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Walter Watts
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Where Have We Been; Where Are We Going?
« on: 2010-03-15 19:55:33 » |
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I felt like I had been sucking on a real old penny after I read this......
Weird.
--Walter
PS--Kunstler rulZ!
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Where Have We Been; Where Are We Going?
By James Howard Kunstler
on March 15, 2010 6:51 AM
Driving down the broad avenues of Cleveland, Ohio, was like flipping through the pages of a picture book about the rise and fall of our industrial empire. Where demolitions had not removed things -- a lot was gone -- stood the residue of a society so different from ours that you felt momentarily transported to another planet where a different race of beings had gone about their business.
Among the qualities most visible in the recent ruins of that lost society is the secure confidence expressed in its buildings. Even the most modest factory or business establishment built before the 20th century included decorations and motifs devised for no other reason but to be beautiful -- towers, swags, medallions, cartouches -- as if to state we are joined proudly in a great enterprise to make good things happen in this world. This was true not just of Cleveland, of course, but the whole nation, for a while anyway.
Equally arresting are the changes visible in the collective demeanor from the mid-20th century, especially after the Second World War, when the adolescent panache of a rising economy had morphed into the grinding force of a place devoted to the production of anything. The memory of the Great Depression lingered like a metabolic disorder, and the spirit of the place was no longer caught up in the muscular exuberance of self-discovery but the sheer determination to stay powerful and alive. This phase didn't last long.
By the 1970s, signs of a new illness were clear. Production was moving someplace else, incomes and household security with it. An existential pall settled over the city as ominous symptoms of waning vitality showed up in the organs of production. Steel-making and car-making staggered. Even the Cuyahoga river caught on fire, as if fate was a practical joke. Major retail was moving elsewhere -- to the suburban outlands -- where so many of the people who worked in the downtown towers had already fled. The population that remained in the city center was made of recently uprooted agricultural quasi-serfs who had only just come up to the city a generation before to make better livings in the factories that were all of a sudden shutting down. It seemed like a kind of swindle and they were understandably angry about it.
These days, reading what remains of the city by the lake -- like so many other cities on the lakes and big rivers of the USA heartland -- you see a place outfitted for different obsolete pasts with almost no sense of a plausible future. Most of the efforts directed at "economic development" in our industrial cities have been aimed at recapturing those pasts, and it is not surprising that they uniformly fail, because we are not going back there. We could conceivably take ourselves toward futures to be proud of, but they are not likely to be the kind of futures we are so busy projecting in our techno-grandiose fantasies about machine "singularities."
Being an actualist, I'm in favor of getting real about things, and the reality we've entered is one of comprehensive contraction, especially for our cities. One of the reasons places like Cleveland (and Detroit, and Milwaukee, and St Louis, and Kansas City....) continue to fail in their redevelopment efforts is because they are already too big. They became overgrown organisms a while ago, unsuited to the realities of the future -- especially the energy resource realities of the future -- and they have tried everything except consciously contracting into smaller, finer, denser, differently-scaled organisms. In fact, the trend up until the so-called housing bubble of recent years was to just keep on expanding ever outward beyond the suburban frontier, which left our cities in a condition like imploded death-stars -- cold and inert at the center, with debris speeding uselessly outward to an unreachable infinity.
This future we're entering, which I call the long emergency, compels us to imagine our society differently. Our cities and towns exist where they do because they occupy important sites. Cleveland is where a significant river empties into the world's greatest inland sea (which has the additional amazing benefit of being fresh water). Some human settlement will continue to be there, very probably a place of consequence, but it will not be run under the same circumstances that produced, for instance, the civic center of Daniel Burnham with its giant Beaux Arts courthouses, banks, and municipal towers.
