Positive Intrigue, that sane reverence assume cultural narrative lead- now: Caroline hosts Kirkpatrick Sale, whose once room-mate, Richard Farina, exhorts, “Take the zircon to Foppa, and tell him we move tonight!”
via ally David Kupfer: “Kirkpatrick Sale has been one of the more intrepid, prescient members of the environmental community since the 1960’s. This independent scholar, author, and technology critic, a once self-proclaimed neo-Luddite who now uses a computer to write and the internet to do research… The unstated goal of his 50-year activist-oriented writing career seems rather clear: influence people, the public’s psychology, and steer the sentiment of industrial society, toward a saner, more sustaining future. an elder visionary and Deep Ecology wise guy who never ceases to challenge our thinking.”
Kirkpatrick Sale, who lives in Mt. Pleasant, South Carolina, is the author of fourteen books over 50 years, including The Collapse of 2020, just published.
“His landmark books include SDS (1973), Power Shift: The Rise of the Southern Rim and Its Challenge to the Eastern Establishment (1975), Human Scale (1980), Dwellers in the Land: The Bioregional Vision (1985), The Conquest of Paradise: Christopher Columbus and the Columbian Legacy (1990), The Green Revolution: The American Environmental Movement (1992), Rebels Against the Future, the Luddites and Their War on the Industrial Revolution: Lessons for the Computer Age (1996). The Fire of His Genius; Robert Fulton and the American Dream, (2001) explored the darker side of the American Dream and the inventor, who in the early 1800s was the first to successfully run steamboats up the Hudson. His most recent book is After Eden: The Evolution of Human Domination. His articles have appeared in the Nation, New York Times Magazine, Utne Reader, New York Review of Books, Mother Jones, Resurgence, and the Ecologist.
After Eden is a sobering tale, but not one without hope. Sale asserts that Homo erectus, the variation of the hominid species that preceded Homo sapiens and survived for nearly two million years, did not attempt to dominate the environment. He contends that vestiges of this more ecologically sound way of life exist today—in some tribal societies, in the central teachings of Hinduism and Buddhism, and in the core principles of the worldwide environmental movement—offering redemptive possibilities for ourselves and for the planet.
Two Truths from the Pandemic No One Is Mentioning
Kirkpatrick Sale
Two truths at least are certain in this post-pandemic world:
1. Humans have so dominated the world, destroying much of non-human life and systems in the process, that the world has struck back in recoil and seeks to readjust the balance.2. Human sustenance systems are far too large and unwieldly to be effective and the smaller the system or operation the more efficient, useful, friendly, or supportive.The first truth is of course the one that the current organizers of the world, the ones who have brought this crisis upon us, do not want to believe. To believe that, they would have to acknowledge that the global-liberal-capitalist-guided environment they have worked centuries—or, to be more precise, 75 years—to create has so damaged the environment that it can no longer function. It is not merely that we have engineered a world warming so fast, with ancillary die-outs of so many other species and ecosystems, that it has finally caught up to us, the bipedal species that thought it was in charge. It is more, that we have almost eliminated all other species than those that serve us (only less than 5 per cent of the species on earth can be called wild any more) to the point that the earth needs to seek a way to reestablish a balance. A global pandemic is a simple way to begin that.
Now it is hardly surprising that the Henry Kissingers and other satraps of the present system want to create another worldwide capitalist world, only this time a little more dictatorial than in the past to crush any nasty pandemic that might stand in the way of progress. But the earth is telling us that the capitalist world is using her up, fouling her systems, killing off species useful and needful to her, and no one species however sapient can be allowed to do that.
It is saying that here we have the one chance to reorder our values, restructure our relationship with nature, create an economic arrangement that does not depend upon using the treasures we call resources as rapidly and recklessly as we can. The one chance to reposition our species as one among many, and a humble one at that, instead of thinking ourselves superior and dominant.
The second truth follows neatly from the first. Clearly all the large systems we have evolved to solve our problems and govern our lives have failed, some most dramatically so. When a crisis hit, no one depended on international institutions to do anything useful—no one even thought the United Nations should meet!—and all the globalists at once fell upon national governments to save them, ignoring the whole edifice of internationalism cobbled up since World War II.
But as it turned out most of those national systems sputtered and backstepped and went around in circles too, the only partial exceptions being oriental-rooted autocracies in the East. The United States, by far the most powerful and richest, dithered for days without any leadership and no one knew whether the medical side or the political side would step up; in the end it was a little bit of both and a lots of neither. The European Union was completely silent, and the feeble states of Italy, Iran, UK, and the rest could only cry Panic and shut as much down as they could, regardless of consequences.
