Beware of Green Fundamentalism
Because this topic is far too important to hide amongst the comments on Martin’s blog on firewood, I’ve reproduced it here and expanded on each of the elements. I would welcome comments.
Another commenter to the blog had concluded: “Passivhaus or something very similar seems to be the only answer.”
When someone sees only one answer, you can be sure that he’s wearing blinders and seeing the problem through much too narrow a perspective. And the reason that “green” building barely scratches the surface of the problem is that, as a society, we see only through narrow cultural blinders which lead us from one emergency to another. It’s time, rather, for an emerge-and-see.
PassiveHaus takes our increasing isolation and alienation from Nature to its logical (or illogical) extreme. To restore the ecological balance, we need to immerse ourselves deeper into the web-of-life rather than remove ourselves further from it by living in hermetically-sealed boxes of artificial space.
We need super-efficient homes because we have demanded so much of the earth’s resources that we’ve nearly destroyed the ecosystem upon which we depend for our very lives. Homes which merely slow down the rate of destruction can not be the answer.
We need super-efficient homes because we desire many times the indoor space that’s really needed for essential shelter. We no longer know how to differentiate between wants and needs, having been so programmed from birth to desire things rather than relationships.
We need super-efficient homes with close to zero emissions because our exploitation of the earth’s capital resources (ancient buried hydrocarbons) has allowed our population to grow to unsustainable levels (we are now consuming the equivalent of 1¼ earths and by 2050 it will be 2 earths). And, because of this, we are forced to live in such congestion that it’s impossible to avoid our waste impacting someone (or millions of someones) else.
We need super-efficient homes because we are no longer willing to live within the normal climatic changes of the seasons – we demand a uniform year-round indoor climate and insist on the “right” to live anywhere on earth. Rather than adjust our lives to fit the seasons of nature, we force nature to fit the seasons of our lives.
We need super-efficient homes because we choose to live in smaller and smaller family units and “outsource” our children and our elders to institutions. Not only does this require an absurd excess of resources, but it undermines the most important human (and biological) institution: community.
We need super-efficient homes, in other words, because we have created and choose to maintain a thoroughly dysfunctional civilization based on individual freedom and selfishness, which no amount of “greening” is going to make functional. As long as that paradigm rules our world, all “greening” is “greenwashing”.
We have known for more than a century that the Universe is a manifestation of an encompassing Field, an energetic field that we also know is at least partially determined by our collective consciousness. And we’ve known for centuries, but chose to ignore until recently, that evolution is driven primarily by cooperation, not competition.
The world we live in is a Field of Dreams. The indigenous shamans of Ecuador are asking us to change our dream – a dream which has been discovered to be a nightmare. Then the Eagle of the north will once again fly with the Condor of the south, and harmony will return to the land.
GBA Detail Library
A collection of one thousand construction details organized by climate and house part
Replies
poke
As long as God is interested, I must be on the right track. ;-)
But I wish She wouldn't post anonymously.
Dear Anonymous (or Bogus screenname) please register under your first and last name
and ask your question or make your comment again.
Robert,
I was going to bump your post anyway
John (Hot/Mixed Humid)
So there's no one right answer but you know which ones are wrong?
Robert,
I have learned not to worship Passivhaus...
Of course PH is not the Only answer.
I still see nothing wrong with their zest for airtightness.
They do provide better ventilation and fresh air than many other homes.
Why can't those wonderful negative Ions come the HRV and the windows instead of thru unintentional cracks in the walls?
Dan,
There's an old wisdom that says a Guide is not necessarily one who knows the way out of the wilderness, but one who has been lost long enough to know which paths NOT to take.
Anyone with their eyes open knows that our material excesses, dependence on fossil fuels and consideration of all non-monetized costs as "externalities" are the causes of our current global crises. And this realization is the root of the "green" building movement. But that realization is only of the tip of the iceberg. We must look much deeper at root causes, which is the paradigm we live by.
The mindset which supports our current - and dysfunctional - paradigm is based on believing humanity to be above Nature, our destiny to control the world, and life's guiding principle as survival of the fittest through competition for scarce resources.
Ironically, though we are a scientific materialist culture, we've ignored what science has known for more than a century. Quantum mechanics is predicated on the reality of an all-encompassing energetic field, the principle that everything in the universe is entangled with everything else, and that patterns are repeated at every level of organization (as above, so below). Epigenetic evolutionary biology now accepts what Lamarck postulated well before Darwin: that the environment and our own choices determine our evolution, that DNA is nothing more than a blueprint and not the architect, and that our semi-permeable membranes are the "brain" that determines our ability to adapt and flourish in the world.
The ancients looked to Nature as their teacher and guide. Now, cutting-edge science is rediscovering what the perennial wisdom always knew: that not just survival but thrival requires that we mimic the patterns inherent in Nature and that we live within the cooperative, inter-dependent, reciprocal, and altruistic web-of-life.
Each human body is a complex, highly-organized, cooperative community of 50 trillion individual cells, each working for the common good and each receiving exactly what it needs. These are the elemental truths that we are relearning. The only question is: will we find a way to incorporate them into a New Story for the organism called Humanity before we fall off the edge?
John,
I was just kidding God. She can post under any of her names.
Is "hot/mixed humid" your middle name or your personality type?
I have to agree with Robert, there is usually no one right answer to any sufficiently complex problem. Even his.
I have to ask a question of the moderators of this blog - where is the question mark in the original posting? Perhaps we could re-name Q & A to Polemic and Discussion.
Interested Onlooker (do you have a name?),
Without a sufficiently broad and appropriate context, the proper questions cannot even be framed.
And that's the principle deficiency of the "green" building movement: it lacks a deep enough perspective. If this isn't the site to address that deficiency, I don't know what is.
I would have been glad to have offered this in a blog, but the editors and advisors of BGA.com have yet to invite me (even though several active participants have suggested it). In fact, I submitted a Green Home project article six months ago which has yet to appear on this site. And when I did submit an article on "Building (Really) Green in Vermont" - about building with local, green lumber - it was edited to the point of being a completely different article and I refused its publication.