This disintegrating nation is woefully distracted by Web 2.0, iPads, Avatar movies, Facebook, and the idiot celebrity spectacles of TV, not to mention the disasters of job loss, foreclosure, medical extortion, bankruptcy, corporate loot-ocracy, and the squandered moments of politics. We know we have to go somewhere. We know that something like history is leaving us behind. We have no idea how to get to a new place. And we're spending most of our mental energy gaping into the rear-view mirror, which is the last place to look for your destination.
The confusion is apt to get a lot worse before it gets better. I'm not saying this to be ornery but because I believe it is true, and it will benefit us to know the odds we're up against. The confusion is going to generate a lot of ideas that are inconsistent with reality -- especially involving the seductive nostrums of technocracy. Our redemption will be found closer to the ground in the things we do by hand. But we don't know that yet, and we're going to try everything except looking there before we find out.
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Walter Watts
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Fritz
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Re:Where Have We Been; Where Are We Going?
« Reply #1 on: 2010-03-15 23:16:52 » |
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Quote:Posted by: Walter Watts Posted on: Today at 19:55:33
I felt like I had been sucking on a real old penny after I read this...... <snip>Our redemption will be found closer to the ground in the things we do by hand. But we don't know that yet, and we're going to try everything except looking there before we find out.<snip> |
Great read, thx! Well Walter; now let me trade that old penny for a butter scotch candy and a granola bar  .
Cheers
Fritz
My Back to the Land Fantasy : And why it feels more real every day.
Source: TheTyee.ca
Author: Dorothy Woodend,
Date: 29 Nov 2006,
"Can we talk about something other than the end of the world?" someone asked me the other day.
Okay, I suppose I do talk about it a bit much lately. The feeling has been there for a while. It comes on strong whenever I stand in line at the Safeway and look at the magazines filled with stories about Jennifer Aniston and Brad Pitt, or watch television, wondering, when did it all get so dumb and pointless? It's a terrible thought: maybe it wouldn't be such a bad thing if the planet went through a people purge.
There's an odd split in our culture at the moment. Doom and gloom glowers from news headlines and movie documentaries. But the cars roar up and down Vancouver's Oak Street night and day, the coffee shops are full until midnight, and the price of real estate, especially anything with even a distant view of water, continues to shoot through the roof. A big lie maintains we can continue to have our consumptive lifestyle, and stave off environmental chaos, if we use only one coffee cup at Starbucks, turn off the lights, walk to work and recycle plastic bags. We can have our cake, and everyone else's cake too.
And yet, underneath the ordinary activities of daily life, many people have the anxious sense things have gone too far, and something is coming that will push it back in the other direction -- hard.
I live in a two-bedroom apartment over Oak Street, and when I say over, I mean it. You can watch people on the bus from our window, and virtually read over their shoulders. It's not really home, simply a place to be for now. The roar of traffic is like a river of white noise, you get used to it after a while. But when I returned from a summer in the Kootenays, where I was raised, the noise began to seem unbearable. And I am thinking a lot lately that there has got to be better way to live.
Mom the farmer
My mother is no sucker for back to the land romance. She was there during the great exodus of the 1970s when, driven by some mysterious impulse, people fled the cities and suburbs. "I watched it happen. It was like lemmings. People got old milk trucks, VW vans and made their trek into the country. They arrived without any money, or any plan, just the idea that they had to get out. The height of it was about 1974 and by 1979 it was over. Whether it was because people came to realize how much work it really was to do everything yourself -- make yogurt, grow bean sprouts, milk goats -- I don't know. But it ended as mysteriously as it began. After a while, all the hippies either blended in or went back to the city to become yuppies.
"But for a while there it was a lot of fun."
I was there as well but mostly what I remember was a lot of naked adults, drinking goat's milk, being told carob was chocolate and wearing a kerchief on my head when really all I wanted was skin-tight satin jeans. Yes, it's true, we made our own butter, our own ice-cream, our own root-beer. We rode horses, chased cows, spent hours wandering the woods, building fires, going exploring, swimming, skating, it was a different world, a different time, when children left the house in the morning and came back at night dirty and tired from an entire day of roaming like a wild thing.
