A MOUNTAIN OF DIFFERENCE

QUALITY/QUANTITY : ECOLOGY/ECONOMY

Here is a duality opposed across a mysterious point. Quality depends on benefit to the arbitrary purpose of individuals or the general welfare of a group and quantity is the account of an amount, verifiable by each and all. The confusion between good/bad with large/small seems to be a major disruptor in human’s ability to find peace on earth.

The appealing quality of quantity is the safe anonymity sought by the herding instinct found in all animal life. No longer a regular on any predator’s menu, humans had only to fear natural disasters — and each other when compelled to crowd into too tight herds around too little food. Totalitarian agriculture spawned artificial population growth around the silos of surplus. The quantity of days in the future one had food for in the present became a prime quality of life once the ability to hunt and gather nature’s seasonal offering was lost. Tokens relieved the necessity to store one’s share of the crops and soon became the medium of trade for more than mere food — so much so that in developed nations food is less than a quarter of their all consuming budget.

This brings us to the juncture of two seemingly opposed concerns around the same mysterious point; two words with the prefix, eco, from Greek oikos=house.

Add nemein=manage and you get economy, managing the affairs of a household. For centuries mankind was so busy trying to maintain his invented civilization that, until as recently as the sixties, household was the place from which nature was kept at bay. As the term, household, expanded with the growing dependence of individuals on economy of burgeoning civilizations, its relationship to nature has remained one of a manger of goods for human consumption to the rest of the world as his god granted infinite resource.

Western civilization’s attitude about the health of the planet reminds me of a story tellingly told me back in ’62 by the son of the mayor of Greenville, Mississippi about share croppers living on his family land, “They’re so ignernt, they tear siding off their shack to stoke their stove in the winter.”

When the conversation is about money no one but the personhood of corporations, from nations to fledgling factories, have the vocabulary required to express the logic of the bottom line, the bigger the number the greater the quality to minds bent on either owning the most of the last usable chunk of earth or, having shit this nest, traveling to the stars.

Well, sir, along came the scientists who, like Galileo, Copernicus and Darwin further dismantled the human homocentric myth of god granted exceptionality and expanded the household built of civilization’s commodities to the biological interdependence of the entire planet, spaceship earth.

Add logos=study and you get ecology. Science revives the indigenous understanding of Pachamama, Gaia, the living planet, the organism of which we have always been a part throughout our cultural path as self-evolved aliens requiring more and more isolation from our own individually failed responsibility for the usury and mindless waste we work every day to perpetuate. Land fills and oceans collect the charcoal left from burning the siding civilization tears off Pachamama to exact the ideal conditions for separately evolving neohumans.

Nature, considered as our household, cannot be managed without the purpose of making it into something other than it is. Considering nature a wondrous, evolving habitat event to be studied undisturbed until mutually beneficial interaction is understood, is a genetic quality every child is born supremely equipped to do. These tools are useless for managing civilization’s invisible big house and buried beneath the little red schoolhouse with the metal detector at the door.

Quality varies between extremes of ecstasy and suckage. Quantity varies between having everything and owing everything. Economy varies from complete control to complete submission. Ecology varies from healthy to dead.

HERE

It's coming from the sorrow in the street,
the holy places where the races meet;
from the homicidal bitchin'
that goes down in every kitchen
to determine who will serve and who will eat.
—Democracy, by Leonard Cohen

I arrived here when nature rained me out of my home in the heart of the city.

I’d only one reason to leave my comfortable cave after sixteen years of settling in and it didn’t stand a chance of my acting on it, what with my proximity to the headquarters of Whole Foods a block away.

When my wife left, I realized I had never fed myself — from mother’s mammon to military mess to campus cafeteria to married meals I’d always been served. Since rejoining the single way of life thirty-three years ago I’ve evolved an organic understanding of my body’s urge for and reaction to what I feed it. I learned to enjoy preparing healthy food from its life reaffirming spirit to the very physical benefits of satisfying my urges in the most beneficial way.

I began cooking for my friends out of a kitchen in our favorite hangout, the Hole in the Wall. The bean counter practicality of quantity over quality eventually reined me in and drove me out by requiring that I serve industrial food. I left with valuable experience of life in the service lane from both the server and the served perspectives as a metaphor for what keeps mankind on the treadmill of this ruinously ravenous experiment that is western civilization.

An unusual spate of rain softened soil around the roots and soaked the leaves of the hackberry that had grown out from under my house beyond the tipping point of its angled trunk. The roots popped the wall and floor beams next door as it crept to final rest across the street over several cars of patrons dining at the restaurant up the block. When the city came out to clear the road they also noticed how out of code the turn of the century building was and notified the owner to comply. The business from patron parking outweighed the rent the restaurant collected on the space, and once again, the bean counters disrupted a groovy gig.

Here is where I have learned to complete that cycle of feeding myself by inserting myself into the natural chain of life as a planter and feeder of the food I eat and pass on. My broccoli is built of the compost of last year’s garden and leaf fall and my eggs are built of the insect protein literally littering this eight-acre spot on the bank of the Colorado. I have yet to do well enough to avoid trips to the grocery store but I have learned enough to know I could with more incentive. My carbon footprint is a bus trip to town and back, pollution of processing and transporting what products I buy and my electricity bill. I have worked out plans for a solar driven tipi and will be working on that for the rest of the foreseeable future.

The only other axe I was grinding, my disastrous relationship with the daughter who’d not been in any of my homes since she was four, disappeared like a bad dream when we hugged each other standing by Ella Falls and Piddle Pond last month.

Here I am, as vulnerable as I have ever been. Hit me if you can find an opening.

Turns out that this is my 500th post.

LAST RESORT

Posting this video represents my last blatant attempt to influence others' thinking about the prediction of global warming and their responsibility for the health of the nature from which we arose and to which we will return.



I will, however, continue to post personal experiences and the ideas they spawn about our responsibility to become less antagonistic to the rest of life over which we have, by some disastrously perpetuated mistake, assumed mythicaly granted dominion and to become more symbiotic with the health of the planet of who's body we are merely a dependent part.