Anyhow, at the time the suggestion was made I had little actual thought of entering law school and actually was somewhat bewildered by the suggestion. I was a geology student and I was having the time of my life. I was always done with school by late afternoon, and had plenty of time to hunt during the hunting season nearly every day, which is exactly what I did. By 1983, however, the bloom was coming off the petroleum industry's rose and it was becoming increasingly obvious that finding employment was going to be difficult. Given that, the suggestion of a career in the law began to be something I took somewhat more seriously. By the time I graduated from UW in 1986, a full blown oilfield depression was going on and the law appeared to be a more promising option than going on to an advance degree in geology. I did ponder trying to switch to wildlife management at that point, but it appeared to be a bad bet at that stage.
Well, like more than one lawyer I actually know, what that means is that I started out with an outdoor career with outdoor interests combined with an academic study of the same, and then switched to a career which, at least according to Jon Brady, favored "analytical thinking" (which he thought I had, and which is the reason he mentioned the possibility to me). And then there's the interest in nature and history to add to it.
Our artificial environment
So, as part of all of that, I've watched people and animals in the natural and the unnatural environment. And I don't really think that most people do the unnatural environment all that well. In other words, I know why the caged tiger paces.
People who live with and around nature are flat out different than those who do not. There's no real getting around it. People who live outdoors and around nature, and by that I mean real nature, not the kind of nature that some guy who gets out once a year with a full supply of the latest products from REI thinks he experiences, are different. They are happier and healthier. Generally they seem to have a much more balanced approach to big topics, including the Divine, life and death. They don't spend a lot of time with the latest pseudo philosophical quackery. You won't find vegans out there. You also won't find men who are as thin as pipe rails sporting haircuts that suggest they want to be little girls. Nor will you find, for that matter, real thugs.
Indeed the blog author noted above noted that, and quotes from Jack London, the famous author, to the effect and then goes on to conclude:
If depression is partly caused by a mismatch between how our bodies and minds got used to living for thousands of years, and how we now live in the modern world, then a fundamental step in closing this gap isn’t just moving our bodies, but getting those bodies outside.
I think he's correct there. And to take it one step further, I think the degree to which people retain a desire to be closer to nature reflects itself back in so many ways we can barely appreciate it.
Truth be known, we've lived in the world we've crated for only a very brief time. All peoples, even "civilized people", lived very close to a nature for a very long time. We can take, as people often do, the example of hunter gatherers, which all of us were at one time, but even as that evolved in to agricultural communities, for a very long time, people were very "outdoors" even when indoors.
Ruin at Bandalier National Monument. The culture that built these dwellings still lives nearby, in one of the various pueblos of New Mexico. These people were living in stone buildings and growing corn, but they were pretty clearly close to nature, unlike the many urbanites today who live in brick buildings in a society that depends on corn, but where few actually grow it. The modern pueblos continue to live in their own communities, sometimes baffling European Americans. I've heard it declared more than once that "some have university educations but they still go back to the reservation."
Even in our own culture, those who lived rural lives were very much part of the life of the greater nation as a whole, than they are now. Now most people probably don't know a farmer or a rancher, and have no real idea of what rural life consists of. Only a few decades back this was not the case. Indeed, if a person reads obituaries, which are of course miniature biographies of a person, you'll find that for people in their 80s or so, many, many, had rural origins, and it's common to read something like "Bob was born on his families' farm in Haystack County and graduated from Haystack High School in 1945. He went to college and after graduating from high school worked on the farm for a time before . . . ."
Louisiana farmer, 1940s. Part of the community, not apart from it.
Now, however this is rarely the case. Indeed, we can only imagine how unimaginably dull future obits will be, for the generation entering the work force now. "Bob's parents met at their employer Giant Dull Corp where they worked in the cubicle farm. Bob graduated from Public School No 117 and went to college majoring in Obsolete Computers, where upon he obtained a job at Even Bigger Dull Corp. . . "
No wonder things seem to be somewhat messed up with many people.
