A new story

Nathan said...
I can see your point about keeping everything local and networking with your community. If all my waste ends up in my own yard or in the yard of my friends, I have an incentive to be responsible with it. It sounds like you are describing a shared belief system that places a high value on living in harmony with your local eco system. If such a belief system were truly part of the culture at large it would undoubtedly have a very positive effect. I'm sorry that your brother-in-law has a hard time understanding what you are doing. I think you are light years ahead of most of us in your thinking and your actions. Thanks to some prominent national figures that have brought the environment to the fore front, more of us are now aware of these issues. You seem to eat them up with boundless energy. Most of us look on them the way we look at paying the up coming water and electric bills. "It has to be done so I guess I'll do it. Now would someone please tell me how?"
April 14, 2007 4:12 PM

The problem I see with all these high profile calls to action is that while they often succeed in raising awareness of the problem they leave us to act within the context of our 10000 year old culture/mythology. We can't fix the problem because the root of the problem lies in our cultural definition of what it means to be human. We have to live differently. To live differently we have to see ourselves in a different way. Our current mythology has us as seprate from nature. That way of thinking is embedded in our languages, in our religions, in our science, in every aspect of our global culture. Unfortunately, you can't create a new mythology and expect people to adopt it. The Story will come out of our attempts to live differently. It starts by recognizing that we are not seprate from nature. What works for all the other creatures on the planet will work for us too. We can't fix the problem with new programs. Programs come out of the old way of thinking. We need to think in a new way, and let that new way of thinking lead us to a new way of living. Try it as a mental game to start with. Look at where your food, water, and energy come from and where your waste goes. Look for choices that bring those closer to home. Look at how the rest of nature works. Look for the laws that allow complex natural systems to work. Read "Fuzzy Logic". It's a great mathematical look at the way simple rules can result in incredible complexity.

New programs frustrate me. We have programs to eliminate hunger, poverty, population explosions, environmental degradation, etc. We spend vast amounts of time, money, and energy on these programs, and they don't work. They didn't work last year. They didn't work 10 years ago. Or 30 years ago. They won't work this year, or next year. They can't because we keep acting in the same way. We keep living out the story where we are seprate from nature, and exempt from its laws. Where our measure of success is how much excess we can produce. As long as we keep living out this story our programs will fail. If we stop living out this story we wont need any programs.