Wilderness Cry

I think you should know.

Some of us are of the opinion that our way of life is unsustainable. We are not speaking merely of our current economic situation, but of the less tangible concepts of environmental degradation, spiritual awareness, and our collective consciousness. We believe the dominant philosophical paradigm of the United States in the 20th Century, with its emphasis on competition, materialism, credit, and personal ego satiation have brought us to this point. We were wooed by the myriad comforts and entertainments that such a pattern of thinking could produce, given that it was accepted and implemented by hundreds of millions of individuals in the wealthiest country the world has ever known. It was quite easy for us to ignore or to be incurious about the impact this pattern of behavior has wrought on our World and its peoples who reside outside our national borders. The rewards were just too great. We did not have the time, nor did we put forth the effort to comprehend the unintended consequences of such an economic and philosophical system. And now, after living comfortably for decades, the bitter fruits born by such systems are piled outside our doorsteps.

Increasingly we find ourselves, the citizens of the United States of America, having to deal with the issues of poverty, ill health, unemployment, fear, and the lack of a sense of self-determination that have plagued those of “lesser developed nations” for generations.

We feel that our society is at a crossroads. Will we embrace the principles of community, empathy, social justice, economic fairness, and informed rational thought; or will we double down and further pursue unfettered self interest above all else, to the detriment of all those who were born with or have attained less than we?

Do we value human life, and indeed all life, for what it is; a miraculous and possibly even unique occurrence harbored in one small corner of the incomprehensible vastness that is our known universe? Or do we value life merely for what it can produce for us, either individually or for our society? Do we educate our children so that they may begin to understand themselves and the world around them, and so they may appreciate life’s richness? Or do we instead educate them so that they may take their place in the cubicle, perhaps the perfect symbol of our modern lives? Personal, isolated, bounded on all sides but one, offering the chance for something more if we could just tear our eyes away from the computer screen long enough to look up.

And what do our values say about us?

Through our collective investigation, perhaps we can gain insights that will inform our decision making in the future.

within a finite planet. Material goods and the brainwashing that went with them haven't made us happy because they can't; wage slavery is still slavery.

There are those who want to remain in stasis, which is an inevitable black hole. Then there are those who want to change the whole system, to behave like every other animal in symbiosis with the rest of the world. When they say "culture of life," symbiosis is what they should mean.

Under the current system we take resources and create toxic waste. This is not normal or natural, and could be changed easily. We just have to think better. We could create systems that take those resources and create things that last much longer and are easily recyclable. Even dividing the existing waste into its individual, reusable parts and cycling them back into the system. We occasionally send scrap metal and other scrap materials to foreign nations for recycling. That scrap then gets sold back to us, so the systems for doing this already exist.

There is a huge waste of mind-potential, which could easily be called our most precious resource as humans. We leave people in poverty, we do not educate them properly, we throw them away/leave them to die on the vine. Can you imagine what kinds of advances might come from lifting these people up and sharing our knowledge with them?

Intellect, and consciousness in general, is additive - the more you know the more you ask questions and think of new and better systems. Every corporation realizes this, but our systems are not designed that way. We throw away much more intellect than we ever use - it wastes in ghettos, and refugee camps all over the world, creating toxic violence and misery.

It's a black hole, with some portion of ourselves and other creatures constantly circling the drain and falling in. The only way forward with this system is death.

There is plenty, but due to our strange parasitic inclinations, we would rather people starve, physically and mentally, than allow someone who does not already have enough to have more. The human race is apparently insane. It's time for the talking cure, IMO. We have to address the whole system - it's not serving us, and really never has.

Evolve or die.

but we foolishly believe that we can live apart from nature. We take, we destroy, we consume, and we poison. It's unsustainable. Yes, education and imagination are a big part of the cure, but when world governments fear intellectuals, when the goal of a government is to keep the populace "fat, dumb, and happy" so that they willingly continue the madness to enrich the few, how can the cycle be ended? It will end, and sooner than we would all like to think, but there won't be many survivors, human or otherwise.

I often compare our stewardship of the planet to the early naval explorers who tried to circumnavigate the globe. Imagine being on ship, sailing into literally unknown territory, with a finite amount of resources to sustain you and your crew. Would you burn through the food and fresh water as fast as you could while using the hull as a latrine? Would 1% of the crew harbor 95% of the resources, leaving the bottom 99% to fend for the scraps? And what would happen if the bottom 99% realized that they were being manipulated by the Captain and his Inner Circle? How would that story end?

The answers are obvious, as the reasoning behind them should be.

Well, the our ship is the planet Earth and we better get ourselves together quick.

