no living in the living room

i'm sitting in a coffee shop listening to what grown-ups actually talk about, and it's srsly so boring and stupid. i'll never be a grown-up. i'd rather say nothing and listen to my coffee.

http://www.cbc.ca/sunday/2009/04/041209_5.html

they actually talk about the collapse of civilization on CBS!
Aric is smart,
that physicist guy knows nothing about ecology
and
i'm not a "doomer;" i'm a bloomer!

"

what are you going to do when you get out into the real world?
i'm gonna roll around in the dirt!

"

what do you do
when you're waiting for the person at the cash register
to give you change?

because those are the seconds when i go insane

science is one of the most absurd religions i have ever heard of.

and the craziest part is that nobody even realizes it's a religion!!!!!!1111?!?!?!?!?!?!?!111

Adventures of Lolo 3 for Nintento is the best puzzle game ever. It's one of the best video games ever. It is intellectually stimulating and challenging, requires good problem-solving skills, and each room takes some new insight to get through. And it's so satisfying after you finally realize how to solve a tricky puzzle after staring at the screen for 10 minutes!

the point: if you're going to play video games, play Adventures of Lolo 3.

<3

except I'm stuck on level 11, room 5! AGHHHHHHhhhhhhhhhh

edit: I am a genius.

http://www.livescience.com/technology/080527-friendly-bombs.html

finally!
now we can have nuclear warfare without having as much impact on the environment!
now we can kill the planet sustainably!

what??!?!!??!?!?!

this TOTALLY blows my mind. you cannot do this. you cannot make "environmentally friendly" bombs. bombs are not friendly. but hey. whatever you can do to stay in denial about your lust for control and domination and the fact that you are destroying (y)our home.

at night,
beneath the reflection of park lights,
there is water wanting to be seen. 

do you know what winter feels like:
the icy breeze
biting with ferocious love? 

Guilt-free, organic, wholesome, vegan brown rice. One of the most innocent foods there is, right? 
WRONG. 
Let's explore:

First, a natural ecosystem with thousands of live species and rich topsoil, most likely somewhere in Southeastern Asia, is clear-cut and destroyed. Native plants and animals are killed and the soil bared to make way for the annual grain crop. Next, the nearest river is dammed and drained and eventually dried up, while its inhabiting fish, their bird and bear predators, and ultimately a huge chunk of the food chain cycle are exterminated by irrigation for the rice field. If it's organic rice, the field is fertilized with animal bones, blood, and manure. Otherwise, the field is sprinkled with precious fossil fuels and sprayed with poison. When the season is ripe, harvesting equipment kills billions of small animals like mice and rabbits while simultaneously doing further damage to the land. If you anthropocentrically insist that animals are more important than plants since they look and behave more like humans or for whatever absurd reason, take note that countless animals are murdered in every stage of the production of this rice. These animals don't even get to be eaten. Just murdered (this is a waste of energy whether you look at it anthropocentrically or ecologically).

Meanwhile, maintenance of annual monocrops like rice requires endless physical labor, which results in human exploitation. Not to mention more fossil fuels used in packaging and transportation. All the while the once-thriving topsoil is being permanently depleted (monocrops give nothing back to the earth) until the land is so dry not even the perennials can grow back, at which point a new rice field site is chosen and the process continues. I won't even get into what carbohydrate-based diets and grain-based lectins do to the human body (do some real, non-USDA funded, research).

So next time you gag in disgust at the steak on the next table over, take a closer look at what's on your own plate.

