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            There is a saying that sums up our delusional insanity and it is this, “Get out in nature.”  An appropriate response may sound something like “How can I get out of something I am?”  Besides an unusual stare and an uncomfortable silence, the experience of saying this may feel quite wonderful. 

Nature is not for the Sierra Club.  It is not for tree huggers, or mountain climbers, or vice presidents that shoot their friends.  It is us.  All of us.  We were not plopped here by aliens.  This may seem obvious at first, but when you look at how we perceive nature it gets a little unclear. 

            At the risk of feeling like a total jack ass, try and say this out loud, “I am nature.”  I don’t have nature or get in nature.  I am nature.”

Over the last 50 years, food and zoning laws have worked to minimize subsistence activities in populated areas.  Not only have we lost the culture of subsistence, but we’ve instituted legal requirements that make it almost impossible for many people to engage in simple subsistence activities that cut their energy use, reduce their ecological impact, improve their food security and improve their communities.  In some cases, these laws were instituted for fairly good reasons, in many cases, for bad ones that associate such activities with poverty.

We succeeded in taking that picture, and if you look at it, you see a dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever lived, lived out their lives. The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilisations, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every hopeful child, every mother and father, every inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species, lived there on a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam. - Carl Sagan, 11 May 1996

Is it time to change 20th century economic paradigms?
by Richard Heinberg 05/02/2009

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A hundred years ago, markets ruled: fortunes were made, workers abused, bubbles blown. The Austrian School of economists, led by Ludwig von Mises, said this was fine: despite temporary messiness, the market knows best. 

But the messiness of markets was unacceptable to socialists, some of whom led a revolution in Russia to establish the first state-controlled, planned economy.