Embodied Economics: Why I Have Never Owned A Car (or a Smartphone)
Cara Judea Alhadeff
August 2024
Click the image to enlarge.
If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, first you must invent the universe.
—Carl Sagan
Avoiding the Fourth of July celebrations, I am crouching at the edge of the Crystal River in Redstone, Colorado—a quintessential beautific mountain town. Over my shoulder, draped across Highway 133 and leading to the historical Redstone beehive coke ovens (typical of early 1900 coal mines), waves an enormous American flag. The convergence of symbolic anti-immigration flag raising (purity-as-patriotism) juxtaposed to ecocidal nationalism cloaked as an afternoon of family festivities feels daunting.
I am in hiding. The river current is fast and vast enough to drown out the Patriot Parade: revving motors on the Trump Triumph float—mufflers tuned to testosterone, grandmothers congratulating their offspring on their selfie albums, a deluge of candies thrown at onlookers—including, I notice, a one labeled “Toxic Waste,” and of course, an avalanche of MADE IN CHINA patriotic plastic party paraphernalia.
Unfortunately, the full-size Pride flag my husband hangs in his fruitwood furniture display booth is also MADE IN CHINA.
As I read Deb Chachra's How Infrastructure Works: Inside the Systems That Shape Our World , I am reminded why I have never owned a car. Chahra writes: “The most direct example of [the interface of infrastructural systems] is my car, which essentially makes me into a cyborg , an actual, exoskeleton-wearing, Sigourney-Weaver-in-a-power-loader-fighting-off-the-xenomorph-queen cyborg” (23). (Not to mention global cyborg adaptations to the smartphone—which like a car, I have never owned...)
The daisy reaching out between the lichen-covered boulders doesn't seem to notice the seismic intrusion. The river seems untouched.
On shore is a middle-aged couple decked out in cacaphonous red-white-and-blue stars and stripes; trying to capture the flyover with their smartphones.
Cowering, I stammer, “Are there more?”
“I hope so!,” they joyously declare.
How can we transform this normalization? When asked my perspective on how to transition from an economic growth model to a degrowth model, I respond:
How can we collectively inhabit the impossible—knowing the impossible is imperative?
Day and night, night and day. No matter how much I wrack my brain, improvise through dance and movement (wondering of course, when does movement become dance), sweat my prayers, meditate through back-door consciousness, hike barefoot through mountain trails, dialogue with others from all kinds of cultural backgrounds, all kinds of contradictory perspectives (seeking unexpected affinities, unpredictable alliances), each time I arrive at the continual-non-arrival conclusion that there is no solution. There are, however, non-linear unresolvable questions. Wonderings and wanderings that lead me back to how we are all unfathomably interconnected. Perhaps there are resolutions buried in these meanderings. Seeds, not solutions. The imperative of the impossible.
As I write in Zazu Dreams: Between the Scarab and the Dung Beetle, A Cautionary Fable for the Anthropocene Era , my cross-cultural, climate-justice book: it is critical to recognize that both the words economic and ecology derive from the Greek oikos (οἶκος), meaning home. Collaborating across cultural, economic, and ethnic differences, oikos can become a model for embodied interdependency that generates community, cultural diversity, and biodiversity for ethical everyday living (Endnote 6, p. 87). As I raise Zazu, my now thirteen-year-old son and infiltrate my small artist, hippie-homesteader / coal-miner, evangelical, rancher community, I attempt to embody economics and ecology—at their root.
Click on the image to enlarge.
Click on the image to enlarge.
For example, to counter hegemonies of cultural erasure, we can play with Bioregional Learning Centers such as my eco-action, gift-economy model S.O.U.L. (Shared, Opportunity, Used, Local) that literally and figuratively electrifies individual, community, corporation, infrastructure, policy paradigm changes as a collective practice of environmental justice, ethical consumerism, and community action. Equilibrium means galvanizing a constant shift and re-balance among these five components.
A values-culture grounded in compassion not competition supports a multitude of holistic-systems' economies rooted in diversity, interconnectedness, and nurturance (including bioregional degrowth economies such as social permaculture, sacred economics, circular economics, solidarity economics, custodial-storytelling indigenous pattern-thinking economics, Ubuntu (the Xhosa people of South Africa’s word meaning, “I am because you are”), the Mayan en lak ech (“you are the other me”), Buen Vivir (de-growth South American concept of “living well”). As Eric Cheyfitz asserts in his Disinformation Age, “Buen Vivir is not geared toward “having more” and does not see accumulation and growth, but rather a state of equilibrium [between humans and nature alike] as its goal” (412).
This embodied economy is not about degrowth. It is about mutually beneficial co-evolution as a collective act of remembering—remembering how to co-exist, how to live/learn/be curious in relation to one another. Our S.O.U.L. (Shared, Opportunity, Used, Local) Commons invites acquisition through magical accidents. One root of to acquire is to inquire. How can we shift the ideology of infrastructure (centralized, mechanized, inevitabilities rooted in conquest, colonism, and capitalism) to lived-shared idea-action infrastructure rooted in inquiry and inviting the unexpected?
In contrast with our cooperative, public, S.O.U.L. Commons/ Radical Art, Body, and Politics Intersectional Maker Space that supports cross-sector collaborations and includes a Fibershed-based natural-dye garden is “growth” economics. Chachra writes: “The growth in wealth is almost certainly linked to private ownership of resources, particular the idea of enclosure, which was the creation and extension of property rights over open fields and common land which allowed for the exclusion of non-owners” (96). Our epidemic of individualism and growth move hand-in-hand.