Anything you eat in this culture is harmful, and food choices should be situational, not dogmatic. For example, industrial agriculture (totalitarian agriculture in general is the worst thing that humans have done to the planet, but that is for a different discussion) is a lot more harmful and destructive than grass-fed, free-range, local and/or wild animal products. Bananas are a common replacement for eggs in lots of vegan baked goods, but the production of bananas is more destructive and exploitative than the production of organic cage-free eggs. It is much more morally unacceptable to destroy 50 acres of land/natural ecosystem (including numerous live species) to harvest a monocrop and deplete more topsoil than it is to kill a deer and eat it (which, on its own, I don't see any inherent immorality in). (Obviously our choices are not that extreme; that's just an example.) In addition to all that, being vegan is simply a lifestyle decision and lifestyle choices don't change anything. I used to fool myself into thinking I was making a difference, but even if I WERE eating ideally (100% local and self and/or tribe-found/hunted (which I actually really wish I could do)), that doesn't help stop factory farming. I had all these multi-dimensional arguments for veganism, but today I finally realized that my arguments explained why factory farming is bad, but not why veganism is good. And of course I didn't get into the production of SOY or RICE or CORN or CHOCOLATE or COFFEE or THE VAST MAJORITY OF FOOD SOLD IN THIS COUNTRY.

Nutrition-wise, I've been doing some research from non veg-biased sources for once, and it seems like a vegan diet is not so healthy in the long run. Obviously it is much more healthy than the standard American diet, but it's far from optimal. I met a woman about a month ago who ate a fanatically healthy vegan diet for close to 20 years and it caused some serious and permanent health problems. Of course grain-fed (factory farmed) animals are very bad for you (which is the data that all of the "meat is bad" studies look at), but animals with natural diets contain essential nutrients (EFAs and protiens and fats) that you can't really get naturally anywhere else. If you are interested in the nutrition thing, http://www.westonaprice.org and http://www.beyondveg.com are good places to start. In regards to the first website, Weston Price investigated the diets of so-called immune groups (people who achieved perfect health, with no chronic, auto-immune or degenerative diseases) around the globe in the 1930s, when there were still people living traditional lifeways in isolated areas. There is even a "veg-tour" part of the site!

Anyway, I will still eat a primarily vegan diet for now and not buy animal products from factory farms, but occasionally incorporate some appropriate animal products into my diet. The woman mentioned above, Lierre Keith, sent me this book that she just finished writing, "The Vegetarian Myth: Food, Justice and Sustainability," and after I read it I should have some more to say about this.

Oh, and... PLANTS HAVE FEELINGS TOO.

priest: "Plants and animals don't go to heaven; heaven is only for humans"

person: "Just humans? Sounds like hell!"

You may see me writing or hear me talking about all this anti-civ/primitivism stuff, and you may wonder, "What's so bad about civilization? Sure it has its problems, but I like cities; what's so wrong with them? Isn't agriculture good because it makes more food?" and so on. Well, I could (and might) write a book in response to that, and a lot of other people already have (see: Stanley Diamond, Derrick Jensen, Daniel Quinn, John Zerzan, and others). So for now, I will briefly explain why civilization is inherently unsustainable.

I will loosely paraphrase Derrick Jensen here, as he is quite an expert articulator:

Let's define civilization as "a way of life characterized by the growth of cities." Let's define a city as "a collection of people living in numbers large enough to require the importation of resources" (according to history and the present, both of these definitions are accurate). Got it? If you require the importation of resources, your way of living is already unsustainable. This is because you are depleting the resources where you live, so you have to deplete resources outside of where you live. As cities and populations grow, you need to deplete more and more resources. (Do I need to explain why continuing to deplete more resources is unsustainable?) Additionally, if you require the importation of resources, your way of life must be based on violence. If you need outside resources in order to survive and the people who "own" them won't trade you for them, you're going to take them. So we make militaries in order to secure access to outside resources that we require to survive (currently in the US' case this is primarily--but not at all limited to--oil, which we use for food production among other survival technologies).

Well, there you have it. WHY CIVILIZATION IS UNSUSTAINABLE (AND VIOLENT).

"But isn't civilization a natural part of human evolution?"

NO. Humans as we know them today have been on this planet for about 300,000 years. Only in the last 8,000 years, since what we refer to as the "agricultural revolution," have civilizations begun to spring up. Civilization is only so widespread because that is the nature of civilization itself! Before this culture, tens of thousands of human cultures were living sustainably for hundreds of thousands of years.

