time is linear, march of time, and has an apocalyptic edge built into it, li~e Judgement Day. So our civilization, our culture, whatever you want to call it, is an accumulation of dislocated cultures with a transformative, apoc- ' alyptic point of view built into it. Why else would someone believe that if they put themselves into a cylindrical metal tube and were shot out of the planetary biosphere that that would be a superior challenge to anything that would be met in the biosphere? Why would someo!}e believe that unless they were already convinced of the value of change for its own sake? That because there was no-, place that you started from, it really didn't matter ~here you went. ln fact, the bigger the odds, the better. It's like the search for the Golden Fleece or looking for the chalice that Christ_drank from. An incredible mission. Mission Impossible. Getting out there. Ironically, there is no out once you ar_e in outerspace. You're trapped in a metal tube. • • What I'm going to submit is that people don't really need or want' that. As a matter of fact, we'd have to consume a tremendous amount of people's labor, a treme~dous amount of energy, and have to hype people into somehow believing they nfeded or even really wanted to be shot out into space. People have been so coerced by constant transformation, techno_logical transformation, that they feel going into space is a natural extension of that. And, in fact it is a natural extension of transformation. But is it worth it? The people who have come to North America generally have not cared so much about what was here as for what they could do with ~t, how they could use a lot of technological toys to get things out of 1t. Western culture has largely come under the domination now of American culture; ~nd what it tends to reptesent is something I've called global monoculture: Sitting in a gas line in a Toyota with a decal on the back that says, Save the Whales, for four hours reading Jonathan Livingston Seagull. What an incredib,ly ironic place , for people to end up at! • ' I think the futurists are about to take the future, remove our . sense of nbwever, and I want t_o speak in terms of a culture of resis- ~ance. The corporate involvement that goes into ·space pushes the idea of compressed urban populations..It also has a military basis and works hand in hand with the military. There is a kind of theft going on here and I believe that part of the theft is this: we have a possibility to begin designing a vision of what human beings are thanakes in all of the peoples of the planet in a way that is in'harmony with the needs of the planetary biosphere. We have a concrete basis for fulfilling those kinds of wishful, idealistic urges that take the form of wanting, for example, to abolish wars..We have a place for conceiving our way Il'.ow. ·We've all seen that image of the . planet_and realize that \Ye don't have to be hooked into killing a lot ~f other people just because they don't happen to belong to the nat10nal group that we belong to. There is the possibility of seeing human culture, the human species, as relating to the rest of the biosphere. This seems to me to be a proposition on the scale of wanting liberty in the 18th century, when people had aspirations to get, for the first time, the vote. W,e have the possibility now of , thii:1-ki~g in terms of what the human species.might actually doto mamtam and restore the biosphere, to begin actively living in continuity with it. I don't want to have that robbed by futurists and I don't want to be bamboozled into t~inking that our sweat and energy necessarily has to go up in space. • So what would a culture of resistance entail? In Northern California, which I think is a distinct countiy of the planetary biosphere, a cultural resis.tance might be formed by sharing views of the place itself, about the web of life that sustains it and us. To be more specific, let's divide Northern California into four distinct locales:.urban, suburban, rural a:nd wilderness. The urban areas might be thought of as "Green City." San Francisco could have half the streets it now has. .Either because half of them were dosed and dug up to provide topsoil, or because the number of lanes on all of them were divided in_half and one-half of the streets were dug up for topsoil so things could be planted in them. A real civic effort wou!d be made in support of the kinds of things we'v,e already started like neighborhood co-ops; that neighborhood co-ops could in fact be given the kinds of advantages that businesses have always been given.' I think it could be measured whether or not a community store is of value to the neighborhood, and, if it is, then it seems to me that some tax money from San Francisco could be diverted ·into supp~rting that endeavor, rather than having people exhaust themselves'to keep co-ops floating. The kinds of culture that are presented in the Bay Area :might be more overtly cultures of the North Pacific Rim. The kinds of theater and art being done outside of San Francisco could be brought into the city so people could see real examples of people taking over their watersheds in the Salmon Ri_ver Valley, in the Mattole River Valley, things t.hat are really· going on. In the suburbs, a "Green Region" plan might insist that if you're going to live there you have to involve yourself in some kind of part-time agriculture. This would be a way ·of balancing the kind of pressure that suburbanites put on the landscape by covering up the topsoil and using tremendous amounts of energy to commute back and forth to these places. It wouldn't have to be tbo much more thanJearning to provide some of the produce for your own family rather than aping the rich with croquet lawns. The deeper rural areas of Northern California produce farm products on a large scale and the coasts have fisheries that shouldn't have to compete with rainbow trout from Peru. Rather than producing for the global monoculture our economy would be more • regionally oriented and symbiotic. We would clean up our rivers, restore watersheds, and perhaps become Salmon people in the way that we-see the place. For the wilderness thing, we need to overcome the Sierra Club psychosis. The Sierra Club psychosis is that someone went into the woods once and had a tremendous ~xperience and never wanted to' have that experience taken away: It's not unusual now for some people in the Sierra Club to talk about the desirability of nuclear reactors. Nuclear reactors would be good because they would centralize human popul~tions and keep people out 9f the wilderness areas. That's close to psychosis. The Sierra Club supported the Peripheral Canal which would have diverted half the water from around the Delta, turned San Francisco Bay into a sump, and transported that water to replace the depleted ground water in the Central Valley and to Los Angeles. One of the reasons for suppo.rting the Peripheral Canal that I heard from a Sierra Club board member was' that it.was good to keep the people in Los Angeles because if we kept them there they'd be kept out of the wilderness areas of Northern California·. It's crazy to destroy our watershe.ds to keep people in Los Angeles. • . So what we really need is some kind of unified vision of what a Green Region, a re-inhabited region, would be and what our civilization, our culture, might be in terms of this place of the planetary biosphere. Then when that woman from Bali comes to visit us she _can be told that she is in Shasta, that the people that live here are involved in the migra~ion of natural species that occur·here, that they are undertaking programs to secure the long-term inhabitation of this place, and that they have a culture of resistance against the Global Monocultt,\re. • Reprinted with permission from City Miner, Vol. 4, N,o. 3. City Miner is a Bay A~ea community-oriented magazine witb a focus on urban ecology and appropriate techrtology, availab'le for $3.50/ yr. (4 issues) from: P:o. Box 176, Berkeley, CA 94701~'415/8416500.
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy NTc4NTAz