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Show THE ZEPH YR/JUNE-JULY 2007 filters. I had gone on, in my early adulthood, to pursue the level of material prosperity patently obvious that it would require some serious self-delusion to ignore the lemmingthat I had been told would somehow solve all my problems. I worked hard to acquire cliff yawning in front of the human experience. skills that would enable me to attain that goal, and I was well on my way when a series of incidents occurred that wrenched me out of that paradigm and into one that replaced All tools of the modern world; money, credit, compound interest, capital, the legal systhe goal of material gain with one of inner peace and personal freedom. I discovered that tem, armies, hierarchies, corporations, technology, institutional pedagogy, are designed to increase humankind’s ability to apply leverage for the ever-increasing command and the less I had, the more serene and free I became. When I observed that the mad chase for exploitation of resources. In today’s global economy, everyone is enmeshed in the web material wealth was unsustainable from an ecological point of view, that added another, more practical reason to my pursuit of “How Little Do I Need?” At one point, I deter- mined to live for one year without money. It was harder thanI thought (not in the sense of hardship, but because it is almost impossible not to acquire money- it’s almost as easy as breathing!). However, I came close enough to know that I didn’t need money, or the system created around it, to survive comfortably and with a certain style. Every problem the world faces is the result of a paradigm that argues that the solution is more of the same... Carbon exchange trades work only because new carbon belching power plants are being built every day... The Nature Conservancy exists only because people need to fool themselves that ee of something is better than saving all of it. I have seen a bumper sticker that reads, “What isn’t grown has to be mined.” Usually the people who sport such sayings are supporters of extractive industries, but it really is the truth of all existence on earth. Computers and information and stock markets don’t “create” wealth. They merely manipulate it for the purposes of greater extraction and exploitation. Humans grow from the earth. Thus, like corn or cows or copper, they are a resource to be exploited, not because the exploiters are evil, but because the exploiters have no choice. The system we created and which we make real through our belief in it makes exploiters out of us all. 3 So, as I looked out over the frozen wave of the San Rafael, arrested in mid-crash upon the vast expanse of desert a thousand feet below, I knew the problem wasn’t The Nature Another series of life experiences brought me back into the cash economy, but my fundamental paradigm had not shifted. I didn’t believe in the dominant material worldview, and yet somehow, I had forgotten that I saw things differently than others did. Thus, my consternation when I saw that The Nature Conservancy accepted money from environmental destroyers. It had taken me a long time, but I had learned how to _ live within my means, within a balance. If at some point, my manner of living began to take too much effort to sustain, my strategy was to decrease my living requirements until a balance was achieved. The idea of borrowing money and then slaving nine-to-five to pay it back, buying something new just because everyone else had one, or even spending a minute worrying about what people thought of my lifestyle choices was utterly foreign to me. Why should I work so hard as a virtual slave for all of that shiny stuff when I could learn to make something that worked just as well, or fix a broken one for free? Why should I pay rent or a mortgage (which literally means “a promise to the death”), when I could live on the land for free? Why should I pay taxes to support the world’s largest death machine when | could be a free person with no overlord by working for myself and slipping between the cracks of the cash-free economy? I lived in a different reality, one where the basic presumptions and the logical conclusions were so foreign that the actions of others were as incomprehensible to me as mine were to them. But I had forgotten that there was such a difference, and the fault there- fore was mine when I began to make value judgments in a public forum. Just because I could see that collaboration between environmentalists and corporations was wrong didn’t mean others saw it that way. In effect, I had accused others of living the wrong reality, and if I had prejudicial terms for the denizens of that world; “Death-kultur-klones”, “Consumers”, “Babylonians”, sponsible Bum”,” Drifter”. then they had theirs for me; “Dirty bush-hippie”, 3 “Irre- It’s incredibly hard to separate someone from her preferred reality. It takes generations of oppression, and heavy-handed tactics like genocide, the kidnapping of children, who are then sent to re-education camps (boarding schools), the suppression of mother tongues, etc. If those are the tactics a dominant culture has to use in order to change a worldview, what chance did I have to change anyone by speaking out at a town meeting? As my fiancéée kept telling me, “Loch, people just think you're a crank.” But......what if I was right...... at least on an ecological