Foxglove

Open Wounds

"It should work just fine," say the engineers, wringing their hands. And the businessmen say, "yes yes it does work fine, let's do it and get paid," while rubbing their own hands. And theoretically yes, these technological miracles should work just fine. Nuclear power can be robust and clean, and oil derricks should be capped off and sealed when they're done producing.

But then we've seen several nuclear meltdowns, and we know the waste and mines are frequently mismanaged. And the derelict derricks spread about the country steadily leak their oil. And the AI is crashing planes and cars and becoming more vulnerable to hacking and adversarial input.

All this power squandered. The trust has bled out, and only resent and suspicion remain. Which is what happens when you mismanage productive enterprises for the sake of extracting value from them, and starve all of the producers and laborers of that value. The wounds aren't healing like they used to.

Try Again

Yes, attitudes on our relationship to the earth are changing quite dramatically in some places. Or we could say, retreating to an old wisdom.

Agriculture involved tearing nature limb from limb and rearranging it into some grim mosaic to befit a set of provincial tastes and needs, like some taxidermied kill.

At least with the ongoing development of something like permaculture, there is an attempt to sort of fold nature upon itself in the modest service of our needs. Though these alternate systems would still cause problems after certain thresholds of volume and power.

And there are plenty of indigenous societies who didn't really have this problem, though they may have had others, such as having an expanding and totalizing imperial society wedge itself between them and the earth, and then continuously lift and pry.

Industry

I use "industrial" as shorthand because of its easily identifiable and catastrophic unity; it is an easy target. But there were a prior set of motivations and conditions which produced the industrial. The prototype of the industrial can be readily found as an ascendant force in the premodern and the preindustrial, striving to express itself and emerge whole. All industry really does is accelerate and amplify various problems that were baked into the foundations of civilization from the start, and really the problems that we are dealing with now are thousands of years in the making. But you do have to start somewhere.

Tiers of Power

Like-power is required to counter another power, or a greater intensity and quantity of a lesser power which is up against a greater power. On a smaller scale, or a lower tier of power in nature, there is no real challenge or counter to human material forces. Industrial humanity is too powerful; it has truly mastered its domain. It requires scaling up and combining to counter such a power. It took the various coalitions of nations to combine and counter Napoleon's France, and of course all of the other alliances throughout history to counter those ascendant great powers, and so it will take the earth itself, or the ecological totality and its dissenting human allies to rise and counter industrial humanity.

Rubber Hits the Road

Any given theory, concept, or ideology must necessarily come into contact with an infinitely more complex and higher resolution reality than the processes of thought that the theory, concept, or ideology comes from. Funny, we argue endlessly over pure theory, concepts, and ideologies - ghosts floating haughtily in the air whispering taunts - when it necessarily takes time and space for the theory, concept, or ideology, upon touching down upon reality, to bring about its fruit, and of course it becomes something far beyond its image on paper, and it was a moving target before it was even conceived.

Mountain

Homesteading and Social Drag Pt. 1

Today there is much talk of "homesteading," and the interest in the "homestead" seems to be growing in proportion to the collective understanding of the inadequacy of our collective faculties of problem solving, which is an understanding that deepens as our myriad interconnected social and environmental crises intensify.

This is an instinctual shift as well. In a deeply specialized society undergoing a dramatic process of corruption, the evaporation of trust that results from this state of affairs lends to a pervasive sense of uneasiness in regards to the food, infrastructure, medical care, technologies, and services which keep us ensconced in and contributing to greater society.

The idea of breaking away and living as a homesteader, procuring a greater swathe of one's own necessities by one's own efforts, becomes much more attractive in the collective imagination. Here is a direction one can take that carefully reduces one's exposure to the increasingly unstable cluster of social resources of industrial society, and renew one's connection with the land, getting back to some lower center of gravity, as opposed to hovering there, suspended and helpless, trapped in the belly of capital as it unravels.

The term "homestead" itself obscures just as much as it reveals, which is owed to a complicated history and entrenched complex of images and assumptions associated with the word. But we are often obliged to use it when talking about related matters, due to its broad acceptability and currency as a descriptive word. It is very much a Western and American word, with its history of settler farms and its connotations of an isolated, single family operation.

