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“…Everyday I’m on the clock,
my mind races with all my longings,
but can’t keep up with what I’ve got.
So I hope don’t sound too ungrateful,
what history gave modern men:
a telephone to talk to strangers,
machine guns and the camera lens.”

(Oberst, Road to Joy)


















Introduction
On November 18, 1992, a document signed by over sixteen hundred members of the global scientific community was released to the public. It was entitled: “World Scientists' Warning to Humanity,” and began like this:
“Human beings and the natural world are on a collision course. Human activities inflict harsh and often irreversible damage on the environment and on critical resources. If not checked, many of our current practices put at serious risk the future that we wish for human society and the plant and animal kingdoms, and may so alter the living world that it will be unable to sustain life in the manner that we know. Fundamental changes are urgent if we are to avoid the collision our present course will bring about.” (Union of Concerned Scientists)
Clearly defined topics were presented in the warning including, oceans, population, soil and forests. The document went on to read:
“No more than one or a few decades remain before the chance to avert the threats we now confront will be lost and the prospects for humanity immeasurably diminished. We the undersigned, senior members of the world's scientific community, hereby warn all humanity of what lies ahead. A great change in our stewardship of the earth and the life on it is required, if vast human misery is to be avoided and our global home on this planet is not to be irretrievably mutilated.” (Union of Concerned Scientists)
These words outline serious and timely potential for modern Civilization as we know it, to slip into a quagmire of chaos and destruction where plague, violence and death would inevitably result.
Seemingly ignored, by the governments in power, now some fourteen years after this warning was published, our governments are playing the Kyoto Accord as if it is a childish board game, not seriously. Why is this “Warning to Humanity” so (not) important?

I believe it is important because it is the fate of the world in which humanity lives, according to those who we, in Westernized countries hold as the most valuable in terms of a mindful, peaceful existence on earth: the Nobel Peace Laureates.

It is, on another hand, (certainly not my own,) so unimportant because we live in society that grew from industrialization into a modern and capitalist mega system. This type of mega system based on that kind of foundation is one that does not account for the destruction of the very source of where its natural resources come from. Nature is second nature to the modernists. Traditionally, nature embodies the sacred feminine, the cycle of creation, passivity and intuition of the non-linear, and long term.

Modernism embodies the masculine, dictates that which is paternal, mechanical, uses destruction and war for its gain, and is based in linear short-term thinking. The futurists perhaps best illustrate this kind of mentality:
“misogyny is more fundamental than either the absence of women in futurism, or its attack on the feminine” (Foster). ‘We want to demolish museums and libraries, fight morality, feminism and all opportunist and utilitarian cowardice.” (Marinetti) I am all for the carpe diem mentality but not at tomorrow’s expense.


Chapter One: STOP WHEN RED LIGHTS FLASHING

The deepest roots of destruction of the natural world by the implementation of Modernism, can be proven I hope, by deconstructing the words that became the ultimate slogan of the modern age: “Make it New” (Pound). When Ezra Pound let these three words fly together some seventy years ago, a metaphorical time bomb had already begun to tick, and that ticking grows stronger even today.

Humans upon the soil of industrialized modernized countries continue to embrace these words, blindly depleting the very sources of our survival. Indeed “Make it New,” became not just a slogan for experimental poetry, but for the demise of a civilization, at the very least morally and environmentally.

Let’s first look at Pound’s statement, deconstructing it, then examine the implications of these words as a mode to live by. I will focus the gaze of these implications onto humanity’s most basic survival needs:
food, water, shelter, and clothing.

“Make it new, “Pound murmured as if poet turned magician, and a new age was in its youth. The Modern age is based in making: making and doing and reproducing, and then remaking and redoing and constantly producing. It dictates that we must continually make, remake, and make more in order for things to remain new. ‘In 1953 the chairman of President Eisenhower’s Council of Economic Advisors stated that the American economy’s “ultimate purpose” was to “produce more consumer goods.” (Suzuki)

This is the first stage of the problem of Modernism: newness is fleeting, as soon as it is on the shelf, it is no longer new, and must be replaced by the next model. This “Make it New” mentality is surely the most horrific example of plague, yet seen in civilization, because it not only robs us of traditional culture and the value of sustenance and originality, but it devalues human worth with the: West is the best and then there’s the rest attitude, all the while dismantling the earth itself from the core upwards to the ozone, leaving mass produced waste in its wake. All the while, providing means for ensuring growth in human population beyond sustainable levels.

