Sublime

There is no solution to the “drug problem,” or to the problem of environmental destruction or the problem of nuclear weapons stockpiles, until and unless our self-image as a species is reconnected to the earth. This begins with an analysis of the unique confluence of conditions that must have been necessary for animal organization to make the leap

Vernacular, in these contexts, no longer indexes a rigid traditionalism but a space of possibility that could be articulated to creative projects integrating vernacular forms, concrete places and landscapes, ecological restoration, and environmental and digital technologies in order to deal with serious problems of livelihood while reinvigorating c

The gurus for this kind of niche-shift will be people who have studied the places we want to go. Systems ecologists like Howard T. Odum have studied the food chains in a prairie or estuary or bottomland and then drawn diagrams of energy flows and fluxes.

The retreat of the glaciers from the Eurasian landmass and the simultaneous acceleration of aridity in the African grasslands eventually brought the “casting out of Eden” allegorically conveyed in Genesis. The mushroom peoples of Tassili-n-Ajjer began to move “east of Eden.”