Do you ever have those periods of time when so many related issues pop up over the course of a day or two, somewhat out of the blue, that it seems like they must be connected somehow, strung together by a thin, silvery metaphysical thread? They carry you along in a way, they bring you mentally to a place you need to be, they show you something you need to see at that exact moment in time, as clearly as possible. The last 24 hours of my life have been like that, and it has caused me to reach a point of deep revelation that to some degree, I was silently aware of all along, and admittedly a bit terrified of.
It all began yesterday morning.
Well, that’s not entirely true. It had been popping up in a few tiny moments over the last week or so, though at the time I didn’t quite make the connection. During the past 2 weeks when I had stepped out to grab lunch a couple of times, I had gone to this deli in Gastown called The Social. (They make these amazing sandwiches on these huge, round discs of fresh baked bread, and they’re incredible.) There was a note on the chalkboard menu the last few times I’d been there, warning customers that the price of flour had shot up so high, the price of the sandwiches was going to go up soon to compensate for this. I noticed it and pondered why for a few moments, but mentally didn’t make a connection at the time to anything else.
So even though I noticed this issue with rising food costs and had raised an eyebrow to it, the real vortex that sucked me into the thought process that is now churning out this message began yesterday.
The receptionist at the studio where I work, a good friend of mine, was poking around on the internet, reading up on the latest global news (as she usually does), and she found this article on CBC that stated World Vision was cutting aid for 1.5 million people, because of the rising cost of food.
http://www.cbc.ca/world/story/2008/04/23/worldvision-cut.html?ref=rss
Essentially World Vision will be forced to cut 1.5 million people from the 7.5 million it fed last year, a third of them children, because food has become so expensive. Why has it become so expensive? Because there’s a huge shortage of it, specifically food staples, like rice and wheat. Why is there a shortage, you ask? Because humans are selfish, narcissistic consumers. *ahem* But in other (nicer) words, “The rising cost of oil and fertilizer, more fields being used to produce corn for ethanol, drought in Australia and changing food consumption patterns have all contributed to the current crisis” [CBC.ca]. Rice production has declined because of low yield crops in Thailand, the world’s largest rice exporter, which in itself is a result of weather changes (read: global warming) and the long predicted backlash of "the U.S sponsored 'Green Revolution' in the 1960s and 70s that promoted the mono-culture craze. Cash crops like rice were grown with massive amounts of pesticides, fertilizers and water to support seeds developed for high yields while ignoring their nutritional value and their resistance to insects and blight. Agro-chemistry farming degrades the soil leading eventually to crop failure. That’s what has happened in Thailand. Insects keep developing resistance to pesticides." [Mike Carr]
"The hungry are resourceful, they'll do what they have to, but it's going to take human life, there's no question about that," World Vision Canada president Dave Toycen told CBC News on Wednesday. There’s no question? Really? So what we have here is a guaranteed, unnecessary loss of life, which in my view (or in a perfect world) should only ever be expected to happen in a situation like open war between countries.
It was terrible and alarming news, but what made it even more anxiety-causing and eye-opening was the next link she sent me, which stood out in such contrast to the CBC article – a link to the site for Sir Richard Branson’s very own private island. Only $24,000 per week per couple! Golly, what a deal!!
http://www.neckerisland.com/
At this point, I’m struggling to hold back what I’d really like to say about Richard Branson’s god damn island and the people who spend $24,000 to stay there instead of using that grotesque amount of money for something not so self-indulgent, self-centered and entirely fleeting. But I’ll hold it in. For now. Because the larger issues here are more worthy of my energy and focus.
After I left the office yesterday, mulling this over in my mind, I went to visit a dear friend of mine, Dr. Mike Carr. Mike has been a professor at both SFU and UBC, and is currently running for the Green Party in East Van while teaching at SFU. During my time at SFU I studied with Mike, and it was a life-changing experience. He taught me about bioregionalism,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bioregionalism
and our class became so close that we took weekend trips away together, to cabins on various islands off the coast (Denman, Maine, Gambier), little rustic things with no running water, heat or electricity; it was one of the most amazing times of my life. One of the members or our class, Chris, was extremely well-read and passionate about bioregionalism, which is essentially the concept and practice of “living in place”; the idea that we live within a bioregion (usually defined by the nearest local watershed), and we don’t take more from the earth than we need or more than the land can sustain. Bioregional living is entirely self-sustainable and community-based, and I don’t mean fake “Capers Market” community, where no one ever really talks to one another or sits up on a pedestal because they buy organic food, but real, village-style community, where children and families live and work together to produce goods for the community as a whole. Basically, the complete opposite of consumerism and the majority of Western culture. Wow, that sounds totally bitchy and cynical, but hey, it’s true.
Anyways, Chris was really passionate about sustainable living, and during the time we were in class together, he was expecting a son. This seemed to make him even more focused on making real change for the world and his child, simply by changing himself and his way of life, and educating others along the way. So Chris and his wife bought a piece of land in Sechelt with another couple who run a retreat there, and they grow their own grains and make their own bread, among other things, and teach and preach bioregionalism, living “off the grid” as much as they possibly can. Some of you might be thinking that seems cliché and/or “hippie-ish”, but if you can put aside your immediate judgment, it’s really just a conscious choice that Chris and others like him have made because they take the plight of this planet seriously and want to practice what they believe in.
