Searching For Identity and Purpose

Once upon a time, Carl Jung said, “I am not what happened to me, I am what I chose to become.”  He understood his calling, the special role that was unique to his existence.  He consciously pursued it, and he spent his life on a path of powerful healing.

James Hillman was one of Jung’s apprentices.  Hillman did not believe that newborns came into this world as blank slates.  He saw infants as unique acorns, ready to spend their lives growing into unique oaks.  Every oak tree had a different form.  No two were identical.  The form of the tree was influenced by the information stored in the acorn from which it sprouted.

Hillman believed that every human acorn had unique characteristics, and a unique calling, purpose, or destiny.  Every person had a sacred obligation to understand that calling and live it.  This was why nature-based societies encouraged people to discover their calling via vision quest ceremonies.  When they found their vision, they knew their path and purpose.  This helped them avoid wasting their lives in aimless wandering.

Basil Johnston described how vision quests worked in Ojibway culture.  Once a person discovered his or her vision, they tried hard to live in accordance with it.  It was not uncommon for folks to periodically stray from their vision, or betray it, and “such a state was tantamount to non-living in which acts and conduct had no quality.”  Every year, men and women would go on a retreat, to verify that they were still living in synch with their vision, and make any needed adjustments.

Hillman believed that modern society was a train wreck because most people were clueless about their calling, and were wandering aimlessly.  Society fed the sacred acorns into a machine that crushed them, shredded them, and converted them into standard issue industrial robots and recreational shoppers — lost souls.

On a larger scale, it’s not hard to imagine that entire communities were once guided by a collective tribal vision, before agriculture arrived.  Each wild community inhabited a unique ecosystem, and its custom-tailored vision enabled it to live in balance with the land.  This vision was passed from generation to generation, across vast spans of time, and helped to keep the life of the tribe stable and secure.  The vision guiding the human community was in harmony with the vision of the community of life — they were the same.

Ladies and gentlemen, it is with sincere regret that I must inform you that industrial civilization has no sacred vision to guide it; it has a terminal illness.  In ages past, as civilization obliterated countless wild tribes, the visions of those tribes were forgotten.  Because of this, our society has descended into “a non-living state, and our acts have no quality.”  We are no longer like happy tadpoles or maggots, the beautiful offspring of a healthy wild ecosystem.  We have been reduced to lonely stressed-out cogs in a global economy.

What can we do?  Is it possible to remember what was lost?  Native Americans have told me yes, it is.  If you forget your instructions, just look back toward the Creator’s fire, and you’ll remember them.  But each tribe was given different instructions by the Creator.

White folks are not like tribal Indians.  We’re mongrels, having ancestors from numerous tribes, all now disintegrated or extinct.  If I have ancestors from 476 tribes, who am I?  What are my instructions?  Where is my home?  Who are my people?

If my wild ancestors were buried in 476 different lands, and all of those ecosystems have been obliterated by centuries of civilization, what good are the ancient instructions?  The aurochs are gone, the lions are gone, the forests are gone, and the salmon have been herded into concentration camps. 

The stories, songs, and ceremonies of my wild ancestors have all been lost.  Indians disagree.  They insist that all ancient wisdom is always “accessible,” and just wink when I ask how.  This is most perplexing!  I’m hoping that contemplating a sustainable future will open new doors of perception, or old ones.

I’ve lived in nine states, and my extended family is scattered everywhere.  We have become wandering homeless people.  This year, I’m living in the Willamette Valley, on land violently stolen from the Kalapuya.  As a people, the Kalapuya had never forgotten their vision.  They celebrated their lives in a paradise of abundant life, and they knew how to live in balance with it.  It was easy.  All they had to do was to carefully follow the path of the ancestors, the ancient time-proven vision of the community.

The Kalapuya were forced out of their home by the white invaders, who had strayed far from their ancestral home, and had no vision for living in harmony.  The invaders built the city that I live in, which is insane, and is in the process of committing suicide.  It has no spiritual connection to the land, or to life.  Indeed, the entire nation is lost and insane.  This is not encouraging.

Today, the invaders’ culture is a childlike fantasy world of gadget worshippers — robot-driven electric cars, smart highways, smart grids, high-speed trains, Internet everything, windmills and solar panels, and on and on — nothing sustainable, and nothing that is necessary for a healthy and enjoyable life.

The purpose of existence is to make lots of money, by any means necessary, and spend it in a manner that continuously increases your display of personal status, as defined by the ever-changing fads of consumer society.  Stan Rowe perceived that consumers were raging narcissists, spellbound by their own image, imprisoned in an introspective cage — too much time spent before the mirror, and far too little outdoors with the family of life.

Countless millions devote their entire lives to acquiring and discarding unnecessary stuff.  Consumers have a deep longing to experience inner peace and happiness in their lives, and they believe that shopping is the sacred path.  They are trying to fill the vacuum created by their loss of wildness and freedom.  But, no matter how skillfully they shop, or how much they spend, it never works, except for fleeting post-purchase consumer orgasms, soon followed by a return to gnawing hollowness.  Trainloads of Prozac numb the pain.