As it turned out, the U.S. national instruments were inadequate, ill-managed, and inefficient. States tried to move up, as in New York, but they little knew what strategies to pursue for the long term much less what machines to get for the short. Where actual achievements were made, and lives saved, it was at a much more local level, where doctors and nurses could touch and see and know the needed steps to success.
The lesson is that, if anything really useful—and ecologically sound—is to be done in the future it should best be done at a local level. It is there, and there only, that we can all heed the call sent out by Pope Francis in the wake of the pandemic: “We have to slow down our rate of production and consumption and to learn to understand and contemplate the natural world.” That’s the only way to survive the pandemic, and to get about the business of a non-capitalist ecological salvation.
And Wow.
Thor and his team of goats (Old Norse Stories, 1900)
Kirkpatrick Sale has Sun quintile Neptune, deep-souled participatory kinship,
and two! Thor’s Hammers, to root out corruption..
(1)Sun Cancer to Mars Scorpio, to Moon Aquarius, back to Sun
(2) Mars to Saturn to Sun back to Mars
Detail from the 12th-century Aberdeen Bestiary, featuring a phoenix
Stationing Pluto (doors to the Underworld are opening wide, for us all)
be right on his Jupiter 24+ Capricorn (which is fatally opposite Pluto,
exactly opposite US Pluto…)
… Phoenix’s Song Tales
(themes continue under charts)
“In 1995, Sale agreed to a public bet with Wired editor Kevin Kelly that by the year 2020, there would be a convergence of three disasters: global currency collapse, significant warfare between rich and poor, and environmental disasters of some significant size. The bet was turned into a claim on the FX prediction market, where the probability has hovered around 25%.”
Cardiff castle, Wales, 1869
Let us partner with Venus,
as she be “giving rousing speech on behalf of the Earth.”
Stationing, square Neptune…
Let us be distraction proof,
savvy to how we are being played,
and ever more deeply dedicated
to the whole big story of now
Collapse..
Not isolated crises, but crisis of isolation…
Breath of Gaia by Josephine Wall
Our rogue species’ dominator drive,
some have likened to a Virus,
of Inqusitional orthodoxy…
has brought us to collapse
due to our having lost the arts of participatory kinship…
and Democratic Animism…
So let’s re-animate!
Here be Davis Kupfer’s salient interviews:
1)
DK: You have predicted an eco-catastrophe striking the world around 2020. Why 2020 and what is your projection?
KS: 2020 because it sounds good, and it is a fair approximation of when I think this disaster will accumulate and probably destroy much of surface life. My view of it is that it will be a combination of eco-disasters which will include rising sea levels due to the melting of the ice caps, particularly the Antarctic ice cap, increasing ozone layer loss so that there is what I call the “zapping” of people on Earth. Australia will be the first continent to go, and the birds will go blind. There will be all kinds of environmental disruptions triggering a lot of disasters and diseases. Plus there’s the social decay–armed uprisings everywhere. It all seems about to happen in the next 20 years or so, and there is no sign that the corporate global juggernaut is going to halt this impending disaster. It is moving full steam ahead and the scientists can warn them over and over again and the protesters can take to the streets, but there is no sign that they are going to budge in any of their disastrous practices. That is why I think it will happen.
DK: What would you say to younger people to point them in a positive direction for their future?
KS: Ecostery! Ecostery! I would particularly say for young people to immediately learn to live in the kind of community that devotes itself to nature. There are Indian communities of this kind. There are the Amish. There are some bioregional groups of this kind. There are intentional communities that follow this. None of it is as perfect or persuasive as it ought to be. But they don’t need that. For a young person, it’s sufficient to have the analysis of the importance of community and the necessity of being nature-based. You don’t have to have models. You don’t have to have older people. All you need is to live that life.
and
2)
Kupfer: What motivated you to write “After Eden?”
Kirkpatrick Sale: I wrote it to I try to figure out where we went wrong. It is a question that a lot of people have asked, and I mean went wrong in the sense that we dominate and destroy and exploit the planet, and we do it with ever greater force, year after year. We now know that there is a risk that we will destroy the very sources that we depend upon. So where did we go wrong? I went back and tried to figure out where in the evolution of human history did there seem to be a change in their attitude so severe it would lead to the domination of nature. And I found such a point. About 70,000 years ago when a volcano in what is now Indonesia exploded, it was the largest explosion as far as we know in history and it covered the world with ash. And many species died out and we can see that.
