Frankly, I think there isn’t enough energy available on the planet to support such a development unless a dramatic revision of physics occurs. Regardless it is an interesting concept to debate. Kurzweil pops a tremendous number of pills and is likely to suffer greatly as the comforts provided by technology evaporate to all but the super-rich in the decade ahead. I don’t spend much time on the Singularity because I think it is a highly unlikely path our future will take However, its not impossible and is certainly entertaining.

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Post tags: humanity, singularity, technology, video

Babylon's Banksters by Joseph P. Farrell (2010) Feral House

The global economic crisis that started in 2008 has summoned a deeper skepticism of the economic mainstream with its corresponding prognostications for endless growth and prosperity. Individuals are starting to question the need to play on the giant wheels of churning money that represented the retirement funds and investments of the past. While I’ve been reading extensively about alternative economies and monetary systems, nothing has provided a picture of finance as intriguing or as challenging as Joseph P. Farrell’s Babylon’s Banksters: The Alchemy of Deep Physics, High Finance and Ancient Religion.

Babylon’s Banksters serves as a comprehensive outline of the evidence for a group of international monetary elites that have attempted to control the destiny of human affairs throughout history with banking and physics. Even if you don’t buy into the historical monetary elite portion of the thesis, you’ll still find a lot of meat here.

Early on, Farrell draws a clear distinction between the two types of money a nation can create: money built on scarcity and money built on the state itself. Money can be created as a receipt for goods and services with no built-in principal of debt and scarcity. In this case, the money supply can be expanded based on the needs of the nation. For the other type of money, created by a private bank and issued to a nation, the principal is created and not the interest. Thus, the monetary supply must always expand at an exponential rate to continue repaying the interest. When the money supply can no longer expand to make interest payments, the currency falters and eventually collapses.

This is where the connection between a physical system and a financial system begins. For nation-backed money, the system is open and the available amount of money can expand along with the economy, there can always be more money as long as available goods and services expand as well. For a private bank-backed money, the system is closed and there is never as much money as there is debt, inducing scarcity.

Farrell then posits that the first modern nation to discover a connection between open or debt-free economics and open energy systems was Nazi Germany. What Nazi Germany realized was that the Mark’s dramatic devaluation began soon after the Reichbank was privatized, driving the German monetary system into hyperinflation. When Hitler took command of Germany, he turned his back on the international private bankers that shorted the German Mark and created his own fiat money, embarking on a massive public works campaign using one billion non-inflationary bills called Labor Treasury Certificates. At this same time, Germany understood that they were subject to playing by global financial hegemony because they needed access to global oil supplies. And thus, Nazi Germany devoted many of its scientist to pursuing “free energy, i.e. the technologies that would allow Germany to engineer the physical medium and its energy directly…”. But Farrell does not apply heroics to the Nazi movement, he merely points out that they recognized an international malevolent influence in banking and sought to usurp it, all while committing horrible atrocities. Modern China has recognized this same influence, growing into a sophisticated world power by issuing state-created debt-free money, solidifying independence in doing so. Farrell’s overall point being that an international group has controlled money systems and has suppressed technologies and alternative physics in order to maintain this control. In doing so, this group has hidden the connections between alternative physics and alternative monetary economies.

What surprised me most about Babylon’s Banksters was how persuasively Farrell argued the connection between economics and an unpublicized system of physics. This is where the book shined. During the start of the Great Depression, Herbert Hoover sought a solution to the problem of the boom-bust economic cycle and commissioned Chief Economic Analyst of the US Commerce Department Edward R. Dewey to study how the business cycles occurred. What Dewey discovered was that cycles or waves of behavior appeared in nearly all aspects of human societies. In the 1947 book by Dewey and his collaborator Edwin Dakin, Cycles: The Science of Prediction, graphs and charts appeared of everything from railroad industry growth to the Atlantic salmon population. These compiled studies revealed repeating and predictable cycles in the form of discernible waves that were quantifiable as well as regular and predictable. Farrell makes the point that this is the secret a global financial elite is privy to, being able to manipulate these predictable boom-bust cycles for their own benefit. Further, a 54-year and 9-year economic cycle that proceeds at at regular intervals is depicted. Oddly enough, from the 1947 book, when the low-points of the 54 and 9 year cycles are overlaid they hit exactly on the date of our current crisis. While explanations for this phenomena can vary wildly, one way to look at is by imagining the effect a fourth dimension would have on our three dimensional perception. Consider a two dimensional being on a plane with a multi-colored wheel that passes through its plane on a regular basis. The two-dimensional being would perceive nothing but a predictable pattern of colored lines but would be unable to understand why the regular interval occurred because it was a higher dimensional object that was passing through. Perhaps a fourth dimensional object passes through our own world on a regular basis. In other words, Farrell is outlining a deeper physics behind the financial and economic transactions of the human race.

Even stranger, Farrell describes the work of an RCA company engineer, J.H. Nelson who published several articles on the bizarre anomalies that he encountered while working with trans-atlantic short-wave signals. Nelson discovered that the accuracy of long-range radio propagation could be forecasted on the basis of planetary relationships. Oddly enough, his signal degradation charts looked quite similar to astrological forecasts. After further exposition, the point Farrell makes is that modern astrology is a nearly worthless and degraded form of an ancient science that recognized and understood these planetary effects on a larger basis, even within human and social systems. Once again, the implications of a deeper physics behind human economic activity, a ‘paleophysics’ even.

So what energy sources were the Nazi’s researching? Most likely energy from an unknown source that resulted from rotating plasmas, like those described by Swedish physicist Hannes Alfvén. Starting in 1936, Alfvén outlined cosmic electrodynamics or the science of a plasma universe. If a conducting liquid is placed in a constant magnetic field, every motion of the liquid gives rise to an electromagnetic field which produces electric currents. These currents yield mechanical forces which change the state of motion of the liquid. A combined electromagnetic-hydrodynamic wave occurs which appears to transduce energy out of space-time itself, from an unknown source or maybe even the oft-discussed ‘zero-point field’. Also of note, Alfvén’s theories discussed the possibilities that space itself exhibits a cellular structure, or crystal lattice along which energy can be tapped. There is some actual evidence for this ‘electric universe’, specifically in the questions raised by Dr. Nikolai Kozyrev who noted that during the first hydrogen bomb tests there was an unknown source of energy. The energy of the detonated hydrogen bombs actually varied with the time which they were detonated. Farrell discusses the possibility that the energy variation occurred because the bombs became a transdimensional gateway into the energy of space-time itself which varied based on planetary rotations and proximity to higher dimensions.

Farrell draws connections between this obscured physics and an ancient international money power which are revealed in various historical accounts as they guarded gold mines with mercenaries and usurped local economies with gold and silver based transactions. But how would this international money power communicate in an era without radio? German physicist and engineer Dr. Meyl published a comprehensive account of scalar waves and their corresponding relationship to ancient temples in 2003, drawing the connection between temples as a long-range communication system between the various factions of this monetary elite. And while it sounds a little outlandish, the resonant frequency calculations of each building along with the similarities between modern magnetrons and ancient temple floor plans are rather convincing.

While the book is extremely well footnoted and referenced, where Farrell fails is in quoting his previous work too often. He could have dramatically strengthened his case by omitting those references and linking me to his original sources. Farrell breaks down every section with numbered lists of evidence he presented in previous pages which helped me track the overwhelming amount of information. This is the densest few hundred pages I’ve ever read. While I still remain unconvinced by the entire premise Farrell lays out, I’m thoroughly fascinated by the obscure scientists and historical references he can ferret out. I’m surprised I’ve waited this long to discover Farrell’s unique approach to science, technology, history and humanity. Clearly there’s much more to physics and finance than I could ever imagine and through Babylon’s Banksters I’ve discovered a tremendous number of new and interesting speculative paths on which I can embark, and that’s really all I can ask for from a book like this.

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Post tags: conspiracy, economic crisis, economics, finance, humanity, physics, science

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Post tags: documentaries, ecology, economics, humanity, monetary system, Movies, video

Supernatural by Graham Hancock (2007, Disinformation Company)

Graham Hancock is the king of speculation. His books will either convince you there’s a lot more to human history or make you scoff at his possibly outlandish ideas. Regardless, it is damn entertaining. One of the first books I ever bought was his Fingerprints of the Gods (1996) which discussed how anomalies associated with ancient monuments tend to indicate a wide-spread ancient advanced civilization. Even though I was intrigued by the way Hancock tied all those threads together I’m still deeply skeptical of his overall thesis. And yet, I’ve been completely hooked by his 2007 book Supernatural. This one is deeply convincing because anyone can follow his thesis with a little supplemental research. Using the bitterly accepted idea proposed by anthropologist David Lewis-Williams, that ancient art depicted what early humans saw in altered states of consciousness, Hancock weaves a story that gets at the very heart of what it means to be a member of our species. Where academics might be starting to accept Lewis-Williams’ idea, they are far from ready to use the same plants and rituals that produced these early trance states. This is where Hancock picks up, by starting taking the iboga vine, the plant that enables men to see the dead, and follows with the sacred ayahuasca brew of the Amazon.

Where I’m sure I would have been more sympathetic to Hancock’s other works if I had actually been to the monuments he describes, I can follow the writing here because of my own exposure to these ancient plants. Before I knew the themes and details in this book, my own experiences were eerily similar to those described in Supernatural. I’ve been the archetype of the wounded man and had interactions with serpents. Reading the story of someone thousands of years ago describing something that happened to me (along with its “mystical” significance) is a chilling synchronicity. Hancock’s sketch on p. 52 of the beings he encountered while doing his field research were exactly the same things I’ve seen, and as I learned by reading, have been seen for thousands of years by scattered native groups across the world accessing these same states through various means.

Hancock ties the similarities of the modern UFO/abduction phenomena to experiences that indigenous tribesmen have in altered states to the mythology of the medieval fairies. In doing so, he uncovers that throughout human history our species has been describing the same thing from different angles. Whatever this phenomena is, it appears to be changing over time, evolving and advancing. Hinting at a form of intelligence. All of these encounters have similar themes, particularly in encountering entities with an interest in human sexuality and reproduction mechanisms. That fairies allegedly impregnated and abducted women or danced around in circles to fly into the sky draws more than a few parallels to modern UFO lore. While the case Hancock lays for these similarities takes up the first half of the book, it is in the second half of Supernatural where the mind gems really shine through.

All human languages have a direct, exact, unvarying mathematical relationship between the rank of a word and the actual frequency of occurrence of that word. This relationship is known as Zipf’s Law, named after linguist George Zipf and has proved to hold true for every human language. Oddly enough, when the non-coding regions of DNA are analyzed according to Zipf’s Law a perfect linear Zipf Law linear plot emerges. In fact, the chemical “writing” of the non-coding regions of DNA appear to have all the features of a language, and may in fact be a language. Perhaps it is this language that ancient plant based sacrements tap into. Hancock brings to light the evidence that our interactions with ‘the other’ could be enabled by ancient plant substances because these chemicals allow us to access information encoded in the 97% of our DNA we currently think of as ‘junk DNA’. Further work in this area was done by Dr. Jeremy Narby in his book The Cosmic Serpent, which Hancock touches on briefly, specifically regarding the presence of snake constituted helixes in nearly every culture. That the snake in mythology is often a reference to DNA.

Since Hancock published Supernatural, the knowledge that Francis Crick discovered the shape of DNA while using LSD has become widely known. What is less well known is that Crick later published a book where he explains that DNA is so complex no mechanism of evolution could have produced it on this planet, concluding it must have originated elsewhere in the universe. Strangely, the mythology of many tribes in the Amazon tell the exact same story, of serpents falling from the sky and living inside us. While anthropologist Michael Harner ingested ayahuasca in 1961 he reported seeing, “dragon-like creatures that came to earth from deep in outer space after a journey that had lasted for eons.” These dragons explained that they hid in the multitudinous forms life and that humans were the receptacles for these creatures. Similar encounters have been described by other scientists ingesting these ceremonial brews and ancient cultures are inundated with related stories. Hancock hesitates from drawing any sort of conclusion other than that these ancient myths and timeless sacraments may be far more interesting than we could ever guess. Personally I agree.

Even stranger is that psilocybin (the active ingredient in magic mushrooms) is essentially orally active DMT, an indole compound with a phosphorylated functional group which exists nowhere else in nature. If this pattern exists nowhere else in nature, where could it have come from? What if the alien we’ve been searching for has been here inside us all along? A chilling prospect to consider, but after reading through Supernatural you’ll be forced to confront this possibility in all of its grandeur.

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Post tags: ancient civilizations, ancient knowledge, extraterrestrials, humanity, mysterious, myth, psyche, psychedelics

At the heart of every crisis we currently face is the modern system of education. Our educational model churns out an advanced primate concerned with security and the desire to be important while focusing solely on how to have a good time with as little thought as possible. Education is not merely a matter of training but a method of knowing who you are and how the energy flows around you supply your basic needs.

To quote Krishnamurti, “The ignorant man is not the unlearned but the man who does not know himself. What we now call education is the accumulation of knowledge from books which anyone can do who can read.”

The problem is that governments want efficient technicians, not human beings because human beings become dangerous to governments.

In a recent TED talk, Sir Ken Robinson discusses a system of education that treats our children like pieces of an organic agricultural ecosystem instead of cogs in a machine. The fact that he is on a major platform talking about such reforms to influential people is encouraging.

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Post tags: education, humanity, modern education, videos

In his autobiography, the psychologist Carl Jung tells the story of a man who comes to him for therapy, apparently at the insistence of his wife. The man is dull as a stick: a Swiss high school principal of about sixty years of age, who did everything “right” all his life, and never experienced a moment of ecstasy or imagination. Jung suggests that he keep a record of his dreams, which he does, showing up at the second session with something potentially disturbing. He dreamt that he entered a darkened room, and found a three-year-old infant covered with feces, and crying. What, he asked Dr. Jung, could it mean? Jung decided not to tell him the obvious: that the baby was himself, that it had had the life crushed out of it at an early age, and was now crying out to be heard. Exposing the “shadow” to the light of day, Jung told himself, would precipitate a psychosis in this poor guy; he wouldn’t be able to handle the psychic confrontation. So Jung gave him some sort of neutral explanation, saw the man a few more times, finally pronounced him “cured,” and let him go.

A grim assessment, but I doubt there is any way of denying it. Nor is it limited to the United States, of course; if Freud was right, there is no civilization without deep discontent. It just takes a different form in different cultures. And in any case, it is hard to imagine what a society based entirely on cellular memory would be like—although figures such as Rousseau and Nietzsche did their best to sketch it out. True, the results are less than impressive, but one would like to think that more can be done in this direction beyond individual initiative. It is very rare for a society to literally stop, for a moment, and collectively discuss what an authentic way of life might consist of. Indeed, I can barely imagine such a thing, except that it actually happened in France in May/June of 1968, and for those who were privileged enough to have been at the two-month “teach-in” held at the Sorbonne during that time, it was like breathing oxygen. What is man? What is the good life? What are we doing here? And: Why aren’t we asking ourselves these questions all the time?

[via Morris Berman's Dark Ages America blog]

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Post tags: human beings, humanity, spiritual experience

A single person wrote this entire complex book, illuminating characters with beautiful colors and creating these drawings, without a single mistake or sign of fatigue.

Legend has it that the Codex Gigas was written by a monk who broke his monastic vows and was sentenced to be walled up alive. In order to forbear this harsh penalty he promised to create in one single night a book to glorify the monastery forever, including all human knowledge. Near midnight he became sure that he could not complete this task alone, so he made a special prayer, not addressed to God but to the fallen archangel Lucifer, asking him to help him finish the book in exchange for his soul. The devil completed the manuscript and the monk added the devil’s picture out of gratitude for his aid.

It is also speculated that the inscription of various exorcism spells is the monk trying to exorcise the devil out by himself. (Similar to monks who sinned, and were punished by having them write out the Bible by hand, as it was believed that God’s goodness would be transferred to them by doing that.)

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Post tags: achievements, humanity

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Post tags: earth, environment, humanity

John Michael Greer's The Ecotechnic Future (New Society, 2009)

If industrial society turns out to have been little more than finding the fastest way possible to turn raw materials into pollution, the status quo won’t be maintained for much longer. We’re running out of those raw materials at a rapid pace and the outputs threaten to bring everything down with just as much certainty. We see the possibility of business as usual slipping further and further away as the world falls deeper into a recession which shows no end in sight. In The Ecotechnic Future, John Michael Greer argues that the reason our globalized civilization faces this catastrophe is because our definition of technology is wholly misguided and counters with a realistic vision of the future.

Since the science fiction writers of the early 19th century, our dreams of advanced technology have been synonymous with “extravagant energy use”. It is this redefinition of what the future and what future technology will look like that is the scope of Greer’s most recent book. Our modern industrial society may be a primitive and vastly inefficient form of the coming ecotechnic society which maximizes the efficiency of its energy resources and obtains raw material inputs sustainably. Of course, at the cost of a more restricted access to goods and services when compared to the globalized supply chains of today.

It seems that Greer is the first to apply the ecological concept of succession to explain the rise and fall of societies. Perhaps our current civilization is just the fast-growing opportunist colonizers of the Earth which will then be replaced by a stable climax community. This is a powerful insight, one that views our many mistakes in the supply chain infrastructure not as immoral (as many environmental groups would have you think) but failed attempts at obtaining a future ecotechnic society. Greer’s analogy breaks down to an extent because modern ecology tends to think climax communities are unattainable because the low probability of obtaining an equilibrium community is hampered, ironically because of climate change. Our species was once a climax community but was driven out of the African canopies as the continent slowly dried.

Greer offers an alternative to the current technological program of modernity which reaches a possible end state in a technological singularity, the development of a true artificial intelligence which imprints our minds on immortal silicon and blasts into space to colonize the universe. The absurdity of this vision is quickly revealed by examining the logic of authors and visionaries pushing this ideal, they’ve completely failed to consider energy inputs and the failure of past civilizations. Once we understand the limits placed on us by our rapid consumption of the very resources driving our goals, we realize that industrial society has been largely a “crackpot realist’s” approach to the world, using rational means to reach irrational goals. Our view of nature is that of a helpless adorable bunny which we can easily transcend or a frontier for conquest on which to impose our will. Greer understands that nature is neither, he likens it to a bear which when roused can easily tear us to shreds. If technology saves us from this possibility, it will do so without historical precedence. Human innovation will clearly play a role, Greer quotes Koestler in that, “creativity arises from the collision of incommensurate realities” But to assume that human innovation will allow business as usual to continue is to cement the outcome of repeating the past all while thinking we’re original.

I didn’t expect Greer to provide the clearest description of science that I’ve yet to read, especially since he is a practicing druid. But it is hard to argue with the difference between Science as a product and science as a process. Everyone agrees on the power of the scientific method, unfortunately we’re too infatuated with the products of current Science which have developed over a limited period of history and are subject to the same problems of energy scarcity as our economics and psychology. Science as a profession is also at risk, with its trained personnel and infrastructure. The scientific method will hopefully always be with us, it just won’t be used in the ways of the present.

