Here is a poignant 17 minute film about an old man on an isolated farm in Iceland. His wife dies and he buries himself with her instead of going to an old people’s home in the city. He cannot bear to live without his two loves: his wife and the nature around him. It is a story of love and nature.
define: sustainable
sus·tain·a·ble/səˈstānəbəl/
| Adjective: |
|
There is an irony in the current craze to be sustainable. In the end nothing is sustainable. If something is alive then by definition it must eventually die.
What is it that we really want with all this green hoopla? Honestly. We want to stay alive as humans. All of a sudden we have realized that we’ve been pissing in our own food pot and if we don’t change things we will die.
It is unfair for me to say “we” since I can’t speak for everyone. In fact I am not even speaking for myself. I have a deep love for nature, not the romantic appreciation scenic beauty, but the love of stepping in swamp mud, the feeling of unknown creatures squirming between my toes, and then later the crackly sound of dry mud on my skin.
The love of life and death and everything in between we call existence. I love the mucus of life because it is from it’s primordial fluid that I drink. And I am not the only one.
So when I say “we” I mean as a society, as policy makers, as corporations, as a collective human agenda. We have realized that we need to “conserve ecological balance by avoiding depletion of natural resources.”
Because without natural resources society as we know it would come to a grinding halt. Remember those pictures of communist stores, empty shelves with maybe an old cabbage? That is what happens when there are no more resources to plunder.
You can’t have Walmart without them.
As a society we must be sustainable. Unsustainable societies, well, die.
There is this premise in the sustainability movement that humans have a place in the world, that if we just acted more….sustainably…..then we would find that place and things would be nicely balanced. Dolphins, spotted owls and humans would all live harmoniously together forever.
Is there a harmonious place on this planet for the killer monkey?
The sustainability movement will guide governments and corporations away from the cliff. We will not plunder ourselves into extinction because if there is one thing humans do well, it is survival. And society will pat itself on the back.
But the world as a whole that is made up of many parts, humans being one of those parts, is over. Nature, if it exists at all, will be man made or man controlled, for the benefit of man’s survival.
Like the American Indian whose life was spared by the white man, nature will live in penned estates called parks and sanctuaries, watered down versions of their past that are often overrun by tourists.
Outside of those areas nature will be designed to meet our needs: fabricated recreation parks like Central Park, farms for food and fuel etc.
Here and there nature will act like dandelions in sidewalk cracks, eking out an existence until they are eradicated, but certainly not in their own territory.
Like the only known wolf in California, OR7 , nature will be (is) a stranger in it’s own home.
Pessimistic? Maybe as a vision for the whole world. But as an observation of many parts of the current world it is simple fact. I’ve seen over 40 countries in the planet and this is what I see on an increasing level without much sign of it changing direction.
Note:
@NYFarmer tweeted this comment:
Read ur blog on last farmer. Here is my farm area wild and pretty: