p. 291 - 295   (David's fourth selection, out of six) :-

In the long run, and now more and more in the short run too, the only way to satisfy the real needs the suburban home was intended to satisfy is to find a solution that also satisfies the needs of the squatter city or the inner city.

To put this need into full perspective, though, requires another long view back. The suburbanization of human settlement is revealing a precivilized bent, not only in its hostility to tax-based investments in public life, but in its growing embrace of a world in which a person simply takes what he wants and then defends himself against any would-be competitors, human or otherwise. The wealthy individualist holed up in his trophy house is a high-tech hunter-gatherer: he may be a corporate raider, or mining executive or securities dealer, but his stance is a throw-back to the preagricultural family whose objective was to hunt down and take what they needed. They were not yet ready to take the risks of engaging in the kind of cooperative enterprise—or stewardship of the commons—that requires a willingness to give, share and trust (even while knowing that trus will sometimes be broken or tested) in a much larger enterprise than one can personally dominate or control. The owners of gated estates may be only a small minority of suburban dwellers, but they set the rules of the game*.
{* "The upscaling of the American dream started in the 1980s, prompted by the lifestyles of the most affluent," says Juliet Schor. "Between 1979 and 1989 the top 1% of households in the United States increased their incomes from an average of $280,000 a year to $525,000. This is the group that is now widely watched and emulated, whose visible consumption is the life-style to which most Americans aspire." }

To cope with the changes now sweeping the world will require reconnecting with geography. That means real, physical and biological geography, not the ecologically ignorant overlays of a political map, or a real estate dealer's map of home sale prices. For many of us, this means taking a hard look at the ground under our feet for the first time. And, it will mean looking at this ground with new kinds of questions not only about where to live, how to live, and what kind of work to do. It will also mean knowing—now that we see clearly the big picture kept from us before—that what is good for us as individuals is not in conflict with what's good for the local or global publics. One thing that will not work, whether in choosing a place, a life-style, or a calling, is to try to break off and go it alone.

What that means is something as revolutionary as any change in our evolutionary past—perhaps as in the history of life altogether. It means, necessarily, that in addition to pursuing a better scientific understanding of the connectedness of life, we are on the threshold of a radically different consciousness of our roles, in which every thought a person has about his or her own needs is also a thought about the needs of other life. This won't be an abrupt change; we started toward it with the institutions of parenting which we share with many other highly evolved fauna (bonding to offspring rather than just hatching them), and the institutions of marriage, family, and friendship. We've probed the connectedness through larger institutions of community, church and nation, and in these larger connections we've undergone a vast learning experience that might be described as an evolutionary experimentation with the organization of life in various levels beyond the individual organism that is each of us. Like the evolution of species in the natural world, the process is endlessly experimental. Perhaps our organization of society has subconsciously replicated what happens in the natural world, where most of those experiments ultimately fail, but along the way produce magnificent moments. If we recognise the institutional history of human life as part of evolution, rather than simply as a series of event in a static species,it may help to explain why our history is so replete with triumph and tragedy, pleasure and pain. In real life, the failed experiments that are all in an eon's work for evolution may be deeply disappointing for sentient individuals who are part of them.

As evolution proceeds, however, it's clear that the process was never random. Great movements were created: the movement of life from sea to land, the evident transmogrification of dinosaurs to birds; the rise of mammals. Other broad patterns we've seen coming more quickly, just in the past human generation; they have included the rising resistancce of pests to pesticides; the mixing of ecosystems; and the spike of extinctions. These, among other signs, suggest we're getting closer to a time when we'll have to end our artificial separation from the rest of life or end our span, as most other species have ended theirs.

Instinctively, I think, we know we're close to that decision point—or call it an action point, since mere decisions won't be fast enough. On some level of understanding that is organic and not yet altered beyond reach by ideological and commercial conditioning, we know we've become separated from the processes that sustain us, and we ache for explanation: it accounts, perhaps, for why a specter of apocalypse can be found in so many of earth's religions and cultures.

The evolutionary change we started toward with the institutions of parenting, marriage, and family, and to which I think we have to complete the transition if our species is to remain a part of what might be called God's plan, is to develop a state of consciousness in which the sense of identity each of us feels is not housed only in our individual bodies and minds, but in the ecological processes of which these bodies and minds are a part. Some belief systems have touched on this, but the idea has remained marginalized by the focus of media on celebrity, which is the product of a heightened fascination with the mystique of the individual.

But there are signs that the border between the individual as a distinct entity and the sociobiological world around him may be dissolving much in the way national borders as artificial envelopes of identity are. That doesn't mean the time is approaching when we won't be able to look in a mirror and see ourselves as recognisable individuals. But perceptions are shifting, as we become increasingly conscious that nothing in ourselves is permanently owned. The air you inhaled this morning may have blown across a distant mountain range last night; the protein that is rebuilding the leg muscles you stressed running for a plane last light may have been part of an anemia-affected North Atlantic salmon last week; the water you perspire this afternoon may have been part of the anoxic Black Sea last year and the melting Antarctic icecap the year before and the sap of an adelgid-diseased hemlock the year before that. As we become more aware of ourselves as processes rather than objects, our infatuation with ourselves as objects—as the consumers who constitute an enormous global market for cosmetics, for example—may itself begin to dissolve. The idea of such dissolution may be extremely frighteneng, since it may be taken to mean a loss of self, or a loss of consciousness. However, it actually may entail an expansion of consciousness, and of the satisfactions of love and life that that expansion makes possible.

Other pages: [<< Prev]  1  2  3  4  5  6  [Next >>]

Return  to  David's main  page  Go to David's RainForest: Page

Please send any questions or comments to the site Editor

This is: http://www.oocities.org/Athens/Delphi/3142/EdAyres-GLO-4.html