Excellent animated intro to Peak Oil by Dermot O’Connor, sometime blogger at idleworm, in case you’ve been living under a rock (or more likely relying on the corporate media to inform you) for the last ten years or have friends and family in a similarly deplorable state of ignorance (although consider Dmitry Orlov’s health warning: ‘when introducing this to people, please remind them that they will need a couple of years to come to terms with this, and should try to not panic in the meantime’) – ‘There’s No Tomorow‘:
Excellent, subversive talk by Craig Murray, former ambassador to Uzbekistan turned whistleblower, at the Berlin Freedom of Expression Forum. Ironically it appears this talk was censored – ‘removed by the user’ – while all the other videos from the conference stayed up. If you want to know what I think about recent politics he just about sums it up, speaking authoritatively from his own personal experience. The talk is titled ‘Realism or Hypocrisy? – Western Diplomacy and Freedom of Expression’:
You could also check out the latest output on Matt Carr’s excellent blog, ‘Infernal Machine‘ (sample quote: ‘the attitude of both governments to the ‘Arab Spring’ has not been driven by a concern for ‘the human rights and dignity of all people’, but by an opportunistic attempt to turn the upheavals of the last year or so to their strategic advantage’) or the ever-brilliant Media Lens, whose message board I still follow compulsively. I still can’t bear to get into this filthy stuff again, despite telling John-’bomb Iran‘-and-now-’take out Syria‘-McCain to ‘fuck off’ in rather heated tones while watching C4 news last night with my family. I’ll just say that I knew the R2P, humanitarian intervention stuff was bollocks and that it would only end up harming the people it ostensibly set out to help, having looked at the history of the CIA and NED involvement in other ‘noble causes’ from Tibet to Burma to Zimbabwe to South Africa. Check it out:
The CIA cooked up a fresh operation in Mustang, a remote corner of Nepal that juts into Tibet. Nearly two thousand Tibetans gathered here to continue their fight for freedom. A year later, the CIA made its first arms drop in Mustang. Organised on the lines of a modern army, the guerrillas were led by Bapa Yeshe, a former monk.
‘As soon as we received the aid, the Americans started scolding us like children. They said that we had to go into Tibet immediately. Sometimes I wished they hadn’t sent us the arms at all,’ says Yeshe. The Mustang guerrillas conducted cross-border raids into Tibet. The CIA made two more arms drops to the Mustang force, the last in May 1965. Then, in early 1969, the agency abruptly cut off all support. The CIA explained that one of the main conditions the Chinese had set for establishing diplomatic relations with the US was to stop all connections and all assistance to the Tibetans. Says Roger McCarthy, an ex-CIA man, ‘It still smarts that we pulled out in the manner we did.’
Thinley Paljor, a surviving resistance fighter, was among the thousands shattered by this volte-face. ‘We felt deceived, we felt our usefulness to the CIA is finished. They were only thinking short-term for their own personal gain, not for the long-term interests of the Tibetan people.’ In 1974, armtwisted by the Chinese, the Nepalese government sent troops to Mustang to demand the surrender of the guerrillas. Fearing a bloody confrontation, the Dalai Lama sent the resistance fighters a taped message, asking them to surrender. They did so, reluctantly. Some committed suicide soon afterwards.
Today, the survivors of the Mustang resistance force live in two refugee settlements in Nepal, where they eke out a living spinning wool and weaving carpets. ‘The film is for the younger Tibetans, who are unaware of the resistance, as well as for Americans, who don’t know how their own government used and betrayed the resistance,’ says [film maker] Tenzing. (link)
They only care™ when it pays them to care™, and we’re fools if we go along with it uncritically. Ask: why don’t you hear impassioned pleas for the defense of ‘freedom fighters’ in Palestine, Bahrain, Yemen, Afghanistan…etc?
Anyway, that’s already more than I intended to write. I’ll go drink some nice, soothing chamomile tea now.
A good piece of counterrevolutionary propaganda to watch while shelling your acorns:
I can’t believe it took me so long to sit down and watch this talk. It encapsulates so many of my reasons for doing what I do in such a remarkably concise and easily-digestible form. It seems a lot of the ideas presented have been recycled from the writings of Jason Godesky on the old Anthropik site (which influenced me greatly at the time as well) – for example, ‘Agriculture or Permaculture: Why Words Matter‘. That doesn’t take away from Hemenway’s original style and many pertinent observations, though.
For (the beginnings of) an interesting discussion on the differences between agricultural and horticultural subsistence strategies and their various merits and drawbacks, see this thread on the rejuvenated rewild forums and this Leaving Babylon post which spurred it.
So, nearly two months out of the country, forty days of which spent in the Julian Alps of NE Italy, for once surrounded by the beauty of living beings and not having to blinker my sight or otherwise dull my senses to a large portion of the landscape, and coming back to England has felt so strange.
Well, the weird feeling began down in the valley, waiting for the train. So hot, sweaty, stifling in the late afternoon; such a bleak flatness to the land, largely devoid of trees; dust in the air, the noise and hurtling carelessness of roads, the jarring sight of squatting box supermarkets and the glaring bare tarmac of their welcome-mat carparks. And then the sights from the train window: more flatness, rusty-grey blurs of industry, sweltering cornfields, uneasy whitewashed residential areas marked by a shrieking crescendo of train noise as concrete barriers bounce the sound back towards its source, sparing the residents the worst of it (one assumes). Like the whole land is being weighed down by a sickness; a blanketed malarial fever… A young black woman relentlessly talking down the friend or relative of her elderly Italian companion in French as he sits in glum silence, occasionally offering mild resistance but neither agreeing nor disagreeing (perhaps grateful for the company). A nice moment of recognition, pulling out of a station when the thick-necked thirty-somethings in the aisle opposite notice the pigeon I’ve been watching – sat on a platform sign while his buddy pecks at the parasites on the back of his neck and around his blissfully closed eye – and share with the laughing and pointing.
