NON-COOPERATION

I had to make a decisions today that was rooted in philosophy. It is an idea I believe in, I argue for, and I think that I live in some ways, but when I was pushed by a community member to act in a way that was right (but against the accepted standard) I hesitated for a long, long time. Today I finally put on the Black and Tan, said "Up the Queen" and did it. The "laws" here that "protect' us wont allow me to sell milk to my neighbor. Today we made an agreement that will allow her to get milk from the goats she now "partially owns" for a maintenance fee. The agreement dances around the law, hopefully keeping us out of the slammer, but the action has me stepping away from the fear of social reprimand and living what I believe. This is an act of non-cooperation. There will be more!

Moving

I have moved most of my philosophical rambling to the http://connect.bioneers.org/ site. More of an audience there, and a broader range of discussion. If an issue comes up that relates to what we are doing here at the farm, I will post it here. Other wise look for my thoughts at bioneers under the nome de plume Afriendof B.

The God Question

The other day I was talking philosophy with a friend and the question of God came up. Where does God fit in my vision of how things are? In my typically flip way I said that God was irrelevant. The conversation stopped right there. I'd like to explain what I meant, and I hope my friend will read this and that we can continue talking.

My point is this...

If God created the universe then he/she created it to function according to laws and those laws apply to all of creation. We are not exempt. We should not use God or religion as a justification for trying to live in ways which are contrary to those laws. Religion, at it's core is about how to live with other people. It has been used to justify all kinds of terrible behavior. I haven't found anything in religion that exempts me from the laws of creation.

If God didn't create the universe then it is a self correcting system that tends toward balance. The laws work because they keep the system balanced. Actions that violate the laws tend to be eliminated as the system corrects it's self and returns to a state of balance. Our violating the laws of the system will result in our being eliminated from the system.

Neither one of these options require any intervention from the outside. God may have set up the system or it may have come into existence by random chance, but it is the system we live in, and we must learn to live by its rules.

My quest is to understand those rules and find ways to live in harmony with them. On this quest Gods role, or lack there of, is irrelevant.

Stories that change the world

I have to agree with Jake (see comments on last post) about the power of narrative. We act out of beliefs not because the data point us in a direction. That's why it is so hard to change what is happening in the world. We are so caught up in acting out the story that puts us in the role of the gods that we can't even see it. Joseph Campbell talked a lot about the power of stories in his work on comparative mythology. The movies are a great place to see the story we are living played out. The problem is finding a way to get people to hear a new story. (It's hard to even think of a new story, the one we are living is so pervasive and effective in eliminating any other way of thinking.) I like Daniel Quinn, especially the Story of B, for just that reason. There is nothing new in the science behind what he is saying, but the story sticks in your mind and makes you see things in a little different way. Once you can here 'Mother Culture' whispering in your ear, you can start to see the fallacies in our way of living. We need more people willing to say "NO! I will not live that way." We don't have to fight, we just have to opt to not play.

My kids love to watch Nova, National Geographic, Nature, and the like. I let them because I like them to think, and these programs encourage that. The other day they were watching something about early tool makers, and the story that brought us to this point came screaming out of the TV. "Humans are destine to dominate, shape, and control Nature." It's hard to live by a new story. It's even harder to teach others to do it.

I'd love to here examples of stories that lead to a new way of thinking, a new way of living.

The Toilet Paper Conundrum

We try to buy things that are produced locally from local resources when we can’t produce them ourselves. I spend a fair bit of time researching products trying to find out where they are made and from where the materials used in making them come. It is usually a frustrating and depressing project. So few things are made and sold locally. Even things made here aren’t sold directly here. They must first travel back and forth across the country to get to us. Take toilet paper for example. It isn’t made anywhere near here that I can find. So, logic would say look for the closest source or the most environmentally friendly one. The closest is at least 500 miles, and it is a brand that is not sold in any of the local stores. Environmentally friendly options involve mail order (at quite a high price and a lot of shipping) or a 140 mile round trip to Whole foods to pay a high price for a product that was shipped quite a way to get to the Columbus store. What is one to do? The non-toilet paper options are not very pleasant. I have looked at growing Mullen. It grows wild around here, has large soft fuzzy leaves, and I’ve been told that it makes good toilet paper. But, a field full of Mullen, and the energy and effort needed to cultivate, harvest, and process it seem a bit much right now. So we go to Wal-Mart and but the most eco-friendly brand they carry. Not the ideal, but it is probably the best use of our resources at the time.

Finding that balance between the vision and life in the ‘world as it is’ is a constant struggle for me. I know how I want to live, but it is a slow process dragging the rest of the world into a shape that allows me to live that way. It helps if I stop and list the things we have accomplished on our way to a better life. Here is a short list.

We have reduced our electricity use so far this year by 8% compared to the same time last year by turning things off, changing to compact florescent lights, and accepting a wider range of indoor temperatures.

