Wealth is a system of concentration

Mon, 12 Oct 2009 21:56:03 -0700

Wealth is not what we are taught. Wealth is a verb, not a noun. Wealth is not stuff; it is a fiercely protected system of concentration. It is the act of the hoarding, and is a pillar of our culture.
The Agricultural Revolution, The “Dominion Revolution”
This system was invented by one tribe in the fertile crescent 10,000 years ago during an event called the Agricultural Revolution.
This historical event has been grossly misnamed. It should be called the Dominion Revolution. The change had nothing to do with farming. People were farming and eating way before then. It had everything to do with a complete reversal of the story we live by from, "we belong to the earth," to "the world belongs to man."
This is the point where our modern Taker culture was born. Until the Agricultural Revolution all of humanity were indigenous Leaver peoples. We were just one of thirty million species -- we were simply part of the fire of life. One universal shared animist spirituality shared across thousands of cultures.
Once we saw the world as our own, and that we can take from and apart regardless of the consequences, a whole new set of possibilities opened up. It started with denying our competitors access to food and privatizing the land. If the world belonged to man, not only things but all life including people can be possessed or at least exploited. Every social justice problem directly stems the dominion story that perpetuates our modern mono-culture or civilization.
War, Privatization, and Fear—The End of Nature’s Peace Keeping Law of Limited Competition
Once you extended the logic of dominion all the way out, you were now allowed to wage war. A lion only takes one gazelle, and the rest of the gazelles go back to grazing because they know the lion follows the peace keeping law of nature or law of limited competition: only take what you need to survive, no more. However, since the world belongs to man, he may take all of the gazelles, or trees; he may wage war on the forest or even his fellow man. He may start to accumulate beyond his needs.
Since it is too disruptive to wage war all of the time to get what you want, a lower level system of violence needed to be invented to get what you wanted. The solution was privatization and locking up the food so everyone had to work within the hierarchical, consumptive, Taker system to survive. If you did not work or at least behave within the system you did not get fed.
Forcing everyone to work within the system and enabling concentration of wealth yields a system of incentives to create a desired social behavior that self-perpetuates the system itself. From top to bottom, everyone has the incentive to work to merely survive or accumulate wealth. Once you crawl your way to the top, you ignore all of the people, places, and species that you stepped on the way, and actually believe you deserve to be there and then start fiercely defending your position.
The incentives are the chance that you will get security and even promoted in our culture if you play by the rules. The other incentive is fear; fear is the fuel of our culture or civilization. This includes the obvious fear of not being fed or given a place to live, and down to the fear of enforcement upon you of rules we have written called laws.
Economics is the science of rationalizing the wrong moves for the wrong reasons. Fear is the universal enforcer of narrow vision and blind momentum. — Tom Ward
These incentives are ingrained in us since the moment we are born by almost everyone, every process, story, and cultural item we see. We become attached to things and also become fearful that we could lose our things. By living in this culture, we live in a constant state of subliminal fear and are motivated almost solely by it.
We live in a world without limits. Not limits of what we can achieve, progress is actually not necessarily good. We live in a world without limits of what we will do to keep our place, and our things. Our Taker culture has suspended nature’s peace keeping law of limited competition.
Culture is not our food, clothing, or language. Culture is what system we use to make a living. In our culture you do not need a conspiracy theory planning how to maintain the hierarchy. You just need a uniform set of incentives motivating everyone’s behavior to self perpetuate the system of consumption, accumulation, or wealth.
Hierarchies Accentuate Concentration
By having everyone living within the hierarchy, you can have dozens or -- with technology -- thousands of people doing the concentrating for you. The way to get rich is to direct your way part of the concentrating flow from as large a network as possible.
That is why our system embraces large corporations -- they enable the largest concentration network possible. We don't need a transnational corporation to flip hamburgers, but with 31,000 restaurants, you can concentrate $23.5 billion a year. Wealth is not the $23.5 billion, it is the system that allows something that does not really exist, a corporation, to operate a chain of 31,000 restaurants exploiting 1.5 million employees world wide.
Protection of Hierarchies
Our modern Taker system is fiercely protected. You can't end private property by taking the property of the wealthy. Hierarchies maintain great defenses from attacks from below. McDonald’s grows where McDonald-Douglas goes, now Boeing.
Government especially exists to enforce the system of private property and wealth, along with the infrastructure and markets that enable concentration. Make no mistake about it: government is not here to feed you, as most naively believe. It is here to ensure the dominion of a few people. The regulations, laws, zoning, finances, markets, inspectors, police, and military are here to make sure no one interferes with the markets or private property.
Markets are especially important to keep running because they are the levers used to extract and concentrate resources as fast as possible. Markets and money also useful to filter out externalities such as pollution or social injustices. Money and markets are blind.
Further, if we want another country's natural resources, first we send in the corporations, then the jackals if necessary, and, if they didn't succeed, the military. No ifs, ands, or buts. They system will try to continue and expand at any cost. This meme is taught to us since childhood by "father culture" that civilization is the end of history and must progress at any cost.
This system of protection of the hierarchy is far more than overt force. It includes deep stratification of education, social cliques, and access to capital. Before my awakening I had all three and played within the system. I interned for President Reagan and had seen the inside of several Fortune 100 companies all by the time I was 35. With a little luck, it worked.
Now I am trying to give it all back through one of the country's few really sustainable models and education. Restoration Farm builds topsoil, biodiversity, community, and offers permaculture education. Show me a list of companies that do that.
The Consumption of Population
The ultimate expression of dominion is expansion of your population. The story that Adam chose Eve is misunderstood because the word Eve is mistranslated. Eve means life, it does not mean a person or a woman. Adam, choosing unrestrained life, means he is choosing abandoning Nature’s peacekeeping law of limited competition, and accepting unlimited procreating supported by totalitarian agriculture.
Taker peoples have always been able to overwhelm Leaver peoples because they had more people from a greater food supply. Again, we return to the misunderstanding of the Agricultural Revolution: Because the Takers decided to take all of the land for human food production and uses, they simultaneously denied their fellow species' access to food, and so built their human population. They made the choice to consume the world, start the food-population race, and literally convert the natural world to human flesh.
This all stems from the choice of dominion or taking, which birthed our system of concentration and wealth. When you see wealth of any level, see it for what it is, our culture’s fiercely protected system of concentration through domination.
We Need a New Story
After being on the inside, and through traveling, I know how it works for the very few, and does not work for everyone else -- human and our non-human relations. I also know now that you cannot reverse the system from within the system. You have to get far enough from it to develop a new story. There in lies the solution.
More and more of us want a new story, a new way to live. We want to make a living that does not end in insecurity, a life of bad food, not thinking for oneself, poor health, wage slavery, no retirement, and a death detached from your family. What are those things but civilization?
Tribal Solution to Making a Living
A tribe or a smaller band is a group of people who want to make a living together. A "community" today may be no more than a grouping of Yuppies in close proximity. These are two very different things. More tribe-like or band-like is a circus -- literally. In a small circus, everyone has decided to throw in their lot, and make a living together. No one is higher or lower. Being the "boss" is still just a job that someone may have to do, but comes with no privileges. Decisions are made by consensus.
A tribe is group of people who are land locked and combine what they have, be it land, tools, or skills, and then make a living together. A tribe also has a sense of place in their watershed or bioregion. That is important, but is not the focus of this discussion.
The trick is to carve out enough space to be able to detach ourselves from the modern Taker world. The Amish call this avoiding entanglements with our culture. That is why the old order of Amish drive wagons with wood-steel wheels that they can build and maintain instead of rubber wheels they can't. The point of creating some level of autonomy as a group is to gain the freedom to live your own culture and stories such as, "humanity belongs to the earth." If you are married to modern culture you can’t live a new story or imagine a new vision.
Now, the Amish do and do not live tribally. They live in a grey area in between. Each family still owns its own land, but work together cooperatively in another sense.
We have to end private property and hierarchical government, and replace the failed story of dominion. Concentration, wealth, poverty, every global crisis, and social injustice are the end result of the story we tell ourselves about the nature of the world we live in, “the world belongs to man.”
We will lose a lot of cool stuff in this new world or “earth culture” as I call it, but peak oil is going to do that for us anyway.
Natural Wealth and Permaculture
Real wealth is the resilience of nature and her ecosystems measured by biodiversity, topsoil, and cooperative connections. Ecosystems cooperate and have synergies that are not about competition.
Going back to the lion, the lion is most secure when the ecosystem is most healthy, diverse, and intact allowing for the most food to eat. This can only happen when the lion’s population and rate of consumption follow nature’s peace keeping law of limited competition.
Real human wealth is your community, education, and the cradle-to-grave security that results. Real wealth results from giving security to get security; it does not come from making things to get things.
If you are not taught to think outside the box, it’s hard to think outside of our culture. At Restoration Farm we teach people in my local community, students, and interns from around he world to see with whole-system eyes. I am finding a huge divide in the education level between lay people and those who have studied permaculture. Permaculture helps you see holistically, something we are not taught in school. In in our educational system, each department is separated, very little is taught as a whole system. Your typical economics course does not tell you that for every dollar made, the planet is trashed somewhere, and people and species are exploited along the way. It is far more important to learn how a whole ecosystem works, than it is to split atoms.
The point is, recognize wealth, and our Taker culture for what it really is.
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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 Ishmael
Tom Ward Greenward Ho!