"So, what, Dustin, do you want to go back to hunting and gathering? No one wants to do that! Besides, we like our comfortable lives and we don't want to have to do all that work!"

First of all, it doesn't matter who wants to do what, we are going to have to find a sustainable way of living, which means an end to the dominant culture, and the re-emergence of 10,000 different cultures each coming out of their surrounding natural environments. Secondly, hunters and gatherers work about 3 hours a day. Members of this culture (including "third world" exploitees) generally work from 8 to 16 hours a day. Would you rather sit in front of a computer screen/make shoes with dangerous machinery for 10+ hours a day, or pick wild fruit, dig up roots, go fishing, and occasionally kill a buffalo for 3 or 4 hours a day? HMM THAT'S A TOUGH ONE.

It seems to me that there are currently three major objectives:
1. bring down civilization (obviously this includes bringing down industrial infrastructure)
2. protect natural ecosystems from further destruction
3. prepare for the crash

Here's what YOU can do:
1. figure out what you care about
2. figure out what you're good at
3. figure out how to apply those things to any or all of the major objectives
4. meanwhile, learn about the physical land on which you live (what plants grow naturally in your area (you don't have to be able to name them scientifically)? which plants are okay to eat, and which plants have medicinal uses?)

Examples:
1. If you love salmon and you are good at science, blow up dams.
2. If you care about land and are interested in farming, learn, practice, and teach small-scale sustainable methods of agriculture.
3. If you care about indigenous human cultures and you are good at lots of stuff, learn Spanish and travel to Latin America and learn from indigenous people what it's like to be human and protect them and other indigenous life.

TOKYO (AFP) - Japanese professional baseball players have vowed to shorten playing time per game as part of the national pastime's contribution to the fight against global warming. They will aim to cut playing time by six percent, or 12 minutes, from the average of three hours and 18 minutes per game, the Nippon Professional Baseball (NPB) commissioners' office said. [...] By reducing playing time by 12 minutes per game, the NPB estimates this year baseball will be able to cut its carbon dioxide emissions by 209 tonnes over 864 games.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20080318/lf_afp/environmentbaseballjpnclimatewarming

...phew.

HOW ABOUT STOPPING PROFESSIONAL BASEBALL?! NO WE CAN'T DO THAT SILLY BASEBALL IS MORE IMPORTANT THAN LIFE!!

FROM THE ARTICLE:

"When a professional baseball game is staged, a huge amount of carbon dioxides, a cause of global warming, is discharged because it requires use of energy to move players and spectators, supply electricity for lighting and other purposes and dispose of food and drink waste,"

DO YOU THINK REDUCING EACH GAME BY 12 MINUTES WILL REDUCE THE AMOUNT OF PLAYERS ON A TEAM THAT ARE REQUIRED TO TRAVEL TO PLAY GAMES? DO YOU THINK IT WILL SHRINK THE STADIUM CAPACITY? DO YOU THINK IT WILL HELP DISPOSE WASTE?

It is totally beyond me how these people can recognize that professional baseball is contributing to the destruction of the planet, make this change, and then feel good about themselves and continue to live in denial. (Of course this applies to plenty of things other than baseball.)

"When a professional baseball game is staged, a huge amount of carbon dioxides, a cause of global warming, is discharged."

OH OKAY, SO LET'S MAKE THAT HUGE AMOUNT A LITTLE TINY FRACTION LESS, AND THEN WE CAN KEEP PLAYING BASEBALL AND BEING HAPPY!! =) 

most of my journal is "friends-only" now. you can add me if you'd like and i'll add you back.

2008 EDIT: Now most of my livejournal is "public" and my only "friends-only" posts consist of:

1. rants from 2004 and 2005 about my frustrations with high school, not being able to sleep, and nature poems.

2. dumb posts about girls that I usually delete.