Our Place campers learning environmental philosophy in the field (youtube link!).

The best part of Thanatopsis:

Earth, that nourished thee, shall claim
Thy growth, to be resolved to earth again,
And, lost each human trace, surrendering up
Thine individual being, shalt thou go
To mix forever with the elements;
To be a brother to the insensible rock,
And to the sluggish clod, which the rude swain
Turns with his share, and treads upon. The oak
Shall send his roots abroad, and pierce thy mould.

Have you ever seen the Oxbow? Our Place takes campers to it—

From Thomas Cole‘s’ Essay on American Scenery

It has not been in vain–the good, the enlightened of all ages and nations, have found pleasure and consolation in the beauty of the rural earth. Prophets of old retired into the solitudes of nature to wait the inspiration of heaven. It was on Mount Horeb that Elijah witnessed the mighty wind, the earthquake, and the fire; and heard the “still small voice”–that voice is YET heard among the mountains! St. John preached in the desert;–the wilderness is YET a fitting place to speak of God. The solitary Anchorites of Syria and Egypt, though ignorant that the busy world is man’s noblest sphere of usefulness, well knew how congenial to religious musings are the pathless solitudes….

In the Connecticut we behold a river that differs widely from the Hudson. Its sources are amid the wild mountains of New Hampshire; but it soon breaks into a luxuriant valley, and flows for more than a hundred miles, sometimes beneath the shadow of wooded hills, and sometimes glancing through the green expanse of elm-besprinkled meadows. Whether we see it at Haverhill, Northampton, or Hartford, it still possesses that gentle aspect; and the imagination can scarcely conceive Arcadian vales more lovely or more peaceful than the valley of the Connecticut–its villages are rural places where trees overspread every dwelling, and the fields upon its margin have the richest verdure….

I cannot but express my sorrow that the beauty of such landscapes are quickly passing away–the ravages of the axe are daily increasing–the most noble scenes are made desolate, and oftentimes with a wantonness and barbarism scarcely credible in a civilized nation. The wayside is becoming shadeless, and another generation will behold spots, now rife with beauty, desecrated by what is called improvement; which, as yet, generally destroys Nature’s beauty without substituting that of Art.

Nature has spread for us a rich and delightful banquet. Shall we turn from it? We are still in Eden; the wall that shuts us out of the garden is our own ignorance and folly.

field environmental philosophy

The prompt was “explain this place to your mother—what it was, how it got this way, what to look for and do while you’re here.”

Jefferson in 1786, when he was Washington's Secretary of State

In parts 1 & 2 of this meditation, I’ve shown how our over-the-top consumerism makes us hog the world’s natural resources and invade nations so we can continue the hogging, and how our hoggishness corrupts our political, economic and legal culture.

Now let’s consider Thomas Jefferson’s definitions of citizenship and freedom. Volumes have been written about these subjects, yet by focusing on the Declaration of Independence we can understand what his views were.

Very recently, scholars discovered that when Jefferson began drafting the Declaration he used the word “subjects” to describe the people, like him, who lived in England’s North American colonies. This word is of ancient usage, because it describes the position of an unprivileged person in a monarchical system of government; according to established law, the person is “subject” the decrees of a king. Given that Jefferson’s task was to explain why the colonists were not obliged to obey the king’s laws, he “sought quite methodically to expunge the word, to wipe it out of existence and write over it.” In its place, he wrote “citizen”:

“No longer subjects to the crown, the colonists became something different: a people whose allegiance was to one another, not to a faraway monarch.”

Jefferson explained that this new-and-improved approach to governance required people—citizens—to create and institute laws by consent, through a process of open debate and collective decision-making. Moreover, and of profound import, these laws would be instituted to protect the natural rights of all human beings:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.

Jefferson foresaw that even governance-by-consent would, over time, tend to invest a minority with great powers over the majority, and that—if they were not vigilant in protecting their natural rights—citizens would find themselves being turned into subjects. For this reason, he said that citizens had the right to re-establish their rights by overthrowing oppressive governments:

That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

Jefferson believed that citizens must be creative and active. The citizen had a character, a kind of identity, that was key to governance-by-consent: ie., democracy.

