If it's advertised it's probably toxic

A follow on from Pollan's thoughts...

If you join the dots between a thing advertised and the materials, environments, humans and non-humans used in the process of making that thing, you'll see what I mean.

Take this example:

I walk up to the shops in my town... a massive water tanker passes me by... they advertise their phone number on the side of the truck... I call them up... I'm told they cart bore water for bottled water companies such as Big Wet and Coca-Cola... I then call those companies... they confirm that they exploit this public resource... once public to the Djadjawurrung before their genocide... I start to think about the water being taken from an ecosystem and wonder what large scale, long term water mining will do to it... I start to think about how much carbon pollution the bottled water industry generates by trucking its product around the country... and about the amount of oil required to make the plastic and therefore the landfill of toxic waste...I find out, in Australia alone, nearly 500,000 barrels per year, and for what? Because everyday people like us, just trying to earn a living, conned us into believing that bottled water is cleaner and healthier? My body, my temple – fuck the rest of everything else. 

Conned by religious nuts, conned by business creeps, conned by dodgy politicians? Or do we just con ourselves by falling for the comforting lies of madmen? Why do we pay them attention, why do we pay them our wages?

Here, in my hand is one dot (a discarded water bottle thrown from a car window), and over there is another dot (the ecological sources of that waste). It's up to us to join the dots, for they represent industrial civilisation; they represent our modes of production; they represent us – ecophobic, disembodied and ignorantly abusive.

Take any advertised product, spend a day online researching who's behind that product and where the materials used for it come from, make numerous calls, join the dots, factor in the transportation costs to the environment, and I guarantee you'll find what I have found. Welcome to capitalism! 

It's now time to "grow your own food, catch your own water [and energy], and say hello to your neighbour" – Roberto Perez, Cuban permaculturalist, Daylesford Town Hall, 2008.

Gifts of civilisation (or, how did we get here?)

In my Free-dragging Manifesto I talk about de-civilising activities aimed at mitigating civilisation's brutality. Composting plays a big part, as does the dispersal of cities (the word 'civilisation' comes from the Latin word civilis meaning centre or city). Derrick Jensen's massive two-volume tome Endgame: The Problem of Civilisation played a large role in the forming of my manifesto, especially his idea that any centre large enough to rely upon the importation of resources can never be sustainable. If you haven't got time to read Jensen's or my work then this little film, that I found today, is a micro-summary.



I close the screen and pick up David Graeber's book Possibilities, and the first thing I read is:

This leads to the interesting suggestion that, from the perspective of Medieval psychological theory, our entire civilization...is really a form of clinical depression. p67.

Consumption (or, it's Permablitzing time!)

So far I've been impressed with David Graeber's book, Possibilities. His first essay, "Manners, Deference, and Private Property: or Elements for a General theory of Hierarchy", has been used in various posts here over the past several weeks. His second essay concerns the very idea of consumption, and he naturally begins with some etymology.

The English "to consume" derives from the Latin verb consumere, meaning "to seize or take over completely," and hence, by extension, to "eat up, devour, waste, destroy, or spend". p.59

Graeber argues that if we were still speaking a fourteenth century dialectic a consumer society would mean 'a society of wastrels and destroyers'. 

...wasting diseases "consumed" their victims: a usage that according to the Oxford English Dictionary is already documented by 1395. This is why tuberculosis came to be known as "consumption". At first, the now-familiar sense of consumption as eating or drinking was very much a secondary meaning. Rather, when applied to material goods, consumption was almost always synonymous with waste: it meant destroying something that did not have to be (at least quite so thoroughly) destroyed. p59.

I fail to see how anything has changed since the fourteenth century. Waste and destruction have only intensified with population expansion placing greater and greater pressures on the Earth's ecologies. Graeber almost never writes using ecologic language, and I would guess he is an urban dweller who buys his food in from across the country and from overseas wrapped in plastic. However, his writing is nearly always suggesting an ecological revolution because he understands the toxic corollaries of twenty-first century capitalism, and where it has come from. Once we have a fair grasp of the pathologies of late-capitalism, it's time to turn to the solutions, as David Holmgren might say; it's time to permablitz the world.