Daniel Boone, you are parked in a tow-away zone
Thomas Kemp, a local attorney and friend, posted an excert from a Washington Post article by Joel Achenbach, who visited an eco-village in North Carolina called Earthaven (post here). His quote from the article gets to the heart of where we find ourselves:
We live in a world we didn’t make, by rules and customs and laws we didn’t invent, using tools and technologies we don’t understand.
This is truth. Our culture, in large part, is focused on consumption. It is the purchase, the checkout, the finish line that matters. The foundations, history, and the true accounting of our technological triumph in retail sales and electric and fuel distribution is for scholars, retirees, or the coffee table.
Thomas has spoken on this topic, with Chris Hardie of Richmond News Review, as it applies to the food we eat and specifically concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs). He asks if we need “industrial farming to meet our nutritional needs?” I don’t believe we do, but it certainly distances us from the process of production (that is unless you live next door).
It is partly because our production systems are so efficient that we are so removed from them. Unfortunately, if we allow ourselves too much separation from the pork we eat or the electricity we use, we lose the big picture. We stop valuing the energy, engineering, and effort that gave us the end-product. And we lose the biological connection between the life of the pig and our need for nourishment. We lose the ecological connection between the land stripped for coal and the power line running to our house.
We don’t all need to go back to building water wheels and killing what we eat. We can be more intentional about our choices and examine why we make them:
On the official Earthaven tour, a banker with a small farm who was taking the tour just to get tips on animal husbandry, shook his head at the thought of living by consensus with lots of other people. “That’d kill me,” he said.
What the visitor realizes at Earthaven is how much energy is expended in mainstream culture just keeping other people out of our hair. There’s a reason everyone on the block drives separately to the grocery store. It’s a waste of energy but, arguably, a rational purchase of independence. For the most part, we don’t use energy to be powerful; we use it to be alone
[emphasis added]
