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  • From: "Tradingpost" <tradingpost@gilanet.com>
  • To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [Livingontheland] Democracy Recapitulates Proctology (don't read this unless you have a sense of humor)
  • Date: Mon, 27 Dec 2004 20:29:46 -0700

Archives of the Eleventh Headwaters Conference, November 3-5, 2000
Democracy Recapitulates Proctology
http://www.western.edu/headwaters/archives/headwaters11_papers/nichols_rant.html

Or, How I learned to drive an SUV and stopped worrying about the greenhouse
effect (A cogent analysis of post-modern Headwaters apocalypse and its
concommitant cyberdevelopment paradigm)
11th Headwaters Conference Keynote Address
John Nichols, Taos, New Mexico.

Greetings, my fellow carnivores.

It makes me happy to see so many well-fed middle-class North Americans
willing to pay $25.00 to spend three days excoriating themselves for screwing
up the planet, but good.

Thank you for paying my exorbitant fee here tonight of $1,000 dollars, for
which I only had to spend three months building a file on relevant Headwaters
topics, and then writing a speech over a two week period of eight hour days,
and then driving north 200 miles, losing three days out of my life in order
to deliver the speech to you all, whose lives, no doubt, will be enriched and
changed forever by my cogent insights into this region's sodomy, excuse me,
"economy."

I'd like to give special thanks to George Sibley for inviting me back to the
original scene of my crime. Eleven years ago I made an appearance at the
first Headwaters Conference, during which I launched an impromptu piano
concert in a boogie-woogie mode, accusing Kit Carson of genocide. After that,
for some reason invitations for me to return were lost repeatedly in the mail
between Gunnison and Taos, New Mexico where I live.

Of course, there may be a failure to communicate here, but I hope not. I am
reminded of a famous story about Che Guevara and Cuba. After Fidel Castro and
Che won the revolution, and Fidel was trying to put together a new
government, he needed an economist to run the National Bank. So, in a
meeting, he asked, "Who's an economist?" Che thought Fidel had asked, "Who's
a communist?" So raised his hand. And instantly Fidel made him president of
the National Bank.

Well, speaking frankly as a man who's lost everything in a divorce three
times, I've never considered myself a great economist. But when George Sibley
asked me if I'd come up here and talk about being a communist, I was only too
happy to oblige.

Especially since there's going to be a great election in our country on
November 7, and I never pass up an opportunity to prosylitize the American
Electorate about my feelings on the candidates during this hallowed season.
After all, we live in a democracy, so I'm told, with a two party system that
this year is going to offer us a choice between a Shrub and a Bloody Mess.
One candidate has been called a Maserati, the other a Volvo, and I have read
numerous incisive newspaper columns and editorials expounding at length upon
the respective attributes of these two makes of vehicles. Every four years I
find myself utterly thrilled by the intellectual intensity and vacuity of the
political debates around presidential elections, and I'm also flabbergasted
by the vast ideological diversity offered to us by the various candidates.

For example: Al Gore is a capitalist and Dubya is a capitalist. But whereas
Dubya is five feet nine inches tall and weighs 178 pounds, Al Gore is six
feet tall and weighs 192. Also Bush has thicker hair than Gore and a
different accent. The amazing range of differences evident in these salient
points alone between candidates have me so excited by the election that I
can't wait to vote.

And I am not alone, it seems, because it is predicted that at least thirty,
maybe even thirty-five percent of the registered voters in America can't wait
to vote either. That's how a democracy works, and it's what makes union so
great.

Be that as it may, I started thinking about this conference way back in
February when George Sibley got in touch. And I've been thinking about it
ever since. My thinking has taken place during the worst drought I have ever
experienced here in the west, and also one of the heaviest fire seasons.
Where I live, in Taos, New Mexico, there were a couple of months when all we
did was breathe smoke, first from the Los Alamos Fire, then from a bunch of
other New Mexico fires, and then from the fires in Montana and Wyoming and
Idaho and Hades. Visibility in Taos was often only ten or fifteen miles.
And it got so dry in Taos that Chaptstick was going for thirty bucks a pop.

Every day felt like apocalypse to me. Then the National Forest was closed for
five weeks because of fire danger so I couldn't even take my daily hike in
the hills near Taos until the numerous bomb threats I e-mailed to the
Floresta convinced them to reopen.

The fire season was terrible because a hundred years of fire suppression have
mangled our forests, making them cluttered and unhealthy so that when fires
do take off, they burn with far too much intensity, and cause way more
destruction than normal fires are supposed to. We are learning that fire
suppression is insane, but we can't stop doing it because hundreds of
thousands of people have built wooden houses inside the forest, which is
nuts, but of course their private property is sacred, so billions of dollars
are spent suppressing fires that shouldn't be suppressed in order to save
houses that shouldn't be built where they are built because they are going to
be burned eventually anyway because fire suppression builds up fuels that
inevitably have to burn even though insurance companies don't agree with the
laws of nature and won't pay off on claims made by people who should have
known better than to trust the scumbag insurance companies in the first place.

That's one small example of our economy at work, in a syndrome made famous by
Joseph Heller in his caustic novel, Catch 22. I'll admit, I'm a masochist.
Every day I read newspaper articles about the Greenhouse Effect, ozone holes,
and global warming. I also read about Speed Dating and death metal groupies,
but those topics are less germaine to this evening's discussion. This past
summer of grim and deadly drought, as you might imagine, fairly curdled my
masochistic testes. By August I was having genuine anxiety attacks about
eco-collapse as well as about Liz Taylor's weight problems, which are one and
the same. For years and years I have adamantly railed against an economy, a
lifestyle, a philosophy, a mindset, a culture that seems dead set on
committing planetary suicide. "Growth for the sake of growth," I usually
screech in every single shrill peroration that escapes from between my
frothing self-righteous lips, "is the ideology of the cancer cell." That's a
quote from Cactus Ed Abbey, a philandering anarchist much revered in the
Headwaters Region, who never came up with a plan to save us, but he sure
could make us chortle on our way toward the graveyard.

I became convinced long ago that the world was headed for a monster global
social and eco-disaster, and the United States--the biggest bully on the
block--was going to lead the way. I came to this conclusion after studying
American history beginning with the pilgrims, Indian genocide, slavery and
our plantation mentality, Manifest Destiny and buffalo destruction,
immigration policies, the building of railroads and the rise of the Standard
Oil Company, the labor wars, and the movies of PeeWee Herman.

Our President Woodrow Wilson once said, "We are all caught up in an economic
system that is heartless. If you really study the four hundred years of
historical imperatives that created and shaped the ideology behind Wal-Mart,
Donald Trump, and Mickey Mouse, chances are you'll at least pause over your
latte, glance up, and feel some small twinge of apprehension about the antics
of your happy little freckle-faced soccer-star kid across the living room at
the computer console playing some popular Nintendo ripoff called "Death Slobs
Rape and Dismember Blond Cheerleader Girls."

