Civilization and a sustainble future

Subject: Re: [gwcc] Civilization and a sustainble future
Date: Fri, 17 Nov 2006 11:27:26 -0800
From: Derrick Jensen, derrick@derrickjensen.org
To: dave@reststop.net, gwcc@lists.riseup.net
References: 1 , 2 , 3 , 4

Dear Dave,

Industrial civilization--yes. But even this I think should be more accurately described as the project of industrialism, and its particularly destructive manifestation in the Industrial Growth Society. But civilization itself does not rest on the necessity of industrialism's existence.

I think we need to either come up with a new word, or clearly define what it is we're talking about when we casually toss into a conversation the term civilization, and especially a rejection of it as the root of all evil.

I have defined it rigorously. That's one reason I keep suggesting people read Endgame. I've covered all this ground again and again there and elsewhere. I can't keep recapitulating it here.

Here's the definition I use.

If I’m going to contemplate the collapse of civilization, I need to define what it is. I looked in some dictionaries. Webster’s calls civilization “a high stage of social and cultural development.”[i] The Oxford English Dictionary describes it as “a developed or advanced state of human society.”[ii] All the other dictionaries I checked were similarly laudatory. These definitions, no matter how broadly shared, helped me not in the slightest. They seemed to me hopelessly sloppy. After reading them, I still had no idea what the hell a civilization is: define high, developed, or advanced, please. The definitions, it struck me, are also extremely self-serving: can you imagine writers of dictionaries willingly classifying themselves as members of “a low, undeveloped, or backward state of human society”? I suddenly remembered that all writers, including writers of dictionaries, are propagandists, and realized that these definitions are, in fact, bite-sized chunks of propaganda, concise articulations of the arrogance that has led those who believe they are living in the most advanced­and best­culture to attempt to impose by force this way of being on all others.

I would define a civilization much more precisely, and I believe more usefully, as a culture­that is, a complex of stories, institutions, and artifacts­that both leads to and emerges from the growth of cities (civilization, see civil: from civis, meaning citizen, from latin civitatis, meaning city-state), with cities being defined­so as to distinguish them from camps, villages, and so on­as people living more or less permanently in one place in densities high enough to require the routine importation of food and other necessities of life. Thus a Tolowa village five hundred years ago where I live in Tu’nes (meadow long in the Tolowa tongue), now called Crescent City, California, would not have been a city, since the Tolowa ate native salmon, clams, deer, huckleberries, and so on, and had no need to bring in food from outside. Thus, under my definition, the Tolowa, because their way of living was not characterized by the growth of city-states, would not have been civilized. On the other hand, the Aztecs were. Their social structure led inevitably to great city-states like Iztapalapa and Tenochtitlán, the latter of which was, when Europeans first encountered it, far larger than any city in Europe, with a population five times that of London or Seville.[iii] Shortly before razing Tenochtitlán and slaughtering or enslaving its inhabitants, the explorer and conquistador Hernando Cortés remarked that it was easily the most beautiful city on earth.[iv] Beautiful or not, Tenochtitlán required, as do all cities, the (often forced) importation of food and other resources. The story of any civilization is the story of the rise of city-states, which means it is the story of the funneling of resources toward these centers (in order to sustain them and cause them to grow), which means it is the story of an increasing region of unsustainability surrounded by an increasingly exploited countryside.

German Reichskanzler Paul von Hindenberg described the relationship perfectly: “Without colonies no security regarding the acquisition of raw materials, without raw materials no industry, without industry no adequate standard of living and wealth. Therefore, Germans, do we need colonies.”[v]

Of course someone already lives in the colonies, but that is evidently not of any importance.

