Ecotopian Realism and the Post-Plastic Continuum TPS-0004

Tonight, I feel compelled to talk about something that is very core and central to my ideal lifestyle, something that I have been working on and moving towards for many years. It's always been a point of compromise. It's always been a point where I’ve felt very far from actualizing the ideal completely. I would just feel glimpses of a post-plastic, modern primitive existence.

It's more than just plastic. More broadly, more philosophically, the ecological, philosophical, spiritual dimensions don't always fit in a nice, clean, simple, lifestyle term. But it does come mainly down to the objects that we in the modern world have become accustomed to.

If you apply more consciousness and mindfulness to it, you come to your own sensibilities and added insight.

There's no more excuse for me to compromise on things now that I have my own land.

Whereas, in virtually, if not every previous circumstance of my life, it would be an uphill battle to go against the grain, to go against the momentum of roommates or housemates, or friends, band mates, peers, superiors, whoever, strangers, people sharing a building...

There hasn't really been a zero waste kind of lifestyle experiment.

There are great documentaries that go back now over ten years of the first people making well produced, self produced films about what it was like to go without plastic or without disposable containers. The whole gamut of things that are gonna fill the landfill, that are disposable in your life.

That really brought to light how much junk most people rely on, and how difficult it is to step away from that. It's not slightly inconvenient.

There are things that are almost impossible to get around in modern life or in urban life.

If the ideal, if my ultimate end game, end state ideal...the thing that I wanna direct the rest of my life towards a life purpose...I imagine, ultimately, actually enjoying living in a way that I'm living peacefully on property that I own...Maybe owning multiple properties, for various projects or various purposes, seasonally cycling between them.

To have the ability to live 100% off of the solar energy that hits the property, the products of the soil that I care take.

Harvesting the rain, cycling nutrients. Ultimately no tool, no piece of clothing, no medicinal implement, basically nothing manufactured, nothing from factories.

The ideal for me as a sort of survival challenge for the future is to be able to develop those skills and be able to...even if it's the last day of my life that I actually achieve it, total rewilding.

To be fully sheltered, fed, energized, healed, etc. All of the survival needs be met from what comes from the land that you wildcraft and that you use horticulture to obtain the yields of produce.

I would be great to do that with a tribe, a community, a band of nomadic hunter gathers, all of those things that are missing.

But, hey, if nobody's interested in that, or nobody can get along long enough to get anywhere near getting down that timeline...

I know there are people who do and who are, and I applaud them.

Maybe I will train with them at some at some point. I don't know what having people around me or community really looks like at this point because of the extreme views that I have and the extreme mission that I engage in. Some of which I are extremely alienating, even to the people who really love me.

They can only go so far. So, I'm content with that lone wolf mystique.

I have enough love and friends and connections and people that I'm not completely cut off from… I don't feel at risk of losing touch with being sociable or becoming really sour and really misanthropic.

As a martial artist, the embeddedness of a fighter who trains in nature vs the juxtaposition of a hyped up modern, sportive fighting opponent being the one who's doped up and who's on all the machines and connected to all the wires and has all these high tech things.

The spiritual development and the soulfullness, the animism and the ancestor worship and all the traditional fabric and ecological fabric of training in a traditional village or training outdoors.

That was a big part of Karate Kid, the flute music and the spirituality, training in nature. So if anyone does wanna hang out with me and they understand a more ancient, rewilding, more primitive view of what it means to reject material possessions, material privilege...What it means to have a really down to earth experience.

There is no palace to fight over, there's no empire to fight over, there's a horizontal political economy through a trust architecture.

I’m not touching nonprofits anymore because of the liabilities and the oversight that happens with that. But with a trust, you have a much more elegant transition point where if people contribute to building a project and they know that they become stakeholders, they know that they're holding stake in a future that transcends the founder, that can be structured in many different ways.

I do believe that there will be some sort of sweet spot where people who want to get out of the city, they're willing to do a hard quarantine for a few days or a week or two. Epidemiological future proofing, actually creating air gaps in time between people's exposures.

The simple way to put it is no ins and outs, like a club where they don't want people hanging out, drawing attention from the police. So they say, come inside, we have a smoking area, etc. They accommodate you to do the more appropriate thing.