I know I did, and I concluded that one interesting aspect of our political
system called "Democracy," is that it seems to have abdicated its high moral
ground to the more venal tenets of our economic system called capitalism.
Which has now helped spawn a global economy where the top 200 families on
earth control as much wealth as the poorest two billion people on the bottom.
Years ago, in Vietnam, an American officer stated, "We had to destroy the
town in order to save it." All of us today support an economy that is
predicated on destroying the planet in order to save it.

But in the past twenty-five years I never really got depressed thinking about
the negative forces driving humanity toward global apocalypse...until this
last summer. Starting in January I could see the drought and the fires
coming, and I felt a sense of doom. But whenever I expressed my misgivings to
fellow Taos Citizens, they just looked at me, like, duh. Everyone seemed
oblivious. They loved the cheery sunny weather. And they kept on rushing
about in their Ford Explorers and Chevy Suburbans buying and selling and
consuming and defecating in a frenzy of growth-oriented activity that looked
to me like so many jacked-up amphetamine freaks buttfucking each other in a
free-for-all in a mammoth garbage can full of overweight circus clowns.

At home, last summer, I'd turn on the TV, and the hysterical onslaught of
shop-til-you-drop commercials literally buggered me. When I looked at that
stuff, especially during a drought that must be part of the Greenhouse Effect
that is caused by climax capital gone amok, it isn't funny, it isn't clever,
it isn't even entertaining or seductive. In fact, it is so utterly scarey I
want to run outside and hop in my old 1980 Dodge D15 pickup truck and commit
suicide by driving headfirst into a McDonald's at 80 mph warbling the Singing
Chipmunks Christmas song.

Back on May 4, 2000 I read a column by an Albuquerque Ú ÚJournalÛ Û writer
named Larry Calloway and put his column in my Headwaters file. Calloway
castigated Albuquerque because its "Growth Lags Behind Other Western Cities."
In 1980, Albuquerque was the fifth biggest city in the west. Today,
Albuquerque is only the nation's 60th fastest growing city, and losing ground
daily. Compared to Las Vegas, the fastest growing city in the nation, wrote
Calloway, Albuquerque was "abysmal." And he feared things were "getting
worse," as more and more cities were growing faster than Albuquerque, which
had appallingly fallen to a ranking of 144th in the nation in 1998.

Hello? Earth to Larry Calloway? Well, I shouldn't have been surprised. About
the only economic philosopher I ever read who thought that capitalism could
be successful without being locked into exponential growth was John Stuart
Mill. Everyone else presumes that what's good for General Bullmoose is good
for everybody and material elephantiasis cum hydrocephalicism is the way to
go. You can't stop progress, that's the American Way.

We are trained by our economy to believe growth is sacred. We believe in
allowing "the invisible hand" of the market to decide. We may claim to be
ecologists, we may say we want a sustainable economy, we may scoff at golf
courses, ski resorts, and other forms of recreation development in the
Headwaters region, but most of us through our daily consumption habits,
support the market, and what we support is making growth inevitable beyond
the ability of our biological capital to support us because the invisible
hand of the market keeps spanking the economic monkey--that's why it's called
"climax capitalism." Which is the main problem on both local and global
levels.

Now: If I understand the Headwaters premise correctly, it considers itself a
specific geographical region and would like to think that this region can in
some way define and affect its own destiny apart from the whole. Lotsa luck.
John Muir once said, "Whenever we try to pick out anything by itself, we find
it hitched to everything else in the universe." John Donne wrote, "No man is
an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of
the main.

This region's economy has been a part of the main ever since Spaniards, and
then Americans, clumped into the area and began hacking apart the indigenous
hillbillies. Certainly, the region has been a part of the main since the
advent of modern laissez-faire capitalism, which we might date around the
publication of Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations in 1776. Adam Smith is the man
behind the attitude that gives all of us the legendary hard-on that sets the
invisible hand to spanking our collective monkeys.

I don't believe this area ever had a Sensitive New Age or Balanced Economy,
so I'm not sure there exists any historical foundation here upon which to
build, or go back to, a less divisive, more balanced, and, dare I say,
egalitarian? economy. I bring up "egalitarian," because nowhere on earth will
ever have a viable and sustainable economy until the class warfare that
blights the planet is demobilized and exchanged for an equal distribution of
wealth and civil rights for all. I'd call that democracy. And base it on the
U.S. Declaration of Independence, which has nothing to do with the
stultifying New York Yankee type economy running this Xenophobic
country...which every four years feels proud that its Olympic basketball
team, made up of NBA professionals earning 87 million dollars a year, apiece,
can win a gold medal by defeating Lower Slobovia's amateur basketball bozos
by a margin of 100 points. Why does that make us so proud. "Winning isn't
everything," said legendary Green Bay Packer coach, Vince Schwarzenhitler,
"it's the only thing."

I listen to people in this region talk about the good old days. They bitch
about how newcomers are destroying a way of life. But my understanding of our
history is that there weren't any Good Old Days. Roderick Nash called
westward expansion "a tragic series of ruthless conquests of people and
nature." Not even pre-European Native American tribes cathected their
transductions of affect harmoniously. There was competition for territory,
intertribal raids, kidnapping for slaves. According to Harvard
anthropologist, Steven Leblanc, "That warfare was chronic from the earliest
times right up until the arrival of Europeans, and that violence among
Puebloan people rose and fell in response to climatological changes that,
after 1200 or so, brought fierce competition for resources.

But as soon as the religious fanatics in tin suits from Iberia showed up on
the distant horizon, a lot of Native lookouts on top of a lot of different
buttes, pinnicles, mesas, and chimney rocks said, in unison: "Oh shit, there
goes the neighborhood."
Then the Americans wandered in and trampled just about everybody with their
mining and ranching and logging and railroads and oil shale exploration and
other rapacious extractive activities. If there was anything gentle or
friendly or environmentally sound or that established some sort of bucolic
peaceful balanced land-worshipping lowkey pastoral cuddly community, I am a
monkey's uncle.

I remember a Native American pal of mine saying almost thirty years ago that
if Reies Tijerina, the Chicano land grant activist in northern New Mexico,
ever succeeded in getting the courts to return to the Chicano people the
National Forest Land stolen from Spanish land grants by the American invaders
after the war of 1848, the Indians would be waiting at the bottom of the
courthouse steps with their hands out for Tijerina to transfer that land back
to them, from whom the Spanish stole it in the first place.

