Archives of the Eleventh Headwaters Conference, November 3-5, 2000
Democracy Recapitulates Proctology
Or, How I learned to drive an SUV and stopped worrying about the greenhouse effect (A cogent analysis of post-modern Headwaters apocalypse and its concommitant cyberdevelopment paradigm)
11th Headwaters Conference Keynote Address
John Nichols, Taos, New Mexico.
Greetings, my fellow carnivores.
It makes me happy to see so many well-fed middle-class North Americans willing to pay $25.00 to spend three days excoriating themselves for screwing up the planet, but good.
Thank you for paying my exorbitant fee here tonight of $1,000 dollars, for which I only had to spend three months building a file on relevant Headwaters topics, and then writing a speech over a two week period of eight hour days, and then driving north 200 miles, losing three days out of my life in order to deliver the speech to you all, whose lives, no doubt, will be enriched and changed forever by my cogent insights into this region's sodomy, excuse me, "economy."
I'd like to give special thanks to George Sibley for inviting me back to the original scene of my crime. Eleven years ago I made an appearance at the first Headwaters Conference, during which I launched an impromptu piano concert in a boogie-woogie mode, accusing Kit Carson of genocide. After that, for some reason invitations for me to return were lost repeatedly in the mail between Gunnison and Taos, New Mexico where I live.
Of course, there may be a failure to communicate here, but I hope not. I am reminded of a famous story about Che Guevara and Cuba. After Fidel Castro and Che won the revolution, and Fidel was trying to put together a new government, he needed an economist to run the National Bank. So, in a meeting, he asked, "Who's an economist?" Che thought Fidel had asked, "Who's a communist?" So raised his hand. And instantly Fidel made him president of the National Bank.
Well, speaking frankly as a man who's lost everything in a divorce three times, I've never considered myself a great economist. But when George Sibley asked me if I'd come up here and talk about being a communist, I was only too happy to oblige.
Especially since there's going to be a great election in our country on November 7, and I never pass up an opportunity to prosylitize the American Electorate about my feelings on the candidates during this hallowed season. After all, we live in a democracy, so I'm told, with a two party system that this year is going to offer us a choice between a Shrub and a Bloody Mess. One candidate has been called a Maserati, the other a Volvo, and I have read numerous incisive newspaper columns and editorials expounding at length upon the respective attributes of these two makes of vehicles. Every four years I find myself utterly thrilled by the intellectual intensity and vacuity of the political debates around presidential elections, and I'm also flabbergasted by the vast ideological diversity offered to us by the various candidates.
For example: Al Gore is a capitalist and Dubya is a capitalist. But whereas Dubya is five feet nine inches tall and weighs 178 pounds, Al Gore is six feet tall and weighs 192. Also Bush has thicker hair than Gore and a different accent. The amazing range of differences evident in these salient points alone between candidates have me so excited by the election that I can't wait to vote.
And I am not alone, it seems, because it is predicted that at least thirty, maybe even thirty-five percent of the registered voters in America can't wait to vote either. That's how a democracy works, and it's what makes union so great.
Be that as it may, I started thinking about this conference way back in February when George Sibley got in touch. And I've been thinking about it ever since. My thinking has taken place during the worst drought I have ever experienced here in the west, and also one of the heaviest fire seasons. Where I live, in Taos, New Mexico, there were a couple of months when all we did was breathe smoke, first from the Los Alamos Fire, then from a bunch of other New Mexico fires, and then from the fires in Montana and Wyoming and Idaho and Hades. Visibility in Taos was often only ten or fifteen miles.
And it got so dry in Taos that Chaptstick was going for thirty bucks a pop.
Every day felt like apocalypse to me. Then the National Forest was closed for five weeks because of fire danger so I couldn't even take my daily hike in the hills near Taos until the numerous bomb threats I e-mailed to the Floresta convinced them to reopen.
The fire season was terrible because a hundred years of fire suppression have mangled our forests, making them cluttered and unhealthy so that when fires do take off, they burn with far too much intensity, and cause way more destruction than normal fires are supposed to. We are learning that fire suppression is insane, but we can't stop doing it because hundreds of thousands of people have built wooden houses inside the forest, which is nuts, but of course their private property is sacred, so billions of dollars are spent suppressing fires that shouldn't be suppressed in order to save houses that shouldn't be built where they are built because they are going to be burned eventually anyway because fire suppression builds up fuels that inevitably have to burn even though insurance companies don't agree with the laws of nature and won't pay off on claims made by people who should have known better than to trust the scumbag insurance companies in the first place.
That's one small example of our economy at work, in a syndrome made famous by Joseph Heller in his caustic novel, Catch 22. I'll admit, I'm a masochist. Every day I read newspaper articles about the Greenhouse Effect, ozone holes, and global warming. I also read about Speed Dating and death metal groupies, but those topics are less germaine to this evening's discussion. This past summer of grim and deadly drought, as you might imagine, fairly curdled my masochistic testes. By August I was having genuine anxiety attacks about eco-collapse as well as about Liz Taylor's weight problems, which are one and the same. For years and years I have adamantly railed against an economy, a lifestyle, a philosophy, a mindset, a culture that seems dead set on committing planetary suicide. "Growth for the sake of growth," I usually screech in every single shrill peroration that escapes from between my frothing self-righteous lips, "is the ideology of the cancer cell." That's a quote from Cactus Ed Abbey, a philandering anarchist much revered in the Headwaters Region, who never came up with a plan to save us, but he sure could make us chortle on our way toward the graveyard.
I became convinced long ago that the world was headed for a monster global social and eco-disaster, and the United States--the biggest bully on the block--was going to lead the way. I came to this conclusion after studying American history beginning with the pilgrims, Indian genocide, slavery and our plantation mentality, Manifest Destiny and buffalo destruction, immigration policies, the building of railroads and the rise of the Standard Oil Company, the labor wars, and the movies of PeeWee Herman.
Our President Woodrow Wilson once said, "We are all caught up in an economic system that is heartless. If you really study the four hundred years of historical imperatives that created and shaped the ideology behind Wal-Mart, Donald Trump, and Mickey Mouse, chances are you'll at least pause over your latte, glance up, and feel some small twinge of apprehension about the antics of your happy little freckle-faced soccer-star kid across the living room at the computer console playing some popular Nintendo ripoff called "Death Slobs Rape and Dismember Blond Cheerleader Girls."
