[Dialogue] Interesting analogy.
Bill Bailey
bailey03132 at charter.net
Tue Dec 14 07:21:26 EST 2004
Let me add to this dialogue the quest for a bioregional (tribalism?)
approach to organizing a sustainable economic, political, and cultural set
of relationship that must fist abandon the unworkable and unsustainable
nation-state construct of today.
Below you will find a book review I wrote as an assignment from our local
Ecozoic group.
Book: Dwellers in the Land Page
1 of 4
Author: Kirkpatrick Sale
Personal Response:
I found the book extremely helpful in giving me images of what it might look
like to reinvent the human at the specie level as well as providing
direction on what life in the bioregion could be like in the emerging
Ecozoic Era.
Contents:
I. The Bioregional Heritage
. Gaea
. Gaea Abandoned
. The Crisis
II. The Bioregional Paradigm
. Dwellers in the Land
. Scale
. Economy
. Polity
. Society
III. The Bioregional Project
. Past Realities
. Present Currents
. Future Vision
IV. The Bioregional Imperative
. Gaea Confirmed (Welcome Home - The Ecozoic)
Theses:
The most practical, effective, and do-able way to move away from the
ecological insanity (Biocide) of our day is to move into the bioregional
paradigm.
(Being somewhat familiar with section one "The Bioregional Heritage" I found
section two, The Bioregional; Paradigm (Scale, Economy, Polity, Society) and
his sub-section on the "Future Vision" of the Bioregional Paradigm to be the
heart and soul of this book.)
Briefly, in section Two he creates a "From - To" diagram comparing
the Bioregion and the Industrio-Scientific Paradigms:
Bioregion Industrio-Scientific
Paradigm Paradigm
Scale Region State
Community Nation/world
Economy Conservation Exportation
Stability Change/Progress
Self-sufficiency World Economy
Cooperation Competition
Polity Decentralization Centralization
Complementarity Hierarchy
Diversity Uniformity
Society Symbiosis Polarization
Evolution Growth/Violence
Diversity Monoculture
The rest of this section deals with the Bioregional Paradigm where his
thesis is that human life in the Bioregion is created and sustained by the
same principals and characteristics that guide the life and evolution of the
Earth and all her species. In each sub-chapter he describes with poetry and
examples what this means for the human.
Scale (size)
The Earth is organized not into artificial states but natural regions, and
those regions, while varying greatly in size, are mostly more limited than
those defined by national boundaries.
All biotic life is divided into communities, differing in size, complexity,
development, and stability, but existing everywhere, throughout every
econiche. If one were to look for the single basic building block of the
ecological world, it would be the community.
Economy
As is the case with the Earth and all species:
. A bioregional economy for the human would seek "first to maintain
rather than use up the natural world, to adapt to the environment rather
that try to exploit or manipulate it, to conserve not only the resources but
also the systems of the natural world.
. It would likewise seek to establish a stable means of production and
exchange rather than one always in flux and dependent on continual growth
and constant consumption.
The rest of this section seeks to spell out practical images and examples of
what this might look like and how it could be achieved.
\
Polity
A political vision based on the evident workings of the biotic world would
not celebrate centralized coordination, hierarchical efficiency, and
monolithic strength; but rather decentralization, interdependence, and
diversity.
The rest of this section seeks to spell out practical images and examples of
what this might look like and how it could be achieved.
Society
Symbiosis is an apt model for a successful human society, which we may
envision as a place where families operate within neighborhoods,
neighborhoods within communities, communities within cities, cities within
regions, all on the basis of collaboration and exchange, cooperation and
mutual benefit, and where the fittest is the one that helps the most - and
of course is thereby the most helped.
The rest of this section seeks to spell out practical images and examples of
what this might look like and how it could be achieved.
Future Visions
In this section Sales deals with six basic realities that make the Bioregion
both practical and achievable:
1. The basic idea of a region is already a reality in our everyday
life. Presently we have regional meeting, regional games, regional
distribution points, and on and on and on; thus we only need to add the
suffix "Bio" which in many cases is already a recognized reality without
being named.
2. A bioregional reality has the potential to join together what we
often call the right/left and the liberal/conservative polarity in America
because in the bioregion we are dealing with "the geography where people
live and raise the families." Both sides of the polarity and all in between
have a vested interest in the future that they mutually share together.