But there’s more. Cities don’t arise in political, social, and ecological vacuums. Lewis Mumford, in the second book of his extraordinary two-volume Myth of the Machine, uses the term civilization “to denote the group of institutions that first took form under kingship. Its chief features, constant in varying proportions throughout history, are the centralization of political power, the separation of classes, the lifetime division of labor, the mechanization of production, the magnification of military power, the economic exploitation of the weak, and the universal introduction of slavery and forced labor for both industrial and military purposes.”[vi] (The anthropologist and philosopher Stanley Diamond put this a bit more succinctly when he noted, “Civilization originates in conquest abroad and repression at home.”[vii]) These attributes, which inhere not just in this culture but in all civilizations, make civilization sound pretty bad. But, according to Mumford, civilization has another, more benign face as well. He continues, “These institutions would have completely discredited both the primal myth of divine kingship and the derivative myth of the machine had they not been accompanied by another set of collective traits that deservedly claim admiration: the invention and keeping of the written record, the growth of visual and musical arts, the effort to widen the circle of communication and economic intercourse far beyond the range of any local community: ultimately the purpose to make available to all men [sic] the discoveries and inventions and creations, the works of art and thought, the values and purposes that any single group has discovered.”[viii]

Much as I admire and have been influenced by Mumford’s work, I fear that when he began discussing civilization’s admirable face he fell under the spell to the same propaganda promulgated by the lexicographers whose work I consulted: that this culture really is “advanced,” or “higher.” But if we dig beneath this second, smiling mask of civilization­the belief that civilization’s visual or musical arts, for example, are more developed than those of noncivilized peoples­we find a mirror image of civilization’s other face, that of power. For example, it wouldn’t be the whole truth to say that visual and musical arts have simply grown or become more highly advanced under this system; it’s also true that they have long ago succumbed to the same division of labor that characterizes this culture’s economics and politics. Where among traditional indigenous people­the “uncivilized’­songs are sung by everyone as a means to bond members of the community and celebrate each other and their landbase, within civilization songs are written and performed by experts, those with “talent,” those whose lives are devoted to the production of these arts. There’s no reason for me to listen to my neighbor sing (probably off-key) some amateurish song of her own invention when I can pop in a CD of Beethoven, Mozart, or Lou Reed (okay, so Lou Reed sings off-key, too, but I like it). I’m not certain I’d characterize the conversion of human beings from participants in the ongoing creation of communal arts to more passive consumers of artistic products manufactured by distant experts­even if these distant experts are really talented­as a good thing.

I could make a similar argument about writing, but Stanley Diamond beat me to it: “Writing was one of the original mysteries of civilization, and it reduced the complexities of experience to the written word. Moreover, writing provides the ruling classes with an ideological instrument of incalculable power. The word of God becomes an invincible law, mediated by priests; therefore, respond the Iroquois, confronting the European: ‘Scripture was written by the Devil.’ With the advent of writing, symbols became explicit; they lost a certain richness. Man’s word was no longer an endless exploration of reality, but a sign that could be used against him. . . . For writing splits consciousness in two ways­it becomes more authoritative than talking, thus degrading the meaning of speech and eroding oral tradition; and it makes it possible to use words for the political manipulation and control of others. Written signs supplant memory; an official, fixed and permanent version of events can be made. If it is written, in early civilizations [and I would suggest, now], it is bound to be true.”[ix]

I have two problems, also, with Mumford’s claim that the widening of communication and economic intercourse under civilization benefits people as a whole. The first is that it presumes that uncivilized people do not communicate or participate in economic transactions beyond their local communities. Many do. Shells from the Northwest Coast found their way into the hands of Plains Indians, and buffalo robes often ended up on the coast. (And let’s not even talk about noncivilized people communicating with their nonhuman neighbors, something rarely practiced by the civilized: talk about restricting yourself to your own community!) In any case, I’m not certain that the ability to send emails back and forth to Spain or to watch television programs beamed out of Los Angeles makes my life particularly richer. It’s far more important, useful, and enriching, I think, to get to know my neighbors. I’m frequently amazed to find myself sitting in a room full of fellow human beings, all of us staring at a box watching and listening to a story concocted and enacted by people far away. I have friends who know Seinfeld’s neighbors better than their own. I, too, can get lost in valuing the unreality of the distant over that which surrounds me every day. I have to confess I can navigate the mazes of the computer game Doom2: Hell on Earth far better than I can find my way along the labyrinthine game trails beneath the trees outside my window, and I understand the intricacies of Word for Windows far better than I do the complex dance of rain, sun, predators, prey, scavengers, plants, and soil in the creek a hundred yards away. The other night, I wrote till late, and finally turned off my computer to step outside and say goodnight to the dogs. I realized, then, that the wind was blowing hard through the tops of the redwood trees, and the trees were sighing and whispering. Branches were clashing, and in the distance I heard them cracking. Until that moment I had not realized such a symphony was taking place so near, much less had I gone out to participate in it, to feel the wind blow my hair and to feel the tossed rain hit me in the face. All of the sounds of the night had been drowned out by the monotone whine of my computer’s fan. Just yesterday I saw a pair of hooded mergansers playing on the pond outside my bedroom. Then last night I saw a television program in which yet another lion chased yet another zebra. Which of those two scenes makes me richer? This perceived widening of communication is just another replication of the problem of the visual and musical arts, because given the impulse for centralized control that motivates civilization, widening communication in this case really means reducing us from active participants in our own lives and in the lives of those around us to consumers sucking words and images from some distant sugar tit.

I have another problem with Mumford’s statement. In claiming that the widening of communication and economic intercourse are admirable, he seems to have forgotten­and this is strange, considering the normal sophistication of his analysis­that this widening can only be universally beneficial when all parties act voluntarily and under circumstances of relatively equivalent power. I’d hate to have to make the case, for example, that the people of Africa­perhaps 100 million of whom died because of the slave trade, and many more of whom find themselves dispossessed and/or impoverished today­have benefitted from their “economic intercourse” with Europeans. The same can be said for Aborigines, Indians, the people of pre-contact India, and so on.

I want to re-examine one other thing Mumford wrote, in part because he makes an argument for civilization I’ve seen replicated so many times elsewhere, and that actually leads, I think, to some of the very serious problems we face today. He concluded the section I quoted above, and I reproduce it here just so you don’t have to flip back a couple of pages: “ultimately the purpose [is] to make available to all men [sic] the discoveries and inventions and creations, the works of art and thought, the values and purposes that any single group has discovered.” But just as a widening of economic intercourse is only beneficial to everyone when all exchanges are voluntary, so, too, the imposition of one group’s values and purposes onto another, or its appropriation of the other’s discoveries, can lead only to the exploitation and diminution of the latter in favor of the former. That this “exchange” helps all was commonly argued by early Europeans in America, as when Captain John Chester wrote that the Indians were to gain “the knowledge of our faith,” while the Europeans would harvest “such ritches as the country hath.”[x] It was argued as well by American slaveowners in the nineteenth century: philosopher George Fitzhugh stated that “slavery educates, refines, and moralizes the masses by bringing them into continual intercourse with masters of superior minds, information, and morality.”[xi] And it’s just as commonly argued today by those who would teach the virtues of blue jeans, Big Macs™, Coca-Cola™, Capitalism™, and Jesus Christ™ to the world’s poor in exchange for dispossessing them of their landbases and forcing them to work in sweatshops.

Another problem is that Mumford’s statement reinforces a mindset that leads inevitably to unsustainability, because it presumes that discoveries, inventions, creations, works of art and thought, and values and purposes are transposable over space, that is, that they are separable from both the human context and landbase that created them. Mumford’s statement unintentionally reveals perhaps more than anything else the power of the stories that hold us in thrall to the machine, as he put it, that is civilization: even in brilliantly dissecting the myth of this machine, Mumford fell back into that very same myth by seeming to implicitly accept the notion that ideas or works of art or discoveries are like tools in a toolbox, and can be meaningfully and without negative consequence used out of their original context: thoughts, ideas, and art as tools rather than as tapestries inextricably woven from and into a community of human and nonhuman neighbors. But discoveries, works of thought, and purposes that may work very well in the Great Plains may be harmful in the Pacific Northwest, and even moreso in Hawai’i. To believe that this potential transposition is positive is the same old substitution of what is distant for what is near: if I really want to know how to live in Tu’nes, I should pay attention to Tu’nes.

