HOME SCHOOL

It requires new skills to parent children who may live longer than civilization. In one hundred years you and your children will probably be dead. This is our natural lifespan. So when news tell us “global warming” will cause flooding one hundred years in the future we are not touched. Modern humans find it nearly impossible to take painful and expensive actions for avoiding serious consequences that arise beyond our lifetime. This is because our culture systematically disconnects us from our soul. (But that is another article!)

You may be getting tired of hearing threats of “climate change” and “global warming,” but it has not yet stopped you from driving your car or flying to your next holiday. It has not stopped me either. If the ice melts and the oceans go up in a hundred years, so what? People of the future will learn how to take care of themselves. If some farms dry out, well, new farms can start where the ice is melting. Future generations will figure out how to feed themselves just like we did.

But things may not change as gradually as we thought. (For more information, google abrupt climate change, and melting tundra, and also read every page of www.planetextinction.com, including the 12 newsletters and the links.) The effects of technological byproducts multiplied by growing populations push Earth’s complex ecosystems past hidden tipping points. Geological records reveal that Earth’s climate typically changes suddenly, not gradually, (in decades rather than in centuries) and it flips to greater extremes (e.g. mass extinctions) than are predicted by current computer simulations. If even a minor greenhouse heating spiral occurs, try to imagine a billion homeless desperate people with weapons marching towards your comfortable apartment. Our children may live long after organized Western cultures have disintegrated in the chaos. Let this sink in.

Since we did not manage human overpopulation ourselves, intelligently, it looks like it is going to be handled the Malthusian way.

Imagine being a child now, growing up in a society that is spending your future retirement money on bombs and highways, defecating in its own drinking water, and teaching you to continue the tradition of not asking why. (I just received an ad from the local power company encouraging local citizens to install personal saunas.) Would you have respect for this regime? Would you give credibility to its institutions? If your parents or teachers were not authentically and vulnerably addressing these issues would you respect them? Would you want to continue striving to achieve goals set for you by society? Or would graffiti and car-burning seem like a more appropriate response? Would gangs, piercings and drugs seem like a more fitting training ground for what may be coming?

Teenagers are extremely perceptive. They read between the lines. They see what’s going on with a clarity that is not yet exhausted from being sucked into neurotic modern-day busy-ness. A child may be too timid to say what he or she feels. But imagine how their heart must secretly ache as they come to realize that all of the large animals they have so recently come to know and love are being systematically exterminated by our vicious over-consumption.

We adults may still try to deny that our culture is creating its own demise. But as Werner Erhard would say, “Reality is hard and persistent and will kick you in the ass every time.” You can’t overpopulate a closed system without eventually hitting the limits. What will it be like to experience a couple billion people dieing? We may not have to live through this, but our children will. How can we prepare them?

Even if you do not have children of your own, the following experiments may be important for you.

1) The first experiment is taking radical responsibility for causing the present circumstances. The combination of technological contamination and overpopulation is not our children’s fault. I created it this way. You created it this way. How did we cause such devastation? It was easy: we did nothing to stop it. No wonder adolescents have rage, depression and disconnect. If adults are raping the planet, why should teens do any different? Start by looking around with zero blame towards politicians, corporate directors, television or advertisers. I chose every action that I made to participate in the indulgences leading to planetary devastation. I too chose extinction rather than conscious discipline. Ignorance of the consequences is no excuse. Even if it is too late, you can still take responsibility. Begin explaining to your children in detail how your daily actions subvert sustainability. How putting plastic in the garbage can does not make it disappear. Responsibility starts with not buying it in the first place, no matter how inconvenient that might be. Sustainability comes through unconventional behavior because the conventional is not sustainable.

2) Start learning what your children will need to know to deal with the collapse of the financial system, governmental infrastructures, insurance, and deliver of food, water, and fuel. If you do not learn, how shall they? Here are some suggestions: learn how to deal with death, how to feel grief, rage, fear and acceptance, consciously and clearly, how to be an adult man or woman, how to be present, how to be centered, how to pay attention, how to avoid low drama and to create high drama, how to make boundaries, how to intuitively know, how to communicate with completion loops, how to hold and navigate spaces particularly for the principles of integrity, clarity, possibility, love, transformation, and lightness, how to organize groups and teams chaordically, how to lead meetings that efficiently use nonlinear intelligence resources, how to turn on and use archetypal energies in yourself and others, how to manage Gremlin in yourself and others, how to fight, how to farm, how to forage, how to preserve and cook food, how to do first-aid, how to treat injuries and illness, how to build and maintain sustainably powered living environments, how to raise and care for animals, how to tell stories, how to feed and be intimate in your four bodies (physical, intellectual, emotional and spiritual), how to deliver an authentic rite of passage from adolescence into adulthood, and how to pray, because sometimes prayer will be your only alternative. Tell your children you do not know how to do these things, and set about learning them together starting now.