I know I did, and I concluded that one interesting aspect of our political system called "Democracy," is that it seems to have abdicated its high moral ground to the more venal tenets of our economic system called capitalism. Which has now helped spawn a global economy where the top 200 families on earth control as much wealth as the poorest two billion people on the bottom. Years ago, in Vietnam, an American officer stated, "We had to destroy the town in order to save it." All of us today support an economy that is predicated on destroying the planet in order to save it.
But in the past twenty-five years I never really got depressed thinking about the negative forces driving humanity toward global apocalypse...until this last summer. Starting in January I could see the drought and the fires coming, and I felt a sense of doom. But whenever I expressed my misgivings to fellow Taos Citizens, they just looked at me, like, duh. Everyone seemed oblivious. They loved the cheery sunny weather. And they kept on rushing about in their Ford Explorers and Chevy Suburbans buying and selling and consuming and defecating in a frenzy of growth-oriented activity that looked to me like so many jacked-up amphetamine freaks buttfucking each other in a free-for-all in a mammoth garbage can full of overweight circus clowns.
At home, last summer, I'd turn on the TV, and the hysterical onslaught of shop-til-you-drop commercials literally buggered me. When I looked at that stuff, especially during a drought that must be part of the Greenhouse Effect that is caused by climax capital gone amok, it isn't funny, it isn't clever, it isn't even entertaining or seductive. In fact, it is so utterly scarey I want to run outside and hop in my old 1980 Dodge D15 pickup truck and commit suicide by driving headfirst into a McDonald's at 80 mph warbling the Singing Chipmunks Christmas song.
Back on May 4, 2000 I read a column by an Albuquerque Ú ÚJournalÛ Û writer named Larry Calloway and put his column in my Headwaters file. Calloway castigated Albuquerque because its "Growth Lags Behind Other Western Cities." In 1980, Albuquerque was the fifth biggest city in the west. Today, Albuquerque is only the nation's 60th fastest growing city, and losing ground daily. Compared to Las Vegas, the fastest growing city in the nation, wrote Calloway, Albuquerque was "abysmal." And he feared things were "getting worse," as more and more cities were growing faster than Albuquerque, which had appallingly fallen to a ranking of 144th in the nation in 1998.
Hello? Earth to Larry Calloway? Well, I shouldn't have been surprised. About the only economic philosopher I ever read who thought that capitalism could be successful without being locked into exponential growth was John Stuart Mill. Everyone else presumes that what's good for General Bullmoose is good for everybody and material elephantiasis cum hydrocephalicism is the way to go. You can't stop progress, that's the American Way.
We are trained by our economy to believe growth is sacred. We believe in allowing "the invisible hand" of the market to decide. We may claim to be ecologists, we may say we want a sustainable economy, we may scoff at golf courses, ski resorts, and other forms of recreation development in the Headwaters region, but most of us through our daily consumption habits, support the market, and what we support is making growth inevitable beyond the ability of our biological capital to support us because the invisible hand of the market keeps spanking the economic monkey--that's why it's called "climax capitalism." Which is the main problem on both local and global levels.
Now: If I understand the Headwaters premise correctly, it considers itself a specific geographical region and would like to think that this region can in some way define and affect its own destiny apart from the whole. Lotsa luck. John Muir once said, "Whenever we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe." John Donne wrote, "No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.
This region's economy has been a part of the main ever since Spaniards, and then Americans, clumped into the area and began hacking apart the indigenous hillbillies. Certainly, the region has been a part of the main since the advent of modern laissez-faire capitalism, which we might date around the publication of Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations in 1776. Adam Smith is the man behind the attitude that gives all of us the legendary hard-on that sets the invisible hand to spanking our collective monkeys.
I don't believe this area ever had a Sensitive New Age or Balanced Economy, so I'm not sure there exists any historical foundation here upon which to build, or go back to, a less divisive, more balanced, and, dare I say, egalitarian? economy. I bring up "egalitarian," because nowhere on earth will ever have a viable and sustainable economy until the class warfare that blights the planet is demobilized and exchanged for an equal distribution of wealth and civil rights for all. I'd call that democracy. And base it on the U.S. Declaration of Independence, which has nothing to do with the stultifying New York Yankee type economy running this Xenophobic country...which every four years feels proud that its Olympic basketball team, made up of NBA professionals earning 87 million dollars a year, apiece, can win a gold medal by defeating Lower Slobovia's amateur basketball bozos by a margin of 100 points. Why does that make us so proud. "Winning isn't everything," said legendary Green Bay Packer coach, Vince Schwarzenhitler, "it's the only thing."
I listen to people in this region talk about the good old days. They bitch about how newcomers are destroying a way of life. But my understanding of our history is that there weren't any Good Old Days. Roderick Nash called westward expansion "a tragic series of ruthless conquests of people and nature." Not even pre-European Native American tribes cathected their transductions of affect harmoniously. There was competition for territory, intertribal raids, kidnapping for slaves. According to Harvard anthropologist, Steven Leblanc, "That warfare was chronic from the earliest times right up until the arrival of Europeans, and that violence among Puebloan people rose and fell in response to climatological changes that, after 1200 or so, brought fierce competition for resources.
But as soon as the religious fanatics in tin suits from Iberia showed up on the distant horizon, a lot of Native lookouts on top of a lot of different buttes, pinnicles, mesas, and chimney rocks said, in unison: "Oh shit, there goes the neighborhood."
Then the Americans wandered in and trampled just about everybody with their mining and ranching and logging and railroads and oil shale exploration and other rapacious extractive activities. If there was anything gentle or friendly or environmentally sound or that established some sort of bucolic peaceful balanced land-worshipping lowkey pastoral cuddly community, I am a monkey's uncle.
I remember a Native American pal of mine saying almost thirty years ago that if Reies Tijerina, the Chicano land grant activist in northern New Mexico, ever succeeded in getting the courts to return to the Chicano people the National Forest Land stolen from Spanish land grants by the American invaders after the war of 1848, the Indians would be waiting at the bottom of the courthouse steps with their hands out for Tijerina to transfer that land back to them, from whom the Spanish stole it in the first place.
Listen to this from the Mancos Times, in Mancos, Colorado, on November 24, 1893, a little over 100 years ago, during the Good Old Days. It's from an outraged editorial about starving Ute Indians killing deer off their reservation. "Every white man caught breaking our game laws," states the editorial, "is severely and justly dealt with, but those lousy, filthy, insolent and murderous bucks can do as they choose." Six days later the same paper remarked about the Utes, "Truly, Uncle Sam has in these Indians another case of the 'White Elephant.' They won't work, and they are not good to eat. They are simply an expensive ornament to the lands, and beyond that are of no earthly use.