A Better Way of Making a Living

Mon, 8 Jun 2009 16:31:53 -0700

Making a living in our modern culture usually requires that you participate in the destruction of the earth. We can’t go back to Homo hunter-gatherer. Is there another way forward?
I call it the “middle way” of making a living between our modern industrial system and hunter gathering. This is a deep subject that deserves to have several books written about it.
Saving the World and Sustainability
The biggest problem with sustainability is the word in general and how we miss-define it. Some believe sustainability involves living in a manner that does not diminish the prospects of future generations. That is an “all about humanity” definition that needs to be discarded.
Sustainability really means humanity continuing in some fashion without taking tens of millions of species down with us. Today our culture is solely responsible for the greatest mass extinction since the death of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. I say, “our culture,” because humanity has lived in harmony with the earth for three or four million years. The problem is not humanity. The problem it is our culture, our growth, and how we make a living.
True sustainability has our species, like all others, living in harmony with the ecosystem or Gaia. It is measured by the growth, not of human population, but of topsoil and biodiversity. These two are the only evolutionarily proven measures of sustainability, and have nothing to do with humanity’s success or failure.
Permaculture, by allowing succession to continue and by mimicking natural structures such as a forest or old field, is the best examples I know of that both builds topsoil and allows for species biodiversity.
Why do we need the other species? In some respects we don’t. But in the long run we do. We need the full resilience of the earth’s ecosystems to adapt to an ever changing world. I also believe that the true measure of our intellect is not what we can take or build, but what we can nurture and leave alone.
Yes, we may be the first to reach this level of consciousness, but the question is are we going to be the last, or are we the mentors for those that will follow over the next few million years?
Honestly, for this to happen our modern monoculture and civilization most likely is going to have to be replaced by a wide diversity of earth friendly cultures. Humanity may be able to continue in a powered down version of what we have for the next 10-20 years. If our culture manages to survive in the long run, it will be in a monoculture desert of our own making. The sad thing is that future generations will not know or appreciate what it was like today just as we don’t know what it was like 200-300 years ago.
Tribal Way of Making A Living
A tribe is a group of people working together to make a living, sharing equally, and with no hierarchy. Generally, tribes are fewer than 150 people. British anthropologist Robin Dunbar theorized this number of people to be the limit with whom we can maintain stable social relationships in which we know each person. He suggests that numbers larger than this require more restricted rules, laws, and enforcement.
All profits, losses, and finds are shared equally. Decisions are made by consensus. It appears that ownership, at least initially, is not so important when getting started. However, since private property leads to hoarding and is a disincentive to sharing, it should be eliminated. All non-household assets should also be communal or part of the commons.
A New Ethic and World View
Here is where it starts to get new. We need to embrace a new world view or remember the original one. Chief Seattle in his 1854 speech and Daniel Quinn in his book Ishmael taught that the world is a sacred place and humanity has a place in it. Another way of saying this is that humanity belongs to the earth, our ecosystem, and Gaia.
This is the opposite of the world view that our ancestors created 6,000 to 10,000 years ago that humanity is flawed, we are sinners, and the earth is a proving ground to see whether we are worthy to go to a better place when we die. This belief gave us a “dominion” which we have to relinquish if we, or at least, most of the other species are going to survive.
Permaculture for instance is based on three central ethics:
1. “Care of the earth” means that our number one priority is taking care of the earth, making sure we don't damage its natural systems.
2. “Care of the people” means meeting people's needs so that people's lives can be sustained and have a good quality of life as well but without damaging the earth.
3. “Accepting limits to population and consumption” is realizing that as a human species we cannot continue to increase and also sustain the planet. Sometimes you will hear this ethic phrased as “share the surplus, invest all of your means in the first two ethics.” This means limiting your consumption so that you can invest your resources in caring for the earth and caring for the people.
These ethics translate to making a living in a way that does not participate in destruction of the earth. This means more than not starting a toxic chemical or genetic engineering lab.
This may mean that will have to shift back to giving support to get support instead of making things to get things. A healthy self reliant local community focusing on each other and on giving support will provide greater cradle-to-grave security than our “all about me” culture.
If we are going to make products, they need to be made and consumed by the local community, bioregion, or watershed. If products are made for export and not just local use, the level of consumption will again lead to the depletion of local resources. I see this just driving around Oregon and Washington in the form of missing forests. In Peru 60 people just died in clashes between indigenous protestors and police over drilling for oil and gas in the rainforest. Defending your local resources and bioregion from outside interests is serious business.
Produce what you need now and some reserves, but not a large surplus that can be concentrated. If you concentrate resources or work within a hierarchy, you again will encourage hoarding, and take away the incentive to share.
Develop Community Self Reliance
One of the keys to the success of the Amish is that they do not operate in a way that creates entanglements with modern culture. Their aversion is more about the entanglement and not so much against technology. For example, old order Amish use wood wheels which they can manufacture and repair themselves. They do not use rubber wheels because they don’t want to be dependent on modern culture. The Amish have nothing against rubber, but they do not want to be dependent upon us.
No individual or even a small group of people can be an island. It will take enough people working together as a community to bring one or both legs out of modern culture. Maybe one will have to work a day job while building skills and a tribal business with your friends. This will be a process not an overnight revolution. Remember though, petrocollapse will not conform to a gradual or delayed schedule for our convenience.
Set Aside Time for Yourself
Start by doing what you love to do. You will become good at it, enjoy your work, and will make the biggest impact with your life that way.
Don’t work more than maybe 30 hours per week. This not only allows for employment of more people, but it gives you time to work on yourself, to study, grow, explore, and self-actualize. This is part of the reason our culture is stuck where it is. People are worked so much and not given a holistic education to think for themselves. Develop your vocabulary, arts, music, mental constructs, travel, and just general self-actualize. So powerdown, give away a bunch of your stuff, and reduce your overhead.
How to Get Started
Based on my experience as an entrepreneur, I would say follow the path of least resistance and watch for serendipity. Try multiple things and see which one gets the most traction. Walk before you run. Try your ideas on a part-time or hobby basis before committing. You could start with your neighbors and each could plant a different fruit or nut tree and you could exchange harvests in the fall. Create a micro-neighborhood edible perennial nursery business. The possibilities are endless. Have fun with it.
One idea I am considering is to start by creating a virtual community. We cannot all move in next door to each other overnight, but like-minded people could put their properties into a land trust for the benefit of the community. It may also be easier to coalesce closer together over time as the opportunities arise.
At Restoration Farm we are trying to build a tribal permaculture farm. We hope to be mostly chemical and fossil fuel free. The fossil fuels we use are largely for infrastructure setup and not so much for planting and harvesting. We will be experimenting with U-pick blueberries and food forest, and compost in exchange for reduced food cost models.
In regards to finding like-minded people, try hosting a potluck to discuss neighborhood sustainability. See who shows up. Learn about permaculture, and consider taking a two week intensive permaculture design course (PDC). You will meet your tribe of like-minded people there.
Finding a benevolent way of making a living that allows you to do what you love and to not participate in the destruction of the world is a journey of a lifetime.
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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 Ishmael
Wikipedia Dunbar’s Number
Susan Blackmore The Meme Machine
John Hostetler Amish Society
Jan Lundberg As surely as the red sun rises: Rebelling against extinction
Toby Hememway Gaia's Garden: A Guide to Home-Scale Permaculture
Geoff Lawton The Permaculture Research Institute of Australia
Peter Bane Permaculture Activist

