My current plan is to put stuff in storage, pack the truck and head north on June 24th. I’m targeting Southern Oregon. Its a nice midpoint between SF & Portland – two cities that I love and have lots of friends in, but it is also out of California proper and remote enough to feel far away. Actually its been more than twelve years – I’ve lived in the Bay Area since 1976 (with a 5 year hiatus in Santa Barbara for college) So I’ve been living here for 26 of my 36 years on this planet. That alone is reason to move!

I know that this may seem as a sudden shock to some of you; “How can this urban-party-hoppin-networking-multimedia-artist possibly survive deep in the woods?” Who knows?!? Its certainly an experiment. I really don’t know how I’m going to make this life shift. And there is a lot of sadness in leting go of that which is familiar to me – I will miss you my friends! However over the past six years, this intrepid explorer has been trying to reach escape velocity in my search for a life that feels sane. But for whatever reasons my spaceship has come smoking, skidding, crashing, back to this fair city by the sea. Allow me to explain a little about the planet I’m searching for.

I’ll start with the most esoteric reason first, because it really informs the rest, and if you only read a couple paragraphs, then at least I know you got the good stuff.

Reason #1: Sensitize Me

I’m seeking out a place where I can dive into a more intuitive-based way of existing. Natural Rhythms. Silence. Internal Visioning. Clean Healthy Living. I want to make some major changes in my mental, physical and emotional states.

Mental:

All around me I am surrounded by logic, reason, intellect and the belief in technology. It is our current paradigm – one dominated by the scientific method and the hum of industrialization. I’ve done my best to accept that mode while developing creative paths – from performance, alternative technology, art festivals and really amazing counter-cultural revolutionary friends. But I’m still faced with a culture (especially here in the U.S.) that values the functional over the beautiful, intellect over reason, knowledge over questions, stasis over change. It feels stifling sometimes. Like this constant uphill battle.

Emotional:

I’m of the opinion that our full mental/emotional/physical faculties as human beings on this planet are stunted in the shadow of what we think we know. Our pre-conceived notions of consciousness and the ongoing application of meaning to our experience limits our abilities. Its like dancing inside of a cardboard box. Actually its like dancing inside a cardboard box with ten different radio stations blasting us from all sides – because the level of external information we have to put up with (advertising, emails, movies, small talk, sports, news etc.) is drowning out the subtler signals. Add to this symphony our own internal “important” thoughts (concerns for the future and judgments of the past) and its amazing that we can dance at all!

Physical:

I also think that we underestimate the negative effect all these electronics and machinations have on our physical and psychic bodies. The technologies are so new, and there really hasn’t been enough honest research or time to evaluate the long-term effects. Microwave and Cell phone radiation penetrate our skulls 24/7. Motorized vehicles and industrial air conditioners keep us tuned into the energy of the matrix, such that we are losing track of the beating of our very own hearts! This was simply illustrated to me one very hung-over morning in a cafe, post Coachella Music Festival:

It’s 7am and I’m painfully slumped on the table, waiting for my life-renewing breakfast, and I noticed that my arms were shaking uncontrollably. While I cursed these shakes and my debaucherous self for causing them, I lifted my hands to my head… and noticed that the spoon, the napkin, the whole table was shaking! The entire building was transmitting vibrational motion from some unseen mechanism deep within it’s bowels. It wasn’t me that was really sick – it was the building itself and the social momentum that allows such things to exist. That was when I knew, from a very personal and intuitive place that I needed to get out of the city.

Reason #2: Civilization ain’t that civilized.

Pollution. Poverty. Crime. Traffic. Racism. Poor public transportation. Industrialized food. Wasteful packaging. Hostile Police. Uncaring City Govt. Jaded & Dis-empowered Populace. Expensive housing. Low wages. Disease. Stress. Ugly Buildings. Fear of anything new or different. Garbage. Cultural Vapidness. Distraction. Shoddy Schools. Propaganda. Political Corruption. War.I mean really now. The amount of crap that we put up with day in day out, in the name of Civilization, is absurd. As if this is the best we can do. As if this thing called “Civilization” is the best possible way to live. Nonsense! So I’m opting out for a moment. Get a different perspective. Read “Beyond Civilization- Humanities Next Great Adventure ” By Daniel Quinn for a more in depth explanation.Suffice it to say, one doesn’t have to physically leave “Civilization” to go beyond it. As a matter of fact, transforming our social and industrial structures together – everywhere – especially in the city, is crucial to the kind of conscious revolution that is actually occurring in big and small ways all over this planet. There is no “away,” we are ALL environmentalists, and the time is NOW to start making changes. I’m just ready to make a more radical life-syle shift. Just recycling isn’t good enough for me anymore.

