Anyhow,
at the time the suggestion was made I had little actual thought of
entering law school and actually was somewhat bewildered by the
suggestion. I was a geology student and I was having the time of my
life. I was always done with school by late afternoon, and had plenty
of time to hunt during the hunting season nearly every day, which is
exactly what I did. By 1983, however, the bloom was coming off the
petroleum industry's rose and it was becoming increasingly obvious that
finding employment was going to be difficult. Given that, the
suggestion of a career in the law began to be something I took somewhat
more seriously. By the time I graduated from UW in 1986, a full blown
oilfield depression was going on and the law appeared to be a more
promising option than going on to an advance degree in geology. I did
ponder trying to switch to wildlife management at that point, but it
appeared to be a bad bet at that stage.
Well,
like more than one lawyer I actually know, what that means is that I
started out with an outdoor career with outdoor interests combined with
an academic study of the same, and then switched to a career which, at
least according to Jon Brady, favored "analytical thinking" (which he
thought I had, and which is the reason he mentioned the possibility to
me). And then there's the interest in nature and history to add to it.
Our artificial environment
So,
as part of all of that, I've watched people and animals in the natural
and the unnatural environment. And I don't really think that most people
do the unnatural environment all that well. In other words, I know why
the caged tiger paces.
People
who live with and around nature are flat out different than those who
do not. There's no real getting around it. People who live outdoors and
around nature, and by that I mean real nature, not the kind of nature
that some guy who gets out once a year with a full supply of the latest
products from REI thinks he experiences, are different. They are happier
and healthier. Generally they seem to have a much more balanced
approach to big topics, including the Divine, life and death. They
don't spend a lot of time with the latest pseudo philosophical
quackery. You won't find vegans out there. You also won't find men who
are as thin as pipe rails sporting haircuts that suggest they want to be
little girls. Nor will you find, for that matter, real thugs.
Indeed
the blog author noted above noted that, and quotes from Jack London,
the famous author, to the effect and then goes on to conclude:
If depression is partly caused by a mismatch between how our bodies and
minds got used to living for thousands of years, and how we now live in
the modern world, then a fundamental step in closing this gap isn’t just
moving our bodies, but getting those bodies outside.
I
think he's correct there. And to take it one step further, I think the
degree to which people retain a desire to be closer to nature reflects
itself back in so many ways we can barely appreciate it.
Truth
be known, we've lived in the world we've crated for only a very brief
time. All peoples, even "civilized people", lived very close to a
nature for a very long time. We can take, as people often do, the
example of hunter gatherers, which all of us were at one time, but even
as that evolved in to agricultural communities, for a very long time,
people were very "outdoors" even when indoors.
Ruin
at Bandalier National Monument. The culture that built these dwellings
still lives nearby, in one of the various pueblos of New Mexico. These
people were living in stone buildings and growing corn, but they were
pretty clearly close to nature, unlike the many urbanites today who live
in brick buildings in a society that depends on corn, but where few
actually grow it. The modern pueblos continue to live in their own
communities, sometimes baffling European Americans. I've heard it
declared more than once that "some have university educations but they
still go back to the reservation."
Even
in our own culture, those who lived rural lives were very much part of
the life of the greater nation as a whole, than they are now. Now most
people probably don't know a farmer or a rancher, and have no real idea
of what rural life consists of. Only a few decades back this was not
the case. Indeed, if a person reads obituaries, which are of course miniature biographies of a person, you'll find that for people in their
80s or so, many, many, had rural origins, and it's common to read
something like "Bob was born on his families' farm in Haystack County
and graduated from Haystack High School in 1945. He went to college and
after graduating from high school worked on the farm for a time before .
. . ."
Louisiana farmer, 1940s. Part of the community, not apart from it.
Now,
however this is rarely the case. Indeed, we can only imagine how
unimaginably dull future obits will be, for the generation entering the
work force now. "Bob's parents met at their employer Giant Dull Corp
where they worked in the cubicle farm. Bob graduated from Public School
No 117 and went to college majoring in Obsolete Computers, where upon he
obtained a job at Even Bigger Dull Corp. . . "
No wonder things seem to be somewhat messed up with many people.