Haying season, in particular, sticks in my mind with a deep affection -- everyone working together all day long, coming in at lunch to eat around an enormous table, shouting stories one over top of the other, knocking off in the heat of the afternoon to go swimming, staying until evening and watching the stars step onto the immensity of the summer sky, like some insanely grand Bob Fosse production. I remember the thrill then, of simply being alive in the world.
My mother, being my mother, has her own opinion on these issues. I'll let her tell it:
"I have often deliberately introduced myself in groups or at conferences as a farmer. It is interesting to watch the confusion on people's faces when I say this, especially if they know that I also have PhD and a list of published books. But the initial assumption is that farmers are stupid. So how can I be both? These contradictions fight themselves out on their faces. Perhaps I am not a real farmer, then, but a hobby farmer, a pretend farmer, a landed gentry, the kind of farmer who rides about on her horse to see how the peasants are getting on. But no, I'm a poor farmer, the kind who began young and got hooked on the life and can't or won't quit because, for me, it is the only life that makes sense, or has ever made sense to me.
"And yet, in those odd and endlessly despairing conversations people tend to fall into these days about the future, the one place people won't go is the idea of small farming. Why? The chances are good that either their parents or grandparents or uncles or someone was a farmer, raised food, grew animals, lived rurally. People who got to visit their uncle's or grandparents farms tend to remain endlessly nostalgic about the place, while completely denying that living such a life would ever be possible for them. And they are probably right. In my experience, you pretty much have to be born a farmer to become a farmer. Over the years I have watched many bright-eyed idealistic people arrive to 'help' me on my farm. And then leave again for a variety of reasons.
"The new back to the land movement that we in rural Canada are experiencing has nothing to do with survival or rural living. It's more about people buying a postage stamp sized piece of land on a mountainside, building far too large a house and then using that place for a week a year. The modern myths that most people hold about rural life and country living are endlessly backed up and supported by a media that treats 'country living' as the property of the rich, with occasional walk-ons by quaint, cute, folksy 'rural' people." (That would be me my mother is describing.)
'People will wait for rescue'
She continues: "There is also a constant onslaught of stories about the 'natural' world, and these tend to get published in a variety of places, outdoor magazine, travel magazines, environmental magazines, or 'nature' writing. They always take one of the many standard lines; nature as savage, or cute, or lost, or sentimentally, and nostalgically beautiful.
"Rural life has changed completely over the past 50 years. In the past 50 years that I have lived on our farm, I have watched as our rural community has been completely replaced by suburbanites, both the summer and the year round variety. They are, on the whole, nice people, and we tend to leave each other alone. I don't know how they see me, and certainly they don't ask and clearly aren't interested in who used to live here or what the community used to be like.
"To me, what is ironic and even bizarre is that the ideas that were generated by that back to the land movement 30 years ago are steadily being rediscovered and reiterated by the new apocalypse movement: organic farming, locally grown food, alternative energy, conserving energy, getting off the grid, simple living. Only somehow none of these ideas seem to involve actually living on the land where they can actually be implemented and thus they tend to remain just that, ideas.
"Do I think that there will be a new wave of back to the landers? No, and I certainly hope not. I think if something does go wrong, most people will huddle in the suburbs and wait to be rescued by the government."
So this impulse to remake society, which fuelled the first wave of back-to-the-landers may not be quite the same the second time around. It is true that many of the ideals of the counterculture, the freedom-loving hippies and their communal ambitions, wrecked on the rocks of sexual jealousy, or fell victim to plain old bad behaviour. If that history offers some cautionary lessons on the inherent difficulty of living with other people, might we learn from that, and get it right this time?
Counter to cyber
In his new book called From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism, Stanford professor Fred Turner writes about the long and winding road travelled, from hippies communalists to digerati. "Between 1967 and 1970, for instance, tens of thousands of young people set out to establish communes, many in the mountains and the woods...For these back-to-the-landers, and for many others who never actually established new communities, traditional political mechanisms for creating social change had come up bankrupt. Even as their peers organized political parties and marched against the Vietnam War, this group, whom I will call the New Communalists, turned away from political action and toward technology and the transformation of consciousness as the primary sources of social change."