Now there's an attitude that "civilized" this region. At one point, the economy of this area was big on mining, and much of the mining--yesterday and today--was based on--is still based on--the 1872 mining law, a great American legal precedent, on the books and governing us, now, for 128 years. Put simply, the 1872 mining law declares that you can drop a hydrogen bomb for fun and profit on just about any old spot of federal property that tickles your fuzzy, and there's not a damn thing anybody can do to stop you. Witness the Climax Mine, the Superfund Summitville gold mine, those tailings mountains in Leadville and Durango, the new Superfund Molymine down in Questa, New Mexico--yada yada. And what's her name, up in Crested Butte--the Red Lady Mine?--possibly soon coming to a theater...of operations...near you. If Adolf Hitler had married Leona Helmsley, their child would've been called The 1872 Mining Law.
I don't think ranching was any friendlier to the land, or to the peaceful folks who were lolling around here compassionately observing nature while they drank mint juleps before the cattle and the woolly maggots arrived. Cows and sheep are extractive industries just like mining, logging, railroads, dams, ski areas, art galleries, and half-pipes for testosterone saturated skate boarding tongue-pierced Eminem-worshipping teenagers in town parks in the picturesque Noble Rockies. You can read plenty of tomes about the devastation ruminants have caused in these here parts. Cow farts produce methane gas that causes epilepsy in environmentalists. When a sheep nibbles gramma grass in Ouray, it destroys the root system all the way to China. And when a conservative politician enters a riparian area, the river dries up in four minutes, flat.
But then, not much business in this area, right up to the present day, has been what you'd call holistic. Most of it has been based on good solid capitalist economics. Maximum feasible profit for minimum investment. Expand or expire. Planned obsolescence and conspicuous consumption. I.e.: find it, feel it, fuck it, forget it. And whether it was mining, ranching, logging, oil shale, or parasailing on Blue Mesa Reservoir, you can bet your sweet bippy that the activities were not dictated by local markets, or by a regional economy, so much as by national and international demands. The bigwigs calling most of the shots sat in Lay-Z-Boy Barcaloungers smoking Habana Cohibas in St. Louis, Chicago, or New York. And their bottom line was profit.
The same situation exists today. If the mines have shut down, and the ranches are going under, and tourism activities and ski areas run by outsiders are taking over from the oldtimers, well, welcome to business as usual. Sometimes we call this business Social Darwinism. Or Survival of the Fittest. Looking Out for Number One. Winning through intimidation. Amenity-Based Economy. Who the heck invented that phrase--"Amenity Based Economy." According to Adam Smith, for every rich person there have to be 500 poor people. Of course, you might not see those poor people in Gunnison, because they live in Guatemala, Honduras, and Mexico. They're conveniently out of sight, but the connection never changes. For you to buy a banana cheap in the Gunnison Safeway, ten workers in El Salvador crap in a cornfield all their lives, and the life expectancy in Mozambique is 47 years.
Actually, a couple of years ago I toured a potato factory operation down in Center, Colorado, during the Monte Vista Crane Festival. Mexican nationals and Central Americans were working on assembly lines under conditions that would have driven me nuts in about two hours for pay right around minimum wage and no benefits. And the tourism, recreation, and skiing industries in Colorado hire, for poverty wages, third world workers who come from as far away as Africa to do the humble jobs in the service sector on which Michael Eisner's lookalike corporate gangsters trophy homes and socially irresponsible billion dollar investment portfolios are based. Amenity-based, that is.
Natural resources are brutalized same as people. And it's always about outsiders waltzing in and taking over from the old outsiders who danced in and took over from the older outsiders who boogied in and took over from the original inhabitants, who took over from the earlier, more original inhabitants. And unless the newcomers who take over from the oldcomers are members of a utopian socialist New Age admiration society, they tend to be mean mofos. Most of us, no matter how pious, given our consumption habits, fall into that category: Mean Mofos.
You have to be that way to walk into a place as pretty as this and run peaceful God-fearing church-going fun-ºloving racists off their farms. As I write these words I'm watching on TV the mideast violence in Israel, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip. It's October 12, 2000. The Palestinians got pushed out in 1948 and they still don't like it. The Jews got eradicated and pushed out of Europe in World War II and they didn't like that either. Everybody wants a homeland, and everybody else wants one too. Just ask the Utes down the road a piece from here.
But if you try and solve your problems by throwing up a fence and being insular, it won't work. No man is an island...apart from the main. Every region exists because of an infinite network of economic, cultural, and historical threads, and there's always changes happening and conflict and new no-good-for-nothing money-grubbing carpetbaggers taking over the territory. I recently read a Pulitzer-prize winning book by Jared Diamond called Guns, Germs and Steel. About the migrations and developments of human societies over the past 7 million years, but most specifically over the last 13,000 years. The one lesson made abundantly clear in the book is that humanity travels just like ocean currents and wind and migrating butterflies. There is a constant ebb and flow and changes and evolutions. When a fifteenth century emporer in western China flicks his fingers and gives an order, there's a chance that a thousand strangers in a different culture will be slaughtered by Chinese warriors three hundred years later and three thousand miles distant, in order to control a trade route or take over a mine full of emeralds.
Where I live in Taos, New Mexico, there was a time when Pueblo Indians controlled the valley for a few hundred years. That ended when Juan de Onate marched out of the Rio Grande Gorge in 1598 under orders from Spain and provincial capitals thousands of miles down south. The Indians revolted and the Spaniards applied the whupping stick by chopping of all their left feet. Spain and Mexico then gave the triumphant Spanish settlers grants of land that had belonged to the native people, and the papers for those grants were filed in Mexico City, Madrid, and Sevilla.
Then the Americans kicked the Spaniard/Mexicans butts and set up McDonald franchises from Costilla to Velarde on orders from Washington DC and Philadelphia. The Spanish and Indians complained by beheading the Americans, defenestrating them, and dropping them into polluted water wells. So the American military marched up to Taos and destroyed the Pueblo in order to save it. Pretty soon, the mining companies and the big sheep conglomerates hit the county like Mike Tyson on a caffeine jag. After that, a bunch of effete artists showed up in Taos trying to paint it to death. And next thing you know the ski area arrived, established by a guy from Switzerland named Ernie Blake who put a sign up at the entrance to his resort: Achtung, you are now leaving the American sector.
That's when the amenity-based tourist boom, that somehow never trickled down to seventy percent of the population, really began in earnest and Winnebagos started cruising the Plaza like decorticate manatees on steroids; and almost all the money was generated by outsiders.
You talk about a regional economy and I was thinking: When have the so-called local yokels here ever truly had control over their economy? Let's take Gunnison as the hub of Headwaters, and do a superficial slalom through its phone book's yellow pages to get an idea of the economy. Chains, the same everywhere in America, jump up and punch me in the eye. A & W, Dairy Queen, McDonald's, Pizza Hut, Subway, Taco Bell. Days Inn, Holiday Inn, Marriott Hotel, Sheraton Resort, Super 8, Best Western. You want a motorcycle or ATV here, you can have it: Kawasaki, Suzuki, Honda, Yamaha, Harley-Davison, Ducati. Ho ming no come chow ki? Murasaki Shikibu. Rental cars? Get 'em from Budget, Hertz, Avis. Car parts? Napa, CarQuest, GM. From the two biggest new car dealers in town you can get Buicks, Chevvies, Chryslers, Dodges, Fords, Jeeps, Mercurys, Olds, Pontiacs--but nothing manufactured here by citizens from this place except a Flintsone hupmobile made in Crested Butte by Italian hod-ºcarriers originally from Genoa. Hardware stores? True Value and Ace. TV stations? I get cable in Taos, 41 channels, and they're almost all national with just one local effort. You got a dish?
The world is at your fingertips, but how much of its brainwashing originates in the Headwaters Region? Our habits are being programmed by Hollywood, Madison Avenue, London and Tokyo, not Gunnison, Crested Butte, Ridgway, or Saguache. You can buy mountain bikes, skis, snowboards up the gazot, but they're all manufactured elsewhere, and the big profits from selling them go out of town. You can buy a pool table in Gunnison, but it was made in Pennsylvania by a corporation based in Montreal financed by investors from Amsterdam using slate mined in Vermont and mahogony from Honduras.
Books and shoes and boots are almost all imported, same with clothing stitched by wage slaves in Hong Kong, Korea, Indonesia. Maybe there's a local lumber mill or two, but I'd be surprised if the big lumber companies around here even get their wood from the region. Certainly, their doors and windows are all manufactured in, and imported from, elsewhere. And local logs go by train to Seattle, by boat to Japan, where they are pulped and pressed into frefab housing kits that are then shipped to San Diego and trucked to Yuma, Arizona, to become temporary toolsheds for snowbirds from Minneapolis.
Phone service? If my phone goes out I have to dial an 800 number in Phoenix or San Diego, haggling with a voice mail system a thousand miles away that'll eventually transfer my information to a dispatching station one quarter mile from my house in Taos, which'll then send over a workman three days later and a whole bunch of dollars short. This is very symbolic of the global economy and our complete lack of control over our own destinies at the local level.
Tourism and camping equipment sold in local Gunnison stores is all imported from Coleman, Patagonia, North Face, and manufactured in Taiwan, China, Dominican Republic, Pakistan. I doubt canoes or kayaks you can buy here are made here, and all the doctors and dentists were most likely educated far away. Fishing flies? Made in Guatemala. Propane? It's New Mexico gas, refined in Houston Texas, then shipped up here with Alabama trucking firms in 18-wheel Peterbilts manufactured in Germany.
Who's your insurance with--State Farm? Farmers? Allstate? And speaking of beef, does McDonald's buy all their's from local ranchers or get it from a feed lot in Costa Rica? I'm betting on the latter. You wanna rent a truck? It'll come from U-Haul and be registered in Michigan. Cheap groceries? Safeway, that's a national chain (whose tomatoes come from Fresno, not Ouray). Who owns and finances the ski area and the chalets in Crested Butte? Probably a consortium of local ranchers who decided to upgrade their operations, right? Yeah, sure. And can you get a credit card from a local credit card company...or are they all Visa, MasterCard, American Express? And prices for the gas for your new trucks and cars: Are they set by local fiat or by corporations thousands of miles distant or by OPEC across the seas? Or by Israeli/Palestinian destabilization of the oil-producing region?
As for the snow that blankets the ski mountains and lures in all the rich idiots, I mean Salvation Angels in quilted jumpsuits that set the chain hotels and motels and restaurants and so forth to jumping, there's little control of that anymore. You can't really blame Crested Butte for Global Warming, but you can blame Global Warming for lack of snow in Crested Butte. That's pollution created by manufacturing in Tokyo, Los Angeles, and Rio de Janeiro that determines income from the white powder that falls on the mountains here.
Any region that must import 90 percent of its goods, whose finances, mortgages, bank loans, credit card interest rates, and bond issues depend on capital raised and invested or usuried elsewhere, and that probably exports little more than 2 percent of what it produces, is in my book a colonial country with not much say over its own destiny. This analysis is slapdash, wiseapple, and simplistic, but I bet it contains serious kernels of truth.
I don't know if this answers the question "What is an economy, anyway?" But I would suggest that the Headwaters economy is a global effort, directed by corporations situated all over our nation and all over the globe, and on first inspection there's not really a whole lot we can do about it...unless a majority of people in this region decide to abandon just about everything they believe in, secede from the union and from the global economy, and forge a political, social, and trading alliance with Cuba.
The scarey thing is that the global economic forces laying the spurs to funning us are now predicted to threaten most species on earth, including ourselves, and all the resources that sustain us, even here in the Headwaters Region. About a month ago I saw a short--maybe three minute--report on late night Headline News on CNN that reported matter-of-factly that thousands of birds and animals and insects were going extinct at rapid rates, more thousands of plant species were going extinct at the same rates, and that if these extinctions continued, human beings would also become extinct. Then the cheerful newscaster smiled and brought in a cheerful weather woman to talk about cheerful rainfall across cheerful New England.
Hello? Earth to CNN?
One of the clippings in my Headwaters file is from the Albuquerque Journal of Friday, October 6, 2000. The article states "The hole in the ozone layer over Antarctica stretched over a Chilean city (Punta Arenas) when it ballooned to a record size last month, the first time it has reached a population center, scientists said Thursday." Two articles clipped around the same day from the October 2000 Summit (Colorado) Free Press, excoriated the proliferation of golf courses all around Breckenridge, and detailed how the Controlled Growth Initiative on the November ballot there is being vigorously opposed by most builders, developers, and municipal leaders in the county.
Another article I read about the same time came from a copy of Durango's Inside/Outside magazine explaining how elected officials in Telluride are trying to stop urban sprawl in that town by condemning 857 acres of wetlands near the town slated by developers "for a golf course, luxury hotel, trophy homes, affordable housing, and a commercial center."