Reason #3: Divest in the Negative, Invest in the positive.

Remember when people all over the world divested in South Africa because of the racial segregation that was occurring there? Now, I don’t know all the real political and social forces behind that massive change, but I do know that every dollar I spend on a Coca-Cola product is more money for the machine that is tearing apart this planet. In addition, a large portion of every dollar I earn is used to build government sponsored war machines that destroy people and families and ravage the environment.And don’t be fooled by all the cool “Organic” labeled products on your shelves now – a lot of these companies have been bought out by major corporations such as Heinz, Kraft, and Kelloggs. Coca-Cola purchased Odwalla in 2001 by the way. Industrialized food and globalization of the market are consuming precious resources and disconnecting us from local sustainably based economy.I want to start growing my own food, living “off-the-grid” and reducing the amount of crap I consume. I am responsible for curbing my addiction to all these destructive conveniences that I consume because I happen to have been born in a rich, bullying industrialized nation. And that’s been really hard to do, for me, while living in the midst of it. So I’m embarking on my own twelve-step program to face my addiction and remove the temptations. And I am formally protesting these unsustainable business by putting my money/energy/attention into something that seems basic and makes sense to me. This is my positive investment.

Reason #4: Economic Breakdown?

The world is running out of cheap oil. Geologists, activists and politicians around the globe are agreeing that we have or will very soon reach PEAK Oil production – which means that we are producing the peak amount of oil we have ever and will ever produce. Humans have been really good at finding and getting to this oil… and we’ve sucked it up and used it up quick – but now the remaining oil is harder to get to (it’s deeper in the ground, it’s thicker, its trapped in shale-rock), it’s more difficult to process and basically will only become more and more expensive to produce. We are not going to run out of oil – its just going to get more and more expensive. And I don’t just mean the price of gas.Our transportation, manufacturing, agriculture, medication and energy production is highly dependent on petroleum and natural gas (which is also getting scarce). Where do you think that Hydrogen comes from? Where does all that plastic packaging come from? What about the keyboard you’re typing on? How does your food stay cold and get delivered to the store? Where do commercial fertilizers come from? That lovely lavender hand lotion? Our dependence on petroleum is pervasive.Its a deadly addiction: Price of oil goes up – price of everything goes up. The potential impact this will have on all the limited budget people in this country is mind-blowing. And what about the impact this will have on our local and state governments as they try to allocate funds to repair roads, run hospitals, and employ millions of people?And the really sad thing is: Developing a new energy infrastructure takes energy to create and build, and the U.S. has squandered the cheap energy we’ve had. When we could have been building high speed rail, investing in wind, solar and geothermal, designing pedestrian and bicycle-friendly inner cities, creating a sustainable agricultural system we’ve been fighting for Oil in Iraq and burning up gas out of our tailpipes.I have no idea what this means for the future. There is certainly not enough farms in San Francisco to feed everyone. To me the writing is on the wall. Something has got to give. Is it going to be us? Or the system we depend on? Or both?

Reason #5: Stopping global warming and mass extinction of species requires people everywhere to do what they can to reduce their impact on the environment.

Humanity is facing a great environmental crisis. It’s no longer about saving the whales – its really about saving ourselves. And to save ourselves, we are going to have to save the whales, and the bees, and the spotted owl, and the thousands upon thousands of species that form the very intricate web of life that gives us a livable planet! So we are going to have to make some changes to how we live and do things if we are to see ourselves through to the other side. And it is possible! I’m willing and able to transition to a lifestyle that is based in sustainable practices. Growing one’s own food. Living off-the-grid of polluting electricity. The Do-It-Yourself production of tools and treasures. Generating simplicity and using less packaging & plastic. Creating culture rather than buying it. Permaculture.

Reason #5: I’ve always wanted to live on a farm.