The Ecotechnic Future is refreshingly not a book which will neatly lay out the reasons for the possible demise of industrial civilization, this has been done many times before, and by Greer himself in The Long Descent. All that is dealt with in about 18 pages and covers everything from the likelihood of culture death (what we call the United States is disparate regions tied together by cheap fuel for travel and mass media) to the implications of the depopulation explosion (that the “world is round” and solutions to being human will take many different forms). Within this section is his most eloquent passage however, tying the faux culture designed by marketing experts and sold over mass media distribution in its supplanting of regional US cultures and its ability to demonstrate that that people can be bribed by propserity and convinced by advertising into doing the same thing.

While many seem to think that an end to the globalized economy will come in an Armaggedon-esque collapse scenario replete with hordes of the angry urban poor looting the countryside while heroic loners that foresaw the crash pump them full of ammo to defend their homestead, Greer is convincing that empires and societies do not collapse overnight, and in ways that aren’t likely to grace plot-lines of blockbuster films. Our pre-disposition to biblical scale catastrophe pushes us towards the extreme. That the French Revolution appeared to occur so rapidly is mainly because our study of history focuses on key moments. Greer mentions that a teenager on the day of the Etats-General in 1788 would have been a grandmother after Waterloo in 1815. Put simply, we’ll still have lives even if industrial society is unraveling, they’ll just be different lives than we’ve expected. The failure to obtain a 9 to 5 job and a suburban mansion is not necessarily such a bad thing. None of the possible futures are unknown in human history, it is only the current members of our species that have been protected due to the shelter provided by inexpensive oil extraction. Although, I do take some exception with Greer’s idea that were a sudden depopulation to occur, our skills and knowledge would be applicable to the future. Some of the training that prepares us for industrial jobs is completely useless in a post-carbon world. Although Greer must understand this, he just omits it from his illustration of what our transition will look like.

Greer provides the first coherent view I’ve read of a post-industrial future. Regardless of your thoughts on what the future may hold, John Michael Greer’s The Ecotechnic Future will challenge you. He steps on everyone’s toes eventually, and that’s what makes his writing so valuable, but far from comfortable. This is the first book written by a member of the peak oil community that I would recommend to someone unfamiliar with its concepts, mainly because Greer is so convincing and eloquent but also because his vision is so well reasoned. The Ecotechnic Future leaves me optimistic about our future as a species, even if it will be a vastly different future than we all thought it would be.

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Post tags: climate change, ecology, future, humanity, peak oil, post-industrial society, sustainability, sustainable development, transition

The Wayfinders by Wade Davis (House of Anansi, 2009)

With the converging crises of imminent energy scarcity, environmental degradation, resource depletion and economic insolvency, suddenly I’m recognizing the apogee of our modern civilization may have passed us by a few decades ago. Being on the slope of globalization’s decline as opposed to its ascent or plateau is a precarious position, mainly because the evidence increasingly indicates an ever more bleak definition of the future. But that’s precisely why I found Wade Davis’ 2009 CBC Massey Lectures collected in The Wayfinders so deeply inspiring. The way we define our lives and the meaning of being a human is far from an absolute and objective answer to reality, it has been the result of numerous decisions made in a compounding form over hundreds of years. Because humanity at large expresses itself in the form of modernity is largely a result of the ever growing demand our lifestyle has on ever more hard to reach raw material inputs. Although I listened to this entire series of lectures through the CBC Ideas Podcast, Davis’ presentation hit me with much more gravity the second time around.

