More on mass extinctions

So I was just reading an article Jason posted in his post entitled Christmas Eve 2050, and it mentions the fact that, aside from the asteroid at the end of the age of dinosaurs, the other great mass extinctions have very mysterious origins.

Now, Michael Cremo's studies of anomalous human evolution data suggest that humans may have been here for possibly billions of years, or at least millions more than the standard anthropological account suggests. What if he's right, and what if humans, then as now, have been civilization-building and causing extinctions on such a wide scale? I could be wrong, but after a million or so years, isn't even the remotest evidence of human civilization, radioactive waste, gone? Surely 62 million years is enough time for human civilization to rise and fall, and disappear without a trace, leaving roaming bands of hundreds of humans alive somewhere on the planet, no? If we do cause a great mass extinction, and nearly wipe ourselves out, and cause this civilization to disappear without a trace, could we start over and, after millions of years, cause another one? Could we have done so already? If the evidence for it disappears, how do we know it hasn't already happened?

Maybe humans really are preordained to do bad, and fall out of ecological balance, but with really really long periods of equilibrium. Maybe that's not so bad, except for times like now.

Hah- crazy.

Planetary Volition

On the heels of that last post, I'm thinking more of the possibility that global warming and civilization are part of the planet's plan. Or, what if this isn't natural, whatever that may mean, but the Earth really is cleaning up after our mess. Derrick Jensen said in an interview that when he was a kid, his mom would sometimes tell him to clean his room, and he would often ignore the request. Eventually, she'd tell him to clean the room, or she would do it for him, and he wouldn't like it (because all his stuff would get thrown out or reorganized in ways unfamiliar to him or whatever). And he said that maybe that's what the planet's doing with us: it's giving us all these warnings and all this opportunity for humanity to prove its worthwhile-ness, and if we keep ignoring the directives, mama Gaia's going to clean up and we're not going to like it. Makes a lot of sense to me.

But my question is: why do some people refuse to see this as a possibility? I'm not talking about those in denial of the crises we face; I mean the people who get it, but are insistent on mechanistic interpretations, and balk at the attribution of such 'human' traits on nonhuman entities. Why is it so difficult for some people to conceive of ascribing consciousness or volition elsewhere in ways like this? It's I think the same sort of denial that people have about Cleve Backster and primary perception, and some sort of consciousness at a level we don't understand that well. What is there to be gained from aclosed worldview? I mean, I dont' necessarily 'believe' in this, but it doesn't touble me to conceive of it, and talk about things as if it were true. A good friend of mine would be troubled by this, and frequently balks at alternate sort of ideas, like astrology or things like this.

It seems to me that we can simultaneously retain scientific and logical vigor and be open to things beyond this rationalist framework. Why do people consciously and intentionally deny possibilities that don't, to my mind, threaten in any meaningful way their place in the world? Maybe they are threatening, and I have forgotten about that. Or maybe they're just crazy, and I've convinced myself of the ludicrous.

Oh well- more fun to bask in bizarre than refuse it.

Mass extinctions

Man, couple of great recent posts by Ran Prieur, about mass entinctions causing great leaps in biological complexity, and us being due for our 62 million year mass extinction event, and more bad news about global warming.

It occured to me a few months ago when I saw the 62-million year cycle article that maybe civilization is just doing the earth's bidding, and helping it's periodic detox, so to speak. And maybe the detoxing is good, because it causes increases in overall complexity in the long haul. There's just something so great to me about the idea that we're not nearly so important as we think we are. Puts things back in perspective and dislodges some of that humanism/anthropocentrism we're so used to.

I love it.

Charles Fort, Wilderness

I'm reading The Book of the Damned, by Charles Fort, and it's pretty cool. It echoes a sentiment I'd expressed some time ago to a friend when we were talking about nonduality. I said that the fact that species differentiation is very blurry at the edges is one indicator that the desire to attribute things to neat categories is unfounded.

Fort acknowledges that at towards the center of these categories that don't really exist, it can be easy to draw boundaries, and I would say that for practical purposes, it can be useful. But in the end, it's all intermediate, and he sees it as importnat to keep that in mind. It's kind of hard to wrap one's mind around, and it comes and goes for me, but I dig it.

