck Burr LLC, revised
Notes:
The Matrix The Red Pill
Aeolus Kephas and Neil “the Cleaver” Kramer Podcast Stormy Weather 22 and 22.5: The Reader & the Red
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Civilization Is War

Tue, 24 Jan 2012 12:36:04 -0800

Most live in the blissful ignorance that their culture was founded on and is maintained by war. This story is difficult for me because it is so blunt, but the truth hurts.
Civilization Is War
Europeans did not “colonize” the America’s, they wrestled a garden of eden away from the native people who had developed and tended it for millennia. The scale of the genocide and theft of land from Native American’s by Europeans and others is staggering. We, the children of the genociders zoom around this content as though it is has always belonged to us—what we and our forefather's did to the other species and first peoples is appalling.
Civilization was founded through the first war in history at the Agricultural Revolution 10,000 years ago. This war has not ended since. One group of people in the fertile crescent decided there was only right way to live: civilization—population growth fueled by totalitarian agriculture. It is now almost universally accepted that civilization must continue at all costs.
The world now wastes over $1 trillion on military spending each year. When you add in everything the US spends on present defense, debt on past defense spending, off-budget covert operations, death benefits, injured veteran’s benefits, national guard employment opportunity costs, we spend almost half the total federal budget on the military.
Over 175 million people lost their lives to war in the last century alone, several times that many were injured—mostly civilians.
When you look at anything from our modern culture think of war: car, computer, light bulb, money, water, food, population, government, media. Resources were taken from someone either by force, coercion or programmed education. If a people did not want to give up their resources, they have been pushed aside and replaced by someone who would.
War Did Not Exist Before Civilization
Some assert that pre-Agricultural Revolution or Paleolithic man waged war. However, the archeological evidence does not support this. The work of Marija Gimbutas revealed that Old Europe towns and villages had no military implement, there is a difference between hunting and warring implements. Towns and villages were sited for their aesthetics and access to crops not defensibility. Artwork frequently depicted the goddess as a universal religion but never war.
There is also some confusion as to time periods, much of the warfare referred to as our prehistory is actually post-agricultural revolution within the last 10,000 years. Archeological references to war only start appearing as waring tribes such as the Kurgans invaded from the east.
There is also confusion between war and humanity’s naturally evolved Erratic Retaliator strategy that Leaver peoples employed. This strategy allowed you to give it back to your neighbors as good as they gave it to you. If you had not heard from them in a while, you could surprise them so they knew you have not gotten soft. Later you have a powwow to make up and trade. After all, it’s not good to inbreed within your own tribe too much, so maintaining relations with your neighbors was important for more than trade. Yes, some were injured and even died, but this was far short of war.
Our modern cultural memes make war an inevitability. Our memes say, “civilization is unsurpassable and must continue at all costs including war” and “there is only one right way to live.” Another says, “the world belongs to man, dominion,” on and on. Fear through locking up the food, privatization, hierarchy and violence are the fuel for our culture.
The Matrix
The real matrix is the web of federal, state, county (province) and municipality government that enforces the concentration of wealth control system. This government model is repeated where you go in the world today. Other arms of the control system include religion and education. Religion first down loads into new people the thought or meme of obedience to absolute authority. Next the education system downloads into people the operational control system of reading, writing and arithmetic. Next, fear is put in place by brutal police enforcement of arbitrary laws and the threat of starvation by locking up the food unless you agree to wage slavery. All self reliance skills are denied by the education system and through privatizing of the land.
The only way to get out is to live on land without buildings that qualify as dwellings and to learn native cultivation or permaculture practices. The best you can do is to own or access undeveloped land without the high property taxes caused by development or dwellings. It is the high property taxes caused by development that forces a family into wage slavery.
Concentration of Wealth Requires War
We are taught since first grade that competition is good, greed is good. Competition most efficiently allocates resources and enables the best and brightest to rise to the top. Without competition we would not have a man on the moon or this computer. You know, I can live without this computer. I would probably be better off and the time will come for it to go. At some point I will have written enough and will just be a permaculture farmer teacher.
Darwin’s theory of natural selection and survival of the fittest has contributed to a misunderstanding of how the world really works. Ecosystems survive through mutually beneficial cooperation not competition. If nature was based solely on competition, there would only be one survivor at the top of each food chain niche instead of the 30 million species alive today.
