Solar Ricardo

Solar Ricardo

Sunday, September 23, 2012

Wildness, Time-Binding and Feral Technology




"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?