In the Absence of the Sacred

New Insight

2007-07-14T06:40:00.000-04:00

So last night my roommate and I were talking for a while. It was one of those conversations that're really honest and intimate where you don't want to even leave to use the bathroom or get water, lest you jinx yourself and lose that. It's sad those conversations are so infrequent and so thus fragile that one has to walk on eggshells around them. Anyway, I saw this parallel.

He and I are often at odds because of something I've written about before: when he interacts with others, he often has an eye toward justifying all of his statements so as to forcefully compel others to listen to the logic and act accordingly. I don't like that approach, and often am much more free-flowing and less rigorous with my ideas, more prone to accepting something new than rejecting it. That's not necessarily a good thing, but I do try to temper it with an increased suspicion of ideas that are supportive of rather than subversive to the dominant culture.

Anyway, I realized that, as Jason points out, these opposing perspectives co-exist in primitive life. The hostility and defensiveness of rational argumentation are of akin to the hostility and defensiveness of the tribe in relation to those outside of the tribe. Likewise, the generosity of spirit, the desire to give the benefit of the doubt to others and the tendency toward acceptance that I tend to emphasize are akin to the openness and non-judgmentalism that exists within the tribe.

It's kind of an old refrain, but balance is key. It's not really feasible to be empathic with everyone, monkey-sphere and all. But it's also a denial of a real spiritual and psychological need for nonjudgment to always assume others disbelieve you and to temper your words and feelings in order to be able to justify their rationality in the eyes of others. I think that not only is it not wrong to apply different standards to different people in your life, but the desire to have universal standards is an artifact of empire, and the desire for everyone in the world to live the same (destructive) way. Multiplicity of beliefs and behaviors are good and necessary in a local world. Cultural relativism and all: to the extent that they allow a group to exist sustainably in a given ecological and human community, their beliefs are acceptable, and cannot be judged by a universal yardstick.

That's kind of tricky, though, because the manifestation of treating people differently is very different in a tribe that exists self-sustainably in a given region, and does not have effective control over the lives of others, versus in empire where the impact of elites is felt way beyond their locale, and where inequity manifests itself in the diminished capacity of the 'other' to exist. I understand this, and anticipate this criticism. I don't know what the answer is, aside from the fact that we will re-localize at some point in probably the not-too-distant future, and what will emerge after empire has tapered down is a multiplicity of cultures who may be ethnocentric, but whose ethnocentrism will still leave room for other ways of life.

Etc.

2007-05-20T12:12:00.000-04:00

I often think of things that I'd like to say here, but forget by the time I get around to writing. I'll hope my keystrokes will spark my memory a bit, though.

One of my favorite primi bloggers pointed out in a post on barefooting that nothing, really nothing in civilization is an improvement on what nature developed. I'm inclined to agree, though the hard-liner in me who's been burned before would temper that a bit. The reason I mention it is because I read a book recently, Living Green, about basic eco practices. It's a fine book for what it's worth, and I like that it drives home the point that not just food but topical products can impact our health. That means sunscreens, shampoos and all the rest. That's something I didn't fully recognize until recently. Now, my natural tendency is to avoid any cosmetic-type product not just because they're wasteful in manufacture, but because they're probably poison.

Anyway, he emphasizes the importance of an organic bed, since we spend so much time on beds, and off-gassing is a huge health concern. I looked into this a bit; organic beds are more than a thousand dollars, and that's probably on the low end of the cost spectrum. Plus organic cotten sheets, pillows and blankets, and now we're talking huge, hefty sums of money. One could make this very expensive investment, or one could start sleeping outside on grass and dirt. It's free, it's good for our immune systems, it's probably better for our backs, and it's better for our breathing, since indoor air pollution is typically worse than outdoor air pollution Once again, wildness is the path of least resistance.

And on the barefooting note, I've been experimenting with that a bit, too. It's fun, though my feet are barely able to deal with it. A little at a time, though. This is another example of wildness and nature being the path of least resistance. Nike has a shoe for runners that mimics not having a shoe at all. Why not skip the middleman?

Another thing I've been doing is not shampooing. My hair actually feels pretty good, though occasionally gets matted together. But it's great. Just give it a good rub down the couple times a week that I shower, and it's all good.

I was speaking to a friend a couple days ago, about what to do about the state of the world. I'm not sure what sort of impact big actions will have, but for me, de-conditioning myself to empire is where it's it. It's fun and personally meaningful. Anything further I think has to stem from that. That exuberant joy I feel about these things is basis of the important aims I have now- learning primitive skills, including the often neglected but absolutely vital interpersonal skills of speaking one's truth and relating to others in deep and true ways, and raising healthy vibrant children. Those are the tasks that speak to me. And I think they're worthwhile.

Empathy

2007-04-18T15:40:00.000-04:00

I'm reading this book, For Your Own Good, and it's really pretty good. Not fantastic, but really helpful and I'm sure especially so for folks who haven't been exposed to this.

Anyway, empathy is a big theme and the fact that its commonly blocked off in parents when it comes to the suffering, degradation, humiliation and general trauma they often unconsciously inflict on their kids.

I thought about my roommate, who mocks the sort of spiritual ideas I'm sympathetic to, the idea of gods and spirits and whatever. (My feelings aren't really fixed, which is part of why he's so critical of them). I think about an expression I'm sure I've used, and one I've heard often, "I just can't understand how someone could believe in gods and ghosts and spirits (and all that other mumbo-jumbo)." And I realized that part of why I'm sympathetic to these ideas is because I'm trying to understand the world from the point of view of some of the nature-based people who I look up to in some ways. Jason at Anthropik talks about cultural materialism, and how ideas are grounded in lived reality, and how it just makes sense for a forager to be an animist, in the same way that its pretty nonsensical to an urban person these days to be an animist.

I don't think it's good to be proud not to understand something in this way, to cast it off and demonize it as incomprehensible, and foreign and other in various ways. Ran makes this point- it's not good enough for Indians to say they just didn't understand the ways of the civilized. We have to do better for the future, and make sure that we understand full well why the culture of empire is absurd, based on experience. It also doesn't work for (not) understanding people who committed evil acts. In the book, Alice Miller tries to uncover some of the context for Hitler. Hitler's no easy guy to have empathy for, and certainly his actions aren't something we should feel compelled to sympathize with. But what she aims to do is provide context, to understand cause and effect, and see the background for acts like these not to re-assign blame, but to pro-actively work to change this in the future so these circumstances don't repeat themselves.

