| Vesna Manojlovic via Nettime-tmp on Sat, 22 Jul 2023 17:39:04 +0200 (CEST) |
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| Re: <nettime> Bioregionalism, restraint, maturation, degrowth |
Dear Brian, Michael, all,
On Fri, Jul 21, 2023, Michael Gregory wrote:One essential word in this discussion that seems conspicuously absent is restraint. We do because we can. (Perhaps the royal pronoun here has to be understood as not including indigenous cultures.) We're trained from the cradle to reach for more, to do our utmost. We are seldom taught to restrain ourselves, to not realize our technologies to their fullest, to not plough as much as we might, to not explode our populations and planet. To learn how and when to say enough is enough.
How could a society learn to practice the kind of restraint that Michael Gregory talks about?
Here's an answer from Tim Fox (from Dark Mountain: https://dark-mountain.net/rivershift/
)
It’s as simple (and as difficult) as promoting ways of human living where communication is direct eye to eye and voice to ear, where mobility is accomplished with feet, where the sources of food, water, shelter and all other material necessities can be accessed by those feet, and where the stories, songs and celebrations that matter most are those that directly bind us, our families and communities to the land which gives us our existence at every level: physical, emotional and spiritual.
He illustrates how "we" need a combination of materialism
(short-term) of ...
deflection, obstruction and blockage of [capitalist] business-as-usual... & myth-making / narrative (long-term) :
our stories will frame this transformation to a steady-state in terms of maturation rather than collapse, stagnation, regression or a devolutionary ‘going back’. Thus we will stop struggling at all costs to preserve a ten thousand year condition of arrested development (ceaseless adolescent growth) and embrace our long-postponed adulthood.
He lists some of the mature societies, but my favorite example is
Australian Aboriginals -- there is a theory that they too did go
through the "adolescent phase" as a society, scorched their way
through Australia, learned from that experience and adjusted their
way of life -- and then passed on the teaching through "myth" /
religion / philosophy / ethics of Dreamtime:
""the relationship between people, plants, animals and the
physical features of the land; the knowledge of how these
relationships came to be, what they mean and how they need to be
maintained in daily life and in ceremony" (wikipedia).
(... until new "teenagers" came to colonize & enslave them,
sadly...)
Part of the new "myths" that those who survive should embrace is
"enoughness": restraint, modesty, humbleness, leaving enough for
others, sharing... and we need new words for that, in English -
words that do exist in other languages, such as "Ubuntu".
(deGrowth is clunky but there's a "mature" movement around it already, so it will do for now).
Coincidentally, I have re-discovered this text about (symbolic)
flooding / river while visiting Zell on the Mossel -- where the
signs of the recent & ancient floods are kept on many houses,
illustrated by photos and still unbelievable -- how *did* they all
survive, and why are they still coming back to the same
(dangerous) places?!
Curiously yours,
Vesna
More references:
https://labs.ripe.net/author/becha/environmental-impact-of-internet-urgency-de-growth-rebellion/
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