Culture Change e-Letter #1
Burned up about planet burning up?
Alternative to Techno-Enslavement
As technology advances, we have less security and less freedom
in our daily lives. The nuclear threat is the best example. But
nukes are only one manifestation, and are not separate from the general
technological and wasteful nature of our artificial (e.g., paved)
environments. It is the workplace, residential and four-wheeled
environments that dispirit our animal selves as much as nuclear holocaust that
hangs over our heads. Our true selves need more than a cold beer and
television—or even more than a great book or being loved by one's chosen mate.
We work harder than ever and are forced to adopt newer ways,
just to obtain food and put shoes on the kids' feet. In a previous
generation, the job was a livelihood spent outside, or working in a craft
indoors while using one's hands. Now masses of us not only use email, but
must upgrade our computer sophistication more and more often. The more
advanced into the realm of technology we go, the less connected we are to nature
in our immediate space and waking consciousness. But the element of coercion
comes along with the whole process, as we are forced to go along with the
distancing from nature. We are therefore more enslaved as technology
develops and proliferates. We are sealed into a techno-box, as it were, which
was not as complete when a worker formerly earned a wage from stoking the
furnace of a factory.
We know this culture began when we exploited nature to gain a
larger and larger food supply, working more and more hours per day to achieve
it. Soon the population growth forced and enabled the encroachment on
hunter-gatherer cultures and habitats of wild species. To jump forward to
today, the dominant expression of power is, in effect, that the bullies take
what they want and take lives to achieve their ends. Wars are common
manifestations of the collective tendency to maintain overwork and being herded
like sheep to survive.
This sounds too unreasonable or revolutionary to those who
have grown up and given up their dreams. They just never found out
alternative ways of living, such as communal or tribal. As old fashioned
or Utopian as they sound, those ways actually comprise over 99% of human
history. An inkling of the truthfulness and superiority of an alternative
to overworking and overpopulating (while trashing the planet and undermining our
economic security in the process) is found when, for example, we stumble on some
publicized research done by Russians several years ago: mutual cooperation is
much more effective than competition in getting the desired results in an agreed
upon goal. [Future editions of this online newsletter will continue Culture Change's
explorations on sustainable living and how to boost the growing movement of
human liberation via respect for nature.]
Periodically, in Bike to Work days, a cyclist and his or her
bike are pitted against a car driver and the multi-horsepower of the heavy,
expensive and deadly machine. A course is laid out for accomplishing
errands around some city during a reasonable amount of time, and... guess which
mode of transport always wins hands-down: the bike is much faster.
The bicyclist also got exercise, saved money, and could greet a friend on the
way and show off some muscles. Don't try that in a car when you're
supposed to be avoiding a random child or dog that should not be flattened under
your wheels.
Economically, a motorist has so much time wrapped up in
earning money for the purchase and maintenance of the car, and in working for
the gasoline and insurance money, etc., that when translated into time, the
actual adjusted speed of the average U.S. car driver is under five miles per
hour. Alienation from nature is the car-driver's lot (pardon the pun), as
well as breathing toxic fumes. The fact that more teenagers are being
killed on the nation's roads each afternoon than were murdered at the Columbine
High School massacre in Colorado, is just an unpleasant detail for the corporate
mass media to cover up as they advertise cars. [If you must buy a car, buy a
used one.]
On a bike, or better yet on foot, one can smell the roses and
be a better citizen by taking up an appropriate amount of space as one travels
(instead of several square yards, as a car does even when parked). But
there is evil afoot in our complicity with the fossil-fueled status quo: as
industry and deforestation warm the globe and distort the climate, spring is
flowering earlier and earlier. The scientific community has deemed it
evidence of the global warming that comes principally from greenhouse gases
accumulating. What the public doesn't realize is (1) today's emissions
will not produce their full effect on the climate for several decades, and (2)
positive feedback loops, such as melting more ice and releasing more CO2 and
methane (the main greenhouse gases), could be kicking in already and can turn
the Earth into a Venusian hell.
But that's alright with the culture's lineage of unthinking
leadership that made the accumulation of material wealth the dominant value to
live (and kill) by. Laws are most strongly created and applied in regard
to protecting private property at the expense of nature and people's needs—needs
that require everyone to start sharing, as we did not so long ago in the time
scale of our species.
Thanks for living simply, that others may simply live.
- Jan Lundberg
Home
Page
