“In the end all struggles have the same objective, the defense of life”
- Ana Sandoval
Nature was always our survival, our belonging, our purpose. The river hydrated us. The sea, the forest, the grassland was our food, clothes and medicine. We loved nature because we had to, not because we are privileged to. Now, water comes from the tap and is followed by a bill. Our necessities can be bought at the store or online; if we have cash.
Cash rules. Cash. Loot. Dollars. Cheddar. Satoshis.
This is the modern bargain.
Go to work, make money, buy stuff. Nature is no longer primary. The dream saturating mytho-poetics of totemic wildness is become entertainment. Our loyalty to the economics of industrial production endlessly rewards us with greater heights of comfort, convenience and dopamine stimulating gadgetry. The dollar intermediates our survival and therein dominates our daily purpose, ambitions and status. Nature becomes the backdrop to fantasy, a recreational destination and a stage for highlighting virtues in public relations.
Who is this “we” I speak of? this “us”? This growing body of human urbanity. refugee metropoles, lawn-huggers commuting from sprawling suburbs?
Certainly not the peasants. The dirty finger-nailed. The loin clothed. Those who still drink water from the palm of their hand and roast wild roots in open fires, climb trees for their coconut water and follow rain across mountain passes for greener pastures. Certainly the mythical wild still inhabits their dream lives. Money here at best is frosting, but the cake belongs to the beloved. Their land cannot be bought nor sold for their land owns them completely.
Hang on a second. Let’s pause. Let me define my frame. I can feel the priestly class of economic dogma chomping at the bit to skewer me with the dreaded moniker “romantic” or worse yet “idealist”. No no no no. Far from it. I am in fact a techno-optimist, but not a techno-utopian. The techno-utopian believes technology can solve all our problems. The techno-utopians are the true romantics/idealists and shrewdly gaslight the realists with their attitudes of techno-supremacy. Techno-utopians, as so much excellent sci-fi has rendered on screen, is surely the path to a techno-dystopia. The techno-cocoon atrophies the relational imagination.
The techno-optimist may recognize it is a relational shift deep in the recesses of the human heart that will save us. A relation to nature as survival. A relation to the othered human. A relation to our own deeper nature. We know that fair-trade, regeneratively mined laptops and smart phones are not yet available but we know they could be. We hold space for that possibility. Technology, after all, can certainly help us globalize human rights and ecosystem restoration but only after this restory-ation in our communities.
So yes, lets put solar panels on the roof, ride that electric bike to the store and Zoom to work but don’t forget from the perspective of the natural world the apocalypse isn’t coming, the apocalypse is here. Lets acknowledge and activate the United Nations pronouncement of this decade of restoration and bring back the cornucopia of indigenous foodways that graced vast swaths of this planet without inflicting an extinction epidemic of colonial proportions. May this restoration be the salve that dismantles racism, heals historical traumas and stabilizes the health and wellness of all beings. Reciprocal economic development.
Remember the luddites were not anti-technology, they were technology operators fighting for labor rights. The indigenous farmer, the permaculture homesteader and the artisanal fisher can always take a job for extra cash, and can always lean back on their relationships for foundational security. A person who can walk a hundred miles in any direction and know they can survive on edible native flora will have an easier time escaping from slavery and oppression than a refugee or slave in a strange land. I wonder if this is why the history books taught us that natives made terrible slaves.
There is a path forward, and the journey of a thousand miles begins with one step. Preferably barefoot and un-intermediated on rich black earth.