Indeed,
people instinctively know that, and they often try to compensate for it
one way or another. Some, no matter how urban they are, resist the
trend and continue to participate in the things people are evolved to
do. They'll hunt, they fish, and they garden. They get out on the trails
and in the woods and they participate in nature in spite of it all.
Others
try to create little imaginary natures in their urban walls. I can't
recount how many steel and glass buildings I've been in that have framed
paintings or photographs of highly rural scenes. Many offices seem to
be screaming out for the 19th Century farm scape in their office decor. It's bizarre. A building may be located on 16th Street in
Denver, but inside, it's 1845 in New Hampshire. That says a lot about
what people actually value.
Others,
however, sink into illness, including depression. Unable to really
fully adjust to an environment that equates with the zoo for the tiger,
they become despondent. Indeed, they're sort of like the gorilla at
the zoo, that spends all day pushing a car tire while looking bored and
upset. No wonder. People just aren't meant to live that way.
Others
yet will do what people have always done when confronted with a
personal inability to live according to the dictates of nature, they
rebel against it. From time immemorial people have done this, and
created philosophies and ideas that hate the idea of people itself and
try to create a new world from their despair. Vegans, radical vegetarians, animal rights, etc., or any other variety of Neo Pagans fit
this mold. Men who starve themselves and adopt girly haircuts and and
wear tight tight jeans so as to look as feminine as possible, and
thereby react against their own impulses. The list goes on and on. And
it will get worse as we continue to hurl towards more and more of this.
But we really need not do so. So why are we?
"It's
inevitable". No it isn't. Nothing is, except our own ends. We are going this way as it suits some, and the ones it principally suits are
those who hold the highest economic cards in this system, and don't
therefore live in the cubicle farm themselves. We don't have to do
anything of this sort, we just are, as we believe that we have to, or
that we haven't thought it out.
So, what can we do
First
of all, we ought to acknowledge our natures and quit attempting to
suppress them . Suppressing them just makes us miserable and or
somewhat odd. To heck with that.
The ills of careerism.
Careerism,
the concept that the end all be all of a person's existence is their
career, has been around for a long time, but as the majority demographic
has moved from farming and labor to white collar and service jobs, it's
become much worse. At some point, and I'd say some point post 1945, the
concept of "career" became incredibly dominant. In the 1970s, when feminism was in high swing, it received an additional massive boost as
women were sold on careerism.
How people view their
work is a somewhat difficult topic to address in part because everyone
views their work as they view it. And not all demographics in a society
view work the same way. But there is sort of a majority society wide
view that predominates.
In our society, and for a very
long time, there's been a very strong societal model which holds that
the key to self worth is a career. Students, starting at the junior
high level, are taught that in order to be happy in the future they need
to go to a "good university" so they can obtain an education which
leads to "a high paying career". For decades the classic careers were
"doctor and lawyer", and you still hear some of that, but the bloom may
be off the rose a bit with the career of lawyer, frankly, in which case
it's really retuning to its American historical norm.
Anyhow,
this had driven a section of the American demographic towards a view
that economics and careers matter more than anything else. More than
family, more than location, more than anything. People leave their
homes upon graduating from high school to pursue that brass ring in
education. They go on to graduate schools from there, and then they
engage in a lifetime of slow nomadic behavior, dumping town after town
for their career, and in the process certainly dumping their friends in
those towns, and quite often their family at home or even their
immediate families.
The payoff for that is money, but that's it. Nothing else.
The
downside is that these careerist nomads abandon a close connection with
anything else. They aren't close to the localities of their birth, they
aren't close to a state they call "home" and they grow distant from the
people they were once closest too.
What's that have to do with this topic?
Well, quite a lot.
People
who do not know, in the strongest sense of that word know, anyone or
anyplace come to be internal exiles, and that's not good. Having no
close connection to anyone place they become only concerned with the
economic advantage that place holds for them. When they move into a
place they can often be downright destructive at that, seeking the
newest and the biggest in keeping with their career status, which often
times was agricultural or wild land just recently. And not being in
anyone place long enough to know it, they never get out into it.
That's
not all of course. Vagabonds without attachment, they severe
themselves from the human connection that forms part of our instinctual
sense of place. We were meant to be part of a community, and those who
have lived a long time in a place know that they'll be incorporated into
that community even against their expressed desires. In a stable
society, money matters, but so does community and relationship. For
those with no real community, only money ends up mattering.