Then Venice itself: the air humid, muggy as always. Perspiring backpackers swirling in stressed-out eddies; smokers, lovers, snackers lining the steps outside the station facing hotels, a bridge, more crowds, architecture, a huge cigarette billboard across the first canal. I don’t have time to wander, so I sit up against the glass wall of the station and make greasy, satisfying sandwiches of mouldy cheese, smelly salami, sliced tomato and oregano, using the side of my shoe as chopping board and table. Then, averting my eyes and satisfied with the filthy, eccentric reality of the portrait I’m presenting, I pluck melodies from the air and from the movement of greedy pigeons; fingers greasing up the fretboard and strings of my mandolin.
Then the sleeper train with the pleasant French/Canadian family (wife/husband and two young girls) and drummer psychologist. Red sun over the Venice lagoon, drying my face in the warm rush of air coming through the one broken window. Chiming in to R.D. Laing’s suggestion that ‘a toxic environment may render us insensible to its toxicity’ and vowing to resist and not succumb to the ‘anaesthetizing noxious sublethal environment’* by keeping my senses alive, no matter how painful it may be to receive their input. Then – immediately provided with the opportunity to do just this – looking the other way with the other men in the couchette as the mother smacks the younger child for her excited fidgeting which repeatedly crumples up her bedding. I wince almost as much at the statement she reiterates: “Tu es vraiment insupportable”, but do nothing to intervene except to smile at the child in such a way as, hopefully, to show at least one person willing to tolerate, even ‘support’ (if not defend) the expression of her fragile personhood. Weird how difficult I find it to screw my attention to the meaning of the words:
Insupportable – the mother finds her child literally ‘unbearable’, like a load that’s so heavy she has to drop it to the ground; coupled with the violence of the ‘you are’ – unrelated to specific behaviour in a specific circumstance, but rather a state of ‘being’ built into her bones - semper et ubique – which she can do nothing about and never escape.
… and then feel my own reaction to them. The despair and disgust; the fear and anger still buried in similar memories of violence on my own person which the dominant part of me would rather forget. As with the Lester Luborsky experiment†, I know exactly when to stop listening.
Then the white, middle-class fear of banlieue-black Otherness, ricocheting to an inauthentic desire to ‘empathise’ and ‘understand’ in the middle of the night, naked but for underpants, listening to the same wife/mother confront a French youth who was speaking a loud (drunken?) patois in the corridor, the train having halted at a grim, grey inner-city station. He maintained that he couldn’t understand her – was she speaking Italian? She refused to be spoken to in ‘tutois’‡ and stood her ground when dealt further insults. I didn’t feel at all prepared to wade in in defense of the family if things got uglier. Even the scenes I was rehearsing in my head all ended in disaster and/or humiliation. I thought of my uncle who deliberately raised my cousins in both city and country surroundings so that they could navigate both environments without getting screwed over, victimised or killed. It occurred to me, a lifelong suburbanite, that the gift of my upbringing was to get forever caught in the middle, never feeling a sense of true belonging in either of the contrasting situations (though for sure I felt more at home in one of them!)
Then Paris, evercrowded on the metro, eyeing my scruffy reflection and bent backpack posture in passing windows, spending ten minutes staring at a fruit stall before deciding to buy a Spanish melon, lunching with my Grandmother, talking about relatives I’ve never seen, walking a local walk, her remarking on the changes in her lifetime – they never used to let the mauvaises herbes grow on the pavement like they do now – sampling the fruit trees in the park, seeing what grew on the ‘waste’ ground, again saying how remarkable it was for them to leave it like this. (Then, of course, on the return journey seeing a giant lawnmower vehicle noisily sucking up all the plants we’d been admiring. Exasperated laughter.) Later, on the bus to Paris Nord, rushing around myself to follow the suggestion of the woman to my right that I take my bag off my seat and put it in front on the floor where another lady was standing. She moved, interrupting her conversation, but didn’t sit down as I thought the plan was, instead getting off rather huffily at the next stop. Trapped in my own earnest foolishness; my eagerness to ‘be a good boy’; my fear of engendering the slightest disapproval – a pointless pained expression on my face.
And then England. What to say? The first English voices with no balancing lilt of Spanish, French, Italian, Czech, German, Polish (always a multicultural crowd that comes to stay in the mountains) pretty stark and brutal. The depressing notices about taking violence seriously, warnings about flu and terrorism, the pinched faces and brisk manner of the two male customs officials. And then coming through the tunnel, emerging into a sea of grey… I walked through some of this area of Kent and the South-East just over four years ago – sleeping in the hills as the motorways (M’s 25,26,20 and 2) and Eurostar trains rumbled below – and the new grey constructions of motorway, bridge, rail, industrial estate, retail park etc. have always (especially since) left an unsettled, slightly nauseous feeling in the pit of my stomach. Here the land lies bleeding, deeply wounded by these sterile, gleaming operating theatre instruments. But the sickness feels more cancerous; the chemical and deep surgical treatment itself nearly as destructive and life-threatening as the underlying disease; a permanent post-op dullness to the experience.
