It may be that the “finely balanced interplay of ecologies” is often nothing more than a carefully balanced arms race between different species who have grown up together and adapted to one another’s tricks, learning how to live together and use one another’s natural tendencies to advantage.

Yes, that’s what evolution theory suggests. But you are still just describing natural behavior, which is perhaps more aptly defined as a “finely balanced interplay of zero-sum and non-zero-sum games”– not the overwhelmingly zero-sum behavior of humanity. The “brutal limits” Pollan anthropomorphically alludes to are only brutal when unrecognized as natural functions of an intelligent environment continually “striving” to balance the two modes of interaction as described by game theory.

Capitalist society has sacralized zero-sum gaming. Culture needs to shift its ‘game plan’. We have to cultivate awareness of zero-sum behavior as a necessary modus operandi within an overarching gestalt of non-zero-sumness. We need to know our place in the world, or the world will set us straight.

What’s the cure for cancer? If humans are cancer or civilization is cancer, the cure in our society is to irradiate it, to drug it, to bludgeon it into submission. It fairly cries out for a destructive response against the “disease” of humanity.

Well that’s the classic example of not being able to solve a problem with the same thinking that caused it. Again, it’s not that culture is bad or unnatural, but that ‘ours’ certainly is (mostly anyway but it’s not all bad), and that’s a reflection of our collective mental state, not a definition of culture in general. If I wasn’t clear, let me point out that I thought the quote you posted was spot on in every respect. I guess the cancer analogy is overused and kinda alienates people, but if it quacks like a duck…

I couldn’t check the video. I’m running Win98 on a Pentium relic over a dialup modem. If I stop pedaling it powers down. I have to speak to an operator to connect me to the net, which I can’t do if one of my neighbors is already making a phone call. My monitor’s a black and white portable TV and I don’t even have a keyboard; to write this took 2 hours to make the punchcards by hand. How can you sit there and do nothing? For just a dollar a day you could hook this wretched dude up to the information superhighway. You can make a difference.

*slap* thanks, whatacharacter, I needed that. Although I did see this:

Pull weed
rake sand
save all beings from suffering

…painted on the side of a Blackhawk in Baghdad.

Conscience, ethical choice, memory, discrimination: it is these very human and decidedly unecological faculties that offer the planet its last hope.

I would argue that there are a plethora of ecological examples of memory and discrimination in Nature. These are not just human features. Even plants exhibit discrimination.

Maybe my opposition to it is as simple as this: What’s the cure for cancer? If humans are cancer or civilization is cancer, the cure in our society is to irradiate it, to drug it, to bludgeon it into submission.

Well, metaphors do eventually have their breaking point. I view it as a cautionary tale: if we don’t check ourselves, Gaia will find a way to get rid of us, and Her solution may be as destructive to us as chemotherapy is to a cancer cell.

Perhaps the cartoon could have been more careful with labels and instead of calling the cells “cancer” just maybe call them “liver cells” or something: emphasizing the point that humans, in proper relationship with our environment, are a necessary and vital part of the organism. Only when the relationship becomes distorted, and we advance beyond our proper boundaries, do we become “cancer”. But then of course the message of the cartoon would have been muted and perhaps lost. Sometimes, with an allegory, you can’t address every subtlety.

He realized he had to live with the paradox and recognize the reality the savage and higher laws exist simultaneously together.

I would argue that that’s not integration. It is accepting an artificial split and not resolving it.

There was a little debate at Znet between Parecon and Green Anarchy Collective
John Zerzan said

It is the primary motor of the cancer of progress (AKA capitalism) which is killing indigenous cultures, species, oceans, the soil, ice caps, the atmosphere, to name a few. You want to preserve all of the basic institutions that account for the deepening crisis at all levels. But you’re really met with the same dilemma Freud faced – and at least he acknowledged its reality. Namely, without the massive coercion involved in civilization people would simply avoid work and not create industrial culture. Even though civilization means neurosis because it rests upon the forcible ending of Eros and instinctual freedom, Freud opted for work and civilization.

http://www.zmag.org/debateprim.htm

What do you find offensive about it?

I’m still working that out, or else I would have posted it separately with commentary. I just feel intuitively that it is an unsound view of our state of affairs and subscribing to its viewpoints lead us to more problems than solutions.

Maybe my opposition to it is as simple as this: What’s the cure for cancer? If humans are cancer or civilization is cancer, the cure in our society is to irradiate it, to drug it, to bludgeon it into submission. It fairly cries out for a destructive response against the “disease” of humanity.

I’m not sure I agree with this, but this video certainly does. I actually find this video kind of offensive and misguided, but I can see the thinking that lead them to this place and its worth mentioning

What do you find offensive about it? It’s quite apt. I don’t necessarily think the video is saying that humans = cancer. Rather, civilization (especially our civilization) is cancer. And it would be hard to argue otherwise, really, given the state of affairs we find ourselves in and the usual attitudes.

Cancer cells start out as normal cells. But somehow, genetic code that checks the growth of the cell gets turned off, and the cell “forgets” its place in the ecology of the body. Somehow, human culture forgot that we live in a larger ecology, and have proliferated unchecked ever since.

I know that native americans tended their surroundings, were more like gardeners than strict “hunter/gatherers”, and did sometimes degrade their environment. Nevertheless, they seemed to understand the place of humans in a larger ecology, and did their best to keep some kind of balance. I also know we can’t go back, but we need to reacquire that sensitivity to ecological concerns or we’re doomed.