3) If you have the courage, (or even if you don’t) here is the real experiment. Stop 90% of everything that you are doing that is not sustainable. If you are working in the lumber, oil, mining, transportation or chemical industry, do not go to work. Stop eating beef and stop supporting businesses who deal in beef. Stop driving. Stop trying to invest in hedge-funds to get yours while the getting is good. Just stop. Let the part of your life defined by modern culture crumble into chaos around you. It may be 90% of your life. Let it die and stay calm in the midst of it. Read. Exercise. Stay well. You are not a victim. Find out what life is like together with your family and friends in human culture rather than in modern culture. Keep getting yourself prepared. In the beginning you will have no idea how. This is okay. Trust the process. Gradually nurture the authentic Phoenix that arises out of the ashes. Teach other people to do the same. This experiment could take some years.

Technopenuriaphobia I could provide numerous suggestions for home schooling, but the limitless variety of possibilities begs to be narrowed. Therefore I will focus in one area – technopenuriaphobia. I have taken the liberty of naming the fear of the lack of technology technopenuriaphobia or TPP. The word penuria comes from the Latin and means scarcity, or deficiency. It is interesting to note that the word technophobia, which is the fear of technology and its effects, first appeared around 1964. Here it is four decades later and we now have technopenuriaphobia, the fear that our technology will leave us! We have grown so dependent on modern technology in these past two generations that we can no longer live on our own planet without it. An ideal environment for beginning Edgework Experiments is in the arena of healing yourself, your relationship, and your family of this disease of contemporary life.

In our modern culture we are born high up on a technological ladder. Hanging out before us in the sky, bright as a Las Vegas casino sign, is the vision of the fabled good life that we are encouraged to strive for. We think we can achieve the good life only if we surround ourselves with enough labor saving, comfort providing, or entertainment devices. Even without trying to we are completely buffered from life on planet earth with scores of modern conveniences.

We learned that if you want food, all you have to do is go to the cupboard, the refrigerator or the freezer and open up boxes, cans, plastic bags, or cartons and there is an abundance of food. If the food starts to get low at home, go to the supermarket and there you will find food in such quantity and variety as to shame any king, all ready for the taking. Load up your basket and haul it home to eat. Food comes from the grocery store. If you need money, for example, to buy the food, just give the people a little plastic card and type in a code number or write your name and the food is instantly paid for. If you want cash, use the same card and go to a cash machine or a bank teller. The money comes pouring out by the handfuls.

You want light? Flip a switch. Water? Turn a handle. New clothes? Use that plastic card again. Want to talk to somebody? Autodial their number wherever you are from your cell phone. Need to go somewhere? Don’t walk; use a machine: bicycle, car, bus, train, boat or plane. Machines take you rapidly and comfortably anywhere in the world. We forget how absolutely astonishing the modern world is. We live in a culture and a time where wonder-filled technological conveniences rule our lives. In this “heaven” we can’t imagine that there could be a problem. But there is. The problem is that we are born high up on a technological ladder. We are skilled at living a modern life within technology. The technology is not the problem. The problem is the gap between us and planet earth. We subconsciously sense that the rungs below us on the ladder of technology are missing. If we dare to look down we realize deep in our guts that those rungs are no longer in place. If we were to take one step down or somehow slip we would instantly be in danger. A hidden ceaseless fear rumbles silently deep in our belly.

The rungs disappear the moment we forget that we and planet earth are one. In our headlong rush toward the tantalizing modern comforts of tomorrow-land we have forgotten how to live without technology. We have high-tech but we are missing low-tech. We cannot sleep without a bed, eat without a supermarket, see without a streetlight, move without a car, or be with ourselves without distractive media.

We have screwed ourselves. We have lost the original technology that created civilization: fire starting, food finding, clothes making, shaping shelter and tools out of whatever comes to hand. The loss of low-tech knowledge creates a lethal gap between us and our planet, and that gap is now filled with unconscious fear: technopenuriaphobia.

There is already a significant body of research proving that harm is done to motor skills and hand-eye coordination by placing children in front of computer and television screens in the years when they need to be developing three-dimensional perceptions and physical dexterity. This psycho-emotional damage may be irreversible. Technopenuriaphobia is an additional damage caused by long-term exposure to a profound fear that we are not aware of and have no culturally embraced cure for.