It is physically impossible to have concentration of resources, material or financial, without war. Competition implies by definition that there will always be a winner and loser, someone at the top and many at the bottom. For the U.S. to consume more in total and per capita than any other national in the world, we must have the largest military in the world. McDonald’s goes where McDonald-Douglas goes, now Boeing.
Put our lifestyle in the context of current local sunlight. If you cannot make it from local sunlight, you have to exploit and concentrate or take from somewhere else. If you cannot make a modern stick-frame home and everything that goes in it just from local sunlight, you need to get it’s components and the energy that it takes to build and maintain it from someplace else. It is simple laws of physics.
Globalization is War
War also comes in the form of colonization, occupation and corporations. For instance, building a railroad to send the Chinese people in and TIbetan natural resources out or as U.S. has recently done in Iraq. Tibetans will soon be a minority in their own country.
Globalization is now a common form of low-level warfare. When the IMF and World Bank make loans, it forces the small third world countries to open their markets and sell their natural resources in order to pay the loans. Local farmers who had saved seeds for centuries are forced to go deeply into debt and buy seed and other inputs from Monsanto. Diversity in the food varieties we eat has disappeared. Free trade agreements enable large producers to leverage their size to put local farmers, manufacturers and merchants, out of business.
Civilization has also waged a 10,000 year war on nature. In short, our one species is responsible for the single largest mass extinction since the dinosaurs 65 million years ago.
Effects of War are Externalized and Invisible
It is a common belief of those in the first world that we do not live in a state of war. Most would say, “my child does not resort to fisticuffs on the soccer field, we have some crime yes and the war in Iraq is winding down.” There is however a low-level pervasive conflict being waged with everything from banks to bombs and religion to rifles. The financial crisis today is a war by the banks against the rest of the world to maintain their control system for profit.
Those in power have found that they can make more money short of large-scale war—with corporations. A regional conflict here and there to keep people in line is acceptable, “but we are not going let things get out of hand like we did the last couple times.” Banks profit by loaning money to both sides.
The externalities of never-ending grinding competition are hidden. No one sees the destruction they cause by pushing their cart down the isle or by shopping online: the exploitation, civil war, resource extraction, habitat destruction, watershed pollution are invisible to the consumer.
It would be amazing to see a time-lapse simulation of what happens around the world over the lifetime of just one first world consumer. To see the trees fall, animals raised and slaughtered, top soil lost and marine life die. Then imagine accelerating the simulation by adding more and more people. People need to connect the dots further out over both time and geography.
What is the Solution?
Return to the truth that humanity belongs to the earth and abandon the destructive dominion culture that the world belongs to man. It is that simple.
Sometime I wish that everyone who believes that war is a necessary evil could be moved to some place to duke it out. Or, that I could take my family some place peaceful based on original Leaver culture where cooperation and consensus have replaced competition. But there is no place left to go. We need new reservations for people who walk away from modern culture.
I am just as guilty as everyone else in our Taker culture. I have now realized what I have been doing and am starting my long journey to change my lifestyle. One problem is that modern culture gives us no real alternatives. We have to make the alternatives. Shopping at a natural food store or grocery store has the same affect. Get over going green. We have to become the change we want to see.
The future lies with new cultures. If modern culture was going to end poverty, hunger, war and environmental destruction, it would have done so by now. As long as it grows, the problem grows. Things seemed fine when there were fewer of us, but now we have grown to the edge of the planetary cage. From now on, competition and war will intensify exponentially as resources dwindle and population grows.
The Bottom line is that if we want the luxuries we have, we are going to have to live with war and exploitation of others. Start talking to your friends from this perspective. Start asking yourself, “is my lifestyle is worth it?”
Teach Your Children Well
Our generation is basically stuck where and how we are. Since the last couple world wars, we blew the cheap energy and resources on the suburbs and expanding our population. But, we still have the opportunity to change the course for our children if we change their education and give them practical skills. We can go green and buy a little more time and space for more people, but it is a wash in the end. We have to level with our kids and tell them the truth that they have to not make the same mistakes we did and learn how to walk away. Its the old do as I say not as I do parent’s dilemma.
Maybe we have to renounce our religion of materialism and embrace each other. We may have to completely flip our world view that instead of the world belonging to us, maybe we belong to the world. Give support to get support instead of making things to get things.