The books falls a bit flat for me in that it, like I guess many theoretical treatises, tries to make its theory the final word, when I think lots of other elements were at play, namely the generalized debasement of life, not limited to the debasement of childhood, and the increasing distance between our context and the ones we evolved in. Miller seems to suggest that if we raise kids in a way that is empathic and not cruel, all misdeeds will be avoided. And that makes sense as far as it goes, but I think the understanding of what constitutes cruelty has to be expanded beyond where she may place it.

Hello again, friends

2007-04-15T16:46:00.000-04:00

Thanks, Marcy, for edging me along to post again. Things have been pretty alright for me. I'm in a new apartment with a long-time friend, and in a newish job, so there's been some transition. I'm most proud of the fact that my student loans are aggressively being paid off, and after my most recent payments are processed, I'll have less than $3K, meaning, I think, freedom to travel and learn some skills by the new year. I may end staying at my job a whiel longer to save a bit, but that's to be determined in months to come.

I've read some interesting things since last I posted, most notably The Revolution Will Not Be Microwaved, by Sandor Ellix Katz, author of Wild Fermentation. It helped inspire me in a renewed way to eat more exclusively locally and to try lots of different vegetables.

Also watched What the Bleep Do We Know, which was alright, but not great. I mean, I'm really open to a lot of that out-there stuff, and it was fun to watch the movie with my roommate and my partner, who seem often to be at odds philosophically. My roommate is much less open to these ideas, and I think he's a good example of seeing one's worldview as a fortress rather than a prison, as Ran articulates. I really do think that how he and I differ is that he's a lot more suspicious and guarded, and I'm (perhaps naively) more willing to open and benevolent toward new information. I understand- he comes from a family who he thinks don't always form ideas based on reason, and often on received wisdom, which often means the 'wisdom' of the dominant paradigm, and rationality is the way to combat that. He's also a middle school teacher and is faced with illogic and prejudice, which reason is a defense against. I mean, it's hard, and I am sympathetic to where he's coming from, but I just prefer to be more (foolishly) open to crazy ideas and I want to accept things that may not make 'sense.'

On the other hand, I really do retreat to reason and use that as my defense when I am forced to interact with prejudiced people, folks who are misogynist or homophobic, and so in some ways my openness is contingent upon being in a supportive environment where all the tedious stupid popular misconceptions and biases are not present.

Hopefully that makes some sense.

More to come, I hope. Thanks for reading, y'all.

Lull

2007-03-07T21:16:00.000-05:00

There's been one hell of a lull in much of the anti-civ blogging corner of the world that I inhabit. Ran's solid, and has regular material, and Marcy's also got lots of insights to share. Same for Sara. But Casey down by the river is gone, Free Range Ted is gone, none of the Anthropik folks have posted much in a long time. Jack Trace has been gone since before 2007, Devin's not had much to post recently, and Frank Black's had only a handful of posts since the new year. And Dan, too, has been transitioning and not posting much.

I'm no better. I guess it's just that sort of season, when those of us in wintertime want to hibernate and are generally less active. It could also just be that we're collectively moving through these ideas, and feeling our way toward other avenues of exploration.

---
I read a book recently, Pig Perfect, which was pretty interesting. Food's been a important issue to me since before I began writing this thing, and I'm getting around to a lot of interesting material. This one's pretty good- the author writes mostly well, and always retains my attention. He covers a lot of topics, some with less élan than others. I felt he was a little clunky when he started talking anthropology, but he did pull out some good points. I guess Charles Mann makes similar points, but this guy, Peter Kaminsky discusses how much of what conquering Europeans saw as wild nature in the Americas was actually nature out of balance. Mann talks about the role the Amerindians played in shaping the physical environment here, but Kaminsky looks especially at the role of large mammals like buffalo. He cites a researcher who suggests that the vast forested canopy was not the 'climax community,' but the result of the decimation of ecosystem altering big game.

What I thought was kind of interesting was that, if this were true, maybe this culture isn't acting so terribly out of place. This is only a half-formed idea, but maybe the continued existence of more open grassland environments which were punctuated by thick forests in between, suggests that some guiding force is at work to make things not go terribly awry.

But then again, I don't even have my facts straight, and the grasslands might well be not the same regions as old forests, and in nay event, the buffalo are still gone, the indigenous humans are still gone, everything is poisoned and we're collectively miserable and violent. So whatever the guiding force is that may be helping us in some ways, it also is letting us work through the consequences of many of our other choices.

One other thing that I've noticed a lot in some food-oriented books that look at agriculture's emergence: the authors often talk about how domestication just came about naturally and was an extension of the relationship the farmer-to-be and domesticated animal-to-be already had. It's not always explicit, but it's often implied. It seems a convenient way to skirt the fact that 90% or more of human history (depending on who you define as human) was non-agricultural, and to thus recuperate agriculture as something that's part and parcel of being human.

I mean, fine, I eat domesticated animal foods, as well as domesticated plant foods, and some wild forms of each, so I'm not saying that it's necessarily bad for you or that there aren't ways to do it better. But let's be honest- most of our food traditions, if you take an honest and long look at it, didn't involved substantial dairy, unfertilized eggs, grains or beans, and had minimal to no processing, at least not of the sort we see today.

It's just so duplicitous when authors like Nina Planck criticize paleo diet advocates, and hoodwink the reader's sense of context by making 10,000 years seem like such a longe time. I mean, no doubt, it is, and it's probably hard for most of us to consider taht sort of era. But don't ignore the legitimate point that, next to 990,000 years, 10,000 actually doesn't look like so much.

Anyway, much love, y'all.

What/Who to Trust

2007-02-23T18:16:00.000-05:00

I was speaking with my boss today, and she mentioned that you shouldn't have more than one egg yolk because of the cholesterol. I just yesterday read a section in Real Food, in which the author talks about the political nature of the official rceommendation of 300mg or less of daily cholesterol. As the account goes, the group of sciemtists in charge of this were not looking at any studies- they came up with a number based I think on what folks were then consuming, on average, and roughly halving it, in accordance with the idea that cholesterol consumption is tied to heart disease.

So I told my boss this, that there is no scientific reason for that, and she recounted some of the trite dismissive allegations of global warming skeptics, 'You can say the same thing about global warming.' And I said that the majority of the world's scientists agree on the basic tenets of global warming. She asked where I heard that, and I said I didn't remember, and she noted that wherever I read it could have been lying or mistaken. My co-worker chimed in that all of the major peer-reviewed publications have been in agreement about the basic ideas of global warming for decades. I tried to point out that general consensus doesn't mean everyone agrees on every point, or that everyone will ever agree on anything, but I'm not very good at arguing, and I don't think she wanted to hear that, so it was sort of left at that. She said, back to the egg yolks thing, that her mother has high cholesterol and her doctor told her not to eat too many egg yolks.