3. The bioregion project is one that can be begun locally, with just a
few people willing to study a little, talk a little, imagine a little and
organize a little. It's all happens locally.
4. The practicality of the bioregional project is also enhanced by the
considerable virtue of already having something of a movement underway.
5. Add to this, the movement is global and goes by many names. Often it
is referred to as "The Green Movement."
6. In the soul of the bioregional movement there are two basic virtues:
a. First, it has the virtue of "gradualism" which suggests that the
processes of change are slow, steady, continuous, and methodical, not
revolutionary and cataclysmic.
b. Secondly, it has the virtue of realism. It does not demand any
elaborate wrenching of the physical or human condition of the world we know,
any fantastic alteration of nature-as-it-is or people-as-they-are.
The rest of this section seeks to spell out practical images and examples of
what this might look like as the bioregional movement grows.
Again, let me say: I found this book extremely helpful in giving me images
of what it might look like to reinvent the human at the specie level as well
as providing direction on what life in the bioregion could be like in the
emerging Ecozoic Era. I sincerely hope we can find someway to make this book
a part of our "Ecozoic" adventure.
Bill Bailey, April 7, 2002
Bill Bailey
-----Original Message-----
From: Dialogue-bounces at wedgeblade.net
[mailto:Dialogue-bounces at wedgeblade.net] On Behalf Of KroegerD at aol.com
Sent: Monday, December 13, 2004 7:38 PM
To: Dialogue at wedgeblade.net
Subject: Re: [Dialogue] Interesting analogy.
I recently reread Quinn's Beyond Civilization.
Here is his proposal in a nutshell
I scanned Pages 172-173 from Beyond Civilization by Daniel Quinn:
Dick Kroeger
65 Stubbs Bay Road
Maple Plain, MN 55359
952-476-6126
Let's bail out and go over the wall!
Professor of anthropology James W Fernandez writes, 'Anthropologists, unlike
philosophers, find that cultural worlds are brought into being by the
performance (enactment) of mixed metaphors.' (Emphasis added.)
So there. I'm happy to mix a few metaphors in the cause of bringing into
being a new cultural world.
After several hours spent discussing the movement beyond civilization to
tribal living, one of the members of my seminar said he still couldn't see
how it
would serve to make human life more sustainable. We've come a ways since the
last time I addressed this issue, so I should probably address it again
here.
It's a valid and important question. The New Tribal Revolution may give
people
a better life, but if it doesn't serve to perpetuate our species beyond a
few
decades, what's the point?
Right now there are about six billion of us in what I've called the culture
of maximum harm. Only ten percent of these six bil- lion are being maximally
harmful-are gobbling up resources at top speed, contributing to global
warming
at top speed, and so on-but the other ninety percent, having nothing better
in
sight, want only to be like the ten percent. They envy that ten percent and
are convinced that living in a way that is maximally harmful is the best way
to
live of all.
If we don't give them something better to want, we're doomed.
A systemic change
The New Tribal Revolution is an escape route from the prison of our culture.
The walls of that prison are economic. That is, the need to make a living
keeps us inside, because there's no way to make a living on the other side.
We
can't employ the Mayan Solution-we can't disappear into a life of ethnic
tribalism. But we can disappear into a life of occupational tribalism.
Will this leave our civilization a smoking ruin? Certainly not. It will
diminish it. As more and more people see that going over the wall means
getting
something better (not 'giving up' something), more and more people will
abandon
the culture of maximum harm-and the more this culture is abandoned, the
better.
The escape route leads beyond civilization, beyond the thing that, according
to our cultural mythology, is humanity's very last invention.
The escape route leads to humanity's next invention.
But even so, will this next invention give us a sustainable lifestyle?
Here's
how I assess this. Humans living in tribes was as ecologically stable as
lions living in prides or baboons living in troops. The tribal life wasn't
something humans sat down and figured out. It was the gift of natural
selection, a
proven success-not perfection but hard to improve on. Hierarchal- ism, on
the
other hand, has proven to be not merely imperfect but ultimately
catastrophic
for the earth and for us. When the plane's going down and someone offers you
a
parachute, you don't demand to see the warranty.
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