Maybe it because my Swedish Grandfather had a farm where my mom was born, or my East Coast Italian Grandfather had a beautiful garden that he loved. There is something incredibly appealing to me about the layout and feeling of a lived on farm. I feel as if I’ve always known I would live on a farm at some point in my life, and I’d like to honor that feeling while I can still bend my knees and swing a hammer.

Reason #6: In Sickness and in Health?

My health is not what it was. Migraines. Chemical Sensitivities. Low energy. Apathy. Maybe I’m just getting older. Or maybe I’ve smoked to many cigarettes and drank too much coffee. Or maybe I’ve inhaled to much pollution and absorbed too many toxins from this chemical soup we call “air.” I really don’t know. But I feel like if I don’t move to a healthier environment than I’m just going to get worse – its that downward spiral.

So I’m asking that this move be a protest and a vote for a healthier, more ethical life for myself. So I can heal and grow and clear my head to begin the clean-up. ‘Cause we ARE going to clean up this mess. And our children will and their children too. It’s going to take a while but the sooner we get on it…..It’s been a great party. But its that time of the night… Maybe its the caterer/chef in me… but I just happen to be that eager beaver who, when it’s time for all the roomies to clean up the house, is the first to tackle that nasty pile of dirty dishes, and before others have finished grumbling and tying their boots, I’m already drying off the counters and whistling Stevie Wonder.

You see it doesn’t have to be all doom and gloom. But it is going to take some changes and some work. Read Paul Hawken’s new book: “Blessed Unrest – How the Largest Movement In the World Came Into Being and Why No One Saw it Coming” We really are the ones we’ve been waiting for. Namaste,Thomas Willy Sepe

http://www.freep.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070320/OPINION03/703200332/1068/OPINION
March 20, 2007
BY LEONARD PITTS JR.
KNIGHT RIDDER NEWSPAPERS

First, let me tell you what I’m not here to talk about.

I’m not here to talk about the role politics played in the sacking of
eight U.S. attorneys. Or the fact that newly released e-mail exchanges
and other documents indicate Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and his
deputies misled Congress when they said the White House had nothing to
do with the decision to fire those attorneys. Or the fact that Gonzales
is facing bipartisan calls for his head from angry lawmakers

All this I will leave to others. I want to talk about a word that
jumped out at me in news reports about this latest Washington scandal.
The word: loyalty.

We learn that, in deciding which attorneys to retain and which to
release, one factor that weighed prominently in Justice Department
deliberations was whether they “exhibited loyalty” to President George
W. Bush. The quote is from an e-mail sent by D. Kyle Sampson, then one
of Gonzales’ top aides. Sampson was also author of another note in
which he suggested that the “vast majority of U.S. Attorneys, 80% to
85%, I would guess, are doing a great job, are loyal Bushies, etc.,
etc.”

It is this notion that being a “loyal Bushie” is a qualification for
getting or keeping a job that rankles. The revelations spilling out of
Gonzales’ office are distressingly familiar.

Take Brownie — please. You remember Michael Brown. Guy had zero
experience in disaster management. So naturally he wound up as head of
FEMA, the federal disaster management agency. He was, after all, a
“loyal Bushie.”

And don’t even get me started on Iraq. To read “Imperial Life in the
Emerald City,” Rajiv Chandrasekaran’s book on the American occupation,
is to sit gape-mouthed at the degree to which the requirement that job
seekers pledge allegiance to George W. Bush shaped what happened there.
People who applied to work for the Coalition Provisional Authority –
the agency governing Iraq — told Chandrasekaran, former Baghdad bureau
chief for the Washington Post, that they were asked in job interviews
about their political party, their opinion of Roe v. Wade, their
religious affiliation and whether or not they voted for Bush in 2000.

Talent and experience were secondary concerns, if that. It was more important that one be loyal than that one be qualified.

Loyalty is a lovely virtue. But it is not the only virtue. And, in
deciding what is best for a nation, whether Iraq or the United States,
one would hope it wouldn’t be the defining one.

The funny thing is, when George W. Bush came into office a hundred
years ago, I remember thinking that though I disagreed with his
politics, it would be good at the very least to have grown-ups –
disciplined, sober, pragmatic — back in charge of the nation’s affairs
after the perceived juvenility and shenanigans of the Clinton team. I
was wrong.

