Savage Gods by Paul Kingsnorth – book review.

Although Savage Gods is Paul Kingsnorth’s latest book, it has been around for a while having been published in late 2019 – just before the entire world went “Covid crazy”.

It is one of two books that I eventually decided on, as late Christmas presents for myself, after my wife suggested I spend $50, or there about, on something for myself for Christmas.

In Kingsnorth’s own words – “Savage Gods is a confessional: a short, sharp, unexpected account of a crisis in my own writing, in my sense of purpose and my sense of home. It is an examination, from within the moment, of what it means to lose faith in words. In the process, it asks: what is the meaning of language and what is it for? Does writing illuminate or conceal? And can a human ever really ‘belong’ to a place in a broken world which militates against it?“

I started reading this book just before bedtime and got a third of the way through it before turning in for bed and then being unable to sleep because my mind was still processing and turning over and over what I had been reading. The following day I knew I had to finish it for my own peace of mind – which is what I did.

Some parts of the book, detailing his move from suburban living in a small Cumbrian market town to his new life in rural western Ireland – apparently just inside what is classed as the romantic bit – is fairly straightforward, clear and informative. It details the move and what his and his family’s new life, working the land and being as gentle on the environment as they can, without being completely off grid, is like. This is their attempt to escape from the all consuming “Machine”. This writing is what I bought the book for, to find out all about his transition from urbanite to part time farmer, working the land.

Other parts of the book concerning his writing and his apparent…..his apparent what exactly? His apparent – one could describe it as his falling out with words or his lack of trust in words….those black markings on a white page. And his inner conflict and lack of self belief, or lack of belief in his ability to write any more, or even if he should write at all in the future – which in my opinion is unjustified because I hold the guy in such high regard – I found quite disturbing.

At times, in this book, he writes as though he is coming apart. Having some kind of breakdown due to his mistrust of words. His lack of belief in his craft, his art.

He talks about writing as a sacrifice, or I should say in his quest to write and to be a writer, to be able to fully immerse himself in the world of words and sentences, he sacrifices everything else in his life. Writing comes first even before family. He chastises himself when he puts his “job” above spending more time with his children because he wants to be remembered by his kids as a good father, but it’s what he, as a writer, is driven to do. It’s his cross and he has to bear it.

It is also about belonging or not belonging to a place and whether or not it’s possible to become at home and at ease in that place. This is not something that Kingsnorth is comfortable about doing. It disturbs him when he starts to feel “at home” in a particular place, because it is alien to him. His lifestyle as a writer, has lead him to be a wanderer – not entirely nomadic – not on the move the whole time, but to move from place to place after a few short years without experiencing the feeling of becoming settled, of feeling “at home”.

But now in Ireland, living the rural idyll and reaching his mid 40’s, he is coming to the conclusion that it’s actually OK to feel at home in a place, to finally put down roots and to learn how to belong.

He thinks that perhaps the planting of hundreds of trees on his property by himself and his wife has helped him to begin to accept the act of putting down his own roots as a natural and normal thing to do. Something he has been both searching for, and at the same time avoiding, all his life.

I have, in the few years that I have been aware of Kingsnorth and his work, always been absolutely sure of his ability as a writer, a communicator and a great thinker. The latter is a title that many people give Kingsnorth and one that he seems to be the least comfortable with. (And there’s that word again – comfortable – something else that doesn’t sit well with Kingsnorth). To see his lack of belief in words and in writing and therefore lack of belief in his singular purpose in life – to be a writer. To expose his vulnerability in this way – and in the process, to expose the raw nerves of his relationship with his father – was both refreshing and deeply disturbing – and made me question my own life, my purpose and where, if anywhere, I belong. (please see my previous blog post)

I can’t say that I “enjoyed” reading this book, but I did find it almost impossible to put down. Once started I had to finish it. It is compelling reading, certainly a must read for anyone contemplating writing as a career…..or a calling. Some writers write because they want to. Kingsnorth writes because he has to. It is his very reason for being. He gets little choice in the matter.

I rate the book highly and am now eager to start reading the other book that made up my late Christmas gift…..another Kingsnorth offering. This time it’s his 2009 homage to his homeland called Real England – Part personal journey, part manifesto, Real England offers a snapshot of a country at a precarious moment in its history, while there is still time to save its future.

Once more, many thanks for reading this. I welcome comments, positive or negative, as long as they are constructive.

On being and belonging….

I’ve probably mentioned in earlier posts about my admiration of the work, or at least some of the work, of writer Paul Kingsnorth. When reading his latest book Savage Gods – which is, quite frankly, a strange and thought provoking book – partly about his and his family settling, or at least trying to settle, into a new life in rural western Ireland….and also about his sense of belonging, his life in general and about writing and words – it made me examine my own life.

I will do a book review of Kingsnorth’s book in a later post.

Before I begin, there is something that you should know. I don’t like myself. I used to when I was a child – young and innocent. But not now. I can’t understand why anyone would want to be my friend, or spend time in my company. I think it was Woody Allen who once said – and I am paraphrasing here – “I could never belong to a club that would have me as a member.”

I once had a dream. At the time of dreaming it, it was very clear. I don’t remember now who it was that I was talking with in the dream, but I was explaining to the person how confused I was about my purpose – why was I here on earth, what was my “raison d’être”? The reason or purpose of my existence. The person in my dream then told me the meaning of life in one short but clear sentence. I remember saying to him…or was it her…”That’s it? It’s that simple?”. And then realizing I was in a dream, I thought “I must tell everyone about this as soon as I wake up….it’s amazing and such a wonderfully simple concept”. You can imagine my excitement.

Of course on waking, the explanation about life and why we are here disappeared into the ether. All I can remember is how simply it was explained to me. I’ve been trying, unsuccessfully, to find my way back into that dream ever since. It often feels tantalisingly close, but is always just out of reach.

Kingsnorth’s book has started me thinking about that dream again and questioning why I am here, where is HERE and my sense of belonging to the place where I live. My thought pattern is a rush of jumbled thoughts and ideas, tripping over one another as they all trying to come out at once, so please bear with me while I attempt to give them all a place on this page, in some semblance of order.

When we are children we are often asked by adults “what do you want to be when you grow up?”. The question that they actually want us to answer is not what we want to be, but what job or career we want to perform in order to earn money which will then allow us to live in a certain manner. We answer and are then often told that we’re wrong in our choices and should strive to become something else….something perceived, by them, as better in some way.