All these news reports and articles are dealing with the oncoming extinctions heralded physically (and metaphorically) by last summer's drought, and topped off, on October 26, by release of the latest United Nations report on global warming, which says that heat-trapping man-made chemicals in our atmosphere pose "a risk of devastating consequences within this century." And as I explained earlier, I have felt doomed during these past ten months of drought not because of the drought itself, but because of the reaction to it by the society I live in. People just keep going about business as usual, not even casting a glance around them in alarm, still absolutely convinced that our economic system is sacred, the market is good, growth is inevitable and necessary, and the car to buy--on the cusp of Armageddon--is a three-ton extended-bed mag-wheel 464 horsepower 8-miles-to-the-gallon Chevy tank with dual carburators, souped-up-engine, high-ºcompression heads, glass packs, tinted windows, surroundsound stereo, independent suspension, and overdrive.
Our behavior, in a time of accelerating crisis, makes me think of us as Good Germans running around in our cute little Lederhosen Outfits, lightweight kangaroo hiking boots, knitted goat-hair tube socks, alpine yodling horns, and Bavarian hats with badgerbrushes or pheasant feathers stuck in the bands, orgasmically celebrating a perpetual Octoberfest while pointedly ignoring the Holocaust. Occasionally, a little voice or two peeps out in the wilderness like the last poor lungless hermaphroditic black-bellied salamander left alive underneath the ozone hole. And from the October 15, 2000 Santa Fe New Mexican I clipped a half dozen articles. One talked about environment versus climax tourism in Hawaii as brought into focus by a Sierra Club lawsuit demanding that before Hawaii's tourist bureau spent 114 million dollars to lure more tourists to the already over-inundated Island the state needed to do an environmental impact statement.
Another article was by an American woman in China discussing how Chinese society is being altered by the fact that families are legally permitted only one child per couple. The third article, by a New Mexican columnist, Ana Consuelo Matiella, said:
"A few years ago, I heard the expression "race to the bottom" on National Public Radio. Unfortunately, as often happens when I am listening to the radio in the car, I didn't catch who was being interviewed and so I can't give proper credit to the person who coined the term. The man being interviewed was referring to American involvement in the global economy and how we are driven by profits regardless of the consequences. We are willing to "race to the bottom" to get those profits. It doesn't matter that children are making tennis shoes for $1 a day and working in substandard conditions, that toxic waste is being dumped in rivers, or that the health and welfare of other living creatures are being threatened. What matters is that money is being made."
The article petered out, devoid of cogent analysis, but the frustration--and fear--it expressed is something many of us feel intuitively. We have almost no way of expressing this fear coherently or of acting to change it, however, short of shooting up our local high school or pouring cyanide into the city's drinking water reservoir, because we have not been taught alternative ways of looking at the world. And it's impossible to solve current problems using only the culture, the economy, and the laws that have created this race toward the bottom. We can't use the master's tools to dismantle the master's house.
Any discussion about any economy must admit that our continued insistence on growth, even controlled growth (an oxymoron), is very self-destructive. We are already well beyond the longterm sustainable carrying capacity of the planet. To make room for our expanding numbers, 100 other species go extinct daily. This is a major law of diminishing returns. It's like cutting off Brian Griese's fingers, one by one, every week, yet still expecting the Broncos to win the Super Bowl. The green revolution and the medical conquest of diseases that allows for the growth that threatens most existence today are probably humanity's most nihilisitic inventions, but we hail them as miracles. On earth, war pales as a factor of devastation compared to our daily economic activity. The ever expanding market creates expanding population, expanding resource depletion, expanding social problems, expanding environmental collapse. To the extent that we participate in the market and the growth it promotes we are part of the problem. The current market provides goods that enable us to eat, propagate, survive longer, expand our numbers exponentially. Unchecked population growth is a direct result of the expanding market, which always needs more workers to produce more goods to be consumed by more people. Put another way, if you lock yourself inside your house and eat an exponentially expanding number of Twinkies every day, and take your Metamucil regularly, pretty soon your house will be filled up to the rafters with your own amenity-based shit.
There is now no place on earth not locked into this formula, created by capital generating more capital, including the Headwaters Region. Many people in the Region fear growth because we don't want to wake up one morning and slowly choke to death, twisting and squirming in horrible agony from lack of non-toxic air to breathe, and we don't want to open the door next Halloween and find the 1872 Mining Law standing on the Welcome mat like a very big Blue Meanie, and we don't want to watch our cute freckle-faced kids get flattened by monster trucks going berserk piloted by gangs of Mad-Max lookalikes in hideously over-populated Gunnison County locked in an all-out war among its starving citizens for increasingly limited resources shrinking further because of climatological changes like the Pueblo Indians used to do before the Spanish upped the ante.
Yet for the most part we participate in the market through our consumption activities, which are, at an accelerating pace, forging a deterioration of the region that will inevitably lead to a futuristic hell right out of an updated Godzilla movie directed by the Cohen Brothers starring Dennis Hopper and Puff Daddy Coombs with a retro soundtrack by the Dead Kennedys and the Circle Jerks. The oncoming global dark ages are not yet really evident in spectacular and prosperous Colorado (except in Mile High Stadium), but almost every economic activity in the region is plugged into the building social and environmental crisis around the globe. Guaranteed, it won't be too long before that Ozone Hole reaches Ridgway, and then what will Dennis Weaver say: "Uh-oh, Spaghetti-O?" And when global warming further melts the artic, raising oceans and driving coastal populations inland, you won't believe how many coastal refugees are going to Californicate Colorado without using condoms.
How, then, can the perky little people in a perky little region like this one change the negative momentum? How can we work toward a Mary Poppins/Disney future instead of toward the Freddy Kruger we all know, at least subconsciously, is in store?
This may sound a tad apocryphal, but to break out of the growth cycle that threatens us, we need a different belief system. To launch this belief system we must first acknowledge the impending disaster. Somebody, and then everybody, must declare: "The emperor wears no clothes." In this case the emperor is the economic precepts guiding all our development. Change begins first with the individual, which will be difficult, because at the start anyone who seriously downgrades their climax capitalist sympathies will be pariah--like communists during the McCarthy period--and they will immediately be voted right off this island by the Gunnison Realty Board and the Sheriff's Posse Drill team. No matter. Regional (and global) solutions will begin by abandoning our current competetive impulses toward accumulation and profit, and by losing our tolerance of the human inequalities and eco-devastation necessary to sustain this accumulation and profit.