Those involved in the "green" building movement have their own cherished perspectives and rarely invite critical appraisals, particularly when core beliefs and paradigms are challenged. But there is no hope for substantive change without such analysis and critique and challenge.
As much as I like GBA, it probably represents a very small % of the home building industry. If you want to get involved in the so called "green building" movement and really make an impact on the industry, I might recommend joining and participating in the NAHB. They represent and influence builders on a very large scale.
And Onlooker,
There IS a simple answer to what only appears complex when looked at askew. It's so simple, in fact, that it was obvious to simple indigenous peoples for hundreds of thousands of years: to live within the laws of Nature.
It's true, though, that there is no one path to that answer. And therein lies the difficulty. But the path will be difficult to forge only because we've strayed so far from Original Harmony. In both Hebrew and Greek, "sin" means "to miss the mark". It is an archer's term. The arrow strays when our attention and intention is misdirected.
We cannot forge a new path unless we clearly see the target.
Robert,
We agree on more than you might think. I too believe that "When someone sees only one answer, you can be sure that he's wearing blinders and seeing the problem through much too narrow a perspective." Though I suspect it will not help, you can add my support to those who wish that you have a blog - GBA should be sufficiently inclusive to accept opinions and experience which challenges the new orthodoxy. It will be interesting to read how you would get us from where we are to where we need to be while taking the populace with you.
IMHO...
For those that really want to see the perfect example of "green" gone arwy... sign up for your free Green Builder Magazine subscription.
It is totally driven by ads of products used and to purchase. The homes featured are top top end builds dripping in excess... ala American capitalistic... "go go go" and you too can be all that you want to be.... not what you need to be. The "American Dream" of late is all about TV. All of it. Monkey see.. monkey want. We monkeys today want to be like our favorirte personna from the boob tube.
Have faith all in the nature of... nature... for true to it, it will guide us through this period and on to the next. All you need to add to your formulas...is a bit of time... that's all... and of course there will be pain and suffering along the way, there always is. Without pain there is no joy. Nature is a complete system, you get the whole package eventually even though you may be able to parse it in times and places.
For more insightful reading... try Friitoj Capra... some of you may have already.
as for my little theory of life... ask me about "tapping the edge" someday when you get a chance.
IMHO.... folks... and just at this moment too... may be more or less inspired tomorrow and surely dead and gone not long from now... so get your licks in now.
I haven't yet written that book, but others have.
Here is my suggested reading list for those who wish to open their eyes and understand (or better yet, help forge) the new path.
Joseph Chilton Pearce
The Crack in the Cosmic Egg: Challenging Constructs of Mind and Reality (1973, 2002)
Exploring the Crack in the Cosmic Egg: Split Minds and Meta-Realities (1974)
The Biology of Transcendence: A Blueprint of the Human Spirit (2002)
Death of Religion and the Rebirth of Spirit: A Return to the Intelligence of the Heart (2007)
Fritzjof Capra
The Tao of Physics: An Exploration of the Parallels between Modern Physics and Eastern Mysticism (1975, 2000)
The Web of Life: A New Scientific Understanding of Living Systems (1997)
Chellis Glendinning
My Name is Chellis and I'm in Recovery from Western Civilization (1994, 2007)
Off The Map: An Expedition Deep into Empire and the Global Economy (2002)
The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World by David Abram (1997)
Earthdance: Living Systems in Evolution - Elisabet Sahtouris and James E. Lovelock (2000)
The Ascent of Humanity: The Age of Separation, the Age of Reunion, and the Convergence of Crises that is Birthing the Transition - Charles Eisenstein (2007)
The Great Turning: From Empire to Earth Community - David C. Korten (2007)
Spontaneous Evolution: Our Positive Future (and a Way to Get There from Here) by Bruce H. Lipton Ph.D. and Steve Bhaerman (2009)
I’m not completely convinced that pre-industrial cultures (all of which seem to get a bit homogenized with the general qualifier ‘indigenous’) were free of dysfunction and not without tendencies that would be characterized as not being harmonious with nature.
Is not ‘surplus’ the real culprit? Do not even the populations of other species propogate unchecked and cause stresses on their environs when they have surplus and no predators?
The scale of the significant issue here is at the scale of culture and not building projects which makes this debate a bit unproductive on this web forum.
I’ve taken refuge in the Dharma, the Buddha, and within the group of practitioners of compassionate livelihoods. This is an effective means for individuals to achieve what Robert is demanding here. Thich Nhat Hanh teaches that we may not understand that part of ourselves that is outside our rational minds and that connects us to everything. That is the more important human(e) aspect of ourselves that is largely absent in most our contemporary cultures. Buddhism offers methods of realizing this.
Chestnut,
First, when I used the term "indigenous", I am not referring to pre-industrial culture, but pre-agricultural clans & tribes - those peoples who lived within the natural balance of their environment, much like all natural creatures.
Second, it would be absurd and overly romantic to assume that there was no dysfunction within those tribes (though, by all accounts, it was very limited because of the necessity of interdependence). But they did not live by a dysfunctional paradigm, as we do.
Occasional deviant behavior within a harmonious paradigm does little to disturb the larger harmony, which is typically quickly restored with collective ritual. The most perfect social relationships within a dysfunctional paradigm are still dysfunctional at the meta-level.
Third, all natural populations wax and wane with the availability of food, but never dramatically overshoot their local resources without a very quick correction, typically in the next breeding cycle. Only two species overshoot the carrying capacity of their environment: humans and cancers - and humans only since the agricultural revolution enabled food surplus, storage, wealth, hierarchies, armies, greed, power-mongering, warfare and violence.
And, while Dharma can be a path toward enlightenment and right action, for most Westerners it is - as you say - a refuge, an escape rather than a pathway toward a new way of living on Earth. Marx was quite right about the function of religion for most moderns: an opiate.
There are far better paths for us scientific materialists, particularly the path through cutting-edge science which has already exposed the fallacy of the mechanistic scientific paradigm and the social Darwinism which has been the foundation of our dysfunction, or - as Swami Beyondamana calls it - our myth-perceptions.