There’s another problem, though, that trumps all of these others. It has to do with a characteristic of this civilization unshared even by other civilizations. It is the deeply- and most-often-invisibly-held beliefs that there is really only one way to live, and that we are the one-and-only possessors of that way. It becomes our job then to propagate this way, by force when necessary, until there are no other ways to be. Far from being a loss, the eradication of these other ways to be, these other cultures, is instead an actual gain, since Western Civilization is the only way worth being anyway: we’re doing ourselves a favor by getting rid of not only obstacles blocking our access to resources but reminders that other ways to be exist, allowing our fantasy to sidle that much closer to reality; and we’re doing the heathens a favor when we raise them from their degraded state to join the highest, most advanced, most developed state of society. If they don’t want to join us, simple: we kill them. Another way to say all of this is that something grimly alchemical happens when we combine the arrogance of the dictionary definition, which holds this civilization superior to all other cultural forms; hypermilitarism, which allows civilization to expand and exploit essentially at will; and a belief, held even by such powerful and relentless critics of civilization as Lewis Mumford, in the desirability of cosmopolitanism, that is, the transposability of discoveries, values, modes of thought, and so on over time and space. The twentieth-century name for that grimly alchemical transmutation is genocide: the eradication of cultural difference, its sacrifice on the altar of the one true way, on the altar of the centralization of perception, the conversion of a multiplicity of moralities all dependent on location and circumstance to one morality based on the precepts of the ever-expanding machine, the surrender of individual perception (as through writing and through the conversion of that and other arts to consumables) to predigested perceptions, ideas, and values imposed by external authorities who with all their hearts­what’s left of them­believe in, and who benefit by, the centralization of power. Ultimately, then, the story of this civilization is the story of the reduction of the world’s tapestry of stories to only one story, the best story, the real story, the most advanced story, the most developed story, the story of the power and the glory that is Western Civilization.

[i] Webster’s.
[ii] OED
[iii] Stannard, 4.
[iv] Stannard, 4.
[v] Mies, 98.
[vi] Mumford, Technics, 186.
[vii] Diamond, 1.
[viii] Mumford, Technics, 186; awkwardness in original, even though Mumford is normally an exquisite stylist.
[ix] Diamond, 4.
[x] Turner, 182.
[xi] Faust, 293.

***
The term's literal etymological sense is to make citified.

Obviously I am aware of this.

As has been pointed out, most articulately I think by Riane Eisler, civilization in cities was doing just fine until the dominator detour of social evolution occurred.

I disagree on any number of levels. First, if you _require_ the importation of resources, by definition your way of life will not be sustainable. Never. No matter how much people may wish, and no matter how strong a feminist one may be.

Second, I interviewed Riane Eisler years ago, and even though she's done good work, she explicitly didn't extend her "partnership model" to the natural world, even when I (gently) pushed her. She was pro high technology, and at that point at least in no way saw the natural world as being a part of her understanding.

Force, fear, and a separation from nature--including our own and others inner nature--lead to the eventual worship of autonomy and accumulation of capital through the enclosure of the commons to make up for the loss of natural fulfillment and unmet community needs. Forgetting that we're an intimate part of an interconnected system, as well as a denial of the need to adhere to today's scientific knowledge of what it takes to stay within the carrying capacity of a bioregion

How did the Tolowa live here for 12500 years without "scientific knowledge of what it takes to stay within the carrying capacity of a bioregion"? There are other ways to know a place that don't include science. Science and its boosters have co-opted the word knowledge. That's incredibly dangerous.

As I've shown in my book Welcome to the Machine, science is part of the problem (and my first degree was in physics, so I say this as someone on the inside). Of course that doesn't mean we shouldn't use data gained by scientific methods. It's just that we need to be clear that one does not "need" to have science to live sustainably. In fact on the main, of course, science and high technology have caused far more damage than they have alleviated.

is indeed pathological, but the blame for this cannot by lain at the door of civilization.