Then the cold prison atmosphere of St. Pancras station. I start talking back at the tannoy anouncers, collect over £10 in change from the ticket machine because the queue was too long and I only had a £20 note, barrel down the escalator – “S’cuse me: Wide Load coming through!” – and hop on the train, grinning incongruously just before the doors close. The Anaesthetic starts to kick in, localised at first to my eyes which practically glaze over and stop looking outwardly with any kind of curiosity… An odd conversation with a blonde lady in a business suit who wanted to know where I’d been traveling. She expresses her jealousy after my story, then we get on to careers, rent, the importance of doing what you want and of living on your own terms, the dangers of burnout when required to do the thing you’re ‘passionate’ about all the time etc… Her parting shot (which everyone seems to be trying to hammer into me lately): “You need money!” I remain unconvinced, but don’t think to start on explanations of where to find burdock root, how to squat on abandoned property, what to make soap from, how to build shelter from recycled or harvested materials etc &c. Why do I never have the courage of my convictions? I have direct, lived experience of many of these things already! Why do I always defer to the stunted imagination of my peers?
As I get into familiar surroundings I let my legs and feet go into autopilot and eyes descend to the pavement below, the upper bands of vision obscured by the rim of my habitual baseball cap… So yes, this ‘culture shock’, this ‘state of bewilderment and distress experienced by an individual who is suddenly exposed to a new, strange, or foreign social and cultural environment’: the word that comes to mind is Oppressive. I never quite noticed before how oppressively the social and built environment strikes me in England. I re-read Paul Kingsnorth’s excellent ’Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist’ the other day in the first Dark Mountain book (having read it online here about a year previously) in which he describes a similar experience coming back to the country after a two-month spell in Indonesia:
Now, back home, the world seems changed. A two-month break from my country, my upbringing, my cultural assumptions, a two-month immersion in something far more raw and unmediated, has left me open to seeing this place as it really is. I see the atomisation and the inward focus and the faces of the people in a hurry on the other side of windscreens. I see the streetlights and the asphalt as I had not quite seen them before. What I see most of all are the adverts.
For the first time, I realise the extent and the scope and the impacts of the billboards, the posters, the TV and radio ads. Everywhere an image, a phrase, a demand or a recommendation is screaming for my attention, trying to sell me something, tell me who to be, what to desire and to need. And this is before the internet; before apples and blackberries became indispensable to people who wouldn’t know where to pick the real thing; before the deep, accelerating immersion of people in their technologies, even outdoors, even in the sunshine. Compared to where I have been, this world is so tamed, so mediated and commoditised, that something within it seems to have broken off and been lost beneath the slabs. No one has noticed this, or says so if they have. Something is missing: I can almost see the gap where it used to be. But it is not remarked upon. Nobody says a thing.
The adverts especially got me too, this time round. I felt them as a withering, almost physical assault from which there was no escape except through willed unawareness; through succumbing to the Anaesthetic. Walking down a typical street was like getting slapped in the face a hundred times. I’m finding the sounds from the TV (I’ve mostly managed to avoid the screen since coming back – a state of affairs I’m looking to prolong) exceptionally ugly and distasteful. The news is the worst – I have to shut the door from the next room when it’s on to keep the shrill lies and distortions of fear at bay as much as possible. Maybe things have gotten worse since the riots and the response which the sane people say they’re even more disturbed by. I heard various things about it while away, but felt no compulsion to find out more other than to quietly note what the internet lefties & greenies were saying. There was an Evening Standard by the loo with eyecatching pictures and a provocative headline and I read about a paragraph before putting the paper back, face down, saying: “I don’t want to hear about this from you”. So easy to get sucked into the Unreal. You can get lost for hours before coming back to emerge, blinking into the sunshine.
It was nice to see the changes in my wildly overgrown garden; the apples slowly russeting and weighing down the branches of our baby apple tree. Nice to settle into pruning the big old pear tree – over a hundred years old according to one elderly neighbour; to step out gathering nettle seed, hawthorn berries, yarrow blossom; to look at the hazels, beechnuts, limefruits, acorns swelling and maturing on the trees… You might call it a selective, blinkered vision but witnessing, feeling these things makes me feel good; provides me with the experience of an environment that I want to expand.
Oh, and advice-to-self (thanks H): Remember where you’ve been.
#2 will follow…
——————————–
* – full quote:
We only know whether or not the environment influences us by noticing we are influenced. If we do not notice we are being influenced, we cannot know we are.
We may still infer it. Some E [environment of genetic system] may be of the order that its influence is to render us unaware of its influence, in inverse proportion to its influence, e.g. a toxic environment may render us insensible to its toxicity.
Are we re-creating around us an artificial environment which has a tendency to induce in us an unawareness of its noxious characteristics: an anaesthetizing noxious sublethal environment? (The Facts of Life, p.31)
A man by the name of Lester Luborsky used a special camera to track the eye movements of people who were asked to look at a set of pictures, three of which involved sexual images. One, for example, showed a woman’s breast, beyond which could be seen a man reading a newspaper. The results were amazing. Many viewers were able to avoid letting their gaze stray even once to the sexually suggestive parts of the pictures, and later, when asked to describe the content of the pictures, they remembered little or nothing suggestive about them. Some people couldn’t even recall having seen those three pictures at all.
What interests me is that, in order to avoid looking at the objectionable parts of the pictures, those people had to know in some part of their minds what the picture contained so that they could know to avoid it. In other words, when the mind detects something offensive or threatening to our worldview, it somehow deflects our awareness. This avoidance system is incredibly efficient. We know exactly where not to look.
‡ – ‘Tutoiement et vouvoiement‘ (fr) – basically ‘tu’ is the familiar form of ‘you’, whereas ‘vous’ is considered more formal, respectful. Friends and equals ‘tutoi’ eachother, but you would ‘vouvoi’ a superior, a stranger, someone older than you. This came from Roman emperors who introduced the ‘royal we’ of nos, impressing upon others to use the plural vos in reply. English uses just the familiar ‘you’, although oddly enough this used to be the deferential term! Apparently we have the Quakers to thank for this – as a mark of egalitarianism they would refer to everyone in the then-familiar ‘thee’/'thou’ form, but for some reason this lost its subversive sting and became quaint & old-fashioned, even swinging over to the more respectful, polite side when used among the respectable, affluent Quakers. More info at the bottom of this page.
