Building the Garden of Eden

SUBHEAD: You will have to build your own Garden of Eden. The sooner you do the better it will be. 

By Juan Wilson on 25 May 2015 for Island Breath -
(http://islandbreath.blogspot.com/2015/05/building-garden-of-eden.htm)


Image above: painting of "The Garden of Eden" by Tomas Cole in 1828. From (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden_of_Eden#/media/File:Jan_Brueghel_de_Oude_en_Peter_Paul_Rubens_-_Het_aards_paradijs_met_de_zondeval_van_Adam_en_Eva.jpg).

This week I am turning seventy years old. Being born in the spring of 1945 means I have experienced the entire post World War Two era. It has been one hell of a ride. And it seems that in my single lifetime I may see the entire era of what some have call Pax Americana.

That era being the time that the Untied States of America has been the dominant player in the world after dropping atomic bombs on Japan. That era is in the process of ending. At best it will be a difficult transition. Difficult even though Americans have been practicing the experience of defeat since the Korean War.

Our Asian wars in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia through the 60's and 70s; our Central American wars in Nicaragua and El Salvador in the 80's; and our Middle East wars in Afghanistan and Iraq since the 1990s; have (with the aide of the CIA) all created more enemies than they have defeated. See the Mujahideen, Al Qaeda, Islamic State in Syria, etc., for recent kinds of negative feedback loops that seem to get worse with each iteration.

These wars have left countless Americans physically tortured and mentally traumatized for a lifetime. Millions have died and nothing has been accomplished. So much so that as the USA now thrashes to create the  international entities the will supersede today's bankrupt and obsolete nation states with supra-national corporations (See NAFTA, TAFTA, TPP,  etc.).

I believe the thinking goes that nations are not "Too Big TO Fail" and they will take the hit for the elites and their financial institutions. How the Greek government gets out of its European Union bind in the GREXIT (Greek Exit) will foreshadow how it goes for Spain, Itialy, and ultimately France and Germany.

The Chinese and Japanese are facing their own crises as well. The financial and resource bubbles are will be bursting all around the world. The people with the most money, power and influence are spending what ever is necessary to make sure that you rather than they are stuck with the bill. It's a game of Musical Chairs with poverty and indentured servitude at boobie prizes.

One of the reasons that I dwell on these issues is that I want to know how much time I have to get certain tasks done. I do not think there is much more time available now. So when the nose-bleed-high towers of Ponzi Schemes, made up of  bets-against-bets-against-bets, tumble to the ground, it will be too late to get prepared for what follows. So get what you can get done before the Shit-Hits-The-Fan.

We have spent several years writing and re-posting articles about the failures to be expected and getting prepared to handle them. We have also spent a great deal of time on trying to read the tea leaves on when this financial gizmo we're stuck in will blow a fatal gasket.

In our efforts to walk-what-we-talk we have come to realize that it takes much longer to "master" a single self-reliant discipline than one might suspect. For example: raising chickens for eggs (and occasional meat). We have been working at it for five years and are just beginning to feel confident that we can handle raising generations of birds who will lay for us and survive to reproduce new generations who will do the same.

The same goes for managing a raised-bed garden; providing your own electricity; installing and using a wood burning cook stove; collecting storing groundwater and rainwater; and managing a banana tree, or papaya tree grove through generations. All these disciplines require experienced learning and attention to detail.

Here on Kauai once the refrigeration in the Big Save, Safeway, Foodland and Times Supermarket goes down it will be too late. Once the barges and jets stop supplying Costco, K-Mart and Walmart are not landing it will be too late. You will be starving and reduced to stealing food from your food growing neighbors.

It's pretty clear that the world governments we have today will be ineffective and useless in averting global warming, climate change, drought, ocean rising, industrial pollution, soil loss, mass extinctions, and host of other Anthropocene Era disasters.

We will have to live within that stinking mess. Hopefully it will be in a place of our own making with as varied and delightful an environment as we can sustain around ourselves. So get used to it. You will have to build your own Garden of Eden. See (http://www.islandbreath.org/2007Year/20-HookahiKauai/0720-03GardenOfEden.html).

Start now! The sooner you do the better it will be.

See also:
Ea O Ka Aina: The New Game 10/11/13
Ea O Ka Aina: The Titanic or Noah's Ark 3/4/12
Ea O Ka Aina: The Hero's Way 1/13/12
Ea O Ka Aina: Here's the Deal 7/5/09
Ea O Ka Aina: The American Century 12/31/08
Island Breath: Our Impending Journey Nears 8/24/07
Island Breath: The Garden of Eden 4/18/07

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2 comments :

Eleanor said...

Happy 70th Juan

Yer jest a young'un. I reach my 80th this August and delighted to be on this beautiful island even with all the humbug. At least we are able to build our own gardens. I look forward to your future articles and hope to get my friends out to visit your place one of these fine days.

Aloha,
Ellie

Anonymous said...

Happy Birthday, Juan! Mahalo for all you do.

I agree with you that the govts. will be ineffective and useless in averting global warming, climate change, drought, ocean rising, industrial pollution, soil loss, mass extinctions, and host of other Anthropocene Era disasters....particularly when they are indeed the ones causing these catastrophes. Tell me why we keep them around and bow down to them like good slaves?

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