I’ll be trying a new kind of blog as a part of this “recreation,” but I will leave this one up if for no other reason than this: some people still come across it as a search result on Ishmael, “the takers,” and since I posted those 23 pages from the book a long time ago and still think they’re good for people to read, I’ll give future Googlers the opportunity to do so. The other blog will be at ayenteeaychohenwhy.wordpress.com—you can follow it if you want, but it isn’t going to be anything like this one has.

About a year ago someone recommended The Naked Ape by Desmond Morris to me.  I picked it up from the library a few weeks ago feeling kind of sick of fiction for a while.  I started to read it one day, got tripped up by some goofy statements in the first few pages, read another chapter, and set it aside.  I haven’t picked it back up since then.  I’ll give it another shot, but I don’t know (for sure) whether I’ll finish it or not.

I can admit that I have biases too.  That should be obvious.  My  biases might clash with the author’s biases enough that I don’t finish the book.  I don’t know.  It might be that 1967 was simply “a different time.”  I don’t know.

One of the strangest features of previous studies of naked-ape behaviour is that they have nearly always avoided the obvious. The earlier anthropologists rushed off to all kinds of unlikely corners of the world in order to unravel the basic truth about our nature scattering to remote cultural backwaters so atypical and unsuccessful that they are nearly extinct. They then returned with startling facts about the bizarre mating customs, strange kinship systems, or weird ritual procedures of these tribes, and used this material as though it were of central importance to the behaviour of our species as a whole. The work done by these investigators was, of course, extremely interesting and most valuable in showing us what can happen when a group of naked apes becomes side-tracked into a cultural blind alley. [All emphasis is mine, not Mr. Morris'.] It revealed just how far from the normal our behaviour patterns can stray without a complete social collapse. What it did not tell us was anything about the typical behaviour of typical naked apes. This can only be done by examining the common behaviour patterns that are shared by all the ordinary, successful members of the major cultures-the mainstream specimens who together represent the vast majority. Biologically, this is the only sound approach. Against this, the old-style anthropologist would have argued that his technologically simple tribal groups are nearer the heart of the matter than the members of advanced civilisations. I submit that this is not so. The simple tribal groups that are living today are not primitive, they are stultified. Truly primitive tribes have not existed for thousands of years. The naked ape is essentially an exploratory species and any society that has failed to advance has in some sense failed, `gone wrong’. Something has happened to it to hold it back, something that is working against the natural tendencies of the species to explore and investigate the world around it. The characteristics that the earlier anthropologists studied in these tribes may well be the very features that have interfered with the progress of the groups concerned. It is therefore dangerous to use this information as the basis for any general scheme of our behaviour as a species.^*

I want to get at each of the bold parts.

… into a cultural blind alley.

I find this one weird simply because I don’t understand what he means by “blind alley.”  I assume he means something like dead end, or, more exactly, something that doesn’t work.  And this is why I’m confused; in what was is the life of a “primitive” person a way that doesn’t work? It’s worked this long, and it will (presumably) work long into the future.

This, and some other things I’ll get to, show me Mr. Morris’ bias toward … hmm—how can I put this?  Toward This is the best we’ve ever had it; how dare you suggest anything is wrong!

… represent the vast majority.

Until very recently, in terms of geological time, hunter-gatherers weren’t only the vast majority—they were the only ones around.

… technologically simple tribal groups are nearer the heart of the matter …

Mr. Morris says this in a way that suggests it’s wrong, bad anthropology, etc. But, as far as I know, this is what anthropologists still believe.  And—again, as far as I know—in the last fifty years the

Hai guis. Im unevolved. :P

general view of “primitive people” has become more positive.  It’s generally taught, leading me to believe that it’s the dominant view, that primitive people work less, are better fed, have high food security, and so on.

… any society that has failed to advance has in some sense failed …

Again, pure bias. He’s unfurling the banners and yelling “Isn’t modern society great!” with this.  Knowing me, it’s no wonder I’m having trouble convincing myself to keep reading.

That’s the one that bugs me most, I guess.  Judging the people of another culture based on the standards of your culture, and then declaring that culture a “failure” seems like one of the stupidest things a scientist can do.  Sure, he’s a zoologist and isn’t, by profession, to show cultural sensitivities.  He studies animals, people being just one.  But scientific study is supposed to be free of biases (although, of course, the reality is much different).

On page 23:

It is worth re-iterating here that, in this book, we are not concerned with the massive cultural explosions that followed, of which the naked ape of today is so proud-the dramatic progression that led him, in a mere half-million years, from making a fire to making a space-craft. It is an exciting story, but the naked ape is in danger of being dazzled by it all and forgetting that beneath the surface gloss he is still very much a primate. (`An ape’s an ape, a varlet’s a varlet, though they be clad in silk or scarlet.) Even a space ape must urinate.

But we made a spaceship! I get so tired of seeing this and other arguments like it.  So what?  So fucking what.  I get it.  You like modern society.  I think it’s going to kill itself.  We disagree.  I think I’m right.  Your reasons for thinking you’re right are dumb.  (Spotting biases is easier when they’re this blatant, donchathink?)

Page 39:

If the organisation of our earthier activities-our feeding, our fear, our aggression, our sex, our parental care-had been developed solely by cultural means, there can be little doubt that we would have got it under better control by now, and twisted it this way and that to suit the increasingly extraordinary demands put upon it by our technological advances. But we have not done so. We have repeatedly bowed our heads before our animal nature and tacitly admitted the existence of the complex beast that stirs within us.  If we are honest, we will confess that it will take millions of years, and the same genetic process of natural selection that put it there, to change it. In the meantime, our unbelievably complicated civilisations will be able to prosper only if we design them in such a way that they do not clash with or tend to suppress our basic animal demands.

This part is weird to me.  Part of the bolded sentence is simply more bias (our civilizations need to prosper!—because, seriously, what else are they going to do?), but the last half of it makes sense.  Of course any way of living must agree with our animal demands.  But, I dare say, the way most people live now doesn’t have that in its favor.

*If interested, you can read this book online for free.  Here’s Google’s cached HTML version of it. I’m just glad I thought about finding the quotes I was looking for online first, instead of typing them all out by hand like I usually do.

I was going to make a post about this because a year ago one of my friends posted this on Facebook: “[Name Removed] has a hard time listening to non-vegans talk about saving the planet.”  I was really confused by this, and offended, on some level.  My first question was simply How is veganism going to save the planet?  (Part of the reason I hesitated to post this for so long, but only part of the reason, was that I added the feed from this site to Facebook and I was afraid he’d read it, and I was being a huge pussy at the time.  I’ve since taken the feed off again, and so with little risk of him reading this, I’m free.  If he does happen to read this, I’m sure he’ll be willing to discuss the matter reasonably.  I think he’s learned his lesson and won’t jump to undue conclusions.)

If it’s not obvious, I don’t think veganism can “save the planet,” and I think the people who believe it will are, to some extent, deluded.  This is not to say that I’m viciously opposed to vegans being vegans—I’m really not opposed to them being vegans at all.  As I’ll quote in a minute, a vegan diet, are far as civilized diets go, is the most efficient and is, in some complex way, commendable.  But I’m opposed to veganism in theory, not so much in practice.  I don’t think it’s the best diet for people, and it’s definitely not going to “save the planet.”

What do I mean by ‘radical’ sustainability, and how does it relate to veganism? Radical comes from the Latin radix – root. Radical sustainability is a kind of sustainability that has deep roots. It’s not something civilized, colonized (and colonizing) people are coming up with, from the distorted vantage point of industrial life, but something that we see when we look to our indigenous heritage, into the land and the big story of who we are. It is something we can look to and see – ‘people existed here without killing the land – how did they do it?’

I make this distinction from simple ‘sustainability’ because that word alone has become meaningless. People bend it to serve their purpose – every big auto, oil, and agricultural corporation claims to have ‘sustainability’ as their primary concern. The word has been killed, it means too many things, most of which are never actually ‘sustainable’ – nourishing or maintaining life.

How does this relate to Veganism? Because, to put it simply, if we look at our roots, the life ways of our indigenous ancestors, we don’t see anything resembling a vegan diet or way of life. Traditional cultures everywhere have two qualities that exclude them from being vegan: 1 – they don’t farm, and 2 – they consume animals as food / are omnivores, be it via insects, eggs, fish, or mammals. If we really look, we’ll see that vegan ethics do not have deep roots at all.

A vegan diet, being a civilized diet, is unsustainable.  I’ve known this for a long time.

[From vegan.org] In a time when population pressures have become an increasing stress on the environment, there are additional arguments for a vegan diet. The United Nations has reported that a vegan diet can feed many more people than an animal-based diet. [Emphasis Urban Scout's.] For instance, projections have estimated that the 1992 food supply could have fed about 6.3 billion people on a purely vegetarian diet, 4.2 billion people on a 85% vegetarian diet, or 3.2 billion people on a 75% vegetarian diet.

Whoever wrote this does not understand the connection between population growth and grain production. Veganism, while addressing many of the terrible problems with animal-cruelty and pollutive factory farms, does not address the larger force that drives population growth, in fact, the diet simply adds more fuel to the population growth diet. By taking grains out of your diet you support another way of food subsistence and limit population growth. Of course, a grain-free diet will still not cease the collapse of civilization, but may actually help to induce collapse, as a collapse-free future no longer exists. I don’t want anyone to think that eating differently will “save the world” or “bring down civilization.” Changing your diet alone will not help that.²

If we broaden our concept of sustainability – if we understand that civilization, agriculture and domestication are inherently unsustainable, then veganism dissolves as any kind of solution. It is a diet that has evolved with agriculture and the most priveleged class of civilization. It does not challenge domestication, absolutely the most ‘unnatural’ aspect to our lives, and actually reinforces it strongly.