I didn't want to get into a long conversation about how her doctor could be wrong too, and lots of people can belief a mistaken idea, and I knew she would be very defensive, and suggest essentially that, because I didn't have the hard facts to force her to believe it, that I wasn't really credible. One thing about my boss is that she can be very defensive and unreceptive; I should start working on Ran's suggestion to try in these moments to expand my sense of self outward and spread love, but I'm afraid of the pain it will probably cause initially.

It's just so frustrating trying to interact with people who are defensive. I used to love it, because I'd have my facts and figures down, and logically force people to ackowledge and accept my position. It's so violent, and I don't have the energy for it anymore, or, I hope, the spiritual will.

All of this highlighted another thing to me: what are we to say when others won't accept your words or ideas? If my boss wants to say that the peer-reviewed articles on global-warming aren't valid, or that she won't believe them, what is there to do. I think that once we stop experiencing things ourselves, this realm of doubt is cast upon us and all our ideas and exchanges. I mean, if someone doesn't wnat to think something, short of maybe some Orwellian sort of torture, one can't force them to. And why should I want to force them, except for self-serving reasons? Having a set of shared understandings does make coexistence easier, thhough, so that's one reason.

It can get tricky, and I think it's related to solipsism. The exchange just reminded me, in a roundabout way, that we aren't grounded, and when we live in a world of ideas and man-made constructions, it can be hard to remind people that others exist outside of oneself.

More Food Stuffs

2007-02-14T18:31:00.000-05:00

Here's a great article by Michael Pollan I read a week or two back, but never mentioned.

He makes a few good points that I really like. He suggests more greens, less grains, eating in traditional ways (which as I've come to learn via the Weston A Price Foundation, often has mre wisdom than we at first may recognize), and he also responds satisfactorily to an issue that I've often been troubled by with from low-carb diet advocates. That is, while they like to point out that 'people have been eating less fat and more carbs, just like the authorities say, but have been getting fatter' in the last generation, that criticism has been addressed by John Robbins in The Food Revolution. Robbins response, like Pollan's, is that, sure that's what the recommendations are. But what's going on on the ground in people diets is, they've just been eating more carb-rich food, and shitty carbs like white grains and sugar. You can't really say that there's a mass experiment underway in which people are eating low-fat and hight-carb diets, and hey, look how bad it is; the truth is, people haven't actually been eating this way, so fair's fair- don't trace the obesity epidemic on the by-the-letter USDA guidelines that aren't being followed.

Makes me think about the criticism of low-carb diets that I haven't seen adequately addressed: our brains need carbs for energy, and ketones that result from high-protein consumption, are unhealthy for us. Now, it could be an issue in which there's just a fundamental clash of interests and perspective, with some people saying ketones are bad, and others are good (like with saturated fat or cholesterol). If that's the case, one has to sift through the competing info and figure out what seems legit, what seems like petty politics, and what the conclusion ultimately should be. I'll keep that all in mind.

Anyway, my food choices are ok. Kind of a two steps forward, one step back deal. I was ill recently, and got very lazy and ate out more frequently than I had been because I didn't have the energy to prepare food. I've also had some white rice and flour, which I had eschewed totally for a while. I'm seriously considering eliminating grains entirely for a while, maybe a week or two. I just feel so gross after eating crappy starchy food. I'll focus on more greens, fewer fruits (which I tend to overeat at times) and good quality meats and eggs. I'm also planning on experimenting with EFT, which may be kind of hokey, but so am I often.

It's unfortunate, though, if I avoid grains, because I just started making sourdough bread, and was hoping to keep working on it. My first loaf was pretty ok- dense, which I can work on, but slightly sour in taste and pretty nice.

On the positive side, I remember a week or two ago, I hadn't had grains all day, or most of the day, and had some coconut oil and felt energized in a different sort of way from carb-energy. Sort of a cleaner-fueling energy, if that makes sense. I was barely conscious of it, but with more time away from grains and with green, I suspect I'll have a chance to explore it more.

Also, there have been some serendipitous events recently as my worldview is widening, which
is encouraging me along the way.

Much love, friends.

Energy

2007-02-10T00:49:00.000-05:00

Still not much substantive to say. This dovetails with what's going on at Ran's site recently, though:

I've been attuning myself more closely to people energetically recently, and have felt especially sensitive to the energy people put out. I've always been a pretty sensitive and intuitive person when it comes to people's bad moods, and thtat's still my strong suit, but I'm beginning to intuit simple life energy more. The other night, for example, I was asleep and woke up, thinking about my partner and our roommate (out late together), and within a minute, I heard them moving up the stairs.

Coincidence? Sure, if you want to. But also not.

I'm also just beginning to sense the meaning in small events like that, which in the past I might not have noticed, or might have wrritten off as chance. I don't know if there needs to be intention behind them, but I do think they point to a dance of meaning that the universe conveys when you want to listen.

Much love, y'all.

Age of Decay?

2007-01-29T21:06:00.000-05:00

I have this idea that's not fully formed, but goes like this:

Maybe we're just in an age of especial decay this last century or so, and really, this whole trajectory is not that bad. This is what i mean: Maybe some of the bad things that anti-civ/primitivist people criticize are not inherently the problem, but the problem is the debased form we see now.

Like the Weston A Price folks talk about the benefits of raw dairy. Now, maybe the paleo/vegan arguments against dairy are rooted in the debased dairy of modern industrial society.

Maybe more broadly the idea that fat makes you fat is just symptomatic of hydrogenated fats, and other industrial fats, which are bad for you, and not the same as good, healthful fats like coconut and animal fats,

Also- one of my teachers a year ago discussed the idea that writing was this empowering thing for Frederick Douglass and others in his age, and that literacy was connected to taking action in one's life. Maybe the critique of media is more about the critique of industrial era media that obfuscates, rather than informs. Maybe media does not 'mediate' in the worst senses of the word necessarily.

Same for the critique of language- maybe it's more a critique of the debased and disenchanted language of postmodernism, where everything is reduced to language, and nothing really matters (indoor philosophy stuff), that is worthy of criticism, rather than language inherently.

This seems to go well with the idea of balance and attempts not to overstate one's case, and bend teh stick too far in the other direction.