While I was visiting Mike, he told me that he had taken another class of his on a field trip to the retreat in Sechelt run by the couple that shares land with Chris and his family. A student of Mike’s made a video of that trip, and we watched it last night.
As I was watching the film, I started to really think about all of these things as a whole… I find we are so used to experiencing “the world” only within the realm of our own personal lives, that we so often don’t take the time to look upwards and outwards to see how all of these things are connected on a grander scale. Watching Chris teach Mike’s students about bioregionalism and showing them that it was entirely possible to live like that, I was struck by the realization of what we were really asking people to do…
I listened to Chris speak to them about the “myth of abundance”, the idea that we have so much food at our disposal, especially in North America, when in reality we don’t, because our methods of farming and harvesting are completely unsustainable and fully vulnerable to our own self-created and ever-worsening climate change problems. I watched them grinding grain for bread in Chris’ “Radical Grains” workshop, and I thought to myself, “God, that would take a hell of a lot of time in a day… to live like that day in and day out, making your own food, heat, water, living sustainably within a bioregion, without harming the earth somehow. How can we do that?” It resonated with me, because I realized that time itself is truly the most valuable commodity in the 21st century, and not because we’re all getting older and will eventually die, but because of what time actually represents. Time represents money, power and social status. Time represents material wealth, social advancement and the accumulation of material goods. Time is what we use to acquire all of these things – how on earth could I go to school, get a degree or two, work 12 – 16 hour days, climb the corporate ladder or any other current social or industrial system, make a name for myself, make enough money to buy a house, a car, summer property, a boat, a truck, RRSPs, if I’m spending most of my time just living sustainably? There are just not enough hours in the day. Ridiculously simple, but painfully true.
At that moment, everything suddenly came together in my brain… the rise in flour prices as part of my everyday existence going almost unnoticed, the articles about the global food crisis, Necker Island, Richard Branson, Mike Carr, bioregionalism, Chris and his family in Sechelt, waking up to the radio this morning to news coverage about the global food crisis.And in the middle of that simple hand-held video, I understood the biggest challenge that we face at this point as a society, the basic foundations of this chafing conflict between how we live now and how we must change.When we talk about living sustainably, we are asking people to choose between worlds.
It’s not even so much a choice about giving up material things or the really comfortable lives most of us live, (though that is a painful reality that many would prefer to avoid), but a choice about our values. Since the industrial revolution and the rampant spread of capitalism, people have been conditioned from birth to value certain things that require a lot of our time, which is why my generation lives such busy lives and experiences unprecedented levels of stress and social pressure starting at such a young age. We are taught to value money, power and influence. We are taught to value social status. We are taught to value levels of higher education (which I don’t argue with, but which is often used to obtain money, power and social influence). Not everyone lives their life entirely governed by these ideals, but the problem is, the biggest consumers and those that contribute enormously to the issues we face as a global community are usually the biggest perpetuators of this system of values, myself included (I have the guts to admit this). If we choose to live sustainably, we have to give up on a lot of those values, and I truly believe that is what scares people the most. Essentially, we are asking people to completely overhaul and dispose of a faulty ideology that has heavily influenced, if not dictated, our life choices from the day we were born.
On a larger scale, we’re asking the Richard Branson’s of the world to reevaluate and even actually alter their entire existence and their attitude towards mind-numbing extravagance, selfish pleasure and the whole freakin’ world around them.
Pretty big choice to make, right? And that’s the root of the problem. We are left not only with a gaping hole in our mental perception of the world and our place in it, but in order to even get there we have to cut the apron strings of that past ideology and free fall into the great unknown. It’s fucking terrifying, to tell you the truth.
But if certainty is any comfort, I know this much is true. We can not co-exist in two separate worlds that will not survive the other. The system that capitalism and consumerism depends on and the system that human, plant and animal life depends on to live sustainably, absolutely can not function side by side, no matter how many lights we turn off or cars we quit driving. We have to choose, and we have to choose soon, without exception. It’s like Mike said in his speech at the Green Party forum, quoting the Hopi Indians: “We are the people we have been waiting for”. Though it would be nice to shrug it off and leave it for the next few generations to deal with, there is no one coming down the road after us that will be that much better or more capable of making change than we are. And frankly, there’s really no time left to mull it over.
Now, I know my good friend (and fellow passionate humanitarian and activist), Tara, might read this and say, “Katie, we need more positivity in these discussions. We need to know more about what we can do to make change and to feel like there’s not just constant negativity with these issues”, and I agree completely.
The purpose of this note is not to make people feel like the world is a big, terrible place with no hope for the future, but rather to make progress by encouraging people to really get to the guts of this issue, to the heart of the matter, if you will, to dig as deep as we can go to the spaces and places within us that hold these truths, the truths that we often deeply fear, to really find out if making this kind of change is something that we really, truly, honestly are willing to do.
If we can face head on this one major question, the question of choosing between worlds, if we can stand in the middle of that fear we all carry of the great unknown, of a society that is unlike anything we exist in presently, then we can see plainly in the light of day the hard truth about the society we have all created, and the truth within ourselves and the choices we make every day as individuals, because in the end, it is the recognition of that truth and the decisions we make following that recognition and understanding that will dictate whether or not we will be able to make these changes we so desperately need to make.
Because like it or not, ready or not, change is upon us…
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/politics/the-food-crisis-begins-to-bite-815437.html
It is time to choose. And in a way, that’s kind of exciting.
No comments:
Post a Comment