I love how you threw off at the end, oh yeah the humans made the amazon and the great plains… that ought to ffuck with lots of heads!

I’m encouraged by your writing (see me vision posted on Ishthink, “A Valley Vision” Except rather than play with the philosophical depths of our interplay, I’m attempting to bring social jsutice to humans by reconnecting them with the regional community of life.

Edible Forest Garden looks like a great book that I may have to purchase soon (or rewrite!). I am experimenting with something new. Since teafching a man to fish would lead him to brain seizures and daeth, I am going to teach him how to clean up the rivers, sequester heavy metals out of the ecosystem, and then grow his own fish to eat some and return the rest to the wild. Perhaps I will write the book on biodynamic aquaculture!

I feel that society has a hard time getting out of it’s rut because I would estimate that most americans are in some form of a sugar coma. Without proper protein nutrition, I believe this is the largest stumbling block to AMerica’s lack of motivation. I think the ideas are out there, they are spoiling in our own minds, but that’s because our bodies resident levels of sacchromycetes are so high that we’re litterally drunk on our own bread and circus.

I believe in Chi, but that’s because it’s reality is only sensed and felt, there is no definition of what chi is, only that it points to the moon. I don’t ‘believe’ in the finger that pointed me to it, but certainly I’m feeling and sensing SOMETHING.

I’m totally blown away by fungi. Our destiny is intertwined. If we could jsut simply get to the point where we leave the micro side of life alone, it could heal itself, and us as well. If we don’t quit polluting, then only opportunistic organisms will survive, and the matrix that keeps mammals afloat will be lost in the genetic river. It’s unfortunate that there are so many of us human; the individual’s voice is small.

I don’t know yet how to share my vision over the internet. I can only imagine ya’ll going camping with me and the group. I can only imagine the nightwalks, and the sunrises, and the greasy breakfasts. I can’t communicate to you ‘this IS life’, and most of my friends are paranoids, so vicariously it can’t be.

Find a vocation that adds to the health of the soil, water and air, that’s it, thats The Real Secret, that’s how you can love your life even while the ship your ego wanted to save goes down.

http://www.scribd.com/doc/41179/plant-mind

http://www.scribd.com/doc/40729/The-Concept-of-Plants-as-Teachers

http://www.scribd.com/doc/41182/Root-apices-as-plant-command-centres

I did an 8 year stint as a vegetarian. Let me tell you, now that I eat meat again, it just amazes me how much I [i]love[/i] the smell of fresh, raw meat.

I break out some deer from the freezer, and man, by the time it finishes thawing… it takes a certain amount of effort to wait for the minimum searing….

One of the reasons I went veggie to start with was that I had some moral issues with the distance we have between us and our food. I still have that as our meat is still much further away from us than I’d prefer, but….

On plant/animal relations:

If we’re including a large portion of the plethora of soil life as animals (as, imho, we should), then, yes, we have some very, very strong (and healthy) relationships in existence between plants & animals. We can see those relationships in “higher order” animals as well, but I think it’s clearer when we start looking at soil (not to mention insects), imho.

How can you butcher a deer when you can’t even touch ground beef?

I’m not quite that far gone — hell, I still get cravings for meat, even ten years since having eaten any. But the actual act of the killing is a major stumbling block for me (irrational, I acknowledge, considering I’m perfectly willing to kill plants).

They’ve already sounded off that their criteria are the same as every person’s: more of us, better off, able to do more.

Okay, that works for me — now all we need is a citation or two, and I’ll concede the point. (And don’t take that the wrong way! I’m genuinely interested, and your sources are usually quite good.)

I’m not philosophically opposed to hunting; but honestly don’t know whether I personally can do it. Time will tell.

Giuli’s vegetarianism has probably hardened me to veganism. It’s helped make her so far removed from the natural world that she’s too disgusted generally to even touch meat, let alone eat insects. How can you butcher a deer when you can’t even touch ground beef?

And yet, many do. Why? Do they want to die? Or do they perceive it (rightly or wrongly) as their least-bad option?

There’s actually a big problem with how few will. Some use us to get back at old enemies. A few believe in “the cause.” But it’s never the least-bad option; it’s usually the most-bad option.

The point is that rather than assuming that we know what’s best for them, we should ask the Iraqis — and the plants — what their criteria are.