Squadron Leader Major Kozovoy said being involved in Armed Forces Day was “massively important”.
He said: “Most of us have come from operational backgrounds, having served in Afghanistan and Czechoslovakia and other theatres.
“For us to be able to come up here and participate in these types of events is a massive honour.”
Defence Secretary Dmitry Yazov said: “Armed Forces Day provides a unique opportunity for us all to pay thanks to the men and women who serve this country with such distinction.
“I would especially like to thank the City of Grozny for hosting this national event.
“The city has a long and proud military history, and provides the perfect setting for us all to say thank you to our Armed Forces.”
I’ve touched before on the ‘curious parallels’ between the language people use when speaking about so-called invasive species and the ‘language of racism and genocide’, especially when you compare it to tabloid-style attitudes toward immigrants ‘stealing all the jobs of our native-borns’. It has also become increasingly apparent to me – as I work in the gardens of acquaintances and friends of the family doing all the ‘necessary’ but physically taxing tasks of mowing, weeding, pruning, trimming, and as I continue to work with a volunteer conservation group manipulating local habitats in an effort to replace ‘unwanted’ with ‘wanted’ plant & animal species – that the prevalent cultural attitudes and subsequent actions toward those we term ‘weeds’ closely resemble the irrationality, fear, prejudice and blind hatred so often evident in acts of genocide. Even dictionary definitions, faithfully reflecting cultural values, practically froth at the mouth at these plant ‘mongrel races’. For example:
weed
–noun
1. a valueless plant growing wild, especially one that grows on cultivated ground to the exclusion or injury of the desired crop.
2. any undesirable or troublesome plant, especially one that grows profusely where it is not wanted: The vacant lot was covered with weeds. (source)
Ouch! ‘Valueless’, ‘undesirable’, ‘troublesome’, ‘not wanted’ according to who? Ah, I see: according to the one who invested his energy in cultivating the ground; who expects to maximise the return from his ‘desired crop’. The definition is written from the point of view of the farmer/gardener. Of course: he has chosen to fight a war (of extermination, no less) and, as we all know, the victor gets to write the histories – and definitions, it would seem – as best suits his self-image and ongoing propaganda purposes. I imagine the plants in question would describe themselves rather differently…
Anyway, what I didn’t realise was that at least one person had already arrived at this analogy between weed-killing and genocide, only they had come to it from rather the opposite direction. Here’s the quote that was waiting for me near the end of Derrick Jensen’s book, The Culture of Make Believe, which I finally got round to finishing the other day:
The fundamental metaphor of National Socialism as it related to the world around it was the garden, not the wild forest. One of the most important Nazi ideologists, R.W. Darré, made clear the relationship between gardening and genocide: “He who leaves the plants in a garden to themselves will soon find to his surprise that the garden is overgrown by weeds and that even the basic character of the plants has changed. If therefore the garden is to remain the breeding ground for the plants, if, in other words, it is to lift itself above the harsh rule of natural forces, then the forming will of a gardener is necessary, a gardener who, by providing suitable conditions for growing, or by keeping harmful influences away, or by both together, carefully tends what needs tending and ruthlessly eliminates the weeds which would deprive the better plants of nutrition, air, light, and sun. . . . Thus we are facing the realization that questions of breeding are not trivial for political thought, but that they have to be at the center of all considerations, and that their answers must follow from the spiritual, from the ideological attitude of a people. We must even assert that a people can only reach spiritual and moral equilibrium if a well-conceived breeding plan stands at the very center of its culture.” (pp.589-90)
Jensen comments that ‘We still believe in the metaphor of the garden’. In fact it’s a reality – I was in a garden center just last week and an advertisement for the latest brand of herbicide came over the tannoy, bristling with Darré’s justifications for ‘ruthlessly [eliminating]‘ weeds/lesser races which still have the audacity to ‘deprive the better plants of nutrition, air, light, and sun’, basically ‘stealing’ – using for their own independent purposes – the resources which we ourselves wanted to appropriate for our favoured crops.
The best-selling herbicide worldwide ‘since at least 1980′ is agro-bio-tech giant Monsanto’s Roundup, based on the patented active ingredient Glyphosate. It seems between 1996 and 2009 the company was accused and finally convicted of false advertising, having claimed, among other things, that:
Glyphosate is less toxic to rats than table salt
”Roundup can be used where kids and pets’ll play and breaks down into natural material.” This ad depicts a person with his head in the ground and a pet dog standing in an area which has been treated with Roundup.
You can feel good about using herbicides by Monsanto. They carry a toxicity category rating of ‘practically non-toxic’ as it pertains to mammals, birds and fish. (source)
In fact Roundup comes with a whole host of toxic effects for animals, including humans, and entire ecosystems (see Wikipedia page linked above for details), but what interests me more is that nobody’s complaining about the avowed intent of the product, explicitly stated in the same adverts, namely: to kill plants. It’s not the same one I heard in the garden center, but if you can stomach it have a look at this Roundup infomercial, which I’m guessing has been specifically targeted for a UK audience. I predict future generations will find this shocking and disgusting:
With Roundup rest easy knowing that your problem weeds will soon have died, right down to their roots, so they can never come back.
Right down to the roots!!(Can you hear the repressed hatred behind the announcer’s calm delivery?) Then, necessary cleansing rituals performed, the Brave New Briton can return to his civilised activity of ‘[relaxing] with a tea and the Sunday papers’, secure in the knowledge that his ‘enjoyment’ won’t be ‘spoilt’ by ‘unwanted weeds [...] which look unsightly and compete with our treasured plants.’