Life’s Simple Truths

Fri, 22 May 2009 11:22:47 -0700

What is the meaning of life? Where do we go when we die? What is god? Important and unimportant questions for all of us. Here are some of my guesses to these and other life centering questions.
Humanity’s Purpose
We are literally here to balance the life process of plants. At one point in the earth’s evolution, the atmosphere became so toxic with oxygen which burned and destroyed everything it touched. Our early ancestors were evolved by Gaia to reverse the creation of the toxic gas we call oxygen that plants give off in the process of photosynthesis. By reversing one of the moves in the dance of photosynthesis, a new process could be born–one that could take the toxic gas, and use it to burn food and make energy. The magnesium in chlorophyl is replaced with iron to form hemoglobin.
Breathers were born, those who dine on the sunlight-harvesters, burning their bodies as fuel for life. In burning food, the breathers give off carbon dioxide, which the plants, with the help of the sun, transform to food again. And the plants give off oxygen, which the breathers use in burning food. Gaia began to breathe, passing her breath back and forth from red to green, continuing to build up oxygen, to transform herself. We are the breath of Gaia.
We are also food for plants and the other microbes the bring the soil to life. We fix nitrogen when we pee, and we create compost when we poop and die.
Larger Brain
The real question is why did Gaia create the experiment of a large frontal lobe and opposable thumbs? The thumbs enable primates to adapt to a wider range of living conditions by eating a wider of foods and to making tools.
The primate brain really only has to be as large as paleolithic man to adapt to wider environmental conditions. The larger frontal lobe grown on top of the mammalian brain which rests on top of the reptilian brain is another question all together.
The agricultural revolution may have been the point where we really put the large frontal lobe to work. Ten thousand years ago we made a shift that extended our role as oxygen and plant consumers to consumers of everything. This may also have been the point where we expanded the individual ego that defines modern culture today.
The real question unanswered so far is, why the big brain? The answer may be domination. Homo sapiens probably used their larger brain size to exterminate neanderthal man. We are of course doing the same directly and indirectly to the 30 million other species we share this planet with today. This must stop, but how?
Modern Purpose of Life
The truth be told, modern culture has become a cancer of indefinite growth upon Gaia. Just as a tumor in your body, our culture has made humanity malignant to Gaia’s body. Humanity itself is not harmful to the earth. Humanity has existed in one form or another for 3 to 4 million years. But, our Taker culture made humanity cancerous 10,000 years ago at the birth of the agricultural revolution.
Gaia will go on without us even if we take ourselves out. The point is that we are going to take down tens of millions of other species with us. Our culture is solely responsible for the greatest mass extinction since the death of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. No matter how green, groovy, or native we get, this cannot be stopped unless we reduce our population to a fraction of what it currently is—probably to preindustrial pre-oil levels of less than 1 billion.
The purpose of life today, now that Gaia is entering stage four cancer, is to find an antidote to the agricultural revolution. Maybe what we need is the un-revolution to find a way back to an evolutionarily proven symbiotic way of life with Gaia. I don’t know how much of our Taker culture can be saved, but if humanity is around in another 10,000 years, it will have a lot more Leaver culture in it than Taker.
Other simple truths include, live your truth and enjoy life, but don’t do it at the expense of your relations. Survive yes, but don’t breed beyond your number.
Modern culture through its human constructed reality has also disconnected us from our truth and created our sense of lack. Every cell in our bodies knows we should live in symbiosis with our ecosystem. The five or six kingdoms of life of monera, protista, fungi, plants, animals have developed over four billion years to form the self-regulating system of life on earth we call Gaia. True sustainability maintains this symbiosis with our ecosystem measured by building top soil and biodiversity.
Humanity evolved over three or four million years living in harmony with Gaia. As Chief Seattle inferred in his 1854 speech, the earth does not belong to man, humanity belongs to the earth.
All in all, humanity has to go through what we will to see if we come out the other side. The crux is, that the exuberance of our modern culture just happens to have caught up with us during our generation.
Now is the time the rainbow warriors to awaken to save us. We may be of the rainbow. We will see if enough people can make the inner shift to change course and birth new culture(s). The current system seems just “too easy” for most to leave.
Where we fit in the Universe
First, we will probably never know where the universe came from, so you can makeup your own story.
What we do know is that we are made of stardust, all of the calcium in our bones, the iron in our blood, and the carbon in our bodies came from stars that lived and died before our sun was born.
Did you also know that you are a walking microbial colony? Over 90 percent of the genes and cells in your body are foreign. Humans are born sterile with no bacteria, but start being colonized from the instant we break from the womb. Of the 110 trillion cells in your body, 100 trillion are not human. Most human cells are concentrated in the brain, blood stream, and organs.
The other thing that is striking to me is that when I look at the human brain from the outside and a section of it, it looks like some mushrooms or colonies of bacteria. We take this great symbiosis of Gaia and our bodies largely for granted.
The Fire of Life
When we die, we pass the fire of life on to others through our compost. Where we go then we will not know until we pass through the psychedelic experience we call death.
Life on earth is based on the sacred circle of birth, growth, death, and regeneration. Life begets life, but not in the way the Bible tells us. Sure rabbits make rabbits. But what is a rabbit? A rabbit is the grass. A lynx is the grass—soil, grass, rabbit, one. Only temporal reality separates them as they tumble through Gaia’s sacred cycle of life.
The fire burns forever. It is the flame of life that courses through all generations from first to last, that burns without consuming, that is itself consumed and renewed inexhaustibly, life after life, generation after generation, species after species, galaxy after galaxy, universe after universe, each sharing in the blaze for its season and going down to death while the fire burns on undiminished. The fire is life itself, the life of this universe, of this galaxy, of this planet, of this place and every place: the place by the rock and the place under the hill and the place by the river and the place in the forest, no two alike anywhere. And the life of every place is god, who is the fire: the life of the pond, god; the life of the tundra, god; the life of the sea, god; the life of the land, god; the life of the earth, god; the life of the universe, god: in every place unique, as the life of every place is unique, and in every place the same, as the fire that burns is everywhere
Heaven or More?
I don’t believe we get a do-over or happy nirvana after this life consciousness. The vision is much grander than an ego-centric blissful cloud city awaiting believers.
Yes, we become compost when we die, but we don’t go as ourselves somewhere else or are reborn as a rabbit or human.
When we change forms to compost and leave this consciousness and reality we rejoin the fire of life that gave birth to us. We return to our mother Gaia and the universe. We become part of all life, as we always have been. Even when we are alive or conscious, we are part of Gaia’s breath and digestion. Breathers and sunlight-harvesters breathing in and out as we live.
God
God is a sacred word for all of the known and unknown universe. Phrases such as, “in god we trust” are better said as, “I trust the universe.” This bridges the gap between science and religion. The fact that we are made of stardust captures the imagination.
Since only four percent of the universe is visible and the remaining 96 percent is made up of dark matter and energy, that leaves a lot of unknown. For me that is better; it leaves infinite possibilities.
Life’s Truths are Simple
Look at a child. When they are young, they have it right, then our cultural programming and peer pressure take over, but until then they are their original selves. We have to get back to that, to undoing the programming.
For me, I now know that I am made of stardust and that I am part of the fire of life that will burn on forever in all life. I am not one, I am all life. These truths are simple.
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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:
James Lovelock The Ages of Gaia: A Biography of Our Living Earth
Starhawk The Earth Path, p 44.
Elisabet Sahtouris and James Lovelock Earthdance: Living Systems in Evolution
YouTube, Christopher Buck The Rainbow Warriors
Colin Nickerson, The Boston Globe Of microbes and men, Bacteria disappearing from our bodies may harm human health Graphic Your Body: A ‘colony of creatures’
Wikipedia Kingdom (biology)
Nancy Zussy Chief Seattle Speech: Washington State Library, Version 3
Michael Dowd Thank God for Evolution
Daniel Quinn Providence, p 181.
Wikipedia Dark matter

