The Problem in a nutshell...

---

Living in our society is becoming unbearable for many of us. We are confused because we know that we are supposed to be the greatest society ever conceived, and yet we see all around us signs that things are not going well. We try to ignore the signs, perhaps telling ourselves that the people in power are aware of the problem and they're going to do something about it. They care, right? Reality, however, invariably sets in for many of us when we watch the news.

The ozone layer continues to be eroded. The rain forests continue to be exterminated. Hundreds of species are driven to extinction every day. Toxins continue to pour into the air, water and soil, pushing the ecosystem to the brink of collapse. The human population is growing out of control, and half of the world's people are malnourished or diseased. Crime rates continue to climb. Mental illness and depression are commonplace.

We are fearful, and perhaps rightly so. We are afraid of our neighbors. We are afraid of the police. We are afraid of the criminals. We live in a constant state of fear and insecurity, and we are told that it's just the way things are, and that things have always been this way. We are told by the people in power not to worry. We are told that if we can just hang in there, we will work it all out. We are told that this is the way people are meant to live, so of course we'll make it work. We just need to get more control, more power. We are told that with enough power we can be in control of everything. We have been lied to.

When seen in this greater context, is it really so shocking that suicide rates are rising? That mental illness is worsening? That there are mothers killing their newborn children in bathrooms, or that students are going into schools with a bag full of weapons and a head full of rage? How can we look at the world around us and wonder why everything is falling apart?

Return to Top

.

..

How did things get to be this way?

---

That's the big question, isn't it? It wouldn't even occur to most people to even ask it. "What do you mean?" They would start. "How did things get to be this way? Well, things were meant to be this way. What other way could people live?" That's what is generally believed. The average person's view of human history (if they have one) tends to go something like this:

"Man evolved from ape-like creatures. They kept getting smarter and smarter, until one day, they were human. Then they lived a primitive, stone-age lifestyle for a very long time until finally, they discovered agriculture. Then man found his true destiny, because it was then that God began to speak to man (apparently he wasn't worthy before then). God told man how things had to be. Humans were charged to 'go forth and multiply.' He was told to take dominion over all the animals and the earth. He was told that he must conquer and subdue the world so that man can live the way man was meant to live."

So what other way could man live? After all, it was divine providence that he live this way, so who are we to second guess God?

There is another way to tell the story about how things came to be this way, and it's much closer to the truth.

"The Earth was abundant and full of life for billions of years before man (homo sapien) made his appearance about 200,000+ years ago. For the greater part of his time on Earth he lived as all other creatures lived. That's not to say he didn't live differently from other creatures. He certainly did. He was a clever and intelligent creature with a gift for memory and abstraction. He learned to read the hidden meanings to be found in the tracks left on the earth by other creatures, and interpret those meanings. Once he realized that those symbols in the dirt told a series of events, man became a storyteller. When he realized that those same tracks could predict future events (i.e. If I follow these tracks, I'm likely to find a deer standing in them.), man became a seer. He began to envision and experience the unseen world. He discovered 'the sacred.'

"Under natural conditions, there is a tendency toward diversity. This is because within the evolutionary process, diversity is what works. The greater the diversity of life that exists within a biosphere, the greater the chance that life will survive, and so it was with humans. They migrated across the Earth, and created thousands and thousands of different ways to live, each unique and beautiful in its own way. They created music, stories, legends, myths, art, tools, and all the other things that are part of what we call culture.

"Humans continued to live like all other creatures; immanent in the world. They belonged to the world and were part of it. And so, this is the way things went for nearly all of man's time on Earth.

"Then, 10,000 years ago, one tribe changed. We may never know how or why, but their world view became significantly altered. In the fertile crescent (the area now occupied by modern Iraq), one tribe decided that they were no longer going to be at the mercy of the world. They were going to take control, and damn anything or anyone that got in their way. Agriculture, which had been practiced in one form or another for quite some time before this, became distorted in their hands. Now, instead of growing food where they could find room, they decided that they would make room, and this room came at the expense of the creatures that lived there. Now, instead of killing only the foxes that went after their sheep, they decided to kill ALL the foxes. That would make room for more sheep and agriculture. This totalitarian style of living comes at a very high price. Once the land is used up by this technique, it is impossible to sustain the lifestyle any longer. It was this kind of agriculture that turned the fertile crescent into the desert that it is today.

"One thing that this tribe noticed was that their numbers were growing. It wasn't a problem though. They could just expand and grow more food. The problem was that they had neighbors. And so began the practice of war and assimilation, and the expansion of empire. Civilization was born".

You see that all of humanity didn't become totalitarian agriculturalists. Only one tribe out of thousands and thousands began this unsustainable practice, and they began a process of assimilation, driven by power and the belief that their way was the one right way for man to live, and fueled by a style of agriculture whose process is designed to turn all food into human food.

With this world view, what else could we do but destroy the world. Our system compels us to do it every day.

Return to Top

.

