[Scpg] "The most radical thing you can do is stay home"

[LBUZZELL at aol.com]

We've reached Peak Travel, and relocalization is the next logical  step.  
Thanks to modern communications, we can stay in touch by text, voice  and video 
but will probably be zooming around the planet less often. And as  Solnit 
points out: "Perhaps the most radical thing you can  do in our time is to start 
turning over the soil, loosening it up for the crops  to settle in, and then stay 
home to tend them." 
 
Linda
 
_http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/3628/_ 
(http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/3628/)    
The Most Radical  Thing You Can Do
Staying home as a necessity and a  right
by Rebecca  Solnit
 
LONG AGO the poet and bioregionalist Gary Snyder said, “The most radical  
thing you can do is stay home,” a phrase that has itself stayed with me for the  
many years since I first heard it. Some or all of its meaning was present 
then,  in the bioregional 1970s, when going back to the land and consuming less 
was how  the task was framed. The task has only become more urgent as climate 
change in  particular underscores that we need to consume a lot less. It’s 
curious, in the  chaos of conversations about what we ought to do to save the 
world, how seldom  sheer modesty comes up—living smaller, staying closer, having 
less—especially  for us in the ranks of the privileged. Not just having a 
fuel-efficient car, but  maybe leaving it parked and taking the bus, or living a lot 
closer to work in  the first place, or not having a car at all. A third of  
carbon-dioxide emissions nationwide are from the restless movements of goods 
and  people. 
We are going to have to stay home a lot more in the future. For us that’s  
about giving things up. But the situation looks quite different from the other  
side of all our divides. The indigenous central Mexicans who are driven by  
poverty to migrate have begun to insist that among the human rights that matter  
is the right to stay home. So reports David Bacon, who through photographs 
and  words has become one of the great chroniclers of the plight of migrant 
labor in  our time. “Today the right to travel to seek work is a matter of 
survival,” he  writes. “But this June in Juxtlahuaca, in the heart of Oaxaca’s 
Mixteca region,  dozens of farmers left their fields, and women weavers their 
looms, to talk  about another right, the right to stay home. . . . In Spanish, 
Mixteco, and  Triqui, people repeated one phrase over and over: thederecho de no  
migrar—the right to not migrate. Asserting this right challenges not just  
inequality and exploitation facing migrants, but the very reasons why people  
have to migrate to begin with.” Seldom mentioned in all the furor over  
undocumented immigrants in this country is the fact that most of these  indigenous and 
mestizo people would be quite happy not to emigrate if they could  earn a 
decent living at home; many of them are just working until they earn  enough to 
lay the foundations for a decent life in their place of origin, or to  support 
the rest of a family that remains behind. 
>From outer space, the privileged of this world must look like ants in an  
anthill that’s been stirred with a stick: everyone  constantly rushing around in 
cars and planes for work and pleasure, for  meetings, jobs, conferences, 
vacations, and more. This is bad for the planet,  but it’s not so good for us 
either. Most of the people I know regard with  bemusement or even chagrin the 
harried, scattered lives they lead. Last summer I  found myself having the same 
conversation with many different people, about our  craving for a life with daily 
rites; with a sense of time like a well-appointed  landscape with its 
landmarks and harmonies; and with a sense of measure and  proportion, as opposed to a 
formless and unending scramble  to go places and get things and do more. I 
think of my mother’s  lower-middle-class childhood vacations, which consisted of 
going to a lake  somewhere not far from Queens and sitting still for a few 
weeks—a lot different  from jetting off to heli-ski in the great unknown and all 
the other models of  hectic and exotic travel urged upon us now. 
For the privileged, the pleasure of staying home means  being reunited with, 
or finally getting to know, or finally settling down to  make the beloved 
place that home can and should be, and it means getting  out of the limbo of 
nowheres that transnational corporate products and their  natural habitats—malls, 
chains, airports, asphalt wastelands—occupy. It means  reclaiming home as a 
rhythmic, coherent kind of time.  Which seems to be what Bacon’s Oaxacans want as 
well, although their version of  being uprooted and out of place is much 
grimmer than ours. 
At some point last summer I started to feel as if the future had arrived, the 
 future I’ve always expected, the one where conventional expectations start 
to  crack and fall apart—kind of like arctic ice nowadays, maybe—and we rush 
toward  an uncertain, unstable world. Of course the old vision of the future 
was of all  hell breaking loose, but what’s breaking loose now is a strange mix 
of blessings  and hardships. Petroleum prices have begun doing what 
climate-change alarms  haven’t: pushing Americans to alter their habits. For people in 
the Northeast  who heat with oil, the crisis had already arrived a few years 
back, but for a  lot of Americans across the country, it wasn’t until filling up 
the tank cost  three times as much as it had less than a decade ago that all 
the rushing around  began to seem questionable, unaffordable, and maybe 
unnecessary. Petroleum  consumption actually went down 4 percent in the first 
quarter of the year, and  miles driven nationally also declined for the first time 
in decades. These were  small things in themselves, but they are a sign of big 
changes coming. The  strange postwar bubble of affluence with its frenzy of 
building, destroying,  shipping, and traveling seems to be deflating at last. 
The price of petroleum  even put a dent in globalization; a piece headlined “
Shipping Costs Start to  Crimp Globalization” in the New York Times mentioned 
several  manufacturers who decided that cheaper labor no longer outweighed 
long-distance  shipping rates. The localized world, the one we need to embrace to 
survive,  seems to be on the horizon. 
But a localized world must address the unwilling and  exploited emigrés as 
well as the joy riders and their gratuitously mobile  goods. For the Oaxacans, 
the right to stay home will involve social and  economic change in Mexico. 
Other factors pushing them to migrate come from our  side of the border, though—
notably the cheap corn emigrating south to bankrupt  farm families and 
communities. The changing petroleum economy could reduce the  economic advantage to 
midwestern corporate farmers growing corn and maybe make  shipping it more 
expensive too. What’s really needed, of course, is a change of  the policy that 
makes Mexico a dumping ground for this stuff, whether that means  canceling NAFTA 
or some other insurrection against “free trade.” Another thing  rarely 
mentioned in the conversations about immigration is what American  agriculture would 
look like without below-minimum-wage immigrant workers,  because we have 
gotten used to food whose cheapness comes in part from appalling  labor 
conditions. It is because we have broken out of the frame of our own  civility that 
undocumented immigrants are forced out of theirs. 
Will the world reorganize for the better? Will Oaxaca’s farmers get to stay  
home and practice their traditional agriculture and culture? Will we stay home 
 and grow more of our own food with dignity, humanity, a little sweat off our 
own  brows, and far fewer container ships and refrigerated trucks zooming 
across the  planet? Will we recover a more stately, settled, secure way of living 
as the  logic of ricocheting like free electrons withers in the shifting 
climate? Some  of these changes must come out of the necessity to reduce carbon 
emissions, the  unaffordability of endlessly moving people and things around. 
But some of it  will have to come by choice. To choose it we will have to desire 
it—desire to  stay home, own less, do less getting and spending, to see a 
richness that lies  not in goods and powers but in the depth of connections. The 
Oaxacans are ahead  of us in this regard. They know what is gained by staying 
home, and most of them  have deeper roots in home to begin with. And they know 
what to do outside the  global economy, how to return to a local realm that 
is extraordinarily rich in  food and agriculture and culture. 
The word radical comes from the Latin word for root. Perhaps the most radical 
thing you can do in our time is to start  turning over the soil, loosening it 
up for the crops to settle in, and then stay  home to tend them. 
 
Thanks to George Vye for passing this along to  us.



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