The introductory chapter of historian Gray Brechin's must-read Imperial San Francisco is entitled “The Urban Maelstrom.” The chapter begins with a reference to Edgar Allen Poe's A Descent Into The Maelstrom, a tale of the now-eponymous sea storm with a whirlpool at its center. It's an apt metaphor, an only slightly hyperbolic description of the voracious relationship large cities have with the land that surrounds them. As Poe describes the Maelstrom:
The most coherent elucidation on reality I've read, a clear connecting of dots.
I believe the panaceas will happen in small pockets and that the rest is "bleak" to say the least. Because at root is unconsciousness in about 99.9999% of humans on the planet, most particularly decision-makers.
Some years ago I gave myself permission to make this small personal bubble of sanity and beauty a priority; happy to find many of my desert-dwelling friends doing same.
Deborah Bird Rose, in Wild Dog Dreaming, Death and Extinction, writes that while "you may not be interested in extinction, extinction is interested in you." Would that extinction might be encouraged to put the big-screen teevee and its friends and relations to the front of the line. Even the Western Meadowlark and the Ferruginous Hawk are threatened, now, out our way. But the power-centers that drive the metropol care about the short grass prairie about as much as they care about the Ivanpah Basin: not much. Metropols don't last long when they ignore the periphery that feeds them (one hopes).
Excellent post, Chris. Dovetails very well with my own from today. We must be on the same wavelength.
The most coherent elucidation on reality I've read, a clear connecting of dots.
I believe the panaceas will happen in small pockets and that the rest is "bleak" to say the least. Because at root is unconsciousness in about 99.9999% of humans on the planet, most particularly decision-makers.
Some years ago I gave myself permission to make this small personal bubble of sanity and beauty a priority; happy to find many of my desert-dwelling friends doing same.
Thank you, Chris.
Deborah Bird Rose, in Wild Dog Dreaming, Death and Extinction, writes that while "you may not be interested in extinction, extinction is interested in you." Would that extinction might be encouraged to put the big-screen teevee and its friends and relations to the front of the line. Even the Western Meadowlark and the Ferruginous Hawk are threatened, now, out our way. But the power-centers that drive the metropol care about the short grass prairie about as much as they care about the Ivanpah Basin: not much. Metropols don't last long when they ignore the periphery that feeds them (one hopes).
Thank you, Chris.