Already we can see that this quality of character contrasts with that of the consumer, who is served, and pays someone else to be creative and active for them. To put it bluntly, Jefferson would not/did not approve of “couch potatoes”—because they made fine subjects.

Tomorrow: Jefferson’s definition of freedom.

Don't worry! Be happy!

Yesterday I outlined the way in which our over-the-top consumerism gives our government a reason to invade other lands, and subjugate and dispossess other people, with the intention of reducing the $$ cost of the materials we “need” to perpetuate our over-the-top consumerism. Talk about a feedback loop!

We have been told, even by former President Bush, that we are “addicted to oil” and that this addiction is a national security issue. At the same time, we are told that the “American way of life” (our over-the-top consumerism) is the “highest” in human history.

The paradox we face is that our “addiction to oil” sustains us our present “American way of life.”

Our addiction is unsustainable; and, yet, our soldiers are bravely fighting to protect that addiction. This is a tragic predicament: bad for us, our soldiers, and the WMD-less people whose lands we occupy. If we believe in “free trade,” why aren’t we allowing those people to sell us their materials—instead of taking them under the pretense of the “war on terror”? Because—as Alan Greenspan said—we take the materials we want by force, we have lost the world’s confidence that the USA spreads democracy. We’ve even lost our own confidence.

You have noticed that, as we are consumed by this tragic paradox, our civil rights have been eroded. The dehumanizing shakedown we endure every time we board an airline is the most obvious example of this, but it’s just the tip of the iceberg. We have lost our civil rights in ways we cannot yet fathom—look at the Citizens United decision, which gives corporations the same rights as us to free speech; which might not sound too bad until you understand that the Supreme Court found that “free speech” = $$. It is likely we will find that those with the most $$ get to exercise their “free speech” the most.

So, us tiny human citizens are now fellow citizens with leviathan corporations, which are not alive or even mentioned in the Constitution; they’re a legal fiction. And/but/yet, they’re much bigger and richer and louder than us. We are at a might-is-right moment in history, and as Emerson put it: “Things are in the saddle and ride mankind.”

We are stuck in this mess because we have been taught in school and in the market to be good consumers. We have not been taught to be good citizens. In fact, we barely even know what it is to be a citizen. One of the main reasons we don’t know what a citizen is, is that in a nation where freedom is always extolled as our highest national value, we don’t know where freedom comes from; and, because we don’t know where it comes from, we take it for granted and/or can’t even explain what it is.

Thomas Jefferson said that “freedom is the gift of nature.” He was correct, and tomorrow I’ll tell you why.

Our future is attending kindergarten next Fall

After 9/11, Mr. Bush had the chance to summon the country to a great nation-building project focused on breaking our addiction to oil. Instead, he told us to go shopping.

Thomas Friedman, NYTs

After the 9/11 terrorist attacks, President Bush didn’t call for sacrifice. He called for shopping. “Get down to Disney World in Florida,” he said. “Take your families and enjoy life, the way we want it to be enjoyed.”

Justin Fox, Time Magazine

We are consumers. That is, of course, obvious. We are good at being consumers, too. Compared to the rest of the world’s population, we consume an inordinate amount; the American Association for the Advancement of Science reports:

For many resources, the United States of America is the world’s largest consumer in absolute terms. For a list of 20 major traded commodities, it takes the greatest share of 11 of them: corn, coffee, copper, lead, zinc, tin, aluminum, rubber, oil seeds, oil and natural gas. For many more it is the largest per-capita consumer.

Our (grand)parents raised us with the expectation that our lives would be better than theirs and, for them, the ability to consume whatever we want whenever we want was proof that things were always getting better. For example, we had more than a hundred different kinds of cars to choose from when we wanted to buy one; but look overseas and that “freedom of choice” was limited, and in many cases, such as in the communist USSR, basically non-existent. That was their proof of the superiority of “the American way of life.”

Somehow, ineluctably, our status as consumers became fused with our status as citizens. Bush’s direction to go shopping right after 911 revealed that there was really no difference. Since not much has changed as far as our national rate of consumption, there is no difference.

There are at least 3 problems that arise from our equation of consumer and citizen:

1) Gaia cannot bear the stress of the unlimited consumption of biomes by humans. (Actually, it is more accurate to say that Gaia can bear the stress, but we cannot.)