The “I Love Lucy” episode where Lucy is on the assembly line at a chocolate factory is a good starting place, to examine the problem of Modernism. Lucy cannot keep up with the production line, it moves too mechanically, not able to engage in a human symbiotic relationship. Lucy ends up stuffing herself with chocolate to try and hide the numerous chocolates she has been unable to decorate in time.

This episode itself, is making new the Charlie Chaplin scene from “Modern Times” wherein Chaplin has such a difficult time keeping up with the production line, that he loses his humanity in a sense, and becomes a drone-like zombie. Both episodes deal with the new reality of an industrialized Modern work ethic, in which production en masse became the norm.

Lucy’s chocolate episode, is interesting to me, as it also addresses the supply and demand issue, which weighs heavily in Modernism. Chocolate is made from the cocoa tree that grows in hot climates near the equator. In these countries, people work for large Western corporations based in capital interests. These farmers receive just enough to keep them alive.

In other words these chocolate harvesters make just enough money to eat, drink, clothe and shelter themselves in modest ways. This so that we in the West can devour the commodity and pay prices for this luxury item that are far below what we should be paying. Most of us do not even think of chocolate as a luxury item, because it is so readily available and so cheap…but at what cost? We in “the West” are robbing our human brothers and sisters for chocolate, for coffee? For silk, cashmere, sugar, cotton, spice? Modernism is surely devoid of love for humanity if one group is able to oppress another for commodity.

We have briefly looked at how modern society works in terms of luxury items, and examined the plague-like implications of Pound’s statement. The luxury of chocolate aside, what about our basic human survival? How do modern conveniences affect our society in terms of food, water, clothing and shelter?






Chapter Two: Food


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History and Evolution


For thousands of years prior to modernism, human populations hunted and gathered their food from local sources. A direct relationship with humans and the food they found and ate created a partnership based on sustenance and gratitude. Because humans were forced to actively go out and search for food, and because this is a difficult task at the best of times, humans became ever appreciative of the bounty of the earth. A great respect grew from this. Evident in old world cultures are several festivals and traditions that offer gratitude and thanks for the earth and its providence through nature of human sustenance.

There is also evidence to support that the first agrarians were well versed in the advantages of biodiversity as opposed to monoculture. Modernists prefer monoculture practices of farming, despite the degradation of the soil and evidently, the food produced.

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Terrence McKenna argues that human evolution itself grew out of the experimental nature in which humans tried to find sustainable food sources In "Food of the Gods," McKenna proposes that “the evolutionary track leading to the development of modern humans was sparked by the consumption of psilocybin mushrooms. Noting that a threshold dose of psilocybin produces enhanced visual acuity,” (McKenna). He theorized that not only an evolutionary gain in hunting and survival was acquired through ingestion of this locally grown fresh produce, but that the language centres themselves were enhanced through the eating of this naturally found food.
“Eventually, language became a learned behavior, and the evolution of consciousness is widely believed to have been an outgrowth of the development of language. “ (McKenna).


From hunting and gathering, the rise of agrarian civilizations grew, which tied people to the land and created community relationships based in local trade. One neighbour might have traded his honey, for another’s rye bread, and thus dietary variety grew and survival increased.

The human population began to grow. Eventually communities turned into villages, and villages to cities. Neighbourly trade and sale turned into corporate based capitalism, and modernism was born.

With some suddenness in the timeline of Civilization: village markets became the local corner store, then turned into the strip mall and mega grocery conglomerate, putting many smaller local producers out of business. Foods that were once whole became commodity items. Foods wrapped in cardboard and plastic and Styrofoam, and full of scientific sounding preservatives colourants and unnatural chemical derivatives are now the commonplace norm.
The origin of our food source has also been irrevocably damaged through modernism and its disregard for sustainability in the pursuit of commodity. “Loss of soil productivity, which is causing extensive land abandonment, is a widespread byproduct of current practices in agriculture and animal husbandry. Since 1945, 11% of the earth's vegetated surface has been degraded -- an area larger than India and China combined -- and per capita food production in many parts of the world is decreasing.” (Union of Concerned Scientists)

Flight of Food
Humans send planes around the world with refrigeration systems to bring back exotic foods to the West.
(Both planes and refrigeration are modern inventions.) These planes and cooling systems pollute the planet and maintain the inequality of human worth, (discussed above in relation to chocolate and other exotic imports.)