I can’t get off the bus and live like a Kalapuya.  The deer, elk, and salmon are mostly gone now, replaced by endless herds of automobiles and cell phone zombies.  The land has been chopped up into thousands of parcels of private property, where my presence is not welcome.  In this reality, a sustainable way of life is impossible.

John Trudell says that we cannot have a spiritual connection to the future if we have lost the connection to our past.  It’s essential that we remember that everyone has ancestors who were tribal people — admirable folks who were solidly connected to the circle of life, and lived in harmony with it. 

We are, at root, tribal people who have been colonized.  Colonization is a component of the spiritual disease that gave birth to domestication.  It’s a mindset devoted to a mining way of life, eating up tomorrow, for no honorable purpose.  At the core of our healing process is decolonizing our minds, remembering that we are wild tribal people — human beings — not miners.

Near Term Extinction

The majority of modern society is clustered together in the hope and optimism pavilion, taking deep tokes on the bong of pleasure-filled fantasies (cough!).  At the other end of the spectrum are the Near Term Extinction (NTE) folks.  They profess absolute certainty that climate change will be the final chapter in the human story.  Our current mode of living will disintegrate by 2030, and a few scientists, like Malcolm Light, predict that all life on Earth will be extinct by 2050.  Ecology professor Guy McPherson is a primary spokesperson for NTE.

The NTE thinkers point to many genuine problems that are intensifying every day.  They describe a number of “positive feedbacks,” where one problem stimulates the worsening of other problems, accelerating the overall pace of destruction more and more.  A small disturbance can trigger a large avalanche.  They chastise the big name climate activism celebrities for failing to realize the actual risks these feedbacks, and, consequently, for preaching sermons tainted with false hope.

Rapid heating will destroy agriculture, release fabulous amounts of methane, and blindside every ecosystem on the planet.  The bright white polar ice caps are quite reflective, and bounce away a lot of incoming solar heat, but they are melting and shrinking.  Oceans may become so acidic that only jellyfish remain.

The burning of fossil fuels will fade with the demise of industry, so less incoming solar energy will be blocked by layers of pollution, speeding the warming process even more.  When the power grid dies, the pumps will quit at 440+ nuclear power plants.  So, the cooling ponds for spent fuel rods will evaporate, the rods will burn, and ionized radiation will poison the planet.  And so on.

Acknowledging these sobering ideas is necessary for those who wish to be present in reality.  It is well within the realm of possibility that their predictions will turn out to be correct — but not 100 percent certain, with a double your money back guarantee.  We’ve never destroyed a planet before, so our understanding of this sad process remains primitive.

Many members of the NTE community are highly intelligent, very well informed, and ruthlessly skeptical of every mainstream idea.  This combination of attributes does not result in a merry band of giggly bliss ninnies.  They comprehend the existence of enormous problems.  At the same time, they also comprehend that humankind is largely ignoring these problems.  It’s a heartbreaking disconnect.  The great majority of people simply fail to perceive the presence of great danger, because their lives still seem normal, today.

Extinction would neatly solve every single one of our problems, and would be a great relief for the family of life.  We were certain to go extinct at some point in the future anyway.  Uff!  But what if there are still some humans alive 100 years from now?  Humans, insects, and bacteria are exceptionally adaptable, and a portion of them may have an extended future.  Because of that possibility, I do this work.  The NTE folks shrug and label me normal (still asleep).  So be it.

I’m very happy that I’m not going to live to see the end of the collapse (I hope).  What the survivors, if any, choose to do is entirely beyond my control.  I am not responsible for the decisions they make, but I am responsible for doing what I can to help them understand their history, predicament, and options.  Nothing can change until ideas change.  So, one of the most essential occupations for those living now is to become idea mongers.  This is a path of great power, and there are Help Wanted signs all over the place.

Before we call it a day, let’s jump in our Hummer and take a quick tour of the NTE neighborhood.  Their mosque is called Nature Bats Last, Guy McPherson’s blog.  When you have a month or two with little to do, go here and visit all the links.  You’ll learn a lot about a wide variety of subjects.  (The links below are just a tiny sample of the information available on the following issues.)

Global Warming.  Climate scientists have been doing a good job of underestimating the rate at which carbon is accumulating in the atmosphere, and raising the planet’s temperature.  New and improved models generated by the UN in 2010 predicted a rise of 5° C by 2050.  Some believe that warming of 4° to 6° C results in a dead planet, and that this could happen in a decade.

Melting Permafrost.  Melting permafrost will release enormous amounts of greenhouse gases.  There is also underwater permafrost, and it too is melting and off gassing methane.

Tundra fires.  Arctic summers are getting warmer and dryer, and the carbon-rich tundra soils readily burn when dry.  Fire actually burns up the soil, exposing the permafrost below to warmer temperatures.  On the surface of the burned land, dark ash absorbs more solar heat, melting the permafrost faster.

Peat Fires.  Warmer, dryer weather is drying out peat lands, which contain one third of the world’s soil carbon.  Peat fires are often ignited by lightning or passing wildfires, and they are difficult or impossible to extinguish.  Some burn for years, or even centuries.  In 2010 there were huge peat fires in Russia.