Decades of peer-reviewed scientific study of Psi phenomenon (what we used to call extra-sensory perception), for instance, have proven to an extremely high level of certainty that focused intention can increase order in the universe, decrease violence, heal others at great distances and across time, and change the past.
The latest research in neuro-cardiology has proven that the heart is the fifth (and primary endocrine) control center of the human body and has more do to with health and communication than the brain. It is, in fact, through the heart that humans are able to communicate directly with other species as well as non-verbally with their own.
Science has established that we have the power to alter our DNA and direct our own evolution. We already understand how to raise humanity to a higher evolutionary level, but we lack the general awareness and the collective will. But both of those are manifesting at an accelerating rate.
The only question is: who amongst us will choose to get on this Ark and who will be left behind, drowning in a flood of myth-perceptions?
Yes, lets foster awareness, compassion and loving kindness.
Discursive discussions can be used as an effective means, but be considerate it is only a means.
If you have paths to share why spend so much time with the critique of ideas?
Why critique ideas?
Because ideas manifest our reality. It's the fundamental quantum magic of the Universe.
Abracadabra is not a comic book incantation. It is from the ancient Hebrew, which means "as it is spoken, so it is."
We are living out a suicidal paradigm because we are so enthralled by our ideas of "How Things Are" that we cannot change, any more than any addict can change, until we hit bottom - until we comprehend (that means grasp in its entirety), the utter falsity and hence futility of the ideas we live by.
Only when we realize how wrong and insane are the myth-perceptions that form our cultural worldview, our gestalt, our paradigm - only then do we even have the option let alone the opportunity to seek out and try out new paths.
Someone who believes he's nourishing his body by eating the flesh of other animals, bred and slaughtered in the most inhumane fashion, does not grasp for a piece of fresh and succulent fruit because it's put before him - not until he realizes (makes real for himself in the deepest part of his being) that he is poisoning not only himself but the entire web-of-life does he then see that there are other, more life-affirming and life-sustaining options.
The Prophet doesn't come to the temple first to address the benefits of prayer, but rather to overturn the tables of the money-lenders. Among those who have already chosen to follow a higher path - his apostles and disciples - does he speak the simple truth: that the meek shall inherit the Earth.
God does not plant a new garden until She has first sent the cleansing Flood. The Flood is upon us and those who choose to build the Ark will be those who plant the next Garden of Eden. Those who cannot or will not open their eyes will be washed away - not by the wrath of God, but by their own choice to remain blind.
many many living things overpopulate... when food and water are plentiful. Watch a few thousand episodes of National Geo or The Discovery Channel. And then... nature... takes care of things. LOL.
As to green fundamentalism...yaa... it's here now and the picture is ugly... but you Robert are one of the greenies that is pointing this out and possibly you will have a part in steering the course.
not sure we need to get all Godly to get there... morals are useful... but... God? Religion? I guess it is one way to lead a school of fish... but so far in history and today... not the most pretty or bloodless direction.
We fish are swimming Robert... hey... let's check out that reef over there!
Robert,
I spent several years at the university studying what was called 'critical studies and comparative literature'. I asked 'why critique ideas?' because I had spent so much time in books and being critical of ideas and theory that at some point I felt so disconnected with the happenings around me and was left wondering what ideas could live up to a rigorous critique and were worth believing. The experience left me with little insight as to how to lead my life and what to endorse through my volition.
I was first engaged with Buddhism intellectually through books much in the same vain as my habits at the university. But it wasn't until I spent some time with an accomplished monk that I really gained a conviction, that Buddhism offered a path to lead one to act, think, and live correctly. My conviction was gained not by the monks arguments. We did little talking. My conviction was gained by his and his communities aura, their actions and the places and livelihoods they maintained. Like with any institution not all examples of 'Buddhist' practice are beyond criticism, but some of the temples I had witnessed are models of living and community that I aspire to contribute to. What I found in Buddhist practice is direction in how to live my daily life as to maintain awareness and not to become overly attached to my own discriminating thoughts.
I made an incorrect assumption about what you are espousing when I made a distinction between 'critiquing ideas' and a 'path' as you communicated that it is an important method to break through people's preconditioned ideas to open the possibility for people to lead different lives. I agree this is a skillful means.
For me in addition to breaking through pre-conceived notions I need also a regimen for leading daily life in order to develop awareness and a greater capacity for the virtues of higher consciousness. That is what I meant by a 'path'.
In Buddhism ideas are approached as all other dharmas (fundamental elements of existence). They are composites that are produced out of a set of circumstances and eventually change. They have no unchanging absolute reality. Ideas, in Thich Nhat Hanh's words, are tools to be used as 'skillfull means' in order to produce a beneficial or good effect. Of course they can work in the opposite direction. Attachment to ideas according to Buddhist teaching clouds our perception of reality. When we are not attached to discriminated ideas which creates distinctions between things we can directly experience reality; and without attachments to mental formations of greed, ignorance and hatred we can act with compassion for all living beings because we are not separating ourselves from anything else through our discriminating mind which organ that produces ideas. Or so I've read.
Thanks for sharing your ideas in depth.
Yes, I understand the Buddhist way. I studied under Robert Thurman, the first American Tibetan Buddhist monk and a disciple of Tenzin Gyatso, the Dalai Lama. And Thich Nhat Hanh is a great inspiration. I helped create the first American Peace Pagoda of the Nipponzan-Myōhōji Buddhist Order.
Buddhism is a powerful path, but like all religious traditions, it's an unnecessary elaboration of the essential path of the heart, which has no tradition and needs no guidance. The path of the heart is an inward journey that brings one back to the Source, from which all wisdom flows.
As Don Juan said, any path is only a path. A path that is given you is but a roadmap that someone else once followed. Each of us has our own unique path and our unique gift. It is the purpose of life to recognize that gift, and use it in service to the world. That is our path. Once found, no map is necessary in order to walk it with integrity, for we and the path become one.
WOW... this GBA has really become weird!!! To many wackos.... Adios ya'll...
Good riddance, Mike.
When "normal" has become insane and suicidal, we had better become "weird" if we wish to survive as a species.
I forgot to include in my "How to Get There From Here" reading list, the works of the last century's greatest visionary writer, Daniel Quinn.