I also recently read "The Trouble with Wilderness, or Getting Back to the Wrong Nature," by William Cronon. It's pretty interesting, and definitely useful to me, but I feel like I've come to terms with a lot of the shortcomings of romanticizing the wild already on my own. He makes some really great points, though, such as pointing out that wilderness has often been constructed as a place of refuge from the urban or suburban, and that experience of the wild is often very tied up to tools of the civilized (cars, camping gear, etc.) He says wilderness is the stand-in for a Judeo-Christian godhead that many environmentalists reject, environmentalists who then project those feelings of awe and grandeur to the pristine wilderness. I think he writes this off, failing to consider that perhaps the feelings of awe and grandeur were on wilderness in the first place, then projected to a Judeo-Christian god, and then re-projected on nature. He criticizes, rightfully, the idea of wilderness as a place of nature absent of humans, but that's an idea that I think primitivists don't hold- we want to get back out there and re-establish a place for humans in the wild.

Maybe I'm partial to the idea of wilderness, and I am still romantic about it. I recognize his criticisms, and do think they are a much-needed counterpoint. I also think his suggestion to place value in other elements of the natural world, no matter how humanly manipulated. is important. But you know, diversity of tactics- not everyone has to do the same thing, or even agree on the same principles or tactics, and doing so may be more effective than debating about the one right way and trying to get everyone behind it.

Rebuilding ecologies

I've really enjoyed Jason's last few posts over at Anthropik about the Alleghany Forest and wolves and coyotes, and have begun to understand that this is what's going to happen. Ecology is dynamic- there is no perfect arrangement. It's built from the ground up by different species tentatively (or not-so-tentatively) making headway into new areas, and negotiating terms with the other inhabitants there. Maybe there is no such thing as a perfect ecosystem, or a single climax community. It seems that a new species will enter a (re-)building ecosystem and have an early stake in it. If one player doesn't show up, the game doesn't go on as it would have otherwise. They are integral, but not perhaps not necessary. The ecosystem, in their absence, would develop in another way.

That's not to deny the importance of basic role-players (producers, consumer, decomposers), but only to suggest that the details are up for grab.

That's why humans can and were and will be again (if we make it) integral parts of ecosystems. In such a community, humans are essential and play a role that the rest depend on. They're not outsiders or foreigners, but co-designers. And that's why the destruction of indigenous is such a tragedy from the broader ecological sense, not just the personal human one (which it is, and mustn't be forgotten). The civilized don't have a place, don't understand that an ecosystem could be better, indeed, could be with humans here. Everywhere the civilized go, the ecosystems would be better off had we not been there, and we're not all dumb; we know this. That supports the absurd notion of original sin and humanity's inherent evilness. We see the destruction we bring, even if on some levels we celebrate it. We invade and have no place in the new communities, and instead of trying to find a place where we could integrate, we destroy. But we can find a place to integrate, and we will again. We're going to have to, and soon. And I'm excited for it.

Revolution

I was at a party yesterday and spent some time looking through one of the hosts' library, which is one hell of a personal infoshop of radical literature. This person's a theory connoisseur, and seemed to really be dedicated to reading and writing and critiquing. He mentioned a couple of times the revolution, semi-earnestly, I think.

I felt really frustrated and kind of sorry for the folks there, though, because it seems to me that there is nothing that they're doing which is going to make much difference. At the risk of being condescending, I felt like I had been the same way and moved past that immature valorization of 'struggle' and resistance to capital. Now, this host was incredibly smart and well informed, but he seemed to me to be so wrapped up in a bubble, more so than I am. I kept thinking about the fact that the world seemed so much an abstraction, even when it may be embodied by struggle (often someone else's far away or at least unrelated to oneself). The world cannot be grappled with in an abstract arena in which rationality is the only currency. Ideas are not the purpose of life, not the only one anyway, and life needs to be embodied.

I'm reminded of Derrick Jensen's quote about violence: "I don't believe the question of whether to use violence is the right one. Instead, the question should be: Do you sufficiently feel the loss? So long as we discuss this in the abstract, we still have much to lose." If you feel it deeply and personally, you'll know how to act. In other words, when dealing with 'violence' or 'no violence,' you're operating primarily in the world of ideas and abstractions, instead of living embodiment. That we are operating in abstractions still probably facilitates the continued destruction.

We have to feel the effects of the onslaught of this world. If you can't cry over it, if you can only think about it in terms of tons of topsoil depleted, or number of species driven to extinction, or square miles of oceanic dead zone, you are not alive. If the death of our homes is not worth crying over, what is?

I'm beginning to suspect that words are pretty hollow for the most important things. They're road posts, maybe, but empty in themselves. Maybe it is about all about deceit. The idea of unspeakability allures me, even though it is horrific. It allures me because it points in the direction of what I'm getting at, what I'm feeling, that there can be actions and events so grievous and monumental that we cannot put words to them. Nothing can describe it, nothing can encapsulate it- it deifies our grasp and reminds us of the task ahead of us, and more optimistically to the other side of unspeakable that may just be waiting for us when we go home.

Letting go

Last post I mentioned that maybe I need to stop worrying about reading all the anti-civ stuff I can, and I agree with that. One of the skills I think it's important to cultivate is acquiescence to circumstances, and the need not to control everything. With a barrage of posts on many of the blogs I read, I've had a hard time keeping up, and feel weighed down trying to keep pace. But that's not necessary. I'll read things, or not, but it shouldn't be obligatory.

When I was in school, I was an overachiever typically and had lots to say. I raised my hand near constantly and often felt frustrated if I couldn't say what I wanted to say. Now, this isn't an apologia for the awful and dehumanizing school system, but that experience eventually brought some wisdom. Namely, we can't always get what we want and that's probably a good thing. I'm not in favor of self-denial, and I think that, left to our own devices, people are not typically bloodlusting and in need of control. But control is ahttp://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.giflso one of the cornerstones of empire, and an appreciation for its downsides is important, I think.

Also, I realized that reading all this stuff all the time puts me in a bit of a bubble, and it's important to reach outward and gain new insight from alternate sources. And not even necessarily reading right-wing popaganda, but just simply authors and ideas that are not of the same milieu. So I'm working on that, including reading 'The Godfather's Revenge,' Mark Weingardner's new interquel in the Godfather series. It's good.

A few days off

Lots of good stuff on the blogs I'm reading the past week. Ran generated a bit of hub bub with a post about the refusal of tribes to engage in purely utilitarian engagements.

I almost quit this blog because I'm not used to writing on a regular basis, and I'm often not sure what to say. But thanks Dan for linking me and thereby encouraging me to keep on.

I feel like I spend a lot of time trying to 'catch up' with all the anti-civ stuff out there. Maybe I should take the advice of Zachary Nowack and quit after three books, so to speak.

My partner asked why I spent so much time reading this stuff which in many ways just affirms what I already know and suspect. Could it be that I'm not really sure of this, my posturing and explicating notwithstanding? I don't know.

But Dan mentioned a sentiment I'd seen from a while ago in one of Johnny Z's pieces that language is about deceit, not truth, because truth is typically expressed unconsciously by the individual. Maybe I plow through so much language looking for truth? I dunno if that makes sense. Another part is probably just trying to find affirmation of sanity in an insane world, and wanting to spend time around people and ideas who understand where I'm coming from. I think it can be really hard for radical-type people to stand tall in the face of criticism, especially when they honestly are not sure of themselves.

I went through a time where I re-examined a lot of my ideas. I considered the possibility that the dominant culture is dominant because it's the most sane, most effective, most just one. I thought about being a police officer, or a real estate agent or going into the military. I considered the idea that, yeah, there are excesses and problems, but maybe these are surmountable and not indicative of anything systemic.

I'm pretty confident they are, and ecological ideas continue to keep me grounded. As Derrick Jensen says, 'clean water' is a sufficient justification for the critique of civilization. That is, we can think ourselves in circles, but we can't deny the physical realities of our bodies.