In my case, I loved playing in the woods as a very young boy, but you can’t play in the woods as an adult. I wanted to do a job that would allow me to remain in the woods and keep me connected to nature. You can’t play in the woods as a job. But why not? Why is it that we cross an invisible line when we go from childhood to manhood that means that what was once a happy, pleasurable, natural thing to do – playing in the woods amongst nature, as a part of the natural world – now becomes unacceptable, even embarrassing. Something unbecoming. Man and nature are not and never should be separate. We are part of the natural world and we lived within it for thousands of years, until suddenly that wasn’t good enough. We considered ourselves above nature and decided that we needed to control it. Not just felt the need to control nature but assumed we had a god given right to control it. To use and exploit its “resources”. (If you’ve read some of my earlier posts you’ll know how I feel about nature being looked upon as a resource). Somehow we have lost our way, allowed ourselves to become detached from nature.

So, after that little rant – my answer was “I want to be a forestry worker” – not the type that cut down trees though, but some kind of fantasy forester who cares for the trees. A protector of the natural world.

This, in later years changed into wanting to join the army and to be just like my older cousin Tony – whom I admired greatly – who joined the British army, travelled to exotic places and also learned a trade. He learned welding, and after leaving the army worked on a huge pipeline across Australia where he earned enough money to build his family a beautiful home in Adelaide where they settled, way back when, to live the dream. I thought that I wanted the same thing.

When I visited him and his family back in the 1980’s on my world travels I asked Tony how he was doing and his reply was “Living the dream mate”. He seemed very content.

For some reason neither of my career suggestions was good enough for my dad and I was pushed towards going to university and/or becoming a quantity surveyor. Why a quantity surveyor? I have no idea, but dad seemed to think it was high enough up the food chain to command respect and a good income. Like most parents, he wanted a better life for his kids than he was able to have. (He missed out on university because of a little thing called world war 2, which found him at the tender age of 17 crewing destroyers and minesweepers in the fight against Hitler). But who defines better and how do you define it?

The pursuit of happiness wasn’t a consideration. By now I was a teenager 16 years of age and naturally, as teenagers do, I revolted. Although up to that point in my life I’d done well at school, even enjoyed being there some of the time, had good grades, was in the top end of scholars and achieved 6 O’levels without expending too much effort, but rather than bowing to dad’s “suggestion” of going to university I deliberately scuppered my chances by missing lessons and instead spent my afternoons in one of many local pubs near the school. Naturally, this ended my run of good grades, served to keep me out of university and limit my options in a world where pieces of paper are deemed proof of intelligence and a persons worth.

It also brought out a bad side of me. I was irresponsible, got drunk often. I must have been a real pain in the arse to live with, but mum and dad (and my brother) were there for me. It certainly wasn’t a time I was particularly proud of.

I realize now of course that this was a stupid thing to do, but hindsight is a wonderful thing.

In the end, neither my dad nor I got our wishes granted and on leaving school I ended up taking on a mediocre job working as a shipping clerk for a freight company. My idea, at this stage in my life was to do this job for 6 months or maybe a year and then pack a bag and travel to distant lands. To escape my childhood home and explore new possibilities. Cast off the old and embrace the new. However, life gets in the way of living the dream and it wasn’t until 8 years had passed, living a comfortable but numb life, before I quit and set off for a year to backpack around the world.

As I stood in my bedroom, on the morning of my departure, and looked around both within the room at the furniture, the decore, my Olivia Newton John poster, my drawing of Diana Ross, my map of the world with the places marked with pins that I wanted to visit…and at the view of old cottages, trees and gardens through the window…and of course my beloved woods beyond… trying to absorb everything into my memory bank for what could be the last time, as I had no idea when, or even if, I would be back again, I wondered if I was making a mistake. Was severing ties with the place I was born and grew up – the place where my dad was born, the place where my grandparents lived most of their lives, the place where my great grandparents settled and made their home – the right thing to do?

At the time I didn’t feel that I belonged there and there were far better places to explore, more interesting people to meet, more exciting experiences to be had. Why be a stick-in-the-mud? Why root myself to the spot like my great grand parents, my grand parents and my parents had done when I have 2 feet that will take me anywhere in the world? So I left.

I didn’t realize it back then but I had, and still have, a self destructive streak – a certain self loathing – a feeling of never being quite good enough. An underlying feeling that accepting failure and giving up or walking away from things – situations, people – was easier than struggling to succeed. “I am not worthy” is my underlying mantra. This wasn’t always the case though.

As a child I had a more or less happy life, particularly in my younger years – say from my earliest recollection of memory up to the age of maybe 10, or there abouts. I was confident in my abilities. I was a good reader and read lots of children’s books – devoured them would be a better description. I loved stories of adventure, of friends going off to explore exciting places together, the feeling of camaraderie and trust among equals. I loved to play and run through the woods, to go biking with friends, to play football in the park, to read endless books in the quiet solitude of my bedroom, to write my own stories, to sketch pictures in my sketchbook, to take my dog for long walks where I could just let my mind wander, to sing at the top of my voice when no one was there. I had confidence in myself. I thought I was good at everything, could do anything. I even got to sing solo in one of the schools productions. Then one day my mum criticised my singing, so I stopped. I started whistling, but my wife doesn’t like that – so I stopped that too….or I try to. I sometimes forget and I get THAT look from her.

I had a lot of friends back then. Good friends. Kids I could count on. I have been keeping in touch with many of my old friends from primary school through the magic of Facebook. Or I should say I HAD been keeping in touch with them. And here’s where my self destructive streak comes in again. I have decided that it’s important to stick to one’s principles. I detest the way that modern man – and modern woman come to that – are destroying the planet, or more accurately, destroying the natural world – real plants, trees, animals, birds, insects, the microbes in the living soil – for something as false as money. The worst of such people are the likes of the new billionaires like Zuckerberg (creator of Facebook….or the Metaverse) who controls what opinions we are allowed to express on Facebook and other (anti) social media platforms and (as I saw it) backs up oppressive governments and helps them to push their agenda. So, I decided to delete my Facebook and other social media accounts (which are a huge absorber of my time) and therefore get back lots of free time, give a 2 finger salute to Zuckerberg, but at the same time this decision sadly served to sever contact with my long time school friends.

Before deleting my account I did post on there to let people know of my decision and to advise them of my email address in case anyone wanted to keep in touch. But my self destructive, self loathing side tells me that no one will. I am not worthy – remember.

I know that it sounds like I am sinking into the pathetic realms of self pity here, but I’m not. I have no pity for myself. I don’t deserve any pity. I don’t seek pity from you or anyone else. I made my choices, rolled the dice, made many mistakes, so many mistakes – thankfully along with a few good choices such as marrying my wife and raising 2 great kids. But other than that I find myself asking “what have I done…what have I achieved….how can I become happy?”

I find myself where I am, disconnected and adrift, without the roots and connection that indigenous peoples have to their land and their sense of place and belonging to that place – in some cases over millennia, such as the Australian Aboriginal tribes. I no longer look at my ancestors as being foolish for putting down roots. I envy them. I envy their sense of belonging.