A disciple of Thomas Merton at the Trappist Gesthemni Abbey and the sole winner of the Turner Tomorrow fellowship for visionary fiction - picked from 2500 entries - Quinn's Socratic meanderings through the course of civilization and beyond were perhaps the most important books of the turn of the millennium. They include:
Ishmael: An Adventure of the Mind and Spirit by Daniel Quinn (1992)
The Story of B (1996)
My Ishmael (1997)
Beyond Civilization (2000)
Tales of Adam (2005)
Robert,
I have to wonder how it is that you know what was "obvious to simple indigenous peoples for hundreds of thousands of years" . Can you contact them somehow? Were you there? Also, faulted though we are in your clear and unstained eyes I wonder why you chose this site to enlighten. Are we the biggest threat to humanity you can find? Why didn't your love for humanity and conviction of full knowing prevent such an impatient and disdainful reaction to the poor wayward Mike? Good riddance? I don't think your buddies Thich and the Dali would approve.
What was obvious to all indigenous peoples is also obvious to anyone who opens their eyes.
To humanity? You miss the point.
Those who think they are saving humanity by rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic are the greatest threat to the rest of creation.
And don't presume to speak for Thick and Dali when you're blind to what's in front of your nose.
Spoken in the tone of a true fundamentalist; Avoid answering questions directly and move on to more of your condescending talking points.
Kurt,
Do you have something to say or are you just Trolling for trouble?
And you suffer from a fundamental misunderstanding.
A "fundamentalist" is one who is lost in the depths of dogma and cannot see the forest for the trees.
A "radical", on the other hand, is one who goes to the root of the issues and reveals both the source of problems and the seeds of solutions. And a "visionary" is one who sees the larger context that is invisible to the vast throngs who go through life wearing cultural and ideological blinders.
I thought I was fairly clear in what I was trying to say, but I'll try again. In #25 I was trying to say that I don't believe you know what other people knew for hundreds of thousands of years and to state that you do is presumptuous. Also, after taking so many paragraphs to show how knowledgeable and connected you are to enlightened beings to then blurt "Good riddance" to a fellow human being seems hypocritical. The other point was why do you attack here? I think that the readers here are likely pretty well intentioned people who are probably doing relatively positive work. In #27 I was trying to say when people use their religion or their peculiar knowledge base to elevate themselves above others (in their own minds) and then see fit to use that position to pass judgment on and denigrate others is what I, perhaps incorrectly, refer to as "fundamentalist ". When asked to explain themselves they often respond with more self-important statements that avoid answering the question (and don't forget to throw in a presumptuous and unfair stinger or 2 like you did in #26). To put it very simply; Your words of wisdom sound self indulgent and hollow when you also go so quickly to statements like "good riddance", "obvious to anyone who opens their eyes", "you're blind to what's in front of your nose", etc. I do want to add that from what I've seen elsewhere, on the technical front, you seem quite selfless, helpful and a valuable resource.
Then you might take a moment to discern whether I am, in fact, exhibiting the very same qualities in this thread and whether your reactions and judgements about my words are entirely your own projections or misinterpretations.
The simple fact is that anyone who takes the time and effort to study - without bias or preconception - the anthropological, paleontological, archeological record and the surviving teachings of the 370 million indigenous peoples of this earth would come to the same obvious conclusion.
I will second that comment
Excerpts from Joe Bageant's latest screed: Live from Planet Norte: America's totalitarian democracy and the politics of plunder, or, life is a titty tuck and a Dodge truck
[Joe is the author of Deer Hunting with Jesus: Dispatches from America's Class War, and Rainbow Pie: A Redneck Memoir.]
By Joe Bageant
http://www.joebageant.com/joe/2010/06/live-from-planet-norte.html
The uniformity on Planet Norte is striking. Each person is a unit, installed in life support boxes in the suburbs and cities; all are fed, clothed by the same closed-loop corporate industrial system. Everywhere you look, inhabitants are plugged in at the brainstem to screens downloading their state approved daily consciousness updates.
Meanwhile, even as capitalism shows every sign of collapsing upon them under the weight of its sheer non-sustainability, Norteamericanos wait like patient, not-too-bright children for its "recovery." Recovery, of course, is that time when they can once again run through the malls and outlet stores, the car lots and the fried chicken palaces eating, grabbing and consuming.
If nothing else though, in the process of building our own gilded rat cage, we have proven that old saw about democracy eventually leading to mediocrity to be true. Especially if you keep dumbing down all the rats.
Yet, despite such intellectual and moral torpor, some of the numbest bozos are beginning to suspect that the wheels are coming off their "have everything" society. One clue is that every time they check, they have less than before.
From the dawn of agriculture, human civilization has been a net subtraction from the environment on which we depend for life. Consider what once existed, and what little of it is left. Consider the burgeoning hordes everywhere burning, smelting, polluting, and generally devouring what remains. Where is that leading us?
You don't need to call the Harvard's environmental science department for the answer. Despite the rule of scientism and the fashionable modern disdain for human intuition, common sense is still a viable option.
How can we solve the problem when we are the problem? So here it is, top of the ninth round, and Gaia is on the ropes with cuts over both eyes, and no referee on the mat. Homo sapiens are moving in for the killer punch. It's been an ugly fight. But the truth is that there will be no winner. Certainly not man, considering that his triumph results in the specter of human self-extinction.
Who in these times, you may ask, believes in the spirit as an animating force of mankind? My answer is: Those who can be still enough to see that spirit moving.
Those who can be still enough see that spirit moving. With it comes the awareness and acceptance of forces far more powerful than our puny anthropocentric illusions of planetary authority. We can arrive at this understanding by way of thinking, logic and reason. The mind is a cumbersome and inefficient way to go about escaping traps you build with your mind, but yes, it can be done. Most educated people in this science worshipping age prefer the convoluted path of logic and rational exercise, over calmly opening one's eyes and heart to the world before us, as wiser men have done for thousands of years.
