"we are unlikely to achieve anything close to sustainability in any area unless we work for the broader goal of becoming native in the modern world, and that means becoming native to our places in a coherent community, that is, in turn, embedded in the ecological realities of the surrounding landscape."
wes jackson
it sounds to me like wes is saying that it's high time we ditched the consumerist utopia that capital has unleashed on us and get a grip on living within our ecological means...adapting ourselves to local abundances and shortfalls and learning to eat in season again...becoming cohesive and mutually supporting local communities...familiar with what can and cannot be accomplished...what the "landscape" will tolerate in the way of human intervention and what must be left alone if there is a chance to live within our ecological means...what the coach would call culture...humans used to have it in a diverse abundance until around five hundred years ago...when technology gave some pathologically avaricious people the means to destroy the culture of others and take what they found of value in the process...never realizing that what they destroyed was easily as valuable as what they took...we are probably all gong to pay a fairly steep price for those acts of wonton ignorance and the hubris they engendered...their heirs are still too blinded by their need for more to see we can't really exist outside a culture...its what we co-evolved with...made us human, no?
the teosinte ears are just a prop...part of my local ecology that has migrated to my backyard because technology transported the seeds to me.
No comments:
Post a Comment