💾 Archived View for library.inu.red › file › ramon-elani-finding-strength-in-stones.gmi captured on 2023-01-29 at 13:36:17. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content

-=-=-=-=-=-=-

Title: Finding Strength in Stones
Author: Ramon Elani
Date: 2016
Language: en
Topics: anti-civ, desert
Source: https://dark-mountain.net/finding-strength-in-stones/

Ramon Elani

Finding Strength in Stones

We ought to dance with rapture that we should be alive and in the flesh,

and part of the living, incarnate cosmos. I am part of the sun as my eye

is part of me. That I am part of the earth my feet know perfectly, and

my blood is part of the sea.

— D.H. Lawrence

Should we fight or should we run? In The Origins of Political Order

Francis Fukuyama noted that civilisation or ‘the state’, as he calls it,

tended to develop in areas that featured geographic boundaries that

prevented people from escaping it. Mesopotamia, for example, is

surrounded by rivers and deserts. China, by deserts and the Himalayas.

For as long as civilisation has existed there have been those that would

rather die than be absorbed by it. Some stood their ground and decided

to fight and die where they stood. Others ran. They fled to the forests,

the hills, the plains beyond the reach of the armies of the civilised.

There they rebuilt their communities and reestablished the old ways.

Over time, of course, the cities grew and their need for lumber, slaves,

and lands to till for crops continued to grow as well. The resisters

were forced to run again, deeper into the forests and the wilderness.

This has been the history of the world. The free communities have almost

been entirely wiped out and civilisation, the enemy of life, threatens

to gobble up every last bit of land and water.

Most people, I believe, simply don’t want to think about such things.

They distract themselves and luckily we have a culture that produces

distractions above all else. They know that things are bad but they

shrug and essentially resign themselves to enjoying their lives for as

long as they can. A hedonism born of despair. In 1962 the Hungarian

Marxist philosopher Georg Lukacs wrote about the Grand Hotel Abyss, ‘A

beautiful hotel, equipped with every comfort, on the edge of an abyss,

of nothingness, of absurdity. And the daily contemplation of the abyss

between excellent meals or artistic entertainments, can only heighten

the enjoyment of the subtle comforts offered.’ Some people might hope

that technology will miraculously save the day. Some might even think

that god will come down from above to set things right, like at the end

of a Greek tragedy. Technology has given us many gifts, it is true. But

every one of those gifts has turned to ash in our mouths and brought

with it new, unimagined horrors. For those who do have the courage to

look into the abyss the question remains, just like it did for our

ancestors: do we fight or do we run?

For those who love life it's impossible not to want to fight against the

madness of civilisation. To try to protect as much of the wild land that

remains as possible from development, industry, and exploitation. To try

to prevent the extinction of the countless species that are currently at

risk of disappearing from the earth forever. To try to reduce the tonnes

of waste that our society produces and dumps into the dirt and water,

which are becoming less and less able to support life. In short, it is

impossible not to want to try to save the world from the horror that

civilisation has unleashed upon it. How can we not feel the urge to

petition lawmakers despite their narrowmindedness and greed? How can we

not march together and chant for justice for humanity and the earth? How

can we not chain ourselves to trees and raise awareness of the dire

condition of life on the world where we live? How can we not build

organisations, networks, create alliances, and movements to make change?

And there are other ways to fight as well. Some plot in the night. They

get the guns and the spears and stand before the enemy, risking

everything. They go to jail. They are gunned down by assassins. They

mail bombs. They form cells. They set fires. They remind us that ‘the

earth is not dying, it is being killed, and those who are killing it

have names and addresses.’ They know that a violent, insane system

cannot be reasoned with. It can only be destroyed. No amount of pleading

will convince the governments and companies to stop. It is a fantasy to

believe that they care about what we want.