Listen to this from the Mancos Times, in Mancos, Colorado, on November 24,
1893, a little over 100 years ago, during the Good Old Days. It's from an
outraged editorial about starving Ute Indians killing deer off their
reservation. "Every white man caught breaking our game laws," states the
editorial, "is severely and justly dealt with, but those lousy, filthy,
insolent and murderous bucks can do as they choose." Six days later the same
paper remarked about the Utes, "Truly, Uncle Sam has in these Indians another
case of the 'White Elephant.' They won't work, and they are not good to eat.
They are simply an expensive ornament to the lands, and beyond that are of no
earthly use.

Now there's an attitude that "civilized" this region. At one point, the
economy of this area was big on mining, and much of the mining--yesterday and
today--was based on--is still based on--the 1872 mining law, a great American
legal precedent, on the books and governing us, now, for 128 years. Put
simply, the 1872 mining law declares that you can drop a hydrogen bomb for
fun and profit on just about any old spot of federal property that tickles
your fuzzy, and there's not a damn thing anybody can do to stop you. Witness
the Climax Mine, the Superfund Summitville gold mine, those tailings
mountains in Leadville and Durango, the new Superfund Molymine down in
Questa, New Mexico--yada yada. And what's her name, up in Crested Butte--the
Red Lady Mine?--possibly soon coming to a theater...of operations...near you.
If Adolf Hitler had married Leona Helmsley, their child would've been called
The 1872 Mining Law.

I don't think ranching was any friendlier to the land, or to the peaceful
folks who were lolling around here compassionately observing nature while
they drank mint juleps before the cattle and the woolly maggots arrived. Cows
and sheep are extractive industries just like mining, logging, railroads,
dams, ski areas, art galleries, and half-pipes for testosterone saturated
skate boarding tongue-pierced Eminem-worshipping teenagers in town parks in
the picturesque Noble Rockies. You can read plenty of tomes about the
devastation ruminants have caused in these here parts. Cow farts produce
methane gas that causes epilepsy in environmentalists. When a sheep nibbles
gramma grass in Ouray, it destroys the root system all the way to China. And
when a conservative politician enters a riparian area, the river dries up in
four minutes, flat.

But then, not much business in this area, right up to the present day, has
been what you'd call holistic. Most of it has been based on good solid
capitalist economics. Maximum feasible profit for minimum investment. Expand
or expire. Planned obsolescence and conspicuous consumption. I.e.: find it,
feel it, fuck it, forget it. And whether it was mining, ranching, logging,
oil shale, or parasailing on Blue Mesa Reservoir, you can bet your sweet
bippy that the activities were not dictated by local markets, or by a
regional economy, so much as by national and international demands. The
bigwigs calling most of the shots sat in Lay-Z-Boy Barcaloungers smoking
Habana Cohibas in St. Louis, Chicago, or New York. And their bottom line was
profit.

The same situation exists today. If the mines have shut down, and the ranches
are going under, and tourism activities and ski areas run by outsiders are
taking over from the oldtimers, well, welcome to business as usual. Sometimes
we call this business Social Darwinism. Or Survival of the Fittest. Looking
Out for Number One. Winning through intimidation. Amenity-Based Economy. Who
the heck invented that phrase--"Amenity Based Economy." According to Adam
Smith, for every rich person there have to be 500 poor people. Of course, you
might not see those poor people in Gunnison, because they live in Guatemala,
Honduras, and Mexico. They're conveniently out of sight, but the connection
never changes. For you to buy a banana cheap in the Gunnison Safeway, ten
workers in El Salvador crap in a cornfield all their lives, and the life
expectancy in Mozambique is 47 years.

Actually, a couple of years ago I toured a potato factory operation down in
Center, Colorado, during the Monte Vista Crane Festival. Mexican nationals
and Central Americans were working on assembly lines under conditions that
would have driven me nuts in about two hours for pay right around minimum
wage and no benefits. And the tourism, recreation, and skiing industries in
Colorado hire, for poverty wages, third world workers who come from as far
away as Africa to do the humble jobs in the service sector on which Michael
Eisner's lookalike corporate gangsters trophy homes and socially
irresponsible billion dollar investment portfolios are based. Amenity-based,
that is.

Natural resources are brutalized same as people. And it's always about
outsiders waltzing in and taking over from the old outsiders who danced in
and took over from the older outsiders who boogied in and took over from the
original inhabitants, who took over from the earlier, more original
inhabitants. And unless the newcomers who take over from the oldcomers are
members of a utopian socialist New Age admiration society, they tend to be
mean mofos. Most of us, no matter how pious, given our consumption habits,
fall into that category: Mean Mofos.

You have to be that way to walk into a place as pretty as this and run
peaceful God-fearing church-going fun-ºloving racists off their farms. As I
write these words I'm watching on TV the mideast violence in Israel, the West
Bank, and the Gaza Strip. It's October 12, 2000. The Palestinians got pushed
out in 1948 and they still don't like it. The Jews got eradicated and pushed
out of Europe in World War II and they didn't like that either. Everybody
wants a homeland, and everybody else wants one too. Just ask the Utes down
the road a piece from here.

But if you try and solve your problems by throwing up a fence and being
insular, it won't work. No man is an island...apart from the main. Every
region exists because of an infinite network of economic, cultural, and
historical threads, and there's always changes happening and conflict and new
no-good-for-nothing money-grubbing carpetbaggers taking over the territory. I
recently read a Pulitzer-prize winning book by Jared Diamond called Guns,
Germs and Steel. About the migrations and developments of human societies
over the past 7 million years, but most specifically over the last 13,000
years. The one lesson made abundantly clear in the book is that humanity
travels just like ocean currents and wind and migrating butterflies. There is
a constant ebb and flow and changes and evolutions. When a fifteenth century
emporer in western China flicks his fingers and gives an order, there's a
chance that a thousand strangers in a different culture will be slaughtered
by Chinese warriors three hundred years later and three thousand miles
distant, in order to control a trade route or take over a mine full of
emeralds.

Where I live in Taos, New Mexico, there was a time when Pueblo Indians
controlled the valley for a few hundred years. That ended when Juan de Onate
marched out of the Rio Grande Gorge in 1598 under orders from Spain and
provincial capitals thousands of miles down south. The Indians revolted and
the Spaniards applied the whupping stick by chopping of all their left feet.
Spain and Mexico then gave the triumphant Spanish settlers grants of land
that had belonged to the native people, and the papers for those grants were
filed in Mexico City, Madrid, and Sevilla.

Then the Americans kicked the Spaniard/Mexicans butts and set up McDonald
franchises from Costilla to Velarde on orders from Washington DC and
Philadelphia. The Spanish and Indians complained by beheading the Americans,
defenestrating them, and dropping them into polluted water wells. So the
American military marched up to Taos and destroyed the Pueblo in order to
save it. Pretty soon, the mining companies and the big sheep conglomerates
hit the county like Mike Tyson on a caffeine jag. After that, a bunch of
effete artists showed up in Taos trying to paint it to death. And next thing
you know the ski area arrived, established by a guy from Switzerland named
Ernie Blake who put a sign up at the entrance to his resort: Achtung, you are
now leaving the American sector.