The New Enlightenment

Sun, 10 May 2009 21:14:58 -0700

Cultural awareness and expanded consciousness is separated by concentric rings with enlightened doers at the center blending out to the zombie masses of our culture on the outside. For those at the center it is a journey of a lifetime.
The New Cultural Enlightenment
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 even rotate the constellation of links, visioning and choosing the direction for your journey becomes effortless—live your truth.
A new kind of enlightenment is emerging. 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 and have experienced every emotion that we ever will.
The new enlightenment goes a step further in new directions through an early doorway of unveiling to being 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 ecosystem we cut ourselves off from our ability to live from it, we become trapped and are separated from the source or the divine.
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 just prisons without bars. Every job is wage slavery because the agricultural revolution locked up the food. If you don’t work, you don’t eat. 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.
Schools are designed to break the individual and end creative thinking, “sit down, be quite, and do what what your told.” Despite education, knowledge and hierarchy remain deeply stratified. The new enlightenment sees through this trap, and sees the way out.
Animism and the Fire of Life
Classic enlightenment includes an appreciation 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 commodities 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. 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.
I know how I am also 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 and seeing our constructed reality, and its affect upon us and the ecosystem. New terms and revelations such as global warming, financial crisis, and the end of security have been added to earlier anti-cultural memes such as pollution, overpopulation, and fractional reserve banking. Some are even expanding such as peak oil is becoming peak everything.
The unveiling is more than recognizing the many problems of our culture, it also means connecting the dots back to how it began, why it succeeds, and forward to the solution for the individual and the local 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
The new 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 community.
Leaving the matrix or our consensus culture is a journey of a lifetime; it will only 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. 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, the greater the resonance.
The Will—Doers
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: depavers, permaculturists, teachers, activists, reporters, bloggers, healers, on and on.
This tool of the Internet, may be the lever that has been missing. We are at the forefront of a complete media and cultural consciousness replacement. Fringe ideas like this blog can be freely distributed globally, are uncontrolled, and entirely non-underwritten. For instance, this blog has been read in 72 countries this year in 2009.
Cultural Singularity
When we reach the tipping point where our culture dissolves away into may new visions or cultures, 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, let alone having to invent the alternative lifestyles needed to walk away.
Remember, you cannot encourage someone to leave modern culture unless you have a viable alternative to the constructed reality.
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, and progress and 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. We all have a long way to go; many today 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 among it goals maximizing profit and concentrate wealth, any group of people who have never even met will appear to coordinate their efforts.
Those ahead of the curve are not a 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 the alternatives. Most of our ideas will fail, but eventually some will work, and will unlock the doors for the others to follow.
Dedication
This essay is dedicated to the Culturequake community, my loyal readers, the 3,000 new readers this month, and to my mentor the Hobbit—Thank you.
Essays will be less frequent during the farming season. We are working about six or seven days a week getting the Restoration Farm and permaculture site up and running. People are right when they say it takes three years to get an organic farm to show any form of profit. It takes three to five years to get fruit trees yielding and five to seven years for nuts. Thanks too everyone involved the project.
Also, the point of the Culturequake blog experience is first of course part of my self-discovery journey and living my truth, but for the reader it should not be about the “latest essay.” It should be about the body of work as a whole starting back in he archives up to the present.
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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:
The Matrix The Red Pill
Aeolus Kephas and Neil “the Cleaver” Kramer Podcast Stormy Weather 22 and 22.5: The Reader & the Red

World War III: It Is Happening Today

Mon, 27 Apr 2009 08:15:49 -0700

We are just not using nuclear weapons. Resource war, class war, drug war, gang war, terror war, trade war, plus war on all other species is global. Is this the culture you want to say you belong to? Is your lifestyle worth it?

When you look at anything from our modern culture, think of war. Car, computer, toaster, light bulb, money, water, food, population, government, media—think of war. The more people, the more competition, the more war. Modern Taker culture is inseparable from war.
Our culture was founded on war 10,000 years ago when one group of people in the fertile crescent decided they had a better way to live, population growth supported by totalitarian agriculture-based civilization. It is now almost universally accepted that civilization is unsurpassable and must continue at all costs.
The world now wastes over $1 trillion on military spending. 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.
More importantly though, 175 million people who lost their lives to war in the last century. Several times that many were injured—mostly civilians.
War Did Not Exist Before our Taker Culture
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 implements or even artwork—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.
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 started invading from the east.
Lastly, there is confusion between war and the 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 privatization, hierarchy, and violence has become the fuel for our culture.
Competition 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 and educator.
Darwin’s natural selection or 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 US 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).
The simplest way to put it is to envision what can be made, grown, and traded just from 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.
Excessive Competition is War
War also comes in the form of occupation, building a railroad to send the occupier’s people in and to send natural resources out as China has done to Tibet and the US is doing in Iraq for oil but not colonization. Tibetans will soon be a minority in their own country.
Globalization is now a common form of low level class 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 back 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.
If every American had to live and work to survive in the third world for just one year, things would change overnight.
Our culture has also waged an unending war on the ecosystem that we call nature. In short, our single species is responsible for the single largest mass extinction since the dinosaurs died 65 million years ago.
War is 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 system of profit and control.
Those in power have found that they can make more money short of large-scale war. 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 make money loaning money to both sides. Corporations make money selling guns and support 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 store 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?
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.
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 we need. Shopping at a natural food store and a 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. We will force exploitation on others we do not see. Start talking to your friends from this perspective. Start asking yourself, “is our lifestyle is worth it?”
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 now. We can go green and buy a little more time and space for more people, but it is a wash. We have to level with our kids and tell them the truth that we are locked in our own cultural prison, and they have to not make the same mistakes we did and to find a way 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.
I’ll talk more about some realistic solutions in the future such as how a greenhouse can not only feed you, but also heat your home in the winter and cool you in the summer. Or, how an old world KachelOfen can both keep your family warm in the winter and bake everything from pizza to cinnamon rolls with just one firing a day. There is hope, we just have to think outside of our cultural box.
I believe one should empower the positive aspects of their beliefs, for instance, “Peace Now!” instead of “No War!” However, I felt it was worth taking a stand on this issue and shining a light where we are afraid to look.
My point is that the destructive behavior of our culture, whether high level warfare or low level environmental destruction, happens globally at all levels, and is inherent within our culture. War and Taker culture are inseparable, is this the culture you want to say you belong to? An individual cannot end war overnight, but an individual and start the discussion.
Here is a movie I made at the 2003 Peace March in Washington, D.C. to try to stop the Iraq War. There was nothing like the of feeling being surrounded by hundreds of thousands of people who share your feelings. We are everywhere.
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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:
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
Chuck Burr Fall of the American Empire
John Cavanagh and Jerry Mander Alternatives to Economic Globalization: A Better World Is Possible
Dan Shinerock It’s A Burl Gallery

