We have many myths about nature.
Most of them are about 'wildness' -- savagery, hardship, suffering.
Most of our stories about nature are of the 'Man vs. Nature' variety,
about 'survival in the wild', as if that were some extraordinary thing.
We build these myths to keep people from running away from our
well-meaning but damaged, terrible, unsustainable culture. Richard
Manning in Against the Grain
has just exploded another of the myths about our culture: He provides a
compelling argument that the Great Wall of China, a work of staggering
and gruelling human labour visible with a telescope from the moon, was not built, as we were told, to keep the Northern hunter-gatherer cultures (the 'Mongol Hordes') out, but rather to keep the stooped, slave labour in the 'new' civilization culture's peasants in. If you really believe nature is savage, turn off the hysterical nature documentaries and read Bernd Heinrich's Winter World,
about how, even in Northern winters, even the tiniest 'wild' animals
live joyful, carefree, comfortable lives. And then read David Abram's Spell of the Sensuous to find out how you, too, can reconnect with lovely, peaceful, easy, sustainable nature.
The myths we teach our impressionable children about nature, from
dragon fables to Old Yeller, are usually about nature's terror and the
need to defend and return back 'home' to our 'safe' civilization. There
is an astonishing amount of animal cruelty in children's stories, and
it is an extremely predatory and desensitizing indoctrination
technique. We reinforce these dreadful lies about nature's savagery by
sending our children to under-supervised day-care operations called
Summer Camps, which, despite their locations and stated objectives, are
not at all about nature, but rather deplorable and usually incompetent
immersion courses in social skills. At least the British are honest
enough to do this without pretext of it being a 'natural' experience:
Their social indoctrination is called Boarding School and occurs
principally indoors. Whatever its intention, the principal effect of
Summer Camp is to untether children from their parents' protection and
their need for privacy, and force them to 'get along' with others, find
their place in the social pecking order of their 'peers'. For the shy,
the weak, the uncoordinated, the physically and emotionally scarred
(and that's most children) it
can be living hell. For psychopathic children and predatory adults, its
lack of supervision provides the ideal environment for honing their
manipulation skills on unprotected and vulnerable victims. Whatever
this may be, it is certainly no way to introduce a child to nature.
Even psychopathic adults use the 'natural experience' cover to prey
upon weaker adults. This activity was most famously depicted in the
film White Mile, where the
aggressive company CEO (played by Alan Alda) bullies younger staff who
want to 'get ahead' to go on a 'character-building' white-water rafting
trip where they are absolutely at his mercy, and where nature is set up
as the straw-man enemy. This psychological brutality is also evident in
many cults which use social isolation and deprivation in a
pseudo-'natural' setting to break down resistance to the cult leader's
propaganda. I recently witnessed a plane-load of teenagers returning
from a six-month 'working field trip' billeted in peasants' homes in
Paraguay -- these kids were raw with emotion and filled with horror and loathing
at the thought of returning 'home' and 'abandoning' the poor Paraguayan
families who had opened their homes and hearts to them. Absolute
gut-wrenching culture shock. We humans are so easy to socially
recondition, so vulnerable to programming and re-programming! Our
psyches are so fragile that, especially with the young, we must take
great care not to tear them even by the simple act of exposing them to
new ideas. This is very dangerous stuff. Damn our adaptability.
Not surprising, then, that most people view nature with great fear, as
something to be conquered or survived. Most of us have no alternative
experience of it. And not surprising that so many of the well-intended
'communing with nature' alternative living experiments have collapsed
or been hijacked by psychopaths or megalomaniacs.
If we were to start with young people, how could we expose them 'naturally' to nature: Teaching them gently the Spell of the Sensuous
without so unhinging their psyches that they would be incapable of
returning to civilized life and working within it, and without
exploiting their ideological vulnerability? (I know, I'm a hopeless
liberal -- I refuse to use propaganda to advance the cause).
Because if we don't show them nature, what possible hope is there for
our world when we can only romanticize (or demonize), idealize, try to imagine a natural way to live and love and be? We learn (especially as children) what we're shown, not what we're told.
There are almost no remaining models of natural life to show them, to
correct the entrenched, neolithic misperception of nature as something
brutal, savage, dangerous, frightening, threatening, hard, and apart. As James Taylor puts it in his song Gaia, we are taught, and left with no alternative but to:
Turn away from your animal kind,
Try to leave your body just to live in your mind,
Leave cold cruel Mother Earth behind -- GAIA,
As if you were your own creation,
As if you were the chosen nation,
And the world around you just a rude and dangerous invasion.
