The Phony Farm Thing — A Lament
There’s lots of buzz about the return of farming. Like most other good buzzes these days, it ignores the elephant in the room.
I call that ELEPHANT sprawl.
Sprawl is the matrix that makes justice impossible because its raison d’etre is injustice.
Sprawl means that new farms will fit in and make invisibility more appealing.
We watch Ferguson and Baltimore from our perches near the new farms and commiserate about Nepal from safe havens.
We think to the tune of binary logic — us and them — as the world becomes more and more triadic.
I have called the current system
benign genocide
because it IS genocide. But we are largely smiling through the pain.
If we want farming, how about we dismantle sprawl?
How about we design to enable farms to be everywhere? How about we acknowledge that the answer to sprawl is
cybercommunities
Such communities are islands of urbanity built in four level-matrices a mile from side to side. They are connected to the whole world and have few or no cars within.
They are clusters of from 6–12,000 souls living with access to complete privacy in an environment where one can work, play and reside and, yes
walk out the back or side or circular exterior and find a cluster of farms and other outdoor things that are there because we have sent all those concrete interchanges back to the Koch Brothers with a note saying No Thanks.
Radicalism these days is a new $10K watch that reminds you to stop sitting there. This is obscene.
Much better a global conference on how to redo the world.
That will take at very least:
Basic Income
The halving of defense expenses
and
the willingness to look past oil and the automobile to the creation of a new world as a means of recovering our lost momentum.
We can farm like troupers, but it won’t do any good if it serves only those who have privilege.
At some point well-being collides with nausea and then all the magic of illusion is gone and we can see in the background of the videos we watch the true condition of the world we continue to make.
In a cybercommunity world we will have education that is based on curiosity and the achievement of benchmarks that spell some sort of practical future. One size will not fit all but that will not be a basis for discrimination.
Farms will not be agribusiness rife with heavy equipment. They will be places where folk can come and see what s being done.
We can pick our dinner from vines and pull it from dirt. We can move forward by retrieving what works from the past.
We are not turning back the clock. We are saying no to corpo-time.
If we are to have farms. let’s have justice too. Otherwise we are condemned to see green as an effete charade to further anesthetize the privileged against the reality they cannot see directly.