Obviously I disagree, with several thousand pages (including my other works) of supporting analysis and facts. I can't recapitulate them all here. That's why I keep suggesting people just read the books.

Aspects of the term civilization I think must go away include it's supposed reliance on organizing principles based on hierarchies to maintain a sense of order, and its strict adherence to being citified--which leads to the derogatory use of the perceived opposite of civilization which is to exist in a primitive or savage state--without honestly admitting that modern "civilized" man is really little more than a cannibal with a fork.

Of course civilized people are cannibals. Many of the indigenous have recognized this for a long long time. The book to read about this is Jack Forbes' absolutely extraordinary Columbus and other Cannibals. Wonderful book. Mumford's Myth of the Machine explores this as well. So does Deborah Roots Cannibal Culture. David Stannard's American Holocaust explores it very well also. So does Richard Drinnon's Facing West: The Metaphysics of Indian Hating and Empire Building; and Frederick Turner's Beyond Geography.

Finally, there is an aspect of civilization that conveys the evolution of social systems. I think if we can better refine our arguments,

Do you think maybe in several thousand pages of analysis, I might have done just a teensy bit of refining? Please.

we'll also be better able to gain more support from a wider base of people who don't see returning to caves as moving forward.

I was just in Portland. The line to come hear my talk filled a sidewalk and snaked down and around the block. The place was packed. Endgame is the second best seller from Seven Stories, only behind Vonnegut's latest. The message is being received. People routinely drive 8 and 10 hours one way to hear these talks. The point is not me. The point is that lots of people recognize that civilization was a very bad idea, and that there have been (and for now continue to be) many other social organizations that make a lot more sense.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with this type of lifestyle for people who are attracted to it, and we all need to spend much more time both playing in the dirt and playing with our own inner wilderness.

I'm not talking about "playing in the dirt" and "playing with our own inner wildnerness." I'm talking about a way of life that has been killing the planet for the past 6000 years (the first written myth of this culture is Gilgamish deforesting the plains and hillsides of what is now Iraq (they were cedar forests so thick the sunlight never touched the ground) to make the great cities of the region. This isn't about "playing in the dirt and playing with our own inner wildnerness." This is about life on the planet. This is about the salmon. This is about the polar bears. This is about the amphibians. This is about little girls starting puberty earlier: one percent of three-year-old girls have begun to develop breasts or pubic hair, and in only the last six years, the percentage of girls under eight with swollen breasts or pubic hair has gone from one percent to 6.7 percent for white girls, and 27.2 percent for black girls. This is about the murder of the planet.

It behooves us all to find ways to better articulate that sustainability does not entail austerity; that "being more" is a more advanced and civilized state than "having more."
I've been working on this for far more than a decade now, and have produced a body of work that already does this. Of course I continue to work on it (I've got two and maybe three more books coming out next year), continue to refine and push forward the analyses.

Derrick

 

Civilization and a sustainble future

Subject: Re: [gwcc] Civilization and a sustainble future
Date: Sat, 18 Nov 2006 12:15:59 -0700
From: dave@reststop.net (Dave Ewoldt)
Organization: Attraction Retreat
To: gwcc@lists.riseup.net
References: 1 , 2 , 3

On 17 Nov 2006 at 11:27, Derrick Jensen wrote:

> >I think we need to either come up with a new word, or clearly define what it is
> >we're talking about when we casually toss into a conversation the term
> >civilization, and especially a rejection of it as the root of all evil.
>
> I have defined it rigorously. That's one reason I keep suggesting people
> read Endgame. I've covered all this ground again and again there and
> elsewhere. I can't keep recapitulating it here.

Ok, all you had to say is that's the way you use it, as explained in length in Endgame. All I was looking for is the core commonalities that we can start moving forward from. As you can see, people have a bit of a problem with throwing the concept, or their conception of the concept, of civilization out the window.

