As the river flows

I used to write of means to alleviate or ameliorate ecosystem degradation and climate heating. It may have been too late even when I started, I don’t know, but to my optimistic, fix-it guy perspective, it looked worth trying. Slow down everything. Walk. Make less. Live on enough.

I did it myself. It’s easy. It’s slower, but it’s far less stressful. I lived in a tiny house, drove a smallish car five or ten miles an hour slower than everybody else. I burned less fuel, my tires turned into poisonous dust slower than before, my brakes did too. I learned to drive animals, and then I did that too. Drove horses, mules, then later donkeys, to go to town. No fuel at all. Tire wear so slow that one set might outlive me. The whole time my blood pressure settled in at lower rates. My resting pulse settled in the high 50s or low 60s. My cars and trucks always lasted me two or three hundred thousand miles. For thirty years I heated my tiny houses by burning dead elm trees that I harvested out of strangers’ front yards for free.

It wasn’t all paradise. It was real life. Lots of physical work, but work is easy. People are always the hardest part. One marriage blew up because of my own actions. Another ended in her terminal cancer. People I thought were my friends turned on me, people I thought were simple commercial contacts turned out to be friends. Years went by. My body slowly degraded, the inevitable weight of too many birthdays limiting my power to build and maintain. But I still believed, and still wrote, of the life that I thought was available to us if only we’d reach out and accept it.

We didn’t.

I guess we never were going to.

When the automobile came, various isolated religious groups looked at what it would do to their communities, met with one another, and decided to reject the speed and keep the local. Aside from a very few organized religions there were no other groups of people who saw the threat. The religions that did see it were those which had been hanged and burned alive, not by foreigners but by those who claimed to share the same holy book, the same foundations of faith, for their beliefs. They knew that only among their close knit communities were they safe.

For much of my life I have dreamed, and even attempted to create, slow, small scale, low technology communities for reasons other than religion. So far I have failed. I’m still trying. Once upon a time I got so desperate that I tried to force myself to believe in the whole God, Jesus, Holy Spirit, Heaven and Hell, package, just so I could become a full member of a religious community which eschewed high energy and high speeds. I couldn’t do it. I can’t believe that stuff. I’m not sorry I tried, but I am sorry that there’s noplace else to go where the roads have buggy signs along them, noplace else to go where the necessary support systems for a low energy life exist.

We use energy to replace humans, not only in the production of our foods, clothing, tools, homes, and supply chains, but even directly in our lives. Instead of talking to you today, I’m sitting with a computer on my lap writing you a letter, a string of letters, a string of words, which you might see or you might not, but if you do it will be without ever seeing my face, without ever hearing my voice, without ever sharing any real humanity among ourselves. We sit inside with our TVs, not on the porch greeting passersby. We travel, each alone in our cars, perhaps entertained by the energy images of singers or speakers, but alone. We don’t speak to the person who bakes our bread, the person who sews our clothing, the person who brews our beer, not even to the truck driver who brings them all to the store, but only, and only sometimes even then, to the person who rings them all out and accepts our payment. Maybe we take it all to the self checkout and avoid even that last one human.

Other people still bake our bread, but they don’t do it with their own hands and attention. They do it by pushing buttons, moving levers, concentrated energy applied to cogs and levers grinds the wheat, mixes, kneads, waits, times… We still live aided and served by other people, but we don’t see them. We don’t interact with them.

Even the religious groups are sucked ever farther into it. Solar panels and wind turbines in their back yards, trucks on highways driven by people they call English bring the harness from Pennsylvania and Ohio instead of, as in the past generation, making it in the shop in Missouri. Industrial agriculture makes the product of one hand, one acre, so insignificant that even within their tight knit communities they can no longer earn their livelihoods as they did for two, three, four or more generations past the death of our communities. The machine eventually grinds us all down, saps our strength, makes our efforts irrelevant.

I have dreamed for forty years of creating just one, even four or five family, tiny community who interacts by foot and buggy, a community with a baker and a butcher, a weaver and a sewer, one to make buggies and another to shoe horses, mules, or donkeys. I have dreamed of a community who gathers together to build a barn, to harvest a crop, to raise a generation. I have dreamed of a community who makes the choices the Amish made, except not for belief in some God, but for belief in our membership in a living Earth and among one another as humans. I have failed. It has never happened. The logic of speed trumps the logic of community. At 79 it comes to pass that I drive my car more often and my donkeys less.

And as I mark my failure, the machine around me, the one that emerged victorious, dies. Even as an old man it could come to pass that I live to see the day when all we have left is our feet, a tiny handful of misfits with horses, mules, donkeys, or oxen, when no matter whether we burn more or burn less we, too, are ground into dust by the death and destruction which modern humans committed ourselves to.

Even still I try. My community is two tiny families. In money terms I support all of us, because there is no way for my community to earn the money it takes to so much as pay taxes without participating in the machine. I’ve got a little money, I’ve got some basic income. My late wife left me savings and this is how I use them. I’m not ready to sleep under a bridge. If I find myself single again I may, no matter how old and decrepit, leave here in a donkey drawn wagon and go die on the road. I don’t know.

What I see, nobody else sees. I hold it up in my hands and say, Look, and they say, People won’t.

And people didn’t.

Earth could have saved us, but we’d have had to trust her. We couldn’t. We called ourselves wise.