I’m really excited about my partner, Amy Gustin’s, latest radio show: Episode #9 of The Living Earth Connection, titled The Big Picture. The Big Picture airs Sunday March 30 at 9:30 AM Pacific Time on KMUD, Redwood Community Radio. You can also listen to it online by clicking “listen now” or by searching the archive @ http://www.kmud.org.
The Big Picture airs during a time-slot known as The Spiritual Perspectives Hour, and Amy’s show, The Living Earth Connection, airs only on the fifth Sunday of the month, and only in those odd three or four months a year that have five Sundays. I know that most religious programming sucks, but I promise you that this show will be unlike anything you have ever heard on the radio before.
I’m really excited about this show because it combines Amy’s Animist message with my electric didgeridoo music in a way that took on a life of its own. The resulting one hour-long musical performance, traces the history of life on Earth from its earliest microscopic origins through the evolution of the human brain, and uses science to reveal the ecology of beliefs that underpin the current environmental crisis. That’s why we call this project, “The Big Picture“.
The combination of spoken word and didgeridoo in The Big Picture engages the whole brain, synthesizing the rational intellect with the wordless depths of the emotional subconscious in a way you’ll find both entertaining and edifying. I hope you’ll tune in.
The time has come to set the record straight about one of the most pervasive myths about Humboldt County. I knew I had to take on this subject when I read Kieth Easthouse’s coverage of the recent “Environmental Cannabis Forum” held at the Mateel Community Center recently. At the forum, Tony Silvaggio, an HSU professor with the Humboldt Institute for Interdisciplinary Marijuana Research, sited, as a factor in the increasing environmental degradation associated with marijuana cultivation…
“The children of the back-to-the landers who first started growing pot in Humboldt’s backcountry tend to be more materialistic and consumer-oriented – and less concerned about the environment than their parents.”
Yeah, blame it on the kids. Surely, those idealistic “back to the landers” with their tiny, hand built eco-sensitive scrap-wood cabins and their 20 year-old trucks, who grow just enough marijuana each year to pay their property taxes, support their favorite environmental and social justice organizations and maybe, if it’s a good year, put some new tires on their old truck, couldn’t be responsible for destroying our watersheds, could they? No, that kind of “back to the lander” has nothing at all to do with the environmental damage wrought by the marijuana industry, mainly because that kind of “back to the lander” doesn’t exist in Humboldt County. At least I’ve never met one. That kind of “back to the lander” is a mythological beast, like leprechauns, Bigfoot or the Loch Ness Monster.
You might think of a “back to the lander” as someone who abandoned the exploding plastic inevitable of American consumerism, for a simple life close to nature, but “back to the lander” means something entirely different in Humboldt County. The reason we call Humboldt’s dope-yuppy Baby Boomers “back to the landers” is because of what they do. They grow marijuana, sell it, use the money to buy stuff, and then they haul that stuff, back to the land.
From what I’ve seen, I’m sure a Humboldt edition of the reality TV show Hoarders would shock most American consumers. I’ve seen some really ridiculous stuff in people’s yards around here, like airplanes without wings,
…speedboats without engines,
…Italian sports cars overgrown with poison oak,
and a seven-foot-tall fiberglass caricature or a dachshund’s head that once festooned the facade of a long defunct fast food franchise.
I know where there is a padlocked, windowless building, way out in the sticks, packed to the rafters with antique pinball machines that don’t work, celebrity look-alike dolls, still in their original packaging, boxes full of fake vomit and rubber dog poop and 15 cases of 30 year old Harley-Davidson brand wine coolers.
Once, while digging in a garden in Humboldt County, my shovel hit something hard. I dug it out, brushed it off, and found myself holding a black statuette of a bird, that I immediately recognized as The Maltese Falcon from the old Humphrey Bogart movie. I kid you not, I dug up The Maltese Fucking Falcon in a Humboldt County garden.
Do you remember The Maltese Falcon? The Maltese Falcon is a movie about an object, so immeasurably valuable in itself, that people willingly sacrifice their lives in order to possess it, only to discover it worthless as it crumbles to pieces in their hands.
Finding The Maltese Falcon, chipped and scratched, in a Humboldt County grow scene seemed appropriate, even perfect for the culture I encountered here. I had no interest in keeping it. I asked my landlord, a gray-haired boomer, of course, about it. Of course, it was his. He told me it was expensive, and that he bought four of them. He told me how much he loved The Maltese Falcon and how inspiring he found the idea of owning an object of immeasurable value. Again, I kid you not. That is a true “back to the lander”.
I know another “back to the lander” who has at least 20 aquariums, no fish in any of them, but if he finds an aquarium at a good price, or one of unusual shape or size, he will immediately buy it. I know a “back to the land” woman who has at least 50 ornate glass and brass overhead electric lighting fixtures strewn about her land even though her house has no electricity. There are barns, sheds, outbuildings and trailers stuffed to the gills with books, records, clothing, stereo equipment, musical instruments, dishes, pottery, art, antiques, and memorabilia of all kinds, scattered all over Humboldt County, “back to the land” Baby Boomers responsible for all of it.
Do you ever wonder what happened to all of the bowling balls and pins from all of the bowling alleys that went out of business in the last 20 years? I’ve seen piles of them, big piles of bowling balls and bowling pins, deep in the woods, on a rural parcel in Humboldt County. Don’t ask me why.
And don’t get me started on the rolling stock. If it has wheels and an engine, some “back to the lander” collects them. They don’t fix them, or restore them, or even try to keep rats from taking up residency in them or forest duff from burying them, but they do collect them. Cars, trucks, motorcycles, go-carts, quads, scooters, vans, Rvs, buses, ambulances, Zambonis, hearses, street-sweepers, cherry-pickers, rock-hoppers, forklifts, bulldozers, backhoes, jeeps, amphibious landing craft, armored personnel carriers, and railroad locomotives, you name it, and some “back to the lander’ bought one, dragged it out into the woods and then lost interest in it.
I’ve offered to help some of these people clean their junk up and get it out of the forest, in exchange for allowing me to stay on their property while I did it. They all looked at me like I just offered to help them dispose of a sack of solid gold Krugerrands. They tell me how rare and valuable all of their stuff is, and how much money they paid for it. Then they tell me how much money they want for it, and how much more money I would have to pay every month for the privilege of living in their junkyard. So, mostly, they live alone on 40, 80 or 160 acres, while they bury themselves in, rapidly deteriorating, consumer-grade junk.
The Baby Boomers are the most materialistic generation in the history of humanity, and Humboldt’s “back to the lander” Baby Boomers are the most insanely, and I mean pathologically, dysfunctionally, psychotically, coo-coo for Cocoa Puffs, insanely materialistic Baby Boomers I have ever met. I find it really hard to imagine how their kids could possibly top them.
True, the children of the “back to the landers” do like their pickup trucks, which cruise conspicuously all over town, but I think the younger generation gets a bad rap, because a lot of them would like to own land themselves. In order to do that, they have to buy it from those “back to the landers”. The “back to the landers” have a formula for determing the value of their land. First, they multiply the price they paid for the land originally, by 10 or 15. Then they add up how much they think all of the crap they’ve dragged onto it, would be worth, if there were anyone on Earth stupid enough to buy it. They then double that number, and add it to the asking price.
So, while the “back to the land” Baby Boomers were able to buy land for $20,000-$30,000, and sold the marijuana they grew on it for $3,000-$4,000 a pound, their kids are buying land for $300,000-$5000,000 and selling their pot for $1,000-$2,000 a pound and spending $10 for every 100 pounds of “back to the lander” crap they haul to the transfer station. Yes, the younger generation may be responsible for a lot of enormous water-sucking, forest-clearing mega-grows, because they really need the money, but as far as the materialism goes, their parents, Humboldt’s “back to the land” Baby Boomers still reign supreme.
I wrote the following letter to the Editor of The Independent in response to a letter written by Dr. Jentry Anders, the author of Beyond Counterculture, a book that describes the modest beginnings of the “back to the land” movement in Humboldt County, and reveals, more than anything else, just how infatuated Baby Boomers are with themselves. Beyond Counterculture remains a central text of the “back to the land” mythology even though not that many people have actually read it. More about the myth of the “back to the landers” next week.
Dear Editor,
I always enjoy hearing from Dr. Jentry Anders, but I must take exception to her most recent letter to the editor. Her explanation of the concept of carrying capacity, and the ecological function of limiting factors as regulators of population were accurate, succinct, and well supported by scientific evidence. However, her contradicting statement, just a few paragraphs later, “It is far too late to apply the concept of carrying capacity to human behavior in most situations.” has no such basis in fact.
Only by the special “magic” of our political and economic system was it possible for some humans, like college professors, politicians, lawyers, judges, cops and drug dealers to temporarily live as though the concept of carrying capacity did not apply to humans, and that limiting factors did not exist for them. The special “magic” of our system comes from the belief that civilized humans are superior to nature, and not bound by its laws. The belief that civilized humans are superior to the rest of nature is a cornerstone of our culture, and it continues to guide and shape our society.