It's pretty simple: If everybody develops a life style like Mother Teresa and Mahatma Ghandi, we are saved. Don't laugh. Nothing is impossible. Back during the oil embargo of 1973, laws were made to meet the crisis by conserving fuel. Speed limits of 55 mph were imposed across the nation. Detroit retooled and brought us compact fuel-efficient cars that could get 35 miles to the gallon. That was a hopeful first step toward human transportation geared to future survival...but then we stuck a tailpipe in our collective gob and pulled the trigger.
Today, we're back up to 75 mph; and we're going that fast in SUVs that get 3 miles per gallon. This is typical of most suicidal economic activity that defines us. To prepare for future survival, we must go back to the oil embargo mindset, lower speed limits, phase out gas guzzlers, build more fuel efficient cars, shore up public transportation everywhere, and enforce the death penalty for all traffic tickets, no exceptions.
It will do no good to unionize the entire workforce of Gunnison County if that workforce is engaged full-tilt-boogie in the current levels of growth and development and other extractive activities.
Forget recycling, girlfriend. If we create that need, we still got the greed.
We will have to modify our religious beliefs radically in order to survive. Catholicism can no longer ban contraception. Planned parenthood in every community. Anti-abortion beliefs will have to be shelved. Sorry, but at least half of the human lives on earth are not held to be sacred by the "pro-life" capitalists in America. And the plethora of human life on earth is killing everything else. Whatever means we have to limit population must become legal and accessible, from government decree (like China's one child per family) to legalization of the morning-after abortion pill, to the controlled atomic bombing--like the controlled burning of National Forests--of cities over 500,000 people. And it might not be a bad idea to sterilize all Republicans and members of those despicable New York Yankees for whom 26 World Championships and three World Series victories in the last four years just ain't enuff.
All means of population control will be ineffective if the expanding market continues. The only real way to limit population is to limit the production of goods (food, medicine, clothing, housing, etc.) that make population growth inevitable. This means no growth policies everywhere. ZPG. Half a kid per family. Or maybe minus one child per family for the next 60 years. Stop, right where we are. Then phase out the structures that govern us and create new, more survival-oriented alternatives. Call it a socialist democracy. Read Che Guevara's essay "Man and Socialism in Cuba."
The world, and the Headwaters Region, are operating on principles and philosophies of profit and consumption and resource and human exploitation that were formulated hundreds of years ago when Strom Thurmond was just a baby, and those principles have become antiquated and incapable of dealing with present realities.
If you are interested in knowing in broad strokes how we got to where we are today, economically, read Robert Heilbroner's THE WORLDLY PHILOSOPHERS, a history of economic philosophies over the past few hundred years, beginning with Adam Smith. Or you can rent the video of Arnold Swarzenegger in Terminator Two.
The good news is that world capital has only operated in more-or-less its present mode for those few hundred years. Older history proves that we can live in very different societies governed by radically different philosophies: For example, like cannibals in the Amazon, a population control that really works.
But seriously: We invented our current predicament, and should be able to invent our way out of it. Our current behavior is not instinctual or biologically ordained, it is a learned process, and learned processes can be altered. After reading THE WORLDLY PHILOSOPHERS, I would suggest you read Tom Athanasiou's book, DIVIDED PLANET: The Ecology of Rich and Poor. University of Georgia Press. This is an excellent, dismaying, very articulate synopsis of the world situation today: environment, economic systems, globalization, the predictable future. It doesn't mention the Headwaters Region, but, believe me, it talks about the Headwaters Region. There's no way to act locally without understanding globally.
I'd also recommend Barry Commoner's THE CLOSING CIRCLE. It was published 30 years ago, but addresses all the social, ecological, economic issues of the present. Global and local.
The first principle we adopt by which to govern our lives and communities has to be no more growth. Build a twelve foot high electric fence around the Headwaters Region, hire thousands of highly-trained vicious Dobermans to patrol it, issue passports and visas to anyone wishing to leave or visit, set up vasectomy clinics in every town over 200 population, and fine people $50 dollars plus eight days of community service for overeating. The need to limit the human presence and the breadth of human consumptive activities on earth and in the Headwaters region is a no-brainer.
The second principle is an egalitarian human society, so that our lives will no longer be dominated by war and social breakdown, thus freeing us to simply deal with important survival difficulties caused by our activities on earth.
To succeed, it will also be necessary to retool our society to adopt biocentric attitudes. According to David B. Morris, "In biocentric thinking, no single species has domain over the earth. The earth instead is viewed as a community where human and nonhuman life are intricately entwined, where all species live and develop together, where the biosphere, not humanity, occupies the center." Without that attitude, we can kiss the Blarney Stone goodbye.
How we can inspire people to give up their capital-saturated anthropocentric world view is beyond me. Maybe hang them up by their thumbs and administer chili enemas, or threaten to urinate on their new Air Jordans. But that certainly is the crucial struggle of, and for, the future. Educators, business people, and recreators in the Headwaters Region will spearhead the biocentric movement. It's motto will be: "Think like a bug; squeak like a mouse; but don't eat like a horse."
If we could invent the unbelievable universe that we have created in modern times, we can also reinvent it. That is the great possibility within our nature, and I'd like to think that is the reason the Headwaters Conference exists--to reinvent how we think and act in light of the changing world situation. This conference should be an educational forum that helps to envision a totally brave new world. To do this, the conference will have to quit futzing around with wishy-washy intellectual paradigms and break out of the age-old academic synchophancy toward market values that typifies our capitalist-driven educational system. Scholars must dare to seek freedom from the brain and imagination incarceration created by their training.
George Sibley sent me a letter on September 20, saying he hoped that my "presentation will go deeper and farther than a discourse on our collective foolishness in the face of the greenhouse effect, which has been drummed into us now to the point of being more deadening than enlivening. What I guess I want to know--and hope you can help us address--is not just 'what I can do as an individual,' but how we--not 'we' as an agglutinative agglomeration of individuals, but we together here down on the ground, in a place to which we've got some commitment--how we can start creatively and maybe successfully fighting back against the abstractions that tend to dominate us.
Okay, I must apologize to George for standing up here and spouting out his worst nightmare. I can't help it, it's like I have Tourette's Syndrome, I'm sorry. Sue me. Put a stop payment on my check.
