Avarice
WE WILL BEAR WITNESS to our world. This media project collects stories from earth's citizens, recording climate destruction, devastation, resilience and hope.
Tell your story.
Can this really be happening?
For all of my remembered life I have loved and been empathetic to the natural world, humans included. Increasingly I feel like being in a dreamlike state.
I look at almost everything humans do as being ugly. Seldom do I see a redeeming quality. It saddens me greatly. Even the poorest societies destroy their environment and degrade their fellow humans.
We are 90% the same with our fellow humans and this could be said of all things, yet we focus negatively on the 10% of difference or uniqueness.
Our ONLY hope is reductionism, leading to a circular existence. My wife and I do our best to live this but it is a lonely existence.
The rich global north and the poor global south differ little in its avarice when one gets right down to it.
I applaud your efforts and all the people that join us, but it just does not seem enough.
It saddens me as we seem to spiral downward.
I long for a simpler time with much less and a utopia where quality and equality reigns supreme.
Cliff Walker
“Not much to tell, Rachel. In my young life I did 4 years of university without a degree. I always loved skilled trades and farmers, grew up in this environment. I became a log home and timber frame builder and quickly hung my hat in energy efficiency and sustainability. My wife, wonderful girl, and I have 4 children and 8 grandchildren and 7 dogs amongst us. We are so fortunate.
I have a saying, “Those who can, should.”
We always cared about the environment and our effect upon it. In my personal building I always went way beyond the norm of energy efficiency and always tried to direct my clients this way. We have been extremely lucky and we show respect by reducing and living as lightly as we can. We grow about 33% of our food and hope to reach 50%. We live off grid with solar and batteries. We harvest rainwater and compost human manure. We practice no till gardening and are working hard to build a poor native soil into a rich ecological environment with as little inputs as possible from the outside. We use one vehicle, use transit as much as can and hope to ride our bikes more. We use bamboo toothbrush, toothpaste tablets and carry hankies. We vow to wear out our clothes closet. In the end reduction is the only way forward for humanity and those of us who have been born a baby boomer have no excuse but to reduce.
We won the lottery and it is shameful how greedy we are.
My bio is how I have lived. This is what counts. I am flawed like all of us but I try to hold the line when I can.”
WE WILL BEAR WITNESS to this moment in history. This media project features stories from earth's citizens, recording climate destruction, devastation, resilience and hope. Tell your story.
"For all of my remembered life I have loved and been empathetic to the natural world, humans included. Increasingly I feel like being in a dreamlike state."
Yep. I'm there too. Everyday life presents as madness. "People are stupid" is a mindset I try to resist but when I fail I remind myself that people live as they were taught and we all are suffering from the consequences of cultural madness.
If we lose faith in humanity, what else do we have?
I've grown fond of the word "metatonia" (its psychological reference, not theology) to describe my dreamlike feeling. It's a crisis of the mind. A liminal zone where one finds themselves between an established worldview and a revelatory birth of a new one.
"Carl Gustav Jung developed the usage to indicate a spontaneous attempt of the psyche to heal itself of unbearable conflict by melting down and then being reborn in a more adaptive form – a form of self healing often associated with the mid-life crisis and psychotic breakdown, which can be viewed as a potentially productive process. Jung considered that psychotic episodes in particular could be understood as an existential crisis which might be an attempt at self-reparation: in such instances metanoia could represent a shift in the balance of the personality away from the persona towards the shadow and the self." (from Wikipedia)
It's my view that we are all experiencing this now. Cultural stories die hard. Even among us who desire new stories.