Stonekite

Some background: I was born in LA, but was raised on an a very undeveloped island in the Puget Sound. I reminisced about that a little here.

A few days ago my mother, Julie, wrote this.
I responded in an email, asking three questions:

“

• 1. What is happening on the island, that is so worthwhile?
  
• 2. How is that thing that is happening on the island exemplified by the people who live there?
  
• 2. What is your prescription for the lives and values of humanity, based on the previous answers? I’m not so much thinking of the moral or philosophical values, but the more pragmatic values of economics [recycling? how/whether to cook what kind of food from where? etc] and locational [where do we live now, and when we have kids? etc] values.
  “

She’s started an answer here (politely not mentioning who I was). Before she posts whatever else she has to say, I’d like to take the opportunity to respond to this first half, and to give her a better idea of why her first post made me queasy.

The picture above was taken from my front door. I estimate that that apartment building holds roughly the same number of permanent residents that live on the island. There is a tremendous difference in space between the physical footprint of four square miles of people living—however intimately—amongst natural settings, and this building. That difference in space is the basis and building block of my unease.

[In the city] it’s possible to move entirely within human mediated systems, and from there, to jump to the conclusion that our comforts are infinitely expandable. […] In contrast, what you learn here is that every bit of land and sea has a prior claim on it from untold generations of bugs, thrushes, lichen, sculpins, blackberries, otters, and salamanders. Any human improvement is at their cost.

[….]

[F]ocusing only on human profit and social justice leads to deforesting Brazil, depleting India’s water table, and pumping more carbon into the atmosphere than it can digest. Anyone who lived with and listened to nature could have told you what a dumb idea things like the Green Revolution are.

As I understand it, Julie is saying people should be more in touch with nature in order to help society—both taken as a whole and as a collection of individuals—avoid mistakes like those and achieve happiness and equilibrium. I agree. And my question is: how does someone living on the island help society, when the very process of living on an unspoiled island requires the exclusion of society at large? In “Trenchant Words” you quoted Bob as saying “There’s something going on here at the intersection of irony, culture, and nature that’s worth pursuing.”, but all I see is a smug expression that stays on the island.

Seven billion people is not a small amount, and it requires sacrifices such as the people in the apartment block above are making by living in small places next to a freeway. This is necessary. Regardless of how big the consumption of a person in the city is vrs. that of an educated person in a rural area today, space consumption seems a far more pressing concern to me. I think some of the greatest solutions we will find in the next forty years will be based on making urban living more efficient and palatable.

The act of living on the island is not a solution, it’s a splurge that cannot be shared in its present form. A sentence like this: “There’s something going on here at the intersection of irony, culture, and nature that’s worth pursuing” annoys me for that reason. Talk of a new paradigm that is associated with how people on the island live should be suspect.

P.S.
As always, comments are welcome.

Also, if you saw this before nine-o’clock you probably saw a version that was still being edited. I have a horrible habit of posting something, and then going back and rewriting the whole thing.