5 (1973 U.S. Congress Energy Emergency Legislation)

Furthermore we may think we are paying a fair price for rare Tahitian fish, Madagascan spices, Chinese roots, but if you factor in the cost of fuel, air transport and labour, creating and distributing refrigeration, growing and harvesting of product, one may think twice and choose to buy local.

Humans have created systems in the modern age that demand space for the imports we seem to cherish. This is true not only for food, but for commodity in general, one look at the docks in the port of Vancouver will tell you, that we receive innumerable amounts of modern consumer commodity every day.
The space these items (cars, appliances, clothing, furniture, technological and mechanical items) have replaced, takes up land which otherwise could have been used agriculturally for farming and food production. Instead we are faced with a situation where if the systems were to fail, Vancouver would be left with enough food in stock for approximately 48 hours, and the rest of the space would be taken up by useless commodity that would not sustain human survival. I will discuss this more in relation to water in the next chapter.


The Monsanto Blues
To make matters all the more grim at a global level, Monsanto, a corporation that is actively destroying life on earth as we know it, is still making it new. Monsanto does this by genetically modifying the natural seeds that the earth has provided us with, and inserting these modified seeds into the ecosystem. This is having devastating effects all over the globe.

Monsanto has moved into non-Western countries and has all but deleted some natural varieties of grain, leaving only their GMO food source as replacement. They have created new chemically based agricultural sprays, which kill natural varieties of seeds and weeds, leaving a barren wasteland of monocultured and modified unnatural plants in its destructive path.
All of this is still occurring over 40 years after Rachel Carsen warned of the negative impact of this on our ecosystems, in her groundbreaking book “Silent Spring”. How to do humans get away with it?

The same way all corporations who operate this way get away with it, the same way governments in the modern world get away with it, trickery through advertising, ignorance of environmental statistics, and capital interest. In Monsanto’s case they advertise that what they are doing is providing adequate agricultural resources to those less fortunate.

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An Advertisement for Monsanto’s pledge letter (Monsanto Corp.)

“Obviously, we still have challenges. They include how to secure our intellectual property in parts of the world where the legal protection is not yet mature. We also want to work with development organizations to share our seeds and expertise in ways that result in better food security and economic opportunity.” (Monsanto Corp.)

If you cannot read between the lines of that charged statement, then turn off your TV., and stop believing everything you read…the red lights are flashing…wake up! Wake up!

The Monsanto Corporation will first insert their new ways in countries that have no defense against them, who have been wooed by their shiny slogans, smiling faces, and pockets full of cash. When this is done, and they have finished their research and development in third world countries, they’ll be knocking on your back door. It has already happened to farmers in Canada. It is real, this is now.

Monsanto has taken its new business into several countries that still live in traditional non-modernized ways. This upsets the equilibrium of their eco systems by killing off food sources that have been readily available, and replacing them with GMO’s that do not grow as well and cannot be as nutritious.
The term ‘Monsanto’ almost translates into Spanish as “my saint’, as if offering farmers of Latin America a somehow heaven sent answer to the intensive labour and continual hardship of farming. This trick is again, one of many that I believe the capitalizing modernist will also use to fool the working class into buying. Advertising slogans are full of these labels, look around, I bet you can find one now.

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McFrankenuggets
The ever-pioneering modernist has made chickens new by cutting off their wings and beaks. This, so they do not peck each at each other in the inhumane cages we have developed for them to be transported in during their last days alive. Their lives have been made new by allowing them to eat things they would never find in a natural environment.

Imagine you are at a restaurant and you order roast beef and the waiter asks you: would you like your beef free range, farmed, or cultured? “Researchers have published details of how lumps of meat would be cultured in laboratory vats rather than carved from livestock reared on a farm.” (Sample) Yes, thanks to modern science, now he actual chicken or cow or pig or whomever, does not need to go through the hardship of living only to be killed and put on a Styrofoam tray at Safeway.

Although the Frankenstein quality of meat born in a dish, is frightening to me, I sigh a breath of relief at the thought of less suffering on the part of some of my animal friends. This meat from a Petri is not yet available, but if you are going to eat meat that you have not killed yourself, and there is still a world to live in after all of this, then Petri-meatie, (oh what a modern treatie) is what I recommend. Enjoy.


