permaculture

["Lawrence F. London, Jr." <venaurafarm@bellsouth.net>]

http://www.countercurrents.org/jensen090311.htm
Listening To Life, Before It's Too Late
By Robert Jensen
09 March, 2011
Countercurrents.org
An interview With Ellen LaConte

    People of conscience face two crucial challenges today: (1) Telling
the truth about the dire state of the ecosphere that makes our lives
possible, no matter how grim that reality, and (2) remaining committed
to collective action to create a more just and sustainable world, no
matter how daunting that task. It's not an easy balancing act, as we
struggle to understand the scope of the crisis without giving into a
sense of hopelessness.

    Ellen LaConte's new book, Life Rules (
http://www.ellenlaconte.com/life-rules-the-book/ ), is a welcome
addition to the growing literature on these crises. The subtitle -- Why
so much is going wrong everywhere at once and how Life teaches us to fix
it -- captures the spirit of the book. LaConte offers an unflinching
assessment of the problems and an honest path to sensible action. In an
interview, I asked her to elaborate on her background and path to the
insights of the book.

    Robert Jensen: For me, your book came out of nowhere. I had never
read an article by you or heard your name. So, as I read Life Rules and
was so impressed with the breadth and depth of your analysis, I found
myself wondering, “Who is she and where does she come from?”

    Ellen LaConte: The short answer is that I've worked for almost 40
years as an old-school print writer and editor, mostly for small
magazines, about organic gardening and farming, appropriate
technologies, organizational communications, homesteading, history,
education, alternative economics, evolution, democracy theory and
practice, complex systems. I'm a generalist and seem instinctively to
synthesize and simplify big ideas like those in Life Rules .

    I like living a small-scale, small-pond, hands-on, quiet life. I
had a paternal grandmother who lived on the remains of what had been a
family farm in Pennsylvania Dutch country outside Lancaster and maternal
grandparents who had a half-acre or so in north Baltimore that was
dominated by my grandfather's vegetable and fruit gardens. I adored
hanging out with him while he made compost, taught me about worms and
ants and the living soil, talked to me non-stop about what he was doing
and why. He was one of J.I. Rodale's first fanatics (
http://www.rodaleinstitute.org/history ). I also grew up surrounded with
books and magazines, was bookish pretty much from the start. I learned
to love hand tools -- my grandfather had a workshop full of them -- and
what was called “handiwork.”

    My childhood was a perfect set up for the
homesteading/owner-built/simplicity/self-reliance movement that in the
1970s -- when I was in my 20s -- seemed to me the most appropriate
response to present and promised oil shortages, and a saner and more
spiritually sound and grounded response to future shock than the
globalized hi-tech, expansive, consumptive, grab-and-get one that also
was popular in the ‘70s. It also suited my somewhat reclusive,
contemplative nature.

    Though my childhood was churched, Protestant, I didn't really enter
onto any kind of serious spiritual study or path until I was in my late
30s. I suppose I'd call myself a Tao, Zen and Sufi influenced Christian
with decided mystical leanings. I somehow missed the 1960s, both the
protest and the flower-power/drugs/sex/rock-and-roll parts. I don't like
crowds, noise, confrontation or argument. I lack both irony and edge, or
maybe what's called “edginess.” It's my nature to want to fix things,
smooth them over when possible, broker agreement or simply yield.

    RJ: You say you don't like confrontation or argument, but your book
is a radical analysis, and you obviously realize that many -- maybe most
-- people will argue with its thesis.

    EL: I prefer writing about my convictions and worldview rather than
explaining or arguing about them in real time. I don't have a
podium-proselytizing personality. Argument, even the constructive kind,
is often reactive and impulsive. I'm emotionally impulsive enough by
nature that I've learned -- or tried to learn -- that one ought to rein
in one's impulses and emotions about things as important as convictions.

    The cartoon character Linus from “Peanuts” said, “I love mankind,
it's people I can't stand.” I'm the flip side: I love people, it's
humanity I have a hard time with. I've always preferred and been
fortunate to be able to work alone or with or for just one or two
people. This, and my general disinterest in and ignorance about
politics, seem contradictory for someone writing about community and
democracy and promoting a deep Green movement. But it's why I've been
able to write about those things.

    RJ: It does appear to be a contradiction. I assume you are
suggesting that there are many different ways to contribute to making a
better world.