There's
something really sad about this entire situation, and its easy to
observe. There are now at least two entire generations of careerist who
have gone through their lives this way, retiring in the end in a
"retirement community" that's also new to them. At that stage, they
often seek to rebuild lives connected to the community they are then in,
but what sort of community is that? One probably made up of people
their own age and much like themselves. Not really a good situation.
Now,
am I saying don't have a career? No, I'm not. But I am saying that the
argument that you need to base your career decisions on what society
deems to be a "good job" with a "good income" is basing it on a pretty
thin argument. At the end of the day, you remain that Cro Magnon really,
whose sense of place and well being weren't based on money, but on
nature and a place in the tribe. Deep down, that's really still who you
are. If you sense a unique calling, or even sort of a calling, the
more power to you. But if you view your place in the world as a series
of ladders in place and income, it's sad.
As long as we
have a philosophy that career="personal fulfillment" and that equates
with Career Uber Alles, we're going to be in trouble in every
imaginable way. This doesn't mean that what a person does for a living
doesn't matter, but other things matter more, and if a person puts
their career above everything else, in the end, they're likely to be
unhappy and they're additionally likely to make everyone else unhappy.
This may seem to cut against what I noted in the post on life work
balance the other day, but it really doesn't, it's part of the same
thing.
Indeed, just he other day my very senior partner
came in my office and was asking about members of my family who live
around here. Quite a few live right here in the town, more live here in
the state, and those who have left have often stayed in the region. The
few that have moved a long ways away have retained close connection,
but formed new stable ones, long term, in their new communities. He
noted that; "this is our home". That says a lot.
Get out there.
Public
(Federal) fishing landing in Natrona County, Wyoming. When we hear of
our local politicians wanting to "take back" the Federal lands, those of
us who get out imagine things like this decreasing considerably in
number. We shouldn't let that happen, and beyond that, we should avail
ourselves of these sites.
And our nature is to get out there in the dirt.
Go
hunting, go fishing, go hiking or go mountain bike riding. Whatever
you excuse is for staying in your artificial walls, get over it and get
out.
That
means, fwiw, that we also have to quit taking snark shots at others in
the dirt, if we do it. That's part of human nature as well, and humans
are very bad about it. I've seen flyfishermen be snots to bait
fisherman (you guys are all just fisherman, angler dudes and dudessses,
and knock off the goofy crap about catching and releasing everything.. .
you catch fish as we like to catch fish because nature endowed us with
the concept that fish are tasty).
Some fisherman will
take shots at hunters; "I don't hunt, . . . but I fish (i.e., fishing
hunting. Some "non consumptive (i.e., consumptive in another manner)
outdoors types take shots at hunters and fisherman; "I don't hunt, but I
ride a mountain bike (that's made of mined stuffed and shipped in a
means that killed wildlife just the same)".
If you
haven't tried something, try it, and the more elemental the better. If
you like hiking in the sticks, keep in mind that the reason people like
to do that has to do with their elemental natures. Try an armed hike
with a shotgun some time and see if bird hunting might be your thing, or
not. Give it a try. And so on.
Get elemental
At
the end of they day, you are still a hunter-gatherer, you just are
being imprisoned in an artificial environment. So get back to it. Try
hunting. Try fishing. Raise a garden.
Unless economics
dictate it, there's no good, even justifiable, reason that you aren't
providing some of your own food directly. Go kill it or raise it in your
dirt.
Indeed, a huge percentage of Americans have a
small plot, sometimes as big as those used by subsistence farmers in the
third world, which is used for nothing other than growing a completely
worthless crop of grass. Fertilizer and water are wasted on ground that
could at least in part be used to grow an eatable crop. I'm not saying
your entire lawn needs to be a truck farm, but you could grow
something. And if you are just going to hang around in the city, you
probably should.
The Land Ethic
Aldo
Leopold and Olaus Murie. The Muries lived in Wyoming and have a very
close connection with Teton County, although probably the majority of
Wyomingites do not realize that. This photo was taken at a meeting of
The Wilderness Society in 1946. While probably not widely known now,
this era saw the beginnings of a lot of conservation organizations. At
this point in time, Leopold was a professor at the University of
Wisconsin.
