 Have you ever had an epiphany where a large idea just kind of clicked into place in your head and you realize that you should have realized this a long time ago? That's what happens to a lot of people when they finally understand that we're facing ecological and societal problems with the use of fossil fuels for the last 200 years causing climate change and the finite nature of fossil fuels. People often get depressed or they have a pretty visceral reaction to what's going on and that realization can be scary and there's a lot of books and shows and podcasts and speakers and organizations working to raise awareness of the climate crisis and the coming end of fossil fuels and the change that our societies are going to need to undergo but I don't really talk about them so much on this podcast because I take it kind of for written or as I take it for granted that people have that understanding and that's why they're coming to listen to our podcast but I realize recently that that's not everyone is already at that place and so today we're going to kind of talk a little bit about that as a meta idea and I'm going to be joined by my friend Kate and yeah we'll go back and forth and talk a little bit about the realization of coming catastrophe potentially or great change I guess is a more neutral way to say it and how people deal with that differently and how they come to that realization and what to do about it once you do so we're going to take a step back from the usual kind of look at specific things and look at larger concept in in general this is the low tech podcast hello and welcome I'm Scott Johnson from the Low Technology Institute your host for podcast number 59 on November 18th 2022 coming to you out of the low tech institute's recording room in Cooksville Wisconsin thanks for joining us and today I'm joined by friend of the institute Kate Ingold to talk about how people come to realize climate and fossil fuel changes in our future are real we'll also have institute updates and don't forget to follow us on twitter our handle is at low underscore techno like us on facebook find us on instagram subscribe to us on youtube and check out our website lowtechinstitute.org for more there you can find out more about our podcast as well as information about joining and supporting the institute and its research also some podcast distributors put ads on podcasts unless you hear me doing the ad someone else is making money on that advertising while all our podcast videos and other information are given freely they do take resources to make and if you're in a position to help support our work and be part of this community please consider becoming a monthly supporter for as little as three dollars a month through our patreon page patreon.com slash low tech institute if you'd like to sponsor an episode directly please get in touch with us through our website lowtechinstitute.org joining me today is Kate Ingold who is an LA based interdisciplinary artist who thinks deeply about an individual's place within our world and society but I've known her since grad school days in New Orleans when our dogs would play at the dog park and her partner and I were in the same department and Kate was the first official member of the low technology institute and has been supporting our work in concrete and conceptual ways since then so thanks so much for coming to chat with me today Kate thank you so much for inviting me I'm super excited we always have very interesting conversations so I know that's kind of why I want to we kind of talks about some of the stuff last week and I thought oh this would be really useful to hear because what we're talking about today is the fact that I feel like sometimes or often or almost all the time in this podcast we kind of gloss over the fact that there is a huge change coming and we gloss over the fact that that change is coming and just get on to you know what we think of as solutions or ideas about how we can house clothing and feed ourselves once we don't have fossil fuels as climate changes all these things but we sometimes I neglect to realize that not everybody is in that place to ready to discuss that they're still coming to grips with the fact that that big change is coming and so you know in the last three or four weeks I've had three people contact me different ways saying hey I just realized that it was either because of the UN panel IPCC report or different news reports or different things and finally it just clicked for them oh my god our world is changing really profoundly in the next decades and I don't feel prepared for that and then one of my friends who I've known for years said now I realize what you've been doing all this time I guess I haven't been articulating what I'm trying to do if you just realized it because I've been saying it or I feel like I've been saying it but I guess everybody comes to it at their own pace how do you come to realize things are going to change Kate? You know it's so interesting you asked that because I'm trying to think of when when did I first become hmm I think it was a long time ago because you know I remember when Al Gore's movie came out In Convenient Truth I went to see it I went to actually I went to a fundraiser we were we were here in LA just visiting because at the time Sonny and I were living in New Orleans I'm pretty sure it's probably 2003 maybe or something and we went to an event here that had John Bon Jovi singing Living on a Prayer and with it acoustically and Al Gore was there and it was all about the an inconvenient truth and talking about climate change and what was coming and at that point we were already I mean I can speak for both of us but certainly I had already been kind of engaged in the issue for a while so where did it come from I'm not sure probably just from you know I love documentaries and so I re I watch a lot of documentaries and so it just kind of came into it and then by the mid 2000s it you know it seemed quite urgent certainly the election the you know the Bush v Gore election and then afterwards felt like holy cow you know what are we going to do and at that point I I think I followed a typical American trajectory where a lot of my energy was going towards changing the way I did things in the house you know so somewhat I mean not the really big not really really big things but cutting down on plastic trying to getting rid of no longer using paper towels no longer you know Davey no longer using liquid soap you know trying trying to find a decent shampoo that was a bar shampoo that that was a really interesting kind of trip you know looking having that kind of eye opening experience of going into the grocery store not seeing anything that wasn't made of plastic and really you know conceptualizing like this is a forever object and what does it mean to be using a forever object in a daily throwaway way yeah just in the last episode where I talked about thatch you know I said in the beginning think of every single shingle on a roof that you've ever seen still exists somewhere in the world just think of all the houses you've ever seen and all the shingles that are on all those houses they're still there or they're still somewhere it's just insanity um and yeah so for me the realization came uh when I finished or when I was finishing writing a book called why did ancient civilizations fail which was not the title I would have chosen um it was called I want to call it hubris but my editor said you can't call a book hubris that's hubris anyway uh and so basically the premise of the book is you know all these ancient civilizations are large-scale complex societies also crashed and burned and they didn't see it coming and they had