Certainly there was a time in my life where I wasn't happy about that, because I wanted to go be the minor that was sneaking in with a fake ID and go drink beers in in the parking lot. Or if I was older and I just wanted to save money and drink beers in the parking lot, or I wanted to go hang out with people. There are many impulses to game that system.

But as I mature, I appreciate, I understand it for the liabilities. I did run an art space venue and with it being in my name, things being on my shoulders I felt for the first time, all these liabilities.

People trying to game the system and break the rules, they create a huge liability for the people who can't just run off into the night, they're stuck dealing with the fines and the landlord and the lease and the neighbors and all that stuff.

So, that's a process of maturing and now when I think about a mature approach to going off grid and possibly having integrated experiences with people from the outside I think, there’s an intelligent way to do that that buffers against contagions.

Going back to this topic of detoxing from plastic and detoxing from junk, this whole mystique of what it means to live nomadic, live out of a backpack, go meditate with masters….

Whatever your adventure is, just that spirit of freedom and adventure that people tend to have earlier in life.

Then later if they've had enough of the corporate world, or their empty-nesters, or whatever, they can have their midlife crisis, or their second childhood or both by going and doing some dare devil adventure, whether it's a spiritual seeking quest or just something totally adrenaline junkie style.

There's a lot of precedents for the impulse to do the Walden Pond thing, to do the Thoreau thing. Not have some really bitter, nasty, foul kind of prepper in a bunker...bullets, beans and band aids sort of hyper-isolationist thing.

I miss the city life and all the junk and noise and pollution less and less every day that I spend deep in wild nature completely off grid, where I'm just surrounded and encountered by more and more wildlife.

It's more and more of a weight on my heart if I let one shred of trash get picked up by the wind and I don't chase after it to go grab it you. It becomes a sport to not let anything modern or synthetic or plastic or garbage get out of my control. And then I wanna keep it contained.

Though sadly I'm just doing the Nimby thing, not in my backyard, just dumping it off somewhere else.

Certainly my production of landfill trash has steadily decreased over time, pretty consistently over the course of my life, as I have shed engagements with most institutions.

I have made a lot of progress towards buying bulk and reusing containers and not buying stuff single serving.

There's always that bit of a feel good, pat yourself on a back thing with recycling. The last thing I'm gonna do is insult that or denigrate that, of course.

But if you're sort of a darker green shade of an environmentalist, then you're gonna think that's cute and good for a kind of gateway environmentalism, or ecology. But, but once you dig deeper, you realize the paradox of the whole term sustainable. It's like, what are you trying to sustain? Are you sustaining wildness by really going non material, anti material, post material, post manufactured, post plastic, whatever? Or are you finding ways to prop up this inherently unsustainable entire system by finding pieces of it and kind of greening them?

It's utopian to think that you can overnight or even in our lifetimes, have a rapid shift to a totally post civilized, post industrial future.

That's just a pipe dream. Even if there was an acute, apocalyptic Mad Max sort of situation, it's gonna be more polluted, more lethal from all of the intensifying wars, it's not gonna be enjoyable.

I don't know if I would have more peace of mind knowing for example, a solar flare knocks out the grid worldwide to a point where it's pretty much impossible to rebuild.

If you watch the documentary series, I believe, it was on the History Channel called Life After People...It was a multi-part series, and then it was based on a book called The World Without Us.

Then another network created a version called Aftermath Population Zero. It had even sharper teeth when it got into what happens if were not able to manage the cooling of reactors...there will be meltdown, the chemicals are gonna be released, it's not gonna be pretty. So there is no romantic industrial collapse.

I remember the slogans visualize industrial collapse. Well, you might visualize it, but you're gonna be putting on rose colored glasses and you're not visualizing what it's gonna smell like, how it's gonna feel, how horrific it’s gonna be. How traumatic it's gonna be.

So there is gonna be an arc. People say it took us thousands of years to get here. It'll take us at least thousands of years, if we really wanted to actually be authentically sustainable.

You get into this philosophical trap of deep nihilism...

If it’s just gonna be a pipe dream, why bother putting up this symbolic protest, or this symbolic lifestyle?

We called it lifestylism. Oh, you're kind of being hedonistic, and you're not being hardcore enough of a militant revolutionary...

If you just wanna, feng shui your life and have your little garden and have your little personal anarchy, like that's such a privilege, because most people don't have that option. They have to fight for everything, every second of every day, and they can't just put themselves in a little green bubble.