Now if you ask me where I feel most connected to, I am drawn back – almost tugged back on a long stretched piece of elastic – to a particular place in the woods where I played in my much younger years and felt a certain contentment with where I was and more importantly perhaps, who I was. As a child I lived in the now. I didn’t worry about my future or regret my past. What was to come or what had already happened didn’t concern me. I had no ambitions, no expectations, no ego. I was there, fully there in the moment, enjoying life – just living.

To cut a long story short I settled in New Zealand – as far away from my place of birth, geographically speaking, as I could be without heading off into space. I just used the word settled, but despite living here for longer than the time I lived in my birth country, I am anything but settled. We, my wife and I, have lived in our current house (notice I use the word house, not home) for almost 28 years. I’ve been in New Zealand for 33 years now. I am surrounded by books, many of which came with us when we emigrated here in 1989. We have made gardens to grow much of our vegetable needs and planted over 25 fruit and nut trees. The trees have put down roots, deep roots to anchor them in place no matter how rough the weather is. But I remain unable to show the same commitment to place as they do.

This place may be where I live, but it will – I fear – never be my home. I don’t belong here. It’s a beautiful country to live in, as far as scenic beauty is concerned, but I am alien to it and in it. I don’t fit. I’m an outsider. A “bloody Pom”, even though I have New Zealand citizenship – something that I waited over 12 years before committing to. I’ve always felt that living here was meant to be something temporary. Our house may be “home” as far as my children are concerned, it is their home because during there formative years it’s where they were brought up, where they played football and cricket in the back yard, where they felt most secure (I hope). But it’s not mine.

That being said, even my children seem to have rejected it. Both of my children have left for places new. One is still in New Zealand. He was born here, but now lives in our Capital City. Preferring city life to our more rural, small town backwater lifestyle. My older son, has lived stateside for over 10 years. I suspect that he feels an even bigger disconnect…or perhaps doesn’t sense the disconnect just yet. (But he will).

He was born in England, brought up in New Zealand, lived for 9 years in Boston and now lives in San Francisco. I hope that they both discover the importance of belonging to where they currently live or realize the importance of coming back to their roots.

As I get older I have more respect for my forebears. They put down roots, they became part of the community, they made friends, they belonged. I’ve lived here in this house for almost half my life and yet I have failed to commit to the place. I have failed to make friends here on this side of the globe. I had colleagues and co-workers at the various jobs I have had. I’ve met others through playing sports, but once I leave the job or stop playing the sport, those people slip away from my life. We have nothing in common any more. The job or the sport was our only common ground. I know a lot of people but there are few, if any, that I can count on as true friends. We reap what we sow I guess. On the bright side I have my long suffering wife by my side (for which I am eternally grateful), my collections of books all around me, my opportunity to use this blog to practice my writing and express myself…and my cat, who sometimes looks like he’s actually listening to me. I’m also very grateful for my kids and my grandchild….and more to come. But they are not here, where I am. It would be wonderful for us all to be together in a place where we all feel that we truly belong. But we aren’t and probably never will be.

On my travels I have felt a connection to a few special places that I have visited, passed through. Places that stir some strange primeval emotion deep within me, something bordering on the spiritual. But they are fleeting and my “modern man mind” dismisses it and I move on.

At the time of writing this, I’m 62 years of age and live 12,000 miles away from my childhood home, but I can see, hear, smell, sense in every way that particular place in the woods. The path is wider here and on one side is an old sandstone wall, waist high, tumbling down here and there. To the other side the land and the trees and bracken beneath slope slightly down hill away as far as the eye can see. Ahead of me the path forks and – like another writer by the name of Frost – I have to decide whether to take the well trodden path or the one least taken. Or do I waste my life and just stand here unable to choose? Then again, is simply being here at this spot in the woods, surrounded by nature and where I am happiest, wasting my life?

I can feel the bits of fallen twig moving in the sand on the path under my feet when I walk on them. I close my eyes and I can hear the constant buzz of insect life and see the beech leaves gently swaying on a whisper of a breeze that is barely audible, but is just enough to make the leaves dance. And below them, in springtime, an endless sea of bluebells that me and my younger brother would pick and take home for mum. The smell of earthiness all around me as fallen leaves decay into fresh soil and bring about new life. This place where I stand leaning against the sun-warmed sandstone wall in the woods, on this sandy path, in dappled light beneath the century old beech trees is warm, safe, familiar and comfortable. It is where I feel most at home, most rooted if you like. Despite the years passing, and the distance I am from it, everything is fresh and in the now.

This place is also where, 27 years after my departure from by birth place, I returned, briefly, with the ashes of my parents. They followed me, my wife and most importantly, their first grandchild out to New Zealand to live, back in 1990, having never even visited there before. Abandoning their roots, their friends, their entire previous lives. They asked that, eventually, their ashes be returned to the woods where they once walked. These woods where my father scattered the ashes of his parents – returning them to nature – ashes to ashes, dust to dust. This is the place I chose to scatter their earthly remains, beneath the beech trees with a good view of the springtime bluebells that my mum loved so much. It was the least that I could do for them. It’s also the place that I wept inconsolably as I scattered their ashes, despite the fact that they had both died a couple of years earlier, so those wounds were no longer new, fresh and raw. I wept not for them, but for myself….in my own typically selfish way. For they had returned to their roots and could never be separated from them. They belonged.

I had made some notes about life and being and belonging that I was going to refer to and work into this post, but once I got going the piece more or less wrote itself and I didn’t need them. I can perhaps use the notes when I tackle my review of Kingsnorth’s book. As usual thank you for reading. I honestly do appreciate any constructive comments.

The bad news is that WE are the problem. The good news is that we can also be the solution….if we want to be.

It was a rainy evening so, with nothing much else that needed my attention I thought I’d spend an hour or so on YouTube. I guess, due to the algorithms that YouTube use, based on my most recent searches and views, they suggested I may be interested in content from a provider called CURRENT IRELAND who were running the first of a string of episodes to be hosted by Jennifer Boyer, head of the Dublin School of Architecture, TU Dublin. These episodes are intended to be broadly related to the theme of consciousness and social responsibility.

Since I have no idea about architecture – except in knowing what I like or dislike about a building simply based on aesthetics – I was tempted to X out of it, but then noticed that their guest was Paul Kingsnorth. Kingsnorth was (actually still is at heart, despite his protestations) an environmental activist. He’s also a writer of fact and fiction, a poet, a recent convert to Christianity, a champion of traditional England and a simpler way of life, and he’s one of a dying breed of men – a great thinker. I don’t always agree with everything that Kingsnorth says, but I do have a great respect for the man and his ideas and ideals.

Kingsnorth delivered a few startling facts and figures about the impact of humans on the planet and other species, particularly since the industrial revolution. But before I get to that, can I just say that here in New Zealand our government have set a target of 65% greenhouse gas emission reduction by 2030. Frankly I can’t see it happening because the current government have been in charge since 2017 and have had no impact on climate change figures over the 5 years that they have been in power. There was a big reduction during March of 2020 during the 4 week Covid lockdown, but that soon rose to pre lockdown levels again.