But the converse is also compelleing, and probably what I tend toward. That maybe the debasement has always been here, and I'm romanticizing the supposed elevated forms of teh past. Maybe Zerzan and others are right when they point out simply that the emptiness of this culture, of this trajectory is finally being laid bare for more of us to see.

Maybe media, as the word implies, does necessarily mediate in the negative sense of distancing us from life. Maybe the means by which it did so were less sophisticated a century or two ago, and thus authenticity existed alongside the abstracted world more fully then, but the basic thrust was toward what we have now from the beginning.

Maybe it's not just the 'Green Revolution,' but agriculture itself which is the catastrophe in teh colloquial as well as biological sense.

Maybe, raw or pasteurized, cow milk is meant for baby cows, not adult humans, and pasteurization just exacerbates its ill-effects.

My own current thinking is somewhere mixed along these gradients, but I wanted to get down some of these ideas that I'm toying with.

Telepathy, inter-species communication and language

2007-01-25T21:18:00.000-05:00

I was on the train a couple weeks ago, and sat next to a woman with a small dog in a dog-carrier bag. She let him poke his head out and I pet him a bit and played with him. And I had this realization about communicating.

I was trying to convey something to him, some sentence of some sort, maybe about his cuteness, or telling him that the train, though maybe a scary place, would not last long, and he'd be home soon. Something.

i realized that I was going about this attempt at telepathic communication all wrong. I was trying to use it as 1:1 analogue of regular language. But language is very much about deceit, and I was trying to manufacture somethign to say, trying to muscle it across to this dog. Earnest and well-meaning as I was, the effort was not going to bear fruit.

I thought about Derrick Jensen's account of his time spent with Cleve Backster and that the yogurt was very sensitive to respond to real emotion, but not forced emotion. I suspect the dog was the same way. What i was trying to convey was not real emotion, was not legitimate in the deepest sense, but busy-work. It was me not being comfortable in beingness and wanting to fill that void with something, so as not to face the simple co-existence of two beings.

Soresnon talks about affect-talk, that is, truth-talk, which conveys emotions and other truths in a very fundamental, and also, when necessary, nuanced way. That, I think, is what telepathy is about. It's conveying that basic truth.

That's why I now suspect that when people talk about Zerzan's critique of language, and ask how it we'll function without language, how we'll say without words the things we convey now, they're missing the point. I was, too- no judgment passed. The point is, when we live in a context in which spoken words aren't so central, when we don't have the sort of infrastructure we have now that depends on logos, we will live in a much more direct way, and our truths will not need to be spoken to be understood.

And all of this I think is another element to the idea that language is for comveying falsehood, not truth.

(As an aside, I don't think language has no place- I suspect it does and probably has for a long time, and it can be damn beautiful. I'm just trying to explore the sort of situations that are deeper than words).

Breaking, again

2007-01-25T15:31:00.000-05:00

I've been trying too hard with this blog. Taking some time off to re-group. Wish me luck.

Balance

2007-01-24T09:08:00.000-05:00

Ted's recent discussions over at Free Range Organic Human reminded me of a conversation I had with a co-worker a few months back. We were talking about a friend, who prioritizes autonomy, and the co-worker commented that, much as he understands it, he doesn't share the emphasis on autonomy, because he sees it as largely a reaction to a world where we have so little of it. In a better society, autonomy would exist alongside interdependence, and would not need to be prioritized.

It reminds me of the emphasis on power that Ted talks about as reigning supreme in nature, and otehrs' comments that the fact that the powerful of this culture seek dominance over others is a sign of powerlessness and insecurity, rather than legitimate power.

The desire for power or autonomy is perhaps a legitimate desire given our circumstances, but should not be vaunted to the ideal that they often are for anarchists or radical-type folks. They're a self-defense mechanism, just as actual self-defense skills are, but that doesn't mean that the ability to fight or to be autonomous or self-empowered is the last step in life.

Balance, balance.

Vibes

2007-01-22T20:22:00.000-05:00

I saw a creepy, disconcerting movie yesterday called 'Alone With Her,' about this stalker and the woman he's electronically surveilling, and into whose life he insinuates himself. She senses that there's something wrong, something off about him as he first starts to enter her daily life, and later eventually writes this off and tries to ignore the bad vibes she was getting, even to the point of fighting with her best friend, who rightly is suspicious of him.

The movie did a good job of depicting how we can be put into situations where we rationalize and talk away out gut feelings about what's going on.

Makes me think of Sorensen and the idea of affect talk, which is necessarily truth talk, and the subsequent idea that we can't really lie about feelings, and that the truth will express itself, involuntarily if need be. In Jensen's book 'Listening to the Land', which I revisited recently, one of the interviewees talks about aphasics in a hospital he worked at who saw Ronald Reagan, and found him hilarious because of the disconnect between his body language and what he was vocalizing. Truly, words lie.

Another example of vibes, and how they don't lie: sometimes I give my partner a back massage. and I['m not always into it. I can feel it, though, when my apathy is not accomplishing much. Mechanically, it may be the same movements, but without the love and joy, massages are not all they can be. I was at an accupuncture workshop, and the speaker said that massage therapists leave the field on average after five years. You can only keep giving energy out and not having it replaced for so long. Ascending versus descending energy , maybe.

On the other hand from all this- vibes can be misread, and it can take a long time to learn or relearn positive associations with situations that you may have had negative associations with before. this happens a lot to me with so-called 'bad' neighborhoods around Manhattan and Brooklyn. I often feel uneasy because of being raised by well-meaning but somewhat racist family members when going through black or hispanic neighborhoods. When I'm with my partner, she doesn't have those same associations and is probably a better judge of vibes in that case. Slowly, these associations get unlearned, and that's good. Over time, our sensitivity returns.

Oh- also, Sorenson's article reminds me of Mutant Message Down Under, a possibly discredited fiction/truthful account of this woman Marlo Morgan who spends a couple of months with Australian Aborigines on a walkabout. She talks about telepathy among them, something very similar-sounding to Sorenson's affect talk. One of the things she recounts that they taught her is that we in the civilized world spend so much of our energy hiding ourselves and our motives and feelings, that we dull our more refined faculties of the ability to communicate truths across distances to one another without words. That resonates with me.

I know I spend so much energy not being comfortable with my inner world. Sometimes I find myself near someone I haven't seen in some time, and will talk a short while with them, and then find myself fabricating a reason to leave the encounter. (Not everyone, but many people, and it may be even the default for me.) I think afterward why I did that, why I hurried myself away, even in those circumstances where I had nothing legitimate to hurry to, and I think it has to do with honesty and comfort with myself. For whatever reason, I often feel like I am hiding something, and cannot be myself, like i'm not comfortable in my own skin.

I think this is related to Ran's comments about working through purposelessness, and getting over the hump we've been acculturated with, getting comfortable with not having any 'productive' thing to do, not hiding from ourselves.

All in good time, friends. Mindfulness is the first step.

God

2007-01-19T15:11:00.000-05:00

I wanted to write this earlier, after Dan commented in an earlier post about Richard Dawkins' disparagment of God. I don't think too much about it, but there's something to God, whatever that may mean.

I was raised Catholic, and recently learned that my grandfather was Jewish (later converted), so I'm of the tribe, as it were. (That adds a layer of interesting-ness to my flirtation with Judaism mid-HS, but nothing substantive enough to draw any conclusions from). Despite this, I stopped caring about God/religion a few years back.

But man, this song really has an effect on me. I'm not unself-conscious enough to be able to say straight-faced that it's profound or thereabouts, but there's something there to it, that really affects me. Just this sense of connection to something broader and less trivial, maybe.

This is one of the most attractive components of spirituality to me, and it's something that I saw in animism or other indigenous spirituality, which in turn opened me back up to God, again, whatever that means.

It's something hard for me to talk about since it all sounds so corny, but the idea of the well really makes sense for me. It's palpable the feeling I experience sometimes, when some feeling rises up from my core to my throat, and I just want to stay there in the moment. Man, I feel like a trashy novel writer, but it's legit, whatever it is I experience.

I don't know if we're supposed to stay there forever, as maybe some advocates of enlightenment suggest, but I think we could use a lot more of that. Likewise, there's probably room for life outside of language, and we can all use so much more of that from where we are now, trapped in linguistic jungles that are, to paraphrase Edward Abbey, symtomatic of an indoor philosophy. But there's still probably a place for spoken language, and there's probably a place for the mundanity of un-profound existence. We just have no balance now.

It's been a long time...

2007-01-19T14:34:00.000-05:00

Long time since I posted, that is. I just haven't felt that I've had much to say or contribute. I often find myself lagging behind the other bloggers in this sphere, like Jason or Ran or Dan. That's ok, though. I don't want to compete much.

Things are pretty uneventful for me. I've been working the grind mostly, though admittedly it's not so much a grind, since I have a pretty good gig. I'm steadily chipping away at my school debt, which stands at just over $6K (USD) at the moment. Since I started paying it back in October, I've paid the money-lenders more than $1K, which, if I continue apace, means I think I can be debt free by 2008.

I found a great site: EarthClinic, which has lots of natural remedies on it. I used some of their suggestions to get over a pernicious sore throat that must've come across the pond from Dan. Took me a full week to get over it 95%, and still working on that last little bit left.

I started doing yoga a couple times a week, after having stopped exercising in early December, right around the time I started eating meat again. It's funny, because I suspect that I could have actually put on some muscle if I'd kept at it, and I may be a little bit with yoga. But I decided that weigth training is a bit too contrived for me at the moment, and I like that yoga, trite as it's become in popular culture, really does feel more holistic, focusing on strength, flexibility and the mind and spirit, rather than trying to force the body into a certain form. I may yet go back, so we'll see.

Cooking is going well- I'm just about there at my goal from a month or so ago of eating 20 of my weekly meals from self-prep, rather than buying pre-made grub. It's funny, because it's a rarity now that I do eat out, and I actively try to avoid it. A good cheap meal at home can usually be had for quickly, and I'd almost always rather do that. I made a sourdough crust for my subsequent pie after last post, which came out alright, but in need of work. The sourdough is good, though, and I just today was offered some 4 1/2 year old rye starter from a local cheese farmer. Also got a cast-iron skillet, uncured, which I've seasoned myself, and which is also great.

I mentioned to Ran that I can sympathize with Loretta's comments in a recent postout about my generation: it's been an active effort on my part to learn basic skills, and though I don't buy into the myth of success in this culture, I've shut down so much that I have a hard time with any delayed gratification, and things not paying off right away. I'm trying to learn to drive, which has been a mixed experience, partly because I have had to fight the urge to quit and not put in the effort, cuz hey- fuck cars. But it's a valid skill that may be useful to have, and which may be necessary for me to stick with my current job.

It all just takes time, I guess, time I (we) may or may not have. But that line of thinking goes nowhere, since we don't really know, and since the likeliest emotion that is to elicit is guilt for not doing the 'right' thing or desapir for the same reason.

Anyway, I hope anyone reading this is doing well. Keep on keeping on, friends.

Pie Crust Recipe

2007-01-07T19:53:00.000-05:00

Taking a page from Ran's site, here's a great pie crust recipe I tried tonight that I found in this year's Slingshot organizer.

I used it as a base for his pumpkin pie recipe. It turned out really well- crunchy and tasty, and no need for expensive added fats like butter or coconut oil , since it's made of fatty nuts anyway.

Here's my modified version:
2 Cups mixed pecans and walnut
11 pitted dates
1/2 tsp vanilla extract
1/4 tsp cinammon powder
2.5 tbsp water

Finely chop pecans and walnuts in food processor
Add remaining ingredients, and continue to process until it's a moist, workable consistency (add more water if need be)
Spoon into pie pan and spread and flatten with your fingers
Bake 15-20 min if desired

We baked for near 40min before putting in the pie filling, so we had to take our pie out a little early to avoid a burnt crust. I imagine 15-20 minutes is good, or no pre-baking at all!

The we followed Ran's recipe the rest of the way. It's a great vegan (raw? if vanilla extract is) pie crust. It comes out nice and crusty.

Good luck!

Idle Theory!

2007-01-05T13:53:00.000-05:00

Everyone who comes across me probably already reads Ran Prieur, but in case you missed it, check out his latest post, which links to both Dan's great piece about the mistaken idea of DNA, rather than environment, as king within biology, and Idle Theory, which suggests that idleness, not strength, speed, whatever, is the better marker of biological fitness.

That is, those species that can get by with doing less are better suited to deal with times of difficulty than those who are constantly working for their survival.

Makes me think about how I sometimes get flustered when people talk about biology as determinative. Like Richard Dawkins and the selfish gene. But I remember at times like this that science changes with the times, and though it's also important to adapt and integrate new information without undue prejudice, that information is not always true. This stuff validates my gut sense of the world, and yeah, that can be unreliable or whatever, but not always. I think I'd rather get in touch with my true self and the honesty I can access of the world in myself, than deny my feelings and operate in a purely abstract realm. I dunno- it's tricky. But nonduality and the universe is within me, and I am the universe, and I just ahve to align myself to its widsom. Cool stuff- sometimes hard to do and certainly hard to access sometimes for me, but a good sentiment worth appreciating.