been very successful for hundreds of years building up these really complex societies and they didn't believe it could happen to them and that was part of their downfall because if it can't happen to you you don't need to adapt to a changing world and you know we certainly do the same thing we don't we don't think that things are going to change and so we don't change anything and then we actually have major catastrophes so I got really depressed and for me you know noodling around on the web I finally found somewhere called the dark the dark mountain project and they have a manifesto out but basically it was a whole bunch of people who had been active mostly in the UK but around the world in climate actions uh protests different things around different causes and then you know they they came to the realization hey this is existential this is an existential threat and nobody's really listening if they were listening and understood the reality of this people would actually be doing something and they're not and so they basically said okay we're done telling you we've been telling you you're not listening so let's kind of not drop out but let's you know talk amongst ourselves let's come up with stories that help push this narrative forward that maybe we're working a different way than you know just presenting facts to people which hasn't been working for a large number of people so yeah and yeah one of my friends I doubt he'll mind me mentioning he's a historical re-enactor he does period construction methods and skills and things like that and he called me the other day and we had been at a event making buckets wooden buckets and he had been giving me a hard time all day because I was using mix of modern and pre-industrial type techniques and tools and he was using like tools he had forged himself in a blacksmith's shop and he was like I've been working on this bucket for 10 years off and on because you know I had to make the tools and I had to make all the stuff and and at the end of the day I had a bucket and he was you know didn't and he was kind of giving me a hard time he's like yeah but you know this is the traditional way to do it and then like a couple weeks later he called me said I'm sorry I didn't mean I hope you weren't insulted I just didn't realize that you're doing like post-industrial technology whereas I'm doing pre-industrial technology I'm trying to preserve that and he's like you know I just realized how important what you're doing is as opposed to what I'm doing which is just kind of like you know cosplaying I'm like well no but it's also important we need those skills we need to know how to do those things so I was trying to talk because I was that he was reading the IPCC report and he got really depressed and so you know it it happens for different reasons for different people yeah definitely you know I'm thinking of two other things that were kind of eye-opening experiences for me even though I was aware of climate change but that also you know increased my involvement perhaps or in our engagement with the issue the first was a talk that T. Knuthon gave back in 2004 I want to say that was on the environment and his lectures you know were quite long it was a two-hour lecture his lectures were very long and they were very slow paced you know which is kind of a wonderful thing about how he approached things but within it he really talks about you know interconnectedness and impermanence and reminding that you know our civilization will someday end that there's the earth itself will end that all things are impermanent including our universe you know these are really large scales yeah and his teaching really was that you know once you are accepting that reality you are called to care for what what is here today yeah and you know and he talks about it within inter interpersonal relationships where he gives a a lesson on not a lesson but a practice on if you're having a for instance a disagreement with your partner and you're really really mad at them that you know when you to of course first take a walk or something but when you come back to have the conversation to you know when you hug each other to think of yourselves in a hundred years and you know what does just just think that that's the only teaching you know how does your relationship with that person change with that so that was one the second one was when captain charles more first documented the so-called pacific garbage patch you know the pacific ocean garbage garbage patch and then becoming aware of like plastic and thinking of plastic as being this forever thing and i started following the work of this artist chris jordan who had been photographing albatross birds in midway who were dying from plastic and you know and eventually he made a beautiful absolutely beautiful film that he offered to the world for free called albatross that we should also link to because everyone should see this film and his his approach was he believed that if you see the beauty if you see the beauty and you fall in love with it you will have no choice but to change the way you are you know that we can't face it we can't see you know these beautiful birds for instance being killed by eating all this plastic and still go into the grocery store and not have you know not say i can't actually use that i can't get that yeah so i need to change my life you know so that that is looking for that in a way that that koan experience of there it is right there right you know a strike a strike of lightning and your enlightenment has occurred mm-hmm yeah and uh on the lighter side uh george carlin had this whole bit uh before he passed away about how you know humans are so self-centered that they think the earth evolved evolved them so that there will be people on the earth and he said no no no the earth evolved us for one reason plastic the earth wanted plastic and it needed us to create it and now it has as much plastic as it needs so it's trying to kill us off so i can just be aware of its plastic i remember that bit that was really hilarious yeah i mean it is a wonderful like light way of approaching the you know who was it that called us the plastic people there's an archaeologist who termed that do you remember that no i don't shame on me i'll look it up but saying that you know that would be the thing that we will be known for you know should there be archaeologists in 2000 years that will be this layer of plastic that just represents our epoch oh yeah it's already that case and when i worked in guatemala you could safely dig as long as you were hitting plastic because there was so much plastic detritus that as long as you were digging through plastic you didn't need to screen it you didn't you knew it was not ancient you could just chug it and so you could get down you know a foot or two real quick because there was plastic bottles and as soon as you stopped hitting plastic that's when you could actually start paying attention for archaeological reasons yeah wow frustrating and yeah so kind of these stories or you started mentioning koans uh i've been thinking recently like you know everybody comes to it differently and for me you know facts and figures and that sort of thing does i guess move the needle i guess in my own mind but that's not i'm not everybody and other people might come to it for different reasons and so sometimes it really grinds my gears on someone says i believe in climate change or i believe in global warming because on the one hand you don't need to believe in it whether you believe in it or not doesn't matter right so it's unlike religion in that way however it has taken on a very religious like space in people's world where like i'm probably