Healthy soil and sustainable growing

["art corbit" <art_c@cox.net>]

Hi Mark,

You bring out some very good points here and so does the article. However we
must take into consideration that most "Clans", animal or human took time to
shape and bring to a workable point. It is then renewed with the birth of
each new member that is born into that clan and becomes a way of life
naturally. We would be forced together and that would make a lot of
difference.

It would take time for people to come together that could live close and do
their thing in a peaceful manner. Some people wouldn't fit into any clan. We
could all learn a lot from the Native American. There was fighting between
different tribes but within a tribe there were very few serious problems.

At this moment in time very few people have any idea what will be required
of us if we do have a crash. If you haven't been there and done that you
cannot understand. When I was 4 years old, (1943) my Dad was farming in
eastern Oklahoma in the Arkansas river bottoms. We lived on the farm in the
flood plane. That spring a large dam on another stream that ran into the
Arkansas river broke and sent a 6' wall of water right across our farm. We
had enough warning that we escaped it by about 3 minutes.

As soon as we heard the dam had broken Dad very quickly hooked a large flat
bed trailer behind a tractor and we piled on it. Dad made a circle through
the country picking up families. When we reached high ground there were
about 40 people on the trailer. When those 40 people stepped off that
trailer we owned the close we were wearing and that was it. The flood
destroyed everything we had. People in a small town nearby invited us into
their homes until we could find some place to live. If they had not we would
have been living under the trees with nothing.

My point is we had no time to get ready for it and barely escaped with our
lives. We are lucky that we have time now to do a few things to get ready
for what is before us. We should not be wasting time now arguing about if
this will happen or not. Even if it doesn't happen we will all still come
out way ahead. Everything you can do for yourself means that you have to
depend on others that much less. Anyone that you must depend on has a
certain amount of control over your life. I not only see this as a means to
survive bad times but also a way to take back some of the freedom we have
all lost in the past. That is reason enough right there for me to do this.

Have any of you ever lived without electricity? I very seriously doubt it.
Have you ever lived without a car? Have you ever lived with wood heat and
cooking? In fact have you ever lived without air conditioning? Some people
don't even understand the things we have now that we could very easily loose
very quickly  much less how to survive without them.

Living in small clans may be the best way to go if it can be done without a
lot of griping and fighting among ourselves. That I seriously doubt.

Art in Arkansas


----- Original Message -----
From: "Mark Nagel" <activism98201@verizon.net>
To: "Healthy soil and sustainable growing"
<livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org>
Sent: Thursday, July 20, 2006 9:45 AM
Subject: [Livingontheland] Mutual aid trumps competition, naturally


> The recent discussion about communes brought up some responses that I
thought were heavily laden in myth.
>
> The point that raised my eyebrows was that we can expect things to decline
and for the majority of people to not cooperate.  Most assuredly there are
_some_ people that won't cooperate just as they don't cooperate now.  But
what is the REAL nature of our social behavior?
>
> Someone noted that we'll become more animal-like.  Well, we ARE animals.
Besides, animals can show us a lot on how to actually work together (there
was a recent program on PBS's Nature about some townsfolk in Autralia who
years ago actually worked with Orca whales to kill large whales!).  And
we're most certainly going to have to depend upon one another MORE in the
future (a future with less machines).  We'll have to share labor and
knowledge more closely (we're kind of doing that here in this list, but in
the future we may not have the luxury of the Internet for knowledge
sharing).
>
> We here in this list are trying to live closer to the land at a time in
which the established controlling systems are fighting hard to maintain
their control [over all things].  Like many of the other big lies that we
hear on a regular basis, those who are behind the lies would like us to
believe that we need them and that without them we would collapse into a
world of competition, a nasty and brutish world.
>
> The truth is that we're not predisposed to compete with one another:
that's the myth propped up by the elite's system.  The elite like to
misinterpret Darwin's message, to scare us into believing that it's a world
where only the survivial of the fittest rules out.
>
> I offer the following resource for those who would like it demonstrated
that human nature is about cooperation more than competition.  As the author
of this piece, Peter Kropotkin, states, we wouldn't have gotten this far
without cooperation (ruling over competition).
>
> Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution"
>
(http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/Anarchist_Archives/kropotkin/mutaidcontents.html
>
> NOTE: It's a fairly lengthy read.  The Indroduction is probably enough to
convey the basic premise.
>
> NO man/woman is an island.  We all depend on others somewhere along the
line, and they in turn depend on us.  Kropotkin uses the phrase "mutual
aid."  What could be more natural?
>
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