Pay the money and put in enough university time, and it's relatively easy to end up certified, acceptable, and equipped with the professional jargon necessary to impress yourself and others that you are an expert of some sort. One of society's answer guys, the kind universities and corporations pay good money to own. But it's downright hard to be calm, to maintain inner stillness. Beyond that, inner stillness does not much impress or frighten others in the rat fight for a good spot at the feeder. Worse yet, it's free. No money it.
But stillness of mind opens onto the fathomless void, where we are dwarfed into utter insignificance. It makes clear how little we comprehend -- how much we do not know and never will, and that the greater the fire we build, the more darkness is revealed.
There never was any guarantee that we would like the universal truth. And the truth is that the universe is busy enough hurling toward its destiny, and does not give a rat's ass what we do or do not like. Or whether a smear of biology on a speck of cosmic dust manages to poison itself to death.
So stay strong. Transcend. Find reasons to love.
Nobody ever gets out of this world alive, anyway.
So what is there to know about your potty training?
We pretty much know the rest.... LOL
ADJAK(ass),
If you truly understood that you are a spark of the Divine, you wouldn't go to such effort to make yourself into a fool.
So... no potty mouth training either? LOL
"I do want to add that from what I've seen elsewhere, on the technical front, you seem quite selfless, helpful and a valuable resource."
Agreed; I appreciate the free education I'm receiving without having to drive somewhere and paying for it.
Yes Robert is overflowing the banks of his river with lush green thoughts and way more.
But a wee bit sensitive... LOL
Ok... do I have to explain humor to our beloved? Laugh with silly comments... and they instantly are what they are.... just havin fun with are so serious Robert.
Robert... Yaa do pee on people here lots when challenged. What do yaa expect after... a thank you? LOL
And it's aj or adkjac with a c please... LOL
So keep going with our spiritual training... please
Your peace loving Judas, aj.
Adjac,
Keep up this adolescent level of response and I'm leaving this site.
I left both the Fine Homebuilding and the JLC online forums because of the prevalence of participants who refused to maintain a mature level of discourse.
If your goal is to drive away responsible participants, then you're succeeding.
Dear Robert,
I, for one, would be very sad if you felt you had to leave this forum; I have learned more from you than from any other single contributor. The contributors and readers on this forum are united, I think, by a belief that the most-achievable contribution that the Western World can make to reducing its environmental impact is in the field of building techniques. Your contribution in sharing your hard-won knowledge and experience in this field has been characterised by a generosity, and thoroughness, which is rare in this me-centric and hurried existence. Your spiritual beliefs are an essential part of who you are and the approach that you have taken to green building. Please try to understand that many on this forum do not share these beliefs and will not be persuaded that they are wrong – just as they will not persuade you that you are wrong. Discussing belief systems is one of the surest ways for human beings to come into conflict and, just as importantly, is always fruitless. I hope you will feel able to continue to guide us as to how to build and to accept that why we build is intensely personal and private.
Well said Wise Onlooker.
Yes PLEASE Adkjac stop your ramblings. I'm tired of your nonsensical posts.
You chime in on every question asked, and never once have I heard anything interesting or clever.
I know you are trying to be funny-- your posts, however, are not. Leave the humor to real comedians.
Interested Onlooker,
I appreciate the honesty and sincerity of your response, and I hope that I can be comfortable continuing to contribute here since my life is dedicated to serving others and the Web-of-Life. One of my weaknesses is a lack of patience with and tolerance for adults who choose to act like children, and I just don't enjoy wallowing in a sandbox with small-minded people. Our culture is largely a sandbox full of arrested-development humanoids (we even elect them to high office), though this forum - until recently - seemed like a sanctuary from them.
But I need to respond to a few of your comments. I agree that arguing "beliefs" is fruitless, since - by definition - a belief is an assumption or acceptance of something that one does not directly know.
I don't have a "spiritual belief system". I'm an avowed skeptic about all beliefs and have spent my nearly 60 years uncovering the fraudulence of belief systems (much like Houdini, who's life was saved by communication from his dead mother and who spent the rest of his life debunking the fake mediums who pretended to be able to open that channel which he knew to be real).
But - and this is what I've been saying in this thread - it is possible for anyone to open their eyes, ears and heart to the fundamental truths of the Universe, as all "primitive" peoples have long done. Then one does not need belief because one knows. This may sound like arrogance to those who have not glimpsed the truth in moments of ecstasy or communion or through the disciplines of meditation which can lead to enlightenment.
And that truth - which, ironically, modern science has stumbled upon through quantum mechanics, chaos theory, epigenetic evolution, neuro-cardiology, and psi phenomena - is that there is no "personal" or "private" realm, since we are each energetically entangled with one another and are each a hologram of the entire Universe. In fact, we are each a cell in the larger super-organism called Humanity, which itself is an organelle in the organism called Gaia.
You are correct in identifying today's culture as "me-centric", but perhaps don't realize that insisting on a personal, private realm is an expression of that dysfunction. When we understand that the false belief in a wholly personal or private realm is what is preventing us from growing into coherence, then perhaps we might transcend the greatest limitations of our forebrain-driven culture.
Decades of neuro-biological research has demonstrated that we exist in a state of health (or harmony or coherence) only when the brain is entrained to the frequencies of the heart, which is 50 times as powerful a resonator as the brain (2.5 watts of electro-magnetic power which can be detected 12' away from the body). When the body, including the heart, is entrained to the frequencies of the brain, we are in not only a state of chronic disease but also in an ego-dominated state (which is the definition of the sandbox world: me, mine, gimme or I'll bop you on the head and take what I want).
When our forebrain (which is primarily an analytic tool) is entrained to, and in service to, the heart (our primary organ of communication), then we are connected to the energetic fields of other creatures, of the earth, and of that universal field of potential we call the Universe (the one song). There is then a broader sense of self-in-relationship and we understand that every thought and action (each a vibration emanating outward) has effects on everything else. There is no self other than self-in-relation, and that webwork of relationship is the warp and weft of the coherent Universe.
Another tip of the hat to Robert here. I'm glad you are here and would miss you if you took off. I've been scanning this "conversation" on a daily basis to see if it was getting really outrageous or not but have not felt drawn to chime in except now to say I really appreciate the perspective and knowledge and passion that you bring to this discourse and hope you stick around.