When moving deeper into the actual activity itself, the nature of "homesteading" departs from its original connotations - though perhaps not as far as we thought.

Don't get me wrong, engaging in what we today call homesteading is a very rich, challenging, and rewarding experience, and certainly a good way to live, and a tenuous way to move forward through the many interlocked social and environmental problems we've found ourselves in. But there are some illusions associated with the popular understanding of the process which should be set aside and dispelled, which, after this is done, reveals unexpected insights about the nature of our societies and their evolution.

What is thought of as a return to self-sufficiency and sustainability is still a process in which ultimately manufactured goods are manipulated and refined to create the desired products and infrastructure for one's more local needs, at a smaller scale and a slower passage of time in terms of production and reproduction.

There are surely a number of isolated exceptions throughout the US, but the typical modern homesteader is still using manufactured tools and various forms of fossil fuel, wood fuel, and solar power, as well as sophisticated vehicles and machinery for saving labor, such as tractors, trucks, saws, hammers, and the like. And let's not forget store-bought foods and resources to complement one's own domestically produced foods and resources, for sustenance and enjoyment. 

Where the homestead is not an old family tradition - which still has its roots in Western Civilization - one enters into it as a prior product of modern civilization. As such, there must be some sort of maintenance of continuity: one still has tastes and sensibilities - and a deep well of traditions, knowledge, and techniques to draw from - which are formed in the civilization and which are generated in specific points in time and space.

And so the process of homesteading is still continuous with what is happening in the greater society. One hits the ground running, so to speak. The simplification of one's life is still contingent on what one eats and drinks, how one likes to sleep, how one likes to be housed, and etc. And those things have a history. The change must always occur in relation to something, and thus has a directionality.

This is still very much a deeply socially interdependent process for many different reasons. All of the manufactured goods - even the secondhand and antique variety - depend on incredibly complex networks of manufacturing, commerce, and repair.

And the typical homesteader is still subject to taxes and maintaining one's space in a regime of private property. And various resources and services must still be bought with the dollar, that floating, magical, and disembodied currency guaranteed by that far-removed, avaricious, and violent giant, the US Government and US capital.

The dollar still maintains a sort of social path of least resistance for the procurement of resources. It has short-circuited those arduous historical processes in which local trust must be maintained with a community that itself maintains a set of intricate and enduring traditions for manipulating natural resources and furnishing finished goods. Good luck finding that on a smaller scale in the core of capital, where the traditions have been taken up and processed in the service of commerce, and the traditional communities swept away.

If one still has access to the dollar, it is irresistible. Try forging a hammer and some nails on one's own, right after one has smelted the iron and steel required, and after one has procured the coal and the required vessels to hold and manipulate the heat and materials. Or one could always look into a completely different building method, which requires an entirely new understanding of how materials are acquired, fashioned, and bound. And I could go on.

So the dream of self-sufficiency, independence, and proximity to the land is clarified: yes one can move in that direction, but one must necessarily move in the historical period and the society one finds oneself in. The power of industry and manufacturing as a historical phenomenon becomes most apparent precisely when one tries to move away from it: it is everywhere, and the bulk of the world population is intimately connected to it.

This is not strictly a contemporary condition either. The whole history of homesteading is replete with images of rugged and self-sufficient settlers, living off of their own self-generated resources, and without a doubt this was a very different way of living. But that state of affairs itself was predicated on vast interconnected social forces: the government funding of settlers, the evolution of state finance and commerce, the volatility of the European Old World which was setting in motion the colonial expansions, the early industrial explosions of manufactured goods and technologies which powered the early homesteads, and so on. Those intrepid, "self-sufficient" homesteaders were far from alone.

So now we have a clearer picture of the nature of homesteading, and hopefully some of the illusions surrounding it have been dispelled. This piece has gotten to be about as long as I'd prefer for the moment. Next, I'd like to talk about what it all means.

