Civilization/Politics Archives - Macska Moksha Press

Nature as Process, Not Just Place

August 3, 2023 by Kollibri terre Sonnenblume

Dandelion in an alleyway in Ft. Bragg, CA [Photo by author]

Here in our techno-industrialized culture, we often think of “nature” as a place. Those who live in urban and suburban settings tend to think of this place as somewhere else. So, nature is a mountain, a river or a forest and it is “out there,” without us in it, and we must go there to see it or to be in it.

What’s more, we tend to think of such places as permanent; that they are fixed in their shape, composition and behavior. If we go visit a spot, we expect it to be pretty much the same when we return, barring seasonal changes such as snow cover, water flow or leaf color, which we consider reliably predictable (or have until recently).

These perspectives—that nature is just a place and that on top of that it is a stable place (climate change notwithstanding)—are misleading. Our continued belief in them will lead us in dangerous directions as human-induced impacts on the planet intensify. If we don’t understand what is going on, we won’t understand how we’re affecting it, nor what we must do differently if we want to sustain habitable circumstances for ourselves.

Summer Solstice musings

June 20, 2023 by Kollibri terre Sonnenblume

Scorzonera flowering at a farm in Paonia, Colorado [photo by the author]

Here in the northern hemisphere we are in the midst of the longest days and shortest nights of year. The farther north you live, the more pronounced the effect. I once took a night train through Norway at this time of year and it never got fully dark. In the seats ahead of me, young people playing guitars didn’t put down their instruments til morning’s brightness. The vibe was at once surreal and comforting, a dimness that never darkened but lit by the golden tones of the gentle strumming. A candlelit mood, I dare say.

Why I Quit Social Media

March 8, 2023 by Kollibri terre Sonnenblume

Thumbs down on Facebook, Image by sue seecof

Image by sue seecof, Creative Commons license, Attribution 2.0 Generic (CC BY 2.0)

This morning I deleted my Facebook and Instagram accounts. It wasn’t a spur of the moment decision. I’d been thinking about it for a months, and I scheduled the date a few weeks out so I could use the medium for a few more things—helping a friend find garden help, announcing a new website, inviting people to subscribe to my other projects.

I got on Facebook in 2015 because I was going to start self-publishing books and people said if you’re going to do that you have to be on social media. You know, so you can get a following and hopefully go viral. Seven books and as many years later, I can say that this never worked as hoped. A following didn’t materialize, nothing went viral, and book sales were never impressive. Thousands of hours that I’ll never get back went into “content creation”—all the secondary and tertiary stuff that people are expected to do to “build a brand”: photos, memes, videos, a podcast, etc., etc. All to call attention to the real thing, the writing. These days, Tik Tok has upped the bar and you have to be a video personality too. <eye roll> Not interested.

Reckless Disregard for the Consequences of War

January 26, 2023 by Kollibri terre Sonnenblume

Collage showing hourglass & nuclear explosion

Collage by the author from elements by Gianluca Miscione (“Sand clock Enschede”) & the National Nuclear Security Administration (“The BADGER explosion on April 18, 1953, as part of Operation Upshot-Knothole, at the Nevada Test Site”), Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International license retained from Miscione work.

“Opposing the horrible madness of war is not anti-European, its not anti-Ukrainian, its not pro-Russian. It’s common sense… I oppose all war. I want it stopped. I make no apology for that. And I’m not going to be scapegoated and labelled for it either.”
~Clare Daly, member of European Parliament (video)

We are living in a very dangerous moment. Tensions between the US and Russia are high. Lines of communication between the two countries are more frayed than during the Cold War. Militant rhetoric is steadily ratcheting up on both sides. In such a strained atmosphere, the risk of setting off a deadly nuclear exchange is all too real, even just by accident in a heat-of-the-moment misunderstanding.

If the situation goes nuclear, it won’t matter who started it. It will only matter that it wasn’t stopped before it got there.

We really need all hands on deck to pull humanity back from the brink. Arguably, nothing is more important right now. All other concerns—the environment, social justice, economic inequality—will be moot. Certainly, our insipid partisan bickering will be irrelevant if we’re bleeding out of every orifice, our hair is falling out, our skin is sloughing off, and we’re dying agonizing deaths from severe burns and radiation sickness, while rotting corpses pile up around us.

The stakes could hardly be higher.

Climate, Covid & Wishful Thinking

January 4, 2023 by Kollibri terre Sonnenblume

[Art by author from public domain elements]

The challenges presented by climate chaos and the Covid-19 pandemic have both elicited cultural responses that superficially appear to be opposed to one another, but that end up working hand-in-hand to bolster a status quo that’s intrinsically harmful to everyone. Both succeed by appealing to wishful thinking.