As you say, define "higher" and "advanced." What we can say is that civilization has moved culture along an evolutionary scale. As is apparent to most of us here, this has not been an entirely positive direction as far as the experiment of life goes.

One of the things that confuses me is that you seem to make an assumption that the division of labor is inherently negative, as in your critique of the arts. I mean, I can't carry a tune in a handbasket, so I really enjoy listening to someone who is an "expert," and even though I can hold my own on pedal steel guitar, listening to a true master like Buddy Cage inspires me to keep practising. But I don't see this as either vicarious living, or that it's decreasing community relationships. And, as always, the fact that we're overpopulated tends to muddy the waters on this and most other issues.

And I've heard this critique of writing, "reduced the complexities of experience to the written word," as expressed here by Stanley Diamond, many times over the years, and in every case I come to the same conclusion: they are couching their critique within the framework of the dominator paradigm. It is to mistake cause with effect. As with so much else today, it is in the application of the technology, as well as the stories we tell about it, that determines whether or not it supports the Global Life Community.

Anyway, I basically agree with the _gist_ of what you're saying in your expanded definition of civilization, as well as the thinking behind why you're saying it, but I also think some of the details are important, because it will affect how it is received. You do have a tendency to conflate predatory capitalism/economic cannibalism with civilization, or to present them as a necessary condition to civilization. That they are amongst the uglier aspects of Western Civilization is not being questioned.

I have a tendency to do similar things, and I've found it makes it difficult to argue persuasively, especially with well educated and articulate defenders of the dominator/capitalist status quo. This is what I'm talking about when I mention the need to refine the arguments.

> >As has been pointed out, most articulately I think by Riane Eisler,
> >civilization in cities was doing just fine until the dominator detour of
> >social evolution occurred.
>
> I disagree on any number of levels. First, if you _require_ the importation of
> resources, by definition your way of life will not be sustainable. Never. No
> matter how much people may wish, and no matter how strong a feminist one may be.

I didn't say anything about requiring the importation of resources, at least any farther away than bioregional boundaries. As Richard Register points out in "Ecocities" doing so isn't necessary, and as you point out would not be sustainable. This is probably the only area we have any _real_ disagreement on, and I'd be perfectly happy to find another term, or an agreement on the size that makes a permanent accumulation of people and their structures unsustainable, and to call this a city.

I think the size would max out at about 100,000 but this would depend on the bioregion, and the size and number of other villages in the surrounding countryside.

Further compounding the problem is the move to city-states and then nations for governance. As Bookchin and others have pointed out, this was not an historical necessity, and moves in the opposite direction of a decentralized partnership, or a system of bioregional autonomous but interdependent governments.

> Second, I interviewed Riane Eisler years ago, and even though she's done
> good work, she explicitly didn't extend her "partnership model" to the
> natural world, even when I (gently) pushed her. She was pro high
> technology, and at that point at least in no way saw the natural world as
> being a part of her understanding.

Well, if she's gone back on her _explicitly_ nature based formulation for a partnership culture, that's too bad, but I'd also like a bit more evidence than this. The foundation of the partnership way has always been that nature is one of the partners. It won't work any other way. I hope you're not confusing her work on domestic violence and other social issues as meaning that nature doesn't play a foundational role in helping us understand the roots of violence.

And, even so, it doesn't mean that the work she did, especially in "The Chalice and The Blade" must now be ignored for the insight it can give us into creating a way of being in the world that would be equitable for all life and thus sustainable.

I think it also might be important to distinguish between thinking that technology can save us, and realizing that technology can be used sustainably in ways that benefit humans and society and don't detract or damage the planetary resources life depends on. When I use the word sustainable, I'm using it from a very broad based systems view, and inherent in all of my arguments is the need to reduce global population levels by about two-thirds and not introduce unnatural substances for which there is no evolutionary defense mechanism except death.

I can't see any of it working any other way.

I'd argue, just to touch briefly on another point you made, and also as a former engineer who's done grad work in high energy particle physics, that the scientific methods of quantification and reductionism are the main problems, but not the only ones. Something else that must occur, especially within applied science, is the replacement of risk analysis with the precautionary principle.