TPP is a particularly Western affliction because you must first live with advanced technologies for a generation before the next generation forgets that you ever did not have them. One-hundred-thousand years of hard-earned life-knowledge vanishes from our common inheritance during one generation of being a city dweller. Considering the virulent Westernization of the rest of the world, technopenuriaphobia will quite likely infect millions if not billions more in the near future.

Getting dropped into the gap between planet and technology can happen in an instant when the elevator stops between floors, the batteries go dead, or the store is closed. A million different accidents can puncture the illusion of our comfortable little techno-world. We know bodily that if we were to somehow be separated from our conveniences – even just a few of them – we would be on very shaky ground.

Unless we have made special efforts to train ourselves in outdoor living skills, we all have technopenuriaphobia bothering us deep in our soul. TPP decreases the number of options from which we can choose and thereby forces certain lifestyles upon us that we assume are without alternatives – “What do you mean I could wear out my old shoes before ordering new ones on the Internet?” “What do you mean unplug the TV?” If our survival is dependant upon a high level of technology, then we live like goldfish swimming precariously in a glass bowl in the desert.

So what can we do? How can we heal ourselves from TPP? How can we get free of this insidious fear? Assuredly it takes work to heal oneself of TPP. Work and time. You can approach the work as fun work, but time to do that work will not come without you making it. Listed below are ideas for Edgework Experiments to heal yourself of this modern day affliction.

By the way, TPP Edgework Experiments are excellent activities to share with children. Anti-technopenuriaphobia measures are a powerful intervention that safeguards the basic sanity and self-esteem of your children for their whole lives. Your efforts may last for generations because your children could well pass the benefit on to their own children, and their children’s children after that.

Please remember that I am not proposing a back-to-nature anti-technology movement. I am not promoting medieval or tribal lifestyles. The point is to fill a gap where we are noncommittal, hollow, and inauthentic due to a deep abiding terror. I am encouraging us to reclaim non-technical options in our everyday actions and thoughts. Installing low-tech rungs in the ladder of technology fills the gap between you and planet earth and builds a stable foundation onto which you can relax.

While reading through this sample list, write down a list of which Edgework Experiments are attractive to you, and add others that you may think of. This does not mean that you promise to do these experiments, or even that you know how to do these experiments. You are simply listing experiments that might turn you on.

COUNTER-TPP EDGEWORK EXPERIMENTS

Go Barefoot: Taking your shoes off and exposing the sensitive soles of your feet to the textures and temperatures of the surface of planet earth adds dimensions to your experience. Walk barefoot, even in the rain. (Leaving bare footprints in the snow really makes your neighbors wonder about you.) Take your shoes and socks off at the office. Whose office is it anyway? Make your house a shoes-off house.

Do Without: Try fasting for a day or three. Just drink water, tea or juice. Walk instead of using any machines to get you places all week. Walk through stores and do not buy anything. Put away the TV. Have radio-free days. Clean out your garage and attic. Enter your weekend without a plan. Be silent for three days. Do without speaking. Do without sugar or meat or coffee for three days.

Go Camping: Just get outside into nature for an hour, a day, a week, a month. Step away from the containment of civilization and live on a wide open sandy beach, in the middle of a forest, in the rocky desert, on top of a mountain, beside a freshwater lake. As you become adjusted to camping, practice taking less and less civilization with you. Start with leaving behind the CD player, the bicycle, the camera. The lighter your backpack, the more the TPP gap is filled in.

Grow a Garden: Even if it is only potted tomatoes on your balcony, those tomatoes will taste different from store-bought. Vegetables grow in the dirt. There are bugs. There are gophers. The sun matters. The rain matters. Vegetables eat cow manure and rotting dead stuff. Then you eat the vegetables. This is Edgework.

Eat Bugs: Yes. There are 1,462 recorded species of edible insects. Get fried grasshoppers with chili, salt and lemon in Mexico; fried cicadas and silk moth pupae in Japan; roasted termites and crickets in Nigeria; snails are a delicacy in France; and you can get canned baby bees, chocolate covered ants, and stir-fried meal worms in the U.S. Suck the back ends of water bugs at vegetable markets in Thailand, and eat witchetty grubs and Bogong moths in Australia. And don’t forget Gnat Soufflé! The menu is wide and varied, and rich in protein and vitamins. For recipes check out The Eat-A-Bug Cookbook by David George Gordon.