Wednesday, March 28, 2012

FALLOUT means all Life dies at a COmmon table

Michael Marshall
"The fallout from the volcano Tambora in Indonesia in 1815 led to "The Year without Summer" across the Northern Hemisphere in 1816, in which hundreds of thousands died on the diseases of hunger."

"The fallout from the last Soviet H-Bomb test series led to increases in cancers all around the world."

"The fallout from the brutalities of the Germans upon ' just a bunch of Polacks' (culminating in the horrors of AUSCHWITZ), ultimately led to the deaths of the sons of many of those same  Isolationist parents, years later and half a non-isolated world away....

Few of us are likely to misunderstand these three sentences, even though the word fallout was first used, in its modern sense, only in 1949.

We now accept that a volcano or pandemic half a world away can reach out and bite us anywhere in the world - even in the heart of Isolationism - the American Heartland of the Mid-West.

We learned this first in 1945 at HIROSHIMA, when it became clear that either a rocket or a large bomber could travel half way around the world and drop a city leveling bomb on us.

We learned it even better by 1954, than none of us could live 'safe' in the countryside --- death would just come to us a little later - from radioactive dust drifting down from the sky from bombs a continent away.

And over and over, if a war happens in a part of the world judged vital by some superpower or other, we know sooner or later our kids will be called upon to get in there and die.

We now accept what Modernist Man did not -- that the world is just one big 'common table' and that we can dine together around it --- or all die together around it.

So people - which side are you on ?

Still believing in MOdernity, that Man is far above nature and we can do nothing to it - or it to us - that a little High Tech Science can't solve ?

Or do you now accept that we live , fully embedded ,inside Nature and Nature's limits, that we now live in "The Age of Commensality" ?

This is this century's global ideological divide ......

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Histories of WWII all start with the presumption that it was a war raged between humans and human ideologies, with Nature’s climate and geography as side issues easily surmounted.My blog, on the contrary will only accept that it was conflict between humans and their ideology that STARTED the war but that it was the barriers thrown up by Mother Nature (geography & climate) that turned it into a war that lasted between 6 to 15 years and expanded to thoroughly involve all the world’s oceans and continents. High Modernity may have started the war convinced that Nature had been conquered and was about to be soon replaced by human Synthetic Autarky and that only human Tiger tanks and human Typhoon planes were to be feared. But by the end, more and more people had lost their naive faith in Scientism and were beginning to accept that humanity was thoroughly entangled with both the Nature of plants, animals & microbes as well as the Nature of so called “lesser” humanity. By 1965, the world was definitely entering the Age of Entanglement. Billions still believed - at least in part -with the promises of High Modernity but intellectually & emotionally, it was no longer dominant...

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