Dilbert wrote:
Mutate wrote:
I don't like living in a global, well developed planet. It's too busy and stressy.
So get a cabin in the woods! Except... no 911, no doctor, no grocer (oh yeah grow your own food and feed your own livestock!), carry a gun with you for safety, no one to call for help.
Do you really want that? Your life in your own hands, and no one elses?
People lived like that, and not too long ago actually. IT SUCKED!
There's a damn good reason why people form communities and exchange goods and services.
I'm sure it sounds terrible to you, with all the "modern conveniences" we enjoy, but there are people in other places around the world who live self-reliantly and don't complain about it, or even notice. If you've got no concept of obtaining food through means other than directly through hunting-gathering or agriculture (like we do in the West, through supermarkets), then you're likely to see it less as a bother and more as just a natural part of life. I'm not a neo-Luddite by any means, but I do think sometimes that we as Westerners invent whole new problems for ourselves with all of the pushing we do for "convenience" and "instant gratification" and materialism. We've become completely chronically impatient and self-entitled, just because we can afford to be.
Years ago, I took a mandatory liberal arts class on environmental science. It was mostly rooted in green philosophy, and I'm personally pretty cynical about that whole thing. However, there
was one assignment that opened my eyes pretty widely. We were assigned to pick one item we regularly bought from the grocery store, and trace back as many of its components and ingredients as we could all the way back to their sources, to see how they were made and what paths they took to end up in our kitchens. I chose potato chips. I called the manufacturers in Plano, Texas, who told me they obtained potatos from Idaho, sunflower oil from Kansas, and sea salt from Maine. From Texas, the chips got shipped out to a warehouse in Atlanta, and finally to the store in Florida where I bought them. From raw ingredients to chips in a bag in my shopping cart, the whole process takes, on average, a little more than a year or so. And here I am, just buying them off the shelf, like most of the other people around me, and completely taking for granted
how much freaking work really goes into making them. Say what ever you want in defense of "convenience"-- but I do think there's something to be said for self-reliance as well, and I find it very humbling (and a little disturbing, honestly) that we have, as a society, become so dependent on our technology and systems and infrastructures, and have completely lost our ability to be self-reliant.
We think we're so advanced, compared to other cultures, because we have things like TV and the internet and supermarkets and mass transit and advanced modern medicine, and they still have "primitive" methods of survival. But if, hypothetically, it all came crashing down-- all of our technology, all of our crutches-- which of us do you think would fare better on the whole, us or them? Who are we, without our technology?
And as a result of our unique position, our ability to never think twice about how long it took to produce anything we consume, or what sort of resources had to be expended, we tend to view the world's processes in a linear fashion-- a model which is completely aberrant to the natural cycles which replenish the world over time. We consume at a faster rate than we can really handle, and we produce so much waste, we have no idea what to do with it all. Tell me, is the Great Pacific Garbage Patch a sign of "progress"?
06 Sep 2010, 7:08 pm
Looks like a mess.
