Flowings of Your Everlasting Taffyman

jenny sent this to me a long time ago i been meanign to post it, (i dont remember doing it so im doing it now, if i did, make me aware and i shall unpost)

"Culture Change Letter #21
The Machine versus Food-Not-Lawns
by Jan Lundberg
Sustainable Energy Institute http://www.culturechange.org
Welcome to the machine: Everytown, USA. When we walk down the streets of our cities, the right angles and blocks that we navigate are part of our mechanical domestication. Control over each human and over nature is what dominant society intends every second, even over centuries. This is just as a machine is supposed to do: control a process as long as it can function. Machine parts and products are preformulated objects of uniformity, and so are our towns--despite the unique restaurant or cute house.
The surfaces of the towns and cities are of industrial material; even lawns are biological pavement soaked with Chevron "lawn care" designed to kill those pesky (but edible and beautiful) dandelions. Most pavement and roofing material is asphalt from the dregs of oil refining--a machine product.
The Earth, meanwhile, is something to be sucked dry, as the oil and water are exploited for profit and population growth. The rain is not to be soaked into the soil, but run off elsewhere, washing "away" the poison dusts and fluids, rendering the nearest bodies of water unfit (aside from the sewage) for providing shellfish, for example, as sustenance.
Alvin Toffler pointed out in The Third Wave that our clocks and watches that became universal in recent history were part of our mechanization. (Off went my watch from my wrist permanently.) "Time Pollution" was an unusual article in the Auto-Free Times, several years ago, on the distortion of time-keeping that warps our social existence.
Human beings are not machines, but you wouldn't know it by the flow of commuters doing the same thing day in day out, year after year, as they stifle their spirits and bring on their early demise with cancer and heart disease. Instead of a tree or a rock to touch as we may make our way on a trail, we hold a steel rail that was manufactured by machines. As the worker or shopper holds that rail, performing the duty of getting from point A to B, the hand and rail become united and integrated as parts of the city machine.
We don't have to live like this. Some live pleasantly in opposition as they create an alternative, while others confront the system in various ways, usually in painful and perhaps vain fashion. It is now our role in history to put history to bed. History is the record of domination and manipulation, and the dominant civilization has been holding it up for almost 10,000 years as the culmination of the "top" life form's work--as if living were not sufficient, and becoming the scourge of the universe was the only worthwhile way of the culture. Our generation seems fated to get humanity back on a path of truth and justice, as just another creature among countless others. Humility can thus triumph over pride and power.
Maybe we don't have to throw the baby out with the bathwater, by stopping writing and printing, but the question must always be: what is sustainable? Do we have to assure the possibility of another Shakespeare-level writer for the masses, using technologies to disseminate "the finest" art and propaganda? Or will we give it up for the way of the Iroquois Nation which eschewed technology and growth, for the sake of the welfare of always seven generations hence?
The purpose of the city machine, or any machine, is to do a great amount of work with exosomatic--usually fossil fuel--energy, using less human or animal energy. The purpose of the energy-application is to create surpluses. The surpluses have been throughout history for the purpose of expansion of the territory or empire, and for the expansion of the personal fortunes of society's dominators.
A home environment, and more so the typical work environment, consists of artificial objects and surfaces that circulate microscopic molecules, unseen, that we breathe and swallow. Most of these are some petroleum compound, and you don't want to smell the factories making these things. What, am I against jobs? Today's cancer victims and their families would have to question the false security that the Pollution Economy, alias the Growth Economy, has wrought. Cancer and heart attacks used to be rare, before industrial, urban living became the norm.
We don't have to pick on the USA for a good glimpse of industrial living that has turned people into machines. The foremost progenitor of machinelike social institutions is (to read remainder of article, see
http://www.culturechange.org/e-letter-21cont.html#cont) "