But I would say that a great problem he touches on, in his letter, though, is that our society trains us to be individuals, to think like individuals, to compete like individuals, to aggregate as independent economic units, to be alienated as individuals. Capitalism has trained us to think and act as an agglutinative agglomeration of exasperatingly asinine and aggressively acquisitive individuals, rather than as a communal entity. The laws that govern us support individuals, they perpetuate an outdated virtue of selfishness. We live in effectively gated communities (America is a gated country) with a private property bias and NO TRESPASSING sign on every third fencepost, and a cultural mindset for the new all-shopping all-the-time millennium that actually makes Vince Lombardi look like an all-school girl Twiggy-type discreet herbal tea party in an English country garden. We don't care who we hurt elsewhere as long as we get ours, here, now.
In the Headwaters region there is much public land, but its multiple use priorities allow the private development of ranching, mining, logging, and recreation to dominate and dismay the ecosystem. Attitudes about labor are guided by inviolable capitalist precepts, mitigated somewhat by minimum wage laws and unions in some of the industry, though unions often form sweetheart deals with management that dilute their possibilities. No matter what aspect of the economy dominates an area, the principles of individual exploitation by the agglutinating agglomomaniacs are going to be prevalent. These principles are instilled in the schools, churches, newspapers and magazines, and, most effectively, by TV and the Internet and Coca-Cola. They make it difficult to fight back against the so-called abstractions that dominate us because we are the abstractions that dominate us. We are captive to the principles of a so-called free market economy. We are trained to be motivated more by personal self-ºinterest than by communal agendas.
Most of the people who clash within our communities, say Realtors with conservationists, actually agree--underneath--with the same principles even though they may disagree bigtime on inconsequential surface differences. Their differences amount to relatively unimportant nuances, which is the problem with our political system as well. I.e., Bush versus Gore.
That's a clever segue back to reflections on democracy, the lack of which is why Gunnison, America, and the planet are locked into a suicidal version of "Dumb and Dumber" that'll wind up in Purgatory instead of Aspen. Democracy in America exists, if at all, at increasingly retarded levels in our society. We the people don't really govern any more, because, frankly, we don't really understand what the F-word is going on. We've been abdicated from an active role in our system by the Devil in Bill Gates' clothing.
In that same Santa Fe New Mexican of October 15 this year, I cut out two other articles that I thought might be relevant to this talk. One was a cartoon on the editorial page of a Tin Woodman named Al, a scarecrow named W, and a little girl named Voter, walking on a yellow brick road. The tin woodman named Al sang, "If I only had a HEART; the scarecrow named W sang "If I only had a BRAIN!; and the little girl named Voter sang "If I only had ANOTHER CHOICE.
The other article, in the USA WEEKEND magazine that came with the paper, was by TV's popular Lisa Ling, and entitled, "Why Gen Xers just don't care about Election 2000." In the article the 27-year-old Lisa wrote: "Perhaps it's that I've grown up and become cynical about the way our government is run. Or maybe I'm disgusted by the hypocrisy and lies that pervade politics. Either way, there's one thing I'm certain of: My friends and fellow young people are just not interested in this election. We're all fed up."
On October 20 I read in the Albuquerque Journal that "young people are tuning out the presidential campaign in such numbers that they may be the most disconnected group of voters in the nation's history."
And an October 28 Gallop Poll revealed that only one in six young Americans between the ages of 18 and 24 on the nation's college campuses could name both (let alone all four) of the Presidential candidates, and only one in 12 of those same students had higher brain stem activity after 14 years in the U.S. educational system. This is why, instead of solving our problems, we're heading towards hell on a handcart: We are born with our heads up a capitalist rectum.
The definition of a democracy should be: A political system where the people understand how the system works and actively direct it through the electoral process. But our political system called democracy is at low ebb. Our economic system called capitalism rules. The alienation expressed by Lisa Ling dominates our culture and is a deliberate creation of the economic system. Shop till you drop, expand or expire, and don't even think about it--like, whatever, girlfriend. We have become a nation of sado-masochistic Barbie Dolls stuck in a perpetual Christmas season controlled by the Bride of Chuckie. Because Democracy's egalitarian traditions have been overrun by capitalism's unfair directives. Warren Buffet and Bill Gates control this region's economy. Nobody can rein in negative progress because the market insists on that progress. So long as a profit can be made, we're willing to kill all the whales. The market redesigns democracy's laws to meet the market's ends. Leaving us with few legal tools within the system capable of forging an alternative system. This is as frustrating as rooting for the New York Mets or praying for a Dolly Parton spread in Playboy.
Al Gore and George Bush stand for the same thing: McCapitalism. Gore is a slightly more liberal McCapitalist; Bush is a slightly more conservative McCapitalist. But we get pretty much the identical McSociety with either man. Ralph Nader is effectively a McNobody who isn't radical enuff to waste my non McVote on. A two-party or multi-party system would involve candidates with seriously differing ideologies, say a Republican and a Nudist. But as things stand today, we Americans have about as much real political choice as a Muslim woman in Taliban Afghanistan. I'm going to vote for Al Gore because I like Tipper's lips.
So reclaiming our democractic principles might be the first step in fighting the abstractions that dominate us, or in mitigating the warfare over limited resources that already plagues us. How does a region do this? First, it recognizes the need to no longer revere the market above everything else. Groups of people get together, in a Headwaters Conference, in community meetings, in a caucus of democratic, green, or other political parties, and define the issues, paint the overall--macroscopic-- picture, declare that the emperor truly wears no clothes, and they write up a big report--a macroscopic overview, an honest social/economic/environmental impact statement, if you will--suggesting a different way of believing and of forging future solutions by recreating a democratic society. This means debunking the current mythologies that justify the expand-or-expire apocalypse. And it includes changing local laws and priorities, and eventually amending our national constitution.
This group will be ridiculed as utopian, or communist, or infantile and unrealistic. Promise Keepers will threaten to understand and forgive it. But the group will insist on building itself into a functioning political entity. Call it a new party, a study group, a citizen's coalition. It will register all its members to vote and they will all vote in every election, exercising real democracy. They will define themselves as liberation ecologists and for their motto paraphrase the Declaration of Independence: All life is created equal. They will propose their own candidates, and take a stand on every issue. On controlled growth, on wilderness, on speed limits within the county, on all education issues, on public transportation, on free or cheap medical aid for citizens--peoples' clinics--on subdivisions and zoning laws, on logging, grazing, mining, ski valley limits, on reduction of special use permits by private corporations on public land, on fire suppression, water conservation, pesticide and herbicide spraying within the region, on forming a local government EPA, on defeat of conservancy districts like that of Animas-La Plata, on stopping the golf courses, condemning the wetlands. The group will take positions on every local ballot proposition in every election, on local school board responsibility to more enlightened educational possibilities, on sex education in the schools, on free family planning and birth control, on counseling programs for youngsters, limited recreation in fragile areas, on amenity-based usury laws and banking fraud, on encouragement of farmer's markets, agitation for higher minimum wages and union representation and against chauvinism and racism and prejudice against short people with buck teeth, on xeriscaping and minimum lawn watering in dry areas, on building codes and programs for affordable housing, skunk control, raccoon badgering, on promotion of solar energy and wind energy, on growth limits to all destructive economic activities in the area, on limited water and sewage hookups, on such high impact fees for mall developers that they'll commit suicide instead, on indigent funds and homeless shelters for less fortunate residents, on curtailment of wood burning that threatens pollution...and so forth across the spectrum of human activities in the Region.