That's it, hope all are having a great summer.
PS to all those heading to Lstiburek's in August, bone up on spray foam and health impacts / endocrine disruption / flame retardants because the conversation is going to be deep and enlightening. (and I guess we should bone up on rock wool and foam alternatives as well just, so we don't sound like the party of no.)
Michael,
Thanks for your support.
And for those getting ready to discuss alternatives to petrochemical foams, I would suggest taking a look at a young but aggressive and creative startup that grew (literally) out of RPI that is growing packaging and insulation materials from regional agricultural waste products and mycelium (mushroom roots). http://www.ecovativedesign.com/
Greensulate™ passes ASTM tests for mold growth, water sorption, and vapor transmission. Best of all, Greensulate™ is chemical and VOC (volatile organic compound) free, while still providing a class 1 fire rating. They are experimenting with growing this into SIPS and roofing insulation. It is not yet ready for subgrade applications.
As a startup operating in a basement, they took first place in an international green product competition, taking home a half million Euros, and have received a research grant from the EPA. They have patents pending in more than 30 countries and are exploring partnerships with global corporations as well as US franchises. They expect to become the global alternative to EPS foam for the 21st century.
They
Robert, In the vein of onlooker's observations; I've found that if there's a surer way of creating conflict than discussing belief systems is stating that you don't deal in "beliefs" because you KNOW (the Truth), and then go on and on and on about it. I actually admire that you take the time to go on and on about your, I'm sorry, but they're beliefs, but when you can only accept what people have to say when they're praising you and then feel the need to discredit anything they say that isn't praise, it makes it hard to believe that your life is dedicated to serving others and the Web-of-Life. Onlooker praised you and then made a statement that he has found to be true and potentially helpful. You apparently exempted him from the small-minded sandbox folks for his praise but then had to knock the legs out from under his observations and then flow into a lecture. While I allow that I bring, as you suggest, some projections and misinterpretations to the table, I don't think that I'm entirely off base in suggesting that you might benefit from giving more leeway and benefit of the doubt to others and apply more critical assessment to yourself. I am not terribly hopeful. I concur with Onlooker that this is likely fruitless. When someone is sure they know, about all you can do is concur, praise or avoid them. Anything else is pissing in the wind.
Kurt,
Take a long look in the mirror. It's you who are being judgemental. I challenge ideas, words and actions. And I demand far more of myself than of others. I actually dislike praise more than I dislike unwarranted negative judgements, such as yours. Always have. I don't need the affirmation of others, and I've never worried about the consequences of doing or saying what needs to be done or said (I've openly refused to pay war taxes to the American Empire for more than 30 years and I've been jailed several times for acts of conscience).
What you don't understand is that I don't have any privileged access to some esoteric knowledge. What I know (that's lower case know) is the same simple and obvious truth (not TRUTH) that have been available to every indigenous culture since time began and are still available to each and every one of us who chooses to open their mind and our heart.
Perhaps even you.
And, by the way, Kurt...
I'm not "creating conflict". I'm simply stating what I know. You're the one choosing to get pissed off. If you blame me for your emotional response, then you're giving away your power to me.
OK Robert. I'm getting not just tired, but bored with being told what I'm thinking and what I am by you. I thought that maybe I could shed some light on why people respond negatively to you. Apparently I've failed and I won't presume to know why (though I feel quite sure "someone" will fill me in). I came to this site to learn how to be of better service to my customers. That's not happening on this particular blog. I feel like I'm wrestling with the tar baby, so I'm escaping while I still can.
Kurt (et al, since Kurt claims to be gone),
People respond negatively because they choose (generally unconsciously) to perceive, interpret and react negatively. I have no power over anyone else's emotions.
I can't know what you're thinking or what you are, but it's obvious what you're not: open-minded. I respond to what you choose to put into words and put out in the world. You might exercise some restraint, care and caution if you cannot tolerate being called on your sh*t.
If you thirst, the River comes to you.
If you do not thirst, there is no River.
Robert - You've made a valuable and interesting post.
I've been gone a couple of weeks. I'm disappointed to see that several recent posts have devolved into personal attacks - many directed toward you - some by you.
I will say that your written "voice" often comes across as abrasive (perhaps because you are unwilling to compromise on certain ideas? IDK). Your written voice makes me think of Edward Abbey's description of Thoreau. Abbey said that Thoreau was "an unpeeled man. A man with the bark still on him."
I like to think that underneath that bark is a strong and finely grained wood, rot resistant and pleasing to the eye. I suspect it's crotch wood or burl. :-) And I say that as a compliment.
I very much appreciate your contributions to this forum. I think part of the kickback is that most people come to this site looking for "how-to" and practical information. The GBA advisors strive to give a fair and balanced perspective on building issues, but they generally avoid making moral judgements.
As an example, Martin will discuss the pros and cons of vinyl siding, but he will generally avoid rendering a personal opinion or moral verdict. As a professional editor on a commercial site, that's his job; he wouldn't last long otherwise. He walks an editorial tightrope.
You do, however, discuss the morality of various subjects. And you approach topics from a different level of discourse (questioning not how to do something, but IF we should do something).
I say keep it up! I say we need more contrarians, more diversity! It's difficult to have a dialogue when everyone agrees.
But as this is a public forum, we all need to show tact and respect and restraint. We can and should challenge each other without insult or disrespect.
Getting back to your post. You are probably familiar (and might agree) with Wendel Berry's description of appropriate technology, or how he defines "high technology." Here is a great quote from Berry to further the idea that you laid down:
"Our national faith so far has been: “There’s always more.” Our true religion is a sort of autistic industrialism. People of intelligence and ability seem now to be genuinely embarrassed by any solution to any problem that does not involve high technology, a great expenditure of energy, or a big machine." Harpers Magazine - "Faustian Economics"
And I thought Baegent's recent article was comparitively tame and sober (A LOT less colorful, sarcastic, and humorous than most of his ruminations!).
Are you familiar with Polyface Farms? Joel Salatin is another contrarian author / speaker / writer (on both politics and farming).