Which all sounds rather lovely. Too bad it didn't actually work out that way. Except for a few -- now seemingly joined by a constantly growing trickle of people heading out of the cities and making a life for themselves in rural B.C.
Consider writer K Linda Kivi, who lives in her own mountaintop fiefdom in the Kootenays. Her land was originally a women's co-op, but now men live there too. The co-op generates its own power, grows much of its own food, but several members work in town and membership tends to shift as people move back to the city for careers, school or relationship.
Kivi says, "I don't think there is a second wave of back to the landers, it's more like a bunch of ripples. I certainly don't consider myself as a back-to-the-lander. I'm more like a forward-to-rural-radicalism type. In terms of the back to the land thing, I'd say I and my land partners have more realistic aspirations and less fantasy. We make the lifestyle work for us instead of us working for it."
It does seem lately as if a lot of people are having similar notions. A recent issue of The Sun Magazine includes a number of articles about living sustainably. An interview with Bill McKibben could have been taken from any number of conversations I've had in my own head. Read it and see if you don't feel like dropping everything in your life and fleeing for the hills.
McKibben agrees with my mother. "It's only been one generation, in which we seemingly lost touch with our farming background. The story of what happened to American agriculture is probably the single most important news story of the last century. We went from 50 per cent of the population living on farms to less than one per cent."
I have a dream
At our family dinners, the imminent demise of society has long been a favoured topic. But lately, our Armageddon fantasies, which used to seem so distant, are composed of one part Little House on the Prairie to two parts Mad Max. Conversation tends to focus on, during some unspecified disaster, what we will need to survive: enough people who know how to do useful things (such as plow a field, skin a cow, or can peaches); enough gas to actually get ourselves back to the family farm, and then enough weapons and fortifications to fend off marauders.
And with each conversation the voice in my head becomes louder, more insistent. I keep asking myself, is it time to head back to the land? And: will the land even have us any longer?
I like to believe that when you winnow human behaviour down to its most fundamental basics, there are really only a few things that matter. You need some place to hole up for the night (preferably some place safe and warm). You need enough to eat and drink. And you need to pass on your genetic material. On these few basic appetites is predicated most of human culture.
I like to remind myself that the most memorable thing about the PBS program Frontier House, which returned a group of families to the 1883 existence of homesteaders, wasn't the daily struggles of pioneer life, but what happened after everyone went back to the ease and comfort of the 21st century. I don't think I've ever seen a sadder sight than the young son of one of the families sitting wanly bored to death in front of the TV in an enormous suburban tract house. The siren call of comfort is offered in lieu of hardship, but hardship and struggle can actually be rather good for people, whereas endless comfort is not.
And last night, I had a dream. It's actually a reoccurring dream that I've had for the past 20 years or so. I'm on the B.C. Ferry, it's always the same. I'm usually missing the boat; sometimes I'm frantically trying to get in line for the cafeteria. There is always a level of anxiety attached. But this time was different. I walked off the boat in mid-passage onto an island, a meadow actually. A great yellow curve of open space, and I lay down and hugged the enormous haunch of the land, like it was a huge warm animal, and the most intense sense of comfort came over me, the purity of feeling that is only available in a dream. Part of me thought, I should get back on the boat, but I couldn't make myself get up and go back, and the boat sailed off without me. [Tyee]
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Where there is the necessary technical skill to move mountains, there is no need for the faith that moves mountains -anon-
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MoEnzyme
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Re:Where Have We Been; Where Are We Going?
« Reply #2 on: 2010-03-17 11:20:54 » |
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I can't really speak for Canadian culture, but I can speak for the US and at least a couple of reasons for fleeing the cities and industrial centers in the 70's.
