You are Part of It

Bob Dylan’s song, All Along the Watchtower, contemplates a crisis approaching on the horizon, where rapid action is required, and most people are blind to the rapidly approaching peril. Global warming and man made climate change fit that pattern, so lets start a conversation using Dylan’s images and poetry as a backdrop.

"There must be some way out of here, said the joker to the thief"

Three common ways of characterizing human existence in relation to the natural world The first view is that Humanity is a Devine creation that exists in a non-material spiritual reality separate from the natural physical world. From the religious and spiritual viewpoint nature is often seen as infused with spiritual force, emanating from a spiritual source, or a separate creation of a Deity.

During the hollidays I got a gift of Dr Andrew Weil’s book, Healthy Aging. Dr Weil recomends eating the anti-inflamatory diet to promote healthy aging. The research and thinking behind the diet is that chronic inflamation in the body encourages the development of chronic diseases like, diabetes, heart disease, arthritis, and alzheimers, to name a few. The diet is basically vegitarian, except for fish high in Omega 3 fatty acids, and I think it would be easy to grow a lot of the fruits and vegatables that are listed as being particularly good at reducing inflamation.

I am still having a hard time getting organized and active with my dietary changes. I get real busy and a little stressed and it is hard to mobalize the energy and create the momentum of change.

My resistance to dietary change has been up front for me lately. I haven’t made the moves into eating foods that I could grow that I have wanted to. I am lazy and complacent and eat by habit, not design. Gotta make it through this resistance to get to a place where growing my food makes sense. Once I start to work on energy, I am sure I will face personal resistance, despite my good conscious intentions.

I did some research on the web last night and there seem to be a lot of things I can grow and I am less worried, a little excited, but kind of overwhelmed. I had assumed that a wide variety of vegatables could be grown in my yard but I was worried that growing other food that I depend on and would have a hard time giving up would be too hard to do. Generally this worry, on paper at least, was overblown. I like grains, and the foods, bread and pasta, you can make using them. When I was younger I went through a period of time when I was a vegitarian.

I am going to begin a personal sustainability project. I want to live as sutainably as possible and to record a journal of my process. The first thing I am going to do is to start changing my diet to see how close I can get to living on foods that I could grow at home. As I change my diet I am going to start trying to grow the foods I eat and eventually grow as much of the food I eat as is possible in the yard of my northern California suburban home. I am also going to conserve and sustainably generate as much energy as I can to see how low a level of energy consumption I can achieve.

Let it break your heart. Let it in. We are just beginning to understand that we are destroying the life sustaining attributes of the world we live in. There isn’t much any one of us can do about it standing alone.

Suck Up Economics is the economic system that sucks the life energy out of, the middle class, working class, under class, and the environment, and into the hands of the corporate and economic elite.  The resources of the vast majority, and the environment that sustains us all, are sucked up and not replenished. All of this just to drive the percentage of wealth held by the economic elites higher. So the top goes up by sucking everyone else dry, while everyone else and our environment gets sucked down.\n\nTo top it all off the main human skill this type of economy promotes is sucking up.

For most people, the world immediately surrounding them seems to be responsive to their individual intention, choice, and action. Our current form of Democracy reinforces the opposite perception, that national government is not responsive to the individual.\r\n\r\nThe effect of individual voting is limited by the creation of electoral districts that virtually insure a candidate of only one party, Democrat or Republican, has a realistic chance of winning election from term to term.