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  • From: "Tradingpost" <tradingpost@lobo.net>
  • To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [Livingontheland] I'd rather be among wild animals than weird humans
  • Date: Mon, 25 Aug 2008 20:25:10 -0600


I'd rather be among wild animals than weird humans
by Jan Lundberg
Culture Change Letter #195
http://www.culturechange.org/cms/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=199&Itemid=33


To live in a near wild state of nature or very rural area is not a
route for many urban dwellers today. But if they have no sustenance in
the city someday, what happens to them? This is a question swept so
far under the rug that we forget it's there at all.

Personally speaking, I feel that a beast that could be watching me or
about to mess with my stuff is not so much a worry as the human one
that one is all too likely to encounter. There's some bad ones out
there, but they are in the cities for the most part, and not, in my
experience, out in healthy nature. It's not that there aren't plenty
of healthy and wonderful people in the cities -- and their more
creative and selfless work may determine our survival as a species.
However, a neglected aspect of survival is pristine nature and living
the country life.

It's considered wrong to lure people in great numbers, or even
additional numbers, to a cherished environment. Understandably so,
particularly when it's someone's home. So the "Portland rated number
one" finding in news media we periodically see is maybe bad news for
locals not looking forward to higher rents. Hey, I didn't say which
Portland, so I'm still cool. The nature area and very rural area being
protected and unpublicized is a place that is too ecologically
sensitive -- alive -- to withstand the modern ways and appetites of
mucho mundo.

So it's not people themselves that are a threat to the world --
although their numbers are overshot past even an all-vegetarian
population -- but what they may tend to do that's destructive. These
days, it's often to plasticize the landscape and waters -- and their
own unfortunate bodies -- or any number of errors such as warring. I
further suggest that Western Civilization as a particular culture is
the same as the problem of "modern ways and appetites."

It seems logical, therefore, that for an overall answer to the issue
of pollution and climate change, we will have to love and uphold an
ecosystem unburdened by modern ways -- enough to abandon them now or
as soon as possible.

It should not have to be such an adventure of heedless, insane
barbarism for a modern person to take up a natural life away from
modernity and high-density populations. Yet, those who live a fairly
simple life and are close enough to natural living to see fearsome
predators on the prowl for lunch, well, such folk are the more sane in
my book.

The city as a diseased, alluring whore

The modern city with its troubles and evils is dressed up along with
its good elements as a fancy whore. The whore beckons, it offers
seductions and satiation, and calls itself (through mass corporate
media) the bastion of sophistication and civilization. (The reader
already suspects that civilization is questionable.) The "trick" in
this case is the poor slob who pays through the nose for stuff that
doesn't quite make him happy or sustain him (money, material things,
isolated consumerism), just as a whore does not offer his or her
partner-in-trade any real substitute for a mate or family. The city,
like the whore, is a temporary experience for both humanity and the
trick.

To mention the weird humans: they are not only in cities, but most of
the crazies in the countryside are just victims of city stuff.
Violence and other rampant crime come to mind. When I was hiking above
Yosemite Valley in wilderness in 1995 (I had come to give a talk and
eco-music recital for the area Audubon Society chapter), I noticed
that out there in wilderness people were consistently friendly and
reasonable. Gosh, could it be that our mental health requires healthy
nature, too?

Among serious readers of this column -- furrow your brow please -- the
question of "how many people can survive the post-petroleum dawn" has
everything to do with where they will live: in cities, or out in
nature and rural areas? Many have given up on the suburbs, when such
movies as End of Suburbia influences a significant audience. Under the
imminent conditions of not nearly enough petroleum available for
almost all our daily habits and vices, will we have much of an urban
population left? If they remain surviving in large cities, massive
human-power farming and intense use of the environment would have to
be devoted to feeding and otherwise providing for the urban dwellers.
How sustainable could that really be?

If, on the other other extreme, large cities become history and we go
back to nature as best we can, at present we have some kind of a taboo
to imagine how many humans (modern and otherwise) can subsist. Such a
number is so much less popular than a run-of-the-mill baseball
statistic, such that the number in question is like a bastard orphan.
Yet, it may come back to haunt us as our cities collapse due to the
failure of technology to truly substitute for actual resources that
can renew themselves without a petroleum infrastructure.

The reliance on technology out in nature, when modern people venture
into the wild, is depressingly high. Even a backpacking trip adds to
the landfill (assuming we remove the refuse we brought in as
packaging, for example). Whether before the landfill or after the
trash gets there, bears get into it in some places. Even more
disturbing than the mess and the occasional hazard to humans is
knowing that the bear tried eating a lot of packaging. Seeing the
remains makes you wonder why we buy unnecessary crap.

It is alarming to some of us that we sorely lack skills in wilderness
survival such as fire-making, creating shelter, finding foods,
assuring access to fresh water, etc. What happens when we individually
don't have enough of the answers, and we feel like a babe in the
woods? Answer: community. Mutual aid. Pooling information and skills.
Are you ready? This will be essential in towns too when the petroleum
free-lunch disappears.

The touting of nature areas as superior dwelling spots is not much of
a solution to the train wreck that the whore known as the city is
about to experience. And, again, "we don't want y'all comin' around",
as refugees from New Orleans found after the 2005 hurricanes. All in
all, I thought it was worthwhile to assert, for everyone's good
including our collective survival, that nature is where it's at. This
has always been, always will be.

The city or whore that tries to substitute for nature is suffering
from AIDS, figuratively if not literally, and has other crises such as
vermin (corresponding perhaps to the social disease of corruption).
The city always tells its population that all is normal: huge portions
covered with asphalt and concrete, foul air, noise, and crazy people
of various segments of society. "Tune in at 7 PM for a new report on
what's hot on four wheels!" With all we know about the suffering
climate and air-pollution related diseases, car culture is still an
acceptable affliction on the body of Gaia, if you will. Why does this
tragedy happen? Simple: profit for the few, enabled by the system's
seduction of enough schmucks and tricks to enrich the whore who claims
to thrill and fulfill.

True, in a city one doesn't have to worry about running water (albeit
tainted city water) until we suddenly run out of it. The same can be
said for electric power, or any other need or "need." But choosing to
do without all the conveniences and without seeing the many
interesting passersby and car drivers, et al, is something to
experience -- if only so that you know where we have to return to: the
garden. There could be love and peace there; you never know until you
try.

* * * * *

Aug. 23, 2008
northern California





  • [Livingontheland] I'd rather be among wild animals than weird humans, Tradingpost, 08/25/2008

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