    EL: I spoke recently to a college Philosophical Society about the
book. I told them that it seemed to me that to love wisdom, to be
philosophical in the truest sense, meant to be to some degree detached
from day-to-day events, from immediate things. Not to be disinterested
or unaffected, but less buffeted or influenced and consumed by them. One
of the reasons I could synthesize so much of what's going wrong in the
world now is that I've had time, as well as the calling and inclination,
for it. I could stand back, meditate, read, engage in independent
research, wait for understanding to come, question conventional
assumptions, including my own, and look almost leisurely for the largest
context in which we humans live our lives, which would be the context
that should guide how we live our lives and deal with the Critical Mass
of crises we presently face. Given how caught up I get in other people's
lives, if I'd been busy organizing, protesting, working full tilt and
full time, trying to respond to the needs and input of multiple
colleagues, I'd have had less mental space and stamina to do that. I'd
never arrived at the simple but elemental understanding that Life rules,
we don't.

    RJ: Please explain that title. Do you mean that Life -- something
bigger than us -- rules? Or that we need to follow Life's rules?

    EL : Yes, both. The largest context -- the largest high-functioning
complex system within which we live our lives -- is not the nation,
nation-state system or global economic system but Life itself, the
whole-earth, emergent and self-maintaining system of natural communities
and ecosystems. That system, the ecosphere, teaches us the physical
laws, the relationships and behaviors discovered in physics, biology and
ecology and exemplified by the so-called “mystical” spiritual teachers,
that we have to obey if we want to remain viable as a species. We aren't
the ultimate authority, and none of the systems we've created possess
ultimate authority. It's Life that has created the physical conditions
that make it possible for us to exist. We depend on Life for our lives.
More specifically, we depend on Life as we know it for our lives, for
the climate, resources, natural communities, and ecosystems that provide
us with what we need to live.

    Life has encoded in every other-than-human species a sort of
protocol or blueprint of eco nomic rules for survival, a set of
behaviors and relationships that allow Life as we know it to live within
earth's means, to be long-term sustainable. In the physical/material
realm on this planet, Life calls the shots. Life rules, we don't. Other
species have no choice but to obey those eco nomic rules. We alone have
a choice. And lately, as a species living under the influence of a
global economy that has, in the vernacular, gone viral, we've chosen
pridefully and foolishly to break all the rules. The way we live in the
present Global Economic Order -- capital G, capital E, capital O --
isn't sustainable. It's pathological. It works at cross purposes to
everything small g, e and o -- “geo,” everything earthy. In particular,
the GEO works at cross purposes to Life.

    RJ: That sounds simple, almost simplistic, pointing out that humans
live within an ecosphere that is governed physical laws and not
limitless. But all around us in the First World is evidence of a society
out of balance, apparently seized with the belief that we can defy
ecological limits indefinitely.

    EL: If you condense the 100,000 years or so that Homo sapiens
sapiens, humans like us, have been around into the 24 hours of one day,
the Global Economic Order has been in existence for less than a minute.
We can live without a GEO, but we can't live without or apart from Life
as we know it. So we have two choices: We can forego our present
economic model and choose to learn and obey Life's eco nomic rules. Or
we can choose not to. In which case Life will rule us out, adapt to our
trespasses like an apple tree adapting to a lightening strike, and get
on with its experiment in creating and sustaining more life just fine
without us. Life rules, we don't.

    RJ: You suggest that because of the way the GEO works, we are close
to a Critical Mass. What do you mean by that term?

    EL : There's actually a pretty good explanation for the now almost
total disconnect between our perception of reality and our actual
reality, between our sense as a species of being larger than Life and
the inarguable fact that we are dependent on it for our very existence.
Actually there are a couple of explanations.

    One is money. Since we use money -- or its funny-money kin, such as
credit and its ever-funnier-money kin like default swaps -- to acquire
the things we need and want, we don't provide those things for
ourselves, we've lost track of where the things we need and want
actually come from. We have little or no knowledge of the sources of our
provisions or the damage done to living systems by the way we acquire
them and the amounts of them we acquire. We've put our faith in the
economy's ability to deliver what we need to us, so long as we have
enough money. Money has come between us and substantial things -- the
real goods, resources and ecosystem services that we actually need to
live. Money has kept us from seeing the truth of our circumstances,
which is that soon there will be insufficient fossil fuels, plastics,
clean fresh water, forests, living soil, grains, seafood, congenial and
predictable climate, functioning governments. You name it, we'll run
short of it ad infinitum.