Ocean Acidification.  One third of carbon dioxide emissions are absorbed by the oceans, which is increasing their levels of acidity.  Plankton in the ocean provides 50 percent of the oxygen in the atmosphere.  This oceanic oxygen production is now six percent less than it was 30 years ago.  Growing acidity is harmful to marine life and coral reefs.

Ionized Radiation.  There are about 440 nuclear power plants in the world, and they generate lots of radioactive waste that will be extremely toxic for a very long time.  These wastes are stored in cooling ponds, a short-term solution.  There is no long-term solution.  Extended power outages will allow the cooling ponds to evaporate, at which point the fuel rods will burn, and spew radiation to the four winds.

Oceanic Deoxygenation.  Climate change is stratifying oceanic waters, and warming the upper layers.  This will reduce the dissolved oxygen in the water, leading to the expansion of dead zones.  Some regions have experienced significant deoxygenation over the last 50 years, and many expect this problem to worsen, possibly for the next thousand years.

Atmospheric Deoxygenation.  Levels of oxygen in the atmosphere are declining.  Three hundred million years ago, the air was 30 percent oxygen.  Ancient dragonflies had four-foot wingspans.  Today it’s between 19 and 21 percent, and 12 to 17 percent in urban areas.  When it gets to 6 or 7 percent, we cannot survive.  Oxygen is consumed when carbon is burned.

Methane Catastrophe.  This report, written by Malcolm Light, is not intended for the general reader.  The first paragraph includes this jarring sentence: “This process of methane release will accelerate exponentially, release huge quantities of methane into the atmosphere and lead to the demise of all life on earth before the middle of this century.”

What a Long, Strange Trip It’s Been

I’ve been living like a hermit for 19 months now, reading dozens of powerful books, and writing weekly blogs.  I’m not the same person I was when I started.  My perception of reality has gone through some changes.  I’ve been sharing what I learned with the world.  I hope that seekers will find it, and I hope that my work will be helpful to them.  I’ll be publishing this material in book form shortly.

Genuine sustainability, of course, is the holy destination — a way of life that is healthy, satisfying, and has a long-term future.  Getting there, of course, will be an enormous challenge, requiring enormous changes, enormous wisdom, enormous luck, and probably a century or three, at least.

What we are today is the result of many choices and changes — stone tools, projectile weapons, fire, complex language, consciousness, directed thinking, cultural evolution, civilization, industrialization, the domestication of plants, animals, and minerals, and so on. 

At the time of the Great Leap Forward, 40,000 years ago, the megafauna were still abundant, and perhaps we were still sustainable.  But these cave painters were quite different from the far simpler hominids who roamed in Africa 500,000 years ago.  The high-tech cave painters were much more vulnerable to falling out of balance, which is exactly what happened.  Infants born today are still pure wild animals, ready to grow up in an advanced tribe of cave painters, or a primitive tribe of early Africans.  As Prince Charles says, we are what we are surrounded by.

Obviously, the safest and most conservative ideal would be to return to tropical regions.  Back in Africa, we didn’t need clothing, fire, shelters, or tools.  We lived much like chimps.  Food was readily available year round.  People enjoyed abundant leisure, and good health.  Perhaps climate change will come to our rescue here, by expanding tropical regions, and dealing a deathblow to agriculture.

But some predict that climate change will be the final chapter in the human story.  Those who foresee near term extinction (NTE) perceive me to be a delusional moron for contemplating the possibility that any humans will exist 100 years from now.  Rapid heating will destroy agriculture and blindside every ecosystem on the planet.  Oceans will become so acidic that only jellyfish remain.  Coal burning will cease with the demise of industry, so less incoming solar energy will be deflected by pollution, and the warming process will accelerate.  When the power goes out, the cooling ponds for spent fuel rods at 430+ nuclear power plants will evaporate, the rods will burn, and ionized radiation will poison the planet.

Extinction would neatly solve every single one of our problems.  We were certain to go extinct at some point in the future anyway.  Uff!  But what if there are still some humans alive 100 years from now?  I’m very happy that I’m not going to live to see the end of the collapse.  What the survivors choose to do is entirely beyond my control.  I am not responsible for the decisions they make, but I am responsible for taking action to protect their wellbeing, to the best of my ability.  We all are.

Collapse will blow away many obstructions that currently block our return to sustainability, but not all of them.  In theory, we are smart enough to choose a new path, and deliberately strive to return to a sustainable way of life.  What we do today to encourage this return, before the lights go out, may make a big difference in the coming years.  It feels right to try.

Five hundred years ago, large portions of the planet were still inhabited by humans living in a relatively sustainable manner.  Four thousand years ago, even more.  But these nature-based societies had no long-term future because there were pockets of dark energy emerging on the planet, something like cancer tumors, and their plan was perpetual growth, by any means necessary.

In his parable of the tribes, Schmookler warned us that once a bully entered the playground, the fun and games were over.  Only power can stop power.  He believed that this problem could be cured by creating a global civilization that was guided by wisdom.  Jack Forbes called it the cannibal disease, and he thought that this disease could be eliminated by spiritual rebirth on a global scale.  There is no fast-acting, silver bullet cure for the growing predator energy.  It’s a formidable challenge to the healing process.  In theory, we can outgrow it.