I used to be a strong proponent of that, now I’ve moderated my slogans or I grew up a bit and I realized that if I were in a context where we're being a war fighter... And you're pretty much born, born to die, you're born to give up your life in that sort of combat, there would actually cultural infrastructure to support that.

The Zapatistas in Chiapas, Mexico have had an authentic life and death land based struggle. Though it’s not my place to try to join it, though I can attempt to emulate it.

So there's an interesting sort of philosophical inner dialogue around how do you maximize your potential to affect positive change given the training you have.

The government taught me to read, I have some skills and training. I have some knowledge. I have social capital. I have no excuse to say I don't have opportunities. I can list a lot of the things that I’ve taken for granted.

There are reasons why I can have self pity, I’ve been victimized but if I say, well, does that mean that I have an excuse to fail at life or to not achieve my dreams? No, it it doesn't. Because people who have suffered worse than me have achieved more than I have. It always helps to put things in perspective.

I don't care whether or not I save the world or I save anything else, for my own sanity, for my own pleasure, for my own sense of accomplishing my goals and transcending my traumas, I wanna live in my ecotopia.

Even if it's by myself or with limited contact with people who come through on a limited basis and operate under certain consensual conditions, like a digital detox type of experience. Then beyond that, of course, you have basic hiking and camping etiquette of leave no trace or leave a place better than you found it.

Certainly don't be littering and actually be mindful of even the types of food products you bring in, and how they might affect the ecosystem if you were to throw them out, and how you might be messing with the delicate balance of competition among species.

That's something I think about a lot, just even with composting, I’ve seen rodent fights over scraps that I put out. What are the ethics of that And, and how do I introduce myself to all these critters in this ecosystem? I will be enhancing it. I already know that I'm enhancing it by bringing in moisture that wasn't there before, bringing my own scrap food, and then ultimately building habitat, creating shade, there's, there's a million ways where I'm going to be enhancing the ecosystem. But every step along the way is going to disrupt things that were that were already happening.

Back to going post-plastic, I'm aware if I’m panning my gaze, where there are no eyesores of anything that I know was derived in a manner that exploited human labor, that poison the environment, that will continually poison the environment as it breaks down or doesn't break down or partially breaks down...

I don't think about it consciously. I don't think oh, I can identify every chemical, every synthetic, human made chemical compound in any little bit of trash I see, or any little manufactured product that I see. I don't have that level of insight, and I don't need it.

I just feel the vibration of being an empath, the way people talk about being empathic if they go to a hospital or they can't be around people who are really, anxious or really neurotic, because they just absorb energy.

Well, I'm not gonna say, I'm a toxin empath. There are certainly people who are hyper sensitive to toxins, breathing them, and they can't go in certain places.

I'm somewhere on that spectrum.

It's also a cumulative thing, the more you strip away from that, the numbing and the armoring that you get when you're constantly exposed to it...If you get away from it, you come back, and then it's more acute.

So I like the idea of less and less eye sores and more and more, things like, I’m eating from a dish that's not poisoning me. It's not an eyesore. It doesn't have this toxic legacy that I can't deal with.



For example disposable plastic silverware for restaurants, vs compostable... It's a good start, I applaud all of that.

I want to drink out of glass, or stainless steel or ceramics if you wanna go even further back.

Those are natural materials and each of those represent more intensive human engineering and altering of the environment to create. They require more tooling and work spaces for their production.

They each have different social impacts and ecological footprints in production. So all those things can be compared.

So if you wanted to have the most ethical, the most biodegradable kitchen...that could be a lifestyle experiment.

I'm in the process of shedding a few things at a time, and then just not wanting to go back.

On this land, there's some tumble weeds of plastic, garbage that comes from the desert, plastic bags, soda cans, other random stuff. If I can make any use of it I will. If not, I will pack it out of here in a cycle. I don't wanna be adding to that burden.

Besides the random tumble weeds of plastic junk, that come in with the wind, what is here? That's the archaeology of the uses here. It's a rural area so there's shotgun shells, beer cans, broken beer bottles, glass, old tin cans.

Thankfully, there's not that much of it that I’ve found, but there's enough so that every time I go and hike around, I come back with a bucket or a handful that I'll gather up.

I'll always try to make sure I come back with a few bits of glass, or a can or two, or whatever.