Another thing is that they are fighting the symptoms of Climate Change rather than the cause. They would rather blame New Zealand farmers for methane emissions from cows belching and farting and so tax them, rather than tackling the real problem which is the continuing push for economic growth. Economic growth as a guide to a nations wellbeing is absurd. We’re burying ourselves under mountains of stuff we don’t need, in order to keep the economy on an upward trend, making a few billionaires even richer, at the expense of nature and other species. WE are the cause of Climate Change…..and if you don’t believe in man made Climate Change, you can hardly deny the polluting effect that man has had on the earth, the seas and the air. Our need to consume is killing the planet and every other species on it.

The big problem is that we like our stuff and we don’t want to give it up. We want the latest iPhone, tablet, smart watch, MacBook, smart TV, in home A.I. – we’ve become addicted to our gadgets. We don’t need all the things we amass around us. Many of us have so much stuff that we have to hire off site storage containers. We have allowed everything on earth, including everything in the natural world to be commodified, given a dollar value, and once that happens it all becomes a resource to be exploited. WE can stop it, but we don’t want to. We love our stuff more than nature, more than other disappearing species, more than our fellow man and more than our children and grandchildren. Why else would we continue to drive the bus, that is humanity, at ever increasing speed toward a high cliff? We have the ability to apply the brakes, to change course and steer away, but we haven’t so far and probably won’t.

The only thing that will possibly save us, if not the planet, is when our civilization, driven by our economy collapses. I say when, not if. The signs are all around us of almost imminent collapse. Spiraling debt, supply chain issues (thanks to our reliance on globalism), rising cost of living, the lowest stock market figures since the financial crisis of 2008, desertion of the church and spiritual beliefs, a lack of what used to be called moral fibre. The constant need for more, more, more. A lack of sense of community – even more so since the Covid pandemic, lockdowns and a huge increase of doing everything on line and becoming physically and emotionally isolated from the world around us. Community has been in a slow state of decline for at least the last 40 years. A rise of The Police State and the Surveillance State, Political tension around the world. Russia and Ukraine – China and Taiwan – the endless Middle East problems. Something has to give, sooner or later.

Anyhow, getting back to Kingsnorth and his facts and figures. He pointed out that everyone wants the modern lifestyle and all the trinkets, baubles and gadgets that go with it. Businesses want increased profits and “a growth economy”. But for us to maintain this lifestyle we need the resources of 3 and a half planet Earths…..and we only have one. If we do go on at this pace -toward the metaphorical cliff – we guarantee our deaths and that of most of the earths other species. He also pointed out that we won’t change things by moaning about it on social media, by endless Tweets, or by petitions or marching in the street. We can only change things by changing what we do in our own lives, and we need everyone to follow suit. We need to walk the walk, not just talk about it.

BUT again we probably won’t, and if we do, we could fall in to a trap and become part of Klaus Schwab’s “Great Reset” – we will own nothing and we will be happy – according to Mr Schwab.

We are currently in the 6th mass extinction event. The last one was about 60 million years ago and that one caused the extinction of the dinosaurs – possibly due to an asteroid impacting the Earth. The 6th mass extinction is not caused by an asteroid, but by humans and our way of life. The World Wildlife Fund states that since the early 1970’s man has been responsible for the demise of 60% of the worlds mammals, birds and reptiles. The most dramatic decline being in central and south America where the wildlife populations have collapsed by 89%. This is over a time period of less than 50 years.

Over the last 10,000 years which basically covers the arrival of human civilization, it’s estimated that we’ve lost 83% of all wild mammals. These are just a few of the depressing figures that show that we as a species are not just part of the problem of the decline of the natural world, but THE problem. Our effect on nature has been devastating and it’s way past time that we started to both accept responsibility and more importantly to act in a responsible manner. This requires a complete change in the way we think and the way that we do things. It means abandoning the growth economy model and living in a more gentle way on the earth, in harmony with nature and with a reverence toward nature. So there is a way that we can be the solution to the problem that we have caused….that’s the good news.

The worse news of course is that we’re too comfortable and too greedy to change our ways, even if it means the total destruction of life on earth, including our own. We’re meant to be the smartest beings on earth….at least that’s what we claim to be. What we’ve done and what we will most likely continue to do is not at all smart.

Modern man relies on advances in technology to solve all our problems, rather than just ceasing our bad habits and being responsible beings. Technology will not save us. In fact, and here’s an interesting figure to ponder over, internet data storage facilities currently emit the same amount of greenhouse gasses as the entire global aviation industry. Get your mind around that little nugget. Just by being on our smart devices – to which we’ve all become accustomed and dare I say addicted – we are doing as much damage as every plane on the entire planet. I don’t have the latest figures but in 2017, at any one time there were on average 9728 commercial flights in the air. That’s a lot of flights and a lot of pollution – but we equal it with our reliance on the world wide web. It’s also estimated that the internet will consume a fifth of the worlds electricity by 2025. Who still thinks that progress is always a good thing?

If everyone in the world deleted their social media accounts today, it wouldn’t only free up a lot of wasted time, it would also make a major contribution to reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Of course we won’t because it’s addictive and the “likes” we get give us a huge dopamine hit. Every time we go on Twitter to tweet about being angry about climate change, we are causing climate change. This is just one example of how we are seriously buggering up the planet.

Since the latest wipeout of species began, almost 50 years ago, there have only been 2 occasions where greenhouse gas emissions have fallen. Global agreements on greenhouse gas reduction, Paris Climate Change agreements etc. have done absolutely zero to reduce the amount of greenhouse gasses. Political solutions are not solutions. The carbon tax that polluting companies have to pay doesn’t reduce greenhouse gasses, it just monetizes the pollution. Planting a tree to offset your pollution is also not helping much in the long term. Stopping your pollution is the best way to solve the problem.

The years that emissions actually fell were 1990 – which was as a result of the fall of the Soviet Union and the corresponding decline of their major industries / closure of factories – and 2008 during the Global Financial Crisis when many businesses went to the wall and the global economy almost collapsed. So you see, there is a direct correlation between the rise of industry, the economic growth model and Climate change/pollution. But we won’t abandon this model until it’s too late. It makes most of us uncomfortable to even think about abandoning our technological lifestyles, giving up our smart toys and (anti)social media.

Our own government here in New Zealand made such a big deal about getting supermarkets to ban individual use plastic bags. Another feather in the cap for Saint Jacinda of the empathetic smile. A step in the right direction maybe, but not a big enough step to make much of a difference…..rather like fighting a forest fire by throwing a thimble full of water on it. We need meaningful actions and we all need to take responsibility, me included.