Maybe this is what the future looks like, hobbit houses. This treehouse was built on our farm by Dan Shinerock (top center) from the It’s a Burl Gallery in Kerby, OR. Dan walked up to the tree for the first time, engineered the treehouse, drew a sketch of it, did a materials takeoff, and calculated the cost all in an hour and a half. He built the treehouse in four days including decks and stairs you do not see here. Compare that to building a modern home or even just remodeling one.
I am not suggesting that everyone start living in a treehouse, but I would suggest every first world person consider giving away most of their “stuff” so what is left would fit in a treehouse. Just food for thought.
Empower the positive aspects of your beliefs, “Peace Now!” instead of “No War!”
My point is that the destructive behavior of our culture, whether high level warfare or low level environmental destruction, happens globally and is inherent within our culture. War and civilization are inseparable. An individual cannot end war overnight but we start the discussion.
Here is a movie we made at the 2003 Peace March in Washington, D.C. to to prevent the Iraq War. There was nothing like being surrounded by hundreds of thousands of people who share your feelings. We are everywhere!

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Chuck Burr is Author of Culturequake: The Restoration Revolution, director of the Southern Oregon Permaculture Institute at Restoration Seeds in Ashland, Oregon. info@culturequake.org. ©2009 Chuck Burr LLC, revised
Notes:
Fritjof Capra Landscapes of Learning: Experiencing ecological relationships and community is the key to ecoliteracy, Resurgence, Sept/Oct 2004, p 8
Murray Bookchin The Ecology of Freedom: The Emergence and Dissolution of Hierarchy, p. 91
War Resisters League Where Your Income Tax Money Really Goes
Norman D. Livergood America, Awake!, p. 108
Peter Starck World Military Spending Topped $1 Trillion in 2004
Marija Gimbutas The Civilization of the Goddess: The World of Old Europe
Free Tibet The Gormo-Lhasa railway
Jim Merkel Radical Simplicity: small footprints on a finite Earth, p. 9
John Cavanagh and Jerry Mander Alternatives to Economic Globalization: A Better World Is Possible
Dan Shinerock It’s A Burl Gallery
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Osama Bin Lowrider: It’s All the Same Culture

Mon, 16 Jan 2012 14:01:43 -0800

Our political discussions and media coverage are far too shallow to be useful. We must go deeper and further back to understand the world today and where we want to go.
What is Culture
Most people misunderstand what culture is. Many believe it is soda pop, pop stars, blue jeans, language and TV. Others think it is capitalism, communism or liberalism. Some see culture as Western or Eastern.
Look at the motorcycle picture above, what culture is it. The motorcycles will fool you. All of the people above called Taliban even belong to the same culture as does a soccer mom in a midwest, which one? Keep guessing.
Our Culture
The answer is, we are all as Daniel Quinn says, Takers. We all belong to the same culture, civilization, teetotaler or Taliban, one culture. The Duncan Donuts cop or the Dali Lama, one culture.
Our Taker culture began 10,000 years ago with the Agricultural Revolution when we locked up the food, privatized the land, began the population–food race, invented war, stratified knowledge and ended the formerly one universal religion disparaging called animism.
A culture is made up of many things but locking up the food and land is far more important than whether one eats tabouli or tater tots. It was forgotten in just a few generation that there used to be probably 10,000 unique Leaver cultures before our now universal Taker culture, the Great Forgetting. There were more than 50 unique tribes in California alone before the Europeans colonized.
Some suggest that modern exuberance or scientism has replaced Christianity as the modern religion or culture. The believe is that here and now and a better life for each generation from technology has replaced Christianity's faith in an unseen unknown afterlife and will culminate in a technological singularity that will save humanity. Moses has an iPad now.
They are right to identify exuberance, but today’s exuberance is the same that caused a tribe of agriculturalists between the Euphrates and Tigris rivers to start overtaking their Leaver neighbors in an unending conquest that is now largely complete. The age of Enlightenment, the Renaissance, and Manifest Destiny are all examples of the same exuberance. The ultimate hubris was inventing one god in a human form. He or She may have genital but they seldom use the. Today, all but one or two million Leavers, versus of 6.8 billion Takers, are left alive or are not yet assimilated.