Another serious problem is a lack of foresight.  I could be gazing at a group of wooly mammoths right now, if only the inventor of the stone-tipped lance had the foresight to imagine the consequences of giving weapons of mass destruction to a gang of scruffy-looking illiterate longhaired rednecks.  Lions and tigers and bears don’t have this problem, because they hunt with tooth and claw, and this works just fine. 

Dilworth, Crosby, and Wright changed the way I think.  I used to believe that our problems began with domestication.  They taught me that our problems began with tool making.  Imagine what a paradise this world would be if prehistoric toolmakers had had foresight, immediately abolished their dangerous profession, and pursued careers in singing, dancing, and storytelling. 

At the dawn of the last century, there was loud and abundant opposition to automobiles, but the wise voice of conservatism was foolishly ignored — a huge mistake!  Two centuries ago, we failed to listen carefully to the ultraconservative Luddites, and what a mess we have now, Lord Almighty!  The problem really isn’t a lack of foresight, it’s a lack of stability.  Stable species have no need for foresight.  They live entirely in the here and now, and do so beautifully.  Domesticated humans are the exception.  We’re the loose cannons of the animal world.

Likewise, Shepard, Wells, Ehrlich, and Livingston warned us about the dangers of cultural evolution.  This is the same problem: a lack of stability.  Culture does not become toxic until it falls out of harmony with wildness, freedom, and the laws of nature — until it crosses the line and becomes unsustainable, a dead end.

It all boils down to remembering who we are, and how to live like human beings.  It’s about living as lightly as possible, and contributing the healing process to the best of our ability.

Thank you!  This has been fun!  Have an honorable life!  Best wishes!

Bring Back the Buffalo

The western plains of the US are witnessing an impressive boom in the growth of ghost towns (6,000 just in Kansas).  Lands having less than two people per square mile are classified as frontier.  In the 1990 census, 133 western counties were frontier.  The area of these counties is one quarter of the land in the lower 48 states (excluding Alaska and Hawaii).  The population of the plains peaked in 1920, and has been declining since.  An area that once may have supported 25,000 Indian buffalo hunters now supports 10,000 Americans.  The population is aging, because young folks tend to leave, and there is little to attract newcomers.

Ernest Callenbach, the author of Ecotopia, is a green dreamer.  His book, Bring Back the Buffalo, presents us with a vision for healing the plains.  For 500 years, the European invaders have done an impressive job of ravaging America’s ecosystems, but the plains are less wrecked than the rest of the nation.  Therefore, the plains would be the easiest region to return to a genuinely sustainable way of life.  So, what are we waiting for?

Well, more than a few folks have little affection for green dreamers.  The plains are home to God-fearing, government hating, ultra-conservatives.  Yet the economy of the region is kept on life support via a golden shower of generous government subsidies (welfare!).  Only fools with high principles question this paradox, and they are promptly bounced out of the saloon.

The government pays farmers not to till 26 million acres (10.5m ha) of highly erodible land.  In North Dakota, 80 percent of net farm income comes from subsidies.  Dry climate trends have been limiting farm productivity, and irrigated farming is on a dead end road, because underground aquifers are in the process of being emptied.

Public lands are leased to ranchers at bargain rates, typically 20 percent of the fair market price.  Grazing is not carefully managed, and both public and private lands are generally degraded.  The current system is a dead end road.  Likewise, the U.S. Forest Service routinely sells timber on public lands at prices far below cost.

Thanks to the General Mining Act of 1872, mining corporations can buy public land for $5 an acre, extract billions of dollars in minerals, pay no royalties to the public, and leave behind toxic messes for the public to clean up at enormous expense.  The latest technology is heap leach mining, which enables corporations to make a profit by extracting one ounce of gold from 60 tons of rock.  Crushed ore is piled up, and toxic cyanide is dumped on the pile.  The cyanide extracts gold, and some of it is collected at the bottom of the heap and then processed.  Thousands of birds are killed by landing on poison lakes.  If only humankind was able to survive without gold.

So, on the plains, like everywhere else in America, profits are privatized, and risks are socialized.  The net result is that taxpayers are subsidizing the destruction of the plains ecosystem.  But there are fools with high principles who question the wisdom of this.  For example, in a 1987 essay, demographers Frank and Deborah Popper proposed creation of the Buffalo Commons.  They needed bodyguards at public appearances in the early days, but the accuracy of their predictions, and the logic of their recommendations are gradually gaining respect.

Lynn Jacobs, author of the fiery Waste of the West, recommended that the government simply buy out the ranchers.  In the long run, it would be cheaper than subsidizing them to raise cattle and damage the range.  Public lands produce just two percent of America’s meat.  We could create an open range for buffalo once again, and this would benefit the health of both the grassland and the meat-eaters.  Grass-fed buffalo meat is low in fat, high in iron, and free of hormones and antibiotics.

Buffalo are amazing critters.  Bulls can weigh a ton, and cows more than a half ton.  In a five-mile race (8 km), they can outrun any horse, and they can sprint up to 50 miles per hour (80 km/h).  Their average lifespan is 12 to 15 years, but some live to 40.  They are perfectly attuned for living in semi-arid grasslands.  Unlike cattle, they can go several days without water.  They can remain healthy on a diet of grass.  They can survive blast-freezer winters without shelters or supplemental feed.  They give birth to their calves without human assistance.  They live wonderfully without managers!