Kingsnorth doesn’t own a smart phone, but still uses the internet, and owns a petrol powered car. He lives a life that is gentler on nature than most of us, on a smallholding in western Ireland, growing his (and his family’s) own food, homeschooling his children so they have a healthy respect for the natural world, adding value to his community rather than turning his back on it….and trying still, to point out the error of our ways to us before it’s all too late.

Thank you for reading. Comments are always appreciated.

Life imitating fiction.

I find it quite ironic that someone over a hundred years ago has a better grasp on what is happening today, to humanity, than many of the people (read “sheeple”) of today.

There have of course been other writers who have predicted our future through their writing – such as George Orwell, Ray Bradbury, Sinclair Lewis, George R Stewart. These writers I knew of and have read their dystopian tales of the demise of the human species, or of the end of the world as we know it. But, I hadn’t realised that E.M. Forster was amongst their ranks,(if only for one story) until I was made aware of his short story The Machine Stops – written in 1909 – which was mentioned in an interview on YouTube with “reformed environmentalist” Paul Kingsnorth.

There are many eerie parallels in Forster’s story with what our society today seems to be adapting as the way forward. I’m referring to people staying in their own little bubbles (in the story these are pods underground), isolated from the outside world, communicating via screens and other devices, relying on The Machine (big government/big pharma/big tech) to meet their needs. All they need to do is follow the rules and do as they are told and they will be housed and fed, given access to medical care and be allowed heavily censored information that has already been through ten retellings so that they can not tell fact from fiction – real news from fake news. Basically the “Facebook Factcheckers” on steroids. Original thought, unless it falls in line with the doctrine of The Machine is not only frowned upon, but could have you cast out and made homeless. This is understood to be akin to a death sentence.

Transport – physical movement – outside of your designated pod, is only achievable if you first apply for permission. Going up and outside onto the earths surface, under the sky and clouds and sunlight is discouraged and is only achievable if you wear a respirator and have permission from The Machine….sound familiar?

The human species in the story have been genetically selected (Eugenics….as promoted these days, by the likes of Bill Gates)- by The Machine – to become little more than unmoving blobs of pasty flesh, devoid of sunlight, who sit in their chairs all day connected to the outside world by their communication devices – much like plugging into virtual reality worlds of today. The only time they get out of their chairs is to go to bed. Athletic types are not allowed to breed as they are deemed unsuitable in this new world where sitting all day is the new normal.

Physical contact with other humans – to touch another person – is considered uncivilized. Everything is done (on line) via The Machine. The Machine tells them what to do, how to behave, what to think.

Not only are there parallels with the world wide covid-19 regulations, but also very ominous similarities with the World Economic Forum’s “Great Reset”. I would hate to think that we would allow ourselves to be manipulated into a dystopian nightmare such as the world described by Forster. However, the last 2 years have proved how compliant we are, on the whole. So, perhaps our fate is sealed?

BUT….that’s just my opinion. What do you think?

I’ll link E. M. Forster’s – “The Machine Stops” below. It is a PDF just 25 pages long and definitely worth a read if you haven’t come across it before.

Click to access Machine_stops.pdf

And for those who claim that the Great Reset is nothing more than conspiracy theory, here is a link to the World Economic Forum website where you can read articles and view videos all about how our future will be, after the Great Reset, according to Klaus Schwab. Our consumer driven lifestyles and our pursuit of “progress”, profits and Capitalism is pushing us closer to Forster’s dystopian future – which is what the WEF is all about, only now they have adopted buzz words such as sustainability……sustaining their wealth perhaps?

https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/06/now-is-the-time-for-a-great-reset/

“Be the change”….but do it soon.

The quote “Be the change you want to see in the world”, was attributed to Mahatma Gandhi….some would say falsely. It appears that the closest he came to saying these words, or something along their lines, was: “If we could change ourselves, the tendencies in the world would also change”.

The actual phrase may have been said much later – in 1970 – well after Gandhi’s death, by New Age Teacher Arleen Lorrance, who taught at Thomas Jefferson High School in Brooklyn. The concept of “be the change you wish to see in the world,” began in a report about The Love Project written by Ms. Lorrance, and published in an education reform text. But this doesn’t detract from the sentiment of the phrase, no matter who said it.

Henry David Thoreau, he of Walden fame, said something similar earlier still than Gandhi, when he said Live your beliefs and you can turn the world around. Actually, Thoreau had a great belief system and came up with some very worthy and notable quotations. He could certainly see through the veil of crap that that the political and the industrial systems put up between them and the public to keep the citizens in the dark, meekly following on as they are told. As follows…..

If a man walks in the woods for love of them half of each day, he is in danger of being regarded as a loafer. But if he spends his days as a speculator, shearing off those woods and making the earth bald before her time, he is deemed an industrious and enterprising citizen.

If the machine of government is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then, I say, break the law.

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.

There is no value in life except what you choose to place upon it and no happiness in any place except what you bring to it yourself.

There are moments when all anxiety and stated toil are becalmed in the infinite leisure and repose of nature.

Heaven is under our feet as well as over our heads.

Thank God men cannot fly, and lay waste the sky as well as the earth.

Thoreau died in 1862, well before the Wright Brothers first flight, but even back then he could see the amount of destruction that mankind could inflict on the earth. Of course since the late 1800’s and into the 1900’s our rate of destruction has ramped up to a terrifying level. Thoreau is best known for his book Walden, a reflection upon simple living in natural surroundings, which he wrote in a basic cabin beside Walden Pond in the woods near Concord, Massachusetts. He is also known for his essay “Civil Disobedience”, an argument for disobedience to an unjust state. In which he encourages the people to stand up to the state machine, which has since morphed into our consumer driven system, that seems hell bent on destroying nature and our relationship with the earth and each other.

His banner….his writing legacy that is… about us being one with nature, of us protecting nature and ourselves as a part of nature, rather than being apart from nature…..has been taken up by other writers of the present day such as – Wendell Erdman Berry, an American novelist, poet, essayist, environmental activist, cultural critic, and farmer – Mark Boyle, a.k.a. The Moneyless Man, an Irish activist and writer best known for founding the online Freeconomy Community – Paul Kingsnorth, an English writer and thinker. Former deputy-editor of The Ecologist and a co-founder of the Dark Mountain Project.

All of the above writers are inspirational in their regard for protecting nature….for natures sake, not just because someone has placed a monetary value on nature. Please read them, become inspired by them, and become part of the solution, not part of the problem that we face today, as we continue to allow “the system” to rape and pillage nature. Sometimes, “the Law” won’t protect that which needs to be protected, because the people who make the laws are the ones doing the plundering….or benefiting financially from those who do the plundering. I’ll leave you with one last quote. This time from Earth Liberation Front spokesperson Leslie James Pickering, who said:

…..the vast majority of efforts made in the name of environmentalism are done so through state-sanctioned means to social change. But when the system itself is precisely what is enabling and promoting oppression, how is it logical to expect that same system to provide avenues toward liberation?