And again, see animism. That’s to animism what, say, repeatable experimentation is to science. They’ve already sounded off that their criteria are the same as every person’s: more of us, better off, able to do more. This gets down to the “Selfish Gene” level of universality.

I feel like we’re just going around in circles. But I’ll say again that you don’t know their motivation for doing these things. Maybe, as I say, it’s a survival strategy. Maybe it’s part of a plan to eventually kill us all off. We don’t really know.

I suppose if you reject the clearest way anyone’s ever voiced their affirmation, then no, we don’t know. But the plants have been much more clear than you or I have.

So what? I guess only that we should make it part of our project to figure out ways to ask them what they want from us; or even, indeed, whether they’d prefer we fuck off (or figure out how to convert sunlight to energy for our own damn selves) altogether.

Most of the plant world would die off if we did. What would survive would be incredibly impoverished. And if you’ve studied animism for very long, you know they haven’t kept their opinions to themselves, but you keep suggesting this as a hypothetical, rather than as an historical fact, so I don’t think you have.

Before you’ll reach sustainability, your veganism will become a hurdle you’ll have to overcome.

Too true! And it’s one (the only one, probably) that I’m really not sure I’ll be able to overcome. I’m not philosophically opposed to hunting; but honestly don’t know whether I personally can do it. Time will tell.

No; cooperating with the American forces is a death sentence.

And yet, many do. Why? Do they want to die? Or do they perceive it (rightly or wrongly) as their least-bad option?

I offered some criteria that I think most Iraqis would agree with, and they had nothing to do with Saddam.

The point is that rather than assuming that we know what’s best for them, we should ask the Iraqis — and the plants — what their criteria are.

Because they’ve gone to such great lengths to accept us, embrace us, and include us in their community.

I feel like we’re just going around in circles. But I’ll say again that you don’t know their motivation for doing these things. Maybe, as I say, it’s a survival strategy. Maybe it’s part of a plan to eventually kill us all off. We don’t really know.

I presume you’ve intuited their feelings on the matter more less accurately. But without asking, neither you nor I know that your interpretation is correct.

So what? I guess only that we should make it part of our project to figure out ways to ask them what they want from us; or even, indeed, whether they’d prefer we fuck off (or figure out how to convert sunlight to energy for our own damn selves) altogether.

Starting from the standard modern Western mindset, he felt driven to ask himself repeatedly: “Am I making this up…?” Yet his practical results suggested again and again that he was contacting something real, and the more he followed it, the more convincing it became.

I think that’s a gift of the kind of self-confidence you get from a strong community, like Jean Liedloff discussed in The Continuum Concept, or Sorenson in “Preconquest Consciousness.” We’ve been taught for so long to ignore our feelings, that naturally we disbelieve them and figure we must be making it up.

As one who has pursued and participated in unmistakeable and sometimes quite flamboyant ‘parapsychological’ — call them that — incidents for many years, I know — well, I firmly believe, anyway — from direct personal experience that mind seems to fraternise with and use brain, but not to be confined to it; nor is it, apparently, nothing more than an epiphenomenon of neurological function, as reductive, materialist Western science would have us accept.

Cartesian dualism has led us to the position of a profound lack of respect for our physical bodies. We feel and think with our whole bodies. “Mind” is a verb, not a noun; it’s something the body does, in relation with the world around it. I get nervous when people talk about things like, “nothing more than an epiphenomenon of neurological function, as reductive, materialist Western science would have us accept,” because what follows is usually domesticated thought at its finest: appeals to some superstitious “world of Forms” or “spirits” separated from the world of our direct senses, always trying to drive us further from our sensuous experience of the living world.

May I suggest also that, as Tolkein imagines so vividly in his descriptions of the nature of Ents and Huorns in his Ring cycle, many nodes of the overall life of the Gaia web — big trees, for example — live on a much longer, slower timescale than humans, just as we see the timescale of bacterial life as incredibly fast and brief from our perspective, and that of virtual particles unimaginably faster and shorter again.

Absolutely! Have you seen this? I love that video.

Putting these two ideas together, we can see that the physical sidekick of plant intelligence — the plant brain — could well be so spread out from our perspective, and operating on such a different timescale, that it would be easy for Western science, with its very short life-so-far, to miss it.