not going to be here in 100 years to see what has happened but i'm you know we're taking on educated faith is that a thing that you know these models are telling us what's happening because we can see into the past you know when we do paleo climatological reconstructions as archaeologists we can see these patterns and what happened so we can be pretty sure that if things continue as they are it's not going to be great and so yeah there is definitely some level of belief in it and what works better for getting over complex concepts to people often are stories right and maybe stories would be a better way to get at people who don't want to look at the data who don't want to understand the data who don't want to think about it that way so maybe parables or like you said koans which for those that don't know koans are short pithy often questions that break out of the try and break you out of the rut of your current thinking is that a decent way to describe it i should ask you yeah i mean they're usually like little little short stories essentially of teachers zen teachers speaking to students or students talking to teachers and there's a dialogue usually and that dialogue and it's and it's usually about a student coming to a teacher talking about their practice and then the teacher saying something back and sometimes it's between a an official like it might be a you know a uh there's this wonderful one with this emperor and the head teacher that and they're walking and they see this lion a stone lion and i'm not going to remember it correctly shoot but it ends with the like the the the emperor is basically like i want some teaching from you i mean tell me you know tell me what i can learn from the stone lion and from you know give me give me the dharma and the head teacher says it's my fault it's all my fault and that's the only teaching right and you know so i like i liked how alan was described them as a joke that if you're enlightened you get the joke and you laugh without thinking because that's how a joke works if you have to think about it it's not you don't get the joke and so the zen koans is if you have a certain understanding then it makes sense immediately otherwise you have to intellectually understand it yes definitely right yeah so if one tried to you know if one really delve deep into the notion of taking full responsibility for everything yeah it's all my fault yeah you know what does that mean and and what is what is it to to accept that and what is what who is the eye in that situation yeah you know but it it's quite profound you know well obviously it's quite profound but it's also quite generous you know to me and and i feel like that's part of scott i have to say that's what i feel a part of about the low technology institute and what i love about what you do it's coming from a perspective of care and generosity so wanting to help this future that you may not be alive for you know at the same time of course it impacts today because the present as tikka hot always taught you know the future is made of the present moment the present moment is made of the past as we know um but but coming from a perspective of wanting to help wanting to be of service to the future you know that's quite beautiful right that's not about it being that there's there's a when you're coming from a perspective of generosity and care and compassion then you know your actions are different than they are if they're coming from a perspective of selfishness and you know and trying and absorption and self-absorption yeah and whether you think about it that way or not you know our actions do have ramifications for everyone else you know it's we pride ourselves on being so individualistic in the u.s it's really difficult sometimes to make you know to make the point that no we are all interconnected in some way shape or form and my you know i don't exist in a vacuum it's kind of what you're talking about again with the faith belief you know idea that you know you don't have to believe in climate change for it to be real it's also true that you don't have to believe that your actions have any consequences outside of yourself but they do they do you know and and one of the things i should say when it comes to the faith and belief idea is that the counter to that something that sums on teachers have really emphasized too is that it's about having the wisdom wisdom based as opposed to belief or faith based so we have the wisdom to look at the data we have the wisdom to look at the reality of you know massive flooding happening in pakistan and you know storms that are stronger droughts that are worse and wreck in and see the direct impacts today we don't even have to look and think about the future we can see what's happening right this moment and we can have the wisdom to say we want it we need to do what we can to try and alleviate suffering today and in the future and how is that going to look you know what does that mean to do that yeah and even if you know people are more motivated by self-preservation or maybe preservation of their own family or whatever i heard someone once tell me like cleaning up and putting things away and keeping things orderly is being compassionate for yourself in the future so sometimes when i'm in a hurry and i just have to throw something down and i can't put it away i i i'll literally say to myself sorry future scott i'm leaving you a problem but you know so doing these things that aren't easy today is a way of being compassionate not only for ourselves in the future making our lives easier in the future even though it's harder now you know it's for others you know whether it's you know you're motivated by your kids your grandkids or more selflessly people that you don't even know right that's right but you know i don't think there's one message and i feel like sometimes both i'm not going to get political but the right and the left they try they talk to themselves rather than trying to think about things from other people's perspectives and i know i'm guilty of this i'm everybody is so you know often i use messages or talk about things that work on me right because oh this makes sense to me i want to share that with the people but it's really difficult to get into the mind of other people so i try and think of people in my life that i care about that don't care about these things as much as i do you know so like you know parents grandparents people in my life who are you know like hey i'm comfortable right now i don't need to you know make any changes it's like well okay how do i get into their perspective and make those changes and that's yeah it brings me to kind of like the different stories and things so i'll i'll i'll try to keep it to a minimum um i'll just read one but i don't know if folks out there are familiar with the the book ecotopia which was written by Ernst Kallenbach um then he wrote a sequel or i guess a prequel called ecotopia emerging i'll hold it up for those that are on youtube ha ha basically the idea is that northern california oregon and washington split off and created their own ecological utopia as the the name implies it's a really interesting kind of thought experiment about how would you create environmental state that that that takes care you know self-sufficient and takes care of itself and tries to take care of its environment so that it doesn't get worse or in a way that's going not just for people but also for the plants and animals and other things that live there and it's it's dated clearly this is a uh 1972 i think was ecotopia and this is 1981 so these are dated and i'll read this and you'll you'll get some of the dated language and the way they talk about it's more about