I think veganism should be defined as efficient, not sustainable. This is because within the context of civilization – which is inherently unsustainable – it is a more efficient way for humans to live. In fact I’m sure those at the top of this culture’s pyramid are aware of this – that it would be more efficient to cut the cattle out and feed all the grain and soy straight to the humans in their feedlots – and are strongly supportive of the endless sea of vegan literature.

I can already hear people saying “But Tony, you have to admit that a vegan diet is more sustainable than a diet that includes factory farmed meat.”  This is an argument that a lot of people use, and it’s usually a pretty decent one (in the situations it’s used) because when we first hear it, it makes sense.  But it has one fatal flaw: something isn’t deemed more sustainable than something else when it’s not sustainable to begin with.  The facts bear repeating: (1) Veganism is a civilized diet.  (2) Civilzation is unsustainable.  (3) Something that is unsustainable cannot work in the long term.

But what about the argument that we have a digestive system and teeth adapted to herbivory? I’m not sure how many times I have read that humans have the digestive system of a herbivore, but I am really curious how people came up with that.

Take a mammal of a similar size to us – deer. They are herbivores – they have a four chambered stomach for slowly fermenting and digesting cellulose. They regurgitate food that has been partially digested, masticate, and then swallow to continue the digestion. They lack upper incisors, and instead have a pad where we have our pearly whites (those teeth you show when you smile). Humans, on the other hand, have a single chambered stomach that food passes through quite fast, comparatively, the length of our intestinal tract being relatively similar to that of a raccoon, bear, or other omnivore. Humans can thrive on a diet of raw, unadulturated animal foods (meat, fat, organs), but many plant foods contain anti-nutrients (oxalic acid in greens, phytic acid in grains/seeds) or are simply indigestible without some kind of adulteration (cooking, fermenting, etc). Cultures that come closest to being total raw foodists also seem to have the highest concentration of animal foods (I am thinking Inuit). The reverse is true for those with more of a focus on plant foods (e.g. China). We are biologically omnivores. Sorry, it’s pretty much that straight forward. Humans thrive with plant and animal foods, that is what we have evolved to eat and need.

Our bodies have evolved to eat and process meat, but they’ve also evolved to the very act of hunting.  Compared to many other animals, humans aren’t capable of very many amazing physical feats.  If a man got in a fight with a bear (or even a chimpanzee!), he’d get his ass kicked.  If he got in a footrace with essentially any other decently-sized mammal, it will leave him in the dust.

Our real difference is bipedality, which contributes to our ability to run long distances at a slower pace.  While most animals are capable of running faster than a person, their bodies are only capable of sustaining that high-speed run for short bursts of time.  Our upright, naked body covered with sweat glands is capable of sustaining a slower run for very long distances, conserving calories and regulating body temperature.  We can chase down a group of speedy antelope for days possibly.  It goes like this: The speedy animal runs away—the people catch up.  It runs away again and the people catch up again.  Eventually, since it never had a chance to refuel, it runs out of energy and can’t run away.

(Amendment, Jun 29: I guess bipedality/upright-ness really doesn’t have much, if anything, to do with it.  Many wild dogs are also well adapted for running long distances and tiring out prey.  The sweat glands do have something to do with it, though.  I didn’t come up with this on my own, either [as if that wasn't obvious], but I don’t know where I originally read/watched it and obviously I didn’t remember things entirely correct.  The process is the same, though: the prey animals are adapted for short bursts of speed and we’re not, so we have to chase and chase and chase and chase.  Wild cats, on the other hand, unlike dogs, are more built for stalking and ending a hunt with a quick ambush.  In other words, since we’re not the best physically adapted land animals in the world, like dogs we had to learn to outrun prey.  Other predators, like wild cats, have different strategies.)

“I would only eat meat if I killed it myself!”

This statement is one I have heard countless times from vegetarians and vegans. I often think: have you ever cleared a forest? Have you plowed a feild – taking the homes and lives of countless wild/feral creatures? While listening to your iPod (cause they do). Have you ever driven a massive combine harvester over and endless field of soy lit by your tractor’s headlights in the middle of the night?  Have you stolen food from exotic places? Why is it okay to be alienated from some foods and the pain associated with their harvest, but not others?

One of the first things you learn about vegans, upon meeting them (in my experience), is that they are vegans.  It might be on their Facebook profiles.  Personally, I find this strange.  After all, I don’t immediately explain my dietary intake, nor do most people who are other-than-vegetarian.  Sometimes upon meeting a middle-aged woman you’ll find out immediately that she’s on a diet, but rarely do people introduce themselves and explain their foods of choice or their taboos.  Vegans do, and I don’t get it.

After outing themselves, if confronted about their choice by someone who is other-than-vegetarian, they’ll often try to explain it.  If they’re being crafty, they’ll explain how meat-eating is bad, how veganism is commendable, and so on.  (If they’re being straight-forward and honest, they’ll say they don’t like the idea of eating animals.)  Often, one of the first arguments is that refusing to eat animals is better for the planet.  They might bring up global warming, but I’m not going to go into this one; nobody seems to know the real details anyway, and I’ve heard some preposterous figures and downright lies.  My favorite is that being a vegetarian for one day cuts down your carbon emissions more than riding a bike (instead of driving) for your entire life.

The next talking point is often the one that sticks: factory farms.  Factory farms are unsustainable, yes, but anyone with empathy for other creatures will hate factory farms because of what happens in factory farms.  But the reasoning isn’t usually just “Factory farms—plain and simple.”  It sounds good, but that’s not it.  And how do I know that’s not it?  Well, for some it is.  I’ve had a few non-meat-eaters tell me that they don’t have a problem with hunting.  But in my experience, most do.  Maybe it’s simply that in this culture vegans are usually left-leaning while hunters are often right-leaning, and that anything right-leaning people do is asinine and stupid and ignorant and backward and “fearful of change.”  Or maybe it’s that the left-leaning vegans have a perceived moral superiority, and that anything that causes harm to anything is bad, and anyone who is OK with anything bad is worse than bad.  Let’s just say there is a spectrum and leave it at that.

In the end, the choice to be vegan is usually a moral choice.  And this is fine.  However, I wish more people would be up-front and honest about the decision being a moral decision, because too many people make themselves look like fools trying to explain all the different reasons they are vegan when it comes down to something so simple: they don’t like the idea of killing animals.

I’m OK with the honest admission of moral reasoning, even though I don’t agree with it.  I appreciate honesty.  I’m not OK with any vegan (or non-vegan, as I’ll explain in a minute) lauding their supposed moral superiority over anyone else.  Anyone who believes himself morally superior to another believes in one universal moral code.  Anyone who believes in a universal moral code is a fool.  This is why it’s not really off the mark to say “hardcore vegan activists” (as it’s put in the video I posted above) act like “bible-thumpers”: both want to impose their superior moral code on others to make it universal.  Both are fools.

(I’ve had a funny story recounted for me second-hand a number of times.  A vegan told a friend that he’d like to own a snake.  When asked by the friend, “How would you feel about buying mice to feed the snake?  You know, being a vegan and all …” he responded that he’d be OK with it because snakes don’t have the moral knowledge to know that eating other animals is wrong.  [Insert laughs.])

~

Anyway, I’ve said everything I originally wanted to say.  To end, I’ll post the end of the post I began quoting.

So how do we live? What am I getting at? I have no easy answer, not for myself, not for others. Factory farming is a tragedy, the industrial food system is too – agriculture itself is unsustainable and so is veganism by association. We need to learn how to live in balance, with what our land bases want to give us – to ‘live in the hands of the gods’, as Daniel Quinn put it. This is how all creatures live, it is the way of life – but how do we realistically get there? 6 billion people cannot live as forager-hunter-gardeners. But then again, 6 billion people cannot live under industrial agriculture without killing the planet (and themselves), so that is a moot point. Like all other creatures, if we weren’t farming, our landbase would determine our population.

Really, there are no easy answers. And that’s exactly what veganism can be; something that makes us stop thinking and questioning, something that is attainable because it plays into the plans of the system. There is something beyond veganism though – beyond a diet of domestication and dogma; a place based diet. A diet based on relationship, on the realness of taking plant and animal life, for the greater good of all living things.

Notes and links

1. Veganism and Radical Sustainablilty at goingferal.wordpress.com
2. Pizza Vs. Rewilding at urbanscout.org

About two years ago I stopped using antiperspirant/deodorant.  A few months later I decided to stop using shampoo.  Health-related issues weren’t on my mind when I decided to give them up, even though I had heard (for a while) that the aluminum in most antiperspirant brands might be a contributing factor in breast cancer and I do rather like the phrase “If you wouldn’t put it in your body, don’t put it on your body.”  Instead, my motivation was vaguely hippieish, but I’d just call it being a “real” naturalist.  I feel like going without is the way people are supposed to be.  I started to grow a beard before I ever had any thoughts like that just because I liked the idea of having a beard, but the first time I grew my hair out it was a kind of this is the way people are supposed to be thing.  (Someone mentioned recently that her dad was “old-fashioned” and that he still thinks long hair on men is a no-no.  I didn’t vocalize the thought, but in my head I went Well, I guess I’m about 1000 years more old-fashioned.)  I’m thin, but fit (thought not as fit as maybe I should be), the way people have always been.

I’ve heard and read that smell is the sense most closely related to memory.  I believe that humans used to use their sense of smell a lot more, and for most people it was a lot more powerful.  (I watched Platoon the other day, and after it the documentary in the DVD extras.  In the doc they explain that one of the scenes was influenced by a real event.  On a patrol one of Oliver Stone’s sergeants stopped him because he knew that there were three NVA soldiers in front of him.  How did he know?  He smelled them.)  Even though people had a more powerful sense of smell, and even though there was no Old Spice and Axe around, I don’t think they sat around thinking themselves (and their families) utterly disgusting.  We’re conditioned to find certain smells pleasant or unpleasant.  Of course there are evolutionary reasons that certain smells are almost universally unpleasant—but what possible evolutionary reason could there be for finding our own human scent deplorable?