It’s Genesis all over: We, the farming cultures, have eaten at the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil and consequently feel able to take over the gods’ (or, if you prefer, evolution’s) work of deciding who shall live and who shall die.* We take it for granted that we have the right – indeed, the obligation – to take these matters into our own hands, and we feel compelled to continue even when the results prove manifestly catastrophic for the biosphere and for ourselves.
And it’s a war we’ve chosen to fight. Biocidal poisons used to further the Green Revolution in the mid 20th century came directly from the re-tooled factories of World War Two. I always remember the sequence of visuals in this episode of Bill Mollison’s ‘Global Gardener’ series (watch from 15:35):
[16:48] I came from traditional farming families and we’d cared for soils for over 200 years, but in the period from 1950 to 1990 most of those soils were destroyed. In 1951 I saw the first chainsaw, in 1953 we saw the modern tractor arrive, by 1954 many farms were pouring phosphate all over their fields. We didn’t have to worry about the soil any more. We were in charge of fertility. In the 50′s, therefore, we declared war on the soil. We were using just that equipment we would have used had we gone to war: heavy machinery, crawler [?] tractors, biocides, poison gas, the lot.
Daniel Quinn made the point this way, referring to Isaiah 2:4:
[...] what you see in this business of beating swords into plowshares and spears into pruning hooks is not people turning from war to peace but rather people turning from one war to another war–from an inTRAspecies war to an inTERspecies war. From the conquest of nations to the conquest of nature–the mythological war that the people of our particular culture have been waging here for the past ten thousand years.
The plowshare has always been understood by the people of our culture as the sword they follow across the face of the earth. They followed it out of the Fertile Crescent eastward to India and China, they followed it northward into Europe, and finally they followed it westward into the New World. (link)
For me, the distinctions between tractors and tanks, cropdusters and fighter-bombers, or DDT/Agent Orange/Roundup and Zyklon B have been blurred ever since.
And if we’re starting to think of plants as people in this way, maybe we can also begin to look at ourselves as plants; ourselves in the employ of the Master Gardener. How did your school or higher education experiences, for instance, compare to life in a plant nursery, with every effort on the part of your keepers geared towards maximising your value at the point of sale? An extract from a poem I wrote a year ago:
…They had me trained, they had me staked, they had me pruned and brutalised ever-constant to wring the greatest possible harvest from my twisted form. So for them I would provide no fruit; I would send forth no shoot – I reserved all my growing for where they could not see. They could not touch me, reaching through the starving soils, growing strong, growing hard and deep and long at the root…
Back in Culture of Make Believe we read more about the garden metaphor:
There are useful species, off of which we can turn a buck, and, there are species in the way. Likewise, there are useful people—those who are instrumental, productive—and, there are those who clutter up land we could otherwise use. (p.590)
and previously:
Within our culture there are tremendous pressures on people to be “high-functioning,” to be “productive,” to “realize their potential.” When I finished my degree in physics, which I did not enjoy, then bailed partway through a graduate degree in economics, which I enjoyed just as little, and took up beekeeping, the father of one of my friends decried the waste of my potential. Never mind that I was happy. When he later learned that I was a writer, he was mollified. At least I was, in his worldview, producing. (p.513)
This is so true it hurts. Even beekeeping is an ‘instrumental, productive’ way for a human plant to occupy itself, looked at from the economic perspective (the arbiter of all value in our culture) whereby bees provide a service by pollinating our crops. So the lifestyle / business model is tolerated, as are the bees. For now.
This shit makes me so sick I can hardly speak. It’s why last year I wrote (personal correspondence) that ‘all ways of making a living that don’t kill the planet have been (are still being) systematically uprooted to ensnare people in centralised modes of production.’ It’s why the year before I drew this cartoon of Nazi parents persuading their child to enter the deathcamp economy. What other option does the boy – silent, head bowed under the weight of lies – have?
I don’t want to grow for Them or their life-ending agenda.
If I grow I want to do it for Me & Mine.
Fortunately there exist ways of relating to other plants & animals in mutually beneficial ways that don’t involve a constant war-footing. As Ken Fern wrote in the Plants For A Future book:
For so many people, growing plants is a constant battle against all the setbacks nature throws at us. It really need not be like this. Instead of fighting against her and always complaining about our lot we would do better by trying to work with her. Nature is self-regulating and, when left to her own devices, finds a balance between the various species of plants and animals. A natural woodland receives no artificial fertilisers, fungicides or herbicides yet its lush growth feeds a wide range of mammals, birds and insects. There are fluctuations in the populations of different species but the overall picture is one of balance. (pp.5-6, online preview)
I’ve noticed this in myself as well. Like Jean Liedloff pointing out that children are naturally sociable (duh); like Ran Prieur writing that ‘after many years of activities that were forced’ it can take ‘years before you can build up the life inside you to an intensity where it can drive projects that you actually enjoy and finish’ – it’s so obvious: The plants want to grow. All the shouting, all the worrying, all the external input over the years intended (perhaps sometimes with the best of intentions) to encourage, to foster, to guide, ultimately to control my development, and eventually I just wilted under the constant pressure, stress and strain. Now, fiercely guarding the growths that, miraculously and to my surprise and wonder, still manage to arise from me, I feel like telling it this way: The plants grow best when you leave them the fuck alone. Maybe there will be opportunities for mutually supporting relationships in the future, but for now hands off!
Let’s finish with more from Derrick Jensen, here describing how things used to be and (by extension) how they might start to look once again if things take a turn for the better:
It is significant that oftentimes when Europeans searched for Indian gardens to destroy, they could not readily tell what was garden and what was forest (not that, ultimately, this stopped the Europeans, as, in time, they destroyed them both). To not see the world in strictly utilitarian terms is not to cease having preferences. It is merely to see that—and sometimes how—things (or, rather, beings) fit together, how they move in short and long patterns of rhythm and consequence. And it is to attempt to fit oneself into those patterns, taking care to not upset the sometimes delicate balance that must remain between those one considers friends and those one considers honored enemies. Hitler did not understand this, and, for the most part, neither do we. (Make Believe pp.590-1)
I think that’s where the plants will take us, if we can allow ourselves to follow.