This is not the way grown-ups behave. It is the way cultists behave.
The willingness to bypass critical thought, the tendency to make one’s
faith in a man a litmus test, the emphasis on belief, sounds more
appropriate to followers of Jim Jones or David Koresh than to high
officials of the U.S. government.

Every president has the right to seek subordinates who support his
policies, but not at the expense of competence. Nor integrity. Nor loss
of life and destruction of property.

Loyalty to Bush is all well and good. But ultimately, these people work
for you and me. Is it asking too much that they show a little loyalty
to us?

LEONARD PITTS JR. is a columnist for the Miami Herald. Write to him at lpitts@miamiherald.com.

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How to Survive the Crash and Save the Earth
December 19, 2004

1. Abandon the world. The world is the enemy of the Earth. The “world as we know it” is a deadly parasite on the biosphere. Both cannot survive, nor can the world survive without the Earth. Do the logic: the world is doomed. If you stay on the parasite, you die with it. If you move to the Earth, and it survives in something like its recent form, you can survive with it.

Our little world is doomed because it’s built on a foundation of taking from the wider world without giving back. For thousands of years we’ve been going into debt and calling it “progress,” exterminating and calling it “development,” stealing and calling it “wealth,” shrinking into a world of our own design and calling it “evolution.” We’re just about done. We’re not just running out of cheap oil — which is used to make and move almost every product, and which gives the average American the energy equivalent of 200 slaves. We’re also running out of topsoil, without which we need oil-derived fertilizers to grow food; and forests, which stabilize climate and create rain by transpiring water to refill the clouds; and ground water, such as the Ogallala aquifer under the Great Plains, which could go dry any time now. We’re running out of room to dump stuff in the oceans without killing them, and to dump stuff in the atmosphere without wrecking the climate, and to manufacture carcinogens without all of us getting cancer. We’re coming to the end of global food stockpiles, and antibiotics that still work, and our own physical health, and our own mental health, and our grip on reality, and our will to keep the whole game going. Why do you think so many Americans are looking forward to “armageddon” or the “rapture”? We hate this shitty world and we want to blow it up.

In the next five or ten years, the US military will be humiliated, the dollar will collapse, the housing bubble will burst, tens of millions of Americans will be destitute, food, fuel, and manufactured items will get really expensive, and most of us will begin withdrawal from the industrial lifestyle. SUV’s will change their function from transportation to shelter. We will not be able to imagine how we ever thought calories were bad. Smart people will stop exterminating the dandelions in their yard and start eating them. Ornamental gardens will go the way of fruit hats and bloomers. In the cities, pigeon populations will decline.

This is not the “doom” scenario. I’m not saying anything about death camps, super-plagues, asteroid impacts, solar flares, nuclear war, an instant ice age, or a runaway greenhouse effect. This is the mildest realistic scenario, the slow crash: energy prices will rise, the middle class will fall into the lower class, economies will collapse, nations will fight desperate wars over resources, in the worst places people will starve, and climate disasters will get worse. Your area might resemble the botched conquest of Iraq, or the depression in Argentina, or the fall of Rome, or even a crusty Ecotopia. My young anarchist friends are already packing themselves into unheated houses and getting around by bicycle, and they’re noticeably happier than my friends with full time jobs. We just have to make the mental adjustment. Those who don’t, who cling to the world they grew up in, numbing themselves and waiting for it all to blow over, will have a miserable time, and if people die, they will be the first. Save some of them if you can, but don’t let them drag you down. The first thing they teach lifeguards is how to break holds.

2. Abandon hope. I don’t mean that we stop trying, or stop believing that a better world is possible, but that we stop believing that some factor is going to save us even if we do the wrong thing. A few examples:

Jesus is coming. If you believe the Bible, Jesus told us when he was coming back to save us. He said, “This generation shall not pass.” That was 2000 years ago. Stop waiting for that bus and get walking.

The Mayan calendar is ending. Some people who scoff at Christian prophecies still manage to believe something equally religious and a lot less specific about what’s going to happen. At least Jesus preached peace and enlightenment — the Mayans were a warlike people who crashed their civilization by cutting down the forests of the Yucatan and exhausting their farmland. That’s what we should be studying, not their calendar and its alleged message that a better world is coming very soon and with little effort on our part. Now the Mayan calendar gurus will say that it does take effort and we have a choice to go either way, but go back to 1988 and read what 2004 was supposed to look like, and it’s obvious that we’ve already failed.