It makes sense that smell really is closely related to memory.  I’ve known quite a few people who have kept a significant other’s clothing around (usually a hoodie), and one told me that the smell of that person was a comfort.  This makes sense, but what doesn’t make sense is that now people usually cherish the smell of a cologne or perfume, smells that anyone can buy and that are unique to no one.

I smell fine.  With a lot of activity I can work up quite a funk, but less so than many people; I don’t sweat a ton, and I eat better than some.  I know other people who don’t use deodorant and they smell fine.  We all smell fine.

I’d rather smell like a person—I’d rather smell like me—than a stick of Right Guard.  Axe makes me nauseous; I can’t believe anyone would actually buy that stuff.  I’m a goofy kind of man’s man, and I don’t ever want to smell like some girly product (I don’t want women to smell like “girly” products, either, just to clarify), I don’t ever want to be “smooth,” and I don’t ever want to have a body like some freak in a magazine.  I’m happy being human and not a trash bin for marketing agencies.

I’m upset/pissed over this “spill” just like every other person who cares about things other than human profit.  I also can’t help but feel slightly fatalistic over it all.  I haven’t been keeping close track of every single thing BP, Transocean, and the government have been doing, but I have had my eyes open enough to see each drastic change in strategy, etc.  When the “accident” first happened, like everyone else I said “Oh, shit.”  But as efforts to stop the “leak” failed one after the other, I started to say “This is so fucked.”

One of the things that pisses me off most is that so many people are saying that the “accident” was “preventable,” had Transocean/BP/everyone else involved just followed the “rules” and did things “safely.”  On the one hand, of course the “accident” was preventable, but on the other, it was inevitable.  As long as we live in a culture that values profit and comfort and luxury and excess over health, corners will be cut, regulations and rules ignored, and accidents like these will happen again and again and again.  The culture, and most of the people within it, don’t care that these kinds of things happen.  It/they never will.  It/they doesn’t/don’t know how.

When one faces facts, one realizes that the hole will (most likely) not be plugged, and that oil will continue gushing from underneath the crust until the pressure stabilizes.  After it stops pouring out the news will chill out on it.  Media will cover the continued cleanup efforts for a while, my guess is for a year or so (sporadically), and then that’ll be it.  The Gulf will be pretty much dead, but after a while nobody (except those that live on the coast) will care anymore.  At that time BP will go in and, in all likelihood, suck out the remainder of the oil in that hole, the stuff that isn’t spewing out anymore.  None will be the wiser, everyone will pay for it, and things will go on again as usual, BP losing a few billion dollars in profits to be made up later.

On reddit, where I’ve most kept up-to-date, there seem to be a few opinions on what should be done now that this huge “accident” has happened.  The most popular, undoubtedly, is that we should be safe about how we drill for oil in the oceans—but it’d be stupid to just not drill.  (Or, as I call it, the Drill, baby, drill! opinion.  Most people who are of this opinion seem to hate my title for it, though.)  Another is that maybe the oil companies should stop drilling in the oceans, maybe they shouldn’t—but one thing is for sure: BP needs to pay for this dearly. The runner-up for least popular is that we should stop drilling because we don’t need to, but again, BP needs to pay/be torn apart/whatever.  The least popular opinion is the one that caught my eye, and that I (obviously) agree with: “BP this. BP that. BP the other. This isn’t about BP. This is about drilling through miles of ocean and seabed in to reservoirs of toxic sludge and high pressure gas. The inevitable happened – but it could have been anybody’s rig that blew up. Don’t lose sight of that as BP is fed to the wolves.”¹ Or, as I’ve put it before: It’s the culture, stupid.

In that thread, other than supporting the submitter (BlueRock), I posted a few things that expressed how I felt about the “accident” and the culture at large.  The first was to a quote from The Living Great Lakes² and this:

We have to face facts here: The Gulf will probably never return to the state it was in, at least not in any of our lifetimes, and probably not the lifetimes of many of the next generations. The people who live on the Gulf Coast, and maybe even the East Coast (if things get bad enough there) should never forgive those responsible for this atrocity. And I don’t mean BP; here I’m siding with BlueRock. This is the fault of BP and the companies they work with, sure, but it’s also the fault of the culture. Everyone who promotes the ideology of those responsible is at fault here. And we who oppose them should be working to stop them. It will happen again—if not the exact same thing, an event with similar, and possibly worse repercussions.

A little later, this: “It’s a matter of risk vs. reward. The risk is the destruction of ocean ecosystems. The reward is, at best, a few more years worth of oil to burn up,”  (In another thread a few days later I amended this by adding “Read that again: a few more years.”) followed by a quote from The Culture of Make Believe.³ After both, this:

“I don’t know how to get out of this hole, but we should at least stop digging.” Basically saying “let’s see what happens” is akin to saying “Well, you’re right, we might be fucked, but lets dig a little deeper until we know for sure. Maybe we’ll make it to China.”

In case it wasn’t obvious, we’re not going to make it to China.

OK, all of that’s fine, but I’ll shift out of narcissism mode.  I came across this report by Rachel Maddow, and other than rocking back and forth and saying to myself “We’re fucked, we’re fucked, we’re fucked,” I thought, Shit, maybe I was wrong.  When I said “We have to face facts here: The Gulf will probably never return to the state it was in, at least not in any of our lifetimes, and probably not the lifetimes of many of the next generations,” I said it not only because I believed it, but I thought it sounded really, really good.  I felt like anyone who read that (and believed it, like I did), would have no choice but to grasp the total impact of this “accident,” and that they’d want to tear apart the whole system and so on.  But finding out that the same thing happened 30 years ago made me think If the Gulf bounced back (somewhat) from that “spill” in a short time (relative to historic time), why did I assume that this time around the Gulf will be dead for maybe hundreds of years? While my first statement was out of instinct and was emotionally influenced, I’m not sure it’s entirely wrong, even though I doubted it for a little while.  Earlier today I came across an article with this headline (on reddit): “Give the Gulf fifty years and your grandkids might see life returning to the waters and shores. In the human timescale, though, for your life and your children’s lives, Louisiana will be the new Bhopal.”⁴ (The article seems a little uninformed somehow, and is representative of the throw BP under the wheel opinion, but it makes a decent point or two.)

I guess it comes down to a few things.  First, I do hope that the “spill” is cleaned up quickly, that what’s left of the affected wildlife bounces back quickly, and that the habitats can be healthy again.  That’s contrasted with the disappointment I have knowing that the out-of-work fishermen are chomping at the bit to get back to gathering their already over-harvested species of choice just so they can start making money again.  I’m willing to admit that maybe I’m wrong, and in some sense I hope I am.  Overall, though, I think the differences between the Deepwater Horizon disaster and the Ixtoc I are large enough for the aftermath to be extreme and felt for a long time to come.  It’s likely that far more oil per day is coming out, and will continue coming out for months to come; this well is in 5000 feet of water and not 200, meaning more water is affected from bottom to surface; the gulf has become increasingly fragile in these 30 years.  I don’t know if, when, or how the ocean will bounce back.  Again, I beg everyone who doesn’t know how to get out of this hole to stop digging.

Notes and links

1. BP this. BP that…. at reddit.com/r/environment
2. A bit of wisdom at this bloggy thing
3. When people make profound admissions at this bloggy thing
4. Louisiana will be the new Bhopal at unknownnews.org
   Read more about the Bhopal disaster. Derrick Jensen also has interesting and insightful coverage of the Bhopal incident in The Culture of Make Believe.

Knowing that it was going to get pretty cold (40°F) I decided I would set up only half of my tent (to be used as wind protection, I guess, and to give me some small illusion of “safety”) and have a fire burning nearby all night long.  Never having done this I knew it would definitely be an interesting experience.  I was expecting to be a bit more comfortable with it though.

In the past few years I’ve made several steps outside of my (then-current) comfort zones.  One of the first outdoor-related steps was buying a tent without a floor.  Won’t bugs and/or, god forbid, snakes get on me? I thought.  As it turned out, that wasn’t a big deal at all.  Another was ditching matches and lighters altogether, preferring instead a firesteel and a few different tinder sources should I fail to find any.  This, also, was not a big deal—in fact, it feels empowering and makes me feel …  honest.  I have to make good fires from the ground up every time.

Anyway, sleeping didn’t go very well.  Fear isn’t an accurate description of what I was feeling, but it wasn’t entirely far from that.  I felt very exposed, vulnerable.  After it got too dark to do anything else, probably a little after 9 o’clock, I got another fire going and decided I’d try to get to sleep early.  For a little while it was simply sounds that kept me up, and uncertainty at those sounds.  At dusk, when there was still a little light, an animal walked by where I had set up at a distance of maybe 150 feet.  It was too dark, and the animal was too far away, to tell what it was, but it was dark and I judged it at the size of a smallish medium-sized dog.  But a lot beefier.  One of my first thoughts was it looks like a wolverine.  I’m pretty sure it wasn’t, since the odds of that are incredibly small, but that’s what it looked like in the dark and at a distance.

So while things were still jumping and moving around, every noise made me think Oh shit that wolverine-like-thing is going to maul my face while I sit here wrapped up in my blanky.  My heart rate jumped considerably and I was actually scared once when I heard a noise literally right behind my tent, but it was a squirrel.  After that, noise stopped bothering me (and later I had the pleasing experience of hearing an owl while it did its who hooting).  (And actually, I think I heard some coyotes howling later too, which briefly turned into wolves, which briefly freaked me out.)

I still couldn’t sleep though.  Impossible situations kept running through my head.  I felt too exposed.  I considered putting on the other half to the tent, but as I thought about that realized I’d then become somewhat cold.  I figured that even if I didn’t sleep, all I’d have to do was wait out the night so I could go home when the sun came up (even though my original intent was to go out for two nights).  I could either build up a big fire and sit by it, or read my book by flashlight for a few hours.  But as my wood got low I realized I wouldn’t be able to have a fire through the night without getting more, and, curiosity getting the best of me I checked the time.  12:59am.  I’d been trying to sleep for roughly four hours, and another four hours of the same didn’t sound appealing.  I gave it a little more time, and after what I assumed was another hour and a half I checked again.  1:31.  Fuck it; I’m only a few miles from home, so I’m going to sleep in my bed tonight.