But I think about, well, this stuff doesn't poison the environment as it breaks down, the slow rusting of soup cans or bean cans or whatever.

It's a hazard, because certainly you would not wanna get snagged on that. So you gotta be mindful, even wearing boots and pants and whatnot, it could be a cause of tripping. I'm not thrilled about it, I do obviously work to get rid of that stuff.

Then I ask myself, well, if I'm transitioning towards post plastic, What is my legacy gonna be? If I end up like one of these other people, where they had their little cabin homestead then they disappear, or they die...

When I got here, there was literally a corpse of a shack that had furniture and had walls and had windows and all the trimmings. It was maybe something from the sixties or seventies, possibly, I don't really know, but it was literally like a tornado hit it 50 years ago. It’s just been bullied around by windstorms and sandstorms ever since. It was pretty much just completely collapsed of the ground. So there is just these remnants.

It just feels like the broken glass just never ends.

After a wind or sand storm, the sand will go another way and there's another layer of more shards of glass everywhere.

So I could see myself, till the end of time, I'll be picking glass pieces out of this place. There's a tiny kind of a shack, but surprisingly, it kind of just feels like it goes on forever.

When I think about, okay, so what am I gonna bring here? What's gonna be left behind.

I know how to grow all my own food. I have grown significant portions of my food in previous locations which I did not own. There were all kinds of different reasons why those story lines ended. I could have said, I wish I would have stayed, I wish I could have been there forever.

But ultimately, it wasn't my gig.

It wasn't my land. It wasn't my property.

I didn't have the freedom or the luxury to do things my way.

Now I’m more realistic about not being so utopian about living communally on one parcel of land.

A more realistic, less idealistic, ecotopian vision, is instead of people living together on one piece of property and making that into a commune where everybody's fighting and everyone's interests and stake and seniority and future vested interest and energy input and donations...All those things that lead to politicking and power struggles…

You immediately eliminate that if you go from the commune model to the neighborhood model or to where people own their parcels. Everyone has a separate, autonomous, individual relationship between themselves and the state, which limits liability of of your friends, or your neighbors.

But you could have all the people who you ever wanted to have the perfect back to the land commune with and just separate land ownership to smaller units. That’s a pretty elegant, pretty simple, powerful paradigm shift to say, own your own property, have neighbors buy property, adjacent or nearby. Then you can have the best of both worlds. You can still share tools. You can still raise a barn. You can still have a community center you can still share farm land. Still have limited functionally specific shared, co-op owned parcels of land…But best not to not be also living on those places. Live on your own homestead plot that you own the title to, and co-own smaller shared plots that are used for community infrastructure and not dwelling. That way, agreed upon norms can be minimized and limited in scope to public areas.

Everyone can have their own private relationship to plastics on their own land, the shared land can have agreed upon conditions...

Personally, I'm gonna take it to the next level, I'm going to eventually bio remediate, myco-remediate all of the plastic as it breaks down by using mushrooms to do it. There’s an article about plastic eating fungi found in the Amazon that may solve world's waste problem.

So I'm sure, thanks to people like Paul Stamets, the mushroom eco Warrior par excellence, we can start solving this problem.

I want a nontoxic world. I want toxic behavior, toxic chemicals, processes to stop immediately.

On a lot of indicators, people would say that it's too late, but too late for what?

Nothing's really too late for fungus to bio remediate.

The non-photosynthesizing miracle of life that fungi are...you don't have to be a mycologist to enjoy the visualization of the prospect of how mushrooms can clean up oil spills, they can eat plastic.

They can clean up toxic waste brown fields.

I'm hopeful that everyone can do their parts.

Hopefully we move in a direction towards understanding the personal value of having less eyesores, taking for granted less things just being plastic by default.

If you have to have this or that kitchen appliance, there's usually a stainless steel alternative, which is not going to be leaching plastic in into your food.

If you have no critique whatsoever of plastic, the documentary Plastic Planet, that was the one that really set me off.

I had the beautiful privilege and luxury to be in a relationship with a very wealthy, very well established interior designer and construction project manager. Her home was built with mostly all natural materials, no eyesores, very rustic, very Tex-Mex design with all of the roofing and the tiling and the large, timber and whatnot.

It was far more luxurious than anything that’s ever been in my personal design/build budget. My style is bamboo and baling wire, tin roofs...