..

Where are we now?

---

If we just focused on the information above, it would seem pretty grim. This isn't meant to depress or anger people. It is meant to wake them up. The people of the Earth who are engaged in civilization are lost, and it is our goal to help them find their way home. But what does that mean?

I'll start by saying what it doesn't mean, since this aspect tends to frighten people the most. It does NOT mean we must go back and live as our ancestors did 10,000 years ago. We don't have to live in straw huts, or hunt bison, or even go without a hot shower. What we DO have to do, if we want to survive as a viable species and not destroy the world, is change our world view which says that the world was made for man, and man must conquer and rule it. If we can change that, we can change the world.

That's the good news. It's not humans as a species who are doing this, and people are not inherently bad, flawed or evil. We are just operating within a dysfunctional system. It is very much like the system software for your computer. If you began running a system that kept crashing, over and over, you'd just stop running that software. You wouldn't throw out your computer. We only have to change one culture (or some might say a group of estranged cultures) to make things better. It can change in our lifetime, and it can change overnight.

Imagine a world where community is more important than being a good consumer. Imagine that when you wake up in the morning, you KNOW that you are secure, and that no matter what happens there is an entire community around you that will take care of you. That's what this immanent world view offers; cradle to grave security, community, and caring. To many people, this sounds very idyllic, and perhaps even unrealistic. They say that we're talking about a utopian society that can never exist.

We believe that we can live in a way that offers us all the things I mentioned, and I have evidence of it. We have living examples of these societies right now. They live in little corners of the world where civilization hasn't managed to displace them. We call them "primitive" people. They live with security and happiness. They have no crime as we know it, and very little stress, or mental illness. This does not mean that they are better human beings than us. There are people within their societies (just like in ours) that have the potential to be greedy, or angry, or just plain rude. But their social structure doesn't allow these things to flourish. A good analogy exists within our own bodies. Every day, every one of us produces deformed cells; cells we would call cancerous. But in a healthy body, these cancer cells are eliminated by our immune system quite easily. It becomes what we think of as Cancer (TM) when the body is thrown out of balance by toxins, radiation, electromagnetic fields, or other unnatural influences. These societies don't have all the social ills that we take for granted because their societies are in balance. Civilization doesn't cause all the bad things, it just allows them to propagate.

I want to point out clearly that we are not talking about technology here. The technology level of primitive cultures isn't what gives them their balanced lifestyle, and technology isn't to blame for making ours unbalanced. Like anything else, the technology simply reflects the intent of it's user. If a man is walking along, and he's a good and kind person, and he suddenly finds a gun on the ground, he is not suddenly going to go crazy and shoot up a mall. The person who goes into a mall with a machine gun and kills a store full of shoppers, would still be mentally ill, even if he didn't have the technology of that gun. He might just as easily pick up a rock and start smashing people. The point is that technology doesn't produce our social problems, it reflects them. A sustainable society can have computers, phones, showers, and cars. But they would work very differently than what we know now.

That is what Sacred Lands is all about. Our goal is to work towards creating a healthy, sustainable, technological, and balanced society.

You will find that once your mind is changed, you can never look at the world in the same way ever again. The change will be forever. We will show you the door to the prison of your mind. We can offer you the key, but you must open the door and walk through.

Return to Top

..

What Lies Ahead?

---

In this section, you will find essays, articles, and stories that describe and define the problems that we face. They are meant to clarify the issues in a way that will leave little doubt that we are in big trouble.

The 30 Theses - Jason Godesky (This is a great place to start.)

Age of Grief - by John Zerzan

The Beginning of Change - by Anthony Zebrowski

Calories as Currency - Adapted from Direct Pointing to Real Wealth: Thomas J. Elpel's Field Guide to Money

Civilization is a Pyramid Scheme - by Ronald Wright

Dead Trees Publishing by EarthFirst! (A collection of writings by various authors.)

Domestic Violence: Symptom of a Malfunctioning Society - by Lalitha Chelliah

The Final Empire: The Collapse of Civilization and the Seed of the Future - by William H. Koetke

Grateful Slave - by Paine's Torch

Human Population Numbers as a Function of Food Supply - by Russell Hopfenberg and David Pimentel

The Lost People - by Thom Hartmann

Nature and Madness - by Paul Shepard

The Politics of Extinction: Remain a parasite OR become an Earth Warrior - by Captain Paul Watson

The Story of B (book excerpts) - by Daniel Quinn

Speech 1: The Great Forgetting

Speech 2: The Boiling Frog

The Story of Civilization: A Child’s Primer of Economics - by Joseph George Caldwell

The Worst Mistake In The History Of The Human Race - by Jared Diamond

What Went Wrong? - by Michael Green, from the After Culture website

You May Be An Anarchist And Not Even Know It - an interview with John Zerzan by Derrick Jensen

 Return to Top

.

..

What can we do?

---

There are several ideas that we must introduce or change if we are to turn our culture and ourselves away from destruction.