I think also, that cities aid this disconnect. Jerry Mander says that we exist in a weird incestuous relationship with ourselves in cities. We forget that not all of existence is man-made, because most of what we experience is man-made. Getting out of the city is important, and something I'm going to more actively pursue, not just for primitive skill-learning which will, I hope, come in time, but also and primarily for my sanity.

UFOs, Information Overload

I've been watching some online videos yesterday and today. One is Hacking Democracy, an HBO documentary about the insecurity of electronic voting. (In short, they're very insecure). Another is 'Arithmetic, Population and Energy,' a look at carrying capacity and growth and the ecological problems we're facing. The other is 'America: From Freedom To Fascism,' made by Aaron Russo, producer of, among other projects, the Eddie Murphy/Dan Aykroyd movie 'Trading Places'. I read about this last one in the Onion, and they were pretty critical, but I was curious, and when I learned that it was available for free to view online, I decided, 'why not?'

I'm not yet through with it, because I got distracted seeing G. Edward Griffin speaking. He's the author of a book I found a few years ago 'World Without Cancer: The Story of Vitamin B17,' which I think I'll write about sometime later. In any event, I decided to look up info on him, and found his website, Freedom Force International. Some interesting stuff there, including info about the Federal Reserve (related to topics covered in America: From Freedom to Fascism), some 9/11 truth stuff about evidence for planned demolitions, some Illuminati stuff, some criticism of the left and the right as all collectivist, rather than individualist, and then this page, featuring a video of a press conference with dozens of people talking about UFO and extraterrestrial life and high technology, and the need not to militarize space. Many of these folks are current or former high level aviation, military or other governmental officials who have pledged to present their testimonies to Congress under oath if given the opportunity. The opening remarks were given by a former medical doctor, who implored the audience to be skeptical, but not irrationally so, and to be willing to accept information that seems credible and believable.

I'm not sure what to make of it all. There's more testimony and then audience Q & A left to view, and it all sounds right. That is, if anything like this were ever to be legit, this seems like the way it would be done. I want to disbelieve it in many ways, but in other ways, I want to be open to it. They mention other advanced alien civilizations, and as a primitivist, that's troubling because it naturalizes high technology and civilization. Ran in his essay, The Critique of Civilization Changes Everything, discusses "intelligent life' in space, and how that's a euphemism for civilized life because it idiosyncratically defines intelligence as the application of knowledge toward civilized ends (towards distance and control I would say), and denies the intelligence of the rest of the community of life on the planet that fails to civilize. He writes:

What we're really looking for in space is other stupid life, other life that has gone mad the same way we have, and we haven't found it because our madness is a violently unsustainable deviation from reality, and if creatures on other planets have done it, they burned out and crashed in a galactic microsecond the same way we're doing, and their sitcoms and commercials and nationalist talk radio blew by us for only 50 years when we were lounging in grass huts eating mangoes, or will blow by us in the future when we're doing so again.

Videos like the one Griffin links to naturalize civilization, and suggest that it's really the path we were always meant for.

That's what I thought when I started writing this, but maybe not. Maybe these extraterrestrials are really stupid in the same way as this culture, and sure, maybe this is 100% true and legit, but so what? With billions and trillions of stars and planets in the universe, who's to say that other "intelligent," that is, stupid life has really got it right? They could be the aberrations too, just ones who happened to make it out to this planet from across galaxies.

In any event, this may not even be true. Griffin himself suggests that it could be the work of agent provocateurs providing disinfo, though the likelihood of all of these people doing so is probably low.

The world is a crazy, exciting place with all sorts of truths. I'm going to keep trying to cultivate an openness to it all. Wish me luck!

Voting, Economy

So I voted today. I'm not entirely sure why. I think part of it was peer pressure, and not wanting to be one of 'those people' who don't vote.

On the other hand, I haven't come across reasons convincing enough for me not to vote. I hate the 'lesser of two evils' idea, but I can't see a way past it, and anyway, voting doesn't prevent me from doing other meaningful activity, like rewilding and learning useful post-collapse skills.

I'm sympathetic to the arguments that say, 'Ultimately, no matter who you vote for, the government is not going to change, so voting is relatively meaningless as an anarchist.' I'm also sympathetic to the fact that, in voting, you participate in your own subjugation. Ran has an essay where he recounts a scene in 'Good Will Hunting:' Matt Damon's character tells Robin Williams' that his father used to beat him, but give him a choice with what implement, either a belt, a stick or a wrench. He always chose the wrench, "Because fuck him." The point is, it was always clear to Will that this was an evil, dominating relationship, and he never deluded himself into thinking otherwise. He also never participated in his own subjugation by electing the implement of lesser evil. I'm also sympathetic to not voting as a statement of withdrawal and refusal of this sham system wherein people have almost no control over the elements of their life, and the vast array of options potentially open to them is typically between two candidates who agree on far more than they disagree about, and who you didn't choose to begin with. Bob Black talks about this, and notes the decline in voting by the eligible population, even by those most recently enfranchised.

All of that I'm sympathetic to, but I still voted. Peer pressure, I guess.

Also- Ran foresees an economic bust soon. I looked into it a bit- countries who typically produced goods for the US are becoming less reliant on US dollars, some countries are beginning to buy petrol barrels in Euros or other non-dollar currencies, the housing bubble is starting to bust, meaning the primary investment considered a 'sure thing,' real estate, is collapsing, and people won't be able to borrow against the mortgages since their 'property' no longer be so valuable. The price of petrol will probably rise soon too to account for the continually diminishing reserves, making it harder and and harder for people to get to the jobs they hate just so they can keep paying off debts, causing a drop in 'productivity' and less money being generated. Soon after that will be inflation probably, and perhaps on a massive scale. Maybe the drop in productivity, as an upside, means less of the world will be converted from the living to the dead. But maybe not- I don't understand economics all that well.

I thought about this a lot. It's pretty scary, and I can understand why people get so worked up over jobs and job security, even if they mostly would rather be doing other things. So many of us, and especially in NY, are so dependent on others for our livelihood. Food and water and medicine, obviously, but also laundering clothes, or fixing things. A shitty economy makes a lot of that tenuous. What's going to happen when bread is $100 a loaf. That's cool for my school loans, cuz $7k becomes 700 loaves of bread, and shit, I could do that now if I needed to with the little savings I have. But income's not going to go up all that much, probably. I could start riding my bike more exclusively once unlimited transit cards are a few hundred bucks a month, not $76, and I could launder clothes at home, probably, and scavenge more foods, and buy more bulk products and never eat out. And rent's tied down for a couple of years, so that's fixed, but not everyone's in such a decent predicament.

Anyway, it all got me scared, and I really worry that in the future once collapse accelerates, debt may be an imprisonable offense as Casemeau expressed concern about. That may be one strategy to for centralized power to maintain its grip, and/or laws may be enacted making it even more difficult to live off the grid. Maybe that's where being an outlaw land squatter like Ted foresees and plans for will come into play.

I may follow suit with Ran and spend some money on goods now in case that money becomes effectively worthless if inflation really does take off.

Also- anyone reading this interested in primitive skills, check out this page. Beer bottles, sticks and discarded wire hangers I can foresee as being in abundance after collapse.

Visions of the Future

Some time ago, my friend J send an email to handful of kids he knew asking what out visions for the future are, as it concerns the environment. He was working on a semester-long project trying to determine our school's ecological impact. Here was my response:

Hey J,

I appreciate your emailing this to me. This is something that I find very compelling about primitivist ideas: it seems to offer an actual alternative vision. I'm reminded of Fight Club, when Tyler says, "In my world, I see people climbing wrist-thick kudzu vines up the side of what used to be the Sears Tower. I see people laying strips of venison on abandoned six-lane superhighways." I was inspired by that, and thought about how this is excellent precisely because it offers a vision, something more than just a negation of present-day bad things.