(...)

2007-01-02T22:26:00.000-05:00

Been experiencing some despair recently. Frustration maybe, and lots of lethargy. Mostly playing video games, which I rarely do.

I'm thinking that too much of what I'm reading about primitivism recently is charged with personality wars, and vitriol.

I don't know what to do. Probably needs to be worked through. Feeling scared. Ran keeps bringing up the collapse of the dollar. I'm scared of that. Starting to understand when people say they don't want the collapse (that is, a hard crash) to come yet. Just a little more time. I want a little more time. Not prepared enough, yet not doing enough about it. Mostly mental decolonization. I'm reminded, unpleasantly, that words can only go so far. All the books in the world, with all the right ideas, are insufficient. I can't rewild in a library.

I used to really want the hard crash, and quick. Makes things easier. Slow crash, puttering engines of civilization, ending in a whimper, are much less dramatic, but much more difficult. I also have trouble experiencing the rage of a dying world right now, being too preoccupied with personal affairs, mostly finances and food. Of course I want the global holocaust to really start teetering. But more viscerally, I just want my school loans paid off and my rewilding journey to begin in earnest. Gotta remember that every moment is a gift. Don't have forever. Should seize it, not (just) out of guilt and fear, but of joy in the act of remembering, reliving, what it is to be more fully human.

I like forceful statements about timelines. Collapse for 2012, like a slogan. Helps me get motivated. I keep falling back to 'well, it hasn't happened yet, I have plenty of time.' Obviously untrue- the collapse has been going on for a century, maybe since World War I, and the formation of the splinter states afterward. Maybe with the accelerated rate of ecological breakdown. Maybe just with all of the momentum of civilization coming to a head in any of the various problems evident. Gotta keep this in mind.

Contradictions. Living with contradictions. Discomfort with that, yet satisfaction with it. Mentally overtaxed from philosophical musings. I want to return to the immediacy of embodied living. Hard to do within cities, ripe environments for infinitely introspective deconstruction, postmodernism, etc.

...
/sentence fragments.

2006-12-27T16:47:00.000-05:00

Well, happy christmas, hanukkah, kwanzuh and festivus everyone. Hope it's been swell for everyone.

Some interesting and challenging posts over at Ted's page. Most recently, he asks whether GA/primitivist folks are too serious or not serious enough in thinking about the coming 'end of the world' or whatever you call it or it ends up being.

It's funny- the reason I got mixed up in the anti-civ blog folks I'm most interested in now is because I felt the anarcho-primitivist folks I had been reading were too serious. These past few days, I was looking through old 'Species Traitor' issues, and they are definitely very serious. Now, I certainly understand why and I think a big part of why that is is because writing in these contexts is supposed to be iconoclastic and infuriating and inspire readers to move, to act. But that didn't do it for me. I mean, Derrick Jensen inspires me to act out of love and rage, but I don't think I can ever be militant. And the beauty of what he says is, I, personally, don't have to. There are talents and proclivities unique to me that I can use. The militant actions are probably important and probably need to (or at least likely will) happen, but only a very small subset of people are going to do that. His main point is diversity of tactics- our only responsibility is not to condemn those people or to abandon them. That's maybe uncomfortable for some people- I don't know. Maybe some can condemn them- good cop, bad cop sort of thing. Whatever.

But really, I think the idea of openness and diversity is so important. I know Frank Black really emphasizes dropping out, whatever that may mean. Aaron and Sara address the importance of child-rearing in raising beautiful human beings able to express and experience compassion and empathy, and who will be the trailblazers of the post-civilized world. Ran and Dan I think both deal with mental decolonization and helping us free our minds so our bodies may follow. (And I don't mean to pigeonhole anyone- apologies to anyone offended by these characterizations). The point is- there's room enough for all of this, and lots of ideas and expressions and paths. Obviously. People say that a lot, but maybe it bears repeating.

I feel like my mental space has been so much more comfortable since I stopped trying to find the answer, and stopped looking for the thing everyone out to be doing. The Kantian 'Categorical Imperative' is so foolish and such a civilized vice: act as if what you were doing were to be done by everyone, and thereby determine its ethical nature. Slipped in there is the idea that one's actions can or should be universally repeated. I used to get upset and think that when people advocated different courses of action or different ethical values for different people or circumstances, that they were using a 'double standard.' Nonsense, because there's no double. Situations, obviously are unique and particular, and needn't have hard and fast rules of decorum.

I think that there are certain things that are abhorrent, that are good and bad, as well as good and evil, but I know them when I see them, and don't think too much about them, out of recognition that this ends up being just word games and intellectual masturbation, and I trust myself enough to know I'm able to make judgments and assessments as they come up, and I don't need a blueprint devised earlier for navigating unseen water (sorry-mixed metaphor).

Anyway, that's something that makes sense to me- diversity and acceptance.

Going back to 'Species Traitor' for a minute, it dawned on me just how contracted my thinking was when I first was introduced to it. I think I really felt like I had just found the answer, the new right perspective, and that was what was up. It was challenging and radical, but I didn't realize, still just substitutive, maintaining the infrastructure. I read Omnivore's Dilemma, recently, and in one part, he's talking about 'big organic' versus 'little organic.' With 'big organic,' that is, industrial, massified organic agriculture, they do 'substitutive' farming, simply replacing the inputs of industrial non-organic farms with organic inputs. So, rather than natural gas based fertilizer, they use manure shipped in from hundreds of miles away often. Or, instead of a banned pesticide, they use a non-banned pesticide, or what have you. Little organic, though, the real small farmers, and the ones we like to think are providing us with most of our food, but who probably aren't unless we're very active about making it so, the farmers who really do integrate themselves to their ecosystems, and even in some cases, leave the land more fertile, more repaired, more healed than before, to these farmers the input-output model is irrelevent. They're not simply substituting ingredients and seeing the land simplistically and as a machine. They're rebuilding an ecosystem and a self-managed, almost permaculture-like area of food generation. I think this land is just about always less diverse than what was grazed over to make it, but it's a step away from monoculture in the right direction. And to return to the analogy- I like to think that my thinking is more like the little organic farmer now, for whom simply substituting the appropriate thoughts into the existing framework is insufficient. I like to think that I'm interested in moving beyond that now, and expanding my worldview and all of that.