Osama Bin Lowrider: It’s All the Same Culture

Mon, 20 Apr 2009 19:01:59 -0700

Our political discussions and media coverage are far too shallow to be useful. We must go deeper and much further back to understand the world today and learn how to get where we want to go.
Almost everyone misunderstands what culture is. Most think it is soda pop, pop stars, blue jeans, language, and TV. Some think it is capitalism, communism, or progressivism. Some see culture as Western culture or Eastern culture.
Look at the motorcycle picture. The motorcycles will fool you. All of the people above belong to the same culture, as does a soccer mom in a Chicago suburb. Keep guessing. This makes a huge difference in how we understand what is happening today and where we are going.
Our Culture
The answer is, that we are all Takers. We all belong to the same culture, tea-to-tiler or Taliban, one culture. The Dali Lama or Duncan Donuts cop, one culture. Our Taker culture began 10,000 years ago with the agricultural revolution when they locked up the food and privatized the land, began the population–food race, invented war, stratified knowledge, and ended the formerly one universal religion of animism. A culture is made up of many things, but the above are far more important than whether someone 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.
Some suggest that modern progressive 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.
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 past examples of the same exuberance. The ultimate hubris was inventing one god in a human form. 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 our culture 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 ecosystem. Until then we are just building and operating the Taker prison for our children and ourselves. Only when our culture ends, will the earth be allowed to start healing itself. A change of leadership within the same culture is also a waste of time.
Here comes the important part of the essay: discussing anything else today except walking away from our culture is pointless. This has to do with the difference between programs and vision or the cultural story. When Columbus invaded Haiti, he brought with him the greatest virus of all, 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 earth belongs to man.”* This has been the crux of the creation and perpetuation of our culture 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 “our relations” or the earth and what you do with the technology that matters.
A program is doing more of the same. If the effort in Afghanistan is failing, send more troops. If test score are falling, spend more on education. If the banks are failing, send them more money.
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 combat 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 is reversed, all programs are a complete 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 the remembered story that humanity belongs to the earth.
The Problem is Not Humanity
Humanity has lived on the earth for three or four million years. For millions of years we followed the natural law and lived in harmony with the earth. We had a stable population. 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 organizational structures and religion. Tribalism is the one and only evolutionarily proven human social organizational system. Tribalism is to humans what herds are for deer, pods are for whales, schools are for fish, and hives are for bees. The problem began 10,000 years ago when our culture was created.
You Cannot Invent a New Social Organizational System
Here is the rub. You just can’t invent a new social organizational system like a tribe. We have been trying to perfect a new social organizational system called civilization for 10,000 years. But, civilization continues to fail more each year for more people and 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 taking everything it can gets it’s hands on will never work. We even treat members of our own species 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 is not going to get you there. It’s deeper than that. I am beginning to thing 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 start rebuilding biodiversity and topsoil.
We will have to remember our relationship with the cultivars, how to live on 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 my family.
Hierarchies have strong defenses for attacks from below. However, they have no defense from abandonment. The point is we have to create new cultures that borrow from what we can from the present that fit within the framework of 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 new tribal communities. We must develop a high enough level of group self-reliance that will allow us to walk away in stages. We need doers, speakers, bloggers and podcasters to inspire millions to build the alternatives we need. Lets walk towards something better, not away from something bad. Its time to start living our truth.
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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:
* 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 US government’s decision to buy or take his people’s land. The makers of the film took a little literary license, further 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

Going Green is Not Enough

Mon, 13 Apr 2009 20:01:11 -0700

Reducing, reusing, and recycling, are not going to save us as long as our cultural story is that the, “world belongs to man.” Our modern cultural story of dominion of the earth or domination will always overwhelm our green efforts.
Recycling is like a stick in the river of our cultural story of procreate and consume. 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 6.7 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, and the techno-alternatives being offered are not solutions either.
A population of 6.7 billion has to be and will be reduced to below pre-1900 levels of 1 billion possibly during this century. There just won’t be the fossil fuels around to support today’s population. You can’t make or even run a diesel tractor with a solar collector, let alone make all of today’s industrial agricultural inputs. You can’t even make a solar collector with a solar collector. You can try to grow ethanol, but it has a negative energy ROI. Biodiesel works, but there won’t be enough to go around.
Petrocollapse and Our Waste
The countdown for the end of the oil age has just run out 18, 11, 3, 3, zero. Several new large oil ﬁelds came online in 2005. These were the last of the 500 million barrel mega oil ﬁelds, since none has been discovered in the past few years. 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. This will not keep up with declining production or depletion of older ﬁelds, much less the increase in demand. The end of the natural gas, coal, and nuclear ages will not be far behind.
Fortunately without fossil fuels, our children won’t have the cheap energy to make all of the garbage we made for ourselves. "WEEE Man" 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.
A Technological Singularity Will Not Save Us
Some people hope for 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 perfecting solar energy production for three billion years and the most efficient solution possible 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 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 reverse build-out 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 resources.
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 especially it’s 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 just to survive. You know you are back within carrying capacity when you are paying back our accumulated ecological debt, and have started to rebuild biodiversity and topsoil.
So, eating vegan and recycling 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 every rule of the system, but still get laid off and lose their house. It is time to tell our children the truth that, “we screwed up, wasted a lot, and that I will teach you everything I can to do better and to develop a new mindset.”
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.
A New Education for Our Children
This will be a community wide effort, even though most of the community does not know it yet. Schools should do their part. Instead of teaching our kids about dead presidents, they should teach children how to be more self-reliant, to think outside the box of our culture, to be “doers”, to feed themselves, and to minimize family size. 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 cultures and 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 detach from modern Taker culture. Teach your children to work from a sense of joy and look for what they can give instead of take. 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 food forest. 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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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:
Chuck Burr Going Green is Not Enough
Chuck Burr Overpopulation is a Cultural Challenge
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
Chuck Burr A Better Way of Making a Living