    Another explanation for our ignorance of the reality of our present
circumstances is that most people have never heard of or taken seriously
the limiting factor on a finite planet called “carrying capacity” -- the
number of a species or a collection of species that an ecosystem can
support long-term without suffering damage in excess of what the
ecosystem itself can repair. In accounting, exceeding carrying capacity
is called going bankrupt. That's where we're headed environmentally as
well as financially right now. But most of us don't realize that's where
we are yet because in those previous 23 hours and 59 minutes of human
history we've either had more places -- more “New Worlds” to move to,
conquer and plunder -- or new technologies that would do a better job of
plundering the places we were in to provide for us.

    We have just recently -- in, say, the last 30 seconds of that last
most recent minute of human history -- hit that point in our global
economic assault on living things and living systems both human and
natural, that there's no going back. We have just hit what I call
Critical Mass, which is the name I've given what others are calling
collapse, the tipping point, the long emergency, or bottleneck. It's my
name for our previously latent and slowly unfolding, now rapidly
worsening planetary equivalent of HIV/AIDS.

    RJ: That analogy to HIV/AIDS runs throughout the book, which may
strike some as an odd comparison. Can you explain that?

    EL: Critical Mass names a syndrome of converging,
mutually-reinforcing environmental, economic, political and social
crises that we think about and try to address as if they were separate
and unrelated, but they are not. They are symptoms of one disease, a
viral, a pathological global economy that is undermining the ability of
human and natural communities -- Earth's equivalent of an immune system
-- to provide for, protect, defend and heal themselves the same way HIV
undermines the ability of our immune systems to protect and heal us.
There are two pages in the book that compare HIV and the GEO,
characteristic for characteristic, and the similarities are startling
and frightening. I think we are presently at the HIV stage of the
disease; it hasn't quite yet become full-blown planetary AIDS. But I
insist in the book that doing more of what we've been doing to exceed
Earth's physical means as well as our own fiscal ones -- in other words,
trying to heal and grow the very kind and scope of economy that caused
this disease -- is akin to injecting a patient who already has HIV with
more HIV. That's precisely what we're doing.

    RJ: From the diagnosis, I want to go back to the treatment plan,
and your assessment of where the solutions to Critical Mass might be
worked out.

    EL:  Since all economies depend on earth and Life as we know it
consistently and continuously delivering the goods -- resources,
ecosystem services like living soils, pollination, marine fisheries,
oxygen, carbon sequestration, air filtration, sufficient clean fresh
water, a habitable, predictable climate -- then it seems to me the
treatment plan has to be one that doesn't exceed earth's means of
supporting us, doesn't run against Life's grain, and doesn't compromise
the health of the living systems. And the only examples of how to do
that come from Life itself. I argue in the book -- with support from
geneticists, microbiologists, evolutionary theorists, and
paleobiologists -- that the oldest and first living things,
single-celled entities like bacteria, spent the first 2 billion years
learning how to provide for themselves in ways that would be sustainable
over the long term. When they did learn it -- after nearly putting
themselves and the Life experiment on Earth out of business -- Life
locked in, genetically encoded, what they'd learned.

    Simply put, after going global and inducing the equivalent of our
present Critical Mass three times, bacteria adopted a sort of Ten
Commandments of Sustainability that can be synthesized for our purposes
as five new behaviors. They went 5D: they downsized, diversified,
decarbonized, dematerialized and, most importantly, they organized
themselves in ways that are profoundly democratic. Over the past 2
billion years, other-than-human living things have mastered the arts of
solar energetics, recycling, sharing and interdependence,
self-regulation, self-limitation, restrained competition, cooperation
and collaboration, grassroots organization, self-governance, ecosystem
management and -- this is profoundly important for us -- community
building. Life is a cross-species, communitarian phenomenon. Their
organically democratic eco-economies are local and regional,
place-based, functionally self-reliant, interdependent, mutually
supportive, regenerative, restorative and resilient.