Per capita consumption rates in China are still about 11 times below ours, but let’s suppose they rise to our level. Let’s also make things easy by imagining that nothing else happens to increase world consumption — that is, no other country increases its consumption, all national populations (including China’s) remain unchanged and immigration ceases. China’s catching up alone would roughly double world consumption rates. Oil consumption would increase by 106 percent, for instance, and world metal consumption by 94 percent.

If India as well as China were to catch up, world consumption rates would triple. If the whole developing world were suddenly to catch up, world rates would increase elevenfold. It would be as if the world population ballooned to 72 billion people (retaining present consumption rates).

2) We are deploying our military around the globe to try to control, and lower the costs of, the extraction of resources needed to keep up the present national rate of consumption; this use of our military is economically unsustainable, politically counterproductive and morally untenable.

The most telling example of how our military is being deployed to ensure our present rate of consumption is the news that Afghanistan contains untold mineral wealth:

It has long been known that Afghanistan had significant deposits of gemstones, copper and other minerals, but United States officials say they have discovered and documented major, previously unknown deposits, including copper, iron, gold and industrial metals like lithium.

A Pentagon team, working with geologists and other experts, has shared its data with the Afghan government, and is working with the Afghan Ministry of Mines to prepare information for potential investors in hopes of placing some mineral exploration rights up for auction within the next six months. On Thursday, Afghan officials said they believed that the American estimates of the value of the mineral deposits — nearly $1 trillion — were too conservative, and that they could be worth as much as $3 trillion.

We find the same story when we look to Iraq:

Alan Greenspan, the former Federal Reserve chairman, said in an interview that the removal of Saddam Hussein had been “essential” to secure world oil supplies, a point he emphasized to the White House in private conversations before the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

3) To review: our consumerism is driving the global environmental crisis, and our use of the military to attack people who live near materials we need to keep up our national rate of consumption. Add to this that our economy is bankrupt, and that we borrow heavily from future generations to maintain “the American way of life” as our parent’s define(d) it, and it is obvious that our children are not going to live lives that are better than ours.

Or are they?

A biocitizen is a person who is a citizen of the bios, ie. life.

Bios is not an abstract concept. It is the absolute, uncontrovertible basis of all human and non-human being. It is chemical, physical, and dynamic; and it is perceivable and knowable as one’s own, and all other’s, reality. Abstract concepts are projected upon bios—everything written constitutes that projection—but it remains our greatest perpetually unsolvable mystery.

Because it is the source of being and (ultimately) unknowable, “life is sacred.” It is safe to say that (despite inconsistent applications of the idea) all political and religious systems hold that life is sacred. I’m sure that you do, too. Bios is sacred if only because without it, there is nothing. As we look out into the galaxy, we find dead planet after dead planet; it is bios, and bios only, that makes our predicament possible.

The concept of biocitizen is rooted in political philosophy and in ecology. The Greeks used the word cosmopolitai to describe “the citizen of the world” and philosophers of the Enlightenment such as Rousseau and Jefferson employed the idea of the “citizen of nature” to describe an essential human being that transcends nationality. Thoreau is perhaps the most articulate purveyor of this concept of identity.

Grounded in, and arising from, these definitions, biocitizen assumes the findings of ecology, the branch of biology that consistently proves that each living being is not an isolated “island universe”; they are “part and parcel” participants in the superorganismic life of Gaia.

In particular, the concept of the biocitizen draws upon the scientific and ethical insights of Aldo Leopold , who is widely celebrated for conceiving the “land ethic“:

“A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.”

Leopold distinguished between two ways Americans relate to nature, one typical of pioneer culture and one newly emerging that is dedicated to inhabiting land sustainably. We “see repeated the same basic paradoxes: man the conqueror versus man the biotic citizen; science the sharpener of his sword versus science the searchlight on his universe; land the slave and the servant versus land the collective organism.”

His biotic citizen is our biocitizen, a person who enacts the land ethic in everyday life, behaving as a “plain member and citizen” of a biotic community that “include[s] soils, waters, plants, animals, or collectively: the land.”