I think we're all looking for the most appropriate answers to "building green." Our questions are often in the wrong context. But one question (or statement) leads to another. And the broader search for understanding is the important part.
Are double pane windows appropriate technology? Triple pane? I don't know the answer. According to Wendell Berry's philosophy, they are not appropriate. A pencil trumps a computer. A blanket trumps a high efficiency heat pump. A garden plot trumps a farmer's market.
I do agree that we live in an age where our perception is one of unlimited materials and resources. I think the wise people of the world are attempting to live and move through a world dominated by this perspective. And coming to the correct answers (or the truth) is a difficult process.
Of course Ed Abbey was often called the Thoreau of the West. They were both iconoclasts who cared more about nature than about the foolish sensibilities of civility or the dictates of government.
In his elegy to Abbey, Earth First! founder Dave Foreman said: "Farting in polite company. Enraging pompous twits, prudes and prigs. Goosing the true believers. Pissing on what was politically correct. And thereby doing sacred work."
But this isn't about Thoreau, Abbey, Wendell Berry, Joe Bageant or me. The several of you who have insisted on turning the focus onto me and my alleged character traits are, of course, avoiding the real point and the message that I've offered to share here. Whenever a simple truth has been delivered to humanity's consciousness, the messenger has always been attacked, tortured, and murdered (in character if not in body).
"...coming to the correct answers (or the truth) is a difficult process."
Only for those who wall it off and resist it, and refuse to open their eyes, their ears, their minds and their hearts to it. We are literally swimming in the truth - it is the Field that manifests as our world. But ask a fish to "see" the waves that make the ocean alive and it'll think you're crazy. It's the "sanity" of our world that is killing us.
Wendell Berry once said (Manifesto):
Love the quick profit, the annual raise,
vacation with pay. Want more
of everything ready-made. Be afraid
to know your neighbors and to die.
And you will have a window in your head.
Not even your future will be a mystery
any more. Your mind will be punched in a card
and shut away in a little drawer.
When they want you to buy something
they will call you. When they want you
to die for profit they will let you know.
So, friends, every day do something
that won't compute. Love the Lord.
Love the world. Work for nothing.
Take all that you have and be poor.
Love someone who does not deserve it.
Denounce the government and embrace
the flag. Hope to live in that free
republic for which it stands.
Give your approval to all you cannot
understand. Praise ignorance, for what man
has not encountered he has not destroyed.
Ask the questions that have no answers.
Invest in the millenium. Plant sequoias.
Say that your main crop is the forest
that you did not plant,
that you will not live to harvest.
Say that the leaves are harvested when they have rotted into the mold.
Call that profit. Prophesy such returns.
Put your faith in the two inches of humus
that will build under the trees
every thousand years.
Listen to carrion -- put your ear
close, and hear the faint chattering
of the songs that are to come.
Expect the end of the world. Laugh.
Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful
though you have considered all the facts.
So long as women do not go cheap
for power, please women more than men.
Ask yourself: Will this satisfy
a woman satisfied to bear a child?
Will this disturb the sleep
of a woman near to giving birth?
Go with your love to the fields.
Lie down in the shade. Rest your head
in her lap. Swear allegiance
to what is nighest your thoughts.
As soon as the generals and the politicos
can predict the motions of your mind,
lose it. Leave it as a sign
to mark the false trail, the way
you didn't go.
Be like the fox
who makes more tracks than necessary,
some in the wrong direction.
Practice resurrection.
He also said (from What Are People For?):
"We must achieve the character and acquire the skills to live much poorer than we do. We must waste less. We must do more for ourselves and each other. It is either that or continue to think and talk about changes that we are inviting catastrophe to make."
"The great obstacle is simply this: the conviction that we cannot change because we are dependent on what is wrong. But that is the addict's excuse and we know that it will not do."
And I'll follow-up with another wonderful poet, e.e. cummings:
Pity this buy monster, manunkind
not. Progress is a comfortable disease:
your victim (death and life safely beyond)
plays with the bigness of his littleness
--electrons diefy one razorblade
into a mountainrange: lenses extend
unwish through curving wherewhen till unwish
returns on its unself.
A world of made
is not a world of born---pity poor flesh
and trees, poor stars and stones, but never this
fine specimen of hypermagical
ultraomnipotence. We doctors know
a hopeless case if---listen: there's a hell
of a good universe next door; let's go
The Holy Longing
by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
(translated from the German by Robert Bly)
Tell a wise person, or else keep silent,
because the mass man will mock it right away.
I praise what is truly alive,
what longs to be burned to death.
In the calm water of the love-nights,
where you were begotten, where you have begotten,
a strange feeling comes over you,
when you see the silent candle burning.
Now you are no longer caught in the obsession with darkness,
and a desire for higher love-making sweeps you upward.
Distance does not make you falter.
Now, arriving in magic, flying,
and finally, insane for the light,
you are the butterfly and you are gone.
And so long as you haven't experienced this: to die and so to grow,
you are only a troubled guest on the dark earth.
Freedom in the Grace of the World
By Chris Hedges
July 05, 2010 "Truthdig" -- Earl Shaffer, adrift after serving in the South Pacific in World War II and struggling with the loss of his childhood friend Walter Winemiller during the assault on Iwo Jima, made his way to Mount Oglethorpe in Georgia in 1947. He headed north toward Mount Katahdin in Maine and for the next 124 days, averaging 16.5 miles a day, beat back the demons of war. His goal, he said, was to ‘‘walk the Army out of my system.'' He was the first person to hike the full length of the Appalachian Trail.
The beauty and tranquility of the old-growth forests, the vistas that stretch for miles over unbroken treetops, the waterfalls and rivers, the severance from the noise and electronic hallucinations of modern existence, becomes, if you stay out long enough, a balm to wounds. It is in solitude, contemplation and a connection with nature that we transcend the frenzied and desperate existence imposed upon us by the distortions of a commodity culture.
