Day 4 With this background, today we consider a very important question: How might we find, inhabit and share a middle ground between the civil and the wild, a common ground between the narratives of science and society with the stories of community and family? How do we find a clear path from our destructive past into a more beneficent future that affirms common cause between humanity and other life forms, allowing our homes and habitats to exist together in shared benefit? Once there were vast rolling prairies with millions of buffalo moving across them, where once also there were small bands of Native families migrating across the land in seasonal rhythms, sustained by the great variety of forbs, grasses and other life. Now there is so little left, a fraction of the abundance that once was - preserves, reserves and parks, a few representatives, reservations and small remnants - for which we hold great responsibility. During the last ice age the Land shifted; as it ended Life migrated; and later natural and human Law was turned and twisted, manipulated into producing surprising, unanticipated landscape changes. In the past few centuries these alterations quickened as we changed ourselves from foragers into fur traders, and then into farmers, foresters, financiers, and finally into fun-seekers, overrunning the Land and other Life. As our contact with the Land became more specialized and distant, it became ever more fragmented. At the same time our own health and happiness declined, as community and family life similarly deteriorated. Can we organize the most salient challenges such changes have wrought in this journey through time? There are many paradoxes as we examine the challenges in such historical shifts in human migration, technological innovation, and population growth and settlement that illuminate historical shifts in three areas: Innovation (things, tools, technologies), increasing ease and speed of travel and transportation (time), and inverting people and production priorities (timing and placement of transactions). I propose three major aspects of consequence in regards to our relations with the landscape: While changing from using moccasins to boots and trading lodges for houses meant more effective protection from the elements and easier survival … insulation against natural forces contribute to our being oblivious to the consequences in the human use of force; we have reduced harm by encapsulating ourselves, as we increase harm to all else, fundamentally changing personal agency and power. While shifting from using walking trails to using canoe routes, wagon roads, canals, railways, highways and finally airways has created more links, the result is often less connection … making the flow of things, people, information and energy easier, faster and more efficient isolates and disengages us from one another, fundamentally changing how we attach and connect. While moving and managing objects, people, energy, and information among corporate entities at a faster and faster pace leads to more productivity, it may also lead to less contribution to those we care about, during our unavoidably busy work engagements… constructing group forms which organize individuals more productively separates us from our families and neighbors, alienating us from proximal communal life … fundamentally changing our priorities and values. I call these major historical shifts individualization of force (which, at its extreme, for instance, fosters road rage, urban snipers, and the creation of IED’s), acceleration of flow (long to-do lists, multi-tasking, and virtual relationships via cell phone), and reversal, inversion of form (a shift from ‘many serving the one’ to ‘one serving the many’). These shifts begin to describe the specific mechanisms whereby we are losing personal happiness, interpersonal harmony, and social health and they begin long ago. * Individualization of force (insulation of individuals from the effects of its use, alteration in perception of reality) * Acceleration of flow (objectification, materialization and abstraction of relationship) * Reversal of form (inversion, modularization, and mass production of social relations) Reversal, Inversion of Form The original adaptive shift from unicellular life to multi-cellular life was a shift in organizational adaptation from one serving itself to many serving one another. However, as hunter-gathering omnivores we shifted from accessing many plants to using only a few plants - from foraging to horticulture and agriculture, from accessing many different animals to using only a few animals - from hunting to herding and domestication. This shifting from many serving the one to one serving the many has taken many forms: now many families and communities use one aquifer, whole communities rely on using the same soils over and over again in the corn-belt; now millions rely upon only a few resources transported as commodities to us in centralized centers. As we moved away from primarily securing sustenance for ourselves and our families toward serving others (market and service industries), we made a similar shift toward ‘one serving the many’ in each fundamental enterprise - that which serves the body (healthcare), the heart (human services), the mind (education) and the soul (religion). This shifting across human systems to one physician serving many patients, one teacher serving many students, one priest serving many parishioners is in sharp contrast to vestiges of ‘many serving the one’ such as the experience of a baby shower, the activities of Habitat for Humanity or home schooling. This inversion of social form promoted large, hierarchical, top-down systems of governance and business in which those decision-makers at the top were most distant and disconnected from the consequences on the ground, but which allowed the application of great legal and financial corporate resources at the local level far beyond that available to local folks. Acceleration of Flow Always has Life moved and migrated across the landscape in manners determined by other creatures and various conditions. We had been so mobile, until we began to run into ourselves wherever we went. So, because there were few other empty places to travel to we settled and processed the Land and Life to yield greater energy benefits than when we traveled. But we sacrificed our time. Where before we spent much time however we wanted when gifted with seasonal surpluses, later we came to work long hours, intensively producing, processing and storing a few food items. As our purpose in providing grew our playing and pausing became less. As we grew in numbers based upon our planned productions and storages, fewer and fewer specialists supplied more and more of our population. Distribution to distant members of our communities created an opportunity for innovations in transport and so also, like our food, did we begin to travel again. Since fewer and fewer specialists produced for more and more of our communities, most of the rest of us created crafts or worked for landholders as labor. This meant that we had to travel first to the market place and then to the work place. We were mobile again, but in a different fashion. We moved as individuals without our families to places they were not and we came home to them at the end of our working day; most of us no longer worked alongside our family or our neighbors. We became increasingly disconnected from the Land that supplied us and from the kin and social kinships that nurtured and supported us. We became consumers of one another (services). We now travel alone (long rides to the workplace) and travel faster across the landscape; we live in large numbers in one place and busily meet briefly in small groups in many different places away from home (workplace); and we spend most time in the marketplace not in natural habitats … (malls versus meadows). In the process of locating near to where we might work productively and purposively provide for our families, we built permanent structures that enclosed us called houses that specialized and encapsulated our living space much in the same way that work specialized and commercialized what we could do – there was a room for eating, rooms for sleeping, rooms for the kids and rooms to store things – there was a separate place for each specialized activity, even a so-called living room, very unlike Aldo Leopold’s shack or Henry David Thoreau’s cabin. In order to secure an adequate housing structure with many rooms that protected us from natural conditions of the natural environment, we had to travel further and spend more time working in order to “pay” for a specialist to build it. In order to travel further more quickly we needed more sophisticated transportation vehicles and smooth transportation routes and needed to spend more time working in order to “pay” for specialists and machines to build our cars and trucks for us. We lost our time and one another in ever increasing cycle of minimizing time and maximizing yield (productivity). We gave up our land and moved to the cities where there was more work. We covered our land with highways and housing developments, after cutting down the forests and plowing up the prairies for food production. We paved and covered the land with housings for all of the material “goods” we put in our separate rooms. We became commercialized consumers as first we cultivated the land from fencerow to fencerow, then constructed over the land with urban housing development and transportation routes, polluted the land with power production and distribution, and, finally, polluted our disembodied minds with ever faster and filling information across media networks. Day 5 How have these shifts affected our children?
Posted on: Tue, 01 Oct 2013 12:19:47 +0000
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