    The salient point is that Life and only Life can teach us how to
live eco-logically, within Earth's means. If we learn what Life teaches
us and create lifeways that mimic Life's ways, we can survive this round
of Critical Mass we've induced and manage to avoid inducing it again.
Janine Benyus wrote a book called Biomimicry that reported on and
inspired a movement to copy, for example, the ways other species and
living systems produce what they need sustainably. You could call what
I'm suggesting in Life Rules radical or full-bore biomimicry.

    RJ: Given how detached most of the contemporary world is from
understanding, let alone mimicking, the natural world, is this realistic?

    Adopting Life's rules will require, of course, a huge
transformation of the ways we think about our place in the community of
living things and the ways we live. My book offers three chapters of
examples of what we can do and some communities are already doing, if in
a very preliminary way. We'll need to revise what education is for, what
needs to get taught and where, when and how learning needs to occur. I
would suggest again that Life is the primary teacher, its eco nomic,
production, consumption, relational and organizational rules the
curriculum. The particular ecosystems -- the geographic places -- we
live in and are presently destroying are the classrooms. And as
Post-Carbon Institute Senior Fellow Richard Heinberg proposed in
Powerdown , the most important and hardest lesson we will need to learn
as a species is self-limitation. Where material consumption is
concerned, “less is best” will absolutely have to replace “wars for
more” as our collective ethical prime directive.

    The good news is, if we take our cues from Life, if we decide to
transform our ways of living and providing for ourselves, we don't need
governments as we know them or any sort of global agreement or
institutions to begin and to succeed. Sustainability is by nature a
grassroots undertaking. Both the learning and the mimicking can, and
must, be engaged in particular places with the natural and human
communities that live in those places. Life's a collection of local
phenomena, a community of communities, as John Cobb and Herman Daly
propose in their books, for example, For the Common Good. If we need a
goad to transformation, there's this one: If we don't choose to
transform ourselves and our lifeways, Life will force us to. Life rules,
we don't, and Life will not hesitate to rule harshly and even rule us out.

    RJ: Does that mean we have ugly times ahead of us?

    While there's no reason to believe we will engage in this
transformation willingly or that there will not be violence on the way
to Life-likeness, a lot of communities around the country and in other
countries have already begun to explore and experiment with aspects of
Life's Protocol for Eco nomic Survival, though they don't have my name
for it yet. The relocalization, Transition Town, post-carbon, 350.org,
local currency, slow food, ecozoic and new economics movements, for
example, all teach and apply one or more of Life's lessons. Paul
Hawken's team at the WiserEarth website is creating a data base of
information about organizations involved in movements like these.
They've accounted for around 125,000 and think there may be twice that
many. Hawken suggests we think of these organizations and their members
as anti-bodies helping healing the planet's immune system of this
AIDS-like, economically induced disease I call Critical Mass. These
organizations and movements represent a starting point.

    But a viable treatment plan for this virulent, life-threatening,
economically-induced syndrome of crises cannot engage in just one or two
or even three of the 5Ds, and cannot engage in them scattershot or only
to a degree that doesn't upset business as usual. Eco-logic requires
that we incorporate, integrate, and practice all of Life's rules, that
we stop behaving as if we were larger than or apart from Life and become
constructive participants in it.

    RJ: It seems clear that the kind of change you describe as
necessary is not possible within capitalism and that capitalism is a
serious impediment to such change. Earlier you said we have to “forego
our present economic model,” but not all the movements and experiments
you mention are anti-capitalist. How do you negotiate that?



    EL : I kept religion, politics, parties, personalities and “ism”
analysis pretty much out of the book in order not to allow any of those
divisive topics to set up straw figures and distract readers from the
central point: By present economic methods and models, we are living
beyond earth's means. I suggest in the book that unregulated,
growth-dependent capitalism only appears to succeed because it has been
enabled by the mechanisms of globalism to have the whole earth at its
disposal and by the machinations of the Powers to make
grab-and-get/pillage-and-plunder its operating principles. Once it has
been globalized, the one thing a capitalist economy can't be is
not-global. And as a globalized phenomenon, it cannot help but exceed
earth's means of supporting it. It is the globalization of the
capitalist -- and, I would add, colonialist -- industrial economy that
is doing-in Life as we know it. And as I also suggest in the book, the
system is too big not to fail since the resource base -- or, to retrieve
my HIV/AIDS analogy, the host planet -- it depends on is finite. When
AIDS sufficiently ravages a human patient's body, the virus dies along
with the patient. Consequently, along with ecosystems, species, human
and natural communities, human lives, quality of life, and Life as we
know it -- the global capitalist economy itself is in its terminal stages.