#1 Pure and simple bigotry/racism. Few people will tell on themselves that directly but that's the time frame in which desegregation happened. In urban centers it became increasingly difficult to maintain isolated cultural enclaves due to national policies which tended to work against such exclusions. If someone really wanted to get away from the "darkies" any more they had to move, and so many of them did. I mention racism because of its prevalence at the time, but any sort of bigotry worked with the same dynamics no doubt. In the long term picture of energy and economy it was a sad day day of retreat that inevitably could not sustain itself more than one generation anyway.
Although the economic and demographic trends have already begun to erode the possibilities of such suburban and rural escapes, there remain residual ethnic/racial distributions which today continue tell on us. The GOP cynically attempt to claim everything after MLK, Jr. as "post racial" even while they paraded the Willie Hortons and every other racial bogeyman since then before the media. If you doubt that political/racial dynamic check out this county-by-county results of the last presidential election, where by the visual you can easily see that McCain dominated the rural and suburban vote, and Obama dominated the urban vote by margins which would seem incredible with any other explanation.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/interactives/campaign08/election/uscounties.html The only notable exception was the heavily hispanic Rio Grand Valley and counties bordering Mexico, which while mostly rural voted for Obama. There aren't many people there but it does cover some significant real estate on a map.
#2 Cheap energy - almost history by now, although at the time it seemed like an endless resource, which of course is why the majority culture found it so easy to abandon their old neighborhoods. If it seems practically free to move away from their strange neighbors, more people were likely to give it a try. If the price of gasoline and commuting at the time had actually reflected all of its current and eventual costs, a lot more people would have found ways to become more tolerant of their urban neighbors and perhaps even doubled down on their investments in the neighborhood.
Anyway, I'm sure there are other factors driving rural/suburban/urban migrations, but in the US anyway it has generally followed predominantly racial lines and cheap gasoline has traditionally lubricated that trend.
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I will fight your gods for food,
Mo Enzyme
(consolidation of handles: Jake Sapiens; memelab; logicnazi; Loki; Every1Hz; and Shadow)
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Fritz
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Re:Where Have We Been; Where Are We Going?
« Reply #3 on: 2010-03-30 20:43:18 » |
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Quote from: MoEnzyme on 2010-03-17 11:20:54
I can't really speak for Canadian culture, but I can speak for the US and at least a couple of reasons for fleeing the cities and industrial centers in the 70's.
#1 Pure and simple bigotry/racism. Few people will tell on themselves that directly but that's the time frame in which desegregation happened. In urban centers it became increasingly difficult to maintain isolated cultural enclaves due to national policies which tended to work against such exclusions. If someone really wanted to get away from the "darkies" any more they had to move, and so many of them did. I mention racism because of its prevalence at the time, but any sort of bigotry worked with the same dynamics no doubt. In the long term picture of energy and economy it was a sad day day of retreat that inevitably could not sustain itself more than one generation anyway.
Although the economic and demographic trends have already begun to erode the possibilities of such suburban and rural escapes, there remain residual ethnic/racial distributions which today continue tell on us. The GOP cynically attempt to claim everything after MLK, Jr. as "post racial" even while they paraded the Willie Hortons and every other racial bogeyman since then before the media. If you doubt that political/racial dynamic check out this county-by-county results of the last presidential election, where by the visual you can easily see that McCain dominated the rural and suburban vote, and Obama dominated the urban vote by margins which would seem incredible with any other explanation.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/interactives/campaign08/election/uscounties.html The only notable exception was the heavily hispanic Rio Grand Valley and counties bordering Mexico, which while mostly rural voted for Obama. There aren't many people there but it does cover some significant real estate on a map.
#2 Cheap energy - almost history by now, although at the time it seemed like an endless resource, which of course is why the majority culture found it so easy to abandon their old neighborhoods. If it seems practically free to move away from their strange neighbors, more people were likely to give it a try. If the price of gasoline and commuting at the time had actually reflected all of its current and eventual costs, a lot more people would have found ways to become more tolerant of their urban neighbors and perhaps even doubled down on their investments in the neighborhood.