We have found and are using local sources for all of our milk, most of our cheese, all of our eggs, most of our fresh produce, and some of our bread and grains.

We have cut our imported animal feeds to about 10% of total feed (except for dog and cat food which we still buy from non local sources.)

We have reduced our fuel consumption by 12% by driving less and making more efficient use of the trips we do take.

We have a long way to go, but we are on our way.

Help

The other day I was talking with a friend about what we were doing here at the farm and the subject of Organic Certification came up. My friend asked why we are not certified and I, in my usual flip way, said something like Organics is not enough. That led to a bit of a philosophical discussion which went very poorly. I know why we are doing what we are doing. The reasoning is crystal clear to me. But, I don’t seem to be able to articulate it very well. I’d like to try again to lay out my philosophy. I’d appreciate it if you would rip it apart. Question it. Find the holes, the bits that don’t make sense, the leaps in reasoning that you can’t make and let me know. I need to be able to explain this to people in a way that they can understand. I sometimes think I have a different cognitive framework to hang my ideas on; that I perceive things differently. Even if that is true, I got here through the same system that everyone else is using. If I can do that I should be able to help other people do that too. So…


There was a man who came to the doctor. He had a throbbing head ache that would not go away. He had tried all kinds of medicine, relaxation techniques, yoga, prayer, everything, and nothing worked. The doctor listened to the man, took his blood pressure, waited for him to stop bashing himself in the head with a hammer, and prescribed a potent pain killer. The man took the medicine, whacked himself in the head with the hammer, and went home wondering if the head ache would stop this time.

We are very much like the man and the doctor. We have been dealing with problems of environmental degradation and population growth for a very long time. We have tried and retried a vast number of programs to fix the pain, and have never found one that really worked. Why? Because we keep bashing ourselves in the head with a hammer. We keep seeing the same effects, even though we put great amounts of effort and resources into solving the problems. We pour millions into efforts to save this animal or that one and at the same time destroy the habitat of some other creature as fast as we can. Next year we will start a program for that creature. We fund hunger relief programs all over the world. We produce more food every year but millions still go hungry. We teach about birth control to help ease the population growth but it still races on at an exponential rate. Why? Because we are still doing the thing that causes these effects. (I could go into a long discussion of history and “pre-history” to show how we got here, but it really doesn’t matter.) The thing I find interesting is that none of the other creatures living on this planet have this problem. They have been living well in every part of the globe for hundreds of thousands of years with out causing massive environmental degradation. On the whole there are not large groups of any living thing starving to death or over running their normal range. (We sometimes see animals starving, or causing environmental problems, but that is always a result of our altering the system, not their normal way of living.) We humans managed to live for several hundred thousand years without causing the kind of problems we have now. So the question is; what are we doing that none of the other creatures are doing? How are they living that is different from how we are living? I think there should be some common law that is true for elephants, trees, fish, spiders, worms, etc. (Every other system in the universe operates on simple laws, why would life be any different?) I have published those laws in the side bar. Right now our way of life, our systems of production, violates the first basic law. We go outside our range for the resources used to produce an excess of food, water, and energy. When we have used up those resources in one area we go looking for them in another. This causes the environmental degradation we are fighting. It also fuels the exponential population growth we continue to see. This population growth must be met with more production which causes more population growth… which brings us to now. So, why would I say Organics is not enough? It’s like really nice aspirin. It will mask the pain for a short time, but if we don’t change how we live, how we produce what we need to live, we will keep whacking ourselves in the head with the hammer until we die.

Giving things up to save the world

Nathan has left a new comment on your post "Nathan has left a new comment on your post "A seco...": There is a lot that can be done within the limits of a home range but there are limits and many of us don't respect them. I eat fresh fruits and vegtables from South America all winter. If I stick to the food sources from my local area I will have to give up fresh fruits and vegtables out of season. That doesn't mean I can't eat well all winter. Fruits and vegtables can be perserved. When I say that we will have to give things up I don't mean we need to move into caves but I do believe there are limits to the what technology can do for us. Todays technological solution is often tomorows environmental problem as was the case with CFC's

My point isn't that we will not have to "give some things up", but that you can't expect people to accept a lower standard of living out of some guilty need to save the world. We will have to change how we live. We will have to learn to eat things in season and to preserve things for the off season. We will have to be more creative in how we produce our energy, how we process our waste, how we use our local resources so that we can live in a truly sustainable way. But we won't achieve that by going back two hundred years, or a thousand years. We won't achieve that by trying to get people to do without things.

All over the world now we are several generations removed from local economies. The local small producers of food and goods are gone for the most part. Some of these things will have to be recreated. We can draw on skills from the past, but doing what was done in the past is what got us here. We need to go forward and find new ways. If we keep our focus on using local resources in a way that continually renews them while producing the things we want and need then we will be taking some real steps in the right direction.