A puzzle was presented
I joked and said, “fitting as we become cyborgs, I can’t help but want to ask the Internet”
My better half belittled and implored, I need not ask the Internet everything, strangers on the web
I had for decades, perhaps 25 years of my life now conversed and befriended strangers on the Internet
(That was when it was “dangerous” to do so, as if our collective Internet use isn’t dangerous group psychosis)
I pointed out the Internet as a great source of info that can improve us and our lives
An incredible source of information-nutrition
Perhaps ChatGPT is a fast food joint
But there are richer food sources
Is Reddit like the hazels, with sprouting subreddits and coppiced threads? Renewing
Is there a walnut of informationin the wilds of the Internet? StackExchange anyone? Some enriching kernels of wisdom, tho some nuts are tough to crack
Anyway, I agree, I do not need to ask the Internet everything. I don’t. In fact I make (imperfect) effort not to use the Internet in excess, setting rules and reflecting.
Just a joke, as we head into cyborgdom.
But then
I walk out the door to continue some outdoor chores, forest garden tending, world-relationship mending,
Outside being one essential way I maintain my humanity in a dormant indoor information age.
When I return from activities in the Less-Built Environment,
I enter my home, walk through 3 rooms to go to my bathroom,
Enjoy modern plumbing, I wash my hands and I see in a factory-made mirror, upon my modern self:
A headlamp hanging from my neck – electronics, LEDs, stretchy headband and plastic case and batteries.
I see headphones round my neck, use-full,
Sleek and wireless and connected to a supercomputer in my pocket connected to
The Internet
Goodbye past
Hello future
Present don’t be harming me
Hoping for harmony
Think fast
Savor every dash
Forever everlasts
In the moment
(Breathe easy)
Tag Archives: ecology
A Journey About What Matters
Look around
Your immediate surroundings and select an object
What is it, how is it interacted with? By you, by others, by the ambient space, by invisible forces
Where did it come from? Before it was where it is now, where has it been over the past day? Over the past weeks and months and years?
“Here
Now”
From whence did it come?
From what origin or source?
Before it is what it is now, what was it? What would you have called it before it reached the state in which you’d call it as you do now?
What is its relationship with The Source?
This one thing, how is it divisible or degradable, and how does it aggregate, enlarge, and accumulate if at all?
Let’s find its constituent parts and ways. Ways and means and matters…
Before this object joined you here
Before you ever met it
Where was it?
Imagine being with this object in the moments before you actually met it
Can you track its momentum backwards?
What was its path over time? Its physical steps through space en route to you? Its transformations? Its self-becoming?
What is self actualization?
Does it breathe?
Did it come from China?
How many places did its original materials come from, Earthling?
How many beings involved in its becoming?
How much love? I ask with thanks.
How much hardship? I&I ask with sorrow.
If we follow the object back, through its steps in spacetime dimensions we’re familiar with,
It probably came to us from an interaction with a human, or from itself in the wild…
Of the humans involved, the supply chain from cradle to current-condition to grave could be very short or very long, in space or in time
<4×4 table labeled distance and duration
columns=space, time; rows=short, long; examples TBD>
Step by step
What’s the best next step?
Be Here Now
===
Mission: optimize for resilient sun-to-life ratio
Minimize harm
This transmission brought to you by a mind picking up litter, detritus, debris
Wearing 3M gear to clean up toxins originating with Big Chem in the first place
Legacy legacy legacy, feeling like a disgrace
Our world sour and what’s it like to be displaced? O habitat
O the grief
O the mass extinction
O the habitat
I give thanks to the Source for the Present
For Home
I try
I participate
What’s the best next step?
World eater, world propagator
Dichotomies
conventional & organic
degenerative & regenerative
degrading & restoring
I like the last pair because they feel difficult to green wash. Take any feature that is necessary for the systems that support us, and see if it is being restored/enhanced, or if it is being degraded. Water quality. Soil fertility. Biodiversity.
Alas, if there is a will there is a way, and all of these terms will be “greenwashed” to some extent, making environmentally degrading acts seem restorative.