In other words, the answer to our environmental/climate problem are not going to come from the same source as those who support the industries and ways of life that are causing the problem. Government and the corporate world are not going to make changes unless forced to do so.

Please look into what Paul Kingsnorth, Mark Boyle and the Earth Liberation Front think are the answers.

3 Essayists – review (continued)

This is the second part of my (former) post of reviews of what was to be 5 books of essays….3 by writers now dead (already covered in an earlier post) and this is a review of the remaining 2 books by writers still very much alive – plus another live writer thrown in for good measure.

The books selected of 3 living essayists.

OK, so now I have managed to confuse you….the books being covered are TEJU COLE – Known and Strange Things, PAUL KINGSNORTH – Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist and other essays, and REBECCA SOLNIT – The Faraway Nearby. I’ll work my way from left to right on the photo.

Teju Cole’s book Known and Strange Things….To be perfectly honest with you, despite the endorsement on the cover of this book, by fellow essayist Rebecca Solnit, I struggled initially to connect with Teju Cole’s writing. That was until I found the essay titled Shadows in Sao Paulo, which is about the writers attempt to locate the exact spot that Magnum photographer Rene Burri took his famous photo of “Men on a Rooftop”.

It’s a black and white photo of 4 men on a rooftop of one of the many skyscrapers in Sao Paulo, casting long shadows as they walk toward the camera. To the left of them and far down below the street scene unfolds….the cars and trams also throwing long shadows down the street. The tram lines adding to the series of straight lines provided by the street, the walls of the buildings, the lines created by the many windows, and the edges of the rooftop. The photo taken in 1960 is from a higher vantage point and it’s this building that Teju Cole tries to locate. Being as I am, a huge fan of most, if not all, of the photographers who have worked for the Magnum Photo Agency – this essay is the one in which Cole and I hit on common ground, a common interest. From here on in I was able to enjoy his writing more (strange as it may seem).

The essays in this book were originally published mainly in the New Yorker, and elsewhere and, once I got connected with Cole via the Rene Burri essay I quite enjoyed the majority of his essays. However the “white saviour industrial complex” essay left a kind of nasty taste in my mouth….if that’s possible from reading something? It just seemed to be much of a rant rather than a serious piece of writing. I guess reading essays, just like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder…..what suits me may not suit you, your reaction may not be the same as mine.

Petina Gappah of the Guardian newspaper – obviously a fan of Cole’s – writes… He ranges over his interests with voracious keenness, laser-sharp prose, an open heart and a clear eye. His subjects are diverse and disparate. Readers are certain to find a personal favourite: I loved Always Returning, an affecting meditation on the death of WG Sebald in which Cole wanders through the cemetery of St Andrew’s in Framingham Earl, Norfolk, looking for Sebald’s grave and trying, at the same time, to have a coherent conversation about his pilgrimage with Jason, the taxi driver who got him there. The interplay between the externals of conversations with Jason and the deep interiority of Cole’s response to seeing Sebald’s grave is masterfully written, with Cole straining to act as a mediator between the worlds inhabited by these two very different men.

By contrast I found Paul Kingsnorth’s Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist to be a very easy, entertaining and interesting read. Kingsnorth was one of those crazy environmentalists (and I use crazy by way of admiration rather than criticism), who used to chain himself to bulldozers and other machinery to try to stop developers from levelling another of natures hilly places – to put a motorway through….or wiping out old growth forest, so that Ikea and similar businesses can make more kitset furniture. I say WAS because now he’s taken a step back physically, if not spiritually from the “war against environmental destruction”. He sees the entire environmental movement as having been hijacked and watered down by factions of the Green movement, who in a bid to communicate natures value to society have now put a dollar value on it. Of course the problem with that, as Kingsnorth points out, is that once nature is given a dollar value, a businessman will justify buying and destroying it based on that valuation.

The essays in this book first appeared in various newspapers and on the website co-founded by Kingsnorth, called The Dark Mountain Project. Each one will provide an insight to the problems the world faces daily as our natural world shrinks past crisis point and consumerist growth economies grow and grow to unsustainable size, until their inevitable collapse and chaos that are surely just around the corner.

Although Kingsnorth has pulled back from being a placard waving demonstrator, his passion for nature and his attempts to convince us, the readers, that nature is worth fighting for…..even if we may be already too late to save it….is as strong as ever. He and his family have retreated to a smallholding in the west of Ireland where they practice what they preach and are as gentle with nature as possible in an attempt to become part of nature again…as mankind used to be….and to help the natural world regenerate. It’s a book that I believe should be mandatory reading in all schools AND for all politicians.

In the book Kingsnorth rejoices in the small wins that the family achieve in their bid to help nature fight back….and in helping his children to understand the magical natural world….how everything is inter-dependent, so that he knows that the next generation will be there on natures side.

In the essay A Short History of Loss, Kingsnorth looks at the problem that beekeepers are having with colony collapse and how a Harvard study linked the death of bees to certain insecticides used on farms – then continues to say that another Harvard group of scientists are working on designing robotic bees. A typical science response – rather than stop using insecticide and saving the lives of real bees, we’ll just make artificial bees and try to program them to act like real bees. It’s like the idea of colonising Mars because we’re destroying the environment here on Earth. Wouldn’t it be more sensible to stop the destruction here?

Kingsnorth then goes on to say that mankind…(or is it more PC these days to call it Humankind?) has experienced a Fall – just like the Bible story of Adam and Eve’s experience of a fall in their eviction from the Garden of Eden. He then tries to identify where the Fall happened….where and when… giving several possible examples. It makes interesting and thought provoking reading.

Another very down to earth and slightly stinky essay about composting human manure in Learning What to Make of It – is a more hands on approach to conserving the environment. It’s a fact that we, as humans, produce waste….so what’s the best way of dealing with it? We can’t continue to pour raw sewage into the rivers, lakes and oceans. So what’s the answer? Read this essay to find out.

Another essay The Barcode Moment – touches on conspiracy theory and the possible future of the monetary system. That at some point we may end up wearing a barcode on the skin, (or possibly a chip under the skin…in my own opinion), to use when making purchases, rather than a bank card or actual money. Thought provoking again.

In other essays he tells us about writers who’s works have formed him as a writer, revolutionaries and the ethics involved in fighting for what we believe in.

I’ll finish with a couple of quotes from the back cover of the book, and to urge you all to please read this book and try to understand where we are in the race against time.

Paul Kingsnorth reads carefully from the book of nature, and also from the great literature of the natural world; they give him, and the reader, one path out of the despair that comes from knowing a bit too much about our condition. – Bill McKibben

…as the environmental movement began to focus on “sustainability” rather than the defence of wild places for their own sake, and as global conditions worsened, he grew disenchanted with the movement that he once embraced. He gave up what he saw as false hope that the residents of the first world would ever make the kind of sacrifices that might avert the severe consequences of climate change…..Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist gathers the wave-making essays that have charted the change in Kingsnorth’s thinking. In them he articulates a new vision, one that stands firmly in opposition to the belief that technology can save us, and he argues for a renewed balance between the human and the non-human worlds.

And so to the final of the three books – Rebecca Solnit’s The Faraway Nearby – published in 2013.

I’ll jump straight to the back cover blurb to begin with….Gifts come in many guises. One summer Rebecca Solnit was given a box of ripening apricots, fruit from a neglected tree that her mother, gradually succumbing to memory loss, could no longer tend to. From this unexpected inheritance Solnit weaves together memoir, fairytales and the lives of others into a meditation of the art of storytelling. Encompassing explorers and monsters, the Marquis de Sade and Mary Shelley, a library of water in Iceland and the depths of the Grand Canyon, the result is a literary treasure trove from a writer of limitless talent and imagination.

Wow….some build up. Lets hope the book lives up to it. Back soon….

I may end up writing this piecemeal – as I find essays that I connect with, that resonate with me. The first of which is the first essay in the book…essay 1 titled Apricots. In this essay Solnit becomes the owner of a huge box of apricots….from her mothers tree, after her mother who is suffering from dementia, can’t cope with them. She writes about the trials and tribulations, sadness and confusion of having a parent who is losing their faculties. It’s a heartfelt piece and something that I am more than familiar with having lost my own mother to Alzheimer’s over 4 years ago and my dad 6 months earlier who had another dementia related illness. She writes very well about the various stages of confusion and frustration that her mother went through as she slowly but surely lost her mind and her identity. In reading Apricots, it opened up some old wounds that I thought were forgotten. Which I guess shows what a good writer Solnit is. I’m now wondering if writing my own essay as another blog post about my experience with my own parents would help to heal those freshly opened wounds? I’ll think on it. If I do, I’ll call it “An evil Bastard called Al” (as in AL-zheimers), as it is an evil and vicious illness. Meantime, back to the next essay from the book.

In my younger years I used to love watching the old black and white “Hammer House of Horror” movies on TV. The classic stories were the best….the ones about the Wolf-man, or Dracula…or Frankenstein. So Solnit’s 3rd essay in the book, entitled simply Ice is my next port of call. This essay is for the most part about Mary Shelley, the author of Frankenstein, the writing of the book, and her life and marriage to the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley….Solnit also touches on the life of Mary Shelley’s mother Mary Wollstonecraft, who died giving birth to her daughter. As one would expect of Solnit’s writing, it’s a well researched and well crafted piece. Quite fascinating to read. I don’t want to say anymore…please read it yourself.

The 5th Essay titled Breath begins briefly about the Marquis de Sade, but is about life and death, degeneration and regeneration and how everything is in a constant state of change. It brings together The Marquis de Sade, Zen Buddhism, the god Apollo and even the joys of cooking. Art as life, life as art, artists and philosophers, travel and cancer detection…and of course life as a journey from birth to death and everything in between.. are all woven into an intricate, almost spellbinding essay.

I could summarise every essay, as they are all well worth reading, but we’d be here all day so I’ll slide along to the end of the book instead. The final, and 13th essay of the book is titled Apricots (as was essay number 1) and we come full circle as Solnit compares the apricots and the things she made from them, thus preserving them, to life and a number of incidents either in her life or the lives of others. She includes many stories – one particular story about a young girl who fell into and became trapped down a well, deep underground, and had to be rescued by drilling a parallel tunnel and lowering a man, face down, down the tunnel to free the girl. It was a long and dangerous mission. Happily she lived and the publicity her rescue generated brought in donations of over a million dollars to give her and her parents an easier life than they would have otherwise had. Her rescuer became famous. BUT there are two sides to every coin and where a story brings good news, it can also bring bad. The man who rescued her, was so traumatised by the experience that he later took his own life. In effect trading his life for hers. The Grim Reaper’s way of balancing the books perhaps? Thus emphasizing how both fame and life are transitory. Life is an adventure and an unpredictable adventure at that. It tosses you a ball to hit out of the park one day and throws you a curve ball, that hit’s you right on the bridge of the nose, the next. One of Solnit’s mantras is “Never turn down an adventure without a really good reason”. If you have to have a mantra I reckon that’s a pretty good one to have.

I have said in an earlier post that I am an admirer of Solnit’s work, having bought one of her books on a visit to San Francisco earlier this year. This book of essays goes a long way in confirming my earlier opinion.

And that brings to an end my round up of books by three living essayists to counter balance my earlier post about the three dead ones. Again, thank you for reading and I am always grateful for any likes, shares, comments, or recommendations of other essayists worth reading.

After we stop pretending….

If you look at this post’s title and wonder “after we stop pretending” about what? I’ll get to that shortly. It’s a prickly subject and it will make a lot of people very uncomfortable. Others won’t feel any discomfort or shame simply because they (a) don’t understand the problem or (b) just don’t give a shit. But please bear with me and I’ll do my best to explain.

Have you ever started on something and it leads to something else and that leads to somewhere else, or an idea, or pattern of thought that hadn’t occurred to you? That’s kind of how I got here….to the After We Stop Pretending thing…and it’s all my wife’s fault. Let me explain.

She, like me, has become very disenchanted by the direction that modern society is going in. Being connected to Wifi, the world wide web, to our phones, to technology, to over consumption of stuff….but completely disconnected from one another, from society, from community and most of all from nature. However, unlike me – I who am content to moan and bitch about how, as a species, we’ve lost our way and how terrible this disconnect with nature is – my wife tends to look deeper into the problem and to try to find out if it can be solved. It was her search to find ways of disconnecting from technology and reconnecting with nature that brought her to Mark Boyle – an Irishman, writer, environmentalist, free thinker and freeconomist – who was formerly as entrenched in the system as the rest of us, having trained as an economist.

Mark Boyle has written a book, (actually he’s written a few books…..but this one in particular was one my wife was drawn to), called “The Moneyless Man”. Which is about how he took a year off from the system – from modern day life – from the economy – from consumerism – and lived for 12 months without money. (This actually became his way of life for a 3 year period, not one). Both to see if it could be done at all and also as a bit of a social experiment. He didn’t completely disconnect from technology though. He lived in a caravan on someone’s farm – he was allowed to park the caravan there in exchange for several days labour in the fields each month. On the caravan he had a solar panel with which he would charge his cell phone – on which he could only accept incoming calls as he had no money to make outgoing calls – and his laptop on which to write his book and a number of newspaper and magazine articles about his one year of living without money. He used a bike for transport and his food came partly from what he grew, partly from what he could forage in the wild and partly from dumpster diving behind the supermarket in the nearby town. His life for the next 12 months proved that necessity is indeed the mother of invention AND that living without money is a possibility.