Roots into, and cultures of, and commitment to specific place will be important, but we must all think global and act local and global because any region is constantly changing and always a part of the main, and if you get bogged down trying to preserve and freeze a place in time you'll be out of the loop entirely and completely ineffectual and the big global bullies will knock you to smithereens like a paper mache pinata at a Cinco de Mayo celebration in Guadalajara.
But none of this can begin to happen or be sustained unless the people involved understand that today's market's profit mechanism is threatening and deadly and suffocates democracy, and that community is more important than individual self, and that a person must lead a sustainable rather than a growth-oriented existence.
In other words, the region will attempt to govern itself to meet social and environmental responsibilities instead of kowtowing principally to the growth-obsessed imperatives of our current materialism.
Here are some quotes from Barry Commoner's THE CLOSING CIRCLE:
"Both socialist and capitalist economic theory have apparently developed without taking into account the limited capacity of the biological capital represented by the ecosystem."
"The real question is to discover what kind of economic and social order is best adapted to serve as a partner in the alliance with nature."
"...in the long run effective social action must be based on an understanding of the origin of the problem which it intends to solve."
"In sum, present productive technologies need to be redesigned to conform as closely as possible to ecological requirements, and most of the present industrial, agricultural, and transportation enterprises reorganzied in accordance with these new designs. In effect, a major part of the new productive enterprises constructed on the basis of postwar, ecologically faulty technology simply has to be rebuilt along ecologically sound lines."
"On ecological grounds it is obvious that we cannot afford unrestrained growth of power production. Its use must be closely governed by over-all social needs rather than by the private interests of the producers or users of power."
"In other words, the ecological imperative calls for the governance of productive processes by social thrift--a criterion which is likely to conflict with private gain."
"Once it is recognized--under the force of the environmental crisis--that no productive system can operate without either fitting into the ecosystem or destroying it, and that the ecosystem is necessarily a social rather than a private good, then the logic of governing production by social criteria rather than by private ones becomes equally evident."
"We now know that modern technology which is privately owned cannot long survive it if destroys the social good on which it depends--the ecosphere. Hence an economic system which is fundamentally based on private transactions rather than social ones is no longer appropriate and increasingly ineffective in managing this vital social good. The system is therefore in need of change."
"What is real in our lives...is the apparently hopeless inertia of the economic and political system; its fantastic agility in sliding away from the basic issues which logic reveals...the frustration of the individual citizen confronted by this power and evasion; the confusion that we all feel in seeking a way out of the environmental morass. To bring environmental logic into contact with the real world we need to relate it to the over-all social, political, and economic forces that govern both our daily lives and the course of history."
"The environmental crisis is somber evidence of an insidious fraud hidden in the vaunted productivity and wealth of modern, technology-based society. This wealth has been gained by rapid short-term exploitation of the environmental system, but it has blindly accumulated a debt to nature...a debt so large and so pervasive that in the next generation it may, if unpaid, wipe out most of the wealth it has gained. In effect, the account books of modern society are drastically out of balance, so that, largely unconsciously, a huge fraud has been perpetrated on the people of the world."
"To resolve the environmental crisis, we shall need to forego, at last, the luxury of tolerating poverty, racial discrimination, and war."
"Over recent years (Garrett Hardin) has expounded on the 'tragedy of the commons'--the view that the world ecosystem is like a common pasture where each individual, guided by a desire for personal gain, increases his herd until the pasture is ruined for all."
"One of the common responses to a recitation of the world's environmental ills is a deep pessimism, which is perhaps the natural aftermath to the shock of recognizing that the vaunted 'progress' of modern civilization is only a thin cloak for global catastrophe. I am convinced, however, that once we pass beyond the mere awareness of impending disaster and begin to understand why we have come to the present predicament, and where the alternative paths ahead can lead, there is reason to find in the very depths of the environmental crisis itself a source of optimism."
I don't think communities can begin to solve these problems, unless individuals within those communities radically alter their own lives as step one. I am not a particularly worth human being, but I have led a fairly sustainable life ever since I entered the economic system as a wage earner in 1965. I refuse to accumulate anything except my own physical ailments. I am not interested in being upwardly mobile. Whether I earn 10 grand a year or 100,000 I try to lead a 10 grand type of life and disperse the other monies to those people or organizations who could use it. Material stuff doesn't interest me. Money makes me so uncomfortable I break out in hives with over $40 bucks in my wallet. I hate shopping like a rat hates clean socks and have little truck with most consuming activities beyond survival. I buy my clothing second hand at Thrift Town in Albuquerque, the store that answers the question: "What happens to dead peoples' clothing?" I'm sixty, and have owned five cars in my life, purchased second hand, cared for diligently, and all of them lasted beyond 200,000 miles. I use very little energy, rarely letting more than two lights burn in my tiny house at once. I wear sweaters, coats, and caps indoors instead of flipping up a thermostat, and I only shed that gear once every four months when I get lucky and engage in the nasties. I don't like to travel unless it's basically for a useful reason, like this speech, or to buy Viagra at half-price in Juarez. I am happy to live like a bum. I don't admire anyone for their fame or fortune except Muhammed Ali and PeeWee Herman. I despise the global racism and inequalities forged by our wealth. I have more freedom than ninety percent of the people I know because I am not in thrall to the economic system. I may be a philosophical basket case or an asinine personality, but economically I don't do a whole lot of damage.
There is no future economy that will work positively here, or elsewhere on earth, without first believing, in some way, shape, or form, along the general material lines that have guided me for most of my existence. Keeping this in mind, you all can now go forth and completely redesign in one weekend a more coherent, humane, and constructive economy for the Headwaters Region.
Hasta la victoria, siempre!