Relocalization to the Rescue

By Larry Ely, Rob Crowner, and Steve Randall

“Civilized man was nearly always able to become master of his environment temporarily.  His chief troubles came from his delusions that his temporary mastership was permanent.  He thought of himself as ‘master of the world,’ while failing to understand fully the laws of nature.”  

–  Tom Dale and Vernon Carter, Topsoil and Civilization, 1955.

Our delusional sense of permanent mastership over the environment accelerated dramatically with the creation of the first American oil company, the Pennsylvania Rock Oil Company, in 1854.  Melville had just been on a whaling ship hunting for another kind of oil and writing Moby Dick in 1851 – whale oil and wood having fueled American society until commercial oil extraction began in Titusville, PA.  In 1854, ironically the very year we entered “sub-nature” by extracting subterranean oil, came a warning from another American savant on the folly of the pell-mell rush to industrialization “Ahab style.” Thoreau summarized his manifold pronouncements on the human being’s relationship to nature by saying in Walden, “We can never have enough of nature.”  

Oil was cheap, involving opening a spigot instead of hunting for whales on the high seas. With the car’s advent we’ve been driven increasingly to be profligate oil users – out of touch with our bodies and each other. Cars have that passivity-inducing, separative effect. A ballooning, overweight body on the personal level now mirrors on the societal level the corpulent spread of the built environment (exurban sprawl).

Dear Representative Story,

Don’t you understand that  gambling brought down the world economy back in 2008?  Gambling is a form of inebriation.  The police tell us in ads on TV and on billboards not to let our friends drive drunk.  Why the heck should we then let the whole society drive drunk by basing our resources to fund government on gambling?

Folks, a weekly email post from Ralph Nader, the patriot who’s been blowing the whistle on how the corporations have been taking away the citizens’ sovereignty, livelihood, health, liberty, and dreams ever since our American experiment began. – Larry Ely

Attention Deficit Democracy

A society not alert to signs of its own decay, because its ideology is a continuing myth of progress, separates itself from reality and envelops illusion.

One yardstick by which to measure the decay in our country’s political, economic, and cultural life, is the answer to this question: Do the forces of power, which have demonstrably failed, become stronger after their widely perceived damage is common knowledge?

Economic decay is all around.  Poverty, unemployment, foreclosures, job export, consumer debt, pension attrition, and crumbling infrastructure are well documented.  The self-destruction of the Wall Street financial giants, with their looting and draining of trillions of other people’s money, have been headlines for two years.  During and after their gigantic taxpayer bailouts from Washington, DC, the banks, et al, are still the most powerful force in determining the nature of proposed corrective legislation.