{"id":503,"date":"2011-12-09T09:33:01","date_gmt":"2011-12-09T16:33:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/maxcarmichael.com\/blog\/?p=503"},"modified":"2020-07-01T17:52:17","modified_gmt":"2020-07-01T23:52:17","slug":"dangerous-knowledge-part-3-nurturing-roots","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/maxcarmichael.com\/blog\/?p=503","title":{"rendered":"Dangerous Knowledge Part 3: Nurturing Roots"},"content":{"rendered":"

The insights of Pictures of Knowledge<\/em> accumulated with the force of a powerful revelation. But what could I do with them? I was living in a vast metropolitan area where food-producing habitat had long been replaced by buildings and streets and parking lots, and society had been segregated into slums, working-class ghettos, middle-class suburbs, yuppie neighborhoods, and affluent enclaves.\u00a0It was clear that I couldn\u2019t just go out and create the kind of community I\u2019ve just described, and I didn\u2019t know anyone else who was either interested or prepared to try. Was it possible to find a subsistence community of people who took good care of each other, and somehow join it?<\/p>\n

Joining a traditional culture like the Amish or the Hopi was clearly not an option for a mature, overeducated white man. I spent some time looking into \u201cintentional communities,\u201d but the few that seemed attractive were still young and unstable, dependent on the consumer economy, lacking institutions that would continue nourishing them through the cycle of the generations.<\/p>\n

I searched for years, and eventually found this compromise: a rural county with abundant natural resources and a long prehistoric heritage of both farming and sophisticated art, a place with small family farms and ranches and idealistic young people going into farming while they try to raise kids outside the mainstream culture. A remote Western town that surprises urbanites with its openness, tolerance, and community activism. A place with a small, historic downtown where country folks mix with townies and gather frequently for festivals and celebrations. A working town that\u2019s not pretty, not restored or gentrified, but affordable and egalitarian, with dark skies, no traffic jams, and a vast mountain wilderness at our doorstep.<\/p>\n

Working with new friends, I started a harvest festival to celebrate local agriculture. I dreamed of starting my own farm and raising livestock, but instead, I ended up in town. Now, for the first time since childhood, I live in a place where literally all of life\u2019s basic resources – from food to health care to building materials – are available within walking distance, from people I know personally and see regularly.<\/p>\n

Poor Max, never satisfied! As good as it is, it\u2019s still not my dream village. It\u2019s still an American town, too big for everyone to know everyone else and make decisions by consensus. Although it\u2019s socially unstratified and far less segregated than any community I knew in California, it\u2019s still divided into Anglo and Latino, liberal and conservative. I\u2019m also 1500 miles from my family and my childhood roots, and my heart is torn.<\/p>\n

Moving here enabled me to rediscover myself as an artist, but that was both a blessing and a curse, because although I reserve my highest respect for traditional cultures, my own work connects more with what\u2019s going on in the cities, and I feel culturally isolated. There\u2019s a lesson there, but it\u2019s a hard one.<\/p>\n

I started out as a child in a rural environment, with a loving family, eating local food, surrounded by remnants and fragments of a healthy, sustainable way of life, but since I was a talented child of talented, educated parents, the damage was already done. The seductive glamour of the arts, sciences and technology, loved by my parents and promoted by the media and the educational system, drove me relentlessly toward the big city and the great university and the cutting edge of art and science and a habitual craving for intellectual challenges and urban sophistication. An exciting but fundamentally destructive culture has uprooted me and shaped me into a misfit, a mass of contradictions.<\/p>\n

As reluctant products of a dysfunctional society, what can we do to live a more meaningful life?<\/p>\n

At the most fundamental level, we can stop thinking of ourselves as part of a global population, a nation, or any society that\u2019s so big that the members can\u2019t know each other personally and be accountable to each other. Caring, cooperation, and consensus only work face to face, and that\u2019s where we should be focusing, close to home.<\/p>\n

We can certainly avoid the national media – that\u2019s a no-brainer \u2013 and, instead of taking inspiration from celebrities and media pundits, work to build the kind of local community that will nurture and sustain inspiring people. Getting out of the imperial city \u2013 whether it\u2019s rooftop-garden Brooklyn or the Ninth Ward of New Orleans \u2013 will dramatically reduce the pressure to consume. Avoid affluence and social stratification and get close to food, family farms, places where young people are getting into farming instead of technology.<\/p>\n

Our kids are a tougher question. But it might help to stop thinking of them as individuals with unlimited potential for advancement, and more as an integral part of our immediate community, a new generation to carry on the roles of the aging generation, caring for our habitat and caring for their neighbors. Give them an inspiring community to belong to, instead of sending them off to college and saddling them with huge loans in hopes of a \u201cpromising career\u201d where they actually have to start over in a distant place, losing the context and support systems of their family and neighborhood, losing their roots. That\u2019s one way the destructive market economy thrives: luring us away from our roots, our families, our social support, isolating us so we\u2019re forced to pay for everything we need.<\/p>\n

The mobility of our society is really a killer, from the consumption of non-renewable resources to pollution and climate change, from the rapid spread of disease and invasive species to the more gradual breakdown of families and communities. So many of my urban friends are currently just \u201cparking\u201d in a job-related location until such time as they can retire to the small community of their dreams. Then, like me, their children won\u2019t even have a childhood home and neighborhood to go back to, and this will become accepted as normal. Roots are worth nurturing, for a lot of vital reasons.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The insights of Pictures of Knowledge accumulated with the force of a powerful revelation. But what could I do with them? I was living in a vast metropolitan area where food-producing habitat had long been replaced by buildings and streets and parking lots, and society had been segregated into slums, working-class ghettos, middle-class suburbs, yuppie […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[80,51],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-503","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-problems-solutions","category-society"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/maxcarmichael.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/503","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/maxcarmichael.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/maxcarmichael.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maxcarmichael.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maxcarmichael.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=503"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/maxcarmichael.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/503\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10490,"href":"https:\/\/maxcarmichael.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/503\/revisions\/10490"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/maxcarmichael.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=503"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maxcarmichael.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=503"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maxcarmichael.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=503"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}