I've been thinking about giving back a lot lately, and in fact have spent a lot of time thinking about giving back for much of my life.
As a child, I'd save things...seems like rubble in remembering...trinkets? Stuff.
I'd save all of this in large boxes, and occasionally invite the neighborhood kids over for a potlatch.
That's an affair where you give all of your stuff away. Industrial societies think that's crazy, stupid.
But in fact, it's about social bonding, in better situations than my childhood was made of.
All the shit I've had to deal with in my life hasn't ever killed that in me. I am still, always about potlatch. The giveaway.
I see it as holy.
Of course, that's part of why I tend to be impecunious. Oh well.
I haven't been doing too much potlatch lately. But that could change. My heirloom tomatoes are doing pretty well, after an initial scare about wilt viruses. I figure they will start ripening in a week or so.
I put up the shadecloth today. I've been using these pieces for years. They are products of industrial civilization, so I must wring every bit of worth I can out of them.
The tomatoes run back to Mexico, where tomatoes are from. I think the purple ones are the oldest, but it's hard to find literature about this.
If this really works this year, I could just juice the extra tomatoes (I love tomato juice). I could work through just about every tomato I can produce, if I put my mind to it, and eat all of it myself.
Or I could give some to my Chicana neighbor, who has been so sick lately. Tomatoes from Mexico.
But, that would not benefit me, because she is old and is going to die. Why bother?
Because I must give back, because if you don't understand the necessity of giving back; you are better off dead. Better off for those of us who do understand, anyway.
How do I give back? Not enough. I still buy too much stuff that is enveloped in trash. I still send my shit down the pipes, though I think it doesn't get to the city's sewage plant, because I don't send very much of anything down the pipes, and my sewer line runs over 300 feet before it hits the alley. Old terra cotta pipe leaks this sort of fertilizer to the roots of trees across the street, more easily than it manages to send it all down to the sewage plant. I think I actually have worked out that part of giving back :-)
Almost all of the water I use winds up on my garden. I don't poison anybody anymore. Not even the ants.
Some is slop water; I buy Oasis Biocompatible soap for washing dishes. It's designed for fertilizer. But I do not know how much environmental impact the Oasis guy (I used to be acquainted with him when I was working at the Venice Co-op) engages in, while making his soap. I haven't a clue. Maybe he does terribly non-environmentalist things while making his soap.
And he's one of the good guys.
It's very difficult to know what sort of horrible anti-environmentalist practices people engage in, when manufacturing "green" products.
We need knowledge. We need to inform each other about truths, not just fuzzy manufacturing lies.
The Oasis soap guy has his soap's ingredients listed on the (plastic) bottles. He's trying to make a change, or at least start to.
He has not been bought out. If he had been bought out, it would be easy to get this soap. Instead, one can only get it from a few websites who sell it for him, or from some shop that buys it from these websites, or directly from him.
I like that.
It's good soap. It isn't as good a degreaser as mainstream commercial soap, but it works.
It also works as fertilizer for plants. I've used it off and on for many years.
It has no sodium, and it doesn't have a lot of other stuff in it either. Bit of nitrogen. A few other good plant things.
This, I think, is an example of how technology may work...but only if the Oasis soap guy can do this without having to (for example) burn a lot of fossil fuel to make his soap (or the plastic gallon jugs he sells it in), or use and then later siphon off a lot of noxious stuff to make his (now very clean, now very pretty) soap.
This is the kind of thing we all constantly have to deal with when considering "green" technology.
It's hell. It's just pure hell trying to work all of this out.
But what are our other choices?
I believe this civilization is going to collapse eventually, because all such civilizations collapse eventually.
The ones that last don't need plastic bottles, or technical soap, or even the computers and electricity involved in my writing this blog post.
I really believe that it's going to collapse. I think it's a given.
So, what do we do about that? How do we prepare?
And (most scarily), should we work to hasten that collapse?
And how do we do that?