LETTERS

Whole Earth,  Summer, 2001  

• E-mail
• Print
• Link

Whole Earth is a conversation. Compliments, cavils, and corrections are welcome. Letters and email may be (reluctantly) edited for space or clarity.

Jeanne Carstensen, former managing editor of the Essential Whole Earth Catalog and guest editor of the Winter 1987 WER (which became Signal) and of our Spring 2000 special in on grassroots radio, has been awarded a National Arts Journalism Program fellowship at Columbia--a big apple she well deserved after living the life of a penny-paid, alternative journalist. Before they made their ways to Whole Earth, Mike was Jeanne's teacher at World College West.

In mid-May, Monika Olson, our sometime design editor, popped a girl, Kamala Rose. We wish her good luck. --PW

Creating Our Future

Memorial Day weekend, the wheat-colored, mist-coated foothills of Walker Creek Ranch in West Marin became the site of a "historical moment" (unprecedented in activist history, according to long-time activist John Steiner), when young and old visionaries came together to share their ideas and memories and to talk deeply about ways to combine spirituality with social conscience. Inspired by our issue on the spiritual labor of Earth healing (Winter, 1997), I packed my backpack and sleeping bag, caught a ride with a colonoptic therapist/trapeze artist, and headed for the ranch. There my life-long environmental heroes were gathered at Sat Santokh's three-day "Creating Our Future" powwow, featuring legendary panelists Ram Dass, Julia Butterfly Hill, Mark Dubois, Randy Hayes, and Claire Greensfelder, among others. When the eclectic mix of activists, ecologists, students, teachers, scientists, and writers were not listening to radical stories of near-death experiences while trying to save rivers and trees, we were sweating in small discussions (about green politics, youth and education, economics and finance, networking, and sustainability), chanting, hiking in the hills, and dancing in drum circles that lasted until sunrise. It felt like a big sleepover with a hundred kindred souls, aged nine to ninety, sharing wisdom, history, passion, and visions. For more about Creating our Future, see www.satsantokh.com. --EP

Get Funny

Another funny website ("Ha Ha Web Sites," Whole Earth, Spring 2001): www.ironictimes.com

Paul Krassner
by email

Hyperreal or Hype

Dear Peter,

First, I would like to commend you on your extensive and enlightening coverage (Spring 2001 features on restoration) of ways to act responsibly in an era of apathy and irresponsibility. I am in the earliest beginnings of restoring my local riparian zone to what it once was before overgrazing eliminated its lushness and diversity. Many of the articles and recommended books will be referred to in the years to come. Playing God is painful and no easy task, so I need all the support and suggestions I can get. Gracias!!

Second, I must say I was deeply disturbed by your article entitled "Wilderness and the Hyperreal." I wonder how much time has gone into saving [the Old Man of the Mountain's] ancient face from the inevitable. I suspect not as much as it takes to preserve or mask the human body from growing old and eventually decaying itself, but a waste of energy and resources just the same. Instead of spraying bleach on blemishes we opt for rouge and powder; rather than fill unsightly skin cracks with epoxy and wire we prefer the surgeon's scalpel to beautify, and even in the end we choose lead-lined coffins with longevity similar to that of this mountain's fiberglass face. I could see how the unaware might be fooled into thinking this particular essay falls under the heading of restoration, but then there is nothing restorative about using chemicals on living organisms, in order to be hyperreal.

Specifically, in the article the French philosopher's association of authentic nature with the hyperreal is more like a hyperbole--in other words a bunch of bullshit. For by exaggerating or replicating the real with the artificial, we lose touch with reality and the only genuine foundation that we are forever dependent upon ... Earth ... regardless of the genuine feelings the contrived may engender.

Although I have never been to this particular mountain, I have no doubt that it is special, for all of Earth is. Thus, this place was sacred before there was a desire for restoring and securing. It actually could have become revered even more, if it was left untouched, for by seeing the decaying profile as a reflection of ourselves--finite in form, yet forever changing in content--we may have grasped more deeply the cycles of creation and destruction, and more importantly have been reminded of our own mortality in order to live ... more fully now.

This once-great omen of the Abenaki is fast becoming a bad one, by demonstrating what we as a society ignorantly preserve and worship. It is not the Old Man of the Mountain anymore, but instead a mountain made by man. We already have Mount Rushmore and soon Crazy Horse (even more of a hypocrisy), not to mention the many bouncing silicone structures of melon-shaped mountains that are lusted after by women and men alike. Are there not enough altars of the profane already? Indeed we must worship, but please let us pay homage to life and death through all its imperfections and ghastly blemishes, rather than kneeling beneath the ghostly hyperreal--a truly disingenuous and ultimately intangible silhouette of man's perfection.