Beyond Environmental

Why are Envrionmentalists often pegged as being crazy my friend Mike brings up? Well first, I think because some of craziest people make it onto television because it makes good television. I recall the pepper pie into the face of Lierre Keith. I think there are many reasons that people find environmentalists a little crazy, some fair and unfair, even amongst environmentalists, myself included. 

Now that I've been fair, I can say that to be truly Environmental you will have the see the world through different eyes. Eyes that see this world as not normal but crazy. And therefore you will be crazy in the modern world.
 
Here are some crazy thoughts. It is more than  fair to say that if we drop the illusions of intention and the pretense of morality and look at who is the most environmental, it isn't me, it isn't my vegan friend Mike, it isn't my wife, or anybody I know.  It would be the most primitive society and above that I can only think of the Amish, because truly that consume the least of all groups. The world is truly upside down when you look at the fact that a hunter gatherer has less impact than a city dwelling environmentalist. But we don't need to go that far. Our great-grandparents, Asians, and any poor person in a third-world country.

I like these ironies the strongest being the hunter gatherer one. It keeps me humble whenever a feeling of self-righteousness attempts to creep into my heart to know I've been wrong about the world.

The solution everyone knows but is too culturally sensitives and unpatriotic to talk about it.  If there is such thing as a fix it all o the world problem, a no growth solution would be it.

And to be honest, I am not ready for such an adoption. I am quite addicted to pleasures and comforts  though not as much as others  and much less than 5 years ago. I'm quite ignorant of the ancient world. I live in a city. I am untested for survival in the wood and my parents never showed me the way that a moma grizzly showed to her cubs. Therefore,  this change is not an on off switch necessarily but some things could be.  There are no easy answers to this because I would have done it by now. But by my wife's love, I will gather the strength and knowledge and courage to opt out of this madness.

At this point growing my own food is my only long term goal. It's modest and humble to say the least but its the most I can work towards at the moment. What is more fundamentally self-sufficient and anti-commercial than feeding yourself.
 

However even if this seems like crazy talk Wesrern environmentalists seem less insane than our tribal brothers. Stephen Harold Buehner speaks about the indigenous mind in a booked called Sacred and Herbal Healing Beers. The indigenous mind is the mind of people who truly live and breath and interconnectedness with nature. They are not connected to the material world. If we are a little crazy to the world then the indigenous people are truly mad! But they aren't called mad, usually unfortunate, uncivilized and other rhetoric to somehow convince us that though they are wild we are free. It's easy to believe when we know no other world.

Here are some quotes I compiled from the Stephen Buehner's book  from authors he felt expressed the indigenous mind. They truly represent to him a "Well of Remembrance," in which we accept the wisdom of our ancestors.

Just Now

A rock took fright

When it saw me.

It escaped 

By playing dead.

-Norben Mayer

I believe a leave of grass is no less than the journeywork of the stars,

And the prismre is equally perfect, and a grain of sand, and the egg of the wren, 

And the tree-toad is a chef-d'owevre for the highest, 

And the running blackberry would adorn

the parlors of heaven,

And the narrowest hinge in my hand

puts to scorn all machinery,

And the cow crunching with depressed head

surpasses any statue,

And a mouse is a mrable enough to stagger

sextillions of infidels

-Walt Whitman

Soon we realized that these men... they were mad. They wanted the land, they wanted to carry away the wood, they were also searching for stones. We explained that the jungle is not something to be tossed over your shoulder and transported like a dead birth, but they did not want to hear our arguments.

-Isabel Allende, The Stories of Eva Luna

Oh, sweet spontaneous earth... how often has the naughty thumb of science prodded thy beauty?

= e e cummings

"John Seed, an Australian rainforest activist describes a meditation he teachees so that people imbued with a Western mind-set can begin to enter the indigenous worldview:

"We have a practice where we approach a leaf as though approaching our revered Zen master We breath to this leaf the oxidized carbon of our body. We do so with the gratitude and the generosity of the signature, the clue to the Nature of which we are a fragment. As we add consciousness to the ancient processes of sharing respiration, we savour the leaf in our imagination. Now we must notive and then lay aside our prejudice that we are the only one capable of consciousness in this transaction, this holy communion that accompanies our every breath. We consciously nourish a leaf and invite the leaf to nourish us not just with the oxygen it creates, but with further communications. The most "primitive" people naturally do this. They live deeply embedded in their "environment" and all practice ceremonies and rituals that affirm and nourish this interconnectedness, this interbeing of human tribe with the rest of the Earth family. "

-Sacred and Herbal Healing Beers