straight-up pollution rather than climate change because in the 80s the only people that knew about climate change were you know fossil fuel companies um so this is more about like pesta you know this was after rachel carsten's silent spring and so it was more about like pesticide and general environmental polluting rather than necessarily climate change but it's completely applicable and so what happens is there's a political party called the survivalist party which would not be the name that they would use if they rewrote this book today and they had a charismatic ish kind of grandmotherly leader who basically started to use stories to try and illustrate what's happening so i'll read this apologies for just kind of reading something into the record but it's i think you'll see why i want to read it and and then we can chat about it at the other end and maybe think about other other types of stories that might be useful and this is an address from uh vera allwin who's the the leader of this party i want to tell you a story once upon a time i have heard there was a country entirely made up of lazy people at first they were just ordinarily lazy and if they had the chance they would always sit down rather than stand up and if they could get someone else to serve their food they'd prefer that to dishing it out for themselves but they were also an ingenious people and they soon realized that since slavery had gone out of fashion they could build machines to serve them they invented machines to wash their dishes dry their hair stir their batters and saw their wood and dig their holes slowly decade by decade they grew lazier and lazier after somebody invented a machine called an automobile their laziness increased by a great leap they began to be so lazy that the idea of walking a block to buy a pack of cigarettes fatigued them terribly and they would drive to the corner in their cars they also invented a machine called the television to amuse themselves generally they watch television in a half sitting half lying slump and they designed sofas to make their slumping position as comfortable as possible soon the lazy people learned that if you bought prefabricated meals called tv dinners you could even eat this in tv slump and hardly move at all for an entire evening even their mouths grew lazy since they didn't talk much when they were occupied by watching television and most of them watched it all evening long and their eyes too grew lazy since watching television they just focused their eyes on the screen it didn't have to move them around to look at things the way we do in real life these lazy people soon grew fat and they almost never got any exercise they died of heart attacks and great numbers and had many other diseases caused by their lazy habits but they didn't care they thought this was natural and made them want to be lazier still if anybody mentioned their terrible health statistics they told them to go away and peddle their bad news someplace else in time a brilliantly lazy inventor kind of oxymoron contrived the ultimate machine for lazy people it was a large egg-shaped wheeled vehicle just big enough to hold one person made out of clear plastic it had a slump shape seep in it and it was called a char because it was half chair and half car it had an electric motor of the kind that had first been used in motorized wheelchairs now the lazy people didn't have to use their legs at all and could still get around quite well even in bad weather using ramps and curb breaks and elevators originally designed for handicap people the chairs were equipped with individual television sets and a microwave oven that that could heat up a tv dinner they had chemical potties under the seat so you didn't even have to go looking for a toilet there was a radio intercom so you could talk to people nearby encased in their own chars a stereo system could play you Mozart or rock a computer console connected them to the entire centralized communication grid these chars came in many brilliant colors and you could get them with air conditioning and many optional chrome plated accessories they soon become immensely popular after a while it was rare to see anybody on the streets or in stores or in offices who's actually walking little prehensile tools were added to the chars which people could manipulate from inside so they could continue to perform the necessary tasks and the lazy people felt that at last they were achieved the kind of life which universe owed them they were very happy for a while because it soon turned out that there were drawbacks for the system deprived of exercise their legs withered and in time the lazy people found themselves unable to extricate themselves from the chars they never touched each other and never developed physical bonds of confidence and trust or fell in love or indeed expressed any lust and so they produced no children when they got sick others were unwilling to get out of their chars to help them they were now two totally lazy and selfish indeed they hardly ever helped each other at all and sometimes they would get so provoked at each other that they would ram their chars into each other until one of them tipped over or like cracked like an egg and its driver would lie they're on the ground kicking feebly with its withers legs like a little baby and now if anybody criticized the char way of living the lazy people were furious and pointed out that they had achieved the highest level of civilization the world had ever seen and they were not about to give it up but their laziness had also made them weak and when they started dying off in large numbers their neighbors began to take notice just to the north of the lazy people's country lived a barbarian people well that's a problematic word uh who survived mostly on nuts and berries and wild game their technology was pretty much limited to horses and fur coats and log cabins but they spent most of their time outdoors and they were tough and strong they passed many hours singing dancing and making love and playing rough games with their children sometimes they got into fights and punched each other and then made up and swore eternal friendship they understood plants and animals and they had never seen a tv dinner one day a roving band of these barbarians galloped through part of the lazy people's country which they noticed had quite a lot of nuts and berries and saw what bad shape the lazy people were in in a clumsy but friendly way the barbarians tried to drag a few of the lazy people out of their chars but they fell over helplessly as soon as they were on their feet and protested loudly and tried to creep back into their charge where they felt safe the barbarians laughed at this spectacle and since they were not called barbarians for nothing they began to push the chars off cliffs and into rivers just for the fun of it soon the barbarian friends came to join them and in a few days there were no lazy people at all left alive the story happened long ago in the old days there are new lazy people now and new barbarians what we need to do is to learn from history so we do not repeat it you might have some fun retelling this story to friends or family in your own way so that's the end of the yeah uh so obviously there's some problematic stuff that we wouldn't write a story like that anymore today um and you know one thing I don't like about it is that it would affront some people right and people that enjoy that story might already be in the choir right so it's not really converting people but the idea of a of a political party or in this in this case you know an ecologically minded group trying to use stories to spur people to action both people that have already