Culture as it is denies nature. We are ashamed of defecation and sex, and we fear death. Thus our culture tries to conquer nature with cement and cities, covering up our shameful biological drives, and the natural world from whence they spring. I don’t know that we can ever find a solution.

Wait, wouldn’t the solution just be to re-model culture? Or in Pollan’s analogy to actively garden - to cultivate - culture?

I found in myself, and still find, an instinct toward a higher, or, as it is named, spiritual life, as do most men, and another toward a primitive rank and savage one

And that I think is one of the precise elements which Pollan criticizes Thoreau for: for separating the two, for perpetuating a long-standing split rather than healing it

He simply said you do not need much to be happy and if we were closer to nature we would be happier. But even Thoreau only lived outside of society for two years.

So in other words that makes him a hypocrite, a liar or simply a man on vacation. Don’t get me wrong, what he did was important. His contributions to American culture were profound and lasting. But the proof is in the pudding, isn’t it? Also check out his struggles growing a bean garden which Pollan talks about. Thoreau eventually gave up because he couldn’t “make the earth speak beans” and as a result he waxes philosophical about how much better a swamp is than a garden - which anyone who has hung out in both will know this is nothing more than an intellectual conceit!

Ugly rather than elegant, cancerous rather than symbiotic.

I’m not sure I agree with this, but this video certainly does. I actually find this video kind of offensive and misguided, but I can see the thinking that lead them to this place and its worth mentioning

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-4369876000541116073

What grows from human shit?

http://weblife.org/humanure/default.html

Most of nature appears to me as a finely balanced interplay of ecologies, not a war between species. I think Thoreau would agree.

He goes to great lengths in other parts of the book to show how Emerson, Thoreau and the Transcendentalists and Romanticists had very distorted (if beautiful) views of nature. He also talks about how these viewpoints were necessary and useful at the time to transform thinking but that nowadays they can actually be harmful in our current state. There’s another good passage which I will post in a few days that I think gets more to the heart of this.

In any event, I would have to say that his “war between species” image here is definitely an apt one if you have done much gardening or landscaping. Plants are often thought of as these docile simple beings, but in many cases plants ruthlessly try to destroy one another. If you’ve ever dealt with anything like bindweed, English ivy or blackberry, you’ll know what I mean. It may be that the “finely balanced interplay of ecologies” is often nothing more than a carefully balanced arms race between different species who have grown up together and adapted to one another’s tricks, learning how to live together and use one another’s natural tendencies to advantage.

Well, consider rock/sand/dirt/the-dust-we-are-made-of, as the basis by which everything grows - weed and flower alike.

For me it’s getting to the essential bare truth of the matter, which is the underlying heart, and which keeps you from an undesirable trailer - hitching. Zen is great for allowing us to “know,” when it’s okay to know, and “don’t know” when it’s okay not to know.

Pull weed
rake sand
save all beings from suffering

Now I’m not a 100% zenophile. I like its humility and non dogmatism, and it’s great for tempering the skeptisim, and relaxing the cynicism, I encounter in my quest to know everything …

As I came home through the woods with my string of fish, trailing my pole, it being now quite dark, I caught a glimpse of a woodchuck stealing across my path, and felt a strange thrill of savage delight, and was strongly tempted to seize and devour him raw; not that I was hungry then, except for that wildness which he represented. Once or twice, however, while I lived at the pond, I found myself ranging the woods, like a half-starved hound, with a strange abandonment, seeking some kind of venison which I might devour, and no morsel could have been too savage for me. The wildest scenes had become unaccountably familiar. I found in myself, and still find, an instinct toward a higher, or, as it is named, spiritual life, as do most men, and another toward a primitive rank and savage one

I wonder about whatacharacter’s comment though:

Ever seen a zen garden? No weeds. No flowers. Just rock.

Don’t get me wrong, I like zen (hang on that wasn’t a very zen thing to say was it?) but what if a weed sprouts up in a rock garden? Do you pull it out by the roots? If so, is that not a value judgement? I mean, no matter what one does, isn’t it always a matter of personal taste and/or circumstantial influences? (These are not rhetorical questions.) Personally I discriminate quite a lot, otherwise I could’ve wound up marrying a trailerpark skank and fucking her dog while watching the Da Vinci Code and slurping diet coke.

Anyway, as Ran Prieur has pointed out, all living things garden, but my favorite gardeners are elephants. They eat fruit, and seeds sprout from their shit. Their most-traveled paths become abundant fruit highways, with no more thought or effort required beyond seeking out what they like to eat, then taking a shit. Nice work.

(Ants rate a mention too. They really know how to work it, and remember that they are not monarchies, but are genetically predisposed to be decentralized operations. This elegant balance of control and freedom is what makes them so efficient, ubiquitous and ancient.)

What grows from human shit? The problem is not that we have culture, but that it is not efficient from a metabolic perspective (or that it’s not aesthetically pleasing). Ugly rather than elegant, cancerous rather than symbiotic. Of course symbiotic does not mean ‘don’t touch anything’. It means we cultivate each other. And it means you reap what you sow.

Reminds me a little of God’s advice to Bender on being a god: If you do the job properly, they won’t know you did anything at all.

Same advice for gardeners, parents and governments. It’s not what you do; it’s that you do it with a light touch.

/rant (as per usual)

Ever seen a zen garden? No weeds. No flowers. Just rock.