Technology will save us. If it does, it will be something we don’t even recognize as “technology” — permaculture or orgonomy or water vortices or forest gardening or quantum consciousness or the next generation of the tribe. It will not be a new germ killer or resource extractor or power generator or anything to give us what we want while exempting us from being aware and respectful of other life. Anything like that will just dig us deeper in the same hole.

The system can be reformed. Yes, and it’s also not against the laws of physics for us to go back in time and prevent the industrial age from ever happening. Ten, twenty, thirty years ago the ecologists said “we have to turn it around now or it will be too late.” They were right. And not only didn’t we turn it around, we sped it up: more cars with worse efficiency, more toxins, more CO2, more deforestation, more pavement, more lawns, more materialism, more corporate rule, more weapons, more war and love of war, more secrets, more lies, more callousness and cynicism and short-sightedness. Now we’re in so deep that politicians right of Nixon are called “liberal” and the Green Party platform is both totally inadequate and politically absurd. Our little system is not going to make it.

Also, there’s a time lag between smokestacks and acid rain, between radioactivity and cancer, between industrial toxins and birth defects, between atmospheric imbalance and giant storms, between deforestation and drought, between soil depletion and starvation. The disasters we’re getting now are from the relatively mild stuff we did years or decades ago, before SUV’s and depleted uranium and aspartame and terminator seeds and the latest generation of factory farms. Even if we could turn it around tomorrow, what’s coming is much worse.

We’re not strong enough to destroy nature. Oddly, this argument almost always invokes the word “hubris,” as in, “You are showing hubris, or excessive pride, in thinking that by lighting this forest on fire to roast a hot dog, I will burn the forest down. Don’t you know humans aren’t capable of burning down a forest? Shame on you for your pride.”

In fact, we’ve already almost finished killing the Earth. The deserts of central and southwest Asia were once forests — ancient empires cut down the trees and let the topsoil wash off into the Indian Ocean. In North America a squirrel could go tree to tree from the Atlantic to the Mississippi, and spawning salmon were so thick in rivers and streams that you couldn’t row a boat through them, and the seashores were rich with seals, fishes, birds, clams, lobsters, whales. Now they’re deserts populated only by seagulls eating human garbage, and nitrogen fertilizer runoff has made dead zones in the oceans, and atmospheric carbon dioxide is increasing oceanic acidity, which may dissolve the shells of the plankton. If the plankton die, it’s all over.

Maybe we can’t kill absolutely everything, but we are on the path to cutting life on Earth down to nothing bigger than a cockroach, and we will do so, and all of us will die, unless something crashes our system sooner and only kills most of us.

3. Drop Out. (See my essay How To Drop Out.) Dropping out of the present dominant system has both a mental and an economic component that go together like your two legs walking. It’s a lot of steps! Maybe you notice that you hate your job, and that you have to do it because you need money. So you reduce expenses, reduce your hours, and get more free time, in which you learn more techniques of self-sufficiency and establish a sense of identity not dependent on where you get your money. Then you switch to a low-status low-stress job that gives you even more room to get outside the system mentally. And so on, until you’ve changed your friends, your values, your whole life.

The point I have to make over and over about this process, and this movement, is that it’s not about avoiding guilt, or reducing your ecological footprint, or being righteous. It’s not a pissing contest to see who’s doing more to save the Earth — although some people will believe that’s your motivation, to justify their own inertia. It’s not even about reducing your participation in the system, just reducing your submission and dependence: getting free, being yourself, slipping out of a wrestling hold so you can throw an elbow at the Beast.

This world is full of people with the intelligence, knowledge, skills, and energy to make heaven on Earth, but they can’t even begin because they would lose their jobs. We’re always arguing to change each other’s minds, but nobody will change if they think their survival depends on not changing. Every time you hear about a whistleblower or reporter getting fired for honesty and integrity, you can be sure that they already had a support network, or just a sense of their own value, outside of the system they defied. Dropping out is about fighting better. Gandalf has to get off Saruman’s tower!