Well that can’t be it; there are plenty of plants that live much shorter than we do; plants that live only a year or two. Not all plants live for centuries on end.

Yes, assuredly plants are people too. Everything that is, is a person.

Most animists disagree, like the Ojibwe elder quoted above. Only some of those rocks were people; most weren’t.

Yes, I agree that veganism is an industrial artifact- where else are we to get the synthetic fibers and processed soy products made miles away? But insofar as it does imply an abstention of factory farmed meat and dairy and eggs, and insofar as the baseline is commercial agricultural consumption (and I think that’s a fair baseline for most of the US population), it’s less bad.

I’m not so sure. If you want to live sustainably, you’re almost certainly going to have to eat meat. Being a vegan makes rewilding much more difficult, if not impossible. Maybe it’s “less bad” in absolute terms, but it moves you even further away from being “good.” Before you’ll reach sustainability, your veganism will become a hurdle you’ll have to overcome.

And yeah, eating local is better, though there was a bit of attention in eco cirles a little while back about New Zealand grass fed meat being less ecologically intensive, even when shipped to Europe, than some of the local foodstuffs, mainly because of the conventional fertilizers and pesticides used in the latter.

But even then, it’s still moving you away from a relationship with your landbase. It’s still moving you away from becoming more native, from rewilding, from attuning yourself to the rhythm of your place’s seasons, tastes, smells, etc. So like veganism, it might be “less bad,” but it’s also further away from “good.”

Eating locally, seasonally, and lower on the food chain must be less unsustainable than eating locally, seasonally, and higher on the food chain?

For alpha predators, yes. Probably not for ungulates, but we’re not ungulates, we’re humans. We’re omnivores. We’re fairly high on the food chain, for the most part. If you try to eat lower, then you are necessarily engaging in an unsustainable system. That’s just another habit you’re going to have to break to become actually sustainable.

Hmmm, it occurs to me that the fruitarian diet has an ethical claim over both the vegetarian and the meat-eating diet…

Perhaps, perhaps not. Thank you, Anonymous, for reminding me of that quote from the Inuit: “The wolves are doctors to the caribou, and keep them strong.” Are you familiar with what happened in Yellowstone when the wolves returned? What would the world be like without herbivores or carnivores? Certainly no fun for the plants, either.

If the plants consent to this arrangement — and I’m not convinced that they have.

If competing for animal attention, trying to become something that animals will like better, taste better, or even just smell better, does not constitute an expression of consent, whatever could? Seems to me that’s about the clearest signal you could ever hope for.

Undoubtedly many do — though not because they like us; but rather because they perceive it as their surest means to survival.

No; cooperating with the American forces is a death sentence.

I’m sure there are plenty of people who genuinely believe that Iraqis are better off than before the invasion, based simply on the reasoning that, “Saddam is gone, obviously they’re better off.” But Iraqis most likely have other criteria.

I offered some criteria that I think most Iraqis would agree with, and they had nothing to do with Saddam.

1. Are there more Iraqis now than before?
2. Is the average Iraqi wealthier and healthier than before?
3. Can Iraqis do things now that they could never do before?

The answer is an astounding no on all counts. You can’t say that for plants. There are more plants, more kinds of plants, and they’re richer and able to do far more now than they ever could before animals. Yes, I agree, that it would be for the plants to decide. But I think they’ve made their decision astoundingly clear. They’ve done more than become dependent on us; they compete for our favor, they give us fruit, adapt to smell better or attract our attention, because animals have helped plants so much that one of the best strategies plants have developed is to get animals to do stuff for them. They positively love us.

Furthermore, even if they’d agree that they’re better off, how do we know that they feel it was worth the sacrifice?

Because they’ve gone to such great lengths to accept us, embrace us, and include us in their community.

Or, they could very well have communicated their approval to the first animals, only to see the human animal violate the terms of the initial agreement.

They communicate their approval to each succeeding generation of animists, and one suspects other animals, too. It wasn’t humans who violated the agreement, just one culture of humans among many, who finally managed to convince themselves that plants had nothing to say, because they had grown tired of hearing them shouting to stop.

Science only proves the obvious.

Well that’s just ridiculous. Science has proven some pretty fascinating and non-obvious things.

