Furthermore, with nature the stakes
are higher than with the things market principles are concerned with. A
manufactured cog can be stored, reused, sold at discounts, etc., but once a
species goes extinct, millions of years of evolutionary wisdom are simply lost,
never to be reclaimed. When a rainforest is destroyed, a rainforest does not
grow back. The destruction of a rainforest changes soil and microclimate
conditions so drastically that what grow back are weeds, not rainforest.
You might say that I need to be
realistic, that I need to compromise just a little and accept practices real
people in the "real world" can handle.
I say that the "real
world" of Western-style commerce as it has become with neoconservative
globalization is so perverse, so self-serving and so void of all feeling for
average people and other living things that there is nothing realistic about
it. Just look at the price Americans must pay for their medicines.
Awakening from the trance we are in
must be a holistic experience. Putting a price on the components of nature
would be no more than a gimmick that would perpetuate the false notion that
nature is composed of discrete, independent parts. Also, it would perpetuate
the lie that we can spend ourselves out of trouble without needing to change
our own behaviors and our ways of seeing the world around us.
On a spiritual level, it would be
just as insulting to the Creative Force of the Universe for the things of
nature to wear price tags than it would be to place a monetary value on a
mother's love for her child, or the way you feel when you "go home,"
or when you gaze into the starry sky at night.
*****
QUANTUM MECHANICS & BALCHÉ
On Sunday Gerardo from Mérida
visited bringing along a newly released DVD on which experts spoke of the
philosophical implications of recent discoveries in quantum mechanics. What
does it mean that one thing may be in more than one place at the same time,
that the future is not necessarily distinguishable from the present and the
past, and that solids are hardly present at all, from certain perspectives
being no more than illusions human minds create for their own utility?
Not two hours before seeing the
film I had sat atop a building with Don Pedro from the village. I'd asked him
if anyone around here still makes balché, the mildly intoxicating drink of the
ancient Maya (they do) made from fermented honey and the bark of a tree growing
here, Lonchocarpus longistylus.