Responding to FC's essay

This is an initial response to an essay by someone I've learned a lot from--the essay "The Dilemma of Global Starvation as Intellectual Abstraction" by Frank Cook.

I appreciate this perspective. I would like to hear (wonder if Shumacher College is bringing in any representatives of) the integral perspective on environmental issues.

I think the most helpful visions of the future will be some kind of synthesis of the indigenous and the modern.

Well--I don't mean to start a debate. In practice most of the people who would be reading your essay are creating some sort of synthesis of the indigenous and modern--using products of corporations in the process.


Should we recognize that, embrace it, and consider how corporations, the products they create, and the institutions and bureacracy and government that are all a part of modernity can be more life affirming?

What would that look like?

You might consider the Habermasian view and the Integral perspectives in developing this future vision.

For me--my vision of synthesis I'm experimenting with: to be out in the forest with my solar-powered internet connection to the pfaf.org database. . .

able to publish, to be an example to others. To network, to help others get out there too. To be an example of how little is needed to have wonderful experience.

Basically, I, and integral philosophy, and Habermas, all claim that the modern era has opened certain wonderful possibilities. Critiques of modernity might be more compelling if they recognized these aspects and incorporated them into their visions of the future.

The anarchoprimitivists are fairly united in saying 'there are no benefits worth the costs'. That their use of modern tech is only pre-fall, and waiting for the fall of civ.

A newer critique, that many may find more helpful--that I hope to offer with my life: I will live simply (in an 'origin skills' way) but with [X] benefits of modern technology, and encourage the diversity of lifeways that make the tech possible to move in [Y] direction.

(Y probably equals what Mollison describes in Permaculture: A Designers' Manual. What X is, I'll be finding out.)

Frank--you have stated the same about your use of airplanes-- modernity and corporations have given you wings. Our lives integrate modernity and indigenous wisdom whether or not our thoughts about our lives do.