“No shirt, no shoes, no service.” It’s a common enough sign in store windows and other establishments, though, who would ever be seen without shoes? Shoes are essential to civilized life, and they bring with them a distinctly civilized manner of walking: lock the knee, and brace a controlled fall on the heel; roll the foot forward, rocking into another locked-knee heel-fall. It’s difficult to walk any other way while wearing shoes, and you’ll often find this described as the way humans walk. But of course, humans are not born with shoes on, nor did we evolve in shoes. Every human begins walking a different way, and needs to be meticulously trained to walk like this.

This week, Greer covers the second trend of deindustrialization he’s outlined, migration. As readers will notice, I’m agreed with Greer here in principle. Earlier this week, I published the “Mexamerica” entry for our continuing Nine Nations series, and flatly said that Mexican culture would dominate what’s now considered the southwest. The main problem I have with Greer’s analysis is that, for all his claims to be taking his cues from history, he’s ignoring history, and making much more of this than there actually is.

The oil age began in 1859, when Edwin Drake’s well hit oil just south of Titusville, Pennsylvania. The first oil boom decimated the Allegheny Forest. Pennsylvania’s oil production peaked 32 years later, in 1891, but it’s taken all the time since then for the forest to begin to recover from that. More recently, with global oil production peaking, some of the old wells have been re-opened. As expensive as they are to drill, the rising price of oil makes them economical again. The Allegheny National Forest has been in the center of it all, and with the U.S. Forest Service’s long history of whoring our forests to corporate interests, despair was long justified. But, to our shocked astonishment, the U.S. Forest Service spontaneously grew a pair and released a forest plan revision that actually began to stand up to the oil and gas drillers who’ve come back to finish the job that the “Allegheny Brush Heap” had started. The 90-day appeal period went forward with nary a sound, set to expire July 2. Then, yesterday, POGROM POGAM filed their appeal.

What barely-closeted racists^{1, 2, 3} have called the “crisis” of the United States’ “broken borders” has become a major issue for the 2008 presidential election. Should English be made the official language of the United States? All the current Republican candidates support such a measure—and most Americans, thinking they’re supporting a recognition of their national language, say they support a very different thing, an official language (the difference, put simply, is that where a national language acknowledges a demographic reality, an official language is being a jerk about it—making it illegal to use other languages in any kind of government-issued communication). Should a giant fence be built along the Mexican border, emulating the smashing historical successes of projects like the Maginot Line or the Berlin Wall, at enormous expense?

Giuli & I spent the weeekend at Raccoon Creek State Park, attending the Primitive Skills workshop as part of the PATHWAYS program there. We’d previously attended the Wild Edibles class, and the Herbal Medicines class. Last year, getting married interrupted much of our schedule, but as of this weekend we’re back.

Long ago, when nothing showed any color and everything looked like shifting, foggy shades, a beautiful maiden lived among the Green Nation, and they called her Lady Redshank, for her beautiful legs, though of course, the word “red” did not mean for them then what it means for us today. Lady Redshank had a lover from the Black Nation, called Alum. One day, Lady Redshank said to her lover, “Doesn’t the endless gray bore you?”

“Of course not, my love,” Alum replied. “This is the way the world has always looked; how could it ever look any differently?”

If film and television have a role to play in our society, if they are capable of helping important social change, if they have a part in the transformation of human society, then T.S. Bennett and Sally Erickson have fulfilled that purpose. What a Way to Go: Life at the End of Empire is the culmination of the “big social issue documentary” genre of Michael Moore’s films, or An Inconvenient Truth, and particularly of the “using ironic 50’s footage” sub-genre, such as The End of Suburbia. It deals with the same issues, but follows them deeper, all the way to the root of the problem in the Agricultural Revolution. Along the way, it hits all the important points: peak oil, mass extinction, climate change, overshoot, and the stories that keep us on the path to self-destruction.

If there’s a part of the world where the hopes of avoiding collapse are coalescing, it’s undoubtedly Latin America. From Cuba’s permacultural revolution, to Venezuela’s oil supply, to Brazil’s ethanol, the hopes for helping civilization stick around a little longer all linger in Latin America. Unfortunately, what’s good at avoiding collapse is rarely good for human beings; collapse is, after all, an economizing process that improves quality of life. The mixture of brutal dictatorships alongside the best hopes for continuing civilization is no mere coincidence.

This week, the Archdruid Report continues “Adam’s Story.” The first installment, published three weeks ago, was “Twilight in Learyville,” wherein Adam left behind the former tourist town in the Pacific Northwest where he’d grown up after the deaths of his sweetheart and his father. This week’s installment, “Nanmin Voyages,” deals with the consequences of waves of Japanese refugees crossing the Pacific to North America. Greer has said that these fictional narratives are tools to help put the situation in perspective, and I heartily agree that fictional narratives can be helpful in that way. But in order to achieve that goal, they need to portray what’s likely, not simply indulge one’s own morbid fantasies.

The great secret of human adaptability is culture. Culture provides a “soft” layer between the biology of Homo sapiens, and the environment we relate to. Culture is learned, and as such, culture can adapt far more quickly than biology. Humans have evolved as cultural creatures: we are born not as perfect tabula rosa, but certainly without all the parameters set. Disgust is an excellent example, felt so deeply that it has often been taken to be innate, even cosmic in nature. Yet what we feel disgust about is largely culturally constructed. We have a deeply-felt, biological response, but it is felt in response to arbitrary, cultural stimuli. Because of responses like that, humans were able to move out of Africa and, developing new cultures, adapt to nearly every bioregion on the planet. As such, a healthy, functional culture must meet two ends: (1) it must suit our evolved, biological, human nature, and (2) it must adapt us to our local environment.