Externalities and the Sacred

A recent report by Trucost on behalf of The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity (TEEB) program sponsored by United Nations Environmental Program concluded the following, “The huge profit margins being made by the world’s most profitable industries (oil, meat, tobacco, mining, electronics) is being paid for against the future: we are trading long term sustainability for the benefit of shareholders. Sometimes the environmental costs vastly outweigh(ed) revenue, meaning that these industries would be constantly losing money had they actually been paying for the ecological damage and strain they were causing.” ¹ This is a very important fact to recognize, as one considers the global economic and social system. However, I believe there is a deeper point to be grasped as we consider the report’s conclusions.

The notion that you can affix a monetary value to many of the "externalities" that the report identifies is the notion of a madman. To wit: if the neoincotinoids found in Monsanto's Roundup result in the catastrophic reduction or extinction of the monarch butterfly – as is occurring presently -- what price tag do we put upon such a crime? I recall visiting the shores of Lake Michigan with my mother in the 1970s and viewing great clusters of these floating miracles perched upon milkweed patches. As Monsanto seeks to remove wonder – in the form of bees and butterflies – from the planet, how many dollars do we assign to this extermination?

Answer: no dollars. The very essence of such elements of existence is that their value exists outside of financial calculus... because they are Sacred. With approximately 200 species going extinct daily, we exist in the epoch of the Sixth Great Extinction on earth and this event is being forced by... "externalities."

The world of the global market is the world of desacralized life. It is a slow motion crime scene.

^{1 http://www.exposingtruth.com/new-un-report-finds-almost-no-industry-profitable-if-environmental-costs-were-included/}

Stravinsky, The Pagan Composer

Igor Stravinsky -- as his works' titles, The Rite of Spring, The Firebird suggest -- was a pagan composer. His work returns always to the four elements of earth, air, fire and water. The compositions are a meditation on how we connect with and honor the elements and how their presence in our lives influences the drama of human emotion. Stravinsky's compositions affirm the fact that human life is rooted in the four elements and that, therefore, they are sacred to us.

The Game of Modernity

Modernity is defined by a game. The game is called The Human vs. The Clock. The game is rigged. The clock always wins. The solution is to abolish the game. We rip the hands off of the face of the clock.

On Progress and Time

Progress is the great delusion. Its pursuit has brought the biotic systems of the Earth to the brink of collapse, has fouled the rivers, has acidified the oceans, has exploded mountain tops, has made plastic backyard fresh air bubble tents a boom industry in China. 

It has robbed us of an experience of the present. The present must be experienced as such: as a blossoming, an unfolding, a revealing. The present offers connection and the movement of the rhizome. It offers access to the past and the possibility of a future. Progress does not.

Return on an Elemental Level

Leave it alone. Don't manage it. And for god's sake, don't develop it. The Earth is the only known habitable place in the universe. It is several billion times more intelligent than you. Don't play around with it. Don't fuck with it. Listen to it. Learn from it. Integrate with it. Return to it. Return to what you are on an elemental level. Return to what you are.

Culture -- Mass and Otherwise

The cultural relativist position that all societies are ultimately the same is based on rhetoric, but not on history or fact. Humans may be the same at the core, but human culture and the values contained within those cultures -- which are ultimately communicated via story and myth -- vary widely. Upon observing that modernity is busy pursuing a suicidal trajectory, it can be edifying to study other cultures and their histories and stories... and why not start with the people who lived on this continent for 12,000 years before the arrival of the Europeans? According to Native American scholars and artists such as Jeanette Armstrong, Vine DeLorean, John Trudell, the primary reason that indigenous peoples were able to live on the continent since the last Ice Age without destroying the soil, the water, the air quality and, ultimately, the climate system can be traced to the fact the founding stories of their cultures do not place humans at the top of some fictional “great chain of being.”

In contrast, the founding stories of European American culture are -- as cultural historian Richard Slotkin demonstrates in his trilogy “Gunfighter Nation” -- based on the bizarre notion that Europeans in the New World are a chosen race who are here to "civilize" Native & African peoples and tame & subdue wild nature. Our stories -- from the first sermons told in Massachusetts to contemporary Hollywood films -- propagate the idea that the European American is constantly under siege and, therefore, all of his violence is justified as noble and self-defensive.

The fact is that the old Western stories are leading us into a rapidly approaching dead end. Literally dead. Culture is the vehicle by which humans’ relations with each other and with our fellow 3.5 million species on the planet are formed. New stories are currently being forged, but the culture industry is successfully blocking their more rapid spread and gestation.

A couple of things I remember distinctly about growing up in the 1970s and 80s in Milwaukee, Wisconsin are the following: The factory farmed and packaged and processed food tasted like shit, the corporate beer tasted like piss and the freeze-dried “coffee” in a can was undrinkable sewage. This was food culture mass produced. Mercifully, those very products are now being produced locally: distinct from the Henry Ford model of culture. I can now eat food without vomiting, enjoy the taste of beer and drink espresso for moments of bliss.

Now it seems that popular music played on the radio has now taken over the mantle of mass-produced tasteless shit. Corporate rap, corporate country & corporate pop are sinister in their banality. Although we undervalue culture and the life of the spirit and the mind greatly in the US, the fact remains that bad art, mass produced and mass marketed, is very harmful to the spirit and the mind. Academics ensconced in postmodernist rhetoric want people to believe that cynically manufactured culture is not harmful to us. That is sophistry. I assert that cynically manufactured culture has very real negative consequences. I believe it explains much of the popularity of Donald Trump, a billionaire racist demagogue reality TV star, for example. His rhetoric makes sense to somebody rendered incapable of critical thought, due to his/her immersion in a culture guided by the logic of manufacturing and mass consumption.

On the Bus

On the bus with the drinkers and the dreamers

And the daffodil and dandelion dandies

I think I just saw Alligator Andy

Speak of poem to a box of wooden matches

Now Andy's up from way down south by Natchez

In Mississippi where he found his luck was lacking

So he chanced upon a ride upon the back roads

With a prayer book and his grandma Emma’s banjo

In Tuscaloosa Andy slept inside a chapel

In a rainstorm by a statue of Saint Daniel

He found a carton full of alabaster angels

And disappeared into a night of crooked angles

Then he walked into the marsh at Loxahatchee

Where he got into a tussle with a caiman

But he walked out with a pair of river fishes

That he cooked upon a fire on a cracked dish

Andy ate beneath a moon of seven wishes

Then he laid down to sleep and thought of seven kisses

He placed upon the lips of one that he was missing

In a summer when his head had started spinning

And so he drifted higher off into the ether

Past Orion and a red dwarf growing deeper

He dreamed he lost the bag of alabaster angels

And had to swim across the Milky Way to get them

Then he gathered up the swimming drifting angels

And he placed them back into the satchel he was toting

Then he turned around and headed back to cold ground

And he stayed asleep until the break of morning

He woke up and noticed that a storm was coming

He scrambled off into a boxcar that was moving

Up to Baltimore he found this train was headed

Then he fell back asleep until the journey ended

And he thought about the red star growing deeper

And he thought about the rings of Saturn glowing

Till the boxcar opened beside an oak tree

Where Andy got out and the city wind was blowing