REAL Green is a realistic localism of low carbon capture with a hybridized by modern tech. The key motivation is offering people a green prepping lifeboat. The lifeboat is the understanding we are carbon trapped and path dependent as a society so we the individual are trapped. It is quite simple and more a mentality that steers a lifestyle. The key element is humans are locked into a planet in succession and a civilization that is in decline. It is only by embracing decline individually that one will be supported by the greater world outside our head which ultimately is the planet below our feet. In other words, the planet will support you if you allow it.
This is the green shaman aspect of REAL Green. Shamans were individuals that addressed the spiritual aspects of the tribe. Our evolution was tribal and still is the individual’s basis of a properly scaled human. The shaman lived on the edge of tribal affairs and were consulted in times of spiritual distress. Today they are looked upon as quacks of the savages of old but that is a deception of a modern that is replete with the quackery of tech and development. I would say the shamans of old were connected to the planet hence guided properly by scale no matter how irrational. Often times the results of a tribal shaman were behaviors that maintained harmony even though they may have been irrational activity from a modern point of view.
The key ingredient was compromise with the planet. The shaman of old most often made the tribe accept limits to their behavior thereby maintaining the status quo of balance of the human and the local ecosystem thereby preventing or mitigating local overshoot. This is a bit alien to moderns today. It is not science based and does not follow the status quo of human manifest destiny of sustainable development in an expanding human world of knowledge powering technology.
The modern shaman is a hybrid of the old and the new. What the green shaman is tasked with is a new wisdom that is honed in the fire of decline. Today the modern green shaman is called to expose the wrongs of modern life and seek a balance with planetary forces. This balance is a scaling. The result is a wisdom that calls into question development and growth for their own sake which is human hubris. It does this most effectively by calling into question mobility and excessive efficiency found in tech. It recognized diminishing returns going non linear with tech and development which means we are approaching more harm than good. This is not a call to turn our back on tech because we can’t it is instead a call to apply the brakes.
This braking is relative and realistic for the individual. Society will take much longer to brake because society is like a supertanker that takes a significant distance to turn once underway. The grass root efforts of the enlightened is the key to this slow turning. The enlightened are those who are seeing the fallacies of tech and development and calling into question current policy. The awakened are the green shamans who now know in their essence that human civilization is in a process of failure. The planet has spoken to them.
A new human type will emerge but this emergence will be a long-term affair. It also could be extinction. This is process of emergence or extinction is a planetary acquiescence. It is not for us to know at this point it is a revelation.
The green shaman calls on the awakened to embrace the journey of constructive change within a general destructive process of succession. New nodes or micro climes will open up as both human and planetary complexity is broken down. These are both places and behaviors of constructive change to be discovered and cultivated. The task of the green shaman is to navigate this journey of human discovery. This is a dualistic transformation which means the green shaman will be the transition force to the new human type. He will not be that type but will be the incubator of the new human type which is yet to be designated by the planet.
This insight is from the power of the planet not the green shaman so extreme humility and modesty is due from the awakened. Any power from the planet drawn for personal use will destroy the green shaman’s powers which are not his own. The reality of this is a relativity. This relativity is the turbulence of living in both worlds for the green shaman. The way one deals with this is extreme acceptance of not only failure and decline of the planet but also the understanding that a green shaman will not be able to dwell in the brightness of this sacred planetary manifestation. His human faculties to see this come from years of experience that coalesces and then will be degraded in time by the process of aging and the wear and tare of living in a human dualism.
This then is the wisdom of insecurity that the green shaman must embrace. The insecurity is the green shaman understanding he does not own his awakening but instead it is a flowering like occurs in the high arctic during the short growing season. The key is to leave seeds in monasteries of enlightenment that can be handed off to those awakened who come afterwards. The green shaman duties are to teach a few who attain awakening and this in turn continues the enlightenment of the human tribe to slowly steer the ship of civilization to better water. The green shaman brings deep water shallow like a shoal navigated which is both dangerous but also a place for successful swift movement of turbulent change.
My muse reading:
Modern Civilization and Its People Without Spirit
https://www.resilience.org/stories/2020-11-06/modern-civilization-and-its-people-without-spirit/
“The world is at the most dangerous moment in human history,” says Noam Chomsky… This dichotomy about the meaning of social organization is in turn closely related to two radically opposite conceptions of nature. Communality is grounded in a sacred idea of nature as a living entity, as a source of life and a receiver of the dead, like Mother Earth. The modern world demolished that image and through science built an idea of nature as an inanimate mechanical system: a machine to be scrutinized, controlled, dominated, and ultimately exploited. “Both animistic and mechanistic thinking are metaphorical,” says R. Sheldrake in his famous book The Renaissance of Nature, “… but while mythical and animistic thinking is based on organic metaphors taken from life processes, mechanistic thinking appeals to metaphors drawn from man-made machinery.”… Only beings with conscience will save the species. They are already doing it.”
REAL Green Adaptation 