The Illegality of Flora
Within each continent of the world, distinct plants grow, which provide natural elements necessary for human survival in their surrounding geography. Mushrooms, numerous herbs, peyote, kava kava, coffee, coca, coconut, aloe, each grow by the natural provision of the earth, in distinct places offering medicine like qualities to the people who inhabit the lands. Local produce not only means eating your local farmers fruits and vegetables, it means using what the land has to offer, to protect and able yourself for the climate and environment in which you inhabit.

Coca known as a cure all in South America, also specifically helps one acclimatize to high elevations, necessary for those living in the Andes Mountains, or other mountainous regions of that continent. Peyote helps ward off hunger in areas where food sources are scarce, as well as allow for night vision enhancement and increased energy. This has been useful for centuries in the locales where it grows, for the main source of transportation and trade between communities was by foot, and often runners carrying messages or goods would travel through the night to get their messages to the next village.

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Modernized Foreign governments should not control local non-modernized supplies. In the case of coca, coffee, and like produce, if we cannot grow it in our own country, it should be up to the peoples of the land it comes from to harvest, and export at costs they see fit and fair. If modernists do not consider nature in their wake of destruction, then perhaps they should get their greedy-make-new-hands off the plants and herbs that inhabit the earth.

There are enough remedies and medicines in the forests of the world to sustain us all for centuries. We cut and burn these same forests, the lungs of the earth, starving the world of oxygen and filling the air with smoke, so that cattle can be raised (which produces methane, destroying the ozone,) and Mc Donalds can supply the consumer market with the NEW mc beefguts surprise, or other such horrible non radiant byproduct of the modernists infinite production line.

Food Then and Now

In the early days of modernism Dickens wrote his book “Oliver Twist” (1937), which certainly gives a real sense of how food was scarce. The orphans sing:
“Food, glorious food!
What wouldn't we give for
That extra bit more --
That's all that we live for
Why should we be fated to
Do nothing but brood
On food,
Magical food,
Wonderful food,
Marvellous food,
Fabulous food…”

(Bart, Lionel)

The catchy song that begins Morgan Spurlock’s recent work entitled “Supersize Me,”starts with a group of school-aged children singing:
“I like food, you like food, Kentucky Fried Chicken and a Pizza
Hut, a Pizza Hut, a Pizza Hut, Kentucky Fried Chicken and a Pizza Hut..McDonalds, McDonalds………” . (Fast Food Rockers)

From Oliver Twist to this, we have the history of food as it has bloomed in the modern garden. The Supersize Me song itself has the repetitive lyric quality of a fast food production line, continuously looping the corporations that provide the “food” in question. In The “Oliver” of the past, starving children in cities that would soon become modernized, have today become overfed with unhealthy non-foods. Soon, the food scarcity issue that we see in Dickens’ Oliver Twist, shall surface once more due to the factory mechanics of Modernism whirling out of control.


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Not until the human population rose, (due to Modernist inventions such as antibiotics and sanitation systems) did humanity see a clear growth of near extinction of animal and plant populations directly resulting from human interference. The ecosystem is unbalanced due to too many humans in comparison to what our planet can tolerate.

What is left here at this waning of the modern era, and indeed waning of Western Civilization as we know it, is a population that is completely disconnected from its food supply. Humans in the West are so comfortable in the readily available modern convenience of grocery shopping, that we have all but forgotten the fact that our food comes from the earth. The fresher the apple from the tree the greater the “radiance of life,” (Tompkins), the more processed, and the longer something sits in an artificial environment, the less radiant, less healthy it becomes. Thus the abolishment of farms, and the rise in modern supermarkets, has actually effectively managed to eradicate our produce of its inherent life force, therefore decreasing the potential life force of the humans who ingest it.


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Who of you has killed their own livestock, who of you has taken a life to preserve your own? We no longer toil in the spring rain planting seeds and nurturing their growth, nor pluck the bounty of the harvest under hot sun, until fingers and backs ache, and sun sets. In fact we barely step outdoors at all. All connection to the earth, all respect for the earth, all gratitude for the gifts of nature, and certainly the quality of sustenance has been lost in path of making it new.

Steady Green Goes
The emergence of community gardens in dense city areas allows not only better oxygen exchange and air quality within the city, but food source options.
Artists such as Kathryn Miller bring awareness to the global food crisis. Her 1992 project entitled “Seed Bombs”, involved her throwing handmade seed bundles “into heavily impacted landscapes” (green museum) in an attempt to reclaim the land and highlight the absurd quality of overly modified landscapes.