That's when the amenity-based tourist boom, that somehow never trickled down
to seventy percent of the population, really began in earnest and Winnebagos
started cruising the Plaza like decorticate manatees on steroids; and almost
all the money was generated by outsiders.

You talk about a regional economy and I was thinking: When have the so-called
local yokels here ever truly had control over their economy? Let's take
Gunnison as the hub of Headwaters, and do a superficial slalom through its
phone book's yellow pages to get an idea of the economy. Chains, the same
everywhere in America, jump up and punch me in the eye. A & W, Dairy Queen,
McDonald's, Pizza Hut, Subway, Taco Bell. Days Inn, Holiday Inn, Marriott
Hotel, Sheraton Resort, Super 8, Best Western. You want a motorcycle or ATV
here, you can have it: Kawasaki, Suzuki, Honda, Yamaha, Harley-Davison,
Ducati. Ho ming no come chow ki? Murasaki Shikibu. Rental cars? Get 'em from
Budget, Hertz, Avis. Car parts? Napa, CarQuest, GM. From the two biggest new
car dealers in town you can get Buicks, Chevvies, Chryslers, Dodges, Fords,
Jeeps, Mercurys, Olds, Pontiacs--but nothing manufactured here by citizens
from this place except a Flintsone hupmobile made in Crested Butte by Italian
hod-ºcarriers originally from Genoa. Hardware stores? True Value and Ace. TV
stations? I get cable in Taos, 41 channels, and they're almost all national
with just one local effort. You got a dish?

The world is at your fingertips, but how much of its brainwashing originates
in the Headwaters Region? Our habits are being programmed by Hollywood,
Madison Avenue, London and Tokyo, not Gunnison, Crested Butte, Ridgway, or
Saguache. You can buy mountain bikes, skis, snowboards up the gazot, but
they're all manufactured elsewhere, and the big profits from selling them go
out of town. You can buy a pool table in Gunnison, but it was made in
Pennsylvania by a corporation based in Montreal financed by investors from
Amsterdam using slate mined in Vermont and mahogony from Honduras.

Books and shoes and boots are almost all imported, same with clothing
stitched by wage slaves in Hong Kong, Korea, Indonesia. Maybe there's a local
lumber mill or two, but I'd be surprised if the big lumber companies around
here even get their wood from the region. Certainly, their doors and windows
are all manufactured in, and imported from, elsewhere. And local logs go by
train to Seattle, by boat to Japan, where they are pulped and pressed into
frefab housing kits that are then shipped to San Diego and trucked to Yuma,
Arizona, to become temporary toolsheds for snowbirds from Minneapolis.

Phone service? If my phone goes out I have to dial an 800 number in Phoenix
or San Diego, haggling with a voice mail system a thousand miles away that'll
eventually transfer my information to a dispatching station one quarter mile
from my house in Taos, which'll then send over a workman three days later and
a whole bunch of dollars short. This is very symbolic of the global economy
and our complete lack of control over our own destinies at the local level.

Tourism and camping equipment sold in local Gunnison stores is all imported
from Coleman, Patagonia, North Face, and manufactured in Taiwan, China,
Dominican Republic, Pakistan. I doubt canoes or kayaks you can buy here are
made here, and all the doctors and dentists were most likely educated far
away. Fishing flies? Made in Guatemala. Propane? It's New Mexico gas, refined
in Houston Texas, then shipped up here with Alabama trucking firms in
18-wheel Peterbilts manufactured in Germany.

Who's your insurance with--State Farm? Farmers? Allstate? And speaking of
beef, does McDonald's buy all their's from local ranchers or get it from a
feed lot in Costa Rica? I'm betting on the latter. You wanna rent a truck?
It'll come from U-Haul and be registered in Michigan. Cheap groceries?
Safeway, that's a national chain (whose tomatoes come from Fresno, not
Ouray). Who owns and finances the ski area and the chalets in Crested Butte?
Probably a consortium of local ranchers who decided to upgrade their
operations, right? Yeah, sure. And can you get a credit card from a local
credit card company...or are they all Visa, MasterCard, American Express? And
prices for the gas for your new trucks and cars: Are they set by local fiat
or by corporations thousands of miles distant or by OPEC across the seas? Or
by Israeli/Palestinian destabilization of the oil-producing region?

As for the snow that blankets the ski mountains and lures in all the rich
idiots, I mean Salvation Angels in quilted jumpsuits that set the chain
hotels and motels and restaurants and so forth to jumping, there's little
control of that anymore. You can't really blame Crested Butte for Global
Warming, but you can blame Global Warming for lack of snow in Crested Butte.
That's pollution created by manufacturing in Tokyo, Los Angeles, and Rio de
Janeiro that determines income from the white powder that falls on the
mountains here.

Any region that must import 90 percent of its goods, whose finances,
mortgages, bank loans, credit card interest rates, and bond issues depend on
capital raised and invested or usuried elsewhere, and that probably exports
little more than 2 percent of what it produces, is in my book a colonial
country with not much say over its own destiny. This analysis is slapdash,
wiseapple, and simplistic, but I bet it contains serious kernels of truth.

I don't know if this answers the question "What is an economy, anyway?" But I
would suggest that the Headwaters economy is a global effort, directed by
corporations situated all over our nation and all over the globe, and on
first inspection there's not really a whole lot we can do about it...unless a
majority of people in this region decide to abandon just about everything
they believe in, secede from the union and from the global economy, and forge
a political, social, and trading alliance with Cuba.

The scarey thing is that the global economic forces laying the spurs to
funning us are now predicted to threaten most species on earth, including
ourselves, and all the resources that sustain us, even here in the Headwaters
Region. About a month ago I saw a short--maybe three minute--report on late
night Headline News on CNN that reported matter-of-factly that thousands of
birds and animals and insects were going extinct at rapid rates, more
thousands of plant species were going extinct at the same rates, and that if
these extinctions continued, human beings would also become extinct. Then the
cheerful newscaster smiled and brought in a cheerful weather woman to talk
about cheerful rainfall across cheerful New England.
Hello? Earth to CNN?

One of the clippings in my Headwaters file is from the Albuquerque Journal of
Friday, October 6, 2000. The article states "The hole in the ozone layer over
Antarctica stretched over a Chilean city (Punta Arenas) when it ballooned to
a record size last month, the first time it has reached a population center,
scientists said Thursday." Two articles clipped around the same day from the
October 2000 Summit (Colorado) Free Press, excoriated the proliferation of
golf courses all around Breckenridge, and detailed how the Controlled Growth
Initiative on the November ballot there is being vigorously opposed by most
builders, developers, and municipal leaders in the county.