This firmly held belief, backed up by systematic, institutionalized violence, justified the extermination of Native Americans, the liquidation of old-growth forests, and the wholesale replacement of natural habitat, at every turn, with simplified man-made environments. This belief continues to appeal to humans, especially those who have come to enjoy having the Earth’s bounty stripped, rendered and served to them on silver platters, and it perpetuates the unmitigated, destruction of nature to serve the whims of some privileged humans.
In the process of expressing their perceived superiority, these privileged, civilized people, with their superiority complex, their brutal violence and their insatiable appetites, manufactured an environmental crisis of unparalleled gravity, and dumped it in our laps. Their activity has dramatically reduced the overall carrying capacity of planet Earth for all creatures, and led to an explosion in human population. However, carrying capacity and limiting factors still apply to humans, just as they did to the countless species driven to extinction by the relentless, expropriation of all natural resources for the benefit of some humans. Apparently, Dr. Anders believes it “far too late” to challenge this elitist attitude, regardless of the scientific evidence refuting it.
It’s easy to “have nothing but compassion for individual people who are now suffering because humans had exceeded their carrying capacity, globally.”, if one remains unwilling to challenge the system responsible for this disaster. As long as this system goes unchallenged, more and more people can expect to share that “nothing”, and that “compassion”, for what it is worth, gets spread thinner as well. Personally, I have nothing but contempt for people who have enough education to understand how the system works, yet remain unwilling to challenge it.
Every homeless person understands the concept of limiting factors on a visceral level. Not only do they understand natural limiting factors, they understand artificial, man-made, limiting factors, and they didn’t need a Pell Grant to afford the tuition to learn it. It’s only the privileged class, a small minority, globally, for whom limiting factors have become an alien and repugnant concept, and it was for them that the Earth’s bounty, as well as countless millions of human lives, have already been sacrificed. It is for these privileged few, that our future has been mortgaged, and Dr. Anders suggests, it is for these privileged few that the last remaining natural resources, be more carefully managed.
When Dr. Anders states, “The only thing I can do is crusade for family planning and choose my decision-makers by their willingness to admit that limiting factors for humans exist…”, I’m reminded that the system of empowering privileged “decision-makers”, always backed by soldiers and lawmen with guns, even when guided by the scientific knowledge of college professors, has failed us spectacularly, completely, and irreparably. In addition to our current environmental crisis, privileged people, and their “decision-makers”, gave us genocide, slavery, poverty, and the horrors of technological warfare, among other gems. They also gave us marijuana prohibition, which artificially drives both agricultural and population expansion, locally.
Not only does our current political and economic system guarantee “the grimmest of futures” for even the privileged, or at least their progeny, this system has already dealt the grimmest of pasts to Native Americans, African slaves, and many millions of others, not to mention most of the non-human creatures with whom we once shared this marvelous blue marble. Today, all you have to do is look around, to see entirely too many people facing a very grim present.
This crisis won’t be solved by electing the right people, or by enacting thoughtful policy at the national, state and local level. That’s what got us into this mess. As dire as our ecological crisis surely is, we should see it as a symptom of a cultural crisis, a cultural crisis with immeasurable consequences for every living thing on Planet Earth.
NPR recently reported on a scientific paper that predicted 1% of girls who live in the area effected by the Fukushima nuclear disaster, and were one year old at the time of the meltdown, would get cancer from the radiation exposure resulting from the incident. The report concluded that cancers resulting from the Fukushima nuclear disaster would not raise Japan’s cancer rate very much at all, since about half, or 50% of all Japanese people get cancer at some point in their lives already.
My brain almost exploded when I heard that report. First, I can scarcely imagine what kind of statistical gymnastics it took for them to jump to that conclusion, especially considering that the disaster continues unabated. I mean, the reactors continue to melt, producing heat, steam and huge quantities of deadly radioactive material, that is by no means contained. This material continues to contaminate soil and groundwater in the area, and few believe that anyone can prevent the heavily contaminated groundwater from flowing into the Pacific Ocean. Clearly, the best is yet to come.
Second: Half of all Japanese people can expect to get cancer in their lifetime! That shocked me. Cancer was relatively rare before the Industrial Revolution, which is why they call cancer a “disease of civilization”. Doctors identified the first causes of cancers in the 18th Century, which appeared as rare tumors on the scrota of chimney-sweeps with poor hygiene. 300 years of carcinogenic industrial pollutants later, so many people get cancer that even an ongoing nuclear catastrophe will hardly make a dent in the national cancer rate.
