William Irwin Thompson, a cultural historian whom I have been reading, once wrote:
“At the end of the eighteenth century it was the rage to journey to ruins and graveyards and meditate on the prospects these stones held out to mortal man. Now as the twentieth century declines it is the rage to journey to Los Angeles and meditate upon the prospect of what that city holds out to the rest of the nation.”
It’s been years since the twentieth century declined completely to nothing, (to continue on in Thompson’s brooding vein), and Los Angeles is still Los Angeles. At this writing in November of 2009, the twenty first century is almost one tenth gone. And those of who live in LA occasionally find ourselves meditating on its prospects for sustainability — whether or not the rest of the world is actually doomed to follow our example.
Recently I have been pre-occupied with food and water. As people who live in Los Angeles are well aware, the water here all comes from someplace else, and often enough, it stinks. When I lived in Arizona, and tourists from LA came into the Natural Foods store where I was working, I wondered at everyone insisting on bottled water. Other people preferred it; only people from LA insisted on it. Now, of course, I know where that thinking comes from, even if I am dismayed at the tonnage of wasted plastic the bottled water industry annually produces. The other night I tried to take a bath, and the water smelled so terrible I could only stand to stay in the water five minutes.
Bottled water, natural supplements and store-bought organic food have been hallmarks of wealthy Los Angeles culture for decades now. For people who want and can afford it, all the benefits of acai, or Omega 3 eggs, or Fiji water, are available at the large Natural Foods chain store of your choice. Not that I am really criticizing these places or these choices. A consciously healthy lifestyle is almost certainly a better choice than the unconscious, unhealthy lifestyles so many of us lead. Sometimes, though, I just have to question our priorities, on the larger scale.
Is it really better to have the natural world available to us in the form of Natural Foods Store items? Or would it be better to have actual nature around us, and in our midst? As someone who has worked as a manager in several such stores, including while founding SSRD, I think I have some insight into the business, and I can say there are days I would trade it all in for urban gardening, farmers’ markets everyone can walk to, clean water and clean air. In Los Angeles, this would be a revolution, and perhaps, as Thompson seemed to imply, it would show the rest of the world the writing on the wall.
“Like a shadow that does not permit us to jump over it, but moves with us to maintain its proper distance, pollution is nature’s answer to culture. When we have learned to recycle pollution into potent information, we will have passed over completely into the new cultural ecology.”
- William Irwin Thompson
