“Energy Crisis” Vs. Rewilding
I keep hearing people say we’ve got an energy crisis. This carries a few bullshit premises. The most obvious premise here: that we need “energy.” Why do we need energy? What does it do that’s so fucking important? Humans lived for millions of years without electricity. Indigenous hunter-gatherers had no need to create it. It requires an entire industrial economy that inherently destroys the land in order to create it. It does not make humans lives easier; it simply gives the rich more power and more destructive tools. How many people in the world even have electricity? We don’t need “energy.” At least not in the way they mean it. The energy crisis, as well as the economic crisis, really means that rich people continue to lose power, and they have so brain-washed us that we believe we need to do our part to keep the pyramid strong, our slavery in place. Civilization uses energy to take even more than we could without it. The less energy civilization has, the more limits it has to grow. That seems pretty fucking fantastic to me.
Nature provides all the energy we need in a sustainable way, as proven by 3 million years of human hunter-gatherers living on this planet without fucking it up. Think about the energy that hunter-gatherers used; seal blubber candle vs. light bulbs. Wood cooking fire vs. gas stove. Not only did hunter-gatherers have smaller scale societies (because they didn’t have agriculture induced population growth problems) but their energy usage came from “renewable” sources. They used the sun to dry food and wood to generate heat in the cold. This burning helped to break down the nutrients and minerals in the wood and make them readily available to fungi and bacteria. It also prevented the insanely destructive, large-scale forest fires we see today.
Without cheap oil or coal to generate the electricity and machinery, the industrial economy cannot exist. They call it “industrial” because machines (slaves, drones, robots) make it up, not people. Before industrial machinery, those in power used people. But it takes a slave with a stick a lot more time and energy to till a field than a farmer in his tractor. This excess of energy created the urban class of people, to manage the wealth (for the wealthy) created by these new machines. Real renewable energy does not mean a solar powered industrial economy. It means small-scale societies using hand-made tools (crafted from non-industrial materials) to encourage more biodiversity.
I don’t mean to say that everyone “should” stop using electricity and gas and everything. As long as you recognize you won’t have it forever, and as long as you use that excess energy to bring down civilization and promote cultures of rewilding. I use this computer, cell phone, cars, etc. etc. to educate people on how to live without them, and encourage them to stop these systems from destroying the planted. Remember, “green” technology doesn’t mean more sustainable” but “less destructive.” And more often it really means, “we’ve re-framed our marketing to pull the focus away from what we destroy, to point out what we don’t destroy so that you’ll forget that we continue to fuck shit up.”
I refer to the crisis that we really have going on as the “Bullshit Crisis.” Everyone listens to this civilized bullshit and just takes it in without question and the world continues to suffer. That looks like the real fucking crisis to me. The only crisis that matters is the Ecological Crisis. This crisis only exists because we have an economy and energy. The economic crisis means the end of growth, which means the end of excessive consumption which means the begining of the end of the ecological crisis. Fuck industrial energy, fuck the hierarchical economy, fuck this bullshit.
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FIRST COMMENT! Whoo! (only because I pointed out WordPress’s mistake)
I’ve recently come up against people adamantly refusing to accept that civilization destroying the natural world isn’t worth it. The most saddening and angering part was that it was a group of so-called pagans who profess to, at the very least, revere natural forces. Nobody wants to consider that civilization doesn’t actually make our lives better, don’t want to get out of their progressivist mindset long enough to see their lives suck.
Suddenly, the lengths people will go to protect their psyches from feelings of guilt and shame are a lot more obvious to me than they ever were studying psychology in college, so much so they’re willing to betray manners, ethics, and as Derrick Jensen points out, are sometimes even willing to kill to protect their psyche from other worldviews.
Or in short: Fuck, we’re outnumbered.
Oh yea, and how that was supposed to tie into your entry is that OH so many of them kept arguing for “green” technologies and corporations’ supposed wildlife protection programs.
Haha! Speaking of “bullshit crisis”, I found a strange but hilarious video about “crisis”.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GagZMdqpP1M
We have to start developing a landscape based land ethic that uses fire to manage for biodiversity. We can, with enough traditional knowledge, supply for all of our needs with knowledge of local flora and fauna. I began the Society of Ethnobiology last year here at the University of Wisconsin – Stevens Point to educate people about the need for us to develop our sense of biophillia; or love for the natural world.
I believe that this attachment can only come from people with a direct connection with the biota living around them. The reason that we are losing biodiversity on a massive scale is because we no longer rely on native plants and animals for our well-being, not because we are exploiting the land through agriculture (though that is the root of the destruction). Native cultures modified the landscape on a massive scale through fire, pruning, and broadcasting/sowing seed, but this management vies for diversity, unlike the totalitarian agriculture that is practiced today (monoculture).
Sam Thayer, a very astute ethnobotanist living in northern Wisconsin, visits our campus every year to speak about wild edible plants. Fifty percent of Sam’s diet consists of wild edibles and most of the rest is produced either in his garden or by a farmer that he knows personally. Even in NORTHERN WISCONSIN…a place that has a relatively short growing season, one can augment a large percentage of one’s diet with native plants. His book, “The Foragers Harvest” is the definitive guide for wild edibles in the Midwest/Great Lakes region.
I have been collecting everything from milkweed sprouts for food to indian hemp for cordage. As Kat Anderson points out in “Tending the Wild”, the california indian elders say that environmental destruction is ongoing because we no longer interact with local biota; that the plants “miss us”.
We need to create “Ethnobiological Parks” throughout the US and show people the meaning of sustainability and the true meaning of liberty. People would have to first have to be certified in some way to be able to partake in its management, i.e apprenticeship, and would be required to live on-site. This could also be done privately if enough individuals had the traditional knowledge required for this sort of undertaking. There could be an on-site school that eases one into this new way of living. These kinds of parks would be absolutely essential for this kind of “awakening”. Call it the “Second Renaissance” , call it the “Green Revolution”, call it what you like, but I call it going back home.
-Aaron
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