The Masters

I have been reading a book lately, Before the Dawn by Nicholas Wade, about human prehistory. It is a fascinating book, and while I wonder about some of what he says, everything is well supported and well thought out. It brings up for me, however, a major issue. I have maintained for years that our society took a bad turn with the Neolithic Revolution. (I suppose that makes me an ultra ultra conservative.) That is where we changed from a largely egalitarian mobile society, to a hierarchical settled one.

It is fairly obvious that such a shift calls for a different kind of organization, more complex, farther reaching, but our solution to this need was that we started having masters, and people who desperately wanted to be our masters, and coincidentally, many people who preferred being slaves. Most of our subsequent recorded history has been the struggles of those masters to gain even more power. Much of the social development since then has been the struggle of the rest of us to keep that power in check.

Gorge Orwell said, "If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face - forever." Those who would be our masters are after exactly that, except that eventually the face would no longer be human, because humans cannot stay human without hope. For those of us who would be free, this is the struggle. To keep the would-be masters in check. To create for our future an egalitarian society despite them and despite the need for responsiveness to a complex ever-changing world.

Introduction

Here I am. I created this blog to place my rambling thoughts on the world, society and gardens. I am a gardener and biologist and a very concerned participant in a world on the eve of destruction. We are mining this world, farming it dry, and leaving the sacred cycles broken. I will attempt to put the pieces together here, or discover how they can be put back together in ways that work for all of us.

There are many, many others working on these same issues, and I am under no illusion that I am the smartest, wisest or best of us. I am just me. But my perspective is a little different than others, and maybe I can provide one or more pieces of the puzzle.

In any event, I will try. And in the spaces inbetween, talk about some of the things I love, plants, people, and perhaps even poetry.