Decades
ago writer Aldo Leopold wrote in his classic A Sand Country Almanac
about the land ethic. Leopold is seemingly remembered today by some as
sort of a Proto Granola, but he wasn't. He was a hunter and a wildlife
agent who was struck by what he saw and wrote accordingly. Beyond that,
he lived what he wrote.
A person can Google (or Yahoo,
or whatever) Leopold and the the "land ethic" and get his original
writings on the topic. I"m not going to try to post them there, as the
book was published posthumously in 1949, quite some years back. Because
it wasn't published until 49, it had obviously been written some time
prior to that. Because of the content of the book, and everything that
has happened since, it's too easy therefore to get a sort of Granola or
Hippy like view of the text, when in fact all of that sort of thing came
after Leopold's untimely death at age 61. It'd be easy to boil
Leopold's writings down to one proposition, that being what's good for
the land is good for everything and everyone, and perhaps that wouldn't
be taking it too far.
If I've summarized it correctly,
and I don't think I'm too far off, we have to take into consideration
further that at the time Leopold was writing the country wasn't nearly
as densely populated as it is now, but balanced against that is that the
country, in no small part due to World War Two, was urbanizing rapidly
and there was a legacy of bad farming practices that got rolling,
really, in about 1914 and which came home to roost during the Dust
Bowl. In some ways things have improved a lot since Leopold's day, but
one thing that hasn't is that in his time the majority of Americans
weren't really all that far removed from an agricultural past. Now,
that's very much not the case. I suspect, further, in Leopold's day
depression, and other social ills due to remoteness from nature weren't
nearly as big of problem. Indeed, if I had to guess, I'd guess that the
single biggest problem of that type was the result of World War Two,
followed by the Great Depression, followed by World War One.
Anyhow, what Leopold warned us about is even a bigger problem now, however
. Not
that the wildness of land is not appreciated. Indeed, it is likely
appreciated more now than it was then. But rather we need to be careful
about preserving all sorts of rural land, which we are seemingly not
doing a terrible good job at. The more urbanized we make our world, the
less we have a world that's a natural habitat for ourselves, and city
parks don't change that. Some thought about what we're doing is likely
in order. As part of that, quite frankly, some acceptance on
restrictions on where and how much you can build comes in with it. That
will make some people unhappy, no doubt, but the long term is more
important than the short term.
It's not inevitable.
The
only reason that our current pattern of living has to continue this way
is solely because most people will it to do so. And if that's bad for
us, we shouldn't.
There's nothing inevitable about a
Walmart parking lot replacing a pasture. Shoot, there's nothing that
says a Walmart can't be torn down and turned into a farm. We don't do
these things, or allow them to happen, as we're completely sold on the
concept that the shareholders in Walmart matter more than our local
concerns, or we have so adopted the chamber of commerce type attitude
that's what's good for business is good for everyone, that we don't.
Baloney. We don't exist for business, it exists for us.
Some
thought beyond the acceptance of platitudes is necessary in the realm
of economics, which is in some ways what we're discussing with this
topic. Americans of our current age are so accepting of our current
economic model that we excuse deficiencies in it as inevitable, and we
tend to shout down any suggestion that anything be done, no matter how
mild, as "socialism".
The irony of that is that our
economic model is corporatist, not really capitalist, in nature. And a
corporatist model requires governmental action to exist. The confusion
that exists which suggests that any government action is "socialism"
would mean that our current economic system is socialist, which of
course would be absurd. Real socialism is when the government owns the
means of production. Social Democracy, another thing that people
sometimes mean when they discuss "socialism" also features government
interaction and intervention in people's affairs, and that's not what
we're suggesting here either.
Rather, I guess what
we're discussing here is small scale distributism, the name of which
scares people fright from the onset as "distribute", in our social
discourse, really refers to something that's a feature of "social
democracy" and which is an offshoot of socialism. That's not what we're
referencing here at all, but rather the system that is aimed at capitalism with a subsidiarity angle. I.e., a capitalist system that's
actually more capitalistic than our corporatist model, as it
discourages government participation through the weighting of the
economy towards corporations.