In all of college, I had two or three 'wow' moments, in which my mind was blown. I mean, legitimately new ideas were offered to me, ones that i never could have come to within the existing logical framework that I'd been operating under. In the past maybe four months or so, particularly reading Ran, I had a half dozen or more of those. That's what's up for me. Just having my mind blown and thinking not so mechanistically. That's inspiring. That's moving.

I still get caught up a lot being resistant to new ideas sometimes, but I try to be more open to them. It helps that, after a while being recalcitrant and being proved wrong by people close to me, I've had to stop being quite so pushy and insistent about my right ideas. But it's also helped me to find people who can both challenge some of the ideas I'm drawn to, and acknowledge the logic of others. It helps show me that anti-civ ideas, in particular, aren't monolithic and that someone can disagree in ways that aren't dismissive. (See also Jason's post about David Abram's 'In the Spell of the Sensuous.')

Elimination Communication

2006-12-20T08:55:00.000-05:00

A nice little article via reddit: It's the bottom line: no nappies, no mess.

It's nice to see this practice(alternately called Infant Potty Training or Elimination Communication) getting a little attention. I only heard about it in August, and thought it was great.

The basic principle of EC is that parents can and should be attuned to the bodily signals of their children, and assist them in eliminating waste. Just as a child communicates hunger, and the parent responds with (breast-)feeding, the child communicates their need to eliminate waste and the parent facilitates that. Often that involved a keyword or sound (eg. 'ssss' for urinating, 'hmmmm' for defacating) once the child is in an appropriate place, (over a toilet or sink or bowl, near bushes or whatever have you).

It's great for a few reasons, I think:
1) It dovetails well with attachment/primal parenting and establishing a deep bond between child and parent.
2) So much less wasteful, even than cloth diapers.
3) It'll be really useful in a collapse environment, when we don't have the resources to divert to disposable diapers or even to constantly cleaning non-disposable ones
4) It's much more hygienic for the child, and doesn't involve the self-renunciation and active ignoring of their bodies that traditional diaper elimination does (EC advocates suggest that even infants are fully cognizant of their bodily functions and have to be taught to ignore them in order to eliminate waste and allow it to accumulate beside their genitals in a diaper. Then later, they have to be taught to re-attune themselves to those functions in order to potty train the standard way.)

Here's my favorite EC page: Free to EC!
And a couple of others: Diaper Free!
Infant Potty Training
What is Infant Potty Training?

World's Tallest Man

2006-12-15T10:17:00.000-05:00

So anyone hear about this? It's all over the internet.

My favorite ones, though are this one and this one. The latter points out how cruel and awful it is to keep dolphins in captivity (along with all other animals, I'd say). The former points out just how much denial this culture is in by providing a dose of reality:

Meanwhile, an international expedition declared on Wednesday that a rare, nearly blind species of white dolphin is effectively extinct...
The baiji will be the first large aquatic mammal driven to extinction, since hunting and over fishing killed off the Caribbean monk seal in the 1950s...
A naturalist who organised the expedition said one or two of the dolphins may still be alive - but the species was effectively extinct.

We're fucking up so bad, and if not you and I, this awful death-obsessed culture.

It's so hard to think about atrocities outside of our "monkey sphere," but reading about individuals makes the situation more comprehensible. Killing a species- almost too hard to imagine. Being one of the last one or two baiji? Heart-wrenchingly imagine-able.

Can you think about that? Being the last white dolphin, (and probably knowing it), and being able to do almost nothing about it.

It makes me hope that one indigenous undertanding of extinction, (that species don't necessarily leave forever, but leave until the conditions are right for their return) is right. But it probably won't be in my lifetime, and damn this system for it.

Masculinity and violence

2006-12-14T21:17:00.000-05:00

I may lose some people with this, but hopefully not.

I looked into the organizer of the Deep Green Resistance, Lierre Kieth, in an interview here

There's one part that really made me think:

I think what women are getting at here is a very real fear of how men from rape-cultures behave when the social order breaks down. Which is that they become public predators. They're already assaulting women in private. But when civic society melts down, like during wartime, men rape women en mass. Women are assessing the situation realistically when they respond with fear to the idea of civilization coming apart.

When I was in an English class in high school, something came up to the effect of,' what would we do if we only had an hour to live?' One of the kids said, 'I'd find someone to rape or something.' The teacher of course rebuked him, and we all gave sort of looks of shock or astonishment. And I'm sure that kid didn't say that again, even if the thought crossed his mind. But I was shocked at home much I sympathized with that, that the same thought crossed my mind, and how the only thing saving me ridicule with my lack of courage to speak out when things cross my mind. And it shocked me, because i consider myself one of the good guys, you know? I didn't have any strong sexist influences in my family, no dads saying 'A women's place is prone, or in the kitchen. No one criticizing women in the workplace or chastising them for being assertive.

I did, however, watch lots of tv and movies, and I think that's where the cultural current came from. It's so hard to try to deal with these issues, and I do know that anti-patriarchy discussion groups didn't work for me. I mean, I spent a lot of time learning about queer issues and women's issues and race issues when I got to college, because I wanted to be an informed activist and do the right thing, so I had maybe a bit of a head start on others in dealing with personal biases. But I also feel like so much of those interactions within activist communities are about guilt and trying to force intragroup change as a result of impotence in the wider world. And I'm not saying small-scale change is worthless; instead, I'm saying maybe the white male activist going to patriarchy and white privilege discussion groups is not the person to demonize. Or maybe they are, since I've heard a lot of people complain about activist communities being rife with sexual assault.

It's tough, because I think people get defensive when they're told they're acting the wrog way. Far better is providing an environment where they can discover their transgressions on their own, and feel like it's they, not anyone else, whoa re prompting change.

There's a section in the Bushido, 'The Code of the Samurai' that talks about correcting your disciples or inferiors or what have you. And they say that it must be done in such a way that you make the person think that the change is their idea, and give them an opportunity to change without losing face. I think that's so right on- I feel like so much of our interaction in this realm is about punishment and humiliation firstly and secondarily about encouraging righteous behavior. That's backwards! If we really do want to encourage different behaviors, then humiliating someone into it is both vindictive (and evil), and probably less effective overall, because once the pressure is removed, they may change back (to driving SUVs, to demeaning women, whatever) because they feel like that is a part of their self they're regaining.

