Nowtopian

A short entry to point to an article on the increasing militarization of our daily lives (out of sight, out of mind)… Peter Byrne used to publish a very good investigative newsletter here in SF before eventually being hired by the SF Weekly, where he did some good investigations and some that seemed like hatchet jobs (but I can’t remember now which ones so we’ll leave that aside). Anyway, in spite of thinking that not ALL his pieces in the Weakly were worthwhile, I always think of Byrne as a good journalist, and worth checking out. Via another old friend came a link to this article on Bohemian.com, a north bay paper where he’s got a column now.

I note too on FireDogLake a link to the former NSA analyst William Arkin’s blog on the Washington Post wherein he emphasizes Bush’s language yesterday:

Extremist-in-chief George W. Bush yesterday continued along his merry way, going over the heads of the wise men and defying Washington moderation and the glories of bipartisan centrism to remind the American public that he is also the protector.

“The only way to secure a lasting peace for our children and grandchildren is to defeat the extremist ideologies,” the president said.

Mark his words: the only way.

Put that together with the neocon Dead-enders running the government, their increasing detachment from any accountability or even reality, and domestic military surveillance and planning takes on even more sinister implications. I can always get paranoid about martial law and camps, being shaped politically by the Nixon era, but I find it hard to imagine that the military and National Guard would actually follow orders to impose it on major U.S. cities. Unless they’ve segregated brigades of fundy xtian soldiers to carry it out, I think most would mutiny before carrying out a desperate martial law declaration from the madmen running the government for two more years… Hopefully we won’t get to find out!

Mark Morford makes a nice contribution to an ongoing shift in the discussion about what we eat, approvingly citing Michael Pollan’s “The Omnivore’s Dilemma,” and intelligently reframing the tired opposition between vegetarian and omnivore in favor of an ecologically informed emphasis on local vs. industrial. This ongoing discussion seems like one of the most potent entry points to a deeper shift in our sensibilities these days. I’ve been reading a few different things that underpin this feel-good shift with some interesting reconceptualizing analyses.

One book I acquired a couple of months ago is “Soil and Civilization” by Edward Hyams, written in 1952. I’ve only read the beginning of the book, but already it’s quite fascinating, rethinking human history from the point of view of the relationship to different kinds of soil giving rise to pastoral or agricultural societies. Any history can be accused of narrowly promoting its own framework as an oversimplification of complex histories. Hyams acknowledges as much himself. Nevertheless, in spite of a somewhat Eurocentric approach (or Euro-Asia-centric anyway), he has a good account of the emergence of agriculture on the Nile and in Mesopotamia based on millennia of alluvial soil deposits in the river flood plains. Alternately he describes the rise of pastoralism as a phenomena of loess soils produced by glacial grinding and wind, leading to grasses suitable for ruminants, which in turn eventually lead to domesticated livestock. I’m oversimplifying it of course, but it leads to my larger point about the interrelationship of organisms that, while obvious, is finally starting to gain some real traction in everyday thinking. Hyams’ argument is basically that humans are but one member of a larger community of life tied fundamentally to the soil. And soil is an incredibly dense and interdependent environment of symbiotic and parastic (mostly bacteriological) species that are the basic source of the entire food chain.

Continue reading Orga(ni)smic Communities