John Roth: Why be a Vegan

Fri, 3 Apr 2009 15:20:44 -0700

This is Part II of my interview with John Roth, naturopathic doctor, and probably the healthiest person I have met. John tells us about his experience growing up on a farm in Kansas and his journey to becoming a vegan.
Vegetarian to Vegan Journey
Chuck Burr: Today is Friday March 20th. Happy Spring. I am talking to N.D. John Roth in his vegan kitchen.
John Roth: Spring Equinox is tomorrow. It is always an exciting part of the year, especially when you live in Telluride and have such long winters.
Chuck: How long have you been a vegetarian, a vegan, and a naturopathic doctor?
John: I have been a vegetarian for 45 years. And what happened to induce me to become a vegetarian, I grew up on a farm in Kansas, and I watched my parents butcher a lot of the animals we ate, and a lot of the animals had names because they were animals that we knew. I was really uncomfortable with the violence that it took to kill the animals. So I decided in my teens to become a vegetarian, and I had never known another vegetarian. I knew absolutely nothing about vegetarianism except that there were vegetarians. So, I thought I was not going to kill anymore animals, and I was not concerned about the consequences. I just did not want to be morally involved in that act of violence to take an animals life.
I thought when I was a vegetarian I would live until I was 40 years old, and I would be really smart and skinny, and I would sit around in a full lotus. But then as soon as I became a vegetarian, and started studying about it I realized that I would become a lot healthier because I was a vegetarian. There are a lot of reasons for a person being healthier as a vegetarian.
Chuck: How long have you been a vegan, and a naturopathic doctor?
John: Then after I was a vegetarian for 10 years, I started studying more about vegetarianism, I realized that I would be a lot healthier as a vegan. We will get into the reasons for the increased health as a vegan.
But basically, the difference between a vegetarian and a vegan is that a vegan does not eat animal by-products, basically eggs and dairy, which take longer to digest and have several different aspects of not being as healthy to eat as vegan foods.
I became a vegan 35 years ago, and I became a naturopathic doctor about 20 years ago. So all three were sort of a progression one to the other. The vegetarian led me to being a vegan. Being a vegan I really wanted to make sure I was getting the nutrients that I needed, and to really understand what I was doing, and make sure I was not hurting myself in anyway. So that is why I became a naturopathic doctor basically for my own knowledge, and then it became free advice for my friends.
Chuck: You mentioned that you have been researching this for 45 years, and that you grew up on a farm, which I respect a great deal, and actually seeing the process. Why would you recommend to someone to go to the extra step to becoming a vegan, cutting out the animal byproducts, eggs and dairy, from both a health and an environmental stand point.
John: I think both of those reasons are really crucial to the difference between being a vegetarian and a vegan. There is also another aspect, that the mind and the body, even though one is physical and the other is metaphysical, they still work together. And the way you treat your physical body affects the clarity and all other aspects of the mind. So, when you make that decision, it is not necessarily solely for health and environmental reasons. Also because of the affect it has on the clarity of mind.
Chuck: OK, for three reasons, healthy, environment, and clarity of the mind.
Health Impact of Eggs and Dairy
JR: From a health point of view, there are reasons why a person should take that extra step to become a vegan, first of all I have a lot of patients who come to me and say, “I couldn’t live if I did not have fish or chocolate or sugar. People will have to realize that the first step of a journey is always the hardest step of the journey. And anything that you decide that you want to do if you just have the will power to do it for a short period of time then it becomes very easy.
When I became a vegetarian it was harder to give up a lot of the things because there wasn’t a substitute, but if you choose to give up dairy and eggs, there are so may substitutes so. There is soy milk, and there is soy cheese, and there is tofu. There is egg-replacer to do you baking or you can use flax seed, arrow root. There are so many substitutes that make it easy to give up the animal products.
But the reason you really want to think about doing that is because technically the human body is designed to be a vegetarian, not a carnivore. The reason that is the case is because humans have such a long digestive system and carnivore have a short digestive system. [And humans have flat teeth instead of canine teeth.]
If you were a fruitarian which you could be if you lived on the equator, you would eat your food and pass it out of your body in one hour. If you were a vegetarian you would eat your food and pass it out of your body in one day. If you eat eggs and dairy, it takes four days at least, minimum. Meat takes anywhere from seven days to 35 years to go through your system. So, meat is a lot more detrimental to your system and to your health than eggs or dairy.
But the thing about eggs or dairy, dairy for instance is produced by cows for food for calves. And the thing about calves is that they have a very strong digestive enzyme in their stomach. Where as humans don’t have that. When a human eats dairy products, humans don’t have the strong enzymes to digest it, so it causes a lot of problems in the human body. One things is that dairy, eggs, and meat produce a lot of mucus in the body. Those three are the primary mucus producing foods. Well mucus is where viruses breed. So you become a lot more susceptible to viruses when you eat dairy.
If anyone has ever broken a egg in the carton, the egg glues itself wonderfully to the carton. That is what happens in your digestive system too. You might as well eat a handful of library paste. Both dairy an eggs gum or glue up your system. You body has a tough time digesting both of those and that is why it takes four days for them pass through through your digestive system. There is nothing in dairy or eggs that you cannot get much better from other sources so far as nutrients go that are a lot more easily assimilate-able.
Diary is also a source of radio active contamination for people. Radio active particles participate out of the atmosphere. Strontium 90 for example, lands on the grass, the cows eat the grass. It goes into the milk which goes into the cheese. So you are getting more radioactive contamination by eating dairy.
Chuck: Why is it bad for the food to spend more time in your digestive system? From an intuitive lay person’s stand point I would think, “Oh my body has more of a chance to absorb nutrients and minerals from the food.” Why is it bad?
John: That is a good question. The reason it is bad, is that food begins to putrefy or deteriorate as it passes through the body and you do not want food to sit in the intestine and in the colon particularly for that long.
The thing is that puts the whole thing in perspective is that the stomach is the concrete mixer. It mixes the food and the digestive enzymes. It gets the food ready to digest. But many of the nutrients that you assimilate are assimilated through the walls of the colon. You can assimilate food and nutrients and food through the colon, but you can also assimilate contaminates through the colon. So when the food sits in the colon for more than one day, it begins to putrefy. And when that happens, it begins to form poisons on toxins. And then you begin to assimilate those toxins into your system.
So by having food sit in the colon for more than a day you actually weaken your body instead of making it stronger because it is more contaminants than it is nutrients.
Chuck: So after a certain amount of time as the food processes through your body it converts from being nutritional to the point it starts composting; it starts going anaerobic.
John: Exactly, that is why you want the food to pass through your body rapidly.
Chuck: I have been told that I should not drink while I eat. To get the maximum amount of nutrients from my food, should I drink liquids when I eat?
John: That is a good question in the total picture of what we are talking about. You want to drink your water half an hour before your meal, and technically you should not drink water with your meal or immediately after your meal—one hour minimum after your meal.
The thing is if you chew your food properly. A lot of Eastern people say that you should chew your food 50 times before you swallow it. In other words, your food should really become water before you swallow it. And the reason for that is because the digestive enzymes that are also secreted in your mouth help to digest that food. But the reason that you don’t want to drink water with your meal is that it dilutes the digestive juices.
Environmental Impacts of Meat, Eggs, and Dairy
So far as the environmental impact of eggs and dairy go, most people are aware of the factory farming that is involved. I grew up on a farm and we milked the cow every morning. And the cow came to the barn every morning and every evening at milking time. We did not have to call her; she loved to come. And she loved to be milked.
It is not something that hurts the animal itself. It is just that cows have probably one of the most detrimental environmental impacts on the earth of anything. They produce methane gas and that is one of the principle destroyers of the ozone layer [and causes of global warming]. They also use a lot of fresh water. It is a fact that 50 percent of the fresh water in the U.S. is used for animal husbandry.