To these political and scientific definitions, I’ll close by adding an existential one. A biocitizen is person who is aware that their identity is not entirely theirs; it has been shared by their ancestors with them, and can be shared by them with their own progeny. When a baby is born, it is common for friends and relatives to look at the baby’s features and say, “she’s got your mother’s chin” etc. As the baby matures into a child and then an adult, such associations are regularly made. Are you not surprised when you look in the mirror and make the same associations yourself? The fact is, our bodies are passed down from one generation to the next, and your face is the aggregate result of the survival of ancestors of which no records survive. In fact, your ancestors go back millions of years and all them shape who you are and enable your everyday existence.

You are more than you have ever been taught you are—

with all due respect I aver: you are a biocitizen.

don't buy it—forage it!

This post from the NYTs about purslane, an easy to find weed and superfood, brings me back to some of the discussions we’ve had at Grown in Westhampton.

Permaculture means “permanent culture,” and is a concept more or less allied with the concepts of “sustainable economy” and “support your local farmer.” In its most authentic form, permaculture means getting your food, shelter and clothing from local sources. If you try to achieve this goal, foraging becomes a part of your way of life.

In other words, you have to learn to eat “weeds.”

So, why not use this NYTs blog as a prompt, and go out and forage some purslane in the next couple of days. It grows basically wherever someone has disturbed soil—if you have a garden you know what I mean.

2 admonitions: Be careful to forage from uncontaminated soil: roadsides etc. are no good! Do your best to identify the right wild edible—use the pic in the NYT blog or find a better one in a plant guide; and take a tiny taste first; if it tastes “off” don’t eat it.

Keep your eye out for free wildfood-walks; in the Valley, there are always a few being offered every month in the summer and fall.

lactobacilli are cute and friendly (once you get to know them)

Gearing up here in Westhampton for our 1st Picklefest, and I thought I’d relay some of the biocitizen-y things we are talking about as the Fest approaches—7pm, July 26th, Westhampton Memorial Library.

Picklefest is an event focused on teaching people the art of making their own raw, vinegar-free, naturally fermented pickles—the classic German-Jewish Dill pickle. I am involved in it for 4 reasons:

Preserving food via fermentation is extremely energy efficient, doesn’t take much time, and is cheap and easy. The “penny saved is a penny earned” yankee in me loves the off-the-grid, self-reliant dimension of pickling. Pickling is an Emersonian enterprise.

Gardeners and CSA customers end up with surplus produce from now until Fall. Pickling is the time-tested way of preserving this surplus. Just about anything grown around here can be pickled. (A neighbor told that his grandmother used to pickle hamburgers, submerging them in brine and sealing the top with lard; with a boyish twinkle, he declared they were the best hamburgers he ever ate.)

Pickles are yummy.

Natural fermented pickling happens when you submerge food in salt water and let lactobacillus munch everything in their path. If ever a bacteria has loved us, lactobacillus is that bacteria. Not only does it munch all the sugars in the brine, it munches every other kind of bacteria and microflora, including the ones that harm us. As it munches, it releases acids that change the PH of the brine—making it sour and inhospitable to all other life forms. In short, it transforms its environment to survive, much like we and our ancestors have done and do. Picklefest gives me a chance to celebrate lactobacillus acidophilus.

Each of us has about a quart of lactobacillus in our digestive system, and they do the same work in our tummies as they do in a pickling jar. They help us digest our food, and by breaking food down, release nutrients and minerals that nourish us and make us who we are. We have a symbiotic relationship with them, a relationship that we actually don’t know that much about because science has not probed too deeply into the subject. Yet, researchers do know that lactobacillus munch pathogenic microflora and therefore play an important role in our immune system.

What fascinates evolutionary biologists is the prospect that, way way back, lactobacillus co-evolved with our ancestors and collaboratively co-created an environment—our stomachs—that suits their needs. Remember that bacteria are the oldest life forms on earth; this view of evolution regards us as essentially as history’s most advanced form of pickling jar . Lynn Margolis, of UMass Amherst, is one of the pioneers in this field of inquiry which is called endosymbiosis.

What fascinates me is that we have an inner ecology as essential to us as the ecologies we perceive outside. I want to explore those inner coasts and mountains.

What is even more fascinating is that there is link, as murky as pickling brine, between lactobacillus and everything you know and love—

!!!!!