“Empowered, aware and engaged human beings will make sustainable decisions.”
Andy Gaertner
Sustainable Humans: Sustaining Ourselves
by Chris Koszalka
Begun August 2008, appreciating the beauty of many late night skies.
Finished January 2010, under a stunning full moon.
The natural world is where reality is.
The world where everything begins and will end.
Change
Every day at work I like nothing better than to create a lush, living canvass of beautiful produce. Tweak it and fuss over it until it’s just right. Every day, with every fruit and vegetable that I touch, I am very conscious of where it has come from, how far it has travelled, how it was raised and who else has also touched it on its long journey here, to us. Every day I think of ways that our entire food system can be modified, overhauled and made to be sustainable. Every day I come to the same conclusion.
Everything has to change.
Change is hard. Or not. It depends on the individual. Change in nature just is. It would be easier for most people if change could just be change. But it’s not.
Truth
A sub-atomic particle can be in two places at once. Two sub-atomic particles can be interconnected even though they are not inhabiting the same space or in the line of sight with each other. If one of these particles reacts to stimulus, so does the other one. These two seeming impossibilities are proven quantum phenomena.
Truth is a hard nut to swallow. It usually goes down with rough edges and gets stuck in our throats, having to be coughed out and beaten down with a mallet in order to get it soft enough to go down. Sometimes it has to be masticated by an expert in order for us to consider it palatable for swallowing. Such is our fate if we abdicate being an expert on a subject so someone else can tell us what is true.
Western industrial culture looks with derision at other cultures who believe the supposed impossible. Out of body travel, healing with plant spirits, communicating through dreams. Industrial Western culture calls these beliefs primitive and superstitious. Is the seemingly impossible, possible?
The truth is not universal.
Sustainability is Perpetual Motion
The Earth keeps on spinning. The various species on the planet keep on living. They are all governed by their environments, both extended and immediate. Within the last 10,000 years or so, humans have modified their environments so as to have a greater control over their personal existences. This is inexplicably linked to spiritual beliefs as well as culture. It is linked to systems of power such as governments and religions. At some point industrialized people lost sight of their actual role on this perpetually spinning earth. They have forgotten that it will continue to spin with or without them.
People’s actions directly affect their immediate environments. Industrialized people understand this because they modify their environments constantly. But, what they tend not to see are the far reaching effects of what they do right outside their homes. Everything we do affects something else and travels along a chain of consequences until the energy of our action dissipates. The more intense the action, the farther reaching are the consequences.
Dropping a Pebble Into a Pond VS Building a Nuclear Reactor
A pebble will create ripples on the surface of a pond and land on the bottom. Stirring up silt, it will disturb the critters that live there. Eventually the ripples subside, the silt settles, the pebble is buried in the silt and the critters go about their daily lives. A nuclear reactor will produce waste that could potentially poison the land for up to fifty thousand years. The benefit of - mining uranium, producing radioactive pollution through the mining process, constructing the reactor, maintaining it for a potential 40 year life span while it constantly produces radioactive waste so it can heat water to produce steam to turn a generator turbine - needs to be rethought.
Footprints
Some prints may be deeper than others but ultimately are worn away by the earth without too much effort. Others may be made of concrete but the earth can make short work of that in its own time. Can you leave no lasting footprint after you have walked? Can you put back what you take from the land base where you live? The only way for anything to be sustainable is for this to happen.
What will end up happening in the future will not be easy. It will be easier to live, however, if we change ourselves now.
Yesterday.
Twenty years ago.
Fifty years ago.
One of the hardest things for people to do is change habits, change traditions, change the way they've been doing things their whole lives. Ironically that's exactly what has to happen for real solutions to our resource related problems to be effective. The bad news is that the changes in human activity on this planet need to happen sooner rather than later. It's this generation that is going to have to make the choices and decisions to affect those changes. I'm actually looking forward to that outcome as I have trust in the up and coming generation.
ReplyDeleteIf you truly want freedom, let go of your self, your possessions, your friends and family, your society. You will find yourself naked, alone, and scared, but you will be free.
ReplyDeleteIf you want to understand your condition, the Human condition, know that there is no such thing as freedom. You are connected to everything; responsive to and responsible for everything. That is love, and that is the Truth.
Samphibiac, I have been wrestling with these concepts for many many years now. Fear, I believe, plays a big role in preventing people from changing. It's a fear of a different life and situation. In the way of material goods and money, it's a fear of giving something up so you can end up having less and ultimately someone who doesn't have enough can have enough. But the end result is a saner and more serene existence for everyone, including the Earth. If more people would explore what you postulate, we would have a healthier world for everyone to live in.
ReplyDeleteWhat I've noticed is that people in this country tend to fear going to the next lower level. If you're upper class you fear having to be middle class and losing your status in society, if you're middle class you fear becoming low income and losing your status in society, if you're low income you fear the government meddling in your life, you fear losing your housing, you fear losing the government benefits that let you eat, you fear becoming homeless. If you're homeless you fear not having food, you fear not making it to the next day, you fear the police harassing you away from a good shelter you just found.
It is through this kind of fear that we as a populace are controlled. If we fear losing what we have then we as a populace won't make too much fuss about what is being done in our name. Especially those people in a position of privelage and status. Especially the middle class, because they are the bread and butter of our society. But once you get low enough down the ladder you have less to lose in the way of posessions. The fear becomes based on on other more intangible things. Things that are much more personal. And much closer to genuine fear. Through this fear the lowest classes are controlled and kept in place so as to keep the Power Structure intact. Business as usual can proceed with a solid base of exploitable people at the bottom of the ladder and a maliable group of privelaged people in the middle and top. At the very top are those that fear everything below them coming apart.
The middle class is part of the working class if we/they could only see it. Class divisions are used by oppressor groups to keep everyone in line.
ReplyDeleteVery true, farmerandy. Class soon becomes a muddle of lines that are slightly different for everyone. The Federal Government defines poverty for administrative purposes to judge eligibility for assistance programs. This varies from city to city based on what it costs to live there, county to county and state to state. Upper class is usually defined as having access to inherited wealth, not so much on income. The middle class is income based and can be a wealthy six figure amount. Regardless, the majority of the middle class punches a clock, even if the clock is now software based. Anyone who punches a clock labors for someone else. And I draw the distinction between works for and labors for. A CEO works for the share holders. But it is the factory workers, miners, restaurant workers, etc who labor.
ReplyDeleteWho benefits from this labor? The laborers do by gaining a paycheck. But a paycheck is the worker's share of the profits. That is all their work is worth to the company, their hourly wage. Often times, this wage is insultingly too low. It is still ultimately the shareholders, people who do not labor or work or have anything to do with the day to day running of the business, who gain the majority of the wealth as profit, not the people who actually do the labor. This is the travesty of our work system.