kind of started on that path and this might push them farther maybe with that story but then we also need stories for people who are opposed to it and use a story to kind of you know not I hate to say sneak in a message that's not what I mean to do but like look at it with new eyes because if you immediately if you hear oh climate change fossil fuels whatever people especially now automatically put up political barriers and they say oh this is from the other side I don't want to hear it and if you're using a story maybe you can kind of circle around behind that that defensive wall and point out the obvious meteor hurtling towards us and so yeah like you know just just look up similarly who's preaching to the choir and those in the choir and really enjoyed it guiltily but yeah so and yes obviously apologies that yeah it's obviously dated but the concept I think is found so my question is since I've not read the book yet is was this a story that the people of ecotopia told each other this was in the founding of ecotopia this was a public broadcast like a political advertisement basically they were saying come join our ranks and they would use like parables and stories they have another one about a rich person and a poor person and the rich person you know would buy like large swaths of wilderness and leave them wild and then there's but then he would like fly out to the visit it and do all these other things where he actually had a great impact on the environment even though he was had money and means preserving it trying to preserve it and then there was a poor person who used like public transit and had to a garden had quote unquote to garden and do all these things that were actually actually ecologically friendly because they were poor and so it was basically you know saying like you know they were they were pulling in religious connotations of like you know the meek shall inherit you know and or passing a rich man having trouble passing through the eye of a needle to get the heaven sort of idea basically but yeah so they use these and kind of turn them on their head for ecological purposes and I don't know I I think messages that couched for some people in religion I think would be helpful for those that aren't religious obviously not but I think the more diversity of stories out there you know if it just catches a few people if you have enough of them it would catch a lot of people there's not one narrative and it's kind of interesting right because we really are talking about like the United States like reaching Americans because a lot of the rest of the world doesn't doesn't need to be convinced yeah you know that's true I mean so there's you know the stories that they're going now are enough you know the news stories or whatever enough to make people go yeah that's bad now now I don't know if that means that they're not flying as often if they're in a wealthier country or you know if they're changing their individual behavior but they're certainly supporting politicians who are trying to enact some level of change yeah I think I think there'd be a really great story like a short story out there that I I've been noodling around with I haven't come up with the right way to go about it yet but basically talking about you know maybe a medieval appearing you know society and then all of a sudden they some sort of magic is invented and it's like a power source basically right and then they convert their lives to run this power source and the power source disappears which obviously is you know just us in parable form but if you start out in a in a different completely different context it relaxes people away from you know their knee-jerk reaction to say like oh defensiveness about you know gas fossil fuels or climate change so yeah I think that's a maybe useful way to try and you know attract people to think differently about about their situation and maybe that's coming from I mean Mary your spouse is a anthropological archaeologist and yeah I'm I'm from the same department you know so we I don't know and you've lived in different parts of the world and I think it's easier for people that specifically look at other cultures very deeply to understand that the way we live right now is not the only way to live but a lot of people don't have that perspective beat into their heads uh the way that we through yeah many years yeah definitely yeah no it's it's it's a very interesting what I think is also kind of interesting is that so when you're talking about story right I feel like there has been this bit of a shift recently of thinking well okay the surface change thing isn't working we need to actually get to people on a different level so there is some sort of fundamental shift in attitude and and what does that entail you know that and so we can talk even about like how have you had a shift ever in your life of really a change in like worldview and I don't mean just in terms of like okay yeah accepting that climate change is real or thinking that plastic pollution is a problem but like where something was oh I am now looking at the world a bit differently than I did before and and I ask that because you know that is that is something that you know I think a lot of people in the arts see what they're doing as having that potential for presenting giving people an opportunity to have that transformational experience you know where they leave the space or whatever they put the book down or they leave the gallery and they look at the clouds for instance and they are not markedly different than they were two hours before I mean the shapes are different but in terms of their comp what they are made of and yet they might be completely different yeah the way that the person perceives them now I had one kind of experience like that now that you mentioned it like this discussion course with a group down the road called Terra Simplay but they're no longer in business but basically it was this exercise where you're supposed to go out at night on a clear night when the stars were shining lay down on the on the grass and then really deeply imagine yourself not on top of the world but under the world with the world on top of you and if you really imagine that it's really hard not to just like dig your fingers into the grass and hold on like you're going to fall off in the space you know I know it was just like it was just like amazing how just that little thought experiment like wow you know shifts your paradigm and now sometimes when I'm like out you know usually it happens when I'm driving because I'm my mind is wandering but like when I see the the moon come up I don't think of it because you know you see it it looks kind of like two-dimensional because it's so far away you know it's just this disc that goes over the sky but really thinking about like I am looking at another planet out there and then this and you know I just try like really try and keep that perspective I find to be helpful sorry you were talking about art and I wanted to circle back to something that you had mentioned before we started recording about the protests recently and I'll preface this by saying just for those that didn't catch it there have been controversial protests in Europe where people have thrown soup I think in both cases at famous artworks Van Gogh's Sunflowers and what was the other one Mona Lisa but yeah there's been there's been like a mashed potatoes tomato soup yeah there's been a few different things but they've always chosen paintings that are protected by glass right so that the painting itself will not get damaged you know I think it's not part of the I don't know if it's an offshoot of the extinct rebellion extinction rebellion but I