I watched one of the worst movies last night, one that I had seen long ago – Dino De Laurentiis and David Lynch’s Dune. There were so many awful things, but especially bad were the voice overs of characters thinking.
I’m working on a voice over for Around Lake Michigan, a way to get the search started. It might be fun to do an homage to De Laurentiis / Lynch. Imagine the ALM guide, gazing heroically over a rocking horizon or shaving in his rain pounded tent. We hear his thoughts…
•••
Where you see rocks, watch out! They’re going to come alive… Alan Watts.
Earth is a giant ball of rock and metal skinned with life. Where does the rock end and the life start? People are alive, and trees and animals, that’s for sure. There’s even tiny things alive in the soil. Life is everywhere. Supposedly though, these things are not alive – water, rocks, air. Folks argue about how life came from non life – god or darwin. I am more interested in how life stays here. Whether by accident or design, the earth is a nice place to live. Everything is just so – the precise amount of oxygen in the atmosphere, consistent temperature, the right kind of light… but how does it stay that way? Somehow, life friendly conditions are maintained. That’s the global life support system, (analogies from NASA and science fiction abound).
Can humans damage or break the global life support system? Have we already? Maybe. Probably. Shit.
A more useful question is, can humans live in accord with it? Can we actually become an integral part of the global life support system? What would that look like?
A sustainable civilization would be in perfect accord with the global life support system. Concepts like garbage and pollution would be obsolete, archaic. There would be no consumption or waste, only cycles of transformation and renewal. Energy is free and abundant.
Hard to imagine, right?
The amazing thing is this…
•••
This could be a preface for the premise.