Indeed, people instinctively know that, and they often try to compensate for it one way or another. Some, no matter how urban they are, resist the trend and continue to participate in the things people are evolved to do. They'll hunt, they fish, and they garden. They get out on the trails and in the woods and they participate in nature in spite of it all.
Others try to create little imaginary natures in their urban walls. I can't recount how many steel and glass buildings I've been in that have framed paintings or photographs of highly rural scenes. Many offices seem to be screaming out for the 19th Century farm scape in their office decor. It's bizarre. A building may be located on 16th Street in Denver, but inside, it's 1845 in New Hampshire. That says a lot about what people actually value.
Others, however, sink into illness, including depression. Unable to really fully adjust to an environment that equates with the zoo for the tiger, they become despondent. Indeed, they're sort of like the gorilla at the zoo, that spends all day pushing a car tire while looking bored and upset. No wonder. People just aren't meant to live that way.
Others yet will do what people have always done when confronted with a personal inability to live according to the dictates of nature, they rebel against it. From time immemorial people have done this, and created philosophies and ideas that hate the idea of people itself and try to create a new world from their despair. Vegans, radical vegetarians, animal rights, etc., or any other variety of Neo Pagans fit this mold. Men who starve themselves and adopt girly haircuts and and wear tight tight jeans so as to look as feminine as possible, and thereby react against their own impulses. The list goes on and on. And it will get worse as we continue to hurl towards more and more of this.
But we really need not do so. So why are we?
"It's inevitable". No it isn't. Nothing is, except our own ends. We are going this way as it suits some, and the ones it principally suits are those who hold the highest economic cards in this system, and don't therefore live in the cubicle farm themselves. We don't have to do anything of this sort, we just are, as we believe that we have to, or that we haven't thought it out.
So, what can we do
First of all, we ought to acknowledge our natures and quit attempting to suppress them . Suppressing them just makes us miserable and or somewhat odd. To heck with that.
The ills of careerism.Careerism, the concept that the end all be all of a person's existence is their career, has been around for a long time, but as the majority demographic has moved from farming and labor to white collar and service jobs, it's become much worse. At some point, and I'd say some point post 1945, the concept of "career" became incredibly dominant. In the 1970s, when feminism was in high swing, it received an additional massive boost as women were sold on careerism.
How people view their work is a somewhat difficult topic to address in part because everyone views their work as they view it. And not all demographics in a society view work the same way. But there is sort of a majority society wide view that predominates.
In our society, and for a very long time, there's been a very strong societal model which holds that the key to self worth is a career. Students, starting at the junior high level, are taught that in order to be happy in the future they need to go to a "good university" so they can obtain an education which leads to "a high paying career". For decades the classic careers were "doctor and lawyer", and you still hear some of that, but the bloom may be off the rose a bit with the career of lawyer, frankly, in which case it's really retuning to its American historical norm.
Anyhow, this had driven a section of the American demographic towards a view that economics and careers matter more than anything else. More than family, more than location, more than anything. People leave their homes upon graduating from high school to pursue that brass ring in education. They go on to graduate schools from there, and then they engage in a lifetime of slow nomadic behavior, dumping town after town for their career, and in the process certainly dumping their friends in those towns, and quite often their family at home or even their immediate families.
The payoff for that is money, but that's it. Nothing else.
The downside is that these careerist nomads abandon a close connection with anything else. They aren't close to the localities of their birth, they aren't close to a state they call "home" and they grow distant from the people they were once closest too.
What's that have to do with this topic?
Well, quite a lot.
People who do not know, in the strongest sense of that word know, anyone or anyplace come to be internal exiles, and that's not good. Having no close connection to anyone place they become only concerned with the economic advantage that place holds for them. When they move into a place they can often be downright destructive at that, seeking the newest and the biggest in keeping with their career status, which often times was agricultural or wild land just recently. And not being in anyone place long enough to know it, they never get out into it.
That's not all of course. Vagabonds without attachment, they severe themselves from the human connection that forms part of our instinctual sense of place. We were meant to be part of a community, and those who have lived a long time in a place know that they'll be incorporated into that community even against their expressed desires. In a stable society, money matters, but so does community and relationship. For those with no real community, only money ends up mattering.
