The problem with written history and reality, Kelly Moody

After all of these presentations on The Ecology of Eden, I have been reflecting on the nature of our view on our world. I know that things are going to shambles, and we're caught in a place trying to figure out how to fix the problem, but is it as bad as we make it seem? I just feel like our perspective, our relative place in time allows us to see this as the end of times, the dark ages of ecology, that its all exponentially leading up to some prime point of destruction or ultimate end. Are we seeing the truth of the situation or are we merely shaped by the things around us that give us facts, numbers, images of the past and present? Because we can see the way we do unique to the modern condition, does this mean we are seeing the truth in the situation? The biggest difference in the way modern society sees their world versus before, is the act of written history, which wasn't something practiced until only recently in the way we understand it today. It seems that everything is exponentially leading up to something big that we are getting closer to because we have this skewed view shaped by written history, and of course you can write down more about what has recently happened because you have that capacity, and the capacity keeps growing. What enables you to communicate to the future generation what you want them to know keeps it in this cyclic progression, and with that progression is the image of some kind of faster and faster growth. I noticed this the most in my Human Adaptation class, how things from the Miocene, Pliocene and Pleistocene times were ordered in MILLIONS of years instead of hundreds or tens of years like they are now. This happens because of the medium we use to understand time, and history, we write it down. In that time, there wasn't such a technology so we are applying ours now to that time. It's hard to have a clear picture of a time that wasn't ordered the way it is now. We have archaeological evidence to order what we can, and we try to write it all out but it is all great generalizations and great assumptions and moldings into the way we want to see things. I have a feeling that the way we see history is GREATLY skewed so i try to see through a lot of things we learn in that class as just mere assumptions but not truths. Paul Shepard talks about this in The Tender Carnivore and the Sacred Game also in his section on "On the Significance of Being Shaped by the Past."

"History as we know it has declared that what was not written was of little importance. It has compared primitives unfavorably with ourselves or patronized them. It has discovered heroes only in terms of the state. And it has subordinated its essential functions, invading life and being by ideology and ecological apartheid." (Shepard xxviii)

Though I am concerned about our environment, and I see that there is a significant problem we face, I also think that our view of our times against the past is a product of the specific mechanisms that currently mediate our existence. It is only natural really for there to be this bias. In 100 years it will be the same way. This sense of fatalism is not as immediate a concern as we always like to think. There will always be issues, even if we solve these, more will be created, and they will seem worse because of the mechanisms of that time enabling it so. The mechanisms of the time bit the best with the understanding of the problems of the time. Maybe we should all look at the world in the light of deep evolution, holistically, and maybe independent of our relative time for a moment to see how the past and future are all really the same. We're just one point in time, on an infinite scale, trying to make sense of our place on this scale.

"A different experience of self--of history--truly explores the bonds among men and between them and other life and non-life, even to the rocks and seas, recognizing that the genesis of these connections belongs in time and that they function only in continuity. The perspective of time is the only clue to our identity and, in its transforming realization, the hope of our ecological maturity." ( Shepard xxviii)