think it's something it's another group stop all oil or something like that I don't know it's three words I mean I'm not remembering but so provocative right that it's you know there's just so much conversation happening mostly in well I should say from my limited little world it's you know lots of condemnation lots of saying that's not the way to do it they're going to turn people off of the movement and I'm like turn people off the movement really and my first thought was actually as soon as I started seeing this quote-unquote controversy around what what they did is I thought of this wonderful story of the Dalai Lama being asked in an interview about the French Revolution they asked him what do you think what do you think you know about the French Revolution and its effects on the world and he said it's too early to tell and you know I mean so true right so I you know I every time I've had a conversation with someone around that action I was like I we it's too early to tell and no there we can't accept I would say that there is not going to be one action that's going to shift things dramatically and that's it and the whole world is going to be on the same page this will never happen yeah because human beings are super diverse and you know we all have our own things there is no one message yep no but I'm like but on the other hand I mean you all are talking about it right now you know so like there's something happening there so the group is called Just Stop Oil and I was so impressed because NPR Steven Skipe did an interview with one of the protesters and it wasn't and I was so impressed that it wasn't just why would you destroy art why would you do isn't this disrespectful that that wasn't the line of questioning the questioning was I'm paraphrasing what were the deeply held beliefs that would cause you to do this because this is a pretty extreme act what we're what's underlying this this thing you did and so they got to talk about hey you know what we did we did road blockages we did other types of like vandalism we did all these things and nobody reacted nobody listened nobody would you know listen to what we were saying they're just annoyed that they got home late that night and it wasn't helpful so we said what can we do that will make people stop really stop in their tracks and think why would you know perfectly nice young people go and vandalize such you know iconic pieces of art and yeah and maybe they would look into it and realize that we're not just doing this to be extreme we're doing it because what's happening is extreme and nobody it cares nobody seems because if we care we'd be doing something seriously about it which we're not so yeah it was it was a really good interview I'll link to it in the show notes but yeah I was oh yeah I heard that the interview start and I just felt myself tighten up saying oh this is just going to be a exploration of the act and not the the meaning behind it so I was really excited about that well I'm so happy that they also interviewed one of the actors in it I mean one of the you know protagonists because so often like in that kind of situation it's all just you know you're going to talk to other people you know about that as opposed to the people who actually did it so that's really that's really interesting I'm gonna have to listen to that for sure yeah yeah I'll link to that in the show notes part of this idea for this this episode of the podcast came to me because I had someone here visiting and volunteering one weekend to help me work on some projects and he was asking me for suggestions for podcasts to listen to and books to read and you know documentaries and all these different things and it occurred to me that like I don't really listen to a lot of podcasts or document or things that are pointing a finger at the problem anymore and I started to be concerned about that like oh I've lost my my you know my hard hardcore edge I'm not I'm not I don't really care about this I'm so focused on what I'm doing here I don't think of it or care about those things anymore and I realized that wasn't true it was that those different types of media had done their job they had gotten me to think critically about how we live and say okay what change can I make originally we had just thought about homesteading and then I said no I want to do research I want to share this with other people and that's why we started a non-profit the Lotte Institute and so and I realized oh that's so much like and I don't mean to push a particular religious idea on anyone but like it's that's what like zen enlightenment is like in some cases you don't have to forever be a monk living in a monastery to be an enlightened person right that's one no in fact yeah I mean in fact there's you know it depends on the school but you know that's true certainly like batik nad han you know his teaching of socially engaged buddhism of which the the the practice center that I'm a member of hupaya zen center is also in that tradition um you know is that that's not the path the path is the bodhisattva path so one does not you know that you're it is all about taking action you know beginning with the tenet of not knowing approaching things with an open you know an open heart secondly is bearing witness to what's actually happening so these are things you've done right and then third is compassionate action so doing that within the having the wisdom of being present you know you're seeing what's happening and then taking appropriate action hopefully you know but having an understanding that you know you don't know you don't know if it's going to work I mean that's the thing right so somebody putting soup on a famous painting does not actually know what the ramifications are going to be of that right but they do know that that's not going to harm the painting right so that's good right you know so they're they're taking an action that they know is radical on some level but they know it's not going to be harmful to the object that they are revering that other people revere um and then beyond that what will happen we don't know and and the and the ramifications of it will maybe never be fully understood yeah you know but I I certainly think it has brought a lot of people into thinking a little bit more deeply about things and when we do that you know like one thing was interesting when you were reading the the section from ecotopia is my I kept thinking like wow man those ecotopians are really judgmental I'm like man they're talking about people being lazy lazy and I'm like so this is why they separated themselves right like they were like we don't have anything to do with you and I'm like wow that's really kind of you know dystopian that's not really a utopian view obviously um it's certainly not the not the bodhisattva view you know it's not trying to help others it's or serve others it's about serving yourself you know and getting the hell out of there and I'm just going to do what I need to do and find other like-minded people um yeah what I find is kind of fascinating though is that I feel like there has been more messaging around care for others you know and a lot of it has been like there is there is a difference I feel like with this much younger generation so-called Generation Z in part because they were you know all of the things that they're derided for wanting safe space all this other kind of stuff right I'm like all those things actually kind of teach you to care about other people some level yeah you know um so whether or not they're derided you know and okay so our larger culture is really about looking at care is something that is obligatory reciprocal or in some other way is not about gifting and so maybe