Thread by @homemadeguitars

Long time readers may have noticed that I've got of backed off my usual schtick about Amish communities on the on hand, and developee societies evolving forward to animal and sail power.
The reason is,.almost everybody sees what I write and thinks, "White America, 1859."
No. Not.

For Dr. Hans-Martin, and anyone else who benefits:
I speak of low energy transportation and power. Many to most who respond to me object based on things that were bad in US culture before automobiles and airplanes and modernity. It appears that I am advocating for an historic way

3. Women write to me and say, life was terrible for women then.
Yeah, it was. I don't want to live then.
Black people write to me.
Obviously, they see a flaw. Slavery and all that it meant. Then Jim Crow / near slavery as sharecropping farmers.
No, not that either.

4. I'm talking about a culture that has never been. Over centuries there have been people who wrote in the vein I write. Karl Marx was looking to solve some of the problems we've still got, that I, too, would like to solve.
In one sense this is monumentally self-aggrandizing.

5. I follow a human tradition. William Penn didn't come here to own slaves. It's just that the slaveowners won.
They're running the country today.
Marx called them some word, but - it's Those People.
They own the corporations.
They invented the industrial revolution.

6. Indigenous people are almost all gone, all over the world.
All the colonists may have been white at the start, but they're not anymore.
Most of Africa is colonized by the the descendants of the men who threw out the colonizers.
Because they accepted their value system.
Money.

7. So what was an indigenous person?
You could go all the way back, and say the only really indigenous people are in Africa today, where their genetic heritage first appeared on Earth. The first of us, as humans, were there.
But loosen that. What about all the ones who walked in

8. One definition might be that an indigenous person is one who lives on Earth as the birds and the foxes do, gathering all of a good life from the annual surplus of Earth's richness and leaving the capital, the living Earth, to produce another income tomorrow.
Lives on with land

9. What little we know for sure about the indigenous people here when the extractors, the cash-it-in culture, got here, is that they had as many different cultures as this continent had biomes.
Because they were part of every biome.
We must relearn this.

10. The first thing they cashed in was the people, but that was a long slow process that ran parallel to the rest of the cashing in. First non-people thing they cashed in was the beavers.

11. This continent basically had beavers in every creek from the Atlantic Ocean to the Continental Divide. The entire uplands of the eastern half the continent was meadows and pools, with almost undescribable richness of water, fish, food plants, birds, and animals.
Cashed it in.

12. A main bridge across the Missouri River in the oldest part of Kansas City is the Chouteau bridge. Pierre Chouteau ran a trading post and bought beaver hides. Extractors on this continent put beaver skin hats on every well-dressed head in Europe.
In about 1835 the plow got ⬇️

13. The second thing they extracted was the forests.
Many of Kansas City's biggest fortunes came from extracting the forests. Longview Road, Longview College, Longview Farm... Long was a timber magnate.

14. You could go to the fish market in Kansas City on any day of the week and buy a 150 pound catfish.

15. Nothing about that culture is fit to emulate.
Slavery was just part of the deal. It wasn't an outlier, a one-off, a unique error in an otherwise workable system.
Slavery slid smoothly into high energy machines.

15. If there'd never have been a Civil War slavery would likely have been phased out within a few years anyway, when the slave-owners figured out they could feed machines cheaper. It's all for the same reason, to hog more than you need and lord it over other people.

16. There has never been a time in American history when an independent, white, smallholder like me could stay in business.
In 1850 I'd be competing with slavers. Think I could make it? Not bloody likely.
Now - if I competed - I'd be competing with big subsidized machines.

17. The only reason I can live like I am is because I'm a disabled veteran with a decent Social Security from many years as a tradesman.
Money enough.
Indigenous people didn't need money *at all* on a day-to-day basis.
There are still people who don't. In Africa. $200.00/yr.

18. We are reasonably certain that there were indigenous cultures on this continent where women were treated as people as they are. So it wasn't the energy budget in 1860 that made the women second class citizens at best, it was the colonists one size fits all culture.

19. You could make a good case that even keeping work animals is excessive, but - those aren't slaves. Unless dogs are. It's a fulfilling relationship and they do give us super-human powers. If you've never worked animals try not to see negative stereotypes. It's more complicated

20. We are quite literally a part of this world. Most humans can't internalize that. We're not separate things that can go to Mars.
People come back from the space station diminished. Physically.
We are Earth. She is us. No separation.
We breathe. Drink. Eat
Earth daily.
Excrete

21. We don't know how to become indigenous, and I assure you that we will never learn looking out the window at a mile a minute.
We start where we are. We've got more to learn than we can possibly imagine.

22. People tell me that, under my vaguely defined system, we wouldn't have the medicine to maintain our high average age at death. They imply this would be a failure.
People tell me that there are already too many of us and this is a bad thing.

23. I too suffer from internal contradictions, so I'm not going to get too snarky, but...
Both.

24. I'm going to make a confession: the reason I write of ways I think Earth could successfully and in good health maintain our numbers is because I can't find an ethical solution to our numbers. However, I accept death as part of life and don't think our monomania is healthy.

25. We are, today, making decisions, not individually but by characteristics, who lives and who dies.
White people with money live.
Pollution kills hundreds of thousands to millions. Millions for sure, globally.
Black Americans die at gunpoint.
People starve.
It's real.

26. I don't know if any of this makes sense, but...
No, I actually don't think life was better for everyone in 1850.
I'm not sure it was a lot worse, either, taking all the world and all the people into measure, and the ecosystem was doing a lot better.
But - not that, no.