level? Well, then events would prove it over time. By living within my means, and reducing how much resource I needed, no one could dispute the fact that my living had a smaller impact on the planetary system. And if everyone reduced, well, then the aggregate human impact would obviously be reduced. But if the philosophy of resource command defined the world of those around me, and if the answer to an unsustainable lifestyle was to increase one’s consumption in an effort to maintain the status quo, then one’s impact on the natural system would be magnified in quantum terms. If everyone lived by such a philosophy, then the unsustainability is so HUB OF MOAB CYCLERY CALL US TOLL-FREE 888.304.8219 MOAB’S FIRST & BEST BIKE SHOP 94 WEST 100 NORTH MOAB, UT 259.5333 rimcyclery.com created by these tools. The pressure to live by the logic of the mercantile economy is so intense that no one can escape it, at least on a day-to-day level. This dominant paradigm has become so entrenched that it exists as a self-perpetuating system. How does one live in any manner that is tied to the land, managing some kind of balance? I had a long conversation with a rancher who had been forced to sell his grazing permits, and who now contemplated the economic weapons of those who might want his irrigation water. “It’s the big squeeze,” he said. “The trouble is, at some point you realize that if you don’t sell out, they’’Il just take it all anyway......it’s an offer you can’t refuse.” For almost everyone on the planet, to live within this system means that one has no choice but to live in a manner that is inherently unsustainable. The very concept of money is based on the principle of resource exploitation. You have to get the gold from somewhere! Profit, on the fundamental level, represents all I have taken beyond my own needs. Wealth can be defined similarly, as that excess stored away beyond the amount I can expect to use in the foreseeable future. Pies faery Vas eae Roy etite Neto ste 0 as Weestiieeie nba) Noes: Conservancy, or corporations, or greedy developers, or any other “other” group at all. The only way to survive in this system is to gain control of more resources than one needs, and more than the next guy. It’s called “profits” or “market share” or “global reach” or “world power.” It filters all the way down to me, when I say I won’t work for ten dollars an hour, but I will for thirteen. In my year without money, I worked hard every day for nothing, but now that I live in the cash economy, I find I am unable to do so. The developer who comes to Boulder and builds a private golf community and lodge has no choice. He is required to take advantage of every opportunity to increase his footprint upon the environmental fabric of the planet, or else he will get swallowed up by the very unsustainability he has created, and which snaps at his heels, no matter how fast he runs. Every problem the world faces is the result of a paradigm that argues that the solution is more of the same. Poor people have more children in order to escape the poverty caused by overpopulation. Carbon exchange trades work only because new carbon belching power plants are being built every day. Ethanol fuel is impossible without a fossil fuel input greater per unit than the ethanol produced. The Nature Conservancy exists only because people need to fool themselves that saving half of something is better than saving all of it. And I think, ultimately, most people would save all of Boulder, or any other beautiful place if they could, but we all run desperately in the midst of a stampeding herd, and it’s all we can do to keep up in an effort to avoid being crushed underfoot. In this reality, saving half is the best anyone can do. I cannot think of anything that will cause a critical mass of the earth’s population to voluntarily revert toa world-view that places an emphasis on balance and the choice to cut back when necessary to regain balance. My own experience reminds me that I didn’t shift my reality without the help of extremely painful and catastrophic life events. As long as the current state of affairs remains, I expect to watch Boulder become developed. There are so few places left to exploit that it is impossible for Boulder to escape notice. If ~ the current players don’t take advantage of what is a golden opportunity for profit, then someone bigger, wealthier, and more powerful will arrive to take their place. Given the global system, I can see why these people are in favor of saving half and developing half. At least this way, they can make their profit with what approximates a clear conscience, since it is impossible to conceive of survival outside of profit-making. ‘ What little I know of history tells me that there is no way to change anyone’s reality, much less that of an entire global population. All such change must cOme from within, individual by individual. I find myself looking forward to the cataclysms predicted by everyone from the Virgin Mary to Joseph Smith to Al Gore. Such uncontrollable changes in the outer world might be humankind’s only hope for helping us change our inner worlds. This may be what it takes to show us that we can find happiness in balance, and that “a little bit less” is more satisfying than “a little bit more”. Loch Wade lives ‘with a little bit less’ in Boulder, Utah. EXTREME ELK? EXTREME BEAR? oo ys of : only in MOAB. |