1. We must stop the murder of the Earth - If you were to come upon a man trying to kill someone you loved, you wouldn't pull up a chair, sit down, and talk to him about why he's doing what he's doing. That might be appropriate at a later time, but at that moment the most important thing to do is to stop them. It is the same with the Earth. Civilization is in the process of raping our mother, has been doing so for quite some time, and is likely to finish killing her in our lifetime. We are rapidly running out of time, and so we must do something... now. The time for talk is over.

Those of us who are awake to the real dangers we face must become leaders. Most of us are not ready, but we can no longer wait to become the elders that the world desparately needs. We must move forward with the tools at hand and take on the role of elders, and perhaps one day, with the guidance of our ansestors, we can truely become the elders that each of us has the potential of becoming.

..

2. We must change our world view - This is obviously one of the most challenging things to change about any culture, for in order to change a world view, they (the members of the culture) must first realize that there is a problem. Then they must discover the source of the problem. Finally, they must be ready and willing to change. It is often very difficult to take these steps since most of a culture's core beliefs and customs are based on their world view.

Civilization's world view says that the world was made for man, and that man is superior to all other creatures. It says that the world belongs to man and that he has the right to dominate and control it as he sees fit. The result of this has been a relentless war against the living community over the past 10,000 years.

We must remind people that the world is sacred, and that we are part of the natural world; a web of life that we cannot live without.

..

3. We must build true communities - When talking about community, we should first understand that a real community is concerned primarily with the security and support of its members. Humans evolved to live within certain social and cultural parameters, so to find the best social structures, we need to look at the patterns within which we developed. For a large percentage of our time on Earth (200,000+ years) we lived in small, egalitarian communities (or tribes) that offered their members security.

The security I'm talking about does not mean that you have enough weapons, although that can be part of it. I'm talking about being cared for by your tribe, clan or community. It means that you have cradle to grave security. It means that no one in the community has more value than another, and that if one person is hungry, then everyone is hungry. It means that no matter what happens, you will be given support, and that you will take care of those in the community who need your support.

Unfortunately for civilization, this system only works on a small scale. One of the reasons for this is that it's far easier to ignore the suffering of a total stranger, than it is to ignore the suffering of someone in your own community of 120 people. Civilization on the other hand tries to legislate compassion. This doesn't work because we are not able to feel the same level of attachment to a total stranger as we do for a loved one. People in our government are right when the say that "it takes a village", but they don't understand that you just cannot have a village of 290,000,000 people.

We must help people to reconnect with those who are closest to them. We must teach them the benefits of cooperation, community, and support.

4. We must return to the family - We are not talking about the typical nuclear family as the one right way to live. In fact, this particular family structure is not typical at all. Within many other cultures, this isn't the case. Of course there is always a biological mother and father to a child, but more often than not, there are extended families that may include other blood relatives, god parents (or the equivalent), non-blood parents (in polygamous cultures), and thousands of other configurations that we can't even imagine. One of the few universal taboos is incest which probably evolved because it's genetically unhealthy. We are not here to judge these different lifestyles.

On the other hand, there are certain things that can be considered "hard wired" into us, and can therefore be considered a healthier way of life for humans.

One of these is child birth. We take for granted that child birth must be a painful and traumatic experience for the mother, and of course no one is saying that it's easy. In fact it could be said that with all the drugs we give the mother, we are robbing her of the most wonderful experience of her life; to be able to truly experience the emergence of her child into the world. Once here, we traumatize the child by blinding it with bright lights, assaulting its ears with noise, and its body with cold. After nine months of warmth in the womb, the child is hung upside down, struck violently by a masked stranger, and is placed on a cold, steel metal scale for weighing. All these experiences combine to give us our first impressions of the world. Is it any wonder that we feel as if the world is against us?

More of these hard wired patterns can be found in the way we raise children. Things like breast feeding, attachment parenting, and natural learning (called home schooling today) are all critical to a natural human way of life, and have been largely abolished (or at least discouraged) by civilization.

If we are able to show people the benefits of only a few of these parenting styles, then we will have gone a long way towards turning things around.

5. We must understand and embrace the full cycle of life and death - Death is one of the most frightening aspects of our lives, and the least understood. Many today still recognize the miracle of life, but so few of us have learned to have the same awe and appreciation of death. Death is absolutely necessary to life on Earth, for without death, there could be no new life. Every day, life feeds on death. When we eat a steak we are feeding on something that was once alive. That living organism died so that we could live. One day, we will die and something will feed on us starting with the bacteria in our own bodies. I don't say this to disgust you, but I do want to impress upon you the idea that we are food, just as the cow who's life was sacrificed to sustain you and your family for another day was food.

We must teach people to honor life and death equally, and understand death as a transition to be neither avoided nor hastened, but rather accepted without fear or regret. Birth and death are the two great miracles of life.

6. Visit our Solutions page to learn more about you can do to make a difference.

Return to Top