It’s Pointless To Discuss Anything Else
Peak oil and financial collapse seem important because they immediately affect us and are within our lifetime scale. But, they are just noise along the way of our 10,000 year Taker cultural odyssey. Nothing will change for our children until modern culture or civilization ends. It will be one rise and fall, migration and conquest, resource war after resource war on and on until our culture is replaced with a resilient diversity of many new cultures again in harmony with our ecosystems. Until then we are just building and operating the Taker prison for ourselves and our children. Only when our culture ends will the earth be allowed to begin restoring herself.
A change of leadership within the same culture is a waste of time, don’t vote, walk away. Elections are egomaniacs competing to be in the comic strip of our media, nothing more.
The Most Powerful Thing in The World, A Meme
Here comes the important part of the essay: discussing anything else today except how to find your tribal community and walk away from our culture is pointless. Unless you dig debt and wage slavery read on. This has to do with the difference between programs vs. vision. When Columbus invaded Haiti, he brought with him the greatest virus of all, not smallpox, but a new cultural story.
The story of Leaver cultures before the agricultural revolution was, Humanity belongs to the earth. The Taker cultural story is, The world belongs to man.* This has been the crux of the creation and perpetuation of civilization for the last 10,000 years.
We have had technology since the digging stick. Technology has nothing to do with culture. It is how you value humanity in relation to the earth and our relations. It is what you do with the technology that matters. Native Americans tended the wild and created a garden of eden with the digging stick; the Europeans wrestled it away from them with the gun and a larger population from their totalitarian agriculture.
A program is like a stick in the river of our culture. Programs run contrary to the cultural story. Recycling is a program to combat our consumer economy. Smart grids are a program to combat our excessive use of cheap fossil fuel energy. Green building is a program to combat urban sprawl. Food aid is a program to continue the population–food race. Organic farming is a program to combat industrial agriculture.
Programs are fruitless efforts to combat the symptoms caused by cultural story that the world belongs to man. Until the story or vision is reversed, all programs are a waste of time. If new cultures do not replace our Taker culture, there will be no Great Turning or awakening. If you truly want peace, social justice and Ecotopia, you have to starting living under a new story or the remembered story that humanity belongs to the earth.
The Problem is Not Humanity
Humanity has lived in harmony with the earth, had a stable population following natural laws for three or four million years. A give it to them as good as you get it, erratic retaliator strategy existed instead of war. Tribalism and animism were the universal human social structures and spirituality.
You Cannot Invent a New Social Organizational System
Tribalism is the only evolutionarily proven human organizational system. Tribalism is to humans what flocks are to birds, herds are to deer, pods are to whales, schools are to fish and hives are to bees. The problem began 10,000 years ago when civilization or our culture was invented.
Here is the rub. You just can’t invent a new social social. We have been trying to perfect a new organizational system called civilization for 10,000 years. But civilization continues to fail more each year for more people and more species. If civilization was going to create world peace and plenty for all it would have done so already. It never can because a story based on one species hoarding everything will never work. We even treat fellow humans as poorly as we do all other species we exploit.
The Great Remembering
The only solution worth discussion is developing new cultures that live by the original story that humanity belongs to the earth. Going green is not enough. Driving a hybrid and having a backyard vegetable garden isn’t going to get you there. It’s deeper than that. I am beginning to think we are going to have to start depaving, give up our iPods and start making music for ourselves. I am not sure how far this is going to have to go. But I do know that it has to go back to a level of population and consumption that allows the earth to begin self-healing restoration.
We will have to remember our relationship with the cultivars, how to live on currant local sunlight, how to find security by giving support to get support instead of making things to get things, and we might even have to remember animism. We have a long way to go. I am starting the journey for myself and my children.
Walking Away
Hierarchies have strong defenses to attacks from below. However, they have no defense from abandonment. The point is we have to create new cultural stories that borrow from what we can from the present and work with what is evolutionarily proven from the past. This is the only way we will make a difference.
We have to become the change we want to see, find like-minded friends and start our own tribal community, overlap your livelihoods. We have to develop a high enough level of group self-reliance that allows us to begin to un-entangle ourselves from civilization in stages.
We need doers, teachers, speakers, bloggers and podcasters to inspire millions to build the alternatives we need. Let’s walk towards something better, not away from something bad. Its time to start living our truth.