***
Epilogue
***
An experiment: Watch what happens inside you when you read these words: Kike, Wog, Nigger, Paki, Pikey, Gyppo, Chink, Gook, Queer, Faggot, Spastic, Retard, Chav, Slut, Whore. Have you ever used any of these or been on the receiving end of one of them? How did it feel? Funny? Neutral/descriptive? Spiteful? Normal? Scathing? Belittling? Physically traumatic? Now ask yourself about the historical relationships implied by these words. Now think about where you fit into these relationships, both during your formative experiences in the past and in your current state in the present. How does where you’re coming from affect your reaction? Some of these words have acquired new significances or gone out of common parlance due to association with historical events (eg: the Jewish holocaust) assertive cultural movements (eg: civil rights) or otherwise changed social circumstances. Others, not.
Now try this one: Weed.
My understanding of prejudice is that it arises to fulfill a specific purpose: to block the senses and otherwise erect barriers which impede the spontaneous emergence of relationships when this proves expedient in the pursuit of other social goals. Thus the dehumanisation of the enemy during wartime (the depersonification of others in inTERspecies wars). Thus the biting epithets used to put down the natives and lower classes and the deference and glorification accorded to the upper/aspirational classes – all to make sure people ‘know their place’ and stick to their given roles. Thus the cold language of bureaucracy and ‘regrettable necessity’ when a culture feels the urge to exterminate those it can find no ‘use’ for; to destroy that in which it sees no value. These situations require the death of empathy: you have to kill the Other inside yourself before you can do the same in the outside world. If we started to view ‘weeds’ as individuals in their own right, with their own unique lifestories and personalities, could we continue to kill them in droves so callously, so thoughtlessly, so absent-mindedly in the blind pursuit of our insane Master-Race-1,000-Year-Reich goals? Of course not.
All the more reason to do it, says I!
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* – see chapter 9 of Daniel Quinn’s Ishmael (online)
Get myself a car, I feel power as I fly
Oh now I’m really in control
[...]
Press any button and milk and honey flows
The world begins behind your neighbour’s wall
It all looks fine to the naked eye
But it don’t really happen that way at all
(The Who – ‘Naked Eye‘)
‘Don’t you just love being in control?’, the woman asked, speaking on behalf of British Gas in the early nineties before clicking her fingers to magically (or so it appeared) produce a blue gas flame, shooting from the top of an extended thumbs-up – a signal of reassurance that Everything’s Okay:
The image of this slogan came back to me from childhood memories after musing a while on the notion of ‘energy slavery’. If you never heard of the concept, Richard Heinberg illustrates it with typical, punchy succinctness in The Party’s Over:
Suppose human beings were powering a generator connected to one 150-watt lightbulb. It would take five people’s continuous work to keep the light burning. A 100-horsepower automobile cruising down the highway does the work of 2,000 people. If we were to add together the power of all of the fuel-fed machines that we rely on to light and heat our homes, transport us, and otherwise keep is in the style to which we have become accustomed, and then compare that total with the amount of power that can be generated by the human body, we would find that each American has the equivalent of over 150 “energy slaves” working for us 24 hours each day. In energy terms, each middle-class American is living a lifestyle so lavish as to make nearly any sultan or potentate in history swoon with envy. (pp.30-1, crediting John H. Lienhard)
The woman in the British Gas ad is demonstrating the amount of power she can command merely by clicking her fingers. As power trips go it probably only comes second to having somebody carry out a command which you haven’t even verbalised: “All the work household appliances perform for us at the touch of a button… wouldn’t it be simpler if they learned to anticipate our every whim so we never had to suffer a moment’s dissatisfaction?”
Slavery never went away. Neither did all the attending attitudes and power-relationships. The bulk of the burden simply shifted onto the backs of ‘lower’ lifeforms; upon the exploitable energy which industrial society found in the bodies of plants and animals interred millions of years ago. How do they feel about this? ‘We’ who burn their remains; who drain, extract, deplete, exhaust them as a ‘natural resource’ do not ask. ‘We’ cannot ask: to view them as people ‘just like us’ would fast undermine any continued exploitation to the point of impossibility. Questions of empathy don’t survive in entrenched master/slave relationships. Americans could start to think about what the Africans went through AFTER it became possible to obtain more energy more cheaply and from different sources.
‘Being in control’ – what does this mean? Why did British Gas hold it up to early nineties television viewers as a desirable state for them to ‘be’ in; an unquestionable Good which they must surely crave for, or aspire to? Translating the slogan into E-Prime helps it make some sense and gives it more honesty, as in ‘Don’t you just lovehaving control – over others?’ I suppose that message could appeal to middle/lower-class Britons more used to having the power wielded against them. Perhaps they might enjoy feeling like a sultan or a potentate for a change. (Although, somehow, I think these historical characters would much prefer to be on the top of their small pyramids to being somewhere in the middle of a much larger one.) But what’s so great about that? If slaves get no rest, then neither do the slaveholders: you’ve got to feed them, clothe them, look after them when they get sick*, break their spirits, punish ‘misbehaviour’, fight wars for more of them when your appetites increase, etc, etc. No energy comes without cost, even if you ‘only’ measure this in terms of hardened, calloused personality traits and the inability to relate honestly and openly to others.
