Death in the Garden
Even though this is the most recent post on this blog, this short audio-video production provides a useful introduction for my perspective on what it is to live in this garden of life on Earth, reminding me of the deep time story of how we got here, the importance of human storytelling, and the fallacy of the nature/culture divide.
This next (and much longer) interview on the Death in the Garden podcast, with activist Helena Norberg-Hodge, looks at the vital role of localisation as a fundamental systemic approach to our most pressing existential problems.
“We have this overabundant natural resource, which is human beings. We can show that when people go back to the land, After the stupid machines, they are now needed to nurture the individual plant, to pick the fruit that's ripe, not come along with the machine and pick every fruit and then often burn or throw away half of it.
We couldn't have anything more inefficient than this techno-economic system that just rips out of nature, that creates … trawling nets that could contain 17 jumbo jets, instead of allowing fishermen to pick and choose what fish they're going to actually be catching instead of the nets that just drops everything off the ocean floor and then throws away half of it. We have them escalating in efficiency and extraction like we've never seen before. This is why we're facing collapse. We must do what we can to liberate human beings. We (‘ve) become too expensive for ourselves because of an artificial economy that tells us that the mass produced, the mass harvested, is cheaper. It isn't cheaper. We're not given access to the truth.
We're enslaved in a system where the dollars are lying. Local, healthy, fresh food, natural wood, natural building materials of every kind, natural fibers are all cheaper. And we could be freed to actually have a world of far greater beauty, far greater health, if we would move away from the lies of the techno-economic so-called efficiency.
We are proving now in permaculture, in agroecology, in many localized community-based ways of doing things, that we can do things that will provide for our needs in a generous, beautiful way while healing the earth.” Helena Norberg-Hodge, founder of Local Futures: https://www.helenanorberghodge.com/