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Chuck Burr is Author of Culturequake: The Restoration Revolution, director of the Southern Oregon Permaculture Institute at Restoration Seeds in Ashland, Oregon. info@culturequake.org. ©2009 Chuck Burr LLC, revised
Notes:
*The first use of the Taker and Leaver stories that I know of maybe Daniel Quinn’s use in his 1992 Ishmael book series that states the Leaver story as, “Man belongs to the world” and the Taker story as, “The world was made for man.” Another widely known version was an adaptation by Texas professor Ted Perry as part of a 1994 film script of Chief Seattle’s 1854 speech at a tribal gathering in response to U.S. government’s decision to buy or take his people’s land. The makers of the film took literary license, changing the speech and making it into a letter to President Franklin Pierce, which has been frequently reprinted. No such letter was actually written by or for Chief Seattle. The National Archives has a fractionating history of Chief Seattle’s speech. See the four following references. 
Daniel Quinn Ishmael, p. 239
Nancy Zussy Chief Seattle Speech: Washington State Library, Version 3
Jerry L. Clark Thus Spoke Chief Seattle: The Story of An Undocumented Speech
Wes Felty Chief Seattle's reply to a Government offer to purchase the remaining Salish lands
Joanna Macy The shift to a life-sustaining civilization, The Great Turning
Ernest Callenbach Ecotopia
Marija Gimbutas The Civilization of the Goddess: The World of Old Europe
Dan Piraro Bizarro
depave.org About Depave
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Going Green is Not Enough

Mon, 9 Jan 2012 15:18:07 -0800

Reducing, reusing and recycling are not going to save us as long as our cultural story is the world belongs to man. Our modern cultural story of dominion and consumption will always overwhelm our green efforts.
No Matter Your Cause, It Is A Lost Cause If...
Recycling is like a stick in the river of our cultural story of agriculture, procreation and consumption. Going green is just being washed away by our numbers. Every person in the United States produces more than twice his or her weight in waste every day. In other words a world of 6.8 billion benevolent vegans or walking Buddhas won’t be enough to save the world. Granted, vegetarians and vegans consume far less water and agricultural land per capita than meat-eaters but that misses the point. There are just too many of us, consuming far to much.
A population approaching 7 billion has to be and will be reduced to pre-1900 levels of 1 billion possibly during this or the next century either with one child families or nature will do it for us. There just won’t be the fossil fuels around to support today’s population. A tractor cannot be made or run a tractor on solar power, let alone make all of today’s industrial agricultural inputs. A solar collector cannot be made with a solar collector, the energy return on investment (ROI) is negative. You can try to grow ethanol but it also has has a negative energy ROI. Biodiesel works, but there won’t be enough french fry grease to go around.
Petrocollapse
The countdown to the end of the oil age has begun 18, 11, 3, 3, zero. These are the number of 500 million barrel mega oil fields discovered each year since 2005. Several new large oil ﬁelds came online in 2005. These are the last of the 500 million barrel mega oil ﬁelds, since none has been discovered in the past few years despite the rise in oil prices. Eighteen new mega projects started producing in 2005, followed by 11 more in 2006. However, 2007 saw the opening of only three new projects, followed by three more in 2008. These dwindling discoveries will not keep up with increased demand. The end of the natural gas, coal, and nuclear ages will not be far behind. I hope you have taken your Permaculture Design Certificate (PDC) course.
Our Waste
Fortunately without fossil fuels, our children won’t have the cheap energy to make all of the junk we made for ourselves. WEEE Man, top photo, was created for the Festival of Nature 2006 in Bristol, U.K. This 21-foot-tall, three-ton sculpture is made of 198 household devices, including five refrigerators, 35 cell phones and 23 computer mice, representing the lifetime e-waste of the average European. In the U.S. a ton of industrial solid waste is created each week for every man, woman and child.
To top it off, about 95 percent of automobile engine and electric energy production is wasted. In an ecosystem waste equals food but in industrial society waste just equals waste. Everything we make ends up in the landfill vegan or meat-eater. And there is almost nothing to little we can do about it. We run long distance alternating current (AC) power that drops off, to an installed base of enormously inefficient electric devices from toasters to vibrators. You can’t change the laws of physics.
A Technological Singularity Save Us, Right
Some believe a technological singularity to save us. For instance, Jacque Fresco’s Venus Project will save the day. “The Venus Project presents a bold, new direction for humanity that entails nothing less than the total redesign of our culture.” According to Jacque, it will solve, “unemployment, violent crime, replacement of humans by technology, overpopulation and a decline in the Earth's ecosystems.”