In any event, this is what I envision, maybe ten, maybe a hundred pr more years down the line: people once again living off their landbases, primarily nomadic foargers, but some horticulturalist probably as populations diminish and people learn again what works and what doesn't in their regions. The mass slaiughter and extinction of species is halted. Some species begin to recover- salmon, black bears, innumerable insects, etc. The skies are clearer, the trees have begun to re-emerge. Forests are coming back. Cities are mostly abandoned curiosities, though wilderness hasn't kept them at arm's length. It seems that much of our civilization's work is maintenance (mowing the lawn, cleaning, waste management, re-building, etc. etc.)- it takes a lot to keep fighting the earth and subduing it. As a result, I envision wilderness sprouting again over former urban enclaves, and within a generation. I see men and women able again to interact with each other in non-dominating ways- rape is a concept so foreign as to be incomprehensible. I see sharing valued a priori. I am inspired by what one author of hunter-gatherers has described as a 'cosmic economy of sharing,' in which the earth is seen as bountiful and giving, and everyone upon the earth is expected to reciprocate that- no hoarding permitted. I see people laughing, playing, sharing stories, making love, arguing and fighting sometimes, but above all being human. I don't think we're perfect- there must be some nascent elements of us which collectivelly brought us to our present crises. But neither are we depraved and blood-lusting. Embedded within us, I think is the capacity to live harmoniously with each other and with the non-human animate and inanimate beings that we share the world with. We did it for so very long, and I think that one day, if we emerge out of this big mess and become healed, we may look at those of us living today as so wounded, and so misguided that we by and large missed the fact that everything we need was right there for us, where it had always been. I hope that one day, we can engage the world around us, the people, the plants, the animals, the rocks, the winds, the soils, everything around us without an eye toward control and manipulation. I think about the myriad problems we face- ecological ones, interpersonal ones, psychological ones, and I hope that one day, we're able to see these as signs on every level that we weren't doing the right thing, and that our problems began to ameliorate once we returned to our roots.

It's hard, the transition- I may never see such a day, but I hope that we will come out on the other side, with the madness behind us, happy, whole again.
______

Still makes me smile. We'll see yet what comes t opass.

Veganism

For about 5 years, I was a vegan. Occasionally, I would freegan some chocolate or other desert, or I would fail to ask the ingredients for a dish if I went to a restaurant if I was sure it was vegetarian.

A few weeks ago, after a while thinking about it, I decided to start eating fish. I wanted to only eat fish I'd caught myself. My uncle has a little boat docked on a lake in Jersey that he fishes in semi-regularly during boat season. He was supposed to go out the next day after I called him a couple Saturdays ago, and would send some of whatever he caught my way. He got sick, though, and never made it out. I decided to get some fish from the Green Market at Union Sq in place of self-caught or uncle-caught fish.

I spoke with one of the stand salespeople for Blue Moon Fish Company, a small-ish operation based in Mattituck, NY. It's one guy who does most of the fishing on his 36-foot boat, and who's been selling at the Green Market for more than a decade. Since I've started eating more and more local food, I would pass his stand the once a week they were there and notice a bunch of articles on their board, stuff from the NY Times, from Zagat, from other magazines. Many of them hailed his fish as 'the freshest in NYC,' only to be surpassed by fishing it oneself. I was lured in.

For a while, I'd been re-thinking veg*nism. I mentioned before that if all the universe is comprised of sentient subjects, and that resonates really strongly with me, then I didn't have the moral basis for not killing animals but killing plants. Also, reading sites like the Weston Price Foundation and Beyond Vegetarianism made me re-think the importance of animal foods in one's diet. Also, reading in similar and other places the ill effects of soy, as well as wheat (with its mock meat form seitan) and other grains made me reconsider my protein sources. (Part of the anti-wheat and anti-soy suggestion comes from my sympathies to the Paleodiet, though I don't think it has a monopoly on good health. Just as there's no one right way to live, I don't think there's one right way to eat. Part of what makes humans so awesome is that we are so adaptable, and can live of a pretty wide range of food, depending on our heritages and lifestyle and all of that).

Anyway, I started eating fish, only from these folks, though. For one, it's all wild-caught, so I feel satisfied knowing that I'm not supporting more domestication, and especially not fish farms. It's sustainable yield, as far as I'm aware, though truthfully I haven't looked too much into that. I'm pretty sure the local Long island fishery is not endangered in the same way as some of the other world's fisheries. I'm also eating locally, not having protein-y foods shipped from 1500 miles away. So far I've had it four times, including tonight's prep for tomorrow's lunch. I didn't feel sick or anything, and felt pretty good eating it.