In the case of anthropogenic climate chaos, the two clusters are centered around denialism and what we could call technophilia or perhaps techno-hopium. Climate chaos results from industrial-scaled agricultural civilization, so seriously addressing it would any would entail significantly changing that system, and—if we’re going to be honest—ultimately phasing it out. Avoiding such change is the shared motivation of both parties, so Team Denial shrilly insists that climate chaos is not real, or if real is “natural” rather than “man-made,” so there’s nothing we have to change about how we live. Team Technophile smugly assures us that it is real, but that “green energy” (so-called “renewables” like solar, wind & hydro) will solve the problem, so… there’s nothing we have to change about how we live.

In both cases, it’s wishful thinking: the former insist there’s no problem to solve, and the latter that science alone can do it.

Two sides, same coin.

My Top 10 favorite songs of 2022

January 1, 2023 by Kollibri terre Sonnenblume

A year ago, in January 2022, I ran across an article listing the top 25 songs of 2021 according to Billboard magazine. Now, I’d stopped actively following the national music scene and the Billboard Hot 100 back in the ’90s when I was living in Boston because the local music scene was so rich that I happily sunk into it and stopped paying attention to what was happening outside the little clubs and labels there. I heard some of the best music of my life during this time, including songs I was convinced would’ve been big smash hits from coast to coast if they could’ve gotten the exposure. Then, I was living in Pacific Northwest, where I was involved in activism and then farming, neither of which left time for pop radio. I’ll admit I also felt like I should dismiss popular music, or should try to hold myself above it or something, because “corporate,” “shallow,” blah blah blah.

But in January 2022, I checked out that article, and listened to the songs on the popular video sharing website. To my surprise, I liked some of it. So next I went through the top 100 for the year, and found a few more things that appealed to me. Then I started digging, to see what I’d missed since the turn of the millennium. I ended up putting together several playlists of 2000s music, and from April onwards they were my mainstays when driving, doing farmwork, etc. Over the year, I made more playlists comprised of just 2022 music, as new releases came out. For six solid months, I basically ignored my music collection in favor of exploring current/recent bands & songs. It was really enjoyable actually.

It’s a common cliche to claim that music now isn’t as good as it used to be, and I had that question in the back of my mind as I surveyed. I definitely have a bit to say about it (spoiler warning, “no”) but that’s for another essay on another day.

In the meantime, just for fun, here’s my top 10 favorite songs that came out in 2022. I put together a playlist of the videos here.

The Tragic but Teachable Moment of China’s Relaxed COVID Policy

December 20, 2022 by Kollibri terre Sonnenblume

Collage by the author from public domain elements

China recently relaxed its COVID policy and the virus is now running rampant. Though exact numbers are not available, we are hearing about overburdened hospitals, emptied pharmacy shelves, and corpses backing up at crematoria. There are also reports about the government expanding hospitals and ICUs and closing down schools, so though “Zero COVID” is no longer in effect, the country has not devolved to the “let it rip” approach of the US and other Western nations.

This turn of events is, first and foremost, an unalloyed tragedy. We should all be hoping that suffering will be minimized as soon as possible. The people of China are other human beings in the world, fully deserving of our compassion. Ultimately, borders are fiction and culture is superficial and we’re all just one family. That’s what I personally believe anyway. I don’t pray, but if I did, China would be at the top of my list.

This tragedy is also a major teachable moment and will remain so for some time to come as events unfold over the next few months. I stress that everyone will stand to learn something, regardless of where they are in the COVID debate. Given that what China did was so different for so long, they were a “control” of sorts compared to the US and the West. Or vice versa, rather, as the control in a study is the group that doesn’t receive treatment. Regardless, for people who are truly interested to learn more about the global phenomena of SARS-CoV-2—no matter what they believe now—what happens next will be instructive. We must then press for policy to change in sensible ways based on what is revealed.

Maskless Dystopia

September 12, 2022 by Kollibri terre Sonnenblume

Munch’s “The Scream” with COVID [collage by the author from non-copyrighted elements]

When I was growing up in the ’70s, a common vision of the dystopian future was a bleak, industrialized landscape where everyone has to wear gas-masks because of pollution. The image goes back further still; speaking on the campaign trail in 1968, RFK warned a classroom of children that unless the US did something, air quality in NYC would be so bad in a decade that people would have to wear masks to breathe.

Now here we are, half a century later, sinking daily further into a dystopia, but one of the emblems of our moment is a lack of masks.

I’m referring to COVID, of course, an infectious disease known to be airborne since January 7, 2020, and to the low number of people who wear masks in public although COVID’s spread can be greatly curtailed by doing so.