Where is all of this cheap energy going to come from? Nature has been testing and perfecting solar energy production for three billion years and the most efficient solution she has found is photosynthesis. The neat thing about nature’s solution is that it makes oxygen, sequesters carbon, creates carbohydrates and sugars, and builds topsoil. Show me a souped-up condominium project that can do that. The future is going to look more like an updated Renaissance Festival than Star Trek. Some wealthy folks will still concentrate resources in their gated communities for a while but everything wears out and eventually hits the land fill, even the last iPod.
We Need Real Community and Doers
People talk to me about how they want community but what they imagine as community is glorified social networking. OK, having a lot of friends is fine. But as Bill Mollison says, “look for skills, not money.” What I am trying to get at is that today we need doers not talkers. We need people who start community supported agriculture coops (CSAs), plant urban food forests, educate, and motivate others. In other words, put their time where their mouth is.
We also need bold people. When your community starts to talk about food security, somebody needs to standup and say, “Hey, we will never have food security until we give land to gardeners, reverse sprawl and reduce our population.” Unless you live in the California Central Valley or in Oregon’s Willamette Valley, you can’t even feed the people you have now with local agricultural.
We are so far in overshoot of the planet’s carrying capacity we can’t even see back to former sustainable levels 10,000 years ago before the agricultural revolution. Sustainability means being able to live in an area over the long-term without degrading it’s resilience, topsoil and biodiversity. And the only way to do that is to get back to population and consumption levels that don’t require importation of massive quantities of energy, raw materials and food. You know you are back within carrying capacity when nature can begin to heal herself.
So being vegan recycler is not going to save the world. Stroll down the isles of your local natural food store and you will find just as much packaging as in a Piggly Wiggly. I honestly don’t think we are going to get it until nature makes her wake-up call, probably in the next 10-20 years or sooner. This will start to happen when people can no longer find security even if you follow all the rules, but still get laid off and lose your house. It is time to tell our children the truth that, “we screwed up, wasted a lot and that I will teach you every practical thing I can for your self-reliance and to develop a new story to live by.”
I have been asked what do you do if you do not have a lot of money. First, you are already much greener than a wealthy person buying a new hybrid car and building a new natural home. There are many new out of the economic box solutions being developed such as Hyperlocavore, Landshare and the Community Weaving networks to look into. Use your friends and the internet to start networking into a new lifestyle and better way of making a living. Develop your right livelihood or appropriate technology skills. Read Rob Roy’s book, Mortgage Free!.
A Self-Reliant Education for Our Children
This should be a community wide effort, even though most of the community does not know it yet. Schools must do their part. Instead of teaching our kids about dead presidents, they should teach children how to feed themselves and build their own home, to be doers and think outside the box. These are some bold steps, but they are the beginning.
Children need to learn how to do things differently than their parents did. They will need new cultural stories to replace those we lived by. For instance, encourage them find new ways doing what they love to build a community self-reliance to an extent that they can start to un-entangle themselves from modern culture. Teach your children to live with a sense of joy and look for what they can give instead of take, to give support to get support instead of make things to get things.
Have a family friendly potluck and see who is interested and starting a neighborhood community garden or yard share. It is time to experiment and learn while things are relatively easy. For now, your garden can fail and you can still go to the groovy natural food store.
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Chuck Burr is Author of Culturequake: The Restoration Revolution, director of the Southern Oregon Permaculture Institute at Restoration Seeds in Ashland, Oregon. info@culturequake.org. ©2009 Chuck Burr LLC, revised
Notes:
Chuck Burr Going Green is Not Enough
Chuck Burr Population CUltural Logjam
Al Gore Earth in the Balance, p. 146, 174
Dale Allen Pfeiffer Current Situation & 2005 Projections
Khebab Analysis of Decline Rates
Fritjob Capra The Hidden Connections: Integrating The Biological, Cognitive, And Social Dimensions Of Life Into A Science Of Sustainability, p 252
Jacque Fresco The Venus Project
Peter Salonius Agriculture: Unsustainable Resource Depletion Began 10,000 Years Ago
Liz McLellan Hyperlocavore.ning.com
Cheryl Honey communityweaving.org
Channel 4 Landshare
Rob Roy Mortgage Free!