4. You are here to help. In the culture of Empire, we are trained to think of ourselves as here to “succeed,” to build wealth and status and walls around ourselves, to get what we desire, to win in games where winning is given meaning by others losing. It is a simple and profound shift to think of ourselves instead as here to help — to serve the greatest good that we can perceive in whatever way is right in front of us.

You don’t have to sacrifice yourself for others, or put others “above” you. Why is it so hard to see each other as equals? And it’s OK to have a good time. In fact, having a good time is what most helping comes down to — the key is that you’re focused on the good times of all life everywhere including your “self,” instead of getting caught up in egocentric comparison games that aren’t even that fun.

Defining yourself as here to help is a prerequisite for doing some of the other things on this list properly. If you’re here to win you’re not saving anything but your own wretched ass for a few additional years. If you’re dropping out to win you’re likely to be stepping on other outsiders, instead of throwing a rope to bring more people out alive. And as the system breaks down, people here to win will waste their energy fighting each other for scraps, while people here to help will build self-sufficient communities capable of generating what they need to survive.

In the real world, being here to help is easier and less stressful, because you will frequently be in a situation where you can’t win, but you will almost never be in a situation where there’s nothing you can do to help. Being here to win only makes sense in an artificial world rigged so you can win all the time. Thousands of years ago only kings were in that position, and they reacted by massacring all enemies and bathing in blood. Now, through a perfect conjunction of Empire and oil energy, we just put the entire American middle class in that position for 50 years. No one should be surprised that we’re so stupid, selfish, cowardly, and irresponsible. But younger generations are already getting poorer and smarter.

5. Learn skills. Readers sometimes ask for my advice on surviving the crash — should they buy guns, canned food, water purifiers, gold? I always tell them to learn skills. You know the saying: get a fish, eat for a day; learn to fish, eat for a lifetime. (Just don’t take it too literally — there might not be any fish left!)

The most obvious useful skills would include improvising shelter from materials at hand, identifying and preparing wild edibles, finding water, making fire, trapping animals, and so on. But I don’t think we’re going all the way to the stone age. There will also be a need for electrical work, medical diagnosis, surgery, optics, celestial navigation, composting, gardening, tree propagation, food preservation, diplomacy, practical chemistry, metalworking, all kinds of mechanical repair, and all kinds of teaching. As the 15th century had the Renaissance Man, we’re going to have the Postapocalypse Man or Woman, someone who can fix a bicycle, tan a hide, set a broken bone, mediate an argument, and teach history.

Even more important are some things that are not normally called skills, but that make skill-learning and everything else easier: luck, intuition, adaptability, attentiveness, curiosity, physical health, mental health, the ability to surf the flow. Maybe the most fundamental is what they call “being yourself” or “waking up.” Most human behavior is based neither on logic nor intuition nor emotion, but habit and conformity. We perceive, think, and act as we’ve always done, and as we see others do. This works well enough in a controlled environment, but in a chaotic environment it doesn’t work at all. If you can just get 10% of yourself free of habit and conformity, people will call you “weird.” 20% and they’ll call you a genius, 30% and they’ll call you a saint, 40% and they’ll kill you.

6. Find your tribe. We minions of Empire think of ourselves as individualists, or as members of silly fake groups — nations, religions, races, followers of political parties and sports teams, loyal inmates of some town that’s the same as every other. In fact we’re all members of a giant mad tribe, where the relationships are not cooperative and open, but coercive, exploitative, abusive, and invisible. If we could see even one percent of the whole picture, we would have a revolution.

You may feel like you want to do it alone, but you have never done it alone. To survive the breakdown of this world and build a better one, you will have to trade your sterile, insulated links of money and law for raw, messy links of friendship and conflict. The big lie of postapocalypse movies like Omegaman and Mad Max is that the survivors will be loners. In the real apocalypse, the survivors will be members of multi-skilled well-balanced cooperative groups.

I think future tribes are already forming, even on the internet, even among people thousands of miles apart. I think the crash will be slow enough that we’ll have plenty of time to get together geographically.

7. Get on some land. This might seem more difficult than the others, yet most people who own land have not done any of the other things — probably because buying land requires money which requires subservience to a system that makes you personally powerless. I suggest extreme frugality, which will give you valuable skills and also allow you to quickly save up money. You probably have a few more years.