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Chapter Three: Resourceful Water

“Heedless exploitation of depletable (sic) ground water supplies endangers food production and other essential human systems. Heavy demands on the world's surface waters have resulted in serious shortages in some 80 countries, containing 40% of the world's population. Pollution of rivers, lakes and ground water further limits the supply.
Destructive pressure on the oceans is severe, particularly in the coastal regions, which produce most of the world's food fish. The total marine catch is now at or above the estimated maximum sustainable yield. Some fisheries have already shown signs of collapse. Rivers carrying heavy burdens of eroded soil into the seas also carry industrial, municipal, agricultural, and livestock waste -- some of it toxic. “ (Union of Concerned Scientists)


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Where I live, Vancouver, British Columbia, I must admit there are times when I curse at the water that falls from the sky, leaving me damp through my layers, a sopping heap of bog, in a new city of concrete and glass. Times like these I go into the forest (something of a luxury, so near to the city, and the reason I live here). I go to be outdoors, yet under the cover of trees, whose vast root systems soak up the rain leaving me in a place of calm. And yet why in all this abundance do we still not employ water-catching devices in this watery wet West Coast we inhabit?
Surely with the statistics at hand, we should all be panicking and definitely taking drastic measures to collect and in fact bury and hide our water for the decades that lay directly ahead of us:
“Beijing's water table has dropped more than a hundred feet in the past forty years. In the United States, the Ogallala Aquifer, which reaches from Texas to South Dakota and is indispensable to farming on the Great Plains, is being drained eight times faster than it can naturally recharge. In vast areas of India, Mexico, the Middle East, and California's Central Valley the story is the same.
Meanwhile, more than a billion people have no access to clean drinking water, and nearly three billion live without basic sanitation. Five million people die each year from waterborne diseases such as cholera, typhoid, and dysentery. This enormous, slow motion public-health emergency is, in large measure, a result of rapid, chaotic urbanization in the nations of the Global South. Traditional water sources have been polluted, destroyed, overtaxed, or abandoned.”(Finnegan)

Should not children be actively holding funnels to the sky at recess to ensure drinking water at school for the next generation? Should not we, once and for all, be viewing global situations in a non-linear way, knowing that the past and the future are all but a wink in the history of time, and that the future is upon us even now?
“Tomorrow, tomorrow comes today” (Gorillaz) Why isn’t anyone actively doing anything, especially here on the rainy West Coast? We have seen rivers, lakes, and icecaps, dry up, melt, or become polluted.

When I lived in Mexico, I would walk home on the goat trail that once provided clean renewable drinking water to the town. Filled with garbage and dust and cactus, no trace of water was left save for the valley that the ghost of water had left behind.
Even at home, one look at the Capilano River side of the Cleveland Dam in North Vancouver, will show a little wealth of human garbage clinging to the bottom of the dam. Incidentally, the other side of this dam is one third of our cities’ drinking water.

As our reservoirs filled with silt from land slides last week (caused by heavy rains,) the people of Vancouver had no source of clean water. The silt covered the organisms (always present in our water,) and it was not probable for the chlorine in our treated drinking water to kill the organisms, as they were covered in silt. The result was a city full of people who raced to the stores as fast as jackrabbits on meth amphetamines, to fight with each other over who would get the last bottle of Perrier, of San Pellegrino, of Evian. Let us not even enter the debate of where all these water bottles end up , or how their plastics leech into the very thing that is supposedly pure. What of the days of public water taps in communities where each member was responsible for bringing their own jug or bottle to fill up with?

Reservoirs are manmade altered environments, Modern structures. One could simply go to any free flowing creek and drink from there with a fair chance of being just fine, I do this often while hiking with no gastro intestinal upsets at all. Similarly, with all the rain that poured down upon us to cause the landslides, there was an abundance of fresh water falling from the sky. People have become so detached, so scared of nature, that it is not even a natural impulse for many to associate rain and the stuff that comes out of their taps as the same material.

