Thoreau, Thoroughly
The beauty of the myth that the world exists for the advancement of human civilization is in its ability to be repudiated by any individual who ponders the role of culture in shaping our perceptions.
As early as I can remember, I was told explicitly or shown by the mundane implications of daily activity that humans were going somewhere. We were pushing boundaries, from oceanic depths to manned flight in space. We were expanding knowledge through science. We were feeding starving nations, making great cities greater, advancing medicine as readily as entertainment, spreading democracy, and inventing new conveniences for the benefit of all. One might view the problems of the world opportunistically, for civilized life marches onward.
Despite the constant reinforcement of the messaging, fringe details suggest something is amiss, even within the boundaries of the United States. Why, as a nation, do we have to keep telling ourselves we enjoy freedom? (Shouldn't it be a nonissue, like saying we enjoy gravity?) Why do we insist that schoolchildren recite a pledge of allegiance to the flag each morning? (Do they have an alternative?) Why do we look forward to vacations? (What are we escaping?)
There's little incentive to ask these questions. But Thoreau asked them, more or less, in 1849, in "Resistance to Civil Government" (famously reprinted as "Civil Disobedience"). To the imaginative individual, the line of thinking is acutely apparent. Why should he pay taxes to support the U.S. government's war against Mexico that he wants no part of? In the broadest sense, what is the purpose of any government but to regulate the management of property, to ensure our way of life?
Fascinated by gloomy projections of peak oil I began to study the seam of petroleum production. Unguided, I followed the thread as it outlined corporate and government conquest of fossil fuels and topsoil nutrients and aquaculture, the complicit winks along the way toward food safety and an invisible immigrant workforce. The seam threaded in various directions-as coal through mountaintops, and again as vaporous greenhouse gases fretted along the same windcurrents that transported fallout from distant atomic tests. It condensed into local communities in uplifting optimism: variegated whirls of conservation and energy production through wind and solar and biomass and microhydro.
The collective threads have started to coat me in the same kind of aspiration toward heightened awareness and inquisitiveness that Thoreau brandishes-and attempts to exemplify-in Walden, and through synergistic deliberation across time, I accept such portions as apply to me.
As early as I can remember, I was told explicitly or shown by the mundane implications of daily activity that humans were going somewhere. We were pushing boundaries, from oceanic depths to manned flight in space. We were expanding knowledge through science. We were feeding starving nations, making great cities greater, advancing medicine as readily as entertainment, spreading democracy, and inventing new conveniences for the benefit of all. One might view the problems of the world opportunistically, for civilized life marches onward.
Despite the constant reinforcement of the messaging, fringe details suggest something is amiss, even within the boundaries of the United States. Why, as a nation, do we have to keep telling ourselves we enjoy freedom? (Shouldn't it be a nonissue, like saying we enjoy gravity?) Why do we insist that schoolchildren recite a pledge of allegiance to the flag each morning? (Do they have an alternative?) Why do we look forward to vacations? (What are we escaping?)
There's little incentive to ask these questions. But Thoreau asked them, more or less, in 1849, in "Resistance to Civil Government" (famously reprinted as "Civil Disobedience"). To the imaginative individual, the line of thinking is acutely apparent. Why should he pay taxes to support the U.S. government's war against Mexico that he wants no part of? In the broadest sense, what is the purpose of any government but to regulate the management of property, to ensure our way of life?
Fascinated by gloomy projections of peak oil I began to study the seam of petroleum production. Unguided, I followed the thread as it outlined corporate and government conquest of fossil fuels and topsoil nutrients and aquaculture, the complicit winks along the way toward food safety and an invisible immigrant workforce. The seam threaded in various directions-as coal through mountaintops, and again as vaporous greenhouse gases fretted along the same windcurrents that transported fallout from distant atomic tests. It condensed into local communities in uplifting optimism: variegated whirls of conservation and energy production through wind and solar and biomass and microhydro.
The collective threads have started to coat me in the same kind of aspiration toward heightened awareness and inquisitiveness that Thoreau brandishes-and attempts to exemplify-in Walden, and through synergistic deliberation across time, I accept such portions as apply to me.