And by what means is the greenwashing motivated and manifest? Who done it? Some words commonly attributed to the complex system in question, which degrades essential qualities while feigning friend of fundamentals:
The man
The system
Capitalism
Neoliberalism
Globalism
...
These terms too are not perfect. Each has assumptions and complexities, they lack precision and can be tricky. Then I read something which shared a term so precise, so empirical, it could not be misconstrued or exploited:
The cosmophagous world: that world which devours all other worlds to feed itself.
cosmo-
From Ancient Greek κόσμος (kósmos, “universe”).
-phagous
From Latin -phagus, from Ancient Greek φάγος (phágos, “glutton”), from φαγεῖν (phageîn, “to eat”).
And what is the alternative to devouring other worlds? To multiply, to propagate, to support many worlds. Consider, as you go about the polarized and dissonant world, whether this dichotomy fits: some ways grow themselves by devouring other worlds, while other ways grow all by propagating many worlds.
I think of this as I visit small farms and see the countless worlds that are hosted there: the worlds of the orchard and of the pasture, the worlds of the meadow flowers and of the insect colonies which enjoy them, the worlds of the varieties of people who are part of the community affected by the small farm, and the worlds of the countless communities which have other small farms of their own.
That world catalyzation is a stark contrast to the vast monocrops, moonscapes, and mines producing homogenized ways of life, wherein one world grows larger while the others are whittled away.
May this be a high-level guideline, leading us toward Earthbound mutualism rather than parasitism.
I end with an excerpt from the text that introduced me to this concept of cosmophagy, and with a wish that you will celebrate and support the many worlds we coexist in as One.
Power is inseparable from the capacity to be affected. We find potentialities in our shared sensitivity: that sense of urgency that pushes us to seek new ways of living — to want to change this world; that feeling of belonging that pushes us to act, and likewise to risk everything. How can we unleash these potentials? The paths suggested by the existing order — call it what you will, Empire, capitalism, colonial modernity, white supremacy, the cosmophagous world — aim to capture the affects that make life worth living.
Neither sinners, nor victims: we inhabit climate change. We see that this period of disillusionment with centuries of misdirection is also one of infinite potential. Each of us have within us the remote possibility of stemming the tide of the catastrophe. By organizing pessimism, the fundamental affect of the times, and giving it a creative consistency, we can hope to bring about other worlds. But first, it is essential to make a break with this one. We did not choose to be thrown into a world that seems doomed to its own destruction, but we can decide to continue it or break free from it.
via “Re-Attachments: Toward an Ecology of Presence” by Dispositions Collective (2021 Jan 29) @ https://illwill.com/re-attachments
Deep Ecology Links
A running tab of some beautiful deep ecology links:
Breathing with trees http://www.rainforestinfo.org.au/deep-eco/breathing.htm
Where does gold come from http://www.rainforestinfo.org.au/gold/havellan.htm
Council of All Beings http://www.rainforestinfo.org.au/deep-eco/coab.htm
Briefer description: http://www.rainforestinfo.org.au/deep-eco/council.htm
Think Like A Mountain text: http://www.rainforestinfo.org.au/deep-eco/TLAM%20text.htm
Agroforestry Cooperative: Succession for Success (and Long-Term Land Tenure)
Temperate-climate agroforestry offers the potential for long-term ecological mutualism with humans and trees, and while it is time-tested in having sustained millennia of our ancestors, there are many hurdles to shifting lifeways toward agroforestry in 2020. In this post I introduce the main challenges I have identified, and I outline a potential approach to overcome these challenges. In short, that approach is an agroforestry worker cooperative that ‘owns’ (has rights of control, and rights to returns) land and practices stewardship so to advance tree crops and sustain itself.
I hope this clarifies opportunities that we can turn into realities, to support multi-generational stewardship of trees for basic needs in a way that is mutually beneficial to all relations involved.
Continue reading →Predation & Evolution
I poem I originally shared July 15, 2014:
SPLASH
FIGHT
BITE
All was alright in the world, as I was moving toward the light
Looking for some food so I’d sleep well through the night
And awaken another day
My mouth becomes open
!!! Woah I am awoken !