If you don’t make it, it’s not the end of the world — oh wait — it is the end of the world! But you still might know someone with room on their land, or someone might take you in for your skills, or if you have a tribe one of you will probably come up with a place in the chaos. And if not, there will be a need for survivors and helpers in the cities and suburbs. So don’t force it.

If you do get land, the most valuable thing it can have is clean surface water, a spring or stream you can drink from. Acceptable but less convenient would be a well that doesn’t require electricity, or dirty surface water, which you can filter and clean through sand and reed beds. At the very least you need the rainfall and skills to catch and store enough rainwater to drink and grow food. (The ancient Nabateans did it on less than four inches of rain a year.) Then you’ll need a few years to learn and adjust and get everything in order so that your tribe can live there year-round, even with no materials from outside. With luck, it won’t come to that.

8. Save part of the Earth. When I say “the Earth,” I mean the life on its surface, the biosphere, as many species and habitats as possible, connected in ways that maximize abundance and complexity — and not just because humans think it’s pretty or useful, but because all life is valuable on its own terms. We like to focus on saving trophy animals — whales, condors, pandas, salmon, spotted owls — but most of them aren’t going to make it, and we could save a lot more species if we could put that attention into habitats and whole systems.

So how do you save habitats and whole systems? You can try working through governments, but at the moment they’re ruled by corporations, which by definition are motivated purely by short term increase-in-exploitation, or “profit.” You can try direct physical action against the destroyers, but it has yet to work well, and as the world plunges to the right I think we’ll see more and more activists simply killed.

My focus is direct positive action for the biosphere: adopting some land, whether by owning or squatting or stealth, and building it into a strong habitat: slowing down the rainwater, composting, mulching, building the topsoil, no-till gardening, scattering seed balls, planting trees, making wetlands — a little oasis where the tree frogs can hide and migrating birds can rest, where you and a few species can wait out the crash.

Tom Brown Jr. mentions in one of his books that the patch of woods where he conducts his wilderness classes, instead of being depleted by all the humans using it for survival, has turned into an Eden, because his students know how to tend it. Some rain forest environments, once thought to be random wilderness, have turned out to be more like the wild gardens of human tribes, orders of magnitude more complex than the soil-killing monoculture fields of our own primitive culture.

Humans have the ability to go beyond sustainability, to live in ways that increase the richness of life on Earth, and help Gaia in ways she cannot help herself. This and only this justifies human survival.

It requires a new set of skills. A good place to start is the permaculture movement. Sadly, in the present dark age the original books are all out of print and rare, and classes are so expensive that the knowledge is languishing among the idle rich when it should be offered free to the world. But the idle poor can still find the books in libraries, and many of the techniques are simple. What it comes down to is seeing whole systems and paying attention and innovating, driven by the knowledge that sustainability is only the middle of the road, and there’s no limit to how far we can go beyond it.

9. Save human knowledge. When people of this age think about knowledge worth saving, they usually think about belief in the Cartesian mechanical philosophy, that dead matter is the basis of reality, and about techniques for rebuilding and using machines that dominate and separate us from other life. I’d like that knowledge to die forever, but I don’t think it works that way. Humans or any other hyper-malleable animal will always be tempted by the Black Arts, by techniques that trade subtle harm for flashy good and feed back into themselves, seducing us into power, corruption, and blindness.

Our descendants will need the intellectual artifacts to avoid this — artifacts we have barely started to develop even as the Great Bad Example begins to fall. In 200 years, when they are brushing seeds into baskets with their fingers, and a stranger appears with a new threshing machine that will do the same thing with less time and effort, they will need to say something smarter than “the Gods forbid it” or “that is not our Way.” They will need the knowledge to say something like:

“Your machine requires the seed to be planted alone and not interspersed with perennials that maintain nitrogen and mineral balance in the soil. And from where will the metal come, and how many trees must be cut down and burned to melt and shape it? And since we cannot build the machine, shall we be dependent on the machine-builders, and give them a portion of our food, which we now keep all for ourselves? Do you not know, clever stranger, that when any biomass is removed from the land, and not recycled back into it, the soil is weakened? And what could we do with our “saved” time, that would be more valuable and pleasurable than gathering the seed by hand, touching and knowing every stalk and every inch of the land that feeds us? Shall we become allies of cold metal that cuts without feeling, turning our hands and eyes to the study of machines and numbers until, severed from the Earth, we nearly destroy it as our ancestors did, making depleted uranium and polychlorinated biphenyls and cadmium batteries that even now make the old cities unfit for living? Go back to your people, and tell them, if they come to conquer us with their machines, we will fight them in ways the Arawaks and Seminoles and Lakota and Hopi and Nez Perce never imagined, because we understand your world better than you do yourself. Tell your people to come to learn.”