There's something really sad about this entire situation, and its easy to observe. There are now at least two entire generations of careerist who have gone through their lives this way, retiring in the end in a "retirement community" that's also new to them. At that stage, they often seek to rebuild lives connected to the community they are then in, but what sort of community is that? One probably made up of people their own age and much like themselves. Not really a good situation.
Now, am I saying don't have a career? No, I'm not. But I am saying that the argument that you need to base your career decisions on what society deems to be a "good job" with a "good income" is basing it on a pretty thin argument. At the end of the day, you remain that Cro Magnon really, whose sense of place and well being weren't based on money, but on nature and a place in the tribe. Deep down, that's really still who you are. If you sense a unique calling, or even sort of a calling, the more power to you. But if you view your place in the world as a series of ladders in place and income, it's sad.
As long as we have a philosophy that career="personal fulfillment" and that equates with Career Uber Alles, we're going to be in trouble in every imaginable way. This doesn't mean that what a person does for a living doesn't matter, but other things matter more, and if a person puts their career above everything else, in the end, they're likely to be unhappy and they're additionally likely to make everyone else unhappy. This may seem to cut against what I noted in the post on life work balance the other day, but it really doesn't, it's part of the same thing.
Indeed, just he other day my very senior partner came in my office and was asking about members of my family who live around here. Quite a few live right here in the town, more live here in the state, and those who have left have often stayed in the region. The few that have moved a long ways away have retained close connection, but formed new stable ones, long term, in their new communities. He noted that; "this is our home". That says a lot.
Get out there. Public (Federal) fishing landing in Natrona County, Wyoming. When we hear of our local politicians wanting to "take back" the Federal lands, those of us who get out imagine things like this decreasing considerably in number. We shouldn't let that happen, and beyond that, we should avail ourselves of these sites.
And our nature is to get out there in the dirt.
Go hunting, go fishing, go hiking or go mountain bike riding. Whatever you excuse is for staying in your artificial walls, get over it and get out.
That means, fwiw, that we also have to quit taking snark shots at others in the dirt, if we do it. That's part of human nature as well, and humans are very bad about it. I've seen flyfishermen be snots to bait fisherman (you guys are all just fisherman, angler dudes and dudessses, and knock off the goofy crap about catching and releasing everything.. . you catch fish as we like to catch fish because nature endowed us with the concept that fish are tasty).
Some fisherman will take shots at hunters; "I don't hunt, . . . but I fish (i.e., fishing hunting. Some "non consumptive (i.e., consumptive in another manner) outdoors types take shots at hunters and fisherman; "I don't hunt, but I ride a mountain bike (that's made of mined stuffed and shipped in a means that killed wildlife just the same)".
If you haven't tried something, try it, and the more elemental the better. If you like hiking in the sticks, keep in mind that the reason people like to do that has to do with their elemental natures. Try an armed hike with a shotgun some time and see if bird hunting might be your thing, or not. Give it a try. And so on.
Get elementalAt the end of they day, you are still a hunter-gatherer, you just are being imprisoned in an artificial environment. So get back to it. Try hunting. Try fishing. Raise a garden.
Unless economics dictate it, there's no good, even justifiable, reason that you aren't providing some of your own food directly. Go kill it or raise it in your dirt.
Indeed, a huge percentage of Americans have a small plot, sometimes as big as those used by subsistence farmers in the third world, which is used for nothing other than growing a completely worthless crop of grass. Fertilizer and water are wasted on ground that could at least in part be used to grow an eatable crop. I'm not saying your entire lawn needs to be a truck farm, but you could grow something. And if you are just going to hang around in the city, you probably should.
The Land EthicAldo Leopold and Olaus Murie. The Muries lived in Wyoming and have a very close connection with Teton County, although probably the majority of Wyomingites do not realize that. This photo was taken at a meeting of The Wilderness Society in 1946. While probably not widely known now, this era saw the beginnings of a lot of conservation organizations. At this point in time, Leopold was a professor at the University of Wisconsin.