Also, the amount of food they eat as compared to what the earth can produce if you ate directly form the earth, say if you ate grains, would be phenomenally less than what it takes to raise a cow. Another interesting thing about chickens and dairy in particular, they have been doing quite a bit of research lately about the antibiotics those animals are given, they go into the eggs as well as the dairy and people begin to form a resistance to antibiotics because they are taking antibiotics everyday by taking these two foods.
One other thing that I would like to add is that vegetarians have one fourth the carbon foot print as a meat eater. Vegans have one seventh, and organic vegans have 1/17th the carbon foot print as a meat eater that eats a regular American diet. That means that 17 people could eat with the same carbon footprint as one person eating meat.
It also takes 20 gallons of water to make one beer, 2,100 gallons of water to make one pair of leather shoes, and 630 gallons of water to make one hamburger.
Clarity of the Mind
Chuck: How about clarify of the mind and physical body link?
John: This is one of the primary reasons that I tell my patients to become a vegetarian. The interesting thing is that even though the body is physical and the mind is metaphysical, still the two work together, and what you put in your body affects your mind. So, if you really want to have clarity of mind, you have to have a pure body. And when you put contaminants into the body it takes away a lot of the mental clarity that people have.
You can see that exemplified in a lot of things in your life. When you eat or drink something, it is going to have an affect on your mind. If you drink alcohol for instance, that affects your body, and in turn your mind. Or any drugs, the idea of taking a drug into to body and the affect it is going to have on the mind is another good example of how the body and the mind work together.
Well, your mind is not in your body. The brain is the central organ of the nervous system. The brain is not where you think from. There are people in other parts of the world that think the mind is in the solar-plexus. There are people who think the mind is in the brain. There are people who think the mind is totally outside the body.
The fact of the matter being that the mind being metaphysical has no physical attributes whatsoever. So isn’t a part of the body. It is the ethereal body. It is separate from the body, but yet the two work together. So, obviously we should be pursuing clarity of the mind because it is the only way we are going to be able to pick the correct path through life, and not make a lot of mistakes. That is the reason we are here to figure out who we are and what we came to do.
So it is important to eat foods that generate a pure body and in the same token a pure mind.
Why the Industrial Food Model Fails
Chuck: Do you think the industrial food system feeds on our inherited proclivities to crave sugar, salts, and fats that were hard for our ancestor’s to find?
John: The interesting fact behind that is that you crave what you eat, and that is something the corporations know. They feed you junk, then you get a taste for junk, and then you crave junk, and then you eat lots of junk.
The fact of the matter is that the body does not need refined sugar; that is not something that it needs at all. The body does need fats, carbohydrates, salt, and protein. But the thing is that what your body needs is not salt, it needs sodium. The best source of sodium is celery or celery juice, and you can get all of the sodium you need. And the hotter climate you live in, the more sodium you need.
So far as fats go, the body produces cholesterol. There is nobody that does not have any cholesterol in their system. It’s the ratio of high density lipids to low density lipids that is the important equation in your life. So, we get our fats from using good oils like coconut, grape seed, flax seed, and hemp seed. All those oils have different nutrients that the body needs.
The question whether the industrial food system of the world thrives by feeding people garbage and then people becoming addicted to that is obviously true and it is a sad thing. It is a hard cycle to break, and the only way it is broken is by people having the foresight and tenacity to give up the bad things in their life, and not realizing that as soon as you give something up right away the desire to do it dissipates.
Chuck: Take two examples of corn syrup and canola oil that are promoted by the industrial food complex that are supposed to be good for us. Are they?
John: No, corn syrup is one of the more detrimental foods you can eat besides putting flesh into your body. The thing is that a lot of the foods that we have now are not the foods that we traditionally have had and the body takes a long time to get used to things.
For example, we have eaten refined sugar for about a hundred years. We never had any sugar that was that concentrated before. Refined sugar is concentrated 4,200 times from the time it leaves the sugar cane. So its the only food that elicits an adrenaline reaction in the body. And the reason it does that is because we only have been eating that for a hundred years and the body has not had a chance to adapt to it.
The thing about corn syrup is that the body has not had a chance to adapt to it. It is basically like eating plastic. The body does not know how to handle it. it is a very detrimental thing.
Another thing, canola oil is made from rapeseed. Canola oil really means oil from Canada basically where rapeseed is grown. Mustard gas is made from rapeseed a very poisonous substance. Rapeseed is detrimental to the autoimmune system and should really not be eaten at all.
Chuck: How does your vegan diet help you take back control of your health and to be proactive instead of reactive. In our medical system doctors are only paid when you are sick.
Take Control of Your Health
John: The thing is that our doctors get paid when you are sick, traditionally, the Chinese and other oriental doctors got paid when you were well. So it tended to make people more preemptive in their dietary choices. And from my own experience as a naturopathic doctor over all of these years I have learned by far the best way to view your health is to be come proactive. Make choices before you’re under the eight ball. Make a choice to stay healthy instead of trying to get healthy after you have become ill.
The smartest people are the ones that make that choice early in their lives, and stay healthy and don’t have all these heath problems. Don’t subject yourself to environmental contamination through the food that you eat and the lifestyle that you live and then get cancer and then try to cure the cancer. It is very important.
Why Take Supplements?
Chuck Why would one want to take the extra step of taking supplements if they have gone to the extra step of eating a healthy vegan diet?
John I recommend to all my patients that they take supplements. The reason is basically that there are a lot of things that affect the nutrients that you take into your body. One thing is that a lot of foods these days are grown in soils that are depleted of nutrients. Even though you may eat a good variety of food and good foods, they do not have all the nutrients that you need. [recent studies have shown a 25 to 30 percent loss of mineral content in vegetables since 1975 alone.]
Another thing is that by the choices that you make in your life, you can destroy nutrients that you have already gotten. For instance if you drink alcohol or eat refined sugar, you destroy your vitamin B. If you smoke cigarettes, you destroy your vitamin C. If you live in a really cold climate you need more vitamin C.
So it is important to take supplements. And the reason is that the body is a complex machine, and to run properly it needs to have the right nutrients. It is just like an engine. If you put bad gasoline or all of the additives you need like oil in an engine it is not going to run well.
It is much more important to get more of the nutrients than you need than less than what you need. So vitamin B for instance, you pass it out of your body the vitamin B that you do not need. But, if you do not get the vitamin B that you do need, it is a much worse situation to not have it than to not utilize all that you take.
The easiest thing to do is to get a good liquid vitamin mineral if they do not want to mess with a lot of different supplements. I use Liquid Health supplement called Complete. Take two tablespoons a day.
I buy mine through a food coop. I spend about $10-15 per week on supplements.
Chuck Mentioning all of these supplements, one would think that you sell supplements.
John No, I don’t.
Chuck What do you charge for your naturopathic consultations?
John To make a long story short, I do all of my naturopathic medicine at no charge. And, that is why I don’t provide supplements or herbs to my patients. I have gone to a lots of doctors, naturopaths included, that have charged me a $100 bucks to come in and see them, but I have left with a bill of $350 dollars because they give me this whole list of nutrients. You know they are making a profit, you never know if the motivation may be pure or not.
Ever since I became a naturopathic doctor, I have done all of my naturopathic medicine for free, and the reason is because I think that we all need to make the world a better place in some way if we can. So each of us needs to do what ever we can. That is one thing that I thought that I could do that would make people healthier and happier, and in turn make the world happier, and in return make me happier.
Chuck: Thank you, John.
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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:
Nancy and Michael Phillips The Village Herbalist:Sharing Plant Medicines with Family and Community, p. 18
John Roth Supplements Table below