The decision to go home was one I had considered throughout that half-hour.  I was uncomfortable (back pain), was going to get cold if I didn’t do something to change it, and I knew I wasn’t going to fall asleep.  I locked my bike up about 150 paces away to the south in a straight line.  Find my bike, get on the two-track that was another 40 paces or so from that (next to a huge clearing), and I’d be fine.

Well, having walked that straight line three or four times during the day, I figured it’d be no problem.  At night, though, I ended up going the wrong direction, getting lost, and thinking It’s OK, because even if I can’t find my way out I only will have to sit a few hours and wait for the sun to come up.  After walking further than I needed to, I turned off my flashlight and looked to the sky.  I looked for where the trees thinned, figuring I could walk that way and reach the big clearing.  Well, I did, but ended up reaching a small clearing (actually an area with a bunch of fallen trees and brambles).  This was aggravating because it was the wrong clearing, but good; if I hadn’t stumbled across this area I would have had no idea where to go.  Since I could see the stars now, I found the north star and realized I’d been walking east instead of south.  (I started going south-southeast, probably, but obviously that changed).  I reoriented, walked in the direction I felt I needed to go (southwest), and occasionally turned off the light to look for the trees thinning again.  After about 10 minutes (I walked way too far in the complete wrong direction to begin with) I found the large clearing I was looking for and was OK.

To sum up: On the one hand I feel defeated, having failed to do what I set out to do.  On the other, I feel  accomplished having found my way out of the woods at two o’clock in the morning, by myself, with nothing to go by but instinct and stars (eventually).  The funniest part about it, to me, was that even though I had gotten myself lost, I kept my cool.  I knew that I would have no problem finding my way out, even if I did have to wait for the sun.  So even though I feel defeated because I’m not cool like Mick Dundee and I can’t sleep in the middle of the bush with nothing but a hat and a fire, and even though I’m never going to have any awesome communal experiences with wolf packs, I took a pretty big step outside of my comfort zone, and that’s a pretty sweet feeling.  A lesson I might have learned: It’s OK to go into the woods to “rough it” and “be badass” with other people.  Had someone been with me I would have felt more comfortable with everything, and might have even got some sleep.

Some time ago I came to the conclusion that I hated plastic.  It might actually be one of the worst things people have ever made.  It’s not capable of mass obliteration and wiping out entire cities like, say, a nuclear bomb or anything—in fact it’s not even capable of killing anyone, except maybe in contributing to a slow death or a life of bad health—but it’s not good for us and it doesn’t go away.  But since it’s cheap to manufacture it’s everywhere.  The result is a world filled with gaudy, low-quality crap that will be around for longer than it should (read as: it shouldn’t have been around in the first place).  One reason (of many) I’ve come to like fantasy settings is the lack of plastic.  Lord of the Rings: Justifiable war and no plastic.  The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion: Me and a horse, no plastic (magic, but no plastic).

I can see nothing good about it. It accumulates and messes things up in ways I can’t even count. We put our food in plastic to preserve it, and by doing so let harmful chemicals into our bodies.¹ When we’re done with those containers we throw them away, but there isn’t a good way to get rid of it. Organic waste deteriorates, but plastic doesn’t. If we put it in landfills it leaches poisons into our ground water. If we burn it it poisons our air. There has been a giant swath of this stuff in the Pacific ocean for quite some time.² And—I’ll be damned—someone found something similar happening in the Atlantic.³ That seems pretty awful, but how about this? All of this oceanic plastic actually does break down. The bad news: that breakdown just means the poisons get into the water faster. Way faster.⁴

Since I have developed such a strong dislike for it (and really all other petroleum-derived synthetic materials that we don’t commonly think of as “plastic”), I try to avoid it.  Since it is so unavoidable, I do a rather pathetic job of this, and when I do end up buying pretty much anything, I have to admit to myself that I’ve had some small failure simply because whatever it is inevitably came with plastic packaging.

That aside, I still try, and as a result of my attempts I’ve just ended up feeling more eccentric than I really am.  Two examples:  (1) Most of my “outdoor gear” is military surplus stuff.  My backpack is cotton, though it was unexpectedly a knockoff of an Australian pack and was made in India.  My tent is genuine surplus and is all cotton.  Surprisingly it’s the driest tent I’ve slept in.  I’ve also been trying to use only a single wool blanket.  The downfalls to all of this are that the backpack isn’t terribly comfortable when loaded up, the tent is way heavier than a modern one, and a single blanket that isn’t very thick isn’t always very warm.  The upside is that I feel honest when I use it.  Put another way:

There is nothing appealing to me anymore about crawling into a plastic smelling, dank, dirty plastic tent at night after a long day out in the fresh air. We go to the woods for many reasons, but one of the most important is so that we as humans can feel again what life is like on Earth without the sensoral deadening of our modern society. So why is it then that we insist on wrapping ourselves in plastic and nylon at night? Even though we may stay dry or keep ourselves away form the creepy-crawlies, we are effectively cutting ourselves off from the wild at that point … ⁵

(2) I won’t buy any more fancy gadgets that modern tech makes cheaper every year.  Not very long ago (a handful of years, I guess), I would have probably considered myself tech-savvy and interested in the “advancements” made every  year.  I still didn’t buy most of it—I’ve never owned a cell phone, for example—but I did buy some.  I was slow to get a digital music player, but eventually I did.  I bought a digital camera when point-and-shoots became affordable—or more affordable than they were before.  I won’t buy any  more of it.

I can rationalize buying used and surplus stuff, however.  In my mind, if I feel like I can benefit from a good and I can find someone with what I want who doesn’t want it anymore, I am acting in a commendable way when I take it off their hands.  If I didn’t someone else would have, and if someone else didn’t, it would have ended up being thrown away, poisoning everyone and never disappearing.  And if I wanted it bad enough I would have ended up buying one new which, when I was done with it, would have also ended up being thrown away to poison and never disappear.  (Eventually this is going to happen to all of these goods, but it makes sense to get as much use as possible out of each one before it’s thrown away.)

My first mp3 player filled up, so I bought a used fourth generation 20GB iPod.  I spilled a drink on my digital camera last year and now (with both batteries) it will only hold a charge for a matter of days when left alone, when it used to hold a charge for many months, but I’ll live with it instead of buying another one.  When I decided to buy a laptop last year I simply refused to allow myself to buy new.  I had at least two people remind me that I could “get a netbook for like $200,” but I didn’t need a new one—because I didn’t need the computer in the first place.  I think of it like this: for every new electronic gadget someone buys there’s a used one that is going to end up in a village in China in which every old lady has cancer and the air smells like melted motherboards.

Even eating is hard.  I’ve figured out, to some extent, which places give out styrofoam and choose to go elsewhere.  I very rarely use straws or lids when I get fountain drinks (almost never), and I won’t take a plastic fork or spoon unless I’m in a bad mood.  I ask for paper plates versus boxes when they are available, paper bags versus boxes, etc.  I don’t even eat out much, but knowing other people who do on a daily basis, I feel bad simply through association.

Notes and links

1. Bisphenol A > Health effects at en.wikipedia.org
2. Oh, This is Great at viceland.com
3. Huge Garbage Patch Found in Atlantic Too at nationalgeographic.com
4. Plastic Breaks Down in Ocean, After All — And Fast at nationalgeographic.com
5. Minimum Or Displaced Impact – About Leaving No Trace at jackmtn.com

One day at a time.  I can’t be freaking out about the fall already.

Sup?

I’m losing my mind.

The last two years have kicked my ass.  My issue goes back a further than that, but in the last two I’ve really started to be affected by my life-to-the-present.  (More exactly, I can almost pinpoint a moment when I started to “lose it” in August of 2008, but events from earlier that year precipitated that specific event.)

Looking back on your life for the past few years and realizing you don’t know where the hell they went is an uncomfortable feeling.  I don’t even know exactly how many years I’m talking about here.  (It’s not two.  Two is just the amount of time I’ve been getting my ass kicked.) Is it five—the number of years since I graduated high school?  Is it three, when I last took a college class?  Maybe it’s three-and-a-half.  Yeah.  Fall 2006 seemed nice.  When I was 19 I think I actually became me, if you understand.  So what have I been doing since then?

I’ll get this out of the way right away: I do feel like I’ve “accomplished” at least one thing in that time—since I’ve been me.  This will sound stupid to a lot of people, but I feel like I’ve successfully started living like an animal.  I’m not one for the human–animal dichotomy, but to go with it for a second, I’m definitely not  living like a human.  I feel like this is a good thing because I’m getting rid of the need to be human in this world.  I’m not obsessively laboring.  I’m not worried about bills.  I spend every day doing as I please, even if it’s not what most pleases me—like an animal.  My cat spends much of every day sleeping, and much of it outside doing whatever it is cats do when they are outside.  My life is a mirror of this, somewhat.

(Getting away from that dichotomy, it could be said that there is no way for a human to live other than like a human.  This is right.  And throwing the dichotomy out, humans have to live “like animals” because that’s what we are.)

The downside to this is that I’m living like a domesticated animal.  I lounge around and don’t fret about status or wealth or other human things, but my food is still placed in front of me and I don’t have to do work to get by.  This isn’t how wild animals live; they have to work to provide food and water and everything else they need, for themselves, or they die.  The next step is therefore, obviously, to start living like a wild animal—and that means undomesticating myself, rewilding.  I’m going to struggle with this, if I do it at all, not necessarily because it will be hard work (I can’t imagine that it won’t be), but because  I don’t have any fucking idea how I’ll do it.