“Degrowth” will not be sustainable if we don't address the root causes of our growth addictions, the construction of desire, and manufactured consent. In the context of grid-power and digital-screen technologies, I will explore the imperative of confronting induced demand next month.
What my dear dog taught me about Degrowth
In the end (although there is no ending, given both the impossibility of and our culturally tyrannical
expectation for “solution”), I return home—oikos—home to my dog, Mac.
Click on the image to enlarge.
Just after midnight, one month short of his 14th birthday, our golden doodle died in my husband's arms. The summer equinox illuminated by the full Strawberry Moon, the Birth Moon[3] enveloped Mac as he took his last breath. Mac was the heartbeat of our family. He embodied home. Attunement. Care. Gentleness. Profound Presence. Mac helped our family navigate the imperative to resist assimilation. The way he related to others (other dogs, cats, chickens, cars, large insects, and people—having conversations, arguments, sex, dancing, laughing, yelling, crying, dreaming) became a guide for each of us. Mac taught us a model for degrowth. He taught us how to be in relation. Tyson Yunkaporta similarly reminds us in his Sand Talk: “...the meaning we make with places, people, and objects and the way we organize interactions between these things become an extension of our thinking. ...This is how spirit works” (102).
I have been playing with spirit through my images and text as I explore interspecies intimacies, biomimicry, and Rupert Sheldrake's morphic resonance. In his Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home And Other Unexplained Powers of Animals, Sheldrake asks how our pets' perceptiveness can teach us ways of (inter)being [4] that exceed “economic progress fueled by science and technology...based on the mechanistic view of life...mechanistic theory of nature” (2, 3). Animal relationality reflects how “everything in the universe is interconnected through quantum non-locality...an indivisible system. ...These [morphic] fields are the basis of interconnections not only in space, but also in time” (280). These morphic fields of relationality offer us the opportunity to practice biomimicry.
Defying our hypernormalized conceptions of causality, Mac helped (and from his flower-covered stone grave just beyond our Love Bus still helps) me wonder:
Is there a difference between morphic resonance and epigenetic potential?
Is there a difference between hyperobject and a quantum field?
Is there a difference between ecosystem and infrastructure?
How can we (humans) embody the psychokinetic possibilities of supply-chain consciousness?
Can we use technology to transform technology? [5]
How can we individually and collectively recognize and transform the “banality of evil” (Hannah Arendt) as it permeates consumer-convenience-waste industrial culture?
And that, dear Reader, is for next month.
Notes
[1] See Hannah Arendt's A Report on the Banality of Evil: Eichmann in Jerusalem . New York: Penguin Books, 1963.
[2] How many tax dollars pay for these grotesque symbols of superiority?
[3] For Native cultures, this moon represents rebirth: the Tlingit of the Pacific Northwest use Birth Moon. Egg Laying Moon and Hatching Moon are Cree terms that also refer to a time when animal babies are born.
[4] Thich Nhat Hahn's Inter-Being is a delightful example of animal interrelationality.
[5] See my critique of the Green New Deal in relation to Eric Cheyfitz's exploration of the Green New Deal as a capitalist solution to a capitalist problem. He writes of “the limits of capitalism’s imagination” that perpetuates the “free market as a euphemism for economic terrorism” (The Disinformation Age: The Collapse of Liberal Democracy in the United States. New York: Routledge, 2017).
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Updated edition, 2024, with Foreword by Vandana Shiva
Dr. Cara Judea Alhadeff, Professor of Transdisciplinary Ecological
Leadership, has published dozens of interdisciplinary books and
articles on critical philosophy, climate justice, art, epigenetics,
gender, sexuality, and ethnic studies, including
the critically-acclaimed Zazu
Dreams: Between the Scarab and the Dung Beetle, A Cautionary Fable
for the Anthropocene Eraand
Viscous
Expectations: Justice, Vulnerability, The Ob-scene.
Alhadeff's
theoretical and visual work is the subject of documentaries for
international films and public television. She has been interviewed
by
The
New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Pacifica
Radio, NPR, and the
New Art Examiner.
Alongside
Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Vandana Shiva, Alhadeff received the
Random Kindness Community Resilience Leadership Award, 2020. Her
work has been endorsed by Noam Chomsky, Bill McKibben, James E.
Hansen, Paul Hawken, SHK-G, Eve Ensler, Alphonso Lingus, Avital
Ronell, and Lucy Lippard among other activists, scholars, and
artists.
Alhadeff's
photographs/performance-videos
have been defended by Freedom-of-Speech organizations (Electronic
Freedom Foundation, artsave/People for the AmericanWay, and the
ACLU), and are
in private and public collections including and San Francisco MoMA,
MoMA
Salzburg, Austria,
the
Kinsey
Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and reproduction, and include
collaborations with international choreographers, composers, poets,
sculptors, architects, scientists. Her art-based and pedagogical
practices, parenting, and commitment to solidarity economics and
lived social-ecological ethics are intimately bound. Former
professor of
Philosophy, Performance, and Pedagogy at
UC Santa Cruz and Program Director for Jews Of The Earth, Alhadeff
and
her family
live in their eco-art
installation repurposed schoolbus where
they perform and teach creative-zero-waste
living, social
permaculture, and cultural diversity.
She is always eager to collaborate with other activists, scholars,
and artists from other disciplines. If you are interested please
contact Cara via email at photo@carajudea.com
or
via her websites, Cara
Judea
and
Zazu
Dreams.
See also this article: Social
ecology pioneers return to Nederland.
