"Pointing
to the logs burning in the fireplace, one child asked me, "What
is fire?" I answered, "Fire is the Sun unwinding from the
tree's log. The Earth revolves and the trees revolve as the radiation
from the Sun's flame reaches the revolving planet Earth... Each ring
of the many rings of the saw-cut log is one year's Sun-energy
impoundment. So the fire is the many-years-of-Sun-flame-winding now
unwinding from the tree. When the log fire pop-sparks, it is letting
go a very sunny day long ago, and doing so in a hurry."
Conventionally educated grown-ups rarely know how to answer such
questions. They're all too specialized."
From
"Critical Path" by R. Buckmister Fuller
The earth is losing its wild places.
Natural resources are being depleted, contaminated, and exploited.
Most humans would agree that these statements are true, and that
these issues need to be addressed, but there is little agreement in
the human community on how to do so. As we look at the options for
preserving and promoting some elements of "Wildness" in our
global and personal environments, we are faced with a basic
contradiction - for a majority of humans in the "developed"
world, "wildness" only exists as an intellectual concept -
most people will never spend time completely immersed in the direct
interaction with their environment on a level of basic survival.
Because humans are physically ill-equipped to survive in the wild,
our tribes have strived to remove us from harm, and like any
successful species, our own survival/success may be our eventual
downfall, due to resource depletion; human over-grazing.
Ironically, one of humankind's most
primitive institutions, tribalism, is the major obstacle to
preserving "Wildness". Humans first conceptual tool in the
struggle for dominance over the terran environment, tribalism remains
hardwired into the cultural psyche of humans in the forms of
governments, corporations and religions - all of which continue to
tool up to wage a war for survival that was long ago won. How do we
retool our tribal machinery to serve not as political, social and
economic weaponry, but as vehicles for omni-survival, what
Buckminster Fuller referred to as "livingry"? Is it
possible to use technology to reclaim elements of the wild, to find a
balance at the fringe of domestication where these "feral
technologies" might flourish?
