Woods Wanderer

On the eve of a major shift of power in these dis-United States, I feel the urge to speak out for sanity even though I don’t know much about such things. My own grasp of reality is tenuous, and I struggle daily to maintain it. All the same, I see madness breaking out all around me – exceptional even by the standards of our time.

It is not just a matter of liberal versus conservative. That’s an old argument, as common as the sun rising. No, it goes much deeper than that. When liberals fight with liberals and conservatives fight with conservatives, you know there is big trouble afoot. As Westerners, we watch Arabs fighting with Arabs then shake our heads at the absurdity of their divisiveness, wondering why they don’t see it. Well, now we know. Now we are the same way.

On a bookshelf in my study sits a ceramic log cabin. It’s a recently acquired family heirloom that reminds me of a fantasy I’ve nurtured most of my life: to someday retreat to a cabin deep in the woods. No, not a Thoreauvian experiment in self-sufficiency, but instead an escape from what I call the madness of civilization. Is such an escape even possible in these modern times? How deep would I have to go to escape property taxes, liability insurance, and all the other trappings of civil society? Could it be anything short of an outlaw existence? Would I still be able to access the Internet?

Whether we like it or not, we are all connected now. The world in the 21st century is truly global. The nationalistic urges cropping up all over the place are only longings for the good ol’ days, when us-versus-them was easy, when our tanks met with their tanks on the battlefield and the winner took all. Hmm… Not so easy nowadays, is it? I know the Chinese are up to no good but I still buy their stuff at Walmart. How about you? Do you really believe that you can live your life these days in any way that isn’t globalized?

Cursed with a tendency to philosophize, I can’t help but see the flaws inherent in any worldview that I or anyone else could possibly devise. Like everyone else, I am only human. My reasoning powers are imperfect no matter how hard I try to make sense of things. That said, just imagine the difficulty I have in the voting booth, thrashing about in the quagmire of good and evil while selecting people to run the government. Oh, the righteous have it so easy by comparison. They know exactly who to pick, and who to shoot at when the war breaks out.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m no peacenik. I know we can’t all just get along, and I know the difference between right and wrong. I know, for example, that rounding up the millions of people that you don’t like and putting them in gas chambers is a really bad idea. And when a True Believer goes down that dark road, there’s only one way to stop them from creating hell on earth. But the problems that humankind creates for itself cannot ultimately be resolved by armed conflict. That’s a fantasy even greater than my cabin in the woods.

One could argue that globalism is exactly what fuels our divisiveness. When there was plenty of space between the few bands of hominids roaming the earth thousands of years ago, there was a lot less fighting no doubt. With over 7 billion of us crowding the earth now, and technology connecting us, major conflicts are inevitable. We can’t just retreat to our own little corners any more and ignore everyone else. So we must find a way, somehow, to live together. And that begins with tolerance.

Being wild at heart, I still escape to the woods whenever I can, to breathe easy for a while, get a handle on myself, and find my place in the world. But these forays are temporary. I spend most of my days living among my own kind in the developed lowlands where conflicts abound, doing my best to be as civil as possible. And that, I believe, is what all men and women should do: be as civil to each other as possible. The alternative is so ugly that I don’t even want to consider it. That which divides us could easily destroy us all.

Tags: divisiveness, geopolitics, globalism, politics, the human condition

About a hundred days after the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded, it became clear that the cap on the leaking wellhead would hold.  Millions of barrels of oil had spilled into the Gulf of Mexico by then, but at least we could breathe easy again, knowing that the mess wouldn’t get any bigger.

Various officials have assured us that most of the oil has been burned, collected, or otherwise disbursed, so what the heck. . .  No sense crying over spilled oil, right?

Everyone is tired of hearing about it.  Consequently, the media is slowly relegating this story to the back burners.  Soon it will slip from view altogether.  Everything but the litigation, that is.  And then it’ll be business as usual, until the next big environmental disaster captures the headlines.