Going back to what I’ve already said, I don’t have any idea what  has really happened to me in the last—what’d I say?—three-and-a-half years.  But two things are explicitly clear to me.  The first is that I’m slowly cracking under my own pressure, and the second is that every year I’ve felt more lonely.

I mean this in all ways, too.  I think a lot of people my age complain about being lonely, but I think most of them (at least from what I can tell) say they are lonely because they lack a companion, spouse, significant other of the (usually) opposite sex.  This is part of my loneliness, of course (and I’ll get to that a little more), but for me I’m lonely in pretty much every other area too.

I spend the vast majority of my time completely alone.  This alone contributes most to what I can only describe, completely without detail, as “losing it.”  Some spans are more without interaction than others, but I think it’s safe to say that more than half, probably more than two-thirds, of my time awake is spent completely alone.  This has been constant for years, too.  I remember sometime in 2008 I posted on a message board about how, after literally going days without seeing or speaking to anyone, I would often start to speak aloud things that needn’t be spoken aloud.  It wasn’t talking to myself per se, just talking.  I theorized that it was just my desire to hear a voice.  I can’t say for sure whether or not this was the case, but it made sense to me.  Now we have a cat so I just talk to him.

In the fall of that year I felt very strongly that if I were trapped at home all winter long I’d go mad.  I stayed with friends for three weeks, but it didn’t help.  Instead of being really lonely at home I was just really lonely somewhere else.  Most days I would walk around town (alone), read (alone), watch episodes of The Dog Whisperer (alone), and eat apples and peanut butter (alone).  Being at someone else’s house didn’t help one bit.  They’d come home anywhere between six and seven o’clock, and most nights they’d just go up to their bedrooms immediately.  There wasn’t a complete lack of interaction, but not significantly more that I was experiencing at home with my family, and it wasn’t more fulfilling.  When the Wii was downstairs they’d play some games they rented sometimes.  And then some TV shows once in a while.  That was pretty much it.

From spring until fall everything continued in much the same way it had previously, and looking back on it I’m a bit surprised I handled it so well.  (I guess I was enjoying my alone time in the woods enough to make up for a lack of friends.  I guess.)  I worked once a week at the record store, occasionally coming in on Saturday or something in addition to Wednesday, but I lost enthusiasm for that as it became increasingly business-only and less helping-out-a-friend.  In the middle of the summer somewhere I started hanging out with someone I’d kind of known for a while, and we quickly became good friends, but then he left town for a few months for school.

When this last fall came around I wasn’t as worried as the year prior even though it would much the same.  My mental and emotional state was different for reasons I’ll get to.  As of December I had a friend around again, so that helped some.  Hanging out once, sometimes twice a week was better than not.

This new year, 2010, is already kicking my ass.  Hell—the few weeks we’ve had since the snow melted have been kicking my ass.  Having a friend once a week isn’t enough.  It was never enough.  It was better than having a friend once every few weeks, or every month, or sometimes longer, but it still wasn’t enough.  I’m cracking, and for several reasons—some that I can elucidate, some that I can’t.  So with that simplified outline of the last two years as they were out of the way, I’ll do the two years as they ought to have been, explain some things about myself, and then speculate on the future.

In the fall of 2007 I really started to like the idea of dropping out, I was getting interested in primitive skills, and just increasing my viability as an adaptable person in general.  I really wanted to spend some time in a tent in the woods.  I figured a month would do.  I figured the spring would be a good time, once it was warm enough at least.  This didn’t happen.  As summer (2008 now) came along I still wanted to find a way to be outside developing Tony the Adaptable Person.  Looked into “interning” at a CSA farm.  I didn’t have a tent of my own so I didn’t go (which is a nice way of saying I was too flaky and/or I wasn’t that interested in doing it).  I got a tent eventually, along with some other stuff, and figured I’d spend some time in the woods later in the year.  By winter I’d slept outside maybe two times, but I seem to remember only one.

In the next months I developed a new plan: get away for a while.  By a combination of biking, picking up car rides, couch-surfing, and wilderness squatting I could drop out and in the process see a bit of this continent.  I had most of what I needed, even some bucks to give me a little bit of wiggle room.  I figured all I’d need in addition to what I already had was a used laptop for setting up rides and couch-surfs.  Through a frustrating series of events I don’t care to elaborate on I didn’t end up with a working computer until July, and by then my funds were near zero again.  I was finally ready to go by August, but then I was doubting the trip.  I was mentally prepared (or at least I had told myself I was) to leave in the spring and run out of money in the summer; I wasn’t prepared to leave in the late summer/early fall and run out of money in the winter.  I didn’t go anywhere.  I went into the winter thinking I’ll just go next year. Next year is here, but I don’t think I want to go anywhere.

I really do think I could do it, but I don’t really want to.  At the moment I have $200 to my name compared to the $400 I had in early 2009.  I have no experience dumpstering, though I’m sure I could manage to get some food that way.  I have a minimal experience foraging for wild foods (I have a field guide and have eaten wild foods maybe 3 times), but I wouldn’t count on that for dependable food procurement.  With those two facts in mind, it seems logical to assume I’d need to buy most of what I would be eating, and I don’t know how far I could stretch $200.  I could no-doubt score free meals a number of ways, but I think it’s safe to assume I’d lose weight and my health would deteriorate.  That doesn’t sound fun.  And somehow I seemed to forget that I’d be incredibly lonely.  How I could have overlooked that I have no idea.

So I come back to loneliness, and to the point at which I explain some things about myself.

1. I don’t make friends very easily.

I just don’t.  I never have.  It’s not in my nature.  I’m not as social as some people are.  In childhood I had friends, enough friends, but never more than one good friend at a time.  From seventh grade until eleventh I had two good friends and a few less-good friends.  From tenth grade until a year after graduation the majority of my time was spent with a girl I thought I loved who didn’t love me and was emotionally abusive.  Then ’til now has been kind of interesting.  At certain times I’d hang out with one or two people a lot, but I never really formed close friendships.

Signing onto Facebook, when I do (I’ve been going a week or two, sometimes a month without using it), is always a rather pathetic event.  Every time I use it I’m harshly reminded of how unfulfilling my life is and how laughable the concept of social networking is when you can’t even get social right.  Some people have the experience of having a very active online social life at the expense of their real social lives.  My experience is that I have neither an active (or fulfilling) online social life or an active real social life.  Every time I sign on I sign on to nothing.  When I post things they rarely even elicit responses unless I carefully craft them in such a way as to provoke comments.

It’s not that I don’t like people, and it’s not that they don’t like me.  I get along with almost everyone I meet, and some actually seem to like me quite a bit.  I guess the problem here is that I demand a lot out of people I consider good friends, and rarely do they meet my standards.  The close friends I had growing up met those standards then, but they don’t meet them now.  Therefore it’s very clear why I’ve only had a handful of close friends, only one at the moment, and none prior to that for years.  I guess there is a bit more to it than that, which is my next point.

I want to hang out with people.  I’d prefer to have more close friends, but since they aren’t easily picked up, I still want to spend time with people I like in some ways.  The reasons I don’t basically all boil down to one of my character traits: I don’t like to intrude, ask for things, or invite myself along, and since I have nothing going on in my life, ever, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to want people to ask me to hang out.  The way I look at is this: if I am never doing anything, and everyone else is always doing something, isn’t it OK for me to wish for a phone call once in a while?  They all know I’m always free—so why don’t they call?  I’ve been told for years that I need to ask people to hang out, but given another trait of mine—my frugality, or you could say cheapness—asking people to hang out usually means, “Hey, want to go walk around and talk or something?”  For acquaintances who value fun a lot more than I do, this is rarely an exciting prospect.  Basically, expecting to be called rather than doing the calling makes sense to me.

This does, however, lead to two problems.  The first is that I don’t hang out with anyone.  The second is that I’ve often been picked out as “compatible” by people who do the calling when in reality we are less compatible than it may seem.  They are always looking for someone to hang out with, I’m always free, and so we’re obviously going to become best friends.  In the past few years this has happened a few times, and it’s never an easy position to be in.

2. I’ve never been in an intimate relationship.

I mentioned that emotionally abusive girl that I hung out with a lot from 15-18 (and then briefly while I was 20).  Maybe I’ve been in one horrible, awful relationship, but we were never actually dating.  She treated me like her boyfriend some of the time, people almost always thought we were together, and while a bond had formed between us there was no physical component—just a very bumpy emotional component.  And that relationship has left me stunted.  After her I have only shared mutual interest with one girl, and that was when I was 17.  We didn’t date because (a) GIRLS HAVE COOTIES and (b) she was more religious than I thought would work.  This was never communicated and she just started to see someone else.

I feel like I’m screwed now, because I could never figure out all of those boy-girl things I was supposed to figure out when I was a teenager due to being in a relationship that wasn’t really a relationship.  There aren’t any social situations in which a guy in his early 20s can figure out things he should have figured out when he was 15.  Putting aside the fact that I’m rarely truly interested in anyone (see “I demand a lot out of people”), I don’t know how to interact with women I’m interested in.  I don’t even know how to express it.

But then pulling back that fact I just  put aside, it all seems rather inconsequential anyway.  I recently saw what I’m about to get at put this way: (Paraphrased) You meet thousands, maybe millions of people throughout your life, and so far you’ve only bonded with a few.  You really think you’re going to meet a girl who makes the cut?

3. I have no motivation.

It's not that I'm lazy, it's that I just don't care.

Really, the things I want in life are very simple.  I would like some land on which to live, a small home, a garden, a woman to grow old with (maybe a wife, maybe not—doesn’t matter to me), and a kid or two.  Ideally we would be in close proximity to other people we like, love, and care about as well.  Access to food and family are two of our most basic necessities, but I don’t know how, or even if, I can get them.