Overpopulation is a Cultural Challenge

Mon, 30 Mar 2009 18:06:48 -0700

It is a cultural or educational challenge for us to teach the next generation not to make the same indefinite growth mistake we made. Maybe the solution starts with telling our children the truth.
Debate is Polarized
The population debate is polarized between the view that population is the root cause of our problems from global warming to environmental destruction vs. the view that human numbers pose no problem at all. Overpopulation denial stems from the fear that human rights would be trampled by a 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.
It has become 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 realize that we have a population problem despite being stuck in traffic jams and surrounded by people constantly.
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, deforestation, and drought 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 then spew out the resulting waste.
Yes, the financial crisis is an immediate problem. However, it all comes back to our numbers. If we did not have the numbers 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, if there weren't so many of us.
Overshoot Background
We have overshot the carrying capacity of our planet. 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.
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 Fall of Modern Culture and the Rise of Earth Culture.
Over Population is a Cultural Problem
Part of me thinks, that people who “get it” should gather and enclave to become the seeds for new cultures that free nature from her servitude 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.
The dilemma is that as long as our dominant culture is growth oriented, and we live by the story that, “the world belongs to man,” our culture will continue to overwhelm all efforts to reverse our crash course.
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 our culture’s pilgrims, settlers, and manifest destiny instead of teaching the truth of the theft of the land 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? Why don’t we give the first Americans a billion dollars a year in military aid like we give Israel? Native American people have a lot to teach us that we need to relearn now, and heck they gave, actually we stole, the entire continent from them—another discussion for later.
In other words, 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. If new cultures do not replace our Taker culture, there will be no change in course or Great Turning.
Ending the Polarized 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 cultural models of the first people’s that we have nearly exterminated or let nature give us a global Easter Island wake-up call.
The first step to get the majority of people to “wake-up” is to develop an appreciation of what our culture has done for the last 10,000 years to our “relations.” This requires a whole new educational message to the youth to overcome our lack of empathy of the impact of our numbers. It is almost becoming an cultural or educational challenge for us to somehow teach the next generation not to make the same indefinite growth mistake we made. Maybe the solution starts with telling our children the truth.
Environmental generational amnesia is another key reason 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. Imagine how you would feel about humanity’s expansion if you were a Native American alive in 1491.
Here are a few controversial, but creative ideas try to develop a consensus to reduce overpopulation before nature does it for us in our monocultured wasteland. Some are realistic today, others are intended to open up your mind and the discussion.
Talk About Overpopulation
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. Our Taker cultural story is told to us this through media, education, social behavior, traditions, stories, and religion. We need to reverse the perception and discussion from pro-growth to pro-powerdown. Let’s alter the discussion so the general public realizes that we have been procreating like rabbits and consuming like pigs.
Our culture insists on growth of both our population and economy. In fact, our modern economic model requires economic growth to pay for the interest on the debt that we are accumulating. The financial crisis today is partly caused and compounded by the end of growth caused by petrocollapse or the 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. The earth is “to big to fail.”
Council of All Beings
If all other species were equally represented at every stage of public decision making, we would live in a far better 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.
Going Green is Not Enough
Simply put, reducing consumption to support nine million, whether by intention or by petrocollapse, is still overpopulation. As I said in my interview on New Dimensions Media, Going Green is Not Enough. Every increase in automobile milage is squandered by an increase in population. Recycling and installing compact florescent light bulbs just manage to make more room for an even larger population and ultimately bigger problems.
Tax Population
If you want to play, maybe you have to pay. Start taxing people more for larger families. 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, but just that you are going to have to pay for what you’re responsible for. More kids means more schools, infrastructure, healthcare, public services, etc. One child should be able to go to public school for free, but after that you pay the actual cost for each additional child. Start this with new children born 12 months from now.
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. Some have said, when famine occurs, send birth control instead of food. I would say, send the birth control and educate women before famine occurs to prevent it in the first place.
Limit the importation of food and migration from outside your bioregion or watershed. Once we have to live within the carrying capacity of our region, we eventually limit our population. Immigration is very controversial. My best friend is strongly pro-immigration to help support his bakery business. But, limiting your population within your fixed geographic region is the primary way native Leaver peoples maintained their steady-state population levels for millions of years. Also, if you can’t move to where the resources are, you will have to make due with smaller families and a simpler lifestyle where you are.
This is a complex issue that probably needs more discussion. All immigrants here in the U.S. today are engrained in our society. Maybe you draw the line here, and then move on.
Reverse Sprawl
Communities should consider ending or heavily taxing construction on new sites and just allow replacement of comparable square footage on existing developed sites. Or, allowing the shifting of development rights to concentrate development into pedestrian communities. What good is having a community discussion about “food security” while at the same time continuing to add to the 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?
A Final Illustration, Running the Numbers
In the image at top of the page, I illustrated that a family of five children for just four generations grows to 625 people, compared to just eight people including grandparents if couples have two kids in their late thirties. Larger families will consume the vast majority of resources in affect taking away from smaller families. Further, if everyone had one child families, the world population of almost 6.8 billion would drop to 1 billion in a 150 years.
Petrocollapse and Population
Here are the most sobering numbers. Before we started using oil around 1850 there were only 1 billion people on the planet. Today with the easy-to-recover half of oil gone there are about 6.7 billion. In the next few years petrocollapse is going to start to take away the carrying capacity supporting 5.7 billion, or 85 percent, of today’s global population.
Homo-fossilus-foolus will be extinct by the end of this century. When oil is gone, world population will probably drop well below 1 billion again because our overshoot has significantly reduced the earth’s resilience and carrying capacity compared before Europeans expanded to the Americas.
The good news is that the problem is not humanity, it is our Taker culture. Humans have lived on the planet for three million years in symbiosis with our ecosystem and a riot of life. The problem is our agricultural revolution Taker culture. The next stage will come from the new earth cultures being born today.
Our duty is, as I said, is to be honest with our children and give them the choice to take control of their future. We have to tell them the truth that our parents did not teach us, that our numbers are not only a threat every other species, but also to ourselves.
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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:
Joanna Macy The shift to a life-sustaining civilization, The Great Turning
Chuck Burr Our Cultural Story: What Makes Us Us
Wikipedia Food Race
Culturequake Watershed vs. Bioregion: A Better Model
Peter H., Jr. Kahn The Human Relationship with Nature: Development and Culture
Starhwak The Fifth Sacred Thing
Joanna Macy Welcome to all beings

A Farm for The Future – Film Review

Sat, 28 Mar 2009 21:40:21 -0700

Wildlife filmmaker Rebecca Hosking investigates how to transform her family's farm in Devon, UK into a low energy farm for the future, and discovers that nature and permaculture holds the key.
The magic of this film is abundant. First, Rebecca is not a died-in-the-wool sustainability activist. Her earnestness in asking questions and genuine learning evolve through the film. Rebecca was raised in a traditional farming family in Devon. The magic also comes from her experience as a wildlife cinematographer. The footage of the wildlife and landscape is beautiful.

The film begins with Rebecca returning to her family's farm in Devon to become the next generation to farm and her quest to find a more sustainable farming practice in view of rising fuel prices. She learns how dependent food production is on cheap fossil fuel and how insecure oil production will be in the future.
The film documents Rebecca’s exploration of ways to farm without fossil fuels. One of the most touching momementcs of A Farm for the Future is when Rebecca asks pioneering farmer Charlotte Hollis, “Are you telling us not to plow?” Rebecca is starting to get it when when Charlotte responds, “Yes.”
The enjoyable balance of the documentary follows Rebecca through her visits to beautifully captured woodland forest garden permacultureists in the UK and Ireland where design is inspired by nature.
Initially dismissing permaculture as, “not proper farming, Rebecca learns from leading permacultureists such as Patrick Whitefield and Chris Dickson, that polyculture yields per acre can exceed those of industrial farming practices and how low maintenance the permaculture food forest model is. After touring these permaculture sites, it is wonderful to see how Rebecca looks at her family farm in a whole new way.
I highly recommend this film to any and everyone who wants to see what real sustainability looks like. Follow this film up with some of the other permaculture resources below.
To inspire you to become the change you want to see, I am going to leave with you with a quote from Joanna Macy, teacher of the “The Council of All Beings” and other deep ecology practices
The most remarkable feature of this historical moment on Earth is not that we are on the way to destroying the world-we've actually been on the way for quite a while. It is that we are beginning to wake up, as from a millennia-long sleep, to a whole new relationship to our world, to ourselves and each other —Joanna Macy.
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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:
Rebecca Hosking A Farm for the Future
Joanna Macy www.joannamacy.net
The Permaculture Research Institute of Australia www.permaculture.org.au
Permaculture Activist magazine www.permacultureactivist.net
Permaculture Magazine www.permaculture-magazine.co.uk
David Jacke with Eric Toensmeier Edible Forest Gardens
Toby Hemenway Gaia’s Garden