“The world is running out of fresh water. There's water everywhere, of course, but less than three per cent of it is fresh, and most of that is locked up in polar ice caps and glaciers, unrecoverable for practical purposes. Lakes, rivers, marshes, aquifers, and atmospheric vapor make up less than one per cent of the earth's total water, and people are already using more than half of the accessible runoff. Water demand, on the other hand, has been growing rapidly—it tripled worldwide between 1950 and 1990—and water use in many areas already exceeds nature's ability to recharge supplies. By 2025, the demand for water around the world is expected to exceed supply by fifty-six per cent.” (Finnegan)


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Aside from the lack of humanity’s fundamental basic need, the beings that live in water are in rapid decline.” In the 48 areas worldwide that have been protected to improve marine biodiversity, they found that "diversity of species recovered dramatically, and with it the ecosystem's productivity and stability".
By extending this pattern into the future, the scientists calculated that by 2048 all species would be in collapse, which the researchers defined as having catches decline 90 per cent.” (Alijazeera)

Although this information is alarming, it is hopeful too. By paying attention, and through intentional action, humanity can sustain the very things that sustain humanity.

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Steady Green Goes
Artists featured on the green museum website (www.greenmuseum.org), such as Ichi Ikeda, AMD&ART/T. Allan Comp, and Shai Zakai, have all been leaders in bringing awareness to the global water situation. Ikeda’s Water stations for the heaven, earth, water, and human have all used recycled materials to create water catchers, for the purpose of rainfall collection. Shai Zakai was able to reclaim a creek that had been used as a concrete dumping ground, restoring it to its former ecology. The more individuals that participate actively in water awareness projects, thereby increases humanity’s chance at ultimate survival.




Chapter Four: Clothing as Culture

Making it new in terms of clothing has had an interesting global impact since the waking of Modernity. Items are created to feed the Western hunger for the modern, the new. Of course far too many items are created in far too many factories in far too many under priviledeged countries by far too many impoverished people who work far too many hours in far too little light for not enough financial or social reward. It is exhausting! (Insert deep breath here).

These items are shipped en masse to the West where these textile items are bought. The buyers may barely acknowledge that they were made in Bangladesh, China or India. These items are multiples of each other. They are made one after the other by the thousand, and sold to us in the West, creating a look, or a sameness which we call fashion. Every season, fashion makes it new, dictating what style is trendy, and what the consumer should buy, buy, buy, to have that new-fresh-now-look that Modernism promotes.

Before this Modern production and distribution was the norm, people made their own clothes, or had tailors produce individual pieces for the buyer.


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In many non-western places in the world, production of clothing by the people who will be wearing the clothing, is still the traditional mode of dressing. Fashion, then becomes a traditional and cultural expression. It becomes a symbol of community and an emblem of distinction within the many different cultural groups living within the world. Traditional clothing does not change greatly with time. It is often based on the Cultural mythology of the local people.

An appropriate example would be the Huichol of Mexico, who use cotton fabrics embellished overtime with traditional embroidery. The Huichol use symbols such as the blue deer, or the peyote cactus because they have valued cultural meaning. Their fashion also includes large brimmed hats for the men, two woven satchels, and a sash.

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Traditional Huichol clothing, Jalisco Mexico


These items on the clothing, and the accessories, give the Huichol a very distinct look. When I attended the indigenous gathering and state performances in Mexico, I was very pleased to see so much cultural variety in the clothing of the people, based on their specific geographic location, yet all from within one country. We see this all over the world in the clothing and adornment of indigenous, or original traditional peoples.

We have surely lost this distinction in the West. In my opinion, these distinctive handmade items of clothing hold what Walter Benjamin referred to as the ”aura.” They hold a dear essential quality of spirit, tradition, and culture. We have no aura in the fashion of the west, (or if we do it has been replaced with the capitalist designer branded items for the bourgeoisie of which have become household names: Prada, Gucci, Dolce and Gabbana, Calvin Klein, Seven, True Religion, to name but a few.

What concerns me the most about how Modernism is affecting clothing trends on a global level, is that this mass production of the West, produces an overabundance of clothing commodity. This overflow, trickles through the system and ends up, not just in the West but everywhere. In places like the Himalayas, South America, Southern Asia, we are seeing entire cultures of people who, up until very recently produced their own unique clothing. Now that the overflow of Westernized fashion has landed at their doorstep, many of these people are replacing their local cultural dress for leftover western wear. This has the devastating impact of cultural destruction. The very fabric of culture disintegrates. As the elders begin to die, and the youth wear the hand-me-down cast offs from an overproducing other society, who will teach the new generation the cultural mythology, the traditional ways of clothing production, the distinct lessons that make their culture different then another’s’?