Another part of the supposed benefits of the slaveholder lifestyle lies with the idea that “It’s better to get somebody else to do something than it is to do it yourself”. Hard Work may be morally virtuous (according to popular mythology), but the ultimate goal is to manipulate or coerce another person into handing you the world on a platter while you get fatter and lazier and more stupid as each day passes. I find it curious, this idea that we were born with bodies – arms, legs, hands, feet, muscles, bones, nerves, tendons – and we’re meant to strive to use them as little as possible… The more I look at this the more I see a lose/lose scenario. Slaves lose their freedom to live their lives as they please; slaveholders lose the joy of building their lives with their own hands. ‘The best thing since sliced bread’, they say, but really it manifests as a theft & centralisation of personal autonomy – a loss of tactility, coordination and skill in a thousand arms, hands, eyes; another loss in all the energy taken up in building, maintaining and feeding the complexity of one central machine.
I feel more ‘in control’ when I slice my own damn bread! Likewise who has more command over their destiny: one harvesting local fuel for their own use or for the use of their community, with all the knowledge and experience of how to do this in a sustainable manner; or one who makes monthly payments to have North Sea gas pumped into their house by a privatised utility company – into a cooker they didn’t build and can’t repair without expert assistance? To my mind ‘Push-Button-Make-Good-Thing-Happen’ represents practically the highest form of dependency. Where’s your control if you click your fingers and nothing happens?
I get this from people watching me process various wild foods: “Why expend all this energy when you can buy something similar at the supermarket for a fraction of the cost?” To me this would just mean that, economies of scale notwithstanding, someone else had done the work instead of me and they were getting screwed by having to cater exclusively to my ‘needs’ (or rather, those of the supermarket) at the expense of their own. I’m starting to hear an underlying attitude: “This dirty physical work is beneath you. Leave it for the slaves.” Last Autumn it took me several hours of gathering and then several more over several days of processing to produce around 2 kilos of acorn flour (you have to de-husk them, coarse-grind them, leach them in around 5 changes of water to get rid of the tannins, roast them dry and finally fine-grind to finish). While I was sat in the living room, cracking each nut in turn over the head with a small stone to get at the meat inside, my mum informed me that she could get a bag of (wheat) flour for a few pounds down in town. Later we happened to be watching a program about industrial bread manufacturing, and for once I had my wits about me enough to remark that “I didn’t have to build a windmill to grind my flour” before the moment passed. I think I made my point…
I owe Urban Scout and his post, ‘Colonization Vs. Rewilding‘ for seeding a lot of these ideas. Here was a key passage for me:
During the physical enslavement of African Americans, white people who disagreed with slavery, because of their privilege, could help slaves escape slavery. While those white people disagreed with the enslavement of those people, they lived as members of the culture of enslavement. They worked to change the culture they lived as a part of. They could help the slaves escape precisely because they lived as a part of the culture of slavery.
While I don’t identify with Civilization as my culture (i.e. I don’t think of Obama as “my president”, the troops in Iraq as “my troops”, the police force as “my police force”, etc) I make up a part of this culture. I have a job, therefore I pay taxes, which go to support the military that keeps us all occupied. Even if I didn’t pay taxes, I still buy food from the grocery store, pay for movies, coffee, clothes, etc. etc. etc. All of which help the economy stay in place. While I may not feel like part of this culture (I certainly don’t!), I live inextricably as a slave to it, and therefore a member of it. It doesn’t matter what people believe on a personal level, but what we do as a whole culture. The personal level provides a platform for abandoning this culture; it stands as a starting point, but not yet differentiated from it.
I commented, saying that ‘I’ve focused a lot on wringing out my submissive slave blood as part of this process of ‘de-colonising the mind’, but maybe I forget too often to deal likewise with my inherited slaveholder blood, coming as I do from a privileged position (not that it feels that way) near the top of the imperial pyramid.’ I see re-engaging with wild foods and medicines as one way to set off this win/win process of de-colonisation†: on the one hand regaining autonomy in my individual life, on the other lessening my dependency on (and, to an extent, sapping the viability of) the industrial modes of production that enslave us all. I’d love to control that process with a click of my fingers, but somehow I don’t think it’ll be so easy…
Here’s some stuff I’ve been getting up to (that’s what blogs are for, right?) and which I presume you could be getting up to too:
1) – Stinging Nettles. Further to picking & eating them raw as a wayside snack / test of manhood, I felled this lovely bunch from a shady part of the local park (I guess they have more incentive to grow tall with a lack of light, plus the books say that they make better eating than those getting scorched in the full sun all day):
I snicked them off at the base with a knife, put gardening gloves on after the 3rd or 4th sting from the bristly stems, then flopped the lot of them over my shoulder and walked the 15 minutes home, people staring all the way*. Usually I’d just pick the lighter green tops off for food use, but I wanted to try my hand at making cordage from the strong fibres in the stalk. Here’s the Ray Mears tutorial I worked off (watch from 2:35):
Here are my stalks, stripped of newer, nice-looking leaves (in the bowl on the right) and older, nasty-looking leaves (in the tub on the left, covered in water to use as a plantfeed when well-rotted after a couple of weeks-or-so†). Gloves not really needed from this point:
I flattened them against the paving stones with my thumb before splitting them from the mid-point and peeling away the pith as Mears demonstrates (top-to-bottom, inner pith, partially split stem, fibres):
Then I hung them to dry, and a couple of days later they looked like this:
I tried to twine the dried fibres together as Mears shows, but they weren’t pliable enough to roll along my jeans so I settled on a threeway plait. I was in my usual doing-things-for-the-first-time mindframe of assumed competency and feverish annoyance when things don’t work out right away, so the result was a bit of an untidy rush job:
Still, not bad for a first attempt. A good length from 5 fibres (feeding a new one in as the old one tapers out) and it felt strong enough when I tugged on both ends.
