So Derrick Jensen, one of my favorite writers, poses the question: What does the landbase you live on want to be like in a 1,000 years, and what can you do to help it achieve that? 1,000 years is apprioximately 40 generations away from us, so Derrick challenges us to think way into the future...even farther then the Iroquis Nation, which challenges it's people to think seven generations ahead.
As Americans, we tend to think only months or weeks ahead..(some of us, like me, have trouble planning a few days ahead,) so the challenge to think about 1,000 years ahead is a really tough one. But when I do, I see a world that is radicially different then the one we live on now. My friend Terra, when describing her ideal world, said that everyone would live in houses in the trees, so that we'd be motivated to keep trees standing, rather then clearing lots for houses. Everyone, she said, would travel by bicycle or horse, reducting their traveling carbon to zero (or nearly zero, since the energy needed to grow food to feed the horse or the person pedaling isn't going to be zero.) In order to be able to do this, every community would have to be self-sufficient, so that people wouldn't have to leave their own town or village to get what they needed...every town or village would grow it's own organic food, have midwives and doctors within the community, have weavers and seamstresses, cobblers, farmers, millers, hunters, candlemakers...everything you need, right there, as happened before the event of the car culture.
I love Terra's vision of the future...I think that is part of the reason I'm becoming a midwife; so I can offer local, suitainable birth to people in my area...so Mommas don't have to drive to a hospital that feels like a shopping mall just to give birth (who wants to give birth in a shopping mall? That, to me, is exactly what hospital birth feels like...) I think we need to move in the direction Terra was talking about...making room for trees, instead of forcing trees to make room for us, living in close communities where everything we need is produced in a 50-100 mile radius, where you know and trust the people around you again, producing only organic, healthy food for our communities, growing cotton or hemp or bamboo or raising sheep to make our clothing, having local people who know how to make plants and animal skins into clothing...
Lets take a look at how that clashes with now:
People struggle to purchase cheap clothing, "food", gas, electronic equiptment, furniture, etc at their local supersized Wal-Mart; these people seem unhappy, since the majority work jobs they could care less about, rather then having a trade they chose in prepuberty, when they learned their skill from an experienced journeyperson; rather, they spent somewhere between 13-24 years in school; trying to combat "ADHD" and depression and the idea our modern schooling system puts in our heads that all elders are evil authority figures who just want to control us; cheap houses go up on newly cleared farmland or forest, quickly being filled by young couples maxing out their credit to pay the rest of their lives for a house that nickle-and-dimes them to death. Well, that, and student loans keep them entrapped in the "rat-race" until they eventually succumb to cancer or heart disease, depression or obesity...
Can't we do better? Don't we owe it to ourselves, our children and our parents to do better? I believe, that when we take care of the earth, it also benefits us. Just think about it; if we ate real, organic foods, and rode a bike or walked, rather then using a car, we'd probably nearly eliminate diseases such as diabetes, heart disease, strokes, high blood pressure, heart attacks. If our children where "unschooled" (which is a hip new term which basically means teaching them about the world around them without a classroom, rather, by observation and interaction with the real world,) and apprienticed, they probably wouldn't have trouble concentrating, because they'd be learning interesting stuff that they wanted to learn, and they wouldn't have to sit still all day, starting at age four or six. Also, children would never learn to hate authority figures....they would interact with people of all ages, starting from birth, when they where caught at home by a biodynamic midwifery team...anyway, I believe the answer is, "yes we can do better....and we can (and must,) think a thousand years into the future and strive to make the life we want for generations to come..."
Love ya,
Carrot