What We Build

It is the mark of a wholly self-absorbed society that can be found in the labyrinthine mechanisms and structures it erects to perpetuate itself, which serve as hellish landscapes that trap, deny, displace, and ultimately destroy the living systems that surround them.

Steel, concrete, and glass-sealed buildings, vehicles, and infrastructure create vast and incomprehensible vacuums within them for the many lifeforms and micro-organisms that accidentally wander or drift into their bounds, and the same goes for the endless rows of fenced in agricultural, industrial, and residential landscapes.

Derelict mines dot the rural hillsides, with their poisonous gases, unseen chasms, and open vents ready to claim curious or unsuspecting passerby. And undetonated ordinance in faraway lands regularly claim victims of their own. I could go on and on with examples; their number and diversity are depressingly great.

Differing attitudes have always existed within a given society, and sensibilities of the dominant society itself are always changing, but this is a state of affairs that is difficult to entirely escape.

I for example still have to use existing technologies and techniques to go about daily life. As an industrial citizen, I only have so much time and energy to move down a given technological ladder as far as possible, though some simplification is always possible, which does free up time and energy, but there are still my existing sensibilities as well.

If I were to construct a shelter for myself at this point in time, I'd still attempt to avoid sleeping on a dirt floor, or dealing with loose slats that admit wind and weather, so long as I have the resources at hand to do so.

And that is sort of the rub. Save some sudden calamity, most of us will slowly and continuously attempt to climb down the tech ladder as far as resources, time, and energy will permit. It is very difficult to enter into extreme privation willingly, without being forced. And meanwhile the earth trembles.

Experience

There really is no substitution for direct experience, as without prior intimate contact with a given activity or phenomenon, one's field of perception contains greater elements of doubt, uncertainty, and potentiality in respect to that activity or phenomenon, which make for an entirely different experiential landscape - that of the unknown and unverified - than that of visceral certitude, which reaches down into one's instincts and one's body.

The modalities of the known and certain and then of the unknown and uncertain have their own respective worlds of action, inaction, consideration, and contemplation. Individuals may have their own characters which contain more elements of a given modality, which predisposes them to a greater strength in a given modality, but it depends on one's areas of interest and expertise as well.

Both modalities - and everything in between - have their own place, and corresponding uses and benefits. Which shouldn't be a problem for someone more immune to imperial and hubristic tendencies.

The Land's Signature

The major national parks each have a distinct signature to them, depending on the characteristics of the land and what is taking place on that land. Of course, apprehending that signature and forming a culture around it is dependent on the region's history and then the regional culture itself, which in turn does a dance with the land's elemental forces.

What characterizes Rainier National Park is an almost excruciating sense of awe in beholding the formative and transformative forces which shape the land, and an accompanying instinct to stand at a remove from the wilderness as a sharply delineated entity.

This inclination to stand at remove is amplified to the point of near revulsion, as if shrinking back from an electrical shock. Trails are carefully defined and raised up from the dense and untouched ecosystems in the surrounding landscape, and the corridors of destruction are just as carefully left intact to carry out their ends.

Which of course must necessarily be balanced with the desire to maintain a park as a site of recreation and tourism, which is evident enough in the pummeled trails, carved out footbridges, built up banks of rock, carefully maintained campsites and facilities, and the rest of it. The form of the park itself - its infrastructure, its intent, the way in which it is regulated - has been derived from the greater concerns of the civilization itself, as a site of preserved wilderness to enter into and tour, and then to leave again, preferably with minimal impact, yet with a sense of comfort and belonging that requires pulling the edges of the wilderness to meet the sensibilities of the industrial citizen.

But anyway, back to Rainier's signature sense. This is a sense that can be found in all the national parks, but it is a sense that is certainly heightened in Rainier due to both the intense fertility and dynamism of the ecosystems, and the utter destructiveness of the natural forces at play. This gives rise to an odd aesthetic opposition in which ecosystems brimming with life exist right alongside volatile geological and weather-related forces of destruction, constantly transforming yet invigorating the landscape, all of which is left to run its own course without interference.