Decades ago writer Aldo Leopold wrote in his classic A Sand Country Almanac about the land ethic. Leopold is seemingly remembered today by some as sort of a Proto Granola, but he wasn't. He was a hunter and a wildlife agent who was struck by what he saw and wrote accordingly. Beyond that, he lived what he wrote.
A person can Google (or Yahoo, or whatever) Leopold and the the "land ethic" and get his original writings on the topic. I"m not going to try to post them there, as the book was published posthumously in 1949, quite some years back. Because it wasn't published until 49, it had obviously been written some time prior to that. Because of the content of the book, and everything that has happened since, it's too easy therefore to get a sort of Granola or Hippy like view of the text, when in fact all of that sort of thing came after Leopold's untimely death at age 61. It'd be easy to boil Leopold's writings down to one proposition, that being what's good for the land is good for everything and everyone, and perhaps that wouldn't be taking it too far.
If I've summarized it correctly, and I don't think I'm too far off, we have to take into consideration further that at the time Leopold was writing the country wasn't nearly as densely populated as it is now, but balanced against that is that the country, in no small part due to World War Two, was urbanizing rapidly and there was a legacy of bad farming practices that got rolling, really, in about 1914 and which came home to roost during the Dust Bowl. In some ways things have improved a lot since Leopold's day, but one thing that hasn't is that in his time the majority of Americans weren't really all that far removed from an agricultural past. Now, that's very much not the case. I suspect, further, in Leopold's day depression, and other social ills due to remoteness from nature weren't nearly as big of problem. Indeed, if I had to guess, I'd guess that the single biggest problem of that type was the result of World War Two, followed by the Great Depression, followed by World War One.
Anyhow, what Leopold warned us about is even a bigger problem now, however
. Not that the wildness of land is not appreciated. Indeed, it is likely appreciated more now than it was then. But rather we need to be careful about preserving all sorts of rural land, which we are seemingly not doing a terrible good job at. The more urbanized we make our world, the less we have a world that's a natural habitat for ourselves, and city parks don't change that. Some thought about what we're doing is likely in order. As part of that, quite frankly, some acceptance on restrictions on where and how much you can build comes in with it. That will make some people unhappy, no doubt, but the long term is more important than the short term.
It's not inevitable.The only reason that our current pattern of living has to continue this way is solely because most people will it to do so. And if that's bad for us, we shouldn't.
There's nothing inevitable about a Walmart parking lot replacing a pasture. Shoot, there's nothing that says a Walmart can't be torn down and turned into a farm. We don't do these things, or allow them to happen, as we're completely sold on the concept that the shareholders in Walmart matter more than our local concerns, or we have so adopted the chamber of commerce type attitude that's what's good for business is good for everyone, that we don't. Baloney. We don't exist for business, it exists for us.
Some thought beyond the acceptance of platitudes is necessary in the realm of economics, which is in some ways what we're discussing with this topic. Americans of our current age are so accepting of our current economic model that we excuse deficiencies in it as inevitable, and we tend to shout down any suggestion that anything be done, no matter how mild, as "socialism".
The irony of that is that our economic model is corporatist, not really capitalist, in nature. And a corporatist model requires governmental action to exist. The confusion that exists which suggests that any government action is "socialism" would mean that our current economic system is socialist, which of course would be absurd. Real socialism is when the government owns the means of production. Social Democracy, another thing that people sometimes mean when they discuss "socialism" also features government interaction and intervention in people's affairs, and that's not what we're suggesting here either.
Rather, I guess what we're discussing here is small scale distributism, the name of which scares people fright from the onset as "distribute", in our social discourse, really refers to something that's a feature of "social democracy" and which is an offshoot of socialism. That's not what we're referencing here at all, but rather the system that is aimed at capitalism with a subsidiarity angle. I.e., a capitalist system that's actually more capitalistic than our corporatist model, as it discourages government participation through the weighting of the economy towards corporations.
