We can deride America too easily. Much of it’s excesses are worthy of derision. But only in so far as it’s foibles are those of humanity.
If we had it’s water and therefore it’s population, a point often forgotten by lobbyists for growth here, (which is humourous given their constant exhortations of reality being in their grasp alone), and the US’s coincidental foundations, namely an enlightenment document at it’s heart, we too would be as idealistic, willfully ignorant of poverty, extravagent and removed from nature.
But we can take little comfort in the fact that dazzling and saturating self-absorbtion takes place in an other hemisphere and is not us. Because we import the best of it and mimic the worst of it. And in fact we are most of those derisable things. Humans in this age are prone to global conciets not just those of their local invention or direct cultural inheiretance.
We have to be harsh on ourselves as autonomous westerners who seek out ways to ignore our own society as it is embedded here.
Nature is only the most glaring of these delusions. We are not pastoral Europe and nor are our soils as forgiving as the American continental aluvium. From the ground up our nature is different. We must look to ourselves as something apart.
Culture too is neglected.
The two are linked.
As Citizens of the here and now we need to focus energy on creating culture that faces our place. Innovation comes of it.
