[Joesred]

dear friends,

http://www.realitysandwich.com/age_water

be well, be love.

david

the age of water
charles eisenstein

for tens of thousands of years, fire has defined our civilization. it is fire that has allowed us to smelt metals, to purify chemicals, to power cars, trains and airplanes, to pave over the earth and travel to the moon. without fire there would be no silicon chips, no pharmaceutical drugs, no plastic toys, no guns or bombs, no televisions or computers. ours is surely an age of fire -- an age which is rapidly drawing to a close.

the age of fire is an age of separation, during which humans have sought to dominate and control nature. from the very beginning, the circle of the campfire divided the world into two parts: the safe, domestic part, and the wild. here was the hearth, the center of the circle of domesticity. here was warmth, keeping the cold world at a distance. here was safety, keeping predators at bay. here was light, defining a human realm but making the night beyond all the deeper, all the more alien. outside the circle of firelight was the other, the wild, the unknown.

the age of fire is also an age of domination. the original technologies of fire mostly employed wood, thereby removing it from the normal biological cycle and preempting the natural flow of matter and energy. no longer did it nourish generations of insects, fungi, and soil. this arrogation of wood's oxidative energy to human purposes defined very early on the dominating relationship that technology embodies; today, the same logic sees all the materials of the world as "resources," classifying them according to their usefulness to man. today we burn oil, not wood, but the mentality of burning is the same: the arrogation of stored energy to human purposes of control, accompanied by the degradation of other phases of the cycle in an unsustainable pretense of eternal linear growth.

the unsustainability of our present system derives from its linearity, its assumption of an infinite reservoir of inputs and limitless capacity for waste. fire is a fitting metaphor for such a system, for it involves a one-way conversion of matter from one form to another, liberating energy-heat and light-in the process. just as our economy is burning through all forms of stored cultural and natural wealth to liberate energy in the form of money, so also does our industry burn up stored fossil fuels to liberate the energy that powers our technology. both generate heat for a while, but also increasing amounts of cold, dead, toxic ash and pollution, whether the ash-heap of wasted human lives or the strip-mine pits and toxic waste dumps of industry.