For some that fills the need left by the loss of the capacity to believe.For others it is a stepping stone to belief. I prefer to concentrate experiencing the things that matter - Nature and Meditation, without trying to wrangle endlessly over the exact meaning of these terms. As they say, you can only lead the horse to the water:)

That’s every bit as inane as when you hear people tell you that science is the only way to know anything. We have many ways of knowing, and all of them have value. You might as well reject hammers forevermore and tell us how the screwdriver is the only tool we’ll ever need. There’s no one right tool; a well-stocked toolbox is useful. There’s no one right way to know, either, and being a zealot for one way doesn’t make you any less foolish than a zealot for another.

How do we justify in our minds the fact that wolves need to kill to eat? We don’t! We accept that that is the way it is for wolves.

Yeah; it’s not our problem, that’s for the wolves to figure out. We need to figure out our own way of life. But if someone takes more than he gives, the community is diminished by that person; that person can’t be allowed to keep going, or he’ll destroy the whole community. So how do you give back more than you take? Wolves give back more than they take. So do most humans–all but one culture.

If we can accept that for wolves, why can’t we accept that for humans?

Because we are humans. Just as it’s up to wolves to figure out what works for wolves, so it’s up to humans to figure out what works for humans. That would be us, so we can’t just leave that one alone. If not us, who?

The fact that wolves reintroduced into yellowstone allowed more plant diversity was not because the wolves were actively conserving plants. The wolves were being wolves, the deer were being deer, the various plants were being themselves.

And part of being wolf is to give back more than you take. That’s very much what animism is all about; how do you ask permission? How do you give back more than you take? According to animists, other animals are animists, too, and they engage in some of the same rituals humans do to give back more than they take. We’re the ones obsessed with conscious thought; they care more about ritual, and conscious or not, there can be no denying that wolves following wolf rituals (like the Hunt) helps give back more than they take.

Suvine, that’s just ridiculous. Meat is no starvation food; hunter-gatherers pursue meat vigorously, because there’s nothing that can match it for its protein density. Meat can be eaten raw, but we generally find cooked meat more palatable because we evolved from scavengers, so we prefer the taste of meat when its texture more resembles that of rotting flesh. Cooking does diminish meat’s nutrition, but not as much as you claim, unless it’s being vastly overcooked. It’s a balance of nutritional value and palatability, which is the same balance struck with the preparation of vegetables and fruit, too. As for saying that humans eat fruit like monkeys, that just shows a good deal of ignorance about monkeys. Sure, we have a fructarian ancestry, and before that, an insectivorous ancestry. But chimps eat meat, too. And before we were omnivores, we were also scavengers. Seeing an animal and not wanting to rip its throat out just means you’re not crazy. Normal people only kill animals for food when they go hunting for them. You don’t see lions normally killing anything that wanders past them, either, you notice.

I am like my monkey relatives. I LIKE FRUIT the most.

Meat is famine food. When there is nothing else to eat. And if it’s so good and great, why don’t you eat it raw? Cooking destroys 85% of protein, kills all enzymes and most vitamins.

That presents us with the basic dilemma of animal life: all animals live only by killing others.
…
How, then, do animals justify their existence?
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Animals give back more than they take.

Ethics doesn’t say anything about modes of existence(or it shouldn’t, it probably does, try to get a philosopher to shut up ).

The idea that it is necessarily bad to kill anything is a function of our “extremist” ethics that attempts to put (civilized) humanity in control of all of the actions of the natural world. How do we justify in our minds the fact that wolves need to kill to eat? We don’t! We accept that that is the way it is for wolves. If we can accept that for wolves, why can’t we accept that for humans? (Ok, I can imagine that there are people who, given the wolf example would think, “they don’t know any better”, which is an even more egregious example of extremist ethics)

If an animal returns to it’s environment more than it takes (in terms of diversity, etc.) that is an unintended consequence of the animal’s mode of existance. (Ok, more accurately, it is a result of coevolution, but coevolution is not planned by the participants and is therefore an unintended side effect) The fact that wolves reintroduced into yellowstone allowed more plant diversity was not because the wolves were actively conserving plants. The wolves were being wolves, the deer were being deer, the various plants were being themselves.

JimFive