Cattle tend to remain close to water, overgraze, and damage the banks of the streams (riparian areas).  Grazing buffalo keep moving, at something like a walking pace.  On the open range, they would eat and move on, and they might not return to that location for several years.  The result was healthy grassland, healthy riparian areas, healthy herds of buffalo, and healthy tribes of Indians.

Having been bred for passivity, cattle and sheep are easy prey, so ranchers have developed a passion for exterminating predators.  The poisons used by the Animal Damage Control (ADC) program kill twice as many cattle and calves as predators do.  Countless numbers of wild animals have been murdered in order to make the world safe for livestock.  Buffalo are far less vulnerable to predators, because they’re wild, fast, strong, smart, and dangerous.

Countless millions of prairie dogs have been killed, because cattle have a tendency to step into their holes and break their legs.  Buffalo, on the other hand, have learned the important skill of not stepping into holes.  Also, prairie dogs dine on vegetation, leaving less for the livestock to convert into profits — death to all freeloaders!

A primary obstacle to creating the Buffalo Commons is that the traditional mindset of the plains has a hard time wrapping its head around the idea of greatly expanding public lands, removing the fences, evicting the cattle, and letting the wild ecosystem heal — allowing the wolves, coyotes, mountain lions, and prairie dogs to return, and happily live in peace.

There’s an even wilder idea.  The government swiped lots of Indian land and gave it to settlers, so it could be put to “higher use.”  Since whites have a hard time surviving on the land without subsidies from outsiders, the land should be returned to the tribes and the wildlife.

Callenbach understands that a “sustainable” system is one that will function smoothly for “several thousand years.”  But in his zeal to sell us on a sustainable future for the grasslands, he gets a bit sloppy with the notion of sustainability.  He recommends promoting a tourism industry to bring urban people from distant lands to marvel at the herds of buffalo.  How will visitors travel to buffalo country?

He recommends constructing many wind turbines on the range.  Wind turbines are industrial products that cannot be made in the backyard with local materials.  The existence of industrial civilization is required for the maintenance and replacement of wind turbines, and the electrical grid.  He also suggests harvesting biomass from the range and using it to generate energy.

He envisions harvesting the buffalo, and exporting their meat and hides to other regions, to generate profits in a cash economy.  The old Indian system was far less risky.  Tribes simply killed what they needed, and left the rest alone.  All tribes had access to buffalo, so there was no motivation to trade, raid, or hoard.  The tribes got along just fine without creating a meat industry, or investing in power plants — and they are still suffering from when the crazy white tourists came to visit.  The tribes understood how to live with the land, as simply as possible.

Callenbach, Ernest, Bring Back the Buffalo: A Sustainable Future for America’s Great Plains, Island Press, Washington, 1996.

God Save Me From A Normal Life — Part Four

OK, so our modern civilized world is lost, but we’re starting to wake up to the notion that we’ve travelled a long ways down a dead path, because we have been guided by a dead vision.  We didn’t create this vision, we inherited it, and we have (so far) been unable to summon the power to acknowledge its fatal defects, reject it, and outgrow it — a long and difficult process.

Luckily, as we move beyond the temporary bubble of abundant energy, the unfolding collapse will undermine the dead vision.  The portion of the vision related to perpetual growth and insatiable consumption will be run over and killed by economic decay.  Unluckily, the portion of the dead vision related to the notion that humans are the divine owners and masters of the world is likely to persist, as we return to a muscle-powered way of life — but it will be weakened and vulnerable.

Following the Black Death, many survivors lost their faith in religion.  Why worship a god that permitted such immense horror?  In the wake of our collapse, many minds will likewise be roaring with resentment about all aspects of industrial civilization.  Our glorious era of astonishing innovation and human brilliance will shapeshift into a hideous calamity of unimaginable stupidity and unforgivable destruction.

“Never again!” will be the mantra of the survivors.  But how thoroughly will they comprehend the mistakes that created the disaster?  How likely will they be to continue the practice of unsustainable habits, especially soil mining, animal enslavement, and metal making?  One of the most powerful medicines of all is understanding.  What knowledge would be of great importance to our descendants?  How can we help them escape from the tentacles of our dead vision, and safely return to wildness and freedom? 

They will need to understand a reality-based version of history that discards the daffy myths and tells us who we are, warts and all — how we stumbled into this mess, and how our mistakes snowballed into the current disaster.  They will need to understand genuine sustainability, an extremely important subject that our society keeps chained up in the basement.  This is why I’ve written two books on sustainability — to shine a light on a clan of thinkers who are not wind turbine salesmen, or sustainable development hucksters.

Unfortunately, our institutions of education, religion, media, and government are manifestations of the dead vision, and they seem committed to going down with the ship.  To them, real history and genuine sustainability are matters of heresy that must religiously be beaten and stoned.  Sustainable living will never become our goal if we don’t know what it is, or why it’s essential to the health of the land, and the survival of our species.