there is starting to be this kind of tiny little shift you know of this opening up of through through those those little things that have happened over the last 15 years of kind of of the teachers of the parents of everybody kind of being exposed to this idea of like trigger warnings I mean it sounds horrible you know and safe spaces and whatever but in reality all those things are about like you know what I actually don't want this person in my class to feel terrible so maybe what we can do is create some space for this person to not feel terrible not to feel like they shouldn't exist in the world or at least not be surprised because you know if you've had a dramatic experience as if you know hey right this class we're going to be talking about x then they know okay I'm not going to be surprised walking into this and all of a sudden like having some that's right that's right that's dragged up with no warning at least yeah and one can argue you know like is that ultimately super helpful we don't know we'll see you know we also want to help kids become resilient but hey you know what we all of us adults too are really struggling to become more resilient and more compassionate and more generous and everything else so you know it's like it's a it's a lifelong kind of process so yeah it's interesting that you know to me from from myself and my own like kind of story that I think of my own awakening around climate catastrophe climate collapse I mean I feel like there's even the language we use is kind of weak about it you know I'm like change yeah like change yeah it is and it doesn't capture it you know um but if we think about climate collapse you know I I really feel like the the teachings of interdependence and interconnectedness are the things that brought me into a different a totally different way of looking at the world and part of that was through we you'd mentioned before we started recording Alan Watts but and of course Teeknot Han who was kind of my one of my first kind of Zen teachers you know he would teach about like a piece of paper and he said he held up a piece of paper he said you know with with insight I can see that within the piece of paper is a cloud and the rain that that you know and the seed of the of the tree and the growth of the tree and the soil and the fungus all these things are in present in the and of course the people who cut down the tree and milled it and you know and pulped it created the paper like all of that is present in the paper you know and I have to say that one teaching I mean I remember listening to it when we were living in New Orleans and like literally everything around me changed you know I mean experience yeah completely I mean so absolutely everything I looked at I was like wow everything contains all of this whole universe you know if I look at a cup and I think about what came what made that cup if I think of the table and what how the table is what it really is it's it's it's incredible I mean it's mind-blowing you know but in a very beautiful way you know and it's not about faith and it's not about belief because it's there's no way you could argue otherwise there is no that is the truth of the world the piece of paper really does come from all these non-paper elements as he would say well the beginning of the universe I mean the the sun is you know elements from the yes of made of non-sun elements you know we are all that we are all made of non us elements and so this this is a such a deeply profound teaching and when you start to really think about it in your daily life like just reminding yourself when you pick up your toothbrush this toothbrush is made of non-toothbrush elements you know it changes the way you look at things and you suddenly are feeling like wow I need to be more gentle in the world I need to be more thoughtful I need to not be so mindlessly consumptive I need to not be so porse or judgmental or any of these things I need to loosen up now will that teaching touch everyone not necessarily I mean I had a conversation with a friend who's going through a bit of a marriage difficulty right now and I just mentioned that that story again of imagining you and your partner in a hundred years and she was like well it'd be 140 and I'm like no you'd be dead you guys are going to be dead in a hundred years none of us are going to be alive in a hundred years you know you know and she's like well what am I supposed to do with that and I said well what is that how does that put what what you're going through right now into perspective does it I don't know it might not yeah you know but just give it a shot see what happens the next time you're touching this your partner just try it out see what happens like even opening up to the curiosity around things and like being willing to try something yeah like what what would happen if I just actually thought that maybe my actions are having ramifications or that maybe we will have that maybe burning fossil fuels is really causing climate change what what changes if I think that yeah I mean you know hopefully we can just encourage people to just start even being curious about stuff like that you know yeah that's gotta be the key and I think that'll help break people out of the ruts that we get stuck in you know we we're just so used to it and we don't question it because I mean the fish doesn't think about water because it lives in it you know what I mean so very difficult for us to question the way that we live in yeah in this in a economy and society that is really made to minimize friction and the way that we we've chosen to minimize friction is by using a lot of power to do so you know minimizing friction and yet politically encouraging friction I mean it's kind of a fascinating thing you know I mean personal friction like oh I understand I'm cold for a minute oh I don't want that so I'm going to eat that's right you know that's right discomfort and safety I mean yeah I mean we should we should have a conversation sometime around those two concepts because of how powerful they are in driving so much of what our society is wanting safety feeling of safety right and you know not that that involves things not changing and yeah that's right yeah exactly for me for me safety is things changing at least definitely my point of view right now definitely yeah things to a way that can exist post fossil fuels and to absorb climate change but yeah for many and I think this is probably not universal but you know if you come at it I think even people who completely disagree and who want to use a lot of don't care about climate change or don't accept it whatever it's because they want their family or themselves to be comfortable and yeah that's pretty human and totally I understand that too and I'm doing the same thing I'm just I see a different you know perspective of what will be comfortable for me is maybe not being comfortable today but being less uncomfortable tomorrow you know so yeah it's very difficult but I want to end on Alan a short clip from Alan Watts just kind of to bring us back to the usual podcast stuff where I don't discuss this stuff very much because as Alan Watts will describe talking about this stuff is kind of like a brick a scaffold or a boat so here so in other words it's like when you erect a building while you're building it you have all kinds of scaffolding up that shows you that building is going on but when the building is complete the scaffolding is taken down to open a door as they say in Zen you may need to pick up a brick to knock at the door but when the door is open you don't carry the brick inside to cross the river you need a boat but when you reach the other side you don't pick up the boat