This is not an an anti-anti-masker screed. I blame institutions, not individuals, for the behavior of the populace. Despite their at times blustering claims to the contrary, most US Americans are obedient and do what they’re told. Most unquestioningly believe the media which, from conservative to liberal, from Fox to CNN to NPR, is telling them they don’t need masks anymore.

So most people don’t wear them, and two and half years into this pandemic, as we are afflicted with new variants and surges, and as more people die or become disabled—and as other diseases like Monkeypox enter the market—we are exposed, defenses down. This is our maskless dystopia: a nation that has apparently given up on the idea of public health, and is barely even making a pretense about fighting an ongoing pandemic. I find it depressing, to say the least.

War in the Age of Bernays

March 8, 2022 by Kollibri terre Sonnenblume

Map of Ukraine with Edward Bernays and a Mushroom Cloud, collage by the author

War offers us an intense if perverse spiritual experience with its myth-making drama of life lived at the extremes of human experience. America has always been susceptible to this kind of religious fervor particularly when we need to forget all of our deep internal divisions and our failure to address even the most elementary social problems. We have pushed the uneasy knowledge of our own wars and war crimes deep into the recesses of our souls but we still long for absolution. There is nothing like a really nasty enemy to restore a sense of our own high moral character. Of course, the thrill of this spiritual revival is usually experienced from the comforts of home far from the blood, guts, and gore. ~Richard Moser

I’ve seen this movie before and it sucks.

The first time was 1979. I was ten years old, in Omaha, Nebraska, which was an intolerant, ignorant place, and insolent about it, to boot.

It was called, “Hostage Crisis.” In Iran, some students took over the US embassy and held a bunch of Americans captive for 444 days. The bad guy was the Ayatollah Khomeini. Everybody hated him. Everybody hated “Eye-Ran.” It was popular, this hatred. It was a bandwagon you were supposed to jump on.

I didn’t get it. It felt faked. I mean, people were really into it—very enthusiastic with their stupid jokes and name-calling and all that—but the way it was suddenly everywhere, like flipping a switch, seemed artificial. How could everyone despise someone so much who they’d just heard of for the first time?

I was smart enough to keep these doubts to myself, or rather, intimidated enough. I could tell that asking questions could get me into trouble, and maybe beaten up.

The misery of a “limited exchange”

March 4, 2022 by Kollibri terre Sonnenblume

Photo by author (Sunset at beach near Manzanita, Oregon, 2021)

The fear of nuclear war has been reawakened, and for good reason. I’ve heard a few commentators refer to the idea that such an event could kill “all life on earth.” While that’s an exaggeration (at the very least some microfauna would survive even in a worst case), a major exchange could certainly kill all humans, many immediately, and the rest the aftermath from fallout. I grew up in Omaha, which was on the target list because of the Strategic Air Command was based nearby, and we were told we’d be vaporized.

Destruction at this massive scale, much of it instantaneous, is certainly a horrific possibility, but its completeness is somehow perversely reassuring. Like, it would be over quick. But less drastic situations would be nightmarish in their own way, and could cause long-term suffering and social breakdown without the “relief” of extinction.

A study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2020 modelled a scenario in which India and Pakistan fight a regional nuclear war and blow up just 50 bombs. They estimated that the particulates kicked up into the atmosphere by the blasts and the firestorms would cause a limited “nuclear winter” situation bad enough to significantly reduce food harvests and lead to starvation. The crisis would go on for years, and would be worst for those countries that import much of their food.

In a limited exchange between the US and Russia in which most cities were left intact, and some rural areas were hit (like where ICBMs are housed), we could still expect widespread disruption of gas, electricity, water treatment, shipping, etc., such that people wouldn’t be able to drive anywhere, there would be massive blackouts, lack of potable water, and stores would go empty. The economy would crash, and domestic violence would probably erupt. Radiation sickness would overburden an already struggling health system. The casualties from secondary effects could far exceed the number killed in the initial strikes.

So just imagine if, tomorrow, you were suddenly stuck where you are. The last thing you heard before the internet went down was that a few dozen missiles had been launched. It was an hour after sunset and you see a few distant flashes in the sky. The power blacks out.

The next day there’s a run on gas so nobody can leave. The stores are only accepting cash. Within a few days, the stores are empty. Even though its spring, the temperature drops and drops some more. It’s hard to stay warm and dry and you feel like you might be getting sick.

The uncertainty is the most maddening part, and people start panicking. The sounds of gunshots become more frequent. Somehow the cops are still able to drive around, and the sirens are almost constant. You don’t feel comfortable going anywhere by yourself anymore.

The consolation prize is that sunsets are crazy colorful from all the crap in the air.

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