Thursday, August 29, 2013

May the small, like the Big, always be with us....

A blog that celebrates the small, in a world that drinks the Kool-Aid of Bigness ...


We certainly don't need a new blogger celebrating the Big : the world already has seven billion mouths doing that daily.

The Big are in absolutely no danger of disappearing, certainly not from our culture and not even as a result of rapid changes in the global environment.

The small also are hardly in danger of disappearing in the world's rapidly changing environmental situation.

In fact, when the environment suddenly changes they always do much better than bigger beings : always have and always will.

But culturally, the small are very much a collection of Rodney Dangerfields : never getting anywhere near the respect they deserve.

As microbe beings too small for us to see with our naked eyes, they keep this whole biological ball of wax afloat : without them the world would be a barren chunk of rock.

Small but visible species of plants and animals are the next layer of beings that help make this rock a nice place to live for us, those human parasites at the topper-most top of the whole food , air and water chain.

Within the human species and culture, 'small' humans (aka the poor, tired and huddled) still tend to be treated with general indifference.

Small places and institutions are still quickly dismissed as yesterday's entities.

This blog , by contrast, is devoted to reminding us of the comforting safety factor that comes with the diversity and flexibility of a world with many small beings and entities all exploring different options.

It seeks also to remind us of the danger of putting all our intellectual eggs in a few Big (tired) baskets as we face a rapidly changing world.

And  it seeks to remind us of the sheer joy we get out of being immersed in an incredible variety of experience.

And it intends to warn us of the danger of returning to being gray-suited citizens of a few unitary-minded empires that all look and act and feel alike as they march eagerly towards their environmental doom....

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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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