The bottom 99% must realize what's happening, but they feel dis-empowered and removed from nature. The notion that we are not animals, and part of nature is beyond my ken. Gratefully, the human system is sustained by human beings, and those same human beings can change the system they use. It is certainly not the only option available, we just need to start taking, and thinking about new systems, fully symbiotic systems. Letting go of this silly idea that we are somehow separate from the rest of nature would be a good start, IMO.

We don't need the leadership, or even participation of those at the top of the current system to get this started. All we need are those people who are willing to listen. Like every other revolution, it begins in the mind, with a handful of people seeing, and wanting to experience, a better way of living. After you get it started, it's like a snowball. Like everything else that grows, consciousness itself is additive - the more people you get thinking this way, the more people will start to see it as a potential. Then the proofs will come to catch the remaining doubters.

I don't think we will actually "kill" the planet, but I'm certain she will shrug us off if we don't cure this parasitic madness we've fallen into.

Spaceship Earth is a world view term usually expressing concern over the use of limited resources available on Earth and the behavior of everyone on it to act as a harmonious crew working toward the greater good.

It may have been derived from a passage in Henry George's best known work, Progress and Poverty<1> (1879). From book IV, chapter 2:

It is a well-provisioned ship, this on which we sail through space. If the bread and beef above decks seem to grow scarce, we but open a hatch and there is a new supply, of which before we never dreamed. And very great command over the services of others comes to those who as the hatches are opened are permitted to say, "This is mine!"

In 1965 Adlai Stevenson made a speech to the UN in which he said "We travel together, passengers on a little space ship, dependent on its vulnerable reserves of air and soil".<2> The following year, Spaceship Earth became the title of a book by a friend of Stevenson's, the internationally influential economist Barbara Ward.

Also in 1966 Kenneth E. Boulding used the phrase in the title of an essay, The Economics of the Coming Spaceship Earth.<3> Boulding described the past open economy of apparently illimitable resources, which he said he was tempted to call the "cowboy economy", and continued: "The closed economy of the future might similarly be called the 'spaceman' economy, in which the earth has become a single spaceship, without unlimited reservoirs of anything, either for extraction or for pollution, and in which, therefore, man must find his place in a cyclical ecological system". (David Korten would take up the "cowboys in a spaceship" theme in his 1995 book When Corporations Rule the World.)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaceship_Earth

You say below it's "hackneyed" - might that not be because it bears repeating century after century? That's how the propagandists do it, they just keep repeating until it sinks in :)

I'm sure you have something solution-oriented to add. What are your solutions, potential lines of thought, and system adjustments that might make mankind a more symbiotic species?

I said the OP is hackneyed. I think what Adlai said was fresh and exceedingly well put. It can be said that there are no new truths, that all ideas have ever been floating all around us. It's the discovery of an idea as new to the thinker that's exciting and reframing it in a fresh way that fits the extant circumstances of a particular time and place.

My solutions? They're only personal. I live a very, very sustainable lifestyle that wouldn't be easy for many people and probably wouldn't be a solution for many. I live in a small house built of largely recycled materials. I have gravity fed spring water. I don't buy anything new except for underwear and winter boots. I grow a large garden, etc.

Frankly, I don't think there are any solutions. We're a species that's too prevalent and too dominant for the planet to sustain. You're wrong about solutions being easy. They aren't.

When I think easy, I think that rather than some large outside force that must be overcome it's an inside force we have to overcome. If someone doesn't believe it's possible to change the style in which we live, as you have already done (kudos), then obviously we never will. I'm not the type to just accept what is. To stop wanting something better is to begin dying rapidly.

Your solutions are repeatable by others, particularly if we work together rather than in our little isolation tanks, even if they may not work for everyone at this time.

Thanks for your thoughtful response. :toast:

relation to land can exist without love, respect, and admiration for land, and a high regard for its value. By value, I of course mean something far broader than mere economic value; I mean value in the philosophical sense."

-Aldo Leopold

oh, and this is as hackneyed a piece as could be written.

but, let's face it. You have the luxury of sitting at a warm, comfortable place, your stomach is full and you have access to the Internet to express your thoughts.

As the famous Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs explained

http://psychology.about.com/od/theoriesofpersonality/a/hierarchyneeds.htm

This is the highest and much less achieved.

Not only in this country, but across the world, people are hungry, cold and sick. People are used as pawns in deadly battles. Tribes and regular armies are fighting over sparse water and land resources, even in our country. Many are just the victims of the acts of nature: drought, floods, earthquake, etc. where no one can help.

And, even if we lived in Utopia where everything is great, human nature what it is, there will always be groups and individuals who will follow their basic instincts to protect what is theirs.

Nice thoughts to aspire, but don't expect any to ever materialize to build a society that is just. This will always remain, well, Utopian.

:hi: