The tent rock landscape, seemingly about a square mile of mostly cliffs, is biscuit colored. Parts of it that we walked close to were like bread with crunchy, nutty stuff (small rocks in this case) added to the crust. Rounded larger rocks darker and sometimes bluish in color stuck out here and there from the cliffs like accents.
Countless volcanic layers are separated by bands of hardened dust. This landscape must have been underwater for eons, since the winding forms are smoothed out and serpentine. It’s called tent rock because of bountiful pyramidal shapes that have the curious feature of round mounds atop them—like ice cream cones turned upside down with the scoop attached to their apexes.
We walked upwards through a canyon that is often very narrow. Large trees have fallen across the top in a few places, like beams, and boulders get wedged into it. The largest bolder I saw was about the size of the largest whales.
Since the canyon was formed by nature it doesn’t necessarily go along the ideal route of a trail, and so boulders might have been artificially located to create rugged steps that lead upward in a predetermined manner.
As so often these days, poor sleep made walking a strain, but I managed to not lag far behind Sandi. As usual, I improve when I get thoroughly warmed up. We got almost to the top, then hearing from a downward trekker that there wasn’t a loop to take us back down on the other side, we started back the way we came.
Three-quarter of the way down we came across a party: a young, good looking couple with the woman holding a baby, and an ancient couple standing in the shade. Before I took time to audit my words, I blurted out: “You can do it. I’m in my seventies, and I went all the way!” To which the old man responded, turning to his smiling wife, “Seventies? What about (something I didn’t hear)?” It could have been eighties, or maybe even nineties. They were very old, and did well to get that far. At the rate I’m going, I wouldn’t be able to make it there at their age. It was stupid of me.
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I find big things easier to comprehend than little things. Since most people (in the Western world at any rate) are just the opposite, I’m always going against the grain. I can’t find any corroboration for my view that it is very easy to correct Earth’s climate and other critical woes if we think big enough. And it’s tempting to go off in a corner and leave the world to its dealings.
Despite what astronauts say about Earth’s unity, beauty and fragility when seen from afar, policy to give meaning to that vision is absent. The awe-stricken astronauts were working at the level of sensibility and feeling, and these are never the concern of policy.
After I wrote my first blog post (“How To Do Everything,” below) I heard about the book “Endgame” by Derrick Jensen, for which the author won The Press Action Person of the Year award. Although I’m puzzled by Jensen’s radical views and by the acclaim given him, what he wrote stopped me in my tracks. Could it be that I received no corroboration for my views because there was none to be found within the broad culture?
Among the premises in Endgame :
Premise Twenty: Within this culture, economics—not community well-being, not morals, not ethics, not justice, not life itself—drives social decisions.
I reread my post, and the main fault I now find with it is the perhaps naïve assumption that it lies within the power of government to save the planet from the dire consequences wrought by industrial civilization. Ain’t gonna happen, most likely.
But I question whether direct acts of violence against civilization (as Jensen advocates) is the answer – these will most likely happen anyway -- or whether it is feasible, as an alternate strategy, to take peaceful but subversive actions to protect and restore the planet. As an example, what if it were feasible to cover dysfunctional paving everywhere (paving that does not use the sun’s energy to do anything useful) with vegetation (a simple, non-technologic solution to climate change)? It can’t be denied that looking at Earth as a seamless orb that depends on vegetation for its survival is something that civilization has proven hopeless at doing.
During the coming year I want to investigate, to my satisfaction, how or whether the broader society, driven by a revolution in the humanities and the arts, could potentially reverse this direction. (Examining the feasibility of a worldwide survey of land-use plans is one possible way to start.)
Can what is harmful in civilization be transcended through civilization itself?
Despite what astronauts say about Earth’s unity, beauty and fragility when seen from afar, policy to give meaning to that vision is absent. The awe-stricken astronauts were working at the level of sensibility and feeling, and these are never the concern of policy.
After I wrote my first blog post (“How To Do Everything,” below) I heard about the book “Endgame” by Derrick Jensen, for which the author won The Press Action Person of the Year award. Although I’m puzzled by Jensen’s radical views and by the acclaim given him, what he wrote stopped me in my tracks. Could it be that I received no corroboration for my views because there was none to be found within the broad culture?
Among the premises in Endgame :
Premise Twenty: Within this culture, economics—not community well-being, not morals, not ethics, not justice, not life itself—drives social decisions.
I reread my post, and the main fault I now find with it is the perhaps naïve assumption that it lies within the power of government to save the planet from the dire consequences wrought by industrial civilization. Ain’t gonna happen, most likely.
But I question whether direct acts of violence against civilization (as Jensen advocates) is the answer – these will most likely happen anyway -- or whether it is feasible, as an alternate strategy, to take peaceful but subversive actions to protect and restore the planet. As an example, what if it were feasible to cover dysfunctional paving everywhere (paving that does not use the sun’s energy to do anything useful) with vegetation (a simple, non-technologic solution to climate change)? It can’t be denied that looking at Earth as a seamless orb that depends on vegetation for its survival is something that civilization has proven hopeless at doing.
During the coming year I want to investigate, to my satisfaction, how or whether the broader society, driven by a revolution in the humanities and the arts, could potentially reverse this direction. (Examining the feasibility of a worldwide survey of land-use plans is one possible way to start.)
Can what is harmful in civilization be transcended through civilization itself?
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