    Taking on capitalism head on would have gotten up the backs of too
many potential readers. And while they might waste time arguing the
merits of capitalism or arguing the possibility of no-growth capitalism,
they cannot successfully argue the merits of a globalized economic
system of any kind. Globalized bartering or socialism or communism would
equally challenge the earth's human and natural communities and the
biosphere's functioning. Kirkpatrick Sale and E.F. Schumacher had it
right: Scale matters and where sustainability is an issue, which in the
matter of human survival it is, small is not only beautiful but
self-limiting, survivable, and sustainable.

    So, no, not all the movements and examples I mention in the book
are anti-capitalist. The measure of an experiment's success is not that
it is anti-capitalist but that it works in harmony with living systems,
and in the ways that living systems work. An experiment need not be in
and of itself the cure for Critical Mass but is exemplary of one or more
elements of Life's Eco nomic Protocol for Survival, which as I've said,
would lead us to integrate and obey all of Life's rules. Doing that
would automatically move us away from capitalism as we know it and
probably from any conceivable model of capital as an economic end-all
and be-all. Provisions themselves are what we need to live, not the
funny-money with which we presently purchase them if we are lucky enough
to have any.

    RJ: Perhaps that is the bottom line: What we need to live. Perhaps
that's an appropriate last question. What do you, Ellen LaConte, need to
live?



    EL :  Much less than I presently have and very much less than is
currently available to me if I were willing to use credit to acquire it.
Like everyone else, I need food, clean air and water, clothing, some
sort of shelter, preferably warm in winter, occasional medicine or
medical care, spiritual and physical exercise, colleagues, friends,
family, if possible books, lots of quiet, a garden to work in, woods and
wild not too far off. To love and be loved. To carry no debt. To believe
there is some sort of livable, desirable future for the next seven
generations. I've been fortunate never to lack for these.

    To be happy, I need good work to do, work that I feel is, in my
late mentor Helen Nearing's terms, “contributory.” (See a review of
LaConte's book about Nearing, On Light Alone ,
http://www.yesmagazine.org/issues/sustaining-watersheds-of-the-pacific-northwest/book-review-on-light-alone-by-ellen-laconte 

)

    I have, in addition, most of what most middle and upper-middle
class Americans have. My partner and I have a house that in absolute
terms is bigger and less efficient than I'd like, a car, the usual
appliances (though we are not appliance or gadget sophisticates), a
computer, a television, arts and entertainment if I choose to access
them, electricity, running water, public services (for the time being),
air-conditioning, various kinds of insurance, every kind of retail
outlet you can think of within five miles or so, most of which I never
patronize. I do not need these things, but I have them. Or, more
accurately, they and the economic system of which they are the
accoutrements have me.

    Thus, I need periodically to contemplate what I have that I don't
need, what harm having it causes and whether I'm willing to discomfort
myself and my partner enough to un-have it, or at least some of it.

    -----------------------

    Robert Jensen is a journalism professor at the University of Texas
at Austin and board member of the Third Coast Activist Resource Center
in Austin, one of the partners in the community center “5604 Manor,”
http://5604manor.org/ .

    He is the author of All My Bones Shake: Seeking a Progressive Path
to the Prophetic Voice, (Soft Skull Press, 2009); Getting Off:
Pornography and the End of Masculinity (South End Press, 2007); The
Heart of Whiteness: Confronting Race, Racism and White Privilege (City
Lights, 2005); Citizens of the Empire: The Struggle to Claim Our
Humanity (City Lights, 2004); and Writing Dissent: Taking Radical Ideas
from the Margins to the Mainstream (Peter Lang, 2002).

    Jensen is also co-producer of the documentary film “Abe Osheroff:
One Foot in the Grave, the Other Still Dancing,” which chronicles the
life and philosophy of the longtime radical activist. Information about
the film, distributed by the Media Education Foundation, and an extended
interview Jensen conducted with Osheroff are online at
http://thirdcoastactivist.org/osheroff.html .

    Jensen can be reached at rjensen@uts.cc.utexas.edu and his articles
can be found online at http://uts.cc.utexas.edu/~rjensen/index.html . To
join an email list to receive articles by Jensen, go to
http://www.thirdcoastactivist.org/jensenupdates-info.html .