#FieldNotes007: Life Beyond our Lifespans
#FieldNotes007: Life Beyond our Lifespans
On friendships, community decline, and the importance of regenerative design
“A human community, then, if it is to last long, must exert a sort of centripetal force, holding local soil and local memory in place. Practically speaking, human society has no work more important than this.” - Wendell Berry, The Work of Local Culture
One of my favorite stories from Homer’s Iliad is the battle between Glaucus and Diomedes. In the midst of the chaotic Battle of Troy, the two warriors come face to face. Diomedes asks his foe, Glaucus, who he is. Glaucus replies by proudly recounting the feats of his ancestors. He explains how his grandfather had hosted an Achaean nobleman by the name of Oeneus, who happened to be Diomedes’ grandfather. In the midst of battle, Diomedes pauses and recognizes the mutual love bound by that hospitality. The two warriors proceed ny exchanging their armor as a sign of love, respect, and friendship, as was customary in Ancient Greece.
This story always strikes me as unusual yet familiar. Deep inside, I recognize the possibility of this kind of loyalty yet I've seldom seen examples. Except perhaps the joy that someone has when they realized they have a common friend or family member, often that feeling doesn’t translate into anything. We’ve lost what it means to live life beyond our lifespans.
The modern world has given us immense power and has disrupted community fabric, both in time and space. What I mean is that our ability to move from place to place so easily has turned our neighbours into strangers. Whereas, once upon a time, morally reprehensible acts would have had grave implications on the whole community, now morality is strictly a matter of personal choice and conviction. After all, we can just up and go.
Across time, this is no different. Each generation is unrecognizable by the next. This not only disrupts any sense of continuity and acquired wisdom, it disrupts our very connection to place, to the land, and to history.1 Perhaps it is a modern condition that leads us to see our own generations as the first and the last. Our very perception of what makes something old is skewed. Just ask anyone the on street, and they’ll think a song written a decade ago is old, and WWI is ancient.
So I ask, how many of us, confronted with a stranger, could pause long enough to seek out those deeper connections—could recognize a shared humanity, or even an ancestral tie, before turning away and never meeting again? Reflecting on the story of Diomedes and Glaucus, we might ask ourselves whether we could show such loyalty to someone we've never even met. The very ease with which we sever relationships today, people we have come to love and trust—whether in marriage, friendship, or community—reveals how far we’ve drifted from the values of loyalty and commitment. In this time of transition, we need to have conviction in our hearts, minds, and bodies that life began before and will continue beyond our lifespan.
The metacrisis2 is a crisis of meaning. It is a crisis of community. Because of abundant energy, we don't see the consequences of our actions. E.F. Schumacher, Jane Jacobs, Wendell Berry, and Ivan Illich we're among the first to write about this extensively.3 In the post-Industrial Age, we outsource our greed and and our lust. Our cheap clothes are sewn by underpaid people in sweatshops, the lithium that power our phones, computers, and electric cars are mined through modern slavery. Our marriages and families are destroyed by the sex trade and human trafficking.
It’s no wonder we find ourselves adrift, increasingly isolated, when our actions no longer have direct consequences. The access to abundant energy has also given us to power to just pack our bags and move thousands of miles away without any moral recourse. Just another reason why we find ourselves increasingly bowling alone.4 This freedom to move, once considered a sign of opportunity, may instead be eroding our ability to truly love and care for a place and for each other. Our lack of love for place is a direct consequence of our ability to pick up and leave. After all, who cares about the land when there’s always a more promising horizon to chase? Who cares about people when we’re no longer tied to them?
In Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations, David Montgomery tells the story of English settlers in the American South. Land was so cheap and abundant that there was no incentive to care for it. Farmers and homesteaders would exhaust the soil, usually within a decade, and simply move westward. He writes “the ready availability of new lands meant that farmers neglected crop rotation and the use of manure to replenish soils. […] Moving on to fresh ground was easier than collecting and spreading manure—as long as there was plenty of land for the taking.”5 In their wake, the land was left barren, forgotten—its fertility stripped just as our connections to place are today. Their descendants grew up miles away from their forebears. This story predates the Industrial Revolution, but once we tapped into abundant ancient sunlight, this tendency to exhaust our resources—including our own families and communities—became the norm. The lure of new lands, new wealth, and even new relationships has become all too seductive. Why would we stay put when we can grow our wealth? Why conserve the land and our communities when we can find better pastures?
When the metacrisis reaches its fruition, we’ll realize that life goes beyond our lifespan. We will need to think about the unborn future ancestors. What kind of soil, what kind of relationships, will we leave behind for them to inherit? If we continue to sever our roots with such ease, what will remain for those who come after us?
These are the questions that we will be exploring in my upcoming offering on Permaculture & Regenerative Design. Permaculture is not just about gardening, but rather about designing regenerative systems (ecological, social, economic, spiritual) that work with nature, not against her. This is how we will deepen our connection to our future ancestors. For more information, and to register, visit the link below.
See #Seed015: Step-by-Step Guide to Opting-Out: A beginner’s guide to disconnecting ourselves from the global monoculture where I provide four strategies to resist that very disruption: re-skill, stay healthy, build friendships, and love the land.
The metacrisis is the underlying diagnosis of the many crises that plague our global civilization. Rather than segmenting crises and assuming distinct solutions for each, it's crucial to acknowledge their interconnectedness and the global impact they all have. See #Seed029: The Metacrisis Epoch: Diagnosing and overcoming our global civilization's pivotal moment.
For those interested in the learning more about this the crisis of community in the post-Industrial Age, I recommend looking at the following works: Schumacher, E. F. (1973). Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered. Harper & Row. Jacobs, J. (2000). The Nature of Economies. Modern Library. Berry, W. (1977). The Unsettling of America: Culture & Agriculture. Sierra Club Books. Illich, I. (2013). Beyond Economics and Ecology: The Radical Thought of Ivan Illich. Marion Boyars.
In his seminal work Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, Robert Putnam explored the decline of social capital in the United States since the mid-20th century. He argued that Americans were becoming increasingly disconnected from each other and from social institutions, a trend reflected in diminishing participation in civic groups, clubs, churches, and other forms of social engagement. Putnam famously used the example of declining participation in bowling leagues, despite a rise in individual bowling, to symbolize the broader erosion of community ties. He attributed this decline in social capital to several factors, including, 1) increased television watching and later the internet; 2) suburbanization and urban sprawl, which made it harder to connect with neighbors; 3) rising time pressures, especially as more households had dual-income earners; and 4) generational changes, with younger generations less engaged in civic life than their predecessors. For more, see Putnam, R. D. (2000). Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. Simon & Schuster.
Montgomery, D. R. (2007). Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations. University of California Press. p.121.