Back to male violence- it's tough, I think, but I suspect that the answer cannot be rationalized and made sense of. What is there to make sense of? It's one of those things for me that I can't over-think to escape, and can only step out, and let it fade to relative unimportance, like spiraling depression. What I mean is, I think if we listen carefully to ourselves, to our bodies and emotions, and not to the rational thoughts that cloud our clarity, we can move away from that cycle of oppression and guilt, and work toward interacting on a more human basis, fully acknowledging and embracing people's experiences and being.

Maybe this doesn't work for everyone, and maybe I'm naive and projecting what I think is the case for me onto everyone, including recalcitrant people who will not change. But maybe for some people, avoiding patriarchy and male oppression (and other oppressions, too) is about opening ourselves up to empathy and interacting in a more genuinely human way.

It's such a tangled, tough issue!

Quick shout:

2006-12-08T20:36:00.000-05:00

To anyone in the northeast US area this coming April, there's a cool conference coming up,:

'Deep Green Resistance, Confronting Industrial Culture

How do we stop the mass destruction of our planet? We need a world without environmental devastation and social oppression: we need to confront civilization.

Join us for a weekend of exploring long range strategy, direct action, oppression, peak oil, natural living, and the deep questions of how to mend our hearts and sustain our spirits in these hard times. Good fun, great food, and the quiet woods also included.'

I'm thinking about checking it out. If you're around, maybe you should too.

Apologies

2006-12-08T18:01:00.000-05:00

To anyone who commented on this blog in the past few months, let me apologize heartily for not publishing your comments until now.

Seems I inadvertantly put comment moderation on, and without an email notification no less, so I had no idea there were twenty-two comments pending publication. Thanks to Devin for pointing this out, and thanks again to everyone who took the time to comment.

Many apologies, and much appreciation to you all.

Nutrition stuffs

2006-12-08T08:02:00.000-05:00

So fairly big changes for me recently, as I've really jumped off the vegan wagon, and am trying different meats. So far I've tried wild boar roast (boar's not really wild, but raised in large pens, it seems probably like heritage turkeys, who are actually still capable of breeding without artifical insemination, necessary for commercial breeds), pork sausage and bacon (delicious!), and bison liver. I've also started having eggs almost every day. I feel mostly good, though I need to make sure I have other food around, because mid-day, when I'm not at home to cook for myself, I get hungry and thrown off, and end up eating store or restaurant-bought food, which is not ideal.

After spending a few days on the Weston A Price Foundation page, I was convinced and decided to give something else a try after years of veganism, and a few weeks of veganism + fish. I've even given some thought to eating dairy, though I'm mixed about that. Ran suggests ghee (clarified butter) as a way to get the nutrients in butter without the potentially hard to handle and allergenic parts of milk. I'm thinking about that, but I still have a hard time with the idea of cheese or yogurt. It just seems weird to me, not to mention a fairly recent tradition (the buzz word for the WAP folks).

I ordered Nourishing Traditions, and am waiting its arrival. I suspect that the Price folks are right on with a lot, and really have a good sense of what proper nutrition on the ground for indigenous groups is. But the diets do seem a bit narrow, and very dairy-based. It's certainly plausible to me that pasteurization is awful for milk and causes all sorts of problems, but it's also highly plausible to me that it's "nature's most perfect food," but only for baby cows, not adult humans.

One of their articles, Guts and Grease, on Native American diets, takes to task the 'politically correct' view that indigenous diets were very lean, pointing out that fat, especially animal fat, was highly valued and sought after, ultimately comprising a high percentage of calories consumed. They also make a concession I appreciate, which is that dairy is a good substitute in the modern age for the relatively inaccessible guts and grease of wild animals typical of hunter-gatherer Amerindian diets. If that's their position (dairy is good, but only as a substitute and not as a first choice for optimal health), then I'd be much more sympathetic to them. As it is, I still think they're right on and take a lot of their information seriously, but remain critical. (That's probably a good thing, though- better not to align oneself to any set of ideas so much as take what's useful in all of them).

I'm also still considering the healthfulness of grains. I know they're relatively new in our diets, but souring and sprouting them seems to increase their nutritional content and counteract the phytic acid, one of the anti-nutrients present that are bad for us. I read through Jason's post here, including a long series of exchanges with Shane. It seems to me that, though Jason's mostly right on, he hasn't exactly disproven Shane's arguments on the edges. I think that it's possible that grains are incorporable into a healthy diet for some people, maybe. Should they be the centerpiece of almost everyone's diet? Almost certainly not. But I think he glosses over the fact that one of humanity's most noteworthy traits is our adaptability. Should everyone live in the Artic like the Inuit? Should everyone live off of primarily mongongo nuts like the !Kung? Probably not, but some people can and do. Likewise, I'll reserve judgment about grains ultimate valuelessness. Doesn't Quinn say 'There's no one right way to live." Likewise, I doubt there are hard and fast rules necessarily excluding grains or even dairy. Maybe, maybe not. I'm not sure. But Jason did seem a big ideologically driven in that exchange, which turned me off somewhat.

Back to Price- I'm disappointed they don't emphasize a more varied diet and more fruit and vegetable consumption, at least leafy greens and other accessible non-agriculture-requiring veggies (i.e. potatos and other roots). They also make a point to criticize the pesticide use in industrial fruits and veggies, which is great, but I didn't think they were similarly critical of industrial meats.

The Nourishing Traditions book, also, according to one reviewer, contains its share of doublethink, too. For example: Fallon says: don't eat white flour, because it's only 400 years old, but then defends feeding livestock to each other as an acceptable practice, because it's been done for almost 100 years.

Anyway, the take home lesson for me is: attune yourself to your body, determine what you need and get it. In the meanwhile, avoid poisons like high fructose corn syrup and hydrogenated oils, and try to emphasize whole organic/pasture-raised/wild foods. That seems damn sound to me.

More on mass extinctions

2006-11-30T22:25:00.000-05:00

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

2006-11-29T22:47:00.000-05:00

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

2006-11-29T15:40:00.000-05:00

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

2006-11-29T07:57:00.000-05:00

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

2006-11-20T10:48:00.000-05:00

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

2006-11-19T11:28:00.000-05:00

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

2006-11-19T11:10:00.000-05:00

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

2006-11-14T19:27:00.000-05:00

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

2006-11-08T21:29:00.000-05:00

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

2006-11-07T20:27:00.000-05:00

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

2006-11-06T17:06:00.000-05:00

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

2006-11-02T20:30:00.000-05:00

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

2006-11-02T20:02:00.000-05:00

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

2006-11-01T12:05:00.000-05:00

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.

2006-11-01T10:26:00.000-05:00

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.