Legally obtaining land is predicated on paying for it.  I could squat, of course, but I don’t think that’d be an ideal situation for a family.  Basically that means: pay for it, or, if you don’t want to pay for it, forget wanting to have a family.  If I pay for it I will literally have to sell years of my life to do so.  If I forget about having a family I don’t personally see a point in having land to begin with.  I find it rather lose-lose.  On the one hand I have to surrender years of my life to someone else, and on the other I have to forget living a life I would find fulfilling.  How do you motivate yourself to do one of two things you don’t want to do?  I certainly have no idea.

And the other side of this is just money.  I know I have skills that could make me some money if I applied them in the right ways, kissed an ass here and there, told some lies, and generally just acted unlike the way I act.  But I don’t want money.  Literally.  I just don’t want it.  I understand that I’m pretty much stuck in a situation that requires its use, but I don’t care for it.

~

None of this is really about the distant future; it’s about right now.  Right now I’m losing my mind.  Right now I can’t find fulfilling things to fill my days with.  I find it hard to get out of bed, and I take a long time doing it.  In fact, I take a long time doing pretty much everything.  It’s kind of like milking the clock at work, only the job is getting through the day.  When I cook I do it slow and I make more food than I need so I can make more than one meal out of it so I can make the whole ordeal span a few hours.  I shower two or three times a week, and usually I take long showers.  Whenever I go into the bathroom I spend a while looking at myself in the mirror, looking for dry skin, hairs (from my head) stuck in my beard, and contemplating the shape of my face, the color of my eyes and hair, and whatever else.  A little while ago I spent an hour-and-a-half—an hour-and-a-half!—changing the cassette on my bike (I could have had it done in less than ten minutes).

I want to clarify something: I don’t do things slowly because I am lazy; I do things slowly because I have so much day to fill and so little to fill it with.  I read for about two hours every day, but I get worn out.  Lately I have ended up watching reruns of Seinfeld more often than I’d like to because I have been spending less time on the computer.  Anyway, I want to clarify something else: I’m not depressed.  I can get mopey, but I’m not regularly sad, angry, upset, or anything else on that list of bad emotions.  I’m just bored.  And lonely.  And feeling incredibly unfulfilled.

Sometimes I think about relocating, but I don’t know to where and for exactly what reasons, and I don’t know if that will even do any good.  And it’s always with the assumption that I’ll come back anyway.  It’s just that I love northern Michigan too much.  It’s not completely unspoiled, it’s beautiful, obviously, and part of me likes the fantasy of bioregional warfare and protecting Great Lakes water with my life.  The reasons I consider it, though, basically come down to accepting the situation I’m in: I live in an area that, while beautiful, can’t really give me the things I want and need right now.  I know one person that is like me, and finding your tribe—that’s what I’m trying to do here: find my tribe—means finding more than one person.  To get that future I want requires three things: (1) that I become a wild animal, (2) that I somehow gain access to land, and (3) that I fall in love.  The land comes into play much later, and I find the odds of accomplishing either of the other two while I remain here at-or-near zero.

By that logic the conclusion seems obvious: relocate.  But to where, for how long?  And what the hell am I going to do when I get there?  If I can’t find fulfilling tasks to fill my day now, by what logic am I to think I’ll magically find fulfilling tasks to fill my day if I live anywhere else?

I’ve kind of spent these past years just expecting to stumble into something, but as time goes on it’s becoming clear that it won’t be that easy.  And then some part of me has also just been hoping someone would come to me and say, “Hey, Tony, you’re a smart and cool guy and I/we have/know about this smart and cool thing that’s going on that you could help with/start/do/become a part of.”  But reality hasn’t suggested this will happen either.

(Going backward for a minute, I realize a contradiction in advice people give.  While the above—just waiting for something to happen, hoping someone will give me a place somewhere—is something nobody will tell you is reasonable, the same advice, or reassurance rather, is given when it comes to relationships.  “You’ll meet a great girl, just you wait,” I’ve been told more times than I care to recall, but it’s the same fantasy.  I’m sick of hearing that because it’s unrealistic and stupid.)

A few years back someone I got e-close to used to, somewhat jokingly, would occasionally send me links to websites for various ecovillages and tell me to just go.  I’ve looked around at various “communes”/intentional communities, but none of them seem like a fit for me.  I do like the idea of “rewilding communities,” but it doesn’t … well, it doesn’t seem like there actually are any.  Rewilders are much rarer than hippies, and I don’t know of any solid “communities.”  I’ve been told to look into wilderness survival schools and stuff too, but have you ever looked at the prices for those places?  Tuition runs as much as colleges in some cases.  I spent a lot of time looking around the website for Teaching Drum in northern Wisconsin today.  It looks really cool and incredibly involved, but nothing I could ever afford.  They have one-month classes that cost $800 dollars, and an 11-month class that costs $7000.

I don’t know what to do or where to go, and “I don’t know” is an awful answer to any question.  Honest, but no less awful.

~

I’m afraid to turn 23 because when I was 16 I told that emotionally abusive girl I spent a lot of time with that I was giving myself seven years.  Why I chose seven years might seem arbitrary, because it is indeed.  Looking back on my likes of the time together with my state of mind I’m pretty sure that I can construct the actual reason I chose seven years—but for the most part it was arbitrary.

For non–math geeks, 16 + 7 = 23.  Well, I’m 22 and guess what?  I’m not happy with my life.  This by no means suggests that a mostly random date for happiness that I came up with when I was a dumb teenager actually means anything—but that doesn’t mean I’m not freaking the fuck out.  While seven years was arbitrary, it actually made sense, and I still think it makes sense.  In my mind, originally, it was “mid-20s.”  Twenty-three is definitely the low side of mid-20s, but it makes it.  It didn’t need to, though.  Basically, given the blessed advancements of modern medicine I generously gave myself 100 years; something around 25, my middest-of-mid-20s, therefore, would be a quarter of my life gone by, and, personally, if something doesn’t show a little bit of promise a quarter of the way through, I give up on it.  Maybe that’s unreasonable of me.  Maybe not.  (More recently I’ve decided that 100 years is unrealistic, but maybe 75 or 80 isn’t.  So “mid-20s” then becomes a third of my life.  A little more reasonable I guess … no?)

The point is that I’m 22 and I’m not happy with my life—so what am I going to do about it?

And this is why I’m scared: I don’t have a fucking clue.  But because of the arbitrary age I picked when I was a stupid teenager, I can’t get around thinking that this year is the only year that matters for me.  If I can’t make a step in a direction I’m happy with this year, I personally find it safe to assume I never will.  That’s why 23, an age that really means nothing, made so much sense to me.  In my 16-year-old brain I had calculated that I would have been graduated from college for two-ish years, and with a fancy degree if I didn’t have a kickass job yet I’d at least be on my way.  If I wasn’t at least on the path at 23, I also wouldn’t be on the path at 24, probably not at 25, and if I wasn’t on the path then I obviously wouldn’t be at the goal—being content with my life.

I’m not on any path, and that is, I think rightfully, starting to scare the living shit out of me.

~

Afterword: All but a few paragraphs of this post were written in the late hours of March 25 after a week of only seeing my mom and sisters for a few minutes each day.  The weather was crappy and I felt crazy.  I have been feeling cheerier since then, but the bulk of this post is just as true now as it was a few weeks ago.  I don’t want to make it public because I doubt it will be as cathartic as I’d originally thought it might be, but against better judgment I am.  Getting it all down on e-paper wasn’t, so I doubt anyone reading it will be either.  If anyone is going to offer me a clichéd “things aren’t so bad” platitude, I’d rather be punched in the face.  Hard advice would be OK,  but if it’s “Get a job!” I’m going to punch you in the face.

Human sacrifice is such a charged subject that its practice by the Triple Alliance has inevitably become shrouded in myths.  Two are important here.  The first is that human sacrifice was never practiced—the many post-conquest accounts of public death-spectacles are racist lies.  It was indeed in the Spanish interest to exaggerate the extent of human sacrifice, because ending what Cortés called this “most horrid and abominable custom” became a post hoc rationale for conquest.  But the many vividly depicted ceremonies in Mexica art and writing leave little doubt that it occurred—and on a large scale.  (Cortés may well have been correct when he estimated that sacrifice claimed “three or four thousand souls” a year.)

The second myth is that in its penchant for public slaughter the Triple Alliance was fundamentally different from Europe.  Criminals beheaded in Palermo, heretics burned alive in Toledo, assassins drawn and quartered in Paris—Europeans flocked to every form of painful death imaginable, free entertainment that drew huge crowds.  London, the historian Fernand Braudel tells us, held public executions eight times a year at Tyburn, just north of Hyde Park.  (The diplomat Samuel Pepys paid a shilling for a good view of a Tyburn hanging in 1664; watching the victim beg for mercy, he wrote, was a crowd of “at least 12 or 14,000 people.”)  In most if not all European nations, the bodies were impaled on city walls and strung along highways as warnings.  “The corpses dangling from trees whose distant silhouettes stand out against the sky, in so many old paintings, are merely a realistic detail,” Braudel observed.  “They were part of the landscape.”  Between 1530 and 1630, according to Cambridge historian V. A. C. Gatrell, England executed seventy-five thousand people.  At the time, its population was about three million, perhaps a tenth that of the Mexica empire.  Arithmetic suggests that if England had been the size of the Triple Alliance, it would have executed, on average, about 7,500 people per year, roughly twice the number Cortés estimated for the empire.  France and Spain were still more bloodthirsty than England, according to Braudel.

From 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus by Charles C. Mann, which, even though I’m only about a third of the way through, is so far just as good as sources (and real people) have suggested.  Earlier in the book the author also threw in some instances of the Indians lauding their superiority over early colonizers that contrast some of the familiar claims us Euro-Americans grow up with.

We’ve all heard how the savages had no work ethic and a seeming allergy toward hard work, so it’s funny to read about Indians sitting back and laughing at ignorant European colonists as they toiled hard for their daily bread.  We’ve all heard how the savages walked around naked like stupid animals, so it’s also funny to read about the healthier, taller, more physically-fit Indians laughing at the ugly and deficient European colonists covered in dirty rags and hair.  What kind of beast has orange, bushy hair coming from its face?!

