It's right that people who want to save this planet from our collective
greed and ignorance should not fight or argue over much with other people
who want to save this planet from our collective greed and ignorance.
Isn't consumerism at the root (or one of the roots) of the problem? Why do
we feel we need so much?
I had a sort of religious experience the third season i was treeplanting,
maybe 14 years ago. I was on a small crew with just a couple of other guys
and way deep in the ocoee national forest in tennessee planting these
clearcuts in otherwise pristine and very beautiful surroundings. One
little mountain had a profound effect on me. It was like i was in love
with it and it loved me back. I held this conversation with it and it
asked me why people had come to clearcut it three times now and it wasn't
like it was mad, it was like it's feelings were hurt because that's all the
use humans had for it. It asked why nobody lived there. I started
imagining a village on the mountain and filled my time doing this. There
was a large rushing stream at the bottom and plenty of wind up top and it
was a nice southern face, getting lots of sun in this hemisphere. Copious
clear springs and nice outcroppings of quartz and it was, and i trust is,
a very nice place.
When i got home to the mountains of VA, one of the first things i
did was to look up "village" in an encyclopedia and this was actually the
religious experience part. It blew me away as i realized that (
demographically and historically speaking) almost everyone had lived in
villages and that cities might be normal behaviour but that for rural
habitation patterns, isolated rural homesteads were very unusual and only
prevalent in the u.s., australia, canada, parts of g.b. and a few other
places and, of course, hadn't been dominant in these places for long. At
this point i'd been doing the homestead trip for over a decade and it was
seeming sortof futile.
There were two articles on villages in this particular
encyclopedia, and one was on "village communities" which is a village where
people cooperated like a corperation. This had been by far the most
prevalent form of human habitation . I became a true believer as i
proceeded to relate EVERYthing i came across to villages and see this
pattern as the cure to all our problems. I wrote essay after essay about
it and a long poem for our local alter/native moonthly ( the museletter)
and (of course) bacame known as the village idiot. Some of my essays were
on why this social form is good for women. I believe that the last
feminine age was an age of villages and the next one will be too. I think
cities have been the form for the age of empires, a masculine epoch that is
coming to a close. A lot of my essays were on the many reasons why this
form is better on the planet environmentaly. So all in all, i think that
the village is an important ecofeminist idea, or maybe even tool. There is
a growing ecovillage movement now, check it out on the web.
I also think we should boycott redwood products.
Hope this finds ya'll well.
will