This first book brought my wife to Boyle’s latest book called “The Way Home” – in which, 9 years on from his moneyless experiment, he has now built his own cabin, has realised that money is in some cases necessary – so has used the money from his book sales to purchase some land of his own – but has opened it up for anyone to live there. He has totally kicked modern technology into touch, even his phone and laptop have now gone. He still writes, but on recycled paper, with pens he finds here and there abandoned or lost by other people. His philosophy is one of paying it forward – he does things for people without expecting anything in return. There is no quid pro quo with Boyle.

It is this recent book, The Way Home (2019), that provides us with the next link. In The Way Home, Boyle refers to another writer by the name of Paul Kingsnorth. Kingsnorth is a former journalist, former editor of the Ecologist and according to his book is “A Recovering Environmentalist”. He is co founder of The Dark Mountain Project – a haven for writers who have seen through the veil of misinformation and fabrication of todays society, have come to the conclusion that the environmental movement has been hijacked by big business and political clout, decided that as things stand our disconnect from nature and our belief in the ideals of consumerism and the growth economy will push us not just to the brink of extinction, but over the brink. After the collapse of the system, perhaps people views about the sanity of the status quo will change. Only After We Stop Pretending can we make the changes in the way we live, that we should have made 40 years ago and get down to the work of re-growing a living culture.

Paul Kingsnorth used to be an environmentalist who put his body on the line to protest abuses of the environment. This video is about his current take on environmentalism, the life we live and why it’s too late for us to save the earth. It’s 49 minutes long but very interesting and has many truths.

Much is made these days about buzz words like “sustainability”. It used to be about sustaining and about not abusing nature or “natural resources”. These days the green movement is more about sustaining our life style by replacing one thing with it’s perceived “eco” counterpart. Environmentalism has become about sustainable development – which let’s face it is an oxymoron. Big business and the consumer lifestyle must, it seems, be the things that we place the priority on sustaining.

We have had countless feel good rallies in parks, marches to parliament to present petitions about protecting the environment, to which a smiling politician speaks a few empty promises about looking into the problem….probably involving committees and sub committees and flights overseas to see how other governments are handling the “environment problem”. But nothing happens to slow down the wheels of industry, of commerce, of commercialism.

We’ve had countless years of presentations of scientific evidence, discussions, debates and resolutions at the United Nations – yet still nothing has been done to slow the commercial machine – CO2 emissions continue to rise, pollution of the air and seas continues unabated, the rain forests continue to be cleared at alarming rates, the icecaps and glaciers continue to melt, sea level continues to rise as do average temperatures. But it’s all okay, none of this will affect the value of your shares on the stock exchange. Despite all the international agreements and environmental protection agencies we are destroying and polluting at an ever increasing rate. Changing your lightbulbs to energy efficient ones or banning single use plastic bags in supermarkets – whilst a step in the right direction – are not going to solve the problems we face and are in fact a case of too little, much too late.

The problem is a result of the system we follow, blindly. It’s not just about our consumption of, and our reliance on, fossil fuels that is the problem – it’s about the need to change the system that drives this consumption. This is the truth that everyone skirts around because of fear of how the abandoning of the growth economy system will affect their lifestyle.

The more disconnected we are from the source of our food, the less we value it and the more wasteful we become. If I can explain….go back to hunter gatherer time…Back when we were hunter gatherers we would spend a couple of hours a day sourcing our food from the forests and streams in the locality of our home base. We’d work along side and within the natural world – take as much as we needed from nature, eat it that day, fresh and then start the whole process again the next day. Rinse and repeat.

Then some bright spark had the idea of gathering some seeds from the bushes and plants that they found in nature and farming the ground close to home base to grow the food we needed right on our doorstep. Because we now take care in tending our food supply it takes us a little longer, but we are still very connected to our food and to nature. We value it and take only what we need. Jumping forward several hundred years we have for the most part separated ourselves from nature. We now live in cities and work 8 hour days, or more, in order to earn these tokens called money. With this money, we can pay for other people, sometimes on the other side of the planet to grow our food for us, pay for the mining and refining of the fossil fuel to power the trucks, ships and planes to bring it thousands of kilometres to a supermarket near us, where we can jump into our cars, using more fossil fuel, to drive to the supermarket to collect the food, (now mostly wrapped in plastic packaging on Styrofoam trays), that we once used to grow fresh on our own doorstep. We have no idea about how much petro-chemical sprays or other toxic materials have been used in the production of our food – which is now grown for shape and colour and shelf life rather than for any nutritional value. And then we waste a third of all the food we buy. This we call progress….and….civilisation. Is it just me, or can anyone else see that this just makes no sense at all?

Photo from Gloria’s Bits and Pieces on BlogSpot.com

And don’t even think to get me started on all the other rubbish that we import from around the world that is built only to last for a limited span of time. We have embraced the throw away society whole heartedly. We have fast food, fast fashions and even fast furnishings. All of which are tasteless and unfortunately get us addicted for more of the same. Anything to keep us spending that money and keep growing the economy. We are blasted by advertisements to buy more, update this, bigger that, new and improved…buy buy buy! Celebrity endorsements on TV, in magazines, on billboards, on the internet. We have so much stuff these days that off site storage is now a multi billion dollar business. It’s craziness. We haven’t just lost our way, we’re completely off the map. A byproduct of this greed for more stuff is that we need more land and more resources, to make the stuff, so we destroy nature, we wipe out hundreds of species weekly….WEEKLY…without even pausing to consider the consequences. We need to have the courage to change, to be responsible for our own actions and to do it quickly. Governments support the status quo – they are NOT going to save us if we don’t force them to.

It’s been said many times, so I’ll say it once more in the forlorn hope that this time someone will read it and say – yes that’s absolutely right, and make the change that we all need for our survival – “You can not have infinite growth on a finite planet”. So, yes we need to Stop Pretending that everything is just fine and dandy. The science says that we may have already passed the tipping point or are within a year or two of it. It’s frightening, but we need to accept that, to look despair right in the face and change the way we live. Let’s not make things any worse than they are already going to be. Is it only when money, credit and “the economy” are seen to be nothing more than the Emperors New Clothes of fairly tales and the system comes crashing down around our ears that most of us will finally admit that it was doomed to fail all along, and try to change the system to one of living with nature. We must realise that we are part of the natural world, not above it.

If anyone is interested in finding out more about the Dark Mountain Project, the link to their website is https://dark-mountain.net/

Mark Boyle (the moneyless man) will be at Scotland’s Booktown – Wigtown – for their annual book festival, appearing on 4th October 2019. He’ll be talking about his latest book and his life without technology.

What does it mean to be human as boundaries between man and machine blur? Mark Boyle tried to find out, embracing life with no running water, car or electricity. The former business graduate, who once lived without money for three years, talks about his remarkable life on a Galway smallholding.