Chuck Burr A Better Way of Making a Living
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Population: Cultural Logjam

Mon, 2 Jan 2012 09:15:35 -0800

It is a cultural challenge for us to teach the next generation not to make the same infinite growth mistake we did. Maybe the solution starts with telling our children the truth.
Polarized Debate
The population debate is polarized between population is the root cause of our problems from global warming to environmental destruction vs. human numbers pose no problem at all. Overpopulation denial stems from the fear that human rights would be trampled by top-own population control and that it would distract us from more pressing social justice and economic issues.
This polarization is keeping either side from developing an appreciation for the other’s point of view. We may have to get past our malthusian vs. human rights logjam to develop a working holistic solution.
This is a question of values. Do you value other species or humanity most? If you are a humanist, do you value your right to procreate or the quality of life of your children and the many the most?
Our Most Pressing Problem
Overpopulation is indeed a problem felt most immediately by the majority in the third world. I often wonder how many first world people do not see that we have a population problem when stuck in traffic jam or in crowds.
No matter what your cause, it is a lost cause unless we reverse overpopulation. We can’t resolve many of our most pressing long-term problems until we reduce human population. Overpopulation is the engine behind global warming, pollution, peak oil, social injustice and poverty, crime, resource wars, biodiversity crash, and deforestation just to name a few. We live in a closed ecosystem, a ball of dirt spinning in space and all of these issues are related to how many people there are trying to consume a limited amount of resources and generate waste.
Yes, the financial crisis seems a more immediate problem. However, it still comes back to numbers. If we did not have the population we do today and had a much smaller steady-state economy, there would be plenty of resources to go around. We all could live like kings and drive Cadillacs with wings.
Overshoot
Carrying capacity is the population level a given area can sustain indefinitely. If a population exceeds this level it will grow until it eventually crashes to a level well below the original carrying capacity. The crash level is below the original level because the overshoot significantly reduced environmental resources and resilience via an ecological debt. We have overshot the carrying capacity of our planet.
Imagine how many more people the Americas were capable of supporting in 1492 than today. Overshoot has eroded carrying capacity through biodiversity crash, deforestation, top soil loss, pollution and global warming, all caused by over population. I have devoted several related chapters to this subject in my most recent book Culturequake: The Restoration Revolution.
Culture of Denial
Part of me thinks, that people who “get it” should start our own reservations to become the seeds for new cultures that free nature from her bondage through reducing our numbers and consumption.
Starhawk’s The Fifth Sacred Thing poses the “then what” question. In a post-apocalyptic world northern California has chosen to live within it’s means while southern California plans to invade to take the north’s resources. It is a great book.
We also live in a culture of historical denial. Our Taker culture has spread from the fertile crescent to overtake all other native Leaver peoples. In the U.S. we teach our children about manifest destiny, pilgrims, settlers instead of teaching the truth of colonization and genocide of Native American people—a crime on the scale of the Jewish holocaust. Where are the genocide memorials in the U.S. for Native American’s? Native American people have a lot to teach us that we need to relearn now plus we stole the entire continent from them.
We are not going to see population reduced to sustainable levels by modern Taker culture. Current human behavior is controlled by the nature of our growth culture. If there is a future to humanity at sustainable numbers that enables restoration of the earth’s ecosystem, it will be from new cultures not ours.
Ending the Debate and Environmental Generational Amnesia
If we do not reduce our population, nature will do it for us. “Nature always bats last,” the saying goes. We can either remember the successful self-sustaining cultures of the first people’s or let nature give us an Easter Island wake-up call.
This is a cultural or educational challenge for us to somehow teach the next generation not to make the same growth mistake we made. Maybe the solution starts with telling our children the truth.
Environmental generational amnesia is why most people do not appreciate the impact of overpopulation. We only remember the population and the environment of our lifetimes. We don’t know the world as our great grandparents did. Since we have not experienced the past, we don’t complain about the way things are now. As far as we are concerned things have always been this way.
Talk About Overpopulation
Here are a few creative ideas to open up your mind and the discussion. Start talking about overpopulation. See if you can find a positive way to encourage smaller families, recommend permanent forms of birth control to friends and family once they have their first child and even consider politely disapproving of larger families. I don’t know about the last one but it is something to think about.
It is difficult to talk about overpopulation because mother culture has been whispering in our ear since the day we were born, “man has dominion over the earth, be fruitful and multiply.” We need to reverse the perception and discussion from pro-growth to pro-less waste. Let’s alter the discussion to we have been procreating like rabbits and consuming like pigs.