Another article I read about the same time came from a copy of Durango's
Inside/Outside magazine explaining how elected officials in Telluride are
trying to stop urban sprawl in that town by condemning 857 acres of wetlands
near the town slated by developers "for a golf course, luxury hotel, trophy
homes, affordable housing, and a commercial center."

All these news reports and articles are dealing with the oncoming extinctions
heralded physically (and metaphorically) by last summer's drought, and topped
off, on October 26, by release of the latest United Nations report on global
warming, which says that heat-trapping man-made chemicals in our atmosphere
pose "a risk of devastating consequences within this century." And as I
explained earlier, I have felt doomed during these past ten months of drought
not because of the drought itself, but because of the reaction to it by the
society I live in. People just keep going about business as usual, not even
casting a glance around them in alarm, still absolutely convinced that our
economic system is sacred, the market is good, growth is inevitable and
necessary, and the car to buy--on the cusp of Armageddon--is a three-ton
extended-bed mag-wheel 464 horsepower 8-miles-to-the-gallon Chevy tank with
dual carburators, souped-up-engine, high-ºcompression heads, glass packs,
tinted windows, surroundsound stereo, independent suspension, and overdrive.

Our behavior, in a time of accelerating crisis, makes me think of us as Good
Germans running around in our cute little Lederhosen Outfits, lightweight
kangaroo hiking boots, knitted goat-hair tube socks, alpine yodling horns,
and Bavarian hats with badgerbrushes or pheasant feathers stuck in the bands,
orgasmically celebrating a perpetual Octoberfest while pointedly ignoring the
Holocaust. Occasionally, a little voice or two peeps out in the wilderness
like the last poor lungless hermaphroditic black-bellied salamander left
alive underneath the ozone hole. And from the October 15, 2000 Santa Fe New
Mexican I clipped a half dozen articles. One talked about environment versus
climax tourism in Hawaii as brought into focus by a Sierra Club lawsuit
demanding that before Hawaii's tourist bureau spent 114 million dollars to
lure more tourists to the already over-inundated Island the state needed to
do an environmental impact statement.

Another article was by an American woman in China discussing how Chinese
society is being altered by the fact that families are legally permitted only
one child per couple. The third article, by a New Mexican columnist, Ana
Consuelo Matiella, said:

"A few years ago, I heard the expression "race to the bottom" on National
Public Radio. Unfortunately, as often happens when I am listening to the
radio in the car, I didn't catch who was being interviewed and so I can't
give proper credit to the person who coined the term. The man being
interviewed was referring to American involvement in the global economy and
how we are driven by profits regardless of the consequences. We are willing
to "race to the bottom" to get those profits. It doesn't matter that children
are making tennis shoes for $1 a day and working in substandard conditions,
that toxic waste is being dumped in rivers, or that the health and welfare of
other living creatures are being threatened. What matters is that money is
being made."

The article petered out, devoid of cogent analysis, but the frustration--and
fear--it expressed is something many of us feel intuitively. We have almost
no way of expressing this fear coherently or of acting to change it, however,
short of shooting up our local high school or pouring cyanide into the city's
drinking water reservoir, because we have not been taught alternative ways of
looking at the world. And it's impossible to solve current problems using
only the culture, the economy, and the laws that have created this race
toward the bottom. We can't use the master's tools to dismantle the master's
house.

Any discussion about any economy must admit that our continued insistence on
growth, even controlled growth (an oxymoron), is very self-destructive. We
are already well beyond the longterm sustainable carrying capacity of the
planet. To make room for our expanding numbers, 100 other species go extinct
daily. This is a major law of diminishing returns. It's like cutting off
Brian Griese's fingers, one by one, every week, yet still expecting the
Broncos to win the Super Bowl. The green revolution and the medical conquest
of diseases that allows for the growth that threatens most existence today
are probably humanity's most nihilisitic inventions, but we hail them as
miracles. On earth, war pales as a factor of devastation compared to our
daily economic activity. The ever expanding market creates expanding
population, expanding resource depletion, expanding social problems,
expanding environmental collapse. To the extent that we participate in the
market and the growth it promotes we are part of the problem. The current
market provides goods that enable us to eat, propagate, survive longer,
expand our numbers exponentially. Unchecked population growth is a direct
result of the expanding market, which always needs more workers to produce
more goods to be consumed by more people. Put another way, if you lock
yourself inside your house and eat an exponentially expanding number of
Twinkies every day, and take your Metamucil regularly, pretty soon your house
will be filled up to the rafters with your own amenity-based shit.

There is now no place on earth not locked into this formula, created by
capital generating more capital, including the Headwaters Region. Many people
in the Region fear growth because we don't want to wake up one morning and
slowly choke to death, twisting and squirming in horrible agony from lack of
non-toxic air to breathe, and we don't want to open the door next Halloween
and find the 1872 Mining Law standing on the Welcome mat like a very big Blue
Meanie, and we don't want to watch our cute freckle-faced kids get flattened
by monster trucks going berserk piloted by gangs of Mad-Max lookalikes in
hideously over-populated Gunnison County locked in an all-out war among its
starving citizens for increasingly limited resources shrinking further
because of climatological changes like the Pueblo Indians used to do before
the Spanish upped the ante.

Yet for the most part we participate in the market through our consumption
activities, which are, at an accelerating pace, forging a deterioration of
the region that will inevitably lead to a futuristic hell right out of an
updated Godzilla movie directed by the Cohen Brothers starring Dennis Hopper
and Puff Daddy Coombs with a retro soundtrack by the Dead Kennedys and the
Circle Jerks. The oncoming global dark ages are not yet really evident in
spectacular and prosperous Colorado (except in Mile High Stadium), but almost
every economic activity in the region is plugged into the building social and
environmental crisis around the globe. Guaranteed, it won't be too long
before that Ozone Hole reaches Ridgway, and then what will Dennis Weaver say:
"Uh-oh, Spaghetti-O?" And when global warming further melts the artic,
raising oceans and driving coastal populations inland, you won't believe how
many coastal refugees are going to Californicate Colorado without using
condoms.

How, then, can the perky little people in a perky little region like this one
change the negative momentum? How can we work toward a Mary Poppins/Disney
future instead of toward the Freddy Kruger we all know, at least
subconsciously, is in store?

This may sound a tad apocryphal, but to break out of the growth cycle that
threatens us, we need a different belief system. To launch this belief system
we must first acknowledge the impending disaster. Somebody, and then
everybody, must declare: "The emperor wears no clothes." In this case the
emperor is the economic precepts guiding all our development. Change begins
first with the individual, which will be difficult, because at the start
anyone who seriously downgrades their climax capitalist sympathies will be
pariah--like communists during the McCarthy period--and they will immediately
be voted right off this island by the Gunnison Realty Board and the Sheriff's
Posse Drill team. No matter. Regional (and global) solutions will begin by
abandoning our current competetive impulses toward accumulation and profit,
and by losing our tolerance of the human inequalities and eco-devastation
necessary to sustain this accumulation and profit.