The mountains that loom on the northern part of the trail in New Hampshire and Maine, most of them in the White Mountain National Forest, are also forbidding, even in summer, when winds can routinely reach 60 or 70 miles per hour accompanied by lashing rain. The highest surface wind speed recorded on the planet, 231 miles per hour, was measured on April 12, 1934, at the Mount Washington Observatory. Boulders and steep inclines become slippery and treacherous when wet and shrouded in dense fog. Thunderstorms, racing across treeless ridge lines with the speed of a freight train, turn the razor-backed peaks into lightning rods. The Penacooks, one of two Native American tribes that dominated the area, called Mount Washington, the highest peak in the Northeast, Agiochook or "place of the Great Spirit."
The Penacooks, fearing the power of Agiochook to inflict death, did not climb to its summit. The fury you bring into the mountains is overpowered by the fury of nature itself. Nature always extracts justice. Defy nature and it obliterates the human species. The more we divorce ourselves from nature, the more we permit the natural world to be exploited and polluted by corporations for profit, the more estranged we become from the essence of life. Corporate systems, which grow our food and ship it across country in trucks, which drill deep into the ocean to extract diminishing fossil fuels and send container ships to bring us piles of electronics and cloths from China, have created fragile, unsustainable man-made infrastructures that will collapse. Corporations have, at the same time, destroyed sustainable local communities. We do not know how to grow our own food. We do not know how to make our own clothes. We are helpless appendages of the corporate state. We are fooled by virtual mirages into mistaking the busy, corporate hives of human activity and the salacious images and gossip that clog our minds as real. The natural world, the real world, on which our life depends, is walled off from view as it is systematically slaughtered. The oil gushing into the Gulf of Mexico is one assault. There are thousands more, including the coal-burning power plants dumping gases into our atmosphere that are largely unseen. Left unchecked, this arrogant defiance of nature will kill us.
"We have reached a point at which we must either consciously desire and choose and determine the future of the Earth or submit to such an involvement in our destructiveness that the Earth, and ourselves with it, must certainly be destroyed," writer-poet Wendell Berry warns. "And we have come to this at a time when it is hard, if not impossible, to foresee a future that is not terrifying."
Year after year I returned to these forbidding peaks from conflicts in Central America, the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans. I had a house in Maine on an 800-foot hill with no television, cell phone or Internet service. The phone number was unlisted. It rarely rang. I refused to give the number to my employer, The New York Times. I brought with me the stench of death, the cries of the wounded, the bloated bodies on the side of the road, the fear, the paranoia, the alienation, the insomnia, the anger and the despair and threw it at these mountains. I strapped my pack on in the pounding rain at trailheads and drove myself, and later my son, up mountains. I rarely stopped. Once, in a bitter rain, I crested the peak of Mount Madison in August and was immediately thrown backward by howling winds whipping across the ridge and pelting hailstones. It was impossible to reach the summit. On a hike in the remote Pemigewasset Wilderness I made a wrong turn and, fearing hypothermia, walked all night. By the time the sun rose my blisters had turned to open sores. I wrung the blood out of my socks. I go to the mountains to at once spend this fury and seek renewal, to be reminded of my tiny, insignificant place in the universe and to confront mystery. Berry writes in "The Peace of Wild Things":
When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
I climbed my first mountain in the White Mountain National Forest when I was 7. It was Mount Chocorua. The mountain, capped with a rocky dome and perhaps the most beautiful in the park, is named for a legendary Pequawket chief who refused to flee with his tribe to Canada and was supposedly pursued to its summit by white settlers, where he leapt to his death. It is a climb I have repeated nearly every year, now with my children. I guided trips in the mountains in college. I would lie, years later, awake in San Salvador, Gaza, Juba or Sarajevo and try to recall the sound of the wind, the smell of the pine forests and the cacophony of bird song. To know the forests and mountains were there, to know that I would return to them, gave me a psychological and physical refuge. And as my two older children grew to adulthood I dragged them up one peak after another, pushing them perhaps too hard. My college-age son is deeply connected to the mountains. He works in the summer as a guide and has spent upward of seven weeks at a time backpacking on the Appalachian Trail. My teenage daughter, perhaps reflecting her sanity, is reticent to enter the mountains with the two of us.
I stood a few days ago in a parking lot at Crawford Notch with Rick Sullivan, an Army captain and Afghanistan war veteran. It was the end of our weeklong hike in the White Mountains. Sullivan noticed a man with a T-shirt that read "Operation Iraqi Freedom." The shirt had Arabic and English script warning motorists not to come too close or risk being shot. The man, an Iraqi veteran, was putting on a pack and told us that he was the caretaker of a camp site. He said he left the Army a year ago, drifted, drank too much and worked at a bar as a bouncer. His life was unraveling. He then answered an ad for a park caretaker. The clouds hovering on the peaks above us were an ominous gray. The caretaker said he planned to beat the rain back to the tent site. I thought of Earl Shaffer.
"You try and forget the war but you carry pieces of it with you anyway," the caretaker said. "In the mountains, at least, I can finally sleep."
A little late to this thread, but just wanted to say, I really liked Roberts original post, and followup comments by Interested Onlooker, J Chestnut, and Kurt.
Robert, I'm curious what common "truth" every single solitary indigenous culture that has ever existed since the dawn of time tune into?
Sorry Dan, oversight. Liked yours too
Steve,
I like your "work together" message.
And we all need to be poked for being not-so-polite
But now it seems that you and Robert are "stalking" each other
and playing the endless Dr Evil and Scott loop.
It's clear who's stalking whom.
Robert.....
You are correct
Steve seems to be following after you
Is this someone pretending to be AJ pretending to be Gandhi?
pretty good post
Leroy is that you?
Out of respect for our hosts and innocent bystanders I'll give this a rest until after the New Year.
Steve El
_______________________
No man can claim that he is absolutely in the right or that particular thing is wrong because he thinks so. The claim to infallibility would thus always be a most dangerous claim to make. (M.K. Gandhi)
"Respect"?
That's the kind of "respect" that the outlaw oppressive state of Israel offers the Palestinians when they agree to a partial short-term moratorium on illegal settlement construction.
[ My father was an idealistic secular Zionist, I've visited Israel and know that Israel does not represent either the Jewish people or Jewish values, any more than Steve (anonymous) El represents Gandhian non-violence or green values.]