Previously, a month or so ago, I visited my friend Johnny's mom's place in Pennsylvania. She has a few acres there and keeps goats and hens and ducks and grows some veggies. I had some scrambled eggs from these happy hens, which was alright. He, like me, is mostly vegan in the city, but gladly ate eggs when visiting up there. He even put on a few pounds of muscle in a couple weeks, his body presumably finally getting something it sought. Also domesticated eggs, but I don't know if it's reasonable to hold out if I know the chickens play an important role on her little farm and are seemingly happy. I don't think there's any reasonable way to be 'pure' in my refusal of domestication (especially when 99% of my veggies are domesticated rather than wild).

Still, I went to a vegan potluck, and didn't feel comfortable about my recent omnivorism. I still haven't 'come out' to my old vegan roommates and friends. There's a lot of peer pressure there, which is probably intentional. If there's no way to physically force someone not to purchase animal foods, at least make them feel bad about it. I think I'm very mindful in my choices, and do try to mitigate my impact where possible. I hate factory farms and want them never to exist. I also recognize the energy use involved in eating higher trophic foods, and don't dismiss that it's far more efficient to feed mouths with grain than animals. But I still don't buy the vegan ideology, and do think eating animals is important, both spiritually and nutritionally.

All of this leaves me conflicted.

Arguing With Others

The science post got me thinking about an observation I had when talking with my friend Flesh. I was talking to him about the critique of civilization and the beneficence of nature-based ways of life, and I realized that he was a rapt audience. Often, I have to temper my words and choose them carefully when discussing crazy ideas with new people, in an effort to have each point I make be thoroughly verifiable and supported by substantial evidence. I did that for a while with him, but realized that he wasn't scanning my words looking for cracks to deny the spirit of what I was saying. And it was then that I realized there are at least two broadly dissimilar ways of making a convincing case for something.

The first is the more scientific way, mentioned above, where you use your words as weapons and chose them carefully, so as to force your audience to accept them or deny logic or the truth of your premises. It's implied that they are looking to criticize whatever they can and poke holes in your argument. In any event, that's how you conduct yourself.

The second is arguing on the assumption that your listener wants to believe you, and you just have to provide a reason to. That person is looking to make sense of your words and you don't need to be nearly as defensive.

I think both ways can bring forth strong argumentation, but for different reasons. In the first, rational way, it's because you don't want to be made a fool of and seem wrong. In the second, it's because you want your beliefs to make as much sense to your listener as to you, and present as clearly as you can why you think what you do.

I much prefer the second way.

On Science

I've been making my way through Jason Godesky's Thirty Theses on Anthropik. I'm in the middle of Thesis 8, human societies are defined by their food. Jason's very smart, and clearly has a handle on the anthropological literature. I studied archaeology and some ethnography as well, but whereas he used Daniel Quinn as a jumping off point, I used John Zerzan, and 'Future Primitive,' specifically.

One thing that made me think- he mentions in Thesis 6 the idea, popular among vegetarians, that to kill an animal for food is morally problematic in ways that killing a plant for food is not, and refutes this in part by suggesting that "there is even some intriguing indications of the possibility that plants may even feel in some strange way." I'm not sure what evidence he's alluding to, but it did remind me of Cleve Backster and his experiments with what he calls Primary Perception. From the link:

Sometimes it happens that a person can name the exact moment when his or her life changed irrevocably. For Cleve Backster, it was early morning on February 2, 1966, at thirteen minutes, fifty-five seconds of chart time for a polygraph he was administering. One of the world's experts on polygraphs, and the creator of the Backster Zone Comparison Test, the standard used by lie detection examiners worldwide, Backster had threatened the subject's well-being in hopes of triggering a response. The subject had responded electrochemically to this threat. The subject was a plant.

In a nutshell, this suggests some sort of primary (rather than extra-sensory) perception on the part of plants, and Backster's gone on to experiment extensively in this arena, uncovering many examples of this. Plants too, not unlike animals, seem to be alive and perceptive in meaningful ways.