Communities are identified with systems that are environmentally recognizable through a comprehensive totality definable as the place vocation. This integration of the place’s symbolic role and the form built in the natural landscape has been represented by art in most cultures.

Advanced research on immunodeficiency recognizes that the human body is connected to the environment by means of a neurochemical communication network that determines our health and wellbeing to a great extent.

Thus, in order to be connected with the environment, it is not necessary to develop a sense of sentimentality or mysticism, not even a vital and intense sense of connection with nature. It is simply necessary to understand the place vocation and to “give advantage” to that feeling, recognizing that the environment -its cultural and natural manifestations- is only an extension of who we are.
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In this way, the bioregional perspective of place vocation is strengthened for the purpose of integrating an emergent movement arising from a communal life experience in the form of an autonomous area in which the antipower of cultural and natural remnants grows and acquires corporeal existence in the co-operation, in the flow of life, in the consideration of a movement displayed as a social doing. The work installed through this doing emerges in the experience of collective life and creates the world.

Read the whole article at greenmuseum.org

I live in a major american city where pollution and toxins fill the air and water.
The human population is increasing exponentially.
The government is corrupt.
Poverty and crime are on the rise.
The economic system favors oppression and waste.
The educational system is backwards and inneffective.
The mainstream media is irresponsible and controlled by corporate interests.
The general population continues to consume more and more useless crap.
There is no saving grace of clean renewable alternative energy within the next 50 years &
The world is running out of cheap petroleum.

The ocean is turning acidic.
there are holes in the ozone layer.
the ice caps are melting.
the planet is the warmest is ever been in recorded history.
We are responsible for a mass extinction of species (more info on mass extinction here)
Biodiversity is being irreversibly destroyed by human activities at an unprecedented rate.
The top soil is eroding.
New inventions are continually repressed.

I am less social than I was 5 years ago (although I know more people).
I haven’t been able to maintain a solid intimate relationship for more than 3 months.
Parties seem empty and meaningless (even the “eco-consciosness awareness” ones).

Most of my friends (and myself) seem more concerned with making the next buck than making the next revolution,
or are convinced that making art and being beautiful is enough to affect positive change,
or simply don’t know what to do.

I feel lost. unfocused. innefective and increasingly poisoned.

HELP!

I need help. Humanity is trapped in a sea of doom. And I feel like I’m going down with the ship.

I’m seeking people with vision and action plans.

Not hope, not consolation, not pats on the back. I need a path that makes sense for now.

Soldiers Speak Out is a powerful, first-hand testament to the reality of the military experience told entirely in the words of American veterans who have been to war and are now opposing it. We hear how they came to join the military, about their experiences in training and in war, and what led to the turning point when they decided they could no longer, in good conscience, participate in the war or keep silent. This half-hour documentary sheds light on the growing and courageous anti-war and anti-occupation movement within the military and their families, and serves as a counter-recruitment and organizing tool for activists, schools and organizations. It provides a sober view of the war in Iraq and an important counterpoint to the ’stay-the-course’ rhetoric of the Bush administration.

source: empowermentproject.org
view the trailer…

http://www.sharedvoice.org/unamerican/

lyrics:
http://www.sharedvoice.org/unamerican/lyrics.html

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i’m really emotional today.
this song makes me cry

tired of watching all my friends party party
tired of watching myself struggle struggle struggle
trying just to get by
trying to bring a smile to another
trying to find what happiness looks like for me

while greed, war, disease, destruction ravage our heritage, our family

tired of feeling like nothing matters
tired of feeling like we have no voice

tired of being ineffective
tired of being afraid

tired of being lied to
tired of not knowing the truth or anything close to it.

tired of being american

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