I spread my wings and make like a cross
Then my world is tossed – tension to release; anticipation to closure; potential to kinetic
So,
It is written
Now I make like the moss (gratitude to the roots, foundations of the Kingdom)
Growing slowly through the churning fires of Time
Now at the turning of the rhyme, I ask:
Have I eaten or been eaten?
Starchy Perennial Plant Ally: Sunchoke
A long term steward of the northeast, Sunchoke aka Earth Apple aka Jerusalem Artichoke aka Helianthus tuberosus. This plant is a sunflower species with a starchy, potato-like root that propagates itself (usually easily) from year to year.
In the video below, Ben Falk harvests and discusses a 400sq.ft. area that grows sunchokes year after year, with minimal maintenance, while building soil. This year’s harvest offers 90lbs of starchy “J-choke” tubers, leaving some in soil to regrow the patch for next year’s harvest. He notes using them as pureed soup after some slow cooking, as well as pickling and lactofermenting them. I have only had them a few times. When I cooked them I cut them thin and stir fried them, cooking them for a while and adding other veggies and seasoning into the mix. They are dense plants and feel like a good staple, able to significantly help mitigate ‘the hunger gap’ as Ben says regarding strains on food supplies and ecology. I look forward to growing, harvesting, and cooking more of this perennial plant ally.
I give thanks.
Community Gardening Solutions: Micro-Scale Infrastructure for Resilient, Trickle-Up Economics
Notes from “Social Resilience and Urban Design: NYC and the COVID-19 Pandemic” webinar (hosted by architecture and urban design firm Cooper Robertson) with inspiring points made by Raymond Figueroa-Reyes and other speakers.
As we look to community gardening to provide food, as it has in the past (e.g. ~40% of food in U.S. during WWII; Cuban urban farming during its Special Period food shortages), we can look to Worker Protection Gardens and Community Gardens during the Industrial Revolution and Redlining period respectively.
Food hubs are on regional scale, but we need to bring them up in micro-scales, as distributed infrastructure for basic needs. Emergent food hubs can help aggregate and distribute food available from existing production systems as well as community gardens. (One example is in the Bronx worked on by this webinar’s speaker Raymond Figueroa-Reyes and others.)
Trickle up economy: focusing support to empower communities with micro-food systems, and the benefits will rise up through the system, growing diversity and resilience.
The Buck Stops at First Principles
One idea for ‘where is the real limit’ is ‘first principles’, meaning the phenomenon studied by natural sciences.
For example: according to the patterns (we sometimes call laws) in physics, biochemistry, and agroecology, is it feasible to grow food in monocultures that rely on external inputs and petroleum products? Not for the long haul, not at all. Yet we do it, and further, we rely on economic systems (e.g. multinational corporations, global prioritization of financial profits) that make it difficult to do the opposite! (Opposite being, for example, ‘restoration agriculture’ or cultivating highly productive, highly diverse agro-ecosystems that mimic natural ecosystems in structure and function over time and space.)
Economics (as in, how we manage our ‘households’ at different scale) and political will is often where we stray from first principles (for some time). We can economically incentivize all we want, we can make all the political noise we want, but eventually we get constrained by higher and broader drivers. “The buck stops”…here and now, in accordance with natural trends and constraints.
We’ve pushed well out of bounds, so it will take some change to get back ‘within our limits’. A framework to work on is ‘relinquishment, resilience, and restoration’ a la deep adaptation (https://jembendell.com/2019/05/15/deep-adaptation-versions/). May peace be upon you.
Lowering? Entropy of Wet Landscapes
Small-Scale Distributed Integrated Resilient Agroforest Ecosystems…Buzz words buzzin’ like bees and birds
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GINQvtKaZGY
“So here is a way to get a wet area to be a pond, well-drained raised garden beds, focused nutrient delivery system, and a propagation space for hardwood cuttings, in an area that was just kind of mucky and filled with grass and shrubs.”
Here’s a nice video on entropy and order. Is forest gardening lowering or increasing entropy in its local system, in our Earth system?