Ecotopian Hippie Rant!

Nature is good.

It is also bigger than you, so it is incumbent upon you to learn about it, rather than for it to bend to your will....because your shit will get smacked down if you try it that way; witness the 20th century for examples of that. The life of the earth is going to prevail no matter what we as humans do to try and subdue it. If it goes, it all goes. Us along with it. We will peter out to one long, gradual whine that trails off into silence and the stars will still turn overhead and the sun will still shine on whatever dust is left.

We are animals on the Earth and we are meant to live here. The natural world is not an inimical force to be defeated. We are part of it. And it is GOOD to be a part of it. Living so removed from the life of the earth that you have to make a special arrangement to see a cow being milked is not only pathetic, its not healthy, or good for your psyche or any other part of you. I mean this seriously. It is genuinely bad for people, for their minds, for their physical selves and emotional selves, to live a completely technological, urbanized, civilized existence. Cities and technology are not our habitat.

The simple proof of that is this: You take any healthy organism and you make it live in an unnatural environment where all of its functions are subverted, redirected or completely forbidden and you destroy all the higher functioning of that organism.

You turn it into LIVESTOCK.

Do you pride yourself on being the 'compleat urbanite'?

Congratulations. Say 'baaaaaaa'.

When people live that way, they begin to go crazy, and I mean crazy as a group, too.

I'm completely serious here. This is why I had to get out of the city. It was like I gradually woke up and realized that I was in the nightmare. I gradually became aware of a fundamental, basic wrongness all around me, like a heavy, hopeless fog weighing down on everything, driving everyone to their knees. I realized that it was because I was, in essence, living in the jaws of a trap... in a place where I WAS NOT ALLOWED TO maintain a standard of living apart from the prosthesis; the money economy, the city, the androcentric system.

That is simply not how we are meant to live on this planet. It just isn't.

Not that I'm all off the grid here, or that I'd even want to be. (Fine, 'now'. I used to hold that as an ideal, but as age has overtaken me I really appreciate things like electricity and indoor plumbing.) Still, if there were a way to exist off the grid and not live in a state of squalor and constant mindless labor, then I'd do it. I don't believe humans are meant to be slaves to the natural environment any more than I think they should be slaves to technology. I do think that we've completely missed many opportunities where we could have developed ways to use the world as a tool instead of a weapon to dominate others. And so I try, in my limited way, to live a kind of life that works in some kind of harmony with the natural world, that keeps me free and keeps my neighbors free as well. This is how I have to live. This is how I'm doing my revolution.

Industrialized society isn't all shit. Still, I am hoping that industrialized society is a kind of a really, really bad puberty that we are going through as a species. There are going to be lots of fuck-ups and irreparable mistakes but eventually, maybe in centuries from now, we will outgrow it; learn how to do things in a more rational, less destructive way, and actually mature as a species. Thats my hope. I don't think it's too pie in the sky, either....after all, we no longer have to run around naked stealing dead shit from hyenas, or sacrifice humans to ensure that spring comes again. We've actually made SOME progress. We have science-basic observation, experiment, repetition and documentation, to thank for it...which we thought up on our own lonesomes, I might add.

Truthfully, I think that the biggest leap ahead will come once we outgrow the need for magic and organized religion, and leave them behind like the crude broken tools that they are. We'll all move ahead to a better place as a people. I really do believe that.

Until then I will probably have a lot of extra pumpkins and garlic and beans and stuff this year, so if you want some stop on by.