and spruce and viola in my mouth after munching on them during tool clean-up this evening. Went back to the garage in the rain to retrieve this device and snapped this picture. The videos that Beaver has been putting on Facebook reminded me of the delights of tree buds, good tasting and new nutritious. So much is edible in our environment that we don’t need to rely on supermarkets.
land is food. land is plants. land is animal. land
is dirt. land is us. a friend called it the skin of the earth, a biome encompassing all living beings in the water, on the ground and in the air.
It is not that i chose to be poor but rather that i chose many years ago to deviate from a path that would have lead to a middle class career with a salary. And being a student at that time meant that i was in a position of little income to begin with and being upwardly mobile did not appeal to me. Such a deviation from didn’t sit well with my parents but they taught us to be independent and to stick up for the little guy so they took a ‘grin and bear it’ attitude to the change. They were workers but “middle class” is one of those illusions that proves to be useful to the elite, every division helps their cause. None of the 50 years of my life after leaving the nest have seen a lucrative income, never enough to enable me to go into long term debt. The richest i have been was when my father died and i shared a small estate with my sisters.
Odd jobs, social programs, the generosity of others, and the sales of crafts have always provided enough to keep a roof over my head and food in my belly. I have never been homeless but have come close enough to understand how people can end up in that predicament. Poverty is not a state of mind, it is state of being. I don’t feel poor but as i walk through dowtown Bancroft, i realize that most of the stores will never see my business. I am not able to shop like the middle class and do not want or need to. It is commenable that enough people do as thrift store goods have to start somewhere.
So yeah, i fail at being a consumer. The lifestyle i have chosen still has a carbon footprint but less than average and every reduction counts when it is a matter of mitigating the foreseeable catatstrophes. Having little disposable (sic!) income means i have less choices in the marketplace but so what? I don’t suffer for that lack, i make do with what is front of me, what i can find in my surroundings or what i can make or fix or borrow. It means that i am more engaged with the infrastructure of life but i have trouble sitting still anyway and my labour time is seldom devoted to wage earning. More stuff comes out of my workshop than i can get rid of.
this is a wine bottle holder being manufactured
Year
Decade
Future
Roasted Koalas now on special for $5.98/lb. at WorldMart. Help make the Worldbanger family richer and happier by buying some today.
Excuse this macabre opening to a New Year’s message but if you can’t laugh, you gotta cry at what is on top of the news these days. Few human lives have been lost in the Australian Apocalypse so far but millions of animals won’t wake up tomorrow. So where is the story of citizens rioting and hauling off their idiot of a prime minster to the gallows? But the Murdoch Media has the populace zombified and only marching to the tune of their next paycheque.
In the year 2020, we will get a clear vision of what is in store for the next decade, whether the world will continue down a path towards authoritarian capitalism or take a sharp left turn to libertarian socialism. The American presidential elections will be the tipping point when either Trump gets back in or his opponent wins the race. The status quo will not hold. If the Democrats put forth a “moderate” candidate in an attempt to tweak the status quo sufficiently, they will fail. Only Bernie Sanders has enough credibility to make a real difference.
Of course, if he wins then the right wing will mobilize all their forces to attempt a coup. It won’t be pretty. Think Spain in 1936. If Trump wins, his war on people and the environment will swing into high gear. Either way, the future does not look bright in the short term.
Couldn,t get in here on the laptop but no problem with my tablet while sitting at Tim Ho at 7 n 62 with a wheel horse secured on the back of the truck. For bush work and snowplowing. Will be back in time for the Sunrun party.
Listening to a CBC Ideas on Luddism that Walter had taped reminded me how the historical narrative has maligned the Luddites. Machines were smashed not because they were against technology but because they wanted to be free. At the time, changes were coming to the textile industry and people who had been weaving for generations were quite willing to adopt new methods. However, they were not willing to be locked into factories to work at the looms only rich industrialists could afford. Working for themselves, they could set their own hours, socialize whenever they wanted and not have do the bidding of a boss. They rebelled not at the machines but against becoming cogs in a machine.
And now we are cogs in the machines like the one you’re reading this on. Our psyches are being mined by captains of silicon valley industries to enrich themselves.
the illusion of perception…
Insect apocalypse? We wish! In these early days of June, you can’t plan on being outside for any length of time without being prepared for the onslaught of blackflies and mosquitoes. And we just put a bug net over our bed to protect us from the buggers that hitchhike on the cats to come indoors. The late spring and abundance of wet weather has contributed to their proliferation this year. In the good news department, there were lots of bumblebees in the flowering crabapple tree and looks like the blueberries and juneberries have been adequately pollinated. But where are the dragonflies?
Also, global warming? Not here! We’ve just experienced 3 hard winters, the last one was long and had lots of snow. January’s cold temperatures put a huge dent in our firewood supple and we had to scramble for wood in the last months that saw snow keep coming down. The burning of garbage wood necessitated chimney cleaning twice and it could use another scouring before the season starts again. A lot of time was spent keeping paths and the driveway clear, time that had been allocated to working on my crafts. On my birthday of May 21, there was still a patch of snow behind the house that had come off the roof.
However, we act and are acted upon locally but we think and know globally that the planet as a whole is in trouble. A friend talking recently to Transition Town Maynooth about sustainability said that our cool temperatures here are a result of the melting of the Greenland ice cap. Overall, Canada was 2 degrees warmer than average and the Arctic has been alarmingly warmer. The term “insect apocalypse” was derived from studies documenting the decrease in insect populations from around the world. Bugs may be small but play a vital role in the maintenance of the ecosystems that provide sustenance for all higher forms of life. That meme about a butterfly flapping its wings in Brazil affecting the weather in Europe was meant to show how everything is connected to everything else in nature.
And we are nature, probably the biggest intellectual mistake that our culture has made is that we are separate from the rest of creation, an alienation that is part of the material fabric of of our interaction with other beings. Industrial civilization has accelerated our impact on thus planet to the degree that we are now entering a new epoch called the anthropocene marked by mass extinctions. Almost everyday, a new animal is added to the list of those we’ll never see again in their natural state. Tragedy unfolding before our eyes.
The other side of the story may be that technology has both doomed us and given us the means to build a new society through the world wide web of consciousness that lets us know of the demise of other species. A tree falling in a forest does make a sound when a webcam picks it up. Knowledge gives us power to see through the illusions that have bound us and to connect us with those with the imagination to build a better world that includes everything. We can aspire to unity.