> >we're an
> >intimate part of an interconnected system, as well as a denial of the need to
> >adhere to today's scientific knowledge of what it takes to stay within the
> >carrying capacity of a bioregion
>
> How did the Tolowa live here for 12500 years without "scientific knowledge of
> what it takes to stay within the carrying capacity of a bioregion"? There are
> other ways to know a place that don't include science. Science and its boosters
> have co-opted the word knowledge. That's incredibly dangerous.

But, I'm not talking about the Tolowa, I'm talking about what we have today. How people are living and thinking today. Americans specifically, but Euro- Americans generally, have overcompensated their loss of the majority of their dozens of natural senses by relying almost exclusively on just two--rationality and language. My core work is based on there being _many_ other ways of knowing.

The point I'm trying to make is that in order to shift from where we are today to where most of us on this list agree we need to be, and do it as quickly as possible, let's benefit from what we have learned over the centuries that will _support_ this shift, and put the indigenous wisdom of cultures like the Tolowa into an _additional_ framework people are comfortable with and can relate to-- where people can readily see that the height of rationality would be to return to a harmonious way of being in mutually supportive relationships with each other and the rest of the natural world.

> > I think if we can better refine our arguments, we'll also be
> >better able to gain more support from a wider base of people who don't see
> >returning to caves as moving forward.
>
> I was just in Portland. The line to come hear my talk filled a sidewalk and
> snaked down and around the block. The place was packed. Endgame is the second
> best seller from Seven Stories, only behind Vonnegut's latest. The message is
> being received. People routinely drive 8 and 10 hours one way to hear these
> talks. The point is not me. The point is that lots of people recognize that
> civilization was a very bad idea, and that there have been (and for now continue
> to be) many other social organizations that make a lot more sense.

Derrick, I like your work, and respect you as one of the better social critics around today. But there's still a long way to go. Even with the size of the crowd in Portland, that represented, what? about .001% of the population?

As you say later in this message, you're still working on refining, and have a whole lot more to write. I'm just offering what I see and trying to make suggestions that might make fruitful avenues of investigation to make your work both more powerful and more accepted. You're sounding a bit defensive, which can be expected when one's work revolves around challenging the power structure (I get it all the time, even from so-called progressives), but I think you're amongst friends here who have the same core goal.

My point is that more and more people are recognizing that things aren't just not working, but are about to bring the universal experiment of life on Earth to a rather ignominious end. Whether this is inherent in civilization or our current application of it may turn out to be less important than the underlying psychology--which will of course lend itself to the definition of the terms we use.

Based primarily on the work of ecopsychologist Michael Cohen and on Eisler, but others say the same thing in different ways, I see the primary problem as the psychological feeling of separation from nature, the concept of otherness, and the availability of addictive substitutes for natural fulfillment. This milieu is created by the force based ranking hierarchies of the dominator paradigm. If civilization is based exclusively on this way of thinking, it will cause problems.

I see the systemic solution as reconnecting with nature and building a culture based on partnership principles which itself is based on the natural systems principles of mutual support and reciprocity, no waste, no greed, and increasing diversity. But I'm fine with dropping the term civilization if it's truly irredeemable and just using culture instead. I do think the educational process of raising awareness would be more difficult, however, because I do see positive values in what many people understand civilization to be and what it can offer to the common good.

> >There is absolutely nothing wrong with
> >this type of lifestyle for people who are attracted to it, and we all need to
> >spend much more time both playing in the dirt and playing with our own inner
> >wilderness.
>
> I'm not talking about "playing in the dirt" and "playing with our own inner
> wildnerness." I'm talking about a way of life that has been killing the planet

Ahh, the difficulty of getting subtlety across in e-mail. The point is there are many ways to live sustainably, and if the diversity of doing so doesn't reflect the diversity in a healthy ecosystem, it won't be sustainable. One of the reasons we're killing our planet with our adherence to dominator control hierarchies is because we don't get out in the dirt, either for play or to responsibly contribute to our community. We also buy into the story that our inner nature is flawed and to be subjugated.