The genius and intelligence recognized by modern humanity is only in that of highly advanced technology while the genius of the cultures detailed in The Wayfinders takes many different forms. Each culture is far from trivial but an answer to the questions that come with being human, all of these answers just as impressive as our own. Our tendency is for to look at the naked and painted body of the native as a failed attempt at modernity. A native to be saved by induction into our economic system with all the benefits of employment and monetary exchange. Even until the 1960′s some Australian textbooks included the Aboriginals among, “interesting animals of the country”. To this point Davis quotes from the testimony of a Penan nomad to the UN General Assembly in 1992, “The (Malaysian) government says that it is bringing us development. But the only development that we see is dusty logging roads and relocation camps. For us, their so-called progress means only starvation, dependence, helplessness, the destruction of our culture and the demoralization of our people. The government says it is creating jobs for our people. Why do we need jobs? My father and grandfather did not have t o ask the government for jobs. They were never unemployed. They lived from the land and from the forest. It was a good life. We were never hungry or in need… In ten years all the jobs will be gone and the forest that has sustained us for thousands of years will be gone with them.”

Davis is able to continue his discussion without resorting to the “noble savage” or the Hobbesian, “nasty, brutish and short” dichotomy. For the cultures he touches on from Australia, the Americas, Africa and Asia it is clear that a genius is required to flourish in harsh environments, against any odds we would consider possible. And all of this despite harmful environmental degradation brought about by our lifestyle. Denial of climate change is a luxury provided by a temperate environment and disconnection from the natural world. For native peoples, when the glaciers their ancestors have worshiped for generations are disappearing and the Arctic lands they’ve hunted annually for all of history fail to freeze but for a few months there is no ideology, only survival.

I was nearly drawn to tears by the examples of rituals and lifestyles Davis uses to illustrate the depth of beauty of human experience. The Pacific islanders sailing thousands of kilometers between beautiful islands with wind blowing through their hair to complete the Kula gift sharing ring live the lives we can only experience through fictional characters projected onto glowing rectangles. The indigenous have no sense of paid employment, of work as burden as opposed to leisure as recreation. These cultures are the definition of the human experience that we have lost and try to replace through futile substitutes. These people experience pain and suffering along with glory and triumph, but through the full spectrum of being human, as opposed to our path which fails in its attempts to shield us from the realities of death and darkness.

These cultures have disappeared rapidly over the last hundred years, entire ways of life wiped out in less than a generation. Davis wonders why we have a universal rejection of genocide yet the ubiquitous practice of  ethnocide destroys more than individuals but whole solutions to the human experience. We may discredit an indigenous approach to life, but they disdain the fact that so many of our own suffer from abject poverty. A native tribesman from Malaysia when observing the homeless in Canada said, “How can homelessness exist, a poor man shames us all.”

The most important lecture included in this collection was the discussion of sacred geography, of the stewardship shown by indigenous to their land. When the Spanish tore down Incan churches and monuments, building Christian churches and monasteries in their place, the native villagers celebrated because this further confirmed the sacredness of those sites. Likely not the reaction the Spanish intended. If we are to look at cultures in terms of success and failure, wouldn’t the successful culture be the one that has survived for over 50,000 years in the harsh deserts of Australia as opposed to our modern world on the verge of extinction after only 300?  An idea of a sacred connection to land may be dismissed as meaningless superstition, but if it does not draw from an actual spirit world, perhaps it was the technological solution created long ago to ensure our species wouldn’t destroy the earth.

Davis has convinced me that when we talk about threats to our planet such as climate change or peak oil, we’re really talking about the end of our globalized civilization and not the extinction of humanity. Our species can exist in many other forms that live far more meaningful lives than the “modern man”. And for that reason, no matter how bleak the global situation may appear to be, the existence of the indigenous and their ability to maintain ancient wisdom despite all odds is a reason for hope.

Fortunately, to see these ideas and illustrations you don’t have to buy the book, you can listen to Wade Davis’ entire series of 2009 CBC Massey lectures online for free.

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Post tags: climate change, culture, human beings, humanity, indigenous