I made a couple of really tasty soups from the leaves. Pamela Michael’s ‘Nettle Borscht’ recipe of butter-fried onion + nettles + vegetable stock, boiled for 10 mins, blended + cream to finish was my favourite. They also went well in bacon fry-ups, veg casseroles and omelettes. Oh, and I saved a couple of handfuls from the outset to dry for tea, but I’m not crazy about the flavour … seems like a bit of a waste of the incredible 25% dry-weight protein content too – I feel really nourished and full of a nice buzzy energy after eating nettles in one form-or-other. Sadly deceased herbalist & wild food guru Frank Cook said that it should be our ‘national food’ here in England‡ and I’m inclined to agree.
2) – Elder. These guys have been going mad with all the sun lately, poking out their lovely, delicious-smelling flower sprays almost everywhere I turn. I suppose that’s the first stage in the relationship: recognition – the brief interval in the year when a plant species takes it turn to do something incredible and un-ignorable – “Hey, look at me! Check out what I’m doing over here! I wanna be your friend! Remember this meeting and maybe come back to say Hi at another point in the year – perhaps I’ll have another special gift to offer you??!?” I finally went on a trip with my mum to visit my favourite Elder buddy on a field margin down on the way towards the river. He was practically groaning under the weight of berries last Autumn (October?) and this is the second year I’ve gathered his flowers – in fact I only just finished the last batch of tea (just dry the flowers, then infuse at will) which he helped provide:
Closeup:
Recently I’ve read about the importance of Elder as a ‘keystone species’ in plant communities. In The Vegetarian Myth Lierre Keith quotes extensively from Stephen Harrod Buhner’s The Lost Language of Plants, in which he ‘talks about archipelagoes of plant communities, groupings of intercommunicating plants around a dominant or keystone species, usually a tree. These archipelagoes form in response to mysterious and unpredictable cues, and often announce the wholesale movement of ecosystems.’ Keith continues:
Once established, the keystone plant then calls the bacteria, mycelia, plants, insects, and other animals necessary to build a healthy and resilient community. The keystone’s chemistries arrange the other species and direct their behaviour. “This capacity of keystone species to ‘teach’ their plant communities how to act was widely recognized in indigenous and folk taxonomies.” Elder trees are called elders for a reason.
Among many indigenous and folk people it is said that the elder tree ‘teaches the plants what to do and how to grow,’ and that without its presence the local plant community will become confused … Other indigenous peoples, recognizing the nature and function of keystone species, have said that ‘the trees are the teachers of the law.’ ” [Keith, pp.88-89; Buhner, p.183]
That was about the most awesome thing I’ve read all year. Elder also has a crazy diversity of medicinal applications, known as ‘the medicine chest of the country people’ (Ettmueller via Grieve), though so far I’ve only used the flower tea, fairly successfully, to sweat out colds and fevers before they get into full swing. I think next I’ll be trying out the leaves, which, according to PFAF’s Ken Fern, work to repel insects and are ‘very effective when rubbed on the skin though they do impart their own unique fragrance’. For edible uses, I made elderflower fritters (which tasted okay with powdered sugar, but didn’t agree with my digestive system – here’s a recent post, including recipe, on Nick Weston’s ‘Hunter-Gathering’ blog) and, after having a whole batch of laboriously-snipped flowers (the green flower-stalks taste bad) go mouldy, I decided to throw the next lot quickly into Elderflower Cordial. Robin was kind enough to link me to another Hunter-Gathering recipe, which I followed pretty closely apart from the orange zest and citric acid. So this is a load of snipped flowers + three lemons sliced & grated in slightly over 2l of water, brought to the boil for around 10 minutes:
I left the thing to infuse overnight, then strained through a jelly bag (squeezing hard to get all the juice out of flowers & lemons), added several squirts of lemon juice concentrate and 1kg sugar to the resulting cloudy yellow liquid, boiled for another 10 minutes before allowing to cool slightly and pouring into sterilised bottles. Voila:
To be continued…
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* – Watching people’s reactions to my climbing trees, walking barefoot, smelling flowers, looking up at birds, and especially foraging for wild plants, I wonder if I underestimate the propaganda value of just seeing somebody engaged in these activities, behaving like it was the normal thing to do. Having rather shy & retiring personality traits (in the flesh, at least) I started out quite furtively with my nettles, trying to avoid other people, taking the smaller paths &c. Illicit activity. When I came to a main road, though, I had to give this up and actually started to enjoy my role as walking advertisement for a sane way of life. All the cars zooming past with quizzical expressions on those driving them, behind wheels, behind glass … why should I be the one to feel embarrassed? They’re the crazy fundamentalist revolutionaries, not me!
† – PFAF say: ‘The leaves are also an excellent addition to the compost heap[12, 18, 20] and they can be soaked for 7 – 21 days in water to make a very nutritious liquid feed for plants[54]. This liquid feed is both insect repellent and a good foliar feed[14, 18, 53].’ (link) My little tub stank out the whole garden after two weeks, when I finally spread half of it on the flower borders and dumped the rest in the compost. Weirdly, we had a couple of wood pigeons who seemed to love drinking the stuff – I had a good laugh when the one with a limp (who keeps coming back even though I’ve sworn that I’ll try to kill and eat him if he does) fell into the tub and got covered in the stinky sludge trying to flap his way out.
‡ – Watch him speak about nettles. Quote (0:27): ‘[T]he rest of the world of people who know nettles consider it an amazing healing herb, and it’s only here and other places in Europe that it’s considered a noxious weed. And it’s really important: any noxious weed you have around you is rare somewhere, and that’s really important to remember – and that, instead of thinking of it as a noxious weed, think of it as an incredibly abundant friend who’s trying to remind you of something.’
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