My inner nihilist got out today.  A lot of people know he exists, since I don’t keep his existence completely unknown, but he’s so greatly annoyed by whine-asses throwing stupid (and wrong) accusations at him that he generally just keeps to himself.  It’s understandable, I guess, since I wouldn’t like being called a sociopath for not adhering to any moral code either, nor would I like being scolded because someone got sensitive about brown people and decided to turn me into a pariah by saying I said ethnic cleansing was a solution to carrying capacity overshoot (something which neither of us has never suggested and never will suggest, although we can both see where the anger came from: there are a lot of people, most of them brown, so to say “less” people obviously means less brown people).  Anyway, we’ve both been reading A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson, and the chapter we just finished was about extinction.  Since this seems like a fitting topic for a nihilist with a careless, totally-matter-of-fact manner of speaking, I’ll let him have the keyboard.

Let me just start out by saying I don’t care if humans go extinct.  However, I don’t find that possibility very likely any time soon, since humans have proven themselves worthy of existing and will probably scratch out some niche to fill until Earth becomes unlivable.  One of the chapters I read yesterday mentioned the possibility of HIV adapting to a point where it is no longer killed by mosquitoes’ systems, therefore becoming transmitted on a new, vast scale thanks to the little bugs.  I just thought Cool! The possibility of humanity being wiped out by something bigger than them is cool.  But the longer I thought about it (OK, I made the realization just a few minutes after) the more I realized that even something totally kickass like that probably wouldn’t do people in.  There are (almost) seven-fucking-billion people now, and no realist is going to believe that a virus that is evolving alongside us is suddenly going to totally wipe us out.  Smallpox killed a ton of Indians because it was new to them—they had been isolated from the Old World for thousands of years by the 1500s, so for the purpose (smallpox wiping them the fuck out) the illness might as well have come from outer space.  If  super-HIV came from space then people might be totally fucked, but it isn’t going to come from outer space (I don’t think; that might make a decent sci-fi story though).

We’re hardy.  I’m not even sure a massive extinction event that kills 75% of all living species will kill us all; there are seven-fucking-billion of us, and we’re on basically every part of the planet.  There is no doubt about it taking a huge chunk, probably way more than half, but I’m almost certain that at the very least a few thousand here and there would survive.  We’re too clever and adaptable to die out only because our numbers are reduced—we don’t even really have any natural predators left because we out-smarted them, so it’d basically just be humans, at the top of the food-chain, and whatever 25% is left.  Put a fucking mask on the back of your head and a tiger won’t attack you from behind (most of the time).  And we think cats are smart!

OK, so that’s out of the way.  Let me find my point….

I don’t care if humans go extinct, but they probably won’t.  Even though an extinction event might have trouble taking every human, it’s what would have the highest chance of doing so.  The only thing I can see wiping out humans altogether is a complete eco-catastrophe, or a collapse in the food chain, which would take out basically all forms of visible animal life (plants and bacteria probably ain’t goin’ nowhere), not just us.

I guess that’s why climate change isn’t quite the big deal it’s made out to be.  The underlying causes of climate change are important, but a climatic shift alone isn’t the end of the world.  We’ll survive it, some animals won’t, and the world will go on.  Maybe it’s completely natural (even though it’s probably not), and if it is then so fucking what?  We can baw about the havoc, but we’ll have to get over it at some point.  We can even baw about the polar bears dying, but … well, that brings me to my next point:

Humans are currently driving an extinction event that might rival the ones that did in the dinosaurs.¹ Climate change is just a bit of it, even to the sorrow of the polar bears.  That, by my estimation, is a lot more worrisome than New York being under water—fuck all that—but most people are completely unaware of it.  If the foundations of the food chain are constantly weakened, given enough time it will collapse—and then we have that eco-catastrophe that I talked about, the one that will probably take everything even slightly complex.  And it is happening, even if most people don’t know about it—it can even be measured and quantified (with a degree of uncertainty).  When the oceans are becoming increasingly unlivable, the forests increasingly non-existent, it’s not terribly difficult to imagine an end approaching.

Since Daniel Quinn has put a lot of things very nicely, I guess I’ll just quote him:

We’re like people living in the penthouse of a tall brick building. Every day we need 200 bricks to maintain our walls, so we go downstairs, knock 200 bricks out of the walls below and bring them back upstairs for our own use. Every day. . . . Every day we go downstairs and knock 200 bricks out of the walls that are holding up the building we live in. Seventy thousand bricks a year, year after year after year.

I hope it’s evident that this is not a sustainable way to maintain a brick building. One day, sooner or later, it’s going to collapse, and the penthouse is going to come down along with all the rest.

Making 200 species extinct every day is similarly not a sustainable way to maintain a living community. Even if we’re in some sense at the top of that community, one day, sooner or later, it’s going to collapse, and when it does, our being at the top won’t help us. We’ll come down along with all the rest.

It would be different of course, if 200 extinctions a day were just a temporary thing. It’s not. And the reason it’s not is that, clever as we are, we can’t increase the amount of biomass that exists on this planet. We can’t increase the amount of land and water that supports life, and we can’t increase the amount of sunlight that falls on that land and water. We can decrease the amount of biomass that exists on this planet (for example by making the land sterile or by poisoning the water), but we can’t increase it.

All we can do is shift that biomass from one bunch of species to another bunch–and that’s what we’re doing. We’re systematically shifting the biomass of species we don’t care about into the biomass of species we do care about: into cows, chickens, corn, beans, tomatoes, and so on. We’re systematically destroying the biodiversity of the living community to support ourselves, which is to say that we’re systematically destroying the infrastructure that is keeping us alive.²

Ah, but you, clever reader, have spotted the contradiction!  You’re always so alert, so aware!  “But Tony,”  you plea, “if you don’t care if humans go extinct, why do you care if they themselves create the optimal conditions for their extinction?”  And damn it all, you got me!

My defense is basically this: it’s just stupid for humans to actively try to kill themselves off, and in the process also kill off anything else that gets in their way.  Stated another way, while it’s totally fucking badass (from some perspectives) to be taken out by something bigger than us, and it’s completely respectable, it’s totally fucking retarded to commit suicide just because it sounds like a good idea, and not respectable at all.

Notes and Links

1. The Extinction Puzzle at project-syndicate.org
2. The New Renaissance at ishmael.org

Anybutt, read it if you want.

Links: YouTube comments, so you can understand what’s up (if you want), and then the updated post.

I don’t think I’ll become a very active YouTuber.

This is a short post influenced by this video, which I just watched.  Actually it’s just about one short quote; at about the midway point the talking guy mentions just how endangered Sumatran tigers are, and says that “their habitat is being lost and fragmented daily.”

I’m struck by his choice in wording.  Their habitat is being lost?  Technically his use of the word isn’t incorrect, but I don’t feel like it does a very good job (at all) of conveying what is actually going on.  The Sumatran tigers’ habitat isn’t like a set of keys or a remote control; it isn’t something that we can just misplace and then go, “Where is the damn thing?  Did I lose it?”

There are so many words that would have made better choices.  Here are two: stolen, destroyed.  Some might say the land is being “converted for human use.”  The fact is, the land hasn’t disappeared and it’s not going anywhere—but it isn’t suitable for tigers anymore.  Why be coy about what is going on?  If you really want to save the tigers you have to do so by saving their habitat, and I don’t think you can do that if you aren’t honest about what is actually happening to it.

Trees are falling so crops can replace them in the soil that remains.  We need that land so we can grow more food; we need that food so we can grow more people. Cutting down the trees alone doesn’t mean the tigers will disappear forever, but an amazing thing happens when habitat is “lost” to agriculture: everyone who used to live there is now a pest, and pests are open to extermination.  Why do you think ranchers shoot wolves?  (As I quoted in a post quite a while ago, wolves “break the rules” and because of that they can “expect to die.”)

Using these weak, vague words is only a favor to those profiting from the habitat “loss.”  It’s certainly not a favor to the tigers.

Tell it like it is.

I received additional acknowledgment of the necessary relationship between civilization and slavery today, when I received this note from a graduate student in engineering at Georgia Tech: “Here in the mechanical engineering department, we have a ‘distinguished lecturer’ each semester who comes to give an hour long talk.  These lecturers are usually CEOs of successful global companies, and we students fill the largest lecture hall on campus (about 400 seats!) to hear them speak.  This semester it was Roger L. McCarthy, chairman of ‘Exponent Inc.,’ giving a talk on the importance of innovation and engineering to society, with an emphasis on ‘learning’ from history’s disasters.  My heart pounded during the lecture, as I wanted to stand up like a magician and reveal to the tranquilized audience the well-disguised and tremendously destructive mythology that serves as the foundation for this culture.  Of course, I couldn’t do this this with the twenty to thirty seconds allotted to me in the Q&A session after the talk.  So at the risk of appearing combative in front of my professors, I settled for these simple questions: ‘Has technology done more harm or good for human life, or more to the point, for life in general?  And what metrics will you use in formulating your opinion?’

“I might as well have put the microphone to my ass and farted.  He was baffled at the question, and probably wondered how someone could even think of asking it.  His response was insulting, but typical: ‘You must not know anything about history!  You must not know what life was like two hundred years ago!  Do you even realized what life would be like without technology?  You  have the equivalent of three hundred slaves working for you every day due to the advanced made in technology over the last two hundred years.  You have the benefit of three hundred slaves but without actually having slaves.’  The implication was that I was ‘ungrateful’ even to ask such a question.