Fortunately, the system is rotting from within.  In its prime, this system vigilantly protected us from fresh ideas and healthy visions — the cultural gatekeepers never allowed this information to enter our madhouse.  But the madhouse walls are crumbling. 

Recently, we have entered a delightful bubble of freedom.  For a limited amount of time — until the lights go out, or freedom is squashed — anyone can publish a book, release a song, display a painting, share a video, or discuss ideas with people from around the world.  For a limited amount of time, we have access to a global communication system.  Anything you do can be made available to billions.  If the moment is ripe, fresh ideas and healthy visions can go viral, rapidly spreading — and these days, large numbers of minds might be intrigued by fresh ideas and healthy visions.  Amazing things could happen.

Today, seven-point-something billion people are sitting ducks in a no-man’s-land between two powerful unfriendly forces.  On one side is climate change, which has many uncomfortable surprises in store for us.  On the other side is the end of the cheap energy bubble, and the collapse of industrial civilization, which will also bring many uncomfortable surprises.  In other words, big trouble is coming, big suffering.  The bill for our experiment in tool making has come due, and it is enormous.

Along with big trouble comes big opportunity.  Mother Nature will mercilessly resolve the overpopulation problem that we have ignored, a problem that has made sustainability impossible.  Another barrier to sustainability, our industrial system, will run out of energy, disintegrate, and rust in peace, terminating our dreadfully meaningless consumer society.  The final barrier to sustainability resides between our ears.

When the lights go out, our crippling isolation from the family of life will thankfully end.  There will be nothing to eat in the refrigerator, and all of our glowing electronic screens will thankfully go blank forever.  We will have no choice but to go outdoors, devote some serious attention to the living world, and develop a profound sense of respect for its power and beauty (and edible aspects).  We will have the precious opportunity to shift to a healthy path, and remember how to live like wild and free human beings once again.  Will we do it?

We at last come to the mother of all questions.  If people educated in industrial cultures survive the storm, will they regroup and repeat the same mistakes we’ve been making for thousands of years?  Or will they wisely perceive these devastating mistakes as important lessons to be learned?  What happens if the dead vision has no serious competition when the lights go out?  Game over?  Maybe climate change will make it impossible to repeat our cardinal mistakes.  Maybe it won’t. 

What if people imagined new visions before the lights went out, and shared them with the world?  What might happen if the moment was ripe, and these visions became as popular as Avatar, Lady Gaga, or Harry Potter?  What might happen if millions of minds received healthy doses of stories depicting real history and genuine sustainability?  What might happen if we acknowledged the existence of reality and began to have deep, meaningful discussions about it?  Could this awakening make a vital difference for those who live in the aftermath?  Could it help the present generation make better choices?

Those whose minds dance outside-the-box are not sodden with despair.  Big change is coming, and the rich and powerful can do nothing to stop it.  There is a faint light at the end of the tunnel.  The gang rape of the planet is running out of fuel, and will eventually cease.  Better days are on the way — a long era of healing.  Sooner or later, with or without us, the family of life will once again return to balance.

The ancestors remind us that there was a time before civilization, industrialization, overpopulation, the madness.  There will also come a time when they have long been forgotten.  There is no undo button, but there will come a day when the storm has passed.  Joy!

God Save Me From A Normal Life — Part Three

The vision that guides our society is peculiar.  Step 1 is to absorb as much education as you can endure and afford.  Step 2 is to plug into the economy, aggressively pursue every opportunity for advancement, and make as much money as you can, by any means necessary.  Step 3 is to spend that money in a manner that continuously increases your display of personal status, as defined by the current trends of consumer society. 

Obviously, this culture is disconnected from our ancestral roots, and from the family of life.  Countless millions devote their entire lives to acquiring and discarding unnecessary stuff.  In the magazine room at the library, I observe patrons devoting intense attention to understanding the latest trends in automobiles, electronics, fashion, cosmetics, homes, pets, and so on.  They long to experience inner peace and happiness in their lives, and they believe that shopping is the sacred path.  But, no matter how skillfully they shop, or how much they spend, it never works, except for fleeting post-purchase consumer orgasms.  Trainloads of Prozac numb the pain.

Nature-based cultures understand and respect power.  It’s everywhere, in everything, including all of us.  Power comes in many forms, and it is the greatest gift of all.  Some folks are skilled at tracking, hunting, or midwifery.  Others are healers, warriors, or storytellers.  There are weavers, herbalists, or shamans.  Power speaks to those who listen.  Modern folks often leave their power in the box, unopened, because they’ve never discovered their vision.  They are lost.

A minority of modern people do manage to connect with their power, and use it.  They are not swept away by the strong currents of consumer society, because they can see right through the silly nonsense, and they have the power to deflect it.  They do not indulge in false hope and irrational optimism.  They remain present in reality.  I don’t understand why they are different, and I have no name for them, but they certainly exist, and they live outside the fence of the fantasy world, usually in the shadows, distrusted by the mainstream. 