One can attribute much of this to the central feature of the park: Rainier itself. This powerful volcano has forced the land high into the air, generating a site of turbulence in which water is carried down and throughout the land, in a region that is already fertile thanks to the climate. And at the same time, the volcano and its displacements pulverize the surroundings with lahars, mudflows, floods, and extreme weather.

Lush old growth forests sit side by side with massive corridors of shattered and toppled trees, carried down by torrential floods or snapped over by wind, their building-sized root systems turned up and towering in the air with much of the soil and embedded rock still stuck to them. Washed out trail crossings, crumbling and advancing glaciers, debris-clogged riverbeds, and the aftermaths of countless rockslides are commonplace, and painstakingly left alone.

Granted, this is a signature that must necessarily be perceived and interpreted by an observer with the accompanying sensibility. It is easy enough to imagine some maurader salivating at the seemingly endless stock of timber, geological treasure, living resources, and so on. Of course such was the case in the early European settling of the continent, as can be seen in the breathless accounts of the pristine conditions, the seemingly limitless resources, and boundless fertility of the land. But that is a different kind of consciousness, with its own historical branches and progressions; another story.

At the very least, these sites of immense natural power are enough to punch through the spiritual torpor of neverending industrial growth, and so they are set aside - for the time being - as sort of secular sites of worship. Which aren't necessarily experienced explicitly as religious sites, but which bear all of the imprints you would expect to find in one, such as the heightened awe and reverence, the air of the sacred, the ascetic sensibilities, the beckonings to pilgrimage and tribute, and the like.

 Whatever the case, there is something happening in these parks worth reflecting on.

Ridges

Materialized Desire

To look upon the massive culverts which direct water runoff underneath the logging roads, and then to situate those roads within the greater expanse of clearcut forest, one can begin to make out the extent of which the desire of a great, materially efficacious power can shape an entire landscape.

Large swathes of land are lifted up and protected as roads, and the water is whisked away, and whole forests are leveled radically changing the landscape and the ecosystems within. This is desire that literally moves mountains, for the purpose of feeding in the earth and processing it and transforming it radically, at a scale that is staggering.

A little desire and the power to change can be quite nice. Who doesn't love a food forest, or a little garden for that matter? But what we are doing is enormous, sometimes incomprehensibly so. And soft squishy things like us should beware of the large heavy things we've set in motion to carry out our desires.

The Bridges of Specialization

Some specialization is intrinsic to social existence. Different personalities exist, different plays of energy, which occupy a definite space and a definite stretch of time, and which distribute energy in unique ways. We delight in those connections, in which we experience an altered reality in the presence of others' realities, and which come together to produce a collective reality, that is in fact necessary to reproduce because each of us develops in and emerges from a collectively produced reality.

It is the constant instinctual antagonisms, characteristic of an intensely hierarchical and competitive society, which staggers those specializations, setting them upon each other, or otherwise apart from each other, and transforms them from joyous experience into instruments of pain and grief.

Closing Opening Distance

The remote control becomes ever more viable the more a living space expands and distances open up.

Invasive?

In forestry, invasive species are an intense fixation. And maybe often appropriately so; invasive species can really take over depending on the situation. But the irony is this: oftentimes the purveyors of forestry are quite the invasive species themselves, no?

Rainy Day

Here a good long rain sets in and as one shuts oneself inside, the psychic energy begins to flow inward. The attention drifts from the land and various labors on the land to various inward concerns like the general state of contemporary political economy.

Sacred or Profane?

I know this is sort of an old hat observation, but the problem (or problems) doesn't really lie in the divisions between the sacred and the profane, but rather the problem is the opposition itself, as a self-reinforcing and self-intensifying force. Or: that which is sacred becomes ever more so the more profane something is felt to be, and vice versa, and the clefts that form between those things in a society deepen between those who are closer to a given category.

 And this is a problem that crops up pretty much everywhere; you can generalize the "sacred" and "profane" to just about as far as it will go, as a general opposition between that which is revered and cherished, and that which is considered base and lowly. It is a very old habit of thought, and perhaps deeper, a very old instinct.