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This site was created in February of 2007. We hope it has a long and fruitful life! |
Articles, Artwork, and Links that will help situate the broader intention of this website in relation to Mass Society. ARTICLE Organic Products vs Guerilla Gardening WGGC Literature. Submitted by admin on Fri, 2007-01-12 A number of well-meaning individuals have made the choice of growing and consuming organic food. While organic food is obviously a better choice than more artificial methods of food production, the present incarnation of the organic food movement does not address the root issues of industrial food production. Those issues being flaws of capitalist economics and personal alienation from food production. This article demonstrates that sustenance horticulture (guerilla gardening in particular) addresses both these issues, and expose organic products for what they really are: a co-option by capitalism of people's desires to return to a more natural way of life. read more... ARTICLE What is a Freegan? Freegan.info, Wetlands Activism Collective, New York. Freegans are people who employ alternative strategies for living based on limited participation in the conventional economy and minimal consumption of resources. Freegans embrace community, generosity, social concern, freedom, cooperation, and sharing in opposition to a society based on materialism, moral apathy, competition, conformity, and greed. read more... ARTICLE This is Anarcho-Herbalism Thoughts On Health and Healing For the Revolution By Laurel Luddite Like so much in this consumerist society, it is easy to ignore the connections between a bottle on a shelf in some store and a living, growing plant out in the world somewhere. It can be hard to know if the plant grows a mile away or on another continent. There is much to be said for reconnecting, for educating ourselves about the herbs we use and gathering our own medicine when we can. That's how we will be able to build a whole new system of healing ñ one that can support our movement away from the corporate power structure that medicine has become. read more... ARTICLE The Idea of a Local Economy by Wendell Berry The danger now is that those who are concerned will believe that the solution to the "environmental crisis" can be merely political - that the problems, being large, can be solved by large solutions generated by a few people to whom we will give our proxies to police the economic proxies that we have already given. The danger, in other words, is that people will think they have made a sufficient change if they have altered their "values," or had a "change of heart," or experienced a "spiritual awakening," and that such a change in passive consumers will cause appropriate changes in the public experts, politicians, and corporate executives to whom they have granted their political and economic proxies. The trouble with this is that a proper concern for nature and our use of nature must be practiced not by our proxy-holders, but by ourselves. A change of heart or of values without a practice is only another pointless luxury of a passively consumptive way of life. read more... ARTICLE The Consequences of Domestication and Sedentism by Emily A. Schultz & Robert H. Lavenda Sedentism and domestication represent not just a technological change but also a change in worldview. Land was no longer a free good, available to anyone, with resources scattered randomly across the landscape; it was transformed into particular territories, collectively or individually owned, on which people raised crops and flocks. Thus, sedentism and a high level of resource extraction (whether by complex foraging or farming) led to concepts of property that were rare in previous foraging societies. read more... ARTICLE Understanding Patriarchy by Bell Hooks Chapter two of "The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity and Love" by bell hooks Patriarchy is the single most life-threatening social disÂease assaulting the male body and spirit in our nation. Yet most men do not use the word "patriarchy" in everyday life. Most men never think about patriarchy-what it means, how it is created and sustained. Many men in our nation would not be able to spell the word or pronounce it correctly. The word "patriarchy" just is not a part of their normal everyday thought or speech. Men who have heard and know the word usually associate it with women's liberÂation, with feminism, and therefore dismiss it as irrelevant to their own experiences. I have been standing at podiums talking about patriarchy for more than thirty years. It is a word I use daily, and men who hear me use it often ask me what I mean by it. read more... ARTICLE Technology, Trauma, and the Wild by Chellis Glendinning (Excerpted from the anthology Ecopsychology) At this point in history, it is essential that we ask difficult and searching questions about the place of technology in our lives. What is the essence of modern technology? How does it structure our lives? Our perceptions? Our politics? How does it shape our psyches? What does it say about our relationship to our humanness and to the Earth? Unfortunately, obstacles to answers are entrenched, like concrete piers at a freeway exchange, in both our social and psychological reality. read more... ARTICLE Dumpster Diving: There's big bucks in tech trash. By Cory Doctorow Over green tea, Darren starts to get philosophical. It's an occupational hazard. You can't spend half your time alone in dumpsters without formulating trash cosmologies. "Those guys who go after tin cans and pop bottles, those garbage pickers, they're fuckin' nuts! Why waste your time on a nickel bottle, when you can sell an empty toner cartridge for 10 or 20 bucks? They're nuts, man." He looks genuinely upset. He gets upset when he talks trash. But he also swells with pride, describing this strange little niche he's carved for himself. "I got caught in somebody's trash one night, and the next time I went back, I found 10 CD-ROM drives, and they'd smashed 'em up with hammers, so I couldn't sell 'em." He grimaces. "It's criminal. This is useful stuff! Why would they want it to end up in a landfill?" read more... |
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