and carry it so the brick the boat the scaffolding all these things represent some sort of religious technology or method and in the end these are all to disappear so that the saint will not be found in church I don't take what I say literally the saint can perfectly readily go to church without being solid by church but ordinary people when they go to church they come out stinking of religion so yeah no offense to I don't mean it in that you know specific religious way but when people want to discuss the climate catastrophe and and these sorts of things it it almost there's another clip I'll play to close it out it makes me sick to my stomach almost because it's like yeah that's really stressful and I'm yeah you know like we changed around a lot of how we live to try and work through and deal with that and think about it in a useful helpful way and so like rehashing that it's just like revisiting something in my past that I'm like wasn't pleasant to deal with and I've come through the other side now and I feel positive about how we're moving forward but yeah it's tough it's tough because I want to be there for them when they need that discussion you know but it's it's hard to re go throughout myself yeah I don't know if that strikes anything with you well I'm looking forward to hearing what it is that you're talking like you know the exact thing that you're talking about in terms of like revisiting that conversation or yeah yeah yeah yeah someday we'll have to go into more detail well and I wonder how to I mean I know where you have to end sorry I'm so thought-provoking it's so thought-provoking how to alleviate some of the discomfort and pain yeah because I think that that is part of once again that's kind of the Bodhisattva's role right so in some ways it's about being that that that scaffolding that's that helps with that building yeah you know and and having the yeah for those that don't know what a Bodhisattva is a Bodhisattva is someone who's realized enlightenment but has foregone breaking free of this world and has stayed to help others make the same realization until all beings are liberated yeah and you know that means all beings not just human or even animal but you know so it's an impossible task right so it's never it's never ending you know but it's that commitment to that yeah yeah I'm sorry I interrupted no it's okay it's all good it's all good yeah and yeah for you know for me because I've been trying to think about that too like how do we you know one way and this is what I try and do here with kind of some of the stuff we have going on is to show like not only is it an alternative to live in a more local kind of self not self-reliant but locally reliant way but it's actually in some ways more advantageous like we were just talking with my mother the other day about you know grocery bill and it's like well a lot of our food comes from our price so our grocery bill is really small and we've been really insulated thankfully from the from the inflation that's been really rampaging through a lot of food costs because it's so fossil fuel derived and so you know that's it's we eat well and we live you know fairly well because we've kind of designed ourselves to be insulated from these things and so that kind of that you know show like it's not just living in it's not taking a vow of poverty or a vow of being uncomfortable all the time it's actually to live in a more comfortable way just a way that's more reasonably adapted for a future that is different than what it is today and it is just a shift right I mean like it's we think of it as being a convenience to go to the grocery store or something like that I mean and on one level it is I suppose but when you think about the harm that's caused by that whole system it becomes a little less convenient you know in which case growing your food is is is perhaps actually more convenient in a spiritual way and surprisingly even more cost effective there are studies done in the 30s where people growing their own food like you can grow food for less than you can actually buy it yeah depending on how you do the accounting but basically if you look at you know you think industrial production is so efficient yeah but then they have marketing and transportation and other costs that you don't have in your backyard so actually it's you're you're quite an efficient food grower yourself you can compete with industrial food production but anyway Kate I feel like we continue talking I know arts anyway um but yeah uh thank you so much for taking some time to chat with me today thank you for inviting me it was so interesting I just love our conversations they are they are really nourishing truly so after my talk with Kate uh yesterday I've been thinking more about that reading I did from Ecotupria emerging and I considered taking it out and cutting out all of our discussion about it in the in the podcast episode because yeah it is kind of judgy and uh not very kind to people who are understandably enticed uh into a comfortable easy life we all fall into that a lot of times and because comfort is comfortable and so I do feel a little uh conflicted about how it demonizes people I just feel difficult I feel slightly conflicted about how that that kind of um puts people down um and so I decided on in the end to leave it in um as you heard uh because that was you know 1981 and I think we've moved on since then to different problems and also different ways of trying to be interacting with our our our fellow human beings and maybe trying to coax them along rather than put them down and shame them because that nobody likes that doesn't help anybody and so that should serve as more of a challenge how are we going to reach people who are very comfortable right now to potentially give up that comfortable life for a different life that could be comfortable or could be very uncomfortable depending on what decisions we make we're trying to get people to make the good decisions so they can continue to live in a comfortable way a diff very different way but also you know comfort can come in different forms so I'm leaving it in even though on reflection it's not the strongest story so maybe uh in the next episode or two you will hear me come up with my own stories um probably pulled from the ancient world talking about uh societies that have done well and not so well with the challenges that face them all right so that's it for this week the low technology podcast is put out by the Low Technology Institute the show is hosted and co-produced by me Scott Johnson and co-produced and edited by Hina Suzuki this episode was recorded in the Low Technology Institute's recording room uh because it's winter and I can't be in the gardens uh subscribe to the podcast on iTunes Spotify Google Play YouTube and elsewhere we hope you enjoyed this free podcast if you'd like to join the community and help support the work we do please consider going to patreon.com slash low tech institute and signing up thanks to our forester and land steward level members Maryland Skirpon Sam Brown and the Havises for their support the Low Technology Institute is a 501c3 research organization supported by members grant and underwriting you can find out more information about the Low Technology Institute membership and underwriting at lowdeckinstitute.org find us on social media and reach me directly i'm scott at lowtechinstitute.org our intro music was some things out there off of the album of the same name by holisna that song is in the public domain and this podcast is under the creative commons attribution and share like license meaning you're free to use and share it as long as you give us credit thanks so much and take care