We joined forces in a ceremonial community, facilitated a lot of healing for a lot of people, including myself. We had a beautiful loving relationship, one of the best of my life, and we were nestled in a beautiful forest ecology, and I got to do some of the best permaculture of my life.

We really were able to maintain that rustic, pre-plastic, very beautiful, very elegant design.

If you buy everything stainless steel, it's gonna get very expensive.

But you can scavenge glass jars for water, which I've been living out of for years now.

I started home brewing cider and then mead. I would just get apple cider already pasteurized in the glass jugs, add the yeast, then from a few days to a couple weeks, depending on the time of year and the temperature... I had my batch.

So I accumulated a bunch of glass jars to drink out of for my daily water supply. And that solved that problem of drinking out of plastic containers. I didn't have to buy stainless steel bottles, that's just one example.

Another example is...I'm not growing all my food yet, that means I still have to buy food. I'll try to do it in bulk. Though even with organic products or bulk products there's still gonna be a lot of plastic.

I'm gonna make some trade offs and say, what if I only buy food containers that I can reuse as biodegradable, nontoxic or almost completely nontoxic, nursery pots?

So instead of what I've always been compromising with, which is I go to the nursery, I buy some flats, I buy some six packs, and I have all this plastic, and I'll just stack it up and I'll keep it and I'll just reuse it.

That's great. But even then, I see that break apart in the sun and fall apart and just lose track of it, it’s like tarps. If you've ever had to pick up a tarp that's been out for a couple of seasons, it just completely falls apart. It's demoralizing.

Despite the mostly all natural and biodegrable wasteland junk and debris, this land is really a clean canvas. So any corner that I cut with bringing any plastic here, I'm gonna have to manage it. I'm gonna make sure it doesn't just fall apart.

But in this sun, I have even less time to transition from the plastic umbilical cord to get myself established here, and then to get rid of that plastic before it becomes a nightmare to deal with.

I have to replace it all with glass, metal, ceramics, natural fabrics, and ultimately have all that stuff be replaced by stuff that I that I'm able to produce completely off the land, whether it's basketry from weaving fibers that I grow, or doing very interesting things with banana leaves for harvesting water...

That's been very well established in so many beautiful cultures, throughout all time before the industrial chemical paradigm.

Going back to the philosophy and the lifestyle thing, even if I'm just being an escapist, and a lifestylist to have my little, green bubble land, even if it's just a microcosm...

It is leading by example. It is being the change you wanna see in the world. On a spiritual level, if you're happier where you are, you're creating a more positive vibration. And that transcends space and time and also effects very viscerally and subtly all of your relations. Really curating your external environment so that it feeds back health, wellness and positivity.

You could try having a non-plastic picnic. Get a wooden picnic basket with cloth, and use only non plastic utensils, dishes, and serving containers. Maybe that's something you never thought of before. May have something you’ve never done before.

I can speak from experience and say, it is a beautiful shift that occurs.

It's a compounding, incremental thing. Every day, as I see my stash of cans build up...the replacement of plastic, with metal...I'm not saying metal is perfect or that it doesn't have its own ecological footprint or doesn't have its own karmic footprint.

Until I get to the end point where I say, everything I use, everything I have in my life I earned it honorably, nobly, sustainably with the real time solar budget, only the sun that landed, only the rain that landed, and only the soil that I helped build.

The magical process of dancing with the sun, the rain, and the soil, and the wildlife… Some day, everything that I use, everything that I am, every new cell could be completely free of any of that legacy.

Of course, there will be toxins in the air, you won't be able to avoid all of the external factors.

If I really wanted to I could relocate somewhere so remote that I almost never see hear or feel or experience anything, but the slightest trace amounts of pollutants that you can't escape from anywhere here in the world.

But for now, I have more freedom, less limits on fulfilling this commitment to myself to move along that continuum gracefully.

And maybe next time you hear from me, it'll be a wire and two tin cans, like you would have connected to tree houses, or I'll send smoke signals or something.

I love the idea that it doesn't require changing anybody else or forcing the world to change faster than it’s gonna change and maybe I'll go down with the ship, with all of the bad decisions of other people and other industries. But at least every day, I'll be happier, healthier, and moving closer towards my ideal end state. Safely, gracefully moving in that direction and spending the bulk of the rest of my life being much closer to a 100% hyper-local, self sufficient, handmade DIY existence...Always leaning less and less on the prefabricated world.