They tend to be intelligent, imaginative, and horrified by the madness of modern society.  Their right brains are bulging and strong, from regular creative exercise.  They are often writers, artists, musicians, filmmakers, playwrights, poets, storytellers, dreamers, or rebels — people whose spirits have not been severed from the ancestral realm of uncontrollable wildness and freedom.  They have power.  According to The Dark Mountain Manifesto, “Words and images can change minds, hearts, even the course of history.  Their makers shape the stories people carry through their lives, unearth old ones and breathe them back to life, add new twists, point to unexpected endings.” 

If they had grown up in a nature-based culture, some of them might have been known as shamans.  All wild cultures had shamans.  Everywhere around the world, descriptions of their methods are remarkably similar.  Adults in a tribe can readily recognize the boys and girls destined to become shamans, because their power is easy to see.  They sometimes have so much power that it’s hard for them to function in society.  Older shamans take them under their wing, and teach them how to carry their power, and use it well.

Ordinary children have no memories of other times, lives, or realities, but young shamans do.  They tend to be introverted, and closely allied to nature.  They may have powerful dreams or hallucinations.  They can communicate with the spirit world, and see things that the others cannot.  Sometimes they play important roles as messengers, bringing back wise instructions from ancestral spirits, when the tribe is confronted with challenges.  They have a strong spiritual connection to life.

For the sacred task of envisioning a sustainable future, people with shaman-like powers could help us remember who we are, and where we came from.  Whatever we call them, they must be people who have a passionate relationship with the natural world, who excel at clear thinking, people who can effortlessly think outside-the-box.  This sort of crowd has power.  They can break spells.

Donella Meadows devoted a lot of thought to the notion of envisioning a sustainable future.  Our society is enacting a vision of perpetual growth, and this drove her crazy, because it’s so stupid.  This stupid vision thrives because alternative visions have yet to gain momentum.  Most folks have no interest in greener visions, because they are perceived to require sacrifice, a life of less.  Less what?  Less stupidity?  Less waste?  Less anxiety and depression? 

I recently saw the movie Cave of Forgotten Dreams, about the ancient paintings at Chauvet Cave in France, discovered in 1994.  Many of the paintings were done about 32,000 years ago, and they depict profound reverence for life.  In those days, France was a healthy paradise filled with wild aurochs, horses, rhinoceros, bears, lions, bison, and many others — a world that was spectacularly alive and well.  The paintings may have been made over a period of 5,000 years. 

Can you imagine a low-impact way of life that lasted 5,000 years?  Can you imagine living in a society filled with awe, amazement, and overwhelming love for the natural world?  Can you imagine living in a world that wasn’t on a high-speed path to self-destruction?  Was this era of abundant freedom, wildness, and vitality truly “less” than our modern suburbia?  Wouldn’t it be precious to wake up in a sane and healthy world?

Our wild ancestors always resisted the aggressive intrusion of outsiders.  The Sentineli still do.  They inhabit North Sentinel Island, one of the Andaman archipelago of islands, in the Bay of Bengal, off the coast of India.  These people are a Stone Age society of Negrito pygmies who survive by hunting, foraging, and especially fishing.  No signs of agriculture have been observed.  They have a long tradition of welcoming visitors with a shower of arrows and insults, and they are skilled marksmen.

Amazingly, the Indian government protects the Sentineli, and allows them to live in wild freedom.  They remain free because the island isn't that big, doesn't have much valuable timber, and mineral treasures are unlikely.  The island is surrounded by treacherous reefs and treacherous seas — safely getting there by boat is nearly impossible.  Once a year there is one location that becomes theoretically accessible to those who wish to take their life in their hands and fight the powerful currents. 

The Sentineli enjoy a good life in a healthy, stable, and sustainable culture.  They need nothing that they don’t have.  They want to be left alone to live in peace.  Imagine what a terrible “sacrifice” it would be to live a simple life on an island paradise, in balance with nature, in a world with no strangers.

To be continued.

God Save Me From A Normal Life — Part Two

My father was born 100 years ago.  One hundred years from now, the seven-point-something billion people alive today will be gone.  There will be no cars, TVs, computers, phones, and so on.  The vision of a technological wonderland will be forgotten and extinct, replaced by many new low-tech survival-oriented pursuits.  If humans continue to exist, they will not be very fond of our generation, and the messes we left for them.

Every civilization eventually exhausts essential resources and collapses.  As predictable as the sun, civilizations rise, peak, and then set.  In the wake of every collapse, the survivors usually regroup and repeat the same mistakes.  It’s the easiest option, or the only option.  This is a primary curse of the agricultural era — once the dirty habit of soil mining takes root, it’s very hard to quit before the ecosystem is entirely wrecked.

As the collapse of modern society unfolds, the consumer lifestyle will eventually go extinct.  Returning to a genuinely sustainable mode of nature-based living will not be possible until nature recovers and the human population adjusts to the new scenario.  This may take a generation or three.

Meanwhile, the safe bet is that muscle-powered subsistence farming and herding will once again become the primary human activities, utilizing severely depleted cropland and grassland, without the magic chemicals and machines.  The survivors will strive to recreate something resembling a pre-industrial peasant way of living — a backbreaking lifestyle, with a short life expectancy, in which everyone lives close to the brink of starvation.  (Some scientists speculate that changing climate may blindside agriculture at some point.)