“I was even more interested in the questions he didn’t answer than the one he did.  First, he made no mention of whether technology was good for life itself.  He simply ignored the human and nonhuman slaves the world over, as well as the fact that we’re killing the planet.  Such topics are beneath consideration.  In fact, they do not exist.  And though he thought he didn’t answer my final question, about how we measure whether something is good or not, in fact he did: we can measure the success of technology with ‘an equivalent number of slaves’ approach.  If next year, my life is such that I have an equivalent of six hundred slaves as opposed to my meager three  hundred this year, well then, I have something to celebrate, don’t I?  Meanwhile, I’ve become fatter and more clinically depressed while I strap on my jogging shoes and run in a  circle for exercise (but not outside, of course, today is a red alert).  What this means is that if we as a culture have chosen to value ‘enslavement’ in the most general and inclusive way possible, then we have done a tremendously good job implementing our design.”

The rest of this post contains passages that aren’t really related to the last one, and my own commentary.

And you’ve heard the arguments.  The United States needs to close its borders to immigration from poor countries.  Having finally gotten our own birthrate down sufficiently to more or less stabilize our population, the last thing we need is a bunch of poor (brown) people moving in to crowd us out (we know, also, that once they’re here they’ll breed faster than we do, and soon enough will outnumber us).

I often respond to this argument by saying I’m all for closing the border to Mexico (and everywhere else, for that matter, all the way down to closing bioregional borders), so long as we close it not only to people but to resources as well.  No bananas from Mexico.  No coffee.  No oil.  No tomatoes in January.  Many of the people who leave their families in Mexico (or any other impoverished nation ) to come to the United States to work do so not because they hate their husbands or wives yet have not gotten to the point in their therapy where they feel comfortable expressing (much less acting on) this.  Nor is it generally because they’re bored with Cancun, Acapulco, and their other normal vacation spots and have decided this tourist season to take a Reality Tour™ of the bean fields of the San Joachin Valley.  They come, one way or another, because the integrity of their resource base and their community (insofar as there can meaningfully be said to be a difference) have already been compromised: the resources have been stolen, and the community is unraveling.  Of course this migration, too, is part of the unraveling.  From the beginning of history, this is why people have moved from country to city.

At first glance, and to someone not familiar with the author, it might seem like this is an example of him being facetious—him basically going, Fine: No Mexicans, no bananas! I don’t think you’d like that very much! But I’m pretty sure he means exactly what he’s saying.

Closing the border not only to people but also to food and other goods isn’t something I ever considered, but it makes perfect sense.  If a region can’t deal with the extra people, then we assume that this region is supporting itself.  If it is not, but is instead being supported from the outside, telling people “You can’t come in” is pretty much a lie.  But even with this new thought, I think Derrick and I would agree that putting a fence and guards at all borders is a rather radical (by that I mean ineffective; wanting to dismantle civilization is nothing if not radical) approach, and since that alone does nothing to change the culture, it won’t work.

The discussion about population that follows is a little confusing, because he says some different things that seem semi-conflicting, and different passages drew out different emotions.  But he doesn’t actually contradict himself, and the conclusion he comes to are pretty much inescapable (that is to say, they’re solid).

The whole population thing starts with sentences like “There are simply too many people” and “The earth can’t support these numbers.”  It gets confusing when he changes the emphasis, and then says something that (again at first glance) seems pretty typical of wussy environmentalists used to dodging the hard stuff: “Another way to talk about this is to notice the language: overpopulation, zero population growth.”  I was taken aback by this: Derrick Jensen being the wussy environmentalist he makes fun of?  By the end of the chapter though, and with some thought and examination of the context, I realized this isn’t the case.  If anything, Derrick is just refusing to separate population and consumption as they relate to carrying capacity overshoot, but he’s pointing out that a focus on population and only on population is silly.  He’s right.

Why he’s right doesn’t jump out at the reader, but it’s there.  It is rather simple, though: It’s the culture, stupid. Just like border patrols would be ineffective if the culture isn’t changed, a reduction in population alone, without a corresponding change in the culture, won’t do shit.  Living within carrying capacity is something civilized people must do, of course, but what are the options?  These are the ones I see:

1. Forceful reduction of population/enforcement of a “birthrate cap.”  Could bring offending humans to within carrying capacity, yes, but implausible and comes with no fail-safes.  There aren’t enough guns to point at everyone, first of all, and then when the population is lowered, who’s to say consumption won’t skyrocket, bringing the offending humans, once again, into overshoot?
2. Reduction of the food supply.  Could be forceful, could be due simply to a crash in agricultural production, or could be voluntary.  The forceful reduction in food supply sounds awful because—and Derrick makes this point in the book—who is going to do the reducing? the enforcing? the protection of lock and key?  (The rich—the ones already running the system, der.)  The other two ways to a smaller food supply don’t really need examination (for my purposes), but the effect of the reduction does.  Since population is a function of food supply, a reduction in food supply will result in a reduction in population.  Daniel Quinn examines this extensively in his books—”food race,” “growing more food to grow more people,” etc.
3. Reduce the rate of consumption.  But since per capita consumption and population are inseparable when discussing carrying capacity, and this can be discussed again and again, a reduction in consumption while continuing on with the offending culture, simply will not work (see older posts for why—suggestions of which ones are on my About page).  This leads to the last way to live within carrying capacity…
4. Change the culture.  This is really the only way to do it that will work.  How to do it? is a difficult question, and not one I can really answer, but it requires discussion.  Not really the point of this post, but a point I felt needed to be made nonetheless.

Maybe it seems like I’ve sidetracked myself, but it doesn’t matter.  I don’t do book reviews, anyway.  Still, this brings up a point I remembered a few days ago when talking with some friends: the current system is working exactly the way it is supposed to be working—the way it was intended to work by those who envisioned it.  People who know this often forget it, and not enough people even know it to begin with.  People who want to “change the world” (young liberals, basically) need to know it, though.  Wanting to change the system is, in effect, just wishing for it to achieve its goals less effectively.  And that’s why changing the system either (a) won’t happen or (b), if it does, won’t be effective in getting us to live within Earth’s carrying capacity for us.  Throw the whole fucking thing out, because it sucks.

The culture—civilization itself, remember—requires a state of overshoot to exist—”because from the beginning the very existence of city-states has required the importation of resources from ever-expanding regions of increasingly exploited countryside”—and a culture that requires that is, in a very real way, suicidal.

Derrick ends the chapter with this passage:

Well, [growth is] going to stop someday.  At some point, probably in the not-too-distant future, there will be far fewer people on this planet.  There will be far fewer than the planet could have supported—and did support—prior to us overshooting carrying capacity, because the great stocks of wild foods are gone (or poisoned), the top soil lost in the wind.

My saying this doesn’t mean I hate people.  Far from it.  A few weeks ago I received an email in response to my statement that the only sustainable level of technology is the Stone Age.  The person said, “I don’t think the stone-age will support anything near the current world population.  [Of course I agree.] [The previous set of brackets and the bracketed text is Derrick's.  This is mine, which I've included for clarification, perhaps unnecessarily.]  So to return to this level implies either killing a lot of people or not having many children and waiting for the population to diminish.  Or do we allow war or other pestilence to do the job?  Is this what you are proposing?”

I responded that what I’m proposing, startlingly enough, is that we look honestly at our situation.  And our situation is that we have overshot carrying capacity.  The question becomes: What are we going to do about it?

(I originally felt like commenting on another passage, but I didn’t get to it in the first pass through all of this, and now I can’t find anywhere for it to fit in to what I’ve already written.  It’s not all that important, but since I feel like including it anyway, I’m tacking it on here at the end.

Derrick Jensen and I are two different people who have different methods and different feelings and different thoughts and a lot of other differences.  No duh.  Somewhere in the middle of the population stuff he brings up that these are people we’re talking about, and to forget that—that they’re living, breathing, real-live people—would be a mistake.

Derrick is a self-described animist who believes all things, living and non-living, have thoughts and something like a “soul” and value for their own sake.  I, being a nihilist, save the valuation for later.  Sometimes I have to see a tree just as a thing that grows, and wood from a tree can be useful.  I can see people as just other things that the Universe has endowed with life who will be here for a while, and then they won’t—that life will pass to something else, just as the very matter which made up their bodies will.  The nihilist can see that none of us are anything particularly great when he considers the whole of the Universe; the nihilist doesn’t have to value any of us, living or non-living, because at our core we don’t have any inherent value.

So I can see a person as just another person, and since the feelings and lives are just more feelings and more lives, I don’t have to value them as anything more than another thing.  Maybe that’s why I’m more OK with talking about human population.  I don’t know.

In the end, however, I have come to value these things for their own sakes.  I value trees.  I value wolves.  I value the people I like and care about.  I value an ecosystem not because it benefits me, but for its own sake.  But I know that I don’t have to.)

Edit, January 17: I’d like to add this.  I was looking through old comments of mine on reddit, and came across this.

The post to which I was responding:

The vast majority of developed countries have fertility rates that aren’t sustainable (ie, below 2 children per woman – most countries are around 1.5 [!!!!]). The US birthrate is close to the replacement rate of 2.1 children per woman. We don’t need any sort of fertility limitations like some have suggested. This would be completely ignoring the facts.

Here’s a fascinating graph of the strong negative correlation between wealth and fertility rates (this is a bit skewed because these undeveloped countries also have high infant/childhood mortality rates): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:TFR_vs_PPP_2009.svg

As you can see, the population problem lies almost entirely in undeveloped countries. It’s hard to say what developed countries should do about this (if anything) in the case that the undeveloped countries continue to grow. Also note how low the fertility rate in most developed countries is.

While I know that this view isn’t particularly popular on Reddit, I do think that human ingenuity is the most valuable resource we have. More engineers, scientists, and visionaries translates directly into technological improvements in efficiency and harvesting/recycling limited resources.

My response:

As far as “the population problem,” it’s actually a total human impact problem. Since in the First World people use stuff at thousands of times the rate of those in the Third, population is just as much, if not more, of a problem here as it is there. Population in the First World needs to drop just as it does in the Third. Birthrates of 1.5 don’t mean entire races will go extinct—by the time the population drops to a number that can be sustained it will stop falling, not just continue to zero.

My comment is directly related to what Derrick Jensen was trying to say in Endgame.