Business As Usual

Business as Usual

Once humans started to farm on a mass scale this allowed for cities to be created. Cities are a major cause of the problems we as a species face on this planet. How can this be reconciled? Can cities change as well as farms? Can farms become less massive? Can cities produce their own food? Can city dwellers get more in touch with the real world and less with the concrete and manufactured world? Can they deal with not getting what they want when they want it? Can they learn to work for their food by helping to produce it, rather than working for money to buy it?

Maybe.

Certainly if forced. That has been shown. Another thing that has been shown: Once city dwellers start producing their own food, they don’t necessarily want to go back to their old way of being. So then why be that way at all? Why not fundamentally change the way our society is structured? A very few people would lose their status and wealth while a great many will be fed in perpetuity. This kind of trade off is worth the effort.

Most importantly however, there would be an awareness. An awareness that all people are connected to the soil, the water, the air and the planet as a whole. We have to adopt new ways of being, especially those who live in cities and dense communities. There needs to be an awareness of presence. An awareness of actions and interrelations.

An acknowledgment that there is no entitlement to the land and its resources.

These are things, sadly, that are not taught within industrial society. These things are actually reviled in favor of conformity and a continuation of what is often called “our way of life”. What is currently happening at the end of the first decade of the twenty first century is

business as usual.

One side of the political spectrum says, "I do not want to change my ways." The other says, "We are going to find alternate ways of maintaining our ways.". Neither is willing to truly change this society’s way of being within the world.

To maintain the kind of society we have is a great burden and responsibility. It is our obligation to minimize and or eliminate this weight upon the Earth. The question here is: "Where to begin?"