The long-term future of these neo-peasants is easy to predict.  After 10,000 years of experiments in agricultural civilization, there is no place where the cropland and grassland remains as fresh and healthy as it was on day one.  Indeed, vast areas have been reduced to waste, and new wastelands are being created at an ever-growing rate.  Agriculture is a dependable path to ruin, because it is almost always unsustainable in the long run.  Industrial society is a dependable high-speed path to ruin. 

Wise guys persistently question the wisdom of remaining on any obvious, clearly marked path to ruin.  Our ancestors were not imbeciles or evil monsters.  With good intentions, they innocently adopted agriculture.  It was impossible for them to foresee the disastrous long-term consequences of their experiment.  Today, we cannot plead ignorance.  The long-term consequences are far better understood (but generally disregarded).  Like all other animals, humans primarily live in the here and now.  Long-term thinking had no purpose when we lived in balance with nature.

Wise guys persistently recommend that we move in the direction of sustainable living, because all unsustainable options, by definition, have no long-term future.  In a smart collapse, the transition to subsistence farming would be seen as no more than a temporary transition on the high-priority path to a genuinely sustainable future.  It would be awesome to actually acknowledge the big lessons of history, break out of our 10,000-year cycle of repeated mistakes, and strive to live more mindfully.  We inherited big brains; we should use them.

A huge plus is that the new generation of radical thinkers is providing us with a different way of perceiving the world.  Agriculture was a stunning mistake.  The long-tarnished reputation of “primitive” nature-based living has been dusted off, spiffed up, and recast as a brilliant, enjoyable, healthy, time-proven mode for living far less destructively, or even sustainably.  It was not problem-free, but it left far fewer scars.

Half-baked intelligence got us into this mess, and our only hope for survival is a new and improved intelligence, heavily armed with clear thinking, reality-based history, state-of-the-art foresight, respect and reverence for nature, and a fervent, uncompromising contempt for deeply rooted pathological traditions.  With powerful wisdom, perfect luck, and more than a few miracles, humankind may once again be wild, free, and happy, a century or three down the road.  Imagine that.

A huge minus is that the road ahead is treacherously littered with slippery banana peels.  Say hi to the hope and optimism crowd, the “normal” mainstream consumers who comprise the vast majority of modern society.  For them, the consumer way of life is sacred and non-negotiable.  They conjure quirky comforting dreams that the current way of life will continue for the rest of their days.  The economy will recover and grow like crazy, everyone will have high-income work with outstanding benefits, the housing market will make everyone billionaires, everyone will drive monster trucks, death will be cured, and technology will clobber every problem — heaven on Earth!

This is false hope and irrational optimism, better known as denial (or psychosis).  It attempts to distract our attention from the pain of despair.  This psychosis dominates our culture, like the air we breathe.  Everywhere we turn; it’s there — entertainment, education, politics, religion, everyday conversations.  It dominates the minds of most people, for obvious reasons.  It’s all they know.  It encloses their minds in a cocoon of magical thinking, shielding them from uncomfortable inputs.  The world outside of the well-padded cocoon is an intensely unhealthy and unstable reality.  So, close the curtains, lock the doors, roll a joint, turn on the TV, and hope for better days ahead, right?

Is it possible to survive without false hope and irrational optimism?  Yes, in fact, it is.  Some of my best friends are present in reality, and they are quite smart and interesting.  For anyone who is even slightly present in reality, the path ahead is obviously jammed with 800-pound gorillas, as far as the eye can see — climate change, deforestation, mass extinction, energy depletion, economic collapse, wars, famines, pestilence, and on and on.  The deeper you explore reality, the more gorillas you find. 

Sadly, if you outwardly acknowledge the presence of even one gorilla, you suddenly change into an abominable monster of pure negative energy — a sick, pessimistic, brain-damaged doomer!  But wait!  Realistically, isn’t it sick and pessimistic to hope that the most destructive experiment of the entire human journey remains alive and well for as long as possible?  Do you really hope that it continues destroying life on Earth?  Circle the true doomer in this picture.  Everything is backwards.  Words can be very slippery.

If these hope fiends could slip outside their cocoon of magical thinking, they would see that genuine optimism enthusiastically embraces the sane and healthy desire to eventually return to a sustainable way of life.  Genuinely positive people are interested in freeing themselves, overcoming their addictions, rejecting the toxic values of mainstream society, resigning from soul-killing and planet-killing occupations, remembering what it is to be authentically human, and celebrating the perfection of creation (what’s left of it).

But the “normal” hope and optimism crowd has no interest in being enlightened or saved, and any attempts at doing so are usually a waste of time, and more than a little depressing.  They are committed to shopping till they drop.  The mainstream worldview is a maximum-security prison, and it will never open the gates when reason and logic come calling — instead, these sensible visitors will be warmly welcomed with a shower of boiling oil.  Obviously, humankind does not march to the beat of reason and logic — these are new, immature, and unstable mental powers.  So, the human mind is a bouncy slippery fish, and the path to genuine sustainability will not be short or simple.

I shall now reveal an immensely hopeful and optimistic plan that has a very slight chance for success — my reason for writing this book. 

To be continued.