Economic Growth
Our culture also encourages economic growth primarily to pay off debt. The financial crisis today is partly caused and compounded by the end of growth caused by passing the peak of fossil fuel era. We are becoming insolvent because to can no longer grow our economy. Growth is actually the last thing we need; our needs cannot be met through growth and destroying the planet. We need to keep our natural resource and ecosystem base intact to help our children through future changes.
Council of All Beings
If all other species were equally represented at every stage of decision making, we would live in a far more resilient and bountiful world of great cultural and biologic diversity. The concept coined by Joanna Macy in 1985 is a communal ritual in which participants speak on behalf of another life-form. It aims to heighten awareness of our interdependence in the living body of Earth and to strengthen our commitment to defend it. The ritual serves to help us acknowledge and give voice to the suffering of our world.
Native Americans routinely thanked, prayed and offered gratitude to the plants and animals before they harvest. They tended the wild for the betterment of the species that cared for them.
Going Green is Not Enough
Simply put, reducing consumption to support seven billion, whether by intention or by petrocollapse, is still overpopulation. As I said in my interview on New Dimensions Media, Going Green is Not Enough and related post. Every increase in automobile milage is squandered by an increase in population.
Recycling and installing compact florescent light bulbs just makes more room for a larger population and ultimately bigger problems. We are probably better off getting the fossil fuel era over sooner than later, do for a drive today!
Take Responsibility For Your Existence
If families want to have six kids, pay for public school themselves after the first child. End the child tax credit—in fact reverse it. I am not saying that you can’t have as many kids as you like, go ahead, just take responsibility for your existence. More kids means more schools, infrastructure, healthcare, public services, unemployment, resource wars, etc. Start this with new children born 12 months from now. If you want to play, you have to pay.
End The Food Race
Since the Agricultural Revolution, our culture has been running a food race: have more people, grow more food, have more people and so on. It is a never ending race that has gotten us to where we are today.
Maybe its time to start reducing food production. When famine occurs maybe send birth control instead of food. Educate women and allow them to control their lives before famine occurs in the first place.
Limit the importation of food from outside your bioregion or watershed. Once we have to live within the carrying capacity of our region, we eventually limit our population.
Emigration
A note about emigration, especially since I live by Emigrant Lake on the original trail the 49ers used to colonize Oregon from California.
This will sound contrary to all popular thinking, but free emigration is another major enabling element in over population. Native culture were geographically limited to their tribal territory. You did not walk to the neighboring tribe and join up, they might kill you or at a minimum run out off their land. The point is that being forced to live within your geographic means forces you to keep your numbers and consumption in check.
Since the Agricultural Revolution, as long as one neighbor could overwhelm another, usually with a larger population from totalitarian agriculture, they would just move in and take the neighbors resources.
Sprawl and Food Security
Communities should consider ending or heavily taxing building on undeveloped lands and encourage infill into pedestrian communities.
What good is having a public discussion about “food security” while at the same time continuing overshoot of the carrying capacity of the same region? In other words, if you cannot feed the people you have, why build more housing and infrastructure for more people?
Petrocollapse
I left the most sobering numbers for last. Before we started using oil around 1850 there were only 1 billion people. Today with the easy-to-recover oil mostly gone there are 6.8 billion. In the next few years petrocollapse is going to to take away our ability to support 5.8 billion or 85 percent of today’s population. Call us Homo fossil-foolish.
The good news is that the problem is not humanity, it is our Taker culture. Humans have lived on the planet for three or four million years in balance with the riot of life. The problem is our Agricultural Revolution Taker culture. The future will come from new earth cultures being born today.
Our duty is to be honest with our children and give them the ability to take control of their future. We have to tell them the truth that our parents did not tell us, that our numbers are not only a threat every other species but also to their children’s future.
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Chuck Burr is Author of Culturequake: The Restoration Revolution, director of the Southern Oregon Permaculture Institute at Restoration Seeds in Ashland, Oregon. info@culturequake.org. ©2009 Chuck Burr LLC, revised
Notes:
Joanna Macy The shift to a life-sustaining civilization, The Great Turning
Wikipedia Food Race
Peter H., Jr. Kahn The Human Relationship with Nature: Development and Culture
Starhwak The Fifth Sacred Thing
Joanna Macy Welcome to all beings
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