It's pretty simple: If everybody develops a life style like Mother Teresa and
Mahatma Ghandi, we are saved. Don't laugh. Nothing is impossible. Back during
the oil embargo of 1973, laws were made to meet the crisis by conserving
fuel. Speed limits of 55 mph were imposed across the nation. Detroit retooled
and brought us compact fuel-efficient cars that could get 35 miles to the
gallon. That was a hopeful first step toward human transportation geared to
future survival...but then we stuck a tailpipe in our collective gob and
pulled the trigger.

Today, we're back up to 75 mph; and we're going that fast in SUVs that get 3
miles per gallon. This is typical of most suicidal economic activity that
defines us. To prepare for future survival, we must go back to the oil
embargo mindset, lower speed limits, phase out gas guzzlers, build more fuel
efficient cars, shore up public transportation everywhere, and enforce the
death penalty for all traffic tickets, no exceptions.

It will do no good to unionize the entire workforce of Gunnison County if
that workforce is engaged full-tilt-boogie in the current levels of growth
and development and other extractive activities.

Forget recycling, girlfriend. If we create that need, we still got the greed.

We will have to modify our religious beliefs radically in order to survive.
Catholicism can no longer ban contraception. Planned parenthood in every
community. Anti-abortion beliefs will have to be shelved. Sorry, but at least
half of the human lives on earth are not held to be sacred by the "pro-life"
capitalists in America. And the plethora of human life on earth is killing
everything else. Whatever means we have to limit population must become legal
and accessible, from government decree (like China's one child per family) to
legalization of the morning-after abortion pill, to the controlled atomic
bombing--like the controlled burning of National Forests--of cities over
500,000 people. And it might not be a bad idea to sterilize all Republicans
and members of those despicable New York Yankees for whom 26 World
Championships and three World Series victories in the last four years just
ain't enuff.

All means of population control will be ineffective if the expanding market
continues. The only real way to limit population is to limit the production
of goods (food, medicine, clothing, housing, etc.) that make population
growth inevitable. This means no growth policies everywhere. ZPG. Half a kid
per family. Or maybe minus one child per family for the next 60 years. Stop,
right where we are. Then phase out the structures that govern us and create
new, more survival-oriented alternatives. Call it a socialist democracy. Read
Che Guevara's essay "Man and Socialism in Cuba."

The world, and the Headwaters Region, are operating on principles and
philosophies of profit and consumption and resource and human exploitation
that were formulated hundreds of years ago when Strom Thurmond was just a
baby, and those principles have become antiquated and incapable of dealing
with present realities.

If you are interested in knowing in broad strokes how we got to where we are
today, economically, read Robert Heilbroner's THE WORLDLY PHILOSOPHERS, a
history of economic philosophies over the past few hundred years, beginning
with Adam Smith. Or you can rent the video of Arnold Swarzenegger in
Terminator Two.

The good news is that world capital has only operated in more-or-less its
present mode for those few hundred years. Older history proves that we can
live in very different societies governed by radically different
philosophies: For example, like cannibals in the Amazon, a population control
that really works.

But seriously: We invented our current predicament, and should be able to
invent our way out of it. Our current behavior is not instinctual or
biologically ordained, it is a learned process, and learned processes can be
altered. After reading THE WORLDLY PHILOSOPHERS, I would suggest you read Tom
Athanasiou's book, DIVIDED PLANET: The Ecology of Rich and Poor. University
of Georgia Press. This is an excellent, dismaying, very articulate synopsis
of the world situation today: environment, economic systems, globalization,
the predictable future. It doesn't mention the Headwaters Region, but,
believe me, it talks about the Headwaters Region. There's no way to act
locally without understanding globally.

I'd also recommend Barry Commoner's THE CLOSING CIRCLE. It was published 30
years ago, but addresses all the social, ecological, economic issues of the
present. Global and local.

The first principle we adopt by which to govern our lives and communities has
to be no more growth. Build a twelve foot high electric fence around the
Headwaters Region, hire thousands of highly-trained vicious Dobermans to
patrol it, issue passports and visas to anyone wishing to leave or visit, set
up vasectomy clinics in every town over 200 population, and fine people $50
dollars plus eight days of community service for overeating. The need to
limit the human presence and the breadth of human consumptive activities on
earth and in the Headwaters region is a no-brainer.

The second principle is an egalitarian human society, so that our lives will
no longer be dominated by war and social breakdown, thus freeing us to simply
deal with important survival difficulties caused by our activities on earth.

To succeed, it will also be necessary to retool our society to adopt
biocentric attitudes. According to David B. Morris, "In biocentric thinking,
no single species has domain over the earth. The earth instead is viewed as a
community where human and nonhuman life are intricately entwined, where all
species live and develop together, where the biosphere, not humanity,
occupies the center." Without that attitude, we can kiss the Blarney Stone
goodbye.

How we can inspire people to give up their capital-saturated anthropocentric
world view is beyond me. Maybe hang them up by their thumbs and administer
chili enemas, or threaten to urinate on their new Air Jordans. But that
certainly is the crucial struggle of, and for, the future. Educators,
business people, and recreators in the Headwaters Region will spearhead the
biocentric movement. It's motto will be: "Think like a bug; squeak like a
mouse; but don't eat like a horse."

If we could invent the unbelievable universe that we have created in modern
times, we can also reinvent it. That is the great possibility within our
nature, and I'd like to think that is the reason the Headwaters Conference
exists--to reinvent how we think and act in light of the changing world
situation. This conference should be an educational forum that helps to
envision a totally brave new world. To do this, the conference will have to
quit futzing around with wishy-washy intellectual paradigms and break out of
the age-old academic synchophancy toward market values that typifies our
capitalist-driven educational system. Scholars must dare to seek freedom from
the brain and imagination incarceration created by their training.

George Sibley sent me a letter on September 20, saying he hoped that my
"presentation will go deeper and farther than a discourse on our collective
foolishness in the face of the greenhouse effect, which has been drummed into
us now to the point of being more deadening than enlivening. What I guess I
want to know--and hope you can help us address--is not just 'what I can do as
an individual,' but how we--not 'we' as an agglutinative agglomeration of
individuals, but we together here down on the ground, in a place to which
we've got some commitment--how we can start creatively and maybe successfully
fighting back against the abstractions that tend to dominate us.

Okay, I must apologize to George for standing up here and spouting out his
worst nightmare. I can't help it, it's like I have Tourette's Syndrome, I'm
sorry. Sue me. Put a stop payment on my check.