Meanwhile, greenies like me traipse off to the woods to escape the madness of civilization.  How do we reach the trailheads?  By car, of course.  My car runs on fossil fuels.  How about yours?  I figure it takes a gallon of gas to reach the nearest trailhead and another to get home.  That’s about 4 or 5 gallons of crude oil.

Short of buying an electric car or living off the grid (neither one of which I can afford), I have little choice.  The socially responsible thing to do would be to carpool, but I’m not that social.  So I’ll either drive to the trailhead or stay home and hike Aldis Hill again.

How many decades have we been on this merry-go-round?  Too many.  And there’s no end in sight.  Oh sure, I could tell you about the many promising clean tech companies I’ve discovered during my research, but since I’ve lost half of my nest-egg investing in them, I probably shouldn’t go there.  Fact is, the much-touted alternatives to fossil fuels aren’t really valued.  Not yet.  I figure it’ll take a few dozen more world-class disasters before they are.  Looks like H. sapiens isn’t as sharp a thinker as he/she used to be.  Or maybe all the political rhetoric is clouding the matter.

We can blame the BP executives for their gross negligence, Transocean for operating the rig, or Haliburton for the nebulous role it played.  We can blame the government in general for their slow and ineffectual response, or blame Obama in particular for endorsing offshore drilling last year.  We can blame those who drive gas guzzlers, the greedy guys on Wall Street who trade in black gold, or OPEC for controlling the global flow of oil, thereby forcing us to desperate measures.  The list goes on.  But Pogo said it best, I think:  “We have met the enemy and he is us.”

As long as we keep pumping gas into our cars, we are screwed.

Tags: change, clean tech, geopolitics, green economy, the environment

President Obama is one of the more thoughtful, intelligent, and humane world leaders to come along in recent years, and that is why he has received the Nobel Peace Prize ahead of any real accomplishments.  All the same, he didn’t shy away from harsh geopolitical realities when he gave his acceptance speech yesterday.  It made a lot of people squirm, I’m sure.  Realism or idealism?  “I reject this choice,” he said in his defense of “just war,” thus exposing him self to criticism from all quarters.  And suddenly I feel a tremendous urge to pull on my hike boots and go for a long walk.

Some insights come to me instantaneously, while I’m conversing with someone, reading, driving, showering, or just staring out the window.  Others have to be wrenched from the deepest recesses of my brain.  Complex problems, harsh realities, difficult matters both personal and universal – these I cannot face while sitting or standing still.  My legs have to be moving in order for me to gain any fresh insight into them whatsoever.  I am one of those “philosophical tramps” that Barbara Hurd talks about in her book, Stirring the Mud, who can face great difficulties only by walking.  And now, after reading Obama’s acceptance speech, I have much to consider, requiring a good, long stretch of the legs.

I too reject the false choice between realism and idealism – between the harsh realities that all pragmatists learn to accept over time, and the unsinkable hopes of dreamers.  But it’s a tough place to be, between the two, and only the perpetual contradiction of wild nature gives me room enough to maneuver between what is and what could be.  Only in the wild does anything human make sense to me, including my own pragmatism, my own cherished dreams.

The other day I cut tracks in the snow while walking among the trees, trying my damnedest to get to the root of personal matters that have been troubling me for quite some time.  On other outings, I have walked to gain a morsel of wisdom concerning metaphysical matters way too abstract to trouble most people.  Personal or impersonal, it’s all the same to the wild.  That oracle doesn’t differentiate between the one and the many.

Perhaps we shouldn’t either.  Perhaps that which affects one of us affects us all.  Perhaps the most profoundly philosophical matters are those that determine how we go about our daily lives.  The gas in the tank of my car, for example, is geopolitical.  Its emissions will have an impact, great or slight, upon every other creature on this planet.  That’s something to consider, anyhow, as I’m motoring to the nearest trailhead.  And perhaps that’s what Obama was driving at in his speech.  I don’t know, I’m not sure, so I’ll go for a long walk and think about it.  That is, after all, what we philosophical tramps do.

Tags: geopolitics, insight, philosophy, reflection, the wild, walking