I was at a conference a week ago with some of the most creative and
intelligent people on the face of the Earth, but when I talked to them
of the importance of wilderness, these mostly urban geniuses had no
idea what I was getting at -- they could not imagine what I meant.
I think we need to abandon the route of in-class nature documentaries
and the one-day (or six-month) field trips (and 'summer camps'), and
instead invent and design something completely new: Model Intentional Communities
that will give children and adults the opportunity to rediscover
nature, and our true nature, first hand. Just as we save endangered
species and try to build their populations back up in 'natural'
settings, we should try to recreate, and show, alternative human
cultures, so that people brought up in our monolithic and troubled
culture can be exposed to people living in balance with wilderness. Not
in order to learn how to 'survive' it, but to learn how to be part of
and at peace with it. Glenn Parton talks about this in his essay Humans-In-The-Wilderness.
I advocate the development of a
human lifestyle in which people live in small villages sparsely
scattered through a wilderness environment. Although this framework or
groundplan is borrowed from aboriginal peoples, it is far more flexible
than has been thought. We can devolve or scale-down modern civilization
to closely fit ancient land use patterns without returning to the Stone
Age.
So we're not talking about a back-to-the-land commune that refuses to
use technology and shuns the 'civilized' world, but rather a series of
communities of, say, 100-150 people each, plus perhaps another 20
guests at any one time who would stay no longer than a month, and bring
in new ideas and take away their learning of another way to live. These
model communities would meld the best of do-more-with-less innovation
and technology (the Internet, solar energy, hydroponics etc.) with the
best of natural community (zero growth, 100% sustainability, everything
recycled, no pollution, no hierarchy, LETS money, no private property
or separate 'family' dwellings etc.) These communities would 'use' only
a tiny proportion of 'their' land for human purposes, leaving the rest
as wilderness for other creatures, for learning and exploration and
discovery and reflection and connection but not
exploitation. Their population density would vary depending on the
carrying capacity of the area, but on average would probably not exceed
one person per four acres (a globally sustainable level). Everyone
would live as part of a self-sufficient, self-managed and self-selected
community, and everyone would also live on the doorstep of wilderness.
The people would work only as hard as they needed to, to be comfortable
-- perhaps an hour per day each (as primitive man did according to
revisionist history, and certainly enough in a modern egalitarian
society with the benefits of today's technology). The rest of the day
could be spent in leisure, in learning, in discovery, in making love
(possibly, as Glenn suggests, with more than one partner, at the
collective discretion of each community), in art, in writing or other
expression -- whatever each individual wanted to do. Members would be
free to travel, and through the Internet and communications media and
visitors there would be lots of interaction with other Model
Intentional Communities and with the 'outside world', but if they
stayed away too long they would be asked to give up their membership in
the community.
What would be needed to make this work would be someone to donate the
land, without recourse or obligation, and some self-selection mechanism
for determining who the members of the communities would be. Building
on a small standard set of inviolable principles to ensure
egalitarianism, no-growth, and wilderness protection, each community
could develop its own rules and code of conduct (or operate without
rules, if it so chose). It would probably take some time, and learning
from failure, before these model communities would stabilize and be
ready to accept visitors -- their only obligation to the civilized
world.
Now imagine a young person exposed to such a community for a month in
adolescence or high school. She would probably find it fun (certainly
more than classwork, anyway), charming, stimulating, but not appealing
enough to want to stay. But when she graduated and realized the devil's
bargain of civilization -- the trade-off of ecocide and wage slavery
and emotional suffocation in return for 'financial security', she might
well decide then to join an existing Model Intentional Community, or
start her own, spreading out and refusing to buy the crappy consumer
products and over-priced postage stamp building lots that drive the
current economy. In short, she, and many or most or all of her
similarly-exposed classmates, might walk away -- millions each year,
until diverse Model Intentional Communities flourish across the globe,
and the old economy, with no 'consumers' left to sustain it, crumbles
away, and with it the old politics and the old social rules and the old
hierarchies and the old education systems, and a new culture that
values wilderness and well-being rises in its place.
That's my dream. It
cannot work, of course, in a world of six billion people, let alone the
12-14 billion we are likely to see by the end of the century. But if we
show people another model now,
a better way to live, maybe it's not impossible to believe that people
will willingly, eagerly reduce their family sizes to no more than one
child per female adult, so that, within a couple of centuries, our
population is down below one billion and we can all
live this way. We could therefore do what early 'civilizing' cultures
like the Anasazi and Incans perhaps did, when, after experimenting with
urban civilized culture, they suddenly and inexplicably walked away
from their cities and returned to a non-hierarchical and natural life.
What a valuable education that could turn out to be.
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MADE IN CANADA
trust your
instincts 