> for the past 6000 years (the first written myth of this culture is Gilgamish
> deforesting the plains and hillsides of what is now Iraq (they were cedar
> forests so thick the sunlight never touched the ground) to make the great cities
> of the region. This isn't about "playing in the dirt and playing with our own
> inner wildnerness." This is about life on the planet. This is about the salmon.

This could just be a matter of semantics, but to me that is what life on this planet is about at a very fundamental level. The core of our disconnection keeps us from this. This is where the problems you speak of spring from.

> This is about the polar bears. This is about the amphibians. This is about
> little girls starting puberty earlier: one percent of three-year-old girls have
> begun to develop breasts or pubic hair, and in only the last six years, the
> percentage of girls under eight with swollen breasts or pubic hair has gone from
> one percent to 6.7 percent for white girls, and 27.2 percent for black girls.
> This is about the murder of the planet.

Exactly. I'm not disagreeing with any of that.

> >It behooves us all to find ways to better articulate that sustainability does
> >not entail austerity; that "being more" is a more advanced and civilized state
> >than "having more."
>
> I've been working on this for far more than a decade now, and have produced a
> body of work that already does this. Of course I continue to work on it (I've
> got two and maybe three more books coming out next year), continue to refine and
> push forward the analyses.

Yeah, I know, I've been working on it seriously for about as long, although as I look back I see I've been heading in this direction since the late '60s. I haven't been as prolific in writing about it, though, at least until recently. More of my time has been spend as an activist and now as a healer--getting people reconnected with nature on the assumption that they won't fight to save what they don't love. I believe this love comes from both a rational and sensual understanding and experience of our interconnected role within the web of life.

All in all, though, I think I'll continue to use the modifier "industrial" for the form of civilization we're creating an alternative to, at least until more people are aware of the dominator propaganda that informs the frames triggered by this word, especially its implicit enforcement of an inferior "other."

I'll put Endgame toward the top of my reading list. I''ve just recently finished Rifkin's 1992 "Biosphere Politics" and am almost done with Bookchin's 1990 "Remaking Society" (and, man, is that one some dense reading, and I've heard his intent with it was to make his academic work more widely accessible.)

I'm also working on ways to refine this message to reach as many people as possible, and especially to help them connect the dots.This is probably my consuming drive at the moment.

The thing about people, though, is that they're all different :-)

For the Earth...
_dave_(this entire message is composed of recycled electrons)
Natural Systems Solutions
http://www.attractionretreat.org/NSS
Sustainable lifestyles, organizations, and communities

 

A model ecological community

Subbject: Re: Re: Portal of the Global Civilization activated
Date: Fri, 3 Nov 2006 18:14:41 -0500
From: ezeflyer@bellsouth.net
To: Global Information Media globalcommunity@telus.net

I propose we establish a model ecological community. We can request help from people like Amory Lovins and others like him. It would differ from the back to the land movement in the sixties in that it would have no leaders or politicians, only good examples to follow. All decisions would be made in a decentralized way by direct democracy in a system similar to the Swiss system with no professional politicians that has given them the highest per capita income in the world, a healthy environment, low unemployment, no wars, little crime, no boom and bust economy and a lasting democracy. Direct democracy and later, Global Online Democracy (G.O.D.) is here waiting for the corruptible representative democracy system to sink by its own weight. It will also make taxes obsolete as we decide where each of us wants to put our money directly.

Members would be screened by a Board of Directors, similar to those of condominiums. We would give priority to Green Party members and experienced artists, scientists and environmentalists that we will need to create our community as an example to the world of what can be done.

Ideas like collective capitalism can be tried. Or to prevent extreme power concentration, a yearly cap on personal wealth can be instituted direct democratically. It can be made inversely proportional to population growth in order to give people an economic incentive to have smaller families to combat overpopulation, resource depletion, pollution, environmental deterioration and it's refugees and so on.

regards,

Ren

 

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