The climate change that occurred because of that explosion must’ve been just terrible. There were humans living in Africa, but it must have been a traumatic experience to live through. The author Chellis Glenndinning suggests that it was a post-dramatic depression that they went through, and they had to do something desperate to find food to eat. It is then, for the first time in the fossil record, that we discover spear points and we discover a lot of them, and we discover a number of different large animals buried in the caves of Southern Africa. So the conclusion is obvious, that it was because of this climate trauma that they turned to hunting. It is clear that humans had not hunted before, that they had been scavengers and gatherers of vegetation and now they were hunters.
I argue that this act of hunting, the regular practice of causing pain and death to fellow creatures, as a central part of tribal cultures, was what estranged humans from nature for so long that we thought we had a right to dominate it, and got very good at it. We got so good, all around the world, that after about 20,000 years ago we caused the massive animal extinctions that eliminated up to 70 per cent of the mega fauna in places.
I go into what that must mean, what that must do psychologically, to be a hunter, to go out and regularly kill other creatures, fellow creatures, some large, some elegant, some beautiful. And to build up a society where this becomes right. Not only necessary, but a rightful thing to do. That has got to have been a very complex social process that developed over perhaps as little as 1000 years, that process of learning how to hunt, and making it a central part of social and economic life.
The effect of that was to make humans separate from the animal world for the first time, so separate that they then felt that they could dominate these other animals and use their flesh and bones and hides, and that meant they were no longer part of nature in the same way—they were apart from it. In a very short period of time, when humans went down to the watering hole, most of the other animals would run away—well, maybe not the lions, who weren’t prey anyway—but particularly the antelope family and other small animals. Where as before humans had gone down to the watering hole side-by-side with all these other animals, now as they were showing how dangerous humans were, and the animals would run away. So we have a separation from nature and a domination of nature—yes, it was very successful and humans survived, but at a huge price. Humans grew in numbers over the centuries and eventually migrated out of Africa, so these hunting cultures spread into Asia and Australia, and up into the Levant and then Europe
DK: How did this ultimately impact them?
Kirkpatrick Sale: It essentially turned humans into killers—regular, efficient, cold-blooded killers.. You can call it hunting if you want, but what it really means is killing, and that will have a strong effect on the types of societies that you create and how they relate to nature.
DK: It must have altered their self-perception as well.
Kirkpatrick Sale: Yes, it’s that distancing of the human from the animal world, their society and their consciousness will have changed completely. What happens as they move into Europe, it is the iciest part of the ice age as they move into Europe, so hunting becomes even more important to them. And competition is greater in this period of time, roughly 35,000 to 20,000 years ago, because people are leaving the coldest parts of the north, and they are moving into western Europe, particularly France and Spain, which are warmer, and if you’re going to have competition for those animals out there you have got to get better and better. And that’s what they do, they develop different kinds of spears and they use spear throwers for greater power and accuracy. They have techniques for tracking whole herds of animals. They get better and better at it, and one of the ways in which they improve their skills is with hunting magic.
DK: What is hunting magic?
Kirkpatrick Sale: That is the use of the cave paintings to ensure a better hunt. The first cave paintings are from about 32,000 years ago, when people decided that they would put pictures of the animals to be hunted on the walls of a cave and go through some kind of ritual so as to be able to say that when I go out there tomorrow, I will be able to kill this animal. The greatest number of cave paintings are from France and northern Spain and a few other places in Germany and Italy, precisely where the competition is greatest.
And then suddenly the animals, big animals particularly, die out. What happened is that these human hunters, in their dominance of nature, led to the extinction of 70% of the large animals throughout Europe, the Americas, and Australia. Even the mammoth becomes extinct, which at one time they must have thought could never happen, there were so many of them, but it happened somewhere around 15 to 12,000 years ago. And when the extinction of so many animals occurred, the humans had to turn toward vegetation to exploit, and we know that because there are certain tools of about 15,000 years ago that show the residues of grasses on them, so they were using them to cut grasses for the first time.
It is not much of a step from that point, maybe three thousand years later, that we begin to find evidence, particularly in the Levant, of people planting. They must have said ‘well why should we go all the way over there to get those grasses? Why can’t we just plant those grasses here?’ And that is the beginning of agriculture–which Jerrod Diamond has called the greatest mistake in the history of humankind. I think it was a great mistake, and it led to diseases and cities and kings and armies and wars, and the human body and brain sizes decreased, but that is just an extension of the same dominant attitude humans developed with hunting.
So that’s the story of human domination that I wanted to tell in After Eden, so that we could at least say where it all began and we now see where it has led us to, and we are on the verge of ecocide. Now maybe we can have a greater understanding of who we are and what we do, and say, let’s not go on this path any more. We’ve treated nature this way for 70,000 years and we see what it’s done.
Let us have the wisdom to learn how to live back within nature instead of over nature…