And yet deep down do we really believe that we can succeed, no matter

what tactics we adopt? Late at night, when we are alone with our

thoughts it’s hard to banish the thought that there is nothing we can

do. That we have already lost. That this is all make believe. The

politicians either don’t care or will not act. There are not enough of

us to change the minds of the majority. There are too many of them and

they have too many guns. And most heartbreaking of all, we have simply

already done too much. More and more the scientists are reporting that

the damage done is irreparable.

The earth is getting hotter and hotter. Sea levels are rising. Lakes and

streams are drying out. Forests are dying. Deserts are spreading. And

through all of this the human population keeps growing and growing. No

matter what kind of cars people drive, no matter what kind of food they

eat, and no matter what kind of energy they use to run their air

conditioners, more people means more carbon, more waste, and more

destruction of non human life. Not to mention the fact that it takes the

climate quite a long time to catch up to us. Much of the warming of the

earth that we are experiencing has been caused by carbon that released

hundreds of years ago during the dawn of the industrial age. What in the

name of mercy will things look like when the atmosphere has caught up to

what we have been doing since then?

So, if we can’t fight then we must run. What does that look like and how

is it different from a politics of despair? No matter how ingrained our

myths of human exceptionalism, our needs are the same as every other

organism. Survival. We cannot survive without the earth. But we can

survive without civilisation. We did for most of our history and, in

fact, it is the greatest threat to our survival and the survival of

other forms of life on this planet.

and

, people are

beginning to rethink

what it means for things to get better, what it means to survive. For a

long time we have been taught and conditioned to fear the end of the

world. To fear catastrophe. But catastrophe means ‘to overturn’, like

soil or compost. And it is hard to imagine that the end of this world

will not bring the possibility of a better one.

We should not forget that humans have lived in the desert for our entire

history. We have known how to find food, water, and shelter in the

wasteland. This knowledge is not gone, even though we have forgotten it.

There are those out there who keep the knowledge alive, sheltering and

protecting it like a tiny guttering flame. In colonial Madagascar many

tribes fought the French and died. Many tribes gave up and became

slaves. Some tribes ran into the jungles. They hid deep in the forests

where the French would not find them. They continued to live as they had

and refused to adopt the ways of the invaders. They waited for the

French to go away. It took sixty years of waiting but eventually their

prayers were answered and the French went home. Colonialism was

unsustainable. It was oppressive, exploitative, and destructive. Thus it

could not survive. This is true for anything that is oppressive,

exploitative, and destructive. It cannot survive. This is especially

true for civilisation, which is the logic of oppression itself.

So perhaps the best thing we can do is run. Run into the woods, into the

jungles, into the deserts, into the mountains, and the seas. Abandon our

cities and farms, like the ancient Mayans, and return to the path of

survival. Remind ourselves of the skills that almost all of us have

forgotten. Remind ourselves how to survive. And wait. Wait for six

thousand years of domestication and greed to collapse under the weight

of its own violence and cruelty. Who knows how long it will take?

Climate scientist James Lovelock has predicted that by the end the

present century the effects of climate change will have reduced the

human population to one billion or less. Lots of people think Lovelock

is a quack and of course there is no way to know what's going to happen

in the future. The important point is that we have to at least begin to

entertain the idea that we may not be able to stop what’s going to

happen from happening. Perhaps by continuing to try to hold onto the

lives we have now and fighting against the tide, we are just ensuring

that, as conditions deteriorate, we will be among those billions who

succumb during the mass migrations, water shortages, or political

upheavals. If we leave, as many of us as possible, we will survive and

be able to leave something for those who will come after us. We can

teach ourselves and each other how to gather wild edible and medicinal

plants, how to build shelter using fallen trees and mud bricks, how to

hunt, how to make fire, how to find water, how to survive.

So if we run, we do not run away from reality, but rather towards a new

dawn. This is not a journey toward delusion or despair. It is a journey

toward the within and without. It is a journey deep into the memories

that we bear, the memories in our hearts and in our blood. We journey

within in order to find that which we shall bring forth back into the

sun of the present. When the time to fight comes, whatever that fight

may look like, we must stand boldly with the dreams of ten thousand

years at our backs.