But I would say that a great problem he touches on, in his letter, though, is
that our society trains us to be individuals, to think like individuals, to
compete like individuals, to aggregate as independent economic units, to be
alienated as individuals. Capitalism has trained us to think and act as an
agglutinative agglomeration of exasperatingly asinine and aggressively
acquisitive individuals, rather than as a communal entity. The laws that
govern us support individuals, they perpetuate an outdated virtue of
selfishness. We live in effectively gated communities (America is a gated
country) with a private property bias and NO TRESPASSING sign on every third
fencepost, and a cultural mindset for the new all-shopping all-the-time
millennium that actually makes Vince Lombardi look like an all-school girl
Twiggy-type discreet herbal tea party in an English country garden. We don't
care who we hurt elsewhere as long as we get ours, here, now.

In the Headwaters region there is much public land, but its multiple use
priorities allow the private development of ranching, mining, logging, and
recreation to dominate and dismay the ecosystem. Attitudes about labor are
guided by inviolable capitalist precepts, mitigated somewhat by minimum wage
laws and unions in some of the industry, though unions often form sweetheart
deals with management that dilute their possibilities. No matter what aspect
of the economy dominates an area, the principles of individual exploitation
by the agglutinating agglomomaniacs are going to be prevalent. These
principles are instilled in the schools, churches, newspapers and magazines,
and, most effectively, by TV and the Internet and Coca-Cola. They make it
difficult to fight back against the so-called abstractions that dominate us
because we are the abstractions that dominate us. We are captive to the
principles of a so-called free market economy. We are trained to be motivated
more by personal self-ºinterest than by communal agendas.

Most of the people who clash within our communities, say Realtors with
conservationists, actually agree--underneath--with the same principles even
though they may disagree bigtime on inconsequential surface differences.
Their differences amount to relatively unimportant nuances, which is the
problem with our political system as well. I.e., Bush versus Gore.

That's a clever segue back to reflections on democracy, the lack of which is
why Gunnison, America, and the planet are locked into a suicidal version of
"Dumb and Dumber" that'll wind up in Purgatory instead of Aspen. Democracy in
America exists, if at all, at increasingly retarded levels in our society. We
the people don't really govern any more, because, frankly, we don't really
understand what the F-word is going on. We've been abdicated from an active
role in our system by the Devil in Bill Gates' clothing.

In that same Santa Fe New Mexican of October 15 this year, I cut out two
other articles that I thought might be relevant to this talk. One was a
cartoon on the editorial page of a Tin Woodman named Al, a scarecrow named W,
and a little girl named Voter, walking on a yellow brick road. The tin
woodman named Al sang, "If I only had a HEART; the scarecrow named W sang "If
I only had a BRAIN!; and the little girl named Voter sang "If I only had
ANOTHER CHOICE.

The other article, in the USA WEEKEND magazine that came with the paper, was
by TV's popular Lisa Ling, and entitled, "Why Gen Xers just don't care about
Election 2000." In the article the 27-year-old Lisa wrote: "Perhaps it's that
I've grown up and become cynical about the way our government is run. Or
maybe I'm disgusted by the hypocrisy and lies that pervade politics. Either
way, there's one thing I'm certain of: My friends and fellow young people are
just not interested in this election. We're all fed up."

On October 20 I read in the Albuquerque Journal that "young people are tuning
out the presidential campaign in such numbers that they may be the most
disconnected group of voters in the nation's history."

And an October 28 Gallop Poll revealed that only one in six young Americans
between the ages of 18 and 24 on the nation's college campuses could name
both (let alone all four) of the Presidential candidates, and only one in 12
of those same students had higher brain stem activity after 14 years in the
U.S. educational system. This is why, instead of solving our problems, we're
heading towards hell on a handcart: We are born with our heads up a
capitalist rectum.

The definition of a democracy should be: A political system where the people
understand how the system works and actively direct it through the electoral
process. But our political system called democracy is at low ebb. Our
economic system called capitalism rules. The alienation expressed by Lisa
Ling dominates our culture and is a deliberate creation of the economic
system. Shop till you drop, expand or expire, and don't even think about
it--like, whatever, girlfriend. We have become a nation of sado-masochistic
Barbie Dolls stuck in a perpetual Christmas season controlled by the Bride of
Chuckie. Because Democracy's egalitarian traditions have been overrun by
capitalism's unfair directives. Warren Buffet and Bill Gates control this
region's economy. Nobody can rein in negative progress because the market
insists on that progress. So long as a profit can be made, we're willing to
kill all the whales. The market redesigns democracy's laws to meet the
market's ends. Leaving us with few legal tools within the system capable of
forging an alternative system. This is as frustrating as rooting for the New
York Mets or praying for a Dolly Parton spread in Playboy.

Al Gore and George Bush stand for the same thing: McCapitalism. Gore is a
slightly more liberal McCapitalist; Bush is a slightly more conservative
McCapitalist. But we get pretty much the identical McSociety with either man.
Ralph Nader is effectively a McNobody who isn't radical enuff to waste my non
McVote on. A two-party or multi-party system would involve candidates with
seriously differing ideologies, say a Republican and a Nudist. But as things
stand today, we Americans have about as much real political choice as a
Muslim woman in Taliban Afghanistan. I'm going to vote for Al Gore because I
like Tipper's lips.

So reclaiming our democractic principles might be the first step in fighting
the abstractions that dominate us, or in mitigating the warfare over limited
resources that already plagues us. How does a region do this? First, it
recognizes the need to no longer revere the market above everything else.
Groups of people get together, in a Headwaters Conference, in community
meetings, in a caucus of democratic, green, or other political parties, and
define the issues, paint the overall--macroscopic-- picture, declare that the
emperor truly wears no clothes, and they write up a big report--a macroscopic
overview, an honest social/economic/environmental impact statement, if you
will--suggesting a different way of believing and of forging future solutions
by recreating a democratic society. This means debunking the current
mythologies that justify the expand-or-expire apocalypse. And it includes
changing local laws and priorities, and eventually amending our national
constitution.

This group will be ridiculed as utopian, or communist, or infantile and
unrealistic. Promise Keepers will threaten to understand and forgive it. But
the group will insist on building itself into a functioning political entity.
Call it a new party, a study group, a citizen's coalition. It will register
all its members to vote and they will all vote in every election, exercising
real democracy. They will define themselves as liberation ecologists and for
their motto paraphrase the Declaration of Independence: All life is created
equal. They will propose their own candidates, and take a stand on every
issue. On controlled growth, on wilderness, on speed limits within the
county, on all education issues, on public transportation, on free or cheap
medical aid for citizens--peoples' clinics--on subdivisions and zoning laws,
on logging, grazing, mining, ski valley limits, on reduction of special use
permits by private corporations on public land, on fire suppression, water
conservation, pesticide and herbicide spraying within the region, on forming
a local government EPA, on defeat of conservancy districts like that of
Animas-La Plata, on stopping the golf courses, condemning the wetlands. The
group will take positions on every local ballot proposition in every
election, on local school board responsibility to more enlightened
educational possibilities, on sex education in the schools, on free family
planning and birth control, on counseling programs for youngsters, limited
recreation in fragile areas, on amenity-based usury laws and banking fraud,
on encouragement of farmer's markets, agitation for higher minimum wages and
union representation and against chauvinism and racism and prejudice against
short people with buck teeth, on xeriscaping and minimum lawn watering in dry
areas, on building codes and programs for affordable housing, skunk control,
raccoon badgering, on promotion of solar energy and wind energy, on growth
limits to all destructive economic activities in the area, on limited water
and sewage hookups, on such high impact fees for mall developers that they'll
commit suicide instead, on indigent funds and homeless shelters for less
fortunate residents, on curtailment of wood burning that threatens
pollution...and so forth across the spectrum of human activities in the
Region.

Roots into, and cultures of, and commitment to specific place will be
important, but we must all think global and act local and global because any
region is constantly changing and always a part of the main, and if you get
bogged down trying to preserve and freeze a place in time you'll be out of
the loop entirely and completely ineffectual and the big global bullies will
knock you to smithereens like a paper mache pinata at a Cinco de Mayo
celebration in Guadalajara.

But none of this can begin to happen or be sustained unless the people
involved understand that today's market's profit mechanism is threatening and
deadly and suffocates democracy, and that community is more important than
individual self, and that a person must lead a sustainable rather than a
growth-oriented existence.

In other words, the region will attempt to govern itself to meet social and
environmental responsibilities instead of kowtowing principally to the
growth-obsessed imperatives of our current materialism.

Here are some quotes from Barry Commoner's THE CLOSING CIRCLE:

"Both socialist and capitalist economic theory have apparently developed
without taking into account the limited capacity of the biological capital
represented by the ecosystem."

"The real question is to discover what kind of economic and social order
is best adapted to serve as a partner in the alliance with nature."

"...in the long run effective social action must be based on an
understanding of the origin of the problem which it intends to solve."

"In sum, present productive technologies need to be redesigned to conform
as closely as possible to ecological requirements, and most of the present
industrial, agricultural, and transportation enterprises reorganzied in
accordance with these new designs. In effect, a major part of the new
productive enterprises constructed on the basis of postwar, ecologically
faulty technology simply has to be rebuilt along ecologically sound lines."

"On ecological grounds it is obvious that we cannot afford unrestrained
growth of power production. Its use must be closely governed by over-all
social needs rather than by the private interests of the producers or users
of power."

"In other words, the ecological imperative calls for the governance of
productive processes by social thrift--a criterion which is likely to
conflict with private gain."

"Once it is recognized--under the force of the environmental crisis--that
no productive system can operate without either fitting into the ecosystem or
destroying it, and that the ecosystem is necessarily a social rather than a
private good, then the logic of governing production by social criteria
rather than by private ones becomes equally evident."

"We now know that modern technology which is privately owned cannot long
survive it if destroys the social good on which it depends--the ecosphere.
Hence an economic system which is fundamentally based on private transactions
rather than social ones is no longer appropriate and increasingly ineffective
in managing this vital social good. The system is therefore in need of
change."

"What is real in our lives...is the apparently hopeless inertia of the
economic and political system; its fantastic agility in sliding away from the
basic issues which logic reveals...the frustration of the individual citizen
confronted by this power and evasion; the confusion that we all feel in
seeking a way out of the environmental morass. To bring environmental logic
into contact with the real world we need to relate it to the over-all social,
political, and economic forces that govern both our daily lives and the
course of history."

"The environmental crisis is somber evidence of an insidious fraud hidden
in the vaunted productivity and wealth of modern, technology-based society.
This wealth has been gained by rapid short-term exploitation of the
environmental system, but it has blindly accumulated a debt to nature...a
debt so large and so pervasive that in the next generation it may, if unpaid,
wipe out most of the wealth it has gained. In effect, the account books of
modern society are drastically out of balance, so that, largely
unconsciously, a huge fraud has been perpetrated on the people of the world."

"To resolve the environmental crisis, we shall need to forego, at last,
the luxury of tolerating poverty, racial discrimination, and war."

"Over recent years (Garrett Hardin) has expounded on the 'tragedy of the
commons'--the view that the world ecosystem is like a common pasture where
each individual, guided by a desire for personal gain, increases his herd
until the pasture is ruined for all."

"One of the common responses to a recitation of the world's environmental
ills is a deep pessimism, which is perhaps the natural aftermath to the shock
of recognizing that the vaunted 'progress' of modern civilization is only a
thin cloak for global catastrophe. I am convinced, however, that once we pass
beyond the mere awareness of impending disaster and begin to understand why
we have come to the present predicament, and where the alternative paths
ahead can lead, there is reason to find in the very depths of the
environmental crisis itself a source of optimism."

I don't think communities can begin to solve these problems, unless
individuals within those communities radically alter their own lives as step
one. I am not a particularly worth human being, but I have led a fairly
sustainable life ever since I entered the economic system as a wage earner in
1965. I refuse to accumulate anything except my own physical ailments. I am
not interested in being upwardly mobile. Whether I earn 10 grand a year or
100,000 I try to lead a 10 grand type of life and disperse the other monies
to those people or organizations who could use it. Material stuff doesn't
interest me. Money makes me so uncomfortable I break out in hives with over
$40 bucks in my wallet. I hate shopping like a rat hates clean socks and have
little truck with most consuming activities beyond survival. I buy my
clothing second hand at Thrift Town in Albuquerque, the store that answers
the question: "What happens to dead peoples' clothing?" I'm sixty, and have
owned five cars in my life, purchased second hand, cared for diligently, and
all of them lasted beyond 200,000 miles. I use very little energy, rarely
letting more than two lights burn in my tiny house at once. I wear sweaters,
coats, and caps indoors instead of flipping up a thermostat, and I only shed
that gear once every four months when I get lucky and engage in the nasties.
I don't like to travel unless it's basically for a useful reason, like this
speech, or to buy Viagra at half-price in Juarez. I am happy to live like a
bum. I don't admire anyone for their fame or fortune except Muhammed Ali and
PeeWee Herman. I despise the global racism and inequalities forged by our
wealth. I have more freedom than ninety percent of the people I know because
I am not in thrall to the economic system. I may be a philosophical basket
case or an asinine personality, but economically I don't do a whole lot of
damage.

There is no future economy that will work positively here, or elsewhere on
earth, without first believing, in some way, shape, or form, along the
general material lines that have guided me for most of my existence. Keeping
this in mind, you all can now go forth and completely redesign in one weekend
a more coherent, humane, and constructive economy for the Headwaters Region.

Hasta la victoria, siempre!






  • [Livingontheland] Democracy Recapitulates Proctology (don't read this unless you have a sense of humor), Tradingpost, 12/27/2004

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