imagination and survival
We know where we’re going, ’cause we know where we’re from
Bob Marley, from Exodus
I bet you’ve been wondering where we’re going lately, given the events we have witnessed and endured since 911. Our most recent enormity down in the Gulf seems to have left us speechless. Over a month has passed since the oil rig burned and sunk, and the oil and natural gas began spurting out of control. As was the case in our previous enormities, the “experts” who triggered the event are suddenly very stupid; and if the past offers any lesson to us, our politicians will help them to vanish with suitcases stuffed with cash. During the build-up to the attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq, and during the economic collapse, the media was able locate human beings who were able to state they are in charge, would provide a solution, and who assured us life would return to normal. Not this time.
The difference, this time, is that the ecocide in the Gulf is totally our fault. Yes: let us blame BP, Halliburton, Transocean, the EPA, the Interior Department, and the Reagan Revolution that, ala TX Congressman Tom Delay, equated the EPA with the gestapo. But once we’ve enjoyed whatever pleasure that gives us, let’s admit that we can’t do much without the cheap gas sold at 15 different stations downtown. We are—at this point in history—made of cheap gas. It is hard to think of a single thing we use that is not cheap oil based.
911/Iraq/Afghanistan, Wall Street collapse/bailout, Gulf ecocide: since this is where we’re coming from, we aren’t feeling good about where we’re going. It’s not a good direction. But it is the direction that our cheap oil economy leads us, even while we run out of cheap oil.
I started Biocitizen a year ago, after teaching literature and environmental philosophy on the college level for 10 years, because I’d learned enough to know that what what really needs to be taught was not being taught. Since the 1920′s, under the influence of John Dewey, education in the US has been geared towards producing people who function well, and achieve success, in the cheap oil economy. Parents want their kids to be successful, reasonably enough, and the way to be successful is to go along with the prevailing norms. Before the economic crash of ’08, it was normal for parents and students to look at Goldman Sachs and say: “Wouldn’t it be great to be a hedge-fund manager?” Eager to meet the demand, every major university cut its humanities, and expanded its business, departments. The prevailing attitude was: Why do students need to read Morrison’s The Bluest Eye if they’ll never use that knowledge to make a buck? At the same time, No Child Left Behind made public school teachers teach to the test. The emphasis on strengthening student’s critical thinking skills—their ability to absorb and interpret data using the creative faculty of reason—became a secondary concern (if that), when the school’s federal funding was determined by how high the school’s test scores are. I experienced a horror of realization when I understood that if the best schools, indeed just about every school, are geared towards producing people who find success by going along with the cheap oil economic system, then the environmental crisis is unsolvable. If it’s unsolvable—well, you know what that means.
Or do you? Or do I?
The ecocide in the Gulf is our first glimpse of an unsolvable environmental crisis. The coasts of Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida will be abandoned by humans for decades, because the oil kills and poisons everything it permeates. That’s why the media, and why we, don’t have the words to express what is occurring. The reason we don’t have the words, is because of what we have been taught; because what we have been taught is meant to make us successful in a cheap oil economy. Now that this economy has shown us how unstable and bankrupt it is, we don’t know what to do—what alternatives do we have?
We have developed no other lifestyles yet that are not dependent on cheap oil—and, despite the almost complete media and educational blackout on this subject, this is the most severe crisis we have faced as a species. Cheap oil allowed us to evolve to become the creatures we are; take away the oil and that creature vanishes. Perhaps it is this thought—that we are going vanish—that makes turn away in fear, and refuse to prepare for the next step in human evolution.
Aldo Leopold said “We fancy that industry supports us, forgetting what supports industry.”
Biocitizen school dedicates itself to remembering, experiencing and celebrating what supports industry: the bios, or more formally biological life that has evolved over eons in concord with geology, solar energy, and the elements listed on the periodic chart. It is so important that we rediscover, right now, that we are—as Leopold put it—biotic citizens, who have arrived here in this moment as the result of many millions of years of adaptation to the diverse environments on our unique planet. The time has come for us retreat from our failing economy, and to think outside of its illusions and myths. The world that awaits us is far more real and alive than any movie like Avatar can suggest; when compared to the history of nations, it is the permanent world, our one and only home.
Our cheap oil economy, and the culture rooted in it, is only about a 100 years old if you measure from the appearance of the Ford Model T, or 250 years old if you measure from the appearance of the steam engine. Not even a blip in time as measured geologically, and barely a blip when measured from the introduction of writing (cuneiform) in Iraq 3,500 years ago.
Our Place, our summer camp offering, introduces you, or your child, to where we come from: not the cheap oil economy, but the watersheds and biomes that sustain us right here right now in the Pioneer Valley. So many of us love nature, but don’t get out enough; and when we do get out, we seldom have a guide who can focus our attention on the living systems that sustain us—that sustain us actually and wholly, and not partially and poisonously like cheap oil does. This kind of attention can be grouped under “environmental studies.”
Environmental study constitutes about 1/3 of Our Place. Another 1/3 is environmental history, the study of how humans beings have transformed the environment to achieve economic and social goals. We read local authors like Sylvester Judd, whose history of Hadley is one of America’s most highly regarded, and other great writers and artists who have lived in or visited or commented on Nonotuck: Jonathan Edwards, Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Cole, William Cullen Bryant, Charles Darwin, Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost.
Their interpretations of environmental history form the basis of the last and most important 1/3 of the Our Place curriculum: your, or your child’s, own critical and creative interpretation of what this place is, and how we fit into it—not as creatures of made of cheap oil, but as biocitizens.
This kind of biotic imagination that perceives how we are made of our biome—our waters, our soils, our culture’s environmental histories—is going to usher us through the final collapses of the doomed cheap oil economy. Through the struggle of trying to explain how we are biocitizens, through the action of devising new words and stories to accurately define our non-oil-based identities, we prepare ourselves to survive, by taking our next evolutionary step as human beings.
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