(This also is partly why I no longer agree with veganism, as a dogma, despite my overwhelmingly vegan practices. After all, if the whole universe is alive and sentient, then the issue can't be eating only non-sentient life, since that doesn't exist. The issue must therefore be somewhere else, such as how that individual lives before it's consumed, or how its consumption fits into a broader whole.)

So Jason alludes to something like this, but later on affirms the anti-scientific nature of Backster's studies via this link. He's right, of course, in some ways. Science demands repeatability, and these phenomena, by Backster's own admission, tend not to be consistently repeatable. But that's not a fault of the phenomenon, but only one of science.

Ran Prieur writes about science's refusal to acknowledge that which cannot be reproduced on demand. I think that's a hell of a lot of wisdom that we're refusing when we discount that.

A friend of mine talks about the inherent biases of science, such as the above-mentioned bias toward reproducibility, the bias toward simple rather than intricate explanations, and the bias toward that which can be quantified at the expense of everything else. (There are probably more) That in particular is troubling to me, because so much of what is meaningful to me is not qualitative rather than quantitative. And even if it can be quantified, why bother, unless your aim is distance and control of the object of study, and I think that's one of Derrick Jensen's big beefs with science.

I'm very interested in exploring beyond science's limits. I recognize there's a world of wisdom in science, and have tempered my earlier dismissal of it. There are good scientists who are motivated by curiosity and wonder of the world, and not interested in distancing us and themselves from it, and trying to control and manipulate it. But science, strictly defined, is not the only way to know the world, and all too often heads away from the engagement I value. And so for me, onward from science to a million different ways of knowing.

First post- here we go.

I decided to start one of these to add to the little anti-civ blog world, both to help me save my thoughts and to maybe get feedback as I work through questions and observations, and to give a little more visibility to people on the ground who share these sentiments.

Where to begin? How about with the permaculture seminar I attended this past weekend at the Sixth Street Community Center? It featured Albert Bates, and covered where we're at ecologically, particularly in terms of Peak Oil and global climate change. He has a book coming out, The Post-Petroleum Survival Guide and Cookbook, which he had an advance copy of and which looks pretty cool. The second part of the talk looked at what permaculture can offer urban spaces in terms of food production and sustainable systems more broadly. Bates doesn't like the term sustainable, but for a slightly different reason than the reason I often have a problem with it. He points out that ultimately, nothing sustains; everything changes, and it only just depends on what sort of time-scale you're looking at. Presumably, he'd emphasize that we can have a role in that change, and work to preserve more or less that which we desire or don't, rather than looking at creating something that will last forever.

All that is fine in my book, and I think it's a good point to make. But it does ignore the more vernacular use of sustainable, which is a practice or system which does not intentionally endanger its ability to continue on in perpetuity. I guess it's tricky, because what does 'in perpetuity' mean, and is that precisely what Bates is pointing out? Anyway, the qualm I have with 'sustainable,' is one expressed by a friend's instructor; he points out that sustainable in some ways is the bare minimum that we have to do to ensure that we can keep up a particular practice, and it doens't mean ecological integration, which is perhaps the more desirable aim. We might be able to sustainably continue to deforest , for example, such that that forest will continue to be there and we can keep cutting it down, but to what end? Does that integrate us into the ecosystem there?

He has this example of a rocket (missile). He says we can look at all the waste and unsustainable elements of this rocket. It produces emissions, maybe, so we can wipe those out of the picture by using the cleanest fuels, maybe, and putting some solar PV cells to provide the tracking system rather than polluting electrical sources, and the rocket can be made out of completely recycled metals rather than virgin-mined materials, and so on and so on. This rocket has maximized efficiency and now we can produce these rockets with a minimal and sustainable ecological impact level.

But it's still a rocket.

Point is- what ends are we pursuing and just because it's not going to do farther harm ecologically doesn't mean we should do it.

And as Ran Prieur pointed out, what we want to sustain in the dominant discourse is usually something as close as possible to life as it is now for those who advocate it, usually 20th century industrial middle class life. As the title of my blog suggests (an illusion to Jerry Mander's book of the same name), I don't think it's desirable to live in man-made environments divorced from the rest of creation.

I think that's good for a first post. More later about permaculture and cultivation, and some thoughts on it.