Anyway, I'm sure there are other factors driving rural/suburban/urban migrations, but in the US anyway it has generally followed predominantly racial lines and cheap gasoline has traditionally lubricated that trend.
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In the Beginning .... I had never thought of the Back to Nature movement in the terms you presented Mo. It is certainly a different take and it would seem to be a serious reality. Below are the versions of the back to nature movement I thought I was taking part in the 70's and 80's; as I sit in downtown Toronto now ... sigh.
Fritz
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hippie
<snip>
The first signs of what we would call modern "proto-hippies" emerged in fin de siècle Europe. Between 1896 and 1908, a German youth movement arose as a countercultural reaction to the organized social and cultural clubs that centered around German folk music. Known as Der Wandervogel ("migratory bird"), the movement opposed the formality of traditional German clubs, instead emphasizing amateur music and singing, creative dress, and communal outings involving hiking and camping.[6] Inspired by the works of Friedrich Nietzsche, Goethe, Hermann Hesse, and Eduard Baltzer, Wandervogel attracted thousands of young Germans who rejected the rapid trend toward urbanization and yearned for the pagan, back-to-nature spiritual life of their ancestors.[7] During the first several decades of the twentieth century, Germans settled around the United States, bringing the values of the Wandervogel with them. Some opened the first health food stores, and many moved to Southern California where they could practice an alternative lifestyle in a warm climate. Over time, young Americans adopted the beliefs and practices of the new immigrants. One group, called the "Nature Boys", took to the California desert and raised organic food, espousing a back-to-nature lifestyle like the Wandervogel. Songwriter Eden Ahbez wrote a hit song called Nature Boy inspired by Robert Bootzin (Gypsy Boots), who helped popularize health-consciousness, yoga, and organic food in the United States.<snip>
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Back-to-the-land_movement
<snip>
The target lifestyle
As a general rule, those who "went back-to-the-land" in this period felt neither desirous nor capable of managing a sizable area. Many of the smallholdings of the period were in the range of five to 20 acres — though some were smaller and some were larger.
Most of the back-to-the-landers wanted greater contact with nature, and sought to become self-employed workers in a cottage industry. Many wished to build their own house, and produce a good deal of their own food. Solar energy was sometimes used for either heat or electricity, and wood fuel was popular. Early issues of The Mother Earth News, along with other practical technology journals, sometimes ran articles that portrayed early experiments with such emerging energy technologies as methane digesters, which (though little actually applied in North American in the 1970s) pointed out directions for the future.
Helen and Scott Nearing, in their life and their books, had embraced organic horticulture and had pursued a healthy diet and general lifestyle. To these interests, the back-to-the-land publications which had sprung up around 1970 added a promotion of new (or at least recently refined) methods of utilizing or generating energy on a modern homestead, such as solar, wind, and small-hydro electricity generation. Worldwide, there had been a very lengthy utilization of wind energy in villages and rural regions, and in fact many farms in North America had employed windmills to drive well pumps for household and irrigation water. In the 1970s, though, electricity-generating wind turbines (which had been developed to an extent in previous decades) were reaching new levels of efficiency. As well, passive solar principles were becoming more widely recognized for their efficacy in space heating (e.g., of houses or outbuildings), and photovoltaic equipment for generating electricity was emerging and was seen to be an exciting new realm.
Most back-to-the-landers wanted to know their neighbors, and expected to be cooperatively part of neighborhood or community projects and processes. With regard to community processes, a common practice was the incorporation of barter, a form of trade where goods or services from one individual or household are exchanged for a certain amount of other goods or services from another individual or household, and in which no money is involved in the transaction. The idea was that barter (along with occasional friendly neighborly assistance) helped to reduce the need for cash income.<snip>
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Where there is the necessary technical skill to move mountains, there is no need for the faith that moves mountains -anon-
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