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Gas station architecture, commuting to an office [why?], endless miles of ugly malls peddling tons and tons of garbage that fills millions of acres of dumps that pollute the landscape and the water table... supermarkets and fast food joints surrounded by seas of asphalt and stockpiled with corporate-farmed nonfoods that cause us to be ill- all are offshoots of this crazy-thinking philosophy that land [the skin of the very planet] is a trading commodity, a disposable toy.
In reality our food, shelter, health, wealth- the very Life Force [aka "true bottom line"]- is innately tied to the land. Pretending it's another commodity for short-term speculation or the building of more disposable buildings has proven to be our undoing on many levels.
When we lose our home to a mortgage company, we've traded our right to be on the planet for trinkets and beads- or iPods and plasma tvs. When the corporate predators come in and destroy the slow-grown wealth of individuals faster than it can regenerate, in the form of Walmart or the WTO, they are ultimately the acting as the uroburos swallowing its own tail. The very "environment" they are feeding upon is destroyed, and they will starve in the end.
I sometimes wonder if Kissinger's disdainful comment that we are the "eaters" [aka "consumers"] wasn't so much an analysis as a plan- more consuming means more profits, after all. People didn't tend to have the gimmes as much as they do now... and the things they "needed" were fewer as well. Buying widgets was never so popular as when the television started making them necessities of life. Meanwhile, we poor aphids don't seem to get that the corporatist predation of our life-force starts with us donating our time towards the getting of things. The Buddhists tell us that we don't own things, they own us. I think they're right- every thing I own requires some of my time in the form of caring for it.
In the very long run, the people who work for corporations will no longer work for them in the end, either due to the corporation closing or due to the end of their work life cycle, with nothing to show for their time on the planet but more trinkets and beads. Their children will remember them by the trinkets and beads they leave behind, because their lifetimes will have been spent apart, at work, school, and other diversions.
The land will continue on, the strip malls and shoebox houses will slowly fade away like the ruins of the Maya- but quicker, and with less style. The septic tanks will outlast the buildings. Our descendants will either learn to grow a vegetable or starve, learn to value the truly finer things- like home and family, learning and love- or be driven from those homes. Hopefully, the Life Force will triumph over the lying, deluded predators that have brought us to this point, and heal itself over time.
If we make ourselves part of that healing process, letting the lions die and helping the land to heal, then we have a chance to become truly wealthy as gardeners of the planet. All wealth is cultivated- it is grown, built up, and slowly brought to fruition. The results, hopefully carefully tended, can be the seeds of more wealth- enough for everybody. Enough to make a civilization out of this crumbling, dying echo of the Roman empire.
But not the way it's been done in recent years, and not with the idea that we're all lions.
That has to change.
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