Comments on: Bulldozed

By: Mark

Mark — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 16:51:08 +0000

Christine, Alan, you guys are welcome here any time. Rants or none. Rants especially, at the moment, it helps me feel Im not the only one. I’m down at Schumacher college again this week, having just got back to feeling like I might be able to have some sort of project after all, I am reeling under the weight of one metric shitload of work I have to do to get the certificate, that I have been putting off since the start of the course. Sometimes I feel stymied, like after watching Escape from Suburbia. There just seems too much to do and I wonder how I can find my way to being part of it, and while I’m wondering, I ain’t doing much and then I get more and more frustrated for my ineffectiveness.

By: Alan

Alan — Sun, 06 Jul 2008 17:55:02 +0000

Some day in fifty years people will be crying, “Why didn’t someone warn us?!” when the shit has hit all the various fans. Then we’ll point to Thomas Malthus’ theory from 1798 on population, Rachel Carson’s damning book on pesticides 1960s, massive famines in Sudan, Ethiopia, and Somalia in the 1980s and 90s, reports from 2006 saying all the sea fish will be gone in fifty years, and not to mention protests around the world lately due to rising fuel costs (protests in Malaysia, Nepal, Spain, Phillipenes, etc… all on Al Jazeera within the last week). Experts have been saying, “Every system on Earth is in decline,” and they’re right.

Daniel Quinn says we will be saved by people with changed minds, not by people with new programs (recycling, hybrid cars, etc), but I am not so optimistic. The only thing I’ve come up with is to tell people not to buy a hybrid, but to drive less (or not at all!)… sometimes I wish we could just “go back” to the wild.

Sorry for the rant, I’m procrastinating on preparing tomorrow’s lecture notes on WAN link standards.

Alan

By: christine

christine — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 18:36:49 +0000

Hey Mark. Interesting entries. Yes, here in North Amreica, we are pretty much up (literally)shit creek without a paddle. I am hopeful only because the rising price of oil is going to drastically change our way of life. All the media outlets report it here in a doom and gloom voiceover, but I couldn’t be happier. It’s time. We haven’t been paying attention…

Have you read any Wendell Berry? Great writer from Kentucky who has been paying attention. From an essay entitled Word and Flesh, he writes:

The question that must be addressed, therefore, is not how to care for the plaent, but how to care for each of the plantet’s millions of human and natural neighborhoods, each of its millions of small pieces and parcels of land, each one of which is in some precious way different from all the others. Our understandable wish to preseve the planet mush somehow be reduced to the scale of our competence - that is, to the wish to preserve all of its humble households and neighborhoods.
What can accomplish this reduction? I will say again, without overweening hope but with certainty nonetheless, that only love can do it. Only love can bring intelligience out of the institutions and organizations, where it aggrandizes itself, into the presence of the work that must be done.
Love is never abstract. It does not adhere to the universe or the planet or the nation or theinstitution or the profession, but to the singular sparrows of the street, the lilies of the field, “the least of these my brethren.” Love is not, by its own desire, heroic. It is heroic only when compelled to be. It exists by its willingness to be anonymous, humble, and unrewarded.
The older love becomes, the more clearly it understands its involvement in partiality, imperfection, sufferring, and mortality. Even so, it longs for incarnation. It can live no longer by thinking.
And yet to put on flesh and do the flesh’s work, it must think.

Among others, he writes a provocative essay titled Why I Am Not Going to Buy a Computer that you might like also.

Much love, Christine