by admin | Nov 27, 2017 | Uncategorized
A myth, in common usage, has come to mean simply a falsehood. A fairy story that can’t be true, a lie perpetrated on a gullible crowd, snake oil for the masses. But the reason we came to think of a myth like this is because it originally meant a powerful symbolic story, which was associated with people who hadn’t learnt reason and didn’t yet realise that technology could get us whatever we wanted. We didn’t need the gods anymore, because we’d proven they didn’t exist and aren’t effective in stopping the onslaught of the victorious society. And the victorious society turns out to be the one that has moved on from such primitive superstitions to take control of the world on their own terms.
But the real myth is that we could have control over the earth and its ‘resources’. This is the myth of the colonising forces. Technological power has seduced us – the members of said winning teams – into believing that its accomplice, reason, dissolves the falsehoods of the ancient, the exotic, the primitive societies we have replaced with our superior powers. And thanks to the extreme desire to exterminate all alternatives to its one God, medieval Christianity did manage to burn out most alternative ways of thinking. A symbolic understanding of the way that other creatures of the earth are our plant and animal kin, along with our intimate and meaningful relationships with even the landscape itself and all its elements, went underground. But it never completely died out. Like the native animism of the Americas, it simply learnt to live within the dominant paradigm, hiding like Halloween spirits ready to burst out at night when the priests weren’t looking.
A real myth, a successful myth, convinces you that the way you live is natural, as well as linked to a bigger picture, a more-than-human reality, another world beyond this one. Neat trick huh? Watch the full 40 minute version of City Living, Nature Calling, the first ever eco mythic documentary series, for more fun debunking and recreating of the world!
by admin | Nov 15, 2017 | Uncategorized
In a timely reminder of how concrete scientific data can be questioned, overturned, ignored and manipulated, 15,000 scientists just composed an open letter to humanity as an update to the consensus reached at the Rio Earth Summit in 1992. As I point out in City Living, Nature Calling, it was 25 years ago now that scientists agreed that the damage being done to the earth by industrialised humanity had to be reversed before it became catastrophic and irreversible. I’m glad that a very comprehensive and influential list of scientists have now increased the urgency of that warning – although of course it is terrifying that they have to do so, with the evidence mounting daily about the danger we and all life on earth are now in.
Here are the opening sentences of the new letter, dated the 14th of November – just days after the first ever ecomythic documentary was launched upon the world, which looks into why we haven’t changed and how we still can: ‘A new, dire “warning to humanity” about the dangers to all of us has been written by 15,000 scientists from around the world. The message updates an original warning sent from the Union of Concerned Scientists that was backed by 1,700 signatures 25 years ago. But the experts say the picture is far, far worse than it was in 1992, and that almost all of the problems identified then have simply been exacerbated. Mankind is still facing the existential threat of runaway consumption of limited resources by a rapidly growing population, they warn. And “scientists, media influencers and lay citizens” aren’t doing enough to fight against it, according to the letter.’
Many people will today say that things are changing too quickly; our computing hardware and software has to be updated constantly, everything solid seems to be made to break, forcing overconsumption in the name of profit, politic systems are in turmoil … the list goes on. But the stuff we should be changing fast, like the shift from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources, getting rid out of disposable packaging like plastic water bottles (amongst millions of other examples), replacing toxic agricultural practices (overdosing on pesticides and fertilisers) with more sustainable practices and so on, are not being changed fast enough at all.
We need to shift the way we do things, to speed up the stuff that should be changing and replace the disposable mentality with a commitment to hard wearing, long lasting products and a more eco-friendly scale. And we need to do it now, for life on earth in the present and in the future.