Isn’t that reassuring. Really, why worry about Fukushima? Your dryer sheets will kill you before it does. Your nail polish, oven cleaner, deodorant, air freshener, the smell of your new car, carpet, paint, and furniture will help. Vehicle emissions, industrial incinerators, coal fired power plants, chemical plants and plastics factories provide free carcinogens for people who can’t afford to buy products that contain them. The body burden of pesticides, flame retardants, rocket propellants and a couple hundred other chemicals we inherited from our parents, gave them all a head start. How could one nuclear disaster hope to compete with a full-court press like that.
Finally, even assuming this dubious estimate turns out to be accurate, what kind of metric is the estimated number of additional cancers in one year old girls from Fukushima, for measuring the magnitude of the Fukushima disaster? What about two year old girls? What about five year old girls? What about boys? What about adults? What about kids who haven’t been born yet?
How many of those one year old girls will suffer miscarriages, or have children with birth defects because of radiation from Fukushima? What about 15 year old girls, or 25 year old women? How many miscarriages and birth defects have already resulted from the Fukushima nuclear disaster. How many of those babies will develop cancer later in life?
How does 1% sound for a wild ass guess for any and all of the above questions. I’ll bet that’s as accurate of a guess as the study I heard quoted. Does that sound like an acceptable cost? 1% sounds like almost nothing, doesn’t it? That’s probably why they chose that number for their prediction. One bullet, one hundred people, Russian Roulette anyone? This still doesn’t get to the heart of the issue, because Fukushima is the gift that keeps on giving.
What happens the next time an earthquake triggers a tsunami in the area, and it stirs up all of the radioactive mud just off the coast of the plant, that will probably never be cleaned up, and dumps it all over the countryside? It’s bound to happen, in 50, 100, or 500 yrs or so, and all of that plutonium will be just as fresh and deadly as it is today. What happens in 10,000 yrs when no one there speaks Japanese anymore, or has any idea why this lovely oceanfront real-estate has remained undeveloped? What happens in 10,000,000 yrs, when bipedal felines plant the whole area in catnip? I’ll hazard a guess that 1% of bipedal felines exposed to contaminated catnip develop feline leukemia, using the same math as the researchers quoted on NPR.
…And for what? A few fleeting megawatts of electricity, mostly wasted on garish signage, excessive lighting, electronic toilets and Japanese game shows. Unlike the electricity generated at the Fukushima nuclear power station, the Fukushima nuclear disaster will not go away. The deadly impacts of Fukushima will even outlast the fortunes of Tepco’s shareholders, who profited from the massive public investment in, inherently dangerous, uncompetitively expensive, nuclear power.
The lasting radioactive legacy of the Fukushima nuclear disaster will remain a threat, and an impediment to life on Earth until the sun goes super-nova and burns the Earth to a cinder. Radioactivity from Fukushima, and the contaminated area around it, like Chernobyl, not to mention every other nuclear power plant, laboratory, or weapons facility ever built, will continue to take lives, cause sickness and make life harder on Planet Earth until the end of time.
Life on Planet Earth is hard enough, thank you very much, and we really don’t need the additional burden.
I see by my calendar that today is Ass Wednesday. Ass Wednesday marks the beginning of Lint, the time of year when winter clothes traditionally begin to break down from being worn constantly.
In honor of this pointlessly offensive introduction, I present this pointlessly tasteless exhibit of bizarre butt embellishments.
Talk about having a bug up your butt, and continuing in the automotive theme…
These trucks haul ass! But this probably gets better gas mileage…
…and speaking of rude gestures…
Fuck me? Please.
…but I was just getting started.
Probably just needs a jump start.
… or maybe it requires a deposit
Hi-ho hi-ho, it’s off to work we go…
Now that you know where he’s been, maybe you don’t want to find him.
scwewy wabbit
Meow! I think this is a fortune tookie. What’s my lucky number?
…and I’ll bet 28 to bring up the rear.
but this is not my game, or my ass for that matter.
and New York is not my town.
This is your brain on ass, so remember…
So, where are you from?
…and how about you?
long way from home, I guess.
nice rack!
nice rack!
Government inspected!
…rejected, and given the boot.
ass art.
more ass art.
colorful ass art.
Monochromatic ass art.
ass art portrait.
Blacklight ass art
some fresh ass art. bet she doesn’t sit down much for the next few days. Speaking of painful…
Hemorrhoids? Maybe you should see a doctor…
…like Dr. Phil, and speaking of celebrities…
…who is Kanye?
In a no-holds barred cage match, who would win, Hulk or…
Homer? and while we’re watching the Simpsons, how about…
…and…
…and…
Plenty of competition in that field. especially if you consider this…
Like You've Got Something Better To Do 