You’ve made everything I’ve dread and everything I feared come true.
Man is the Sire of Sorrow.
-Joni Mitchell
There is an ample and growing body of evidence that our society, if not our global society, then surely this bicentennial society of the “American” empire is approaching a potentially uncomfortable, possibly violent fin de siecle that may be our last. Poverty spreads like a virus. Wealth is becoming more and more concentrated. As I write this six (?) people are dead and a member of Congress lies in a hospital room in Tucson clinging to a life that has been all but taken from her by the contents of an automatic pistol. Our humanity is at war with itself inside a political culture so divisive. That this war has become bloody seems only inevitable. We are the prison guards that our captive souls must fear. Environmentally, our weather systems are increasingly erratic and destructive. The planet is at once drying up and beginning a slow drowning as nations begin to slip into the seas. The world’s oceans are being fished out. Species are disappearing daily and we are finding it necessary to drill deeper and more dangerously for, not only oil, but water as well.
This last one seems to me the most ominous. There is little that is more frightening than the notion of drought. The fish are gone. OK, we can adjust. The oil has dried up. Well, lets learn to exploit what alternatives we have more effectively. What replacement is there for water? This is of course a rhetorical question as there is none. The American Southwest is becoming increasingly reliant on tanker trucks from the Great Lakes. There are plans in place to commence water shipments from Lake Sitka in Alaska to the Indian subcontinent. There is evidence to suggest that the movement of these resources is causing the distributed weight of the planet to shift which could in theory change the spatial behavior of the earth. We are actually changing the weight of the planet. We have no idea what that could mean. It does however provide a simpler path to dark theories.
I do not suffer notions of doomsday, or the popular culture that loves to speculate, gladly. Prognosticating cataclysm has developed a cult that does not fear the apocalypse but actually derives a perverse enjoyment out of the coming end. They love the movies, the tv shows, the books that tell of our inevitable demise with relish. It is incomprehensible to me. This is not to say that I do not share a certain foreboding, that when I look at young children I do not wonder what their world will be like as they pass through it. It frightens me and I have found myself at a loss as to how I might make a valuable response.
In the documentary Collapse Michael Ruppert uses the Titanic as a metaphor to examine potential responses to catastrophe. He breaks it down into three basic types. The first is to pretend there is nothing wrong. “Iceberg? What iceberg? We’re fine. I’m going to the bar.” The next is panic. “Iceberg! There aren’t enough life boats! We’re all gonna die!” The final one Mr. Ruppert considers and the one he has a kinship with is to find a leader. “Iceberg? There aren’t enough lifeboats? How do we go about building some?” This is of course the response he advocates and it’s one that I totally respect. I think though that there might be a fourth response and it might go something like this. “Iceberg? Shit, that sucks. Well, you guys get to work on those lifeboats. I’ll go to the bar and get everything ready for you when you need a break.”
This is I suppose not so much a fourth way as maybe a contingency of the third. I am not a carpenter. The machine shop is an alien landscape to me but I can feed the troops. Activism is in my genes. I can trace it back to the two year old that spent seemingly endless days in nondescript wood-paneled rooms sitting on the floor with a few toys in front of him while his mother took part in meetings, made fliers and signs for progressive politicians; on her back as they traveled a 10 mile bike ride in support of the McGovern campaign in the only state that he succeeded in winning. Activism has been a relative constant in my life. The reasons and the causes have shifted in importance but the impetus, that need to effect change has been a driving force. In more recent years a certain amount of despondency has set in. Change has been hard to come by and when it did seem even remotely possible those hopes crumbled to dust.
As I said before food, cooking has always been a part of my life but it has not been until fairly recently that I have been truly aware of the myriad food issues we face locally, nationally, internationally; the particularly American problem of urban and ex-urban food deserts where one may easily achieve a Big Mac and fries but a fresh apple or head of lettuce is, if you’re lucky, a bus ride away; the lack of affordable green markets; that unemployment check may get you a banana and a bag of chips at your local Whole Foods but not much else; the environmental issues that surround eating that blue fin tuna steak you got at Trader Joe’s; the disappearance of food banks and soup kitchens just when we need them most. Not to mention the utter destitution in the developing world; the victims of genocide in the Sudan; children eating mud pies in Haiti that are actually made of mud.
The list of problems seems endless, hopelessly daunting. But before this ship sinks beneath the waves I will find a way to make a great vegetable sauté life boat. Maybe learning to create a superb beurre blanc seems a round about way to salvation but I am looking at my upcoming time in the classroom as simply a part of my education. Thankfully my current situation allows me time volunteer in those soup kitchens. I will endeavor to become an active part of organizations like City Harvest, Greenmarkets NYC. I look forward to reactivating that dormant activist inside me. And you know, maybe some homeless lady is just dying for a poached salmon fillet in a beurre blanc sauce. Just maybe I’ll help her out.
Andrew
