New Idea for Exploiting our Environment

As long as humans have walked upright we've been learning to exploit the resources around us.  We aren't nearly as good as the plains Indians who turned a single species– the bison– into an entire lifestyle, but we're pretty good at extracting even complex and subtle things like uranium from the world around us.

Wrapped Woman, charcoal.

So I wonder why we never learned how to do this with people- to look around and see what values exist in other people and think about how that might be useful to us.  I sometimes fantasize that as I walk through the crowd at an airport.  If I only knew who all those people really were, I might be surrounded in that one experience by all the collaborators I would ever need the rest of my whole life: the patrons, the artists, the manufacturers and distributors, the experts, gurus– indeed anyone I wish I could ever find might be right there in the line behind me (OK, in front)!  But as amazing as we creatures are we've never figured out a way to find that out.  The Ubiquinet makes all this a lot easier technologically but we still haven't the social creative imagination to value who the strangers around us really are.

In the 70's I had a remarkable encounter I'll never forget.  My car broke down in a small Idaho town and while it was being fixed I took a walk and met a guy tinkering in his garage who showed me a car he'd developed that gets 80 miles to the gallon!  He was bursting with excitement and couldn't wait to call Ford to sell them the idea!  That's of course that last we'll ever hear of him!  You can imagine what happened.  This is the capitalist version of a dissident Russian poet disappeared into Stalin's gulag for having the wrong idea.  But Stalin in this case is the corporatocracy– one that sees us humans as not nothing more than pocketbooks to be emptied.

We all live with this assessment of our fellows as if it were reality.  It's not.  I look forward to living in a community where everyone is valued for whatever they can bring into the circle, and that resource– not gold or oil– is what we value most.