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The boy on the right wears westernized clothing, the ones on the left still wear traditional Huichol clothing made within their community.



Steady Green Goes
In Vancouver large companies like Lululemon Athletica, and Lotuswear have managed to promote their locally made active wear with great success. Similarly little boutiques such as DREAM in Gastown, have been promoting local designers and their creations. DREAM advertises their clothing as 98% local, a statistic that outweighs the made in China labels we have become so familiar with, greatly.





















Chapter Five: Sustainable Shelter

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Making it new in architectural terms has always been an important chapter in Modernism. We have seen how the steel and glass structures of the Crystal Palace, and Eiffel Tower, have changed architecture, bringing it out of a darker age, and into the light of modernity. How has this impacted us at a basic level?

What is important and of consequence here, is the constant need for production within Pound’s statement. As long as we live by modern standards, we will be making things new continually. Does this not imply that buildings in the city will continuously be demolished in order for the newest trends in architecture to emerge? If this is to be the case, then why are we using such sturdy, non-ecological, yet highly modern, materials such as steel and concrete to build with?

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Surely there are environmentally sound waste products that can be used to make bricks and walls. Surely a merger between what standards we have now, and what is sustainable for tomorrow, could be employed to create future friendly residential and commercial buildings.
The contemporary building standard is Modern, and at least in the city I live in, modernity is used time and time again to sell these structures. The developers seem to care not for the environment in which their new project will occupy.

Surely using earth friendly materials, such as straw bale, cob, rammed earth, or reusing materials such as previously used steel, glass, and concrete would have less of an impact on the earth. If we must make it new, then we are assuming that we will be knocking things down as readily as we are building them, thus, would it not be wiser for the future of our planet, to use friendlier modes of production, to ensure longevity of our land? Could not architects utilize a Reggio Emilia approach to their designs? By designing their structures around second hand building supplies, responsible architecture would be in place, as well, as utilizing materials such as steel or glass or wood that otherwise may end up in a landfill somewhere.
The longevity of the land is important, and what of the people within this land? Are not human populations entitled to the basic necessity of shelter, or does modernism change the basic rights of man?
“The population of the world today is 50% urban, an increase from 30% in 1950.And it is estimated that by the year 2050, 75% of a projected global population of 8.5 billion will be living in cities.” ( Rodger)

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In Vancouver right now we see many buildings sitting row, after row, empty, while humans sleep in the street below. How has Modernism succeeded, if it cannot recycle its uninhabited architecture to those who are in need of a roof and four walls?

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Steady Green Goes

The Musee du Quai on the banks of the Seine (minutes away from an original Modernist structure, the Tour Eiffel,) is clothed in greenery. For the museum which is entirely comprised of Non Western Art, Patrick Blank created a “vertical garden covering some 800 square metres, it is decked out with 15,000 different species to symbolize global diversity.” (Desrochers)
Similarly “ a living wall of 1000 plants” (Scott) was created indoors at the University of Guelph by Air Quality designs, enhancing the air of the building, and providing living inspiration to enliven its occupants.
American artist/architect Sun Ray Kelly, is one of many green builders who uses material from the natural world to build his green shelters. I was able to visit his community in Sedro Wooley, Washington last year, and was pleasantly surprised at the creativity and architectural aesetic of his work. I would love to live in a village that built structures like this, especially knowing that if they had to be demolished, mother earth would happily gobble them back up.



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Yoga Hut, Cobb and other natural materials, Sedro Wooley Washington, Sun Ray Kelly (Shelter Pub)










Chapter Six: Reflections on Now




"In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth"
(Genesis 1:1 NIV)



“ In a single day and night of misfortune... the island of Atlantis disappeared in the depths of the sea."
(Plato)



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Chapter Seven: End Times

Modernism has taken the human of out humanity, and like scientific insertion, reconstructed humanism with a machinelike mind, detached from the compassion of the heart, unable to see that all life is made of the same fabric. We have gone so far in waving the flag of Modernism, that not only do we disregard plants and plant-life, animals and mammals, insects and indeed all creatures of this great planet of the world, but other humans.

Modernism has created a unique elitism, where the few that can benefit from its gluttonous gains are standing on top of a metaphorical pyramid made up of hundreds of thousands of literal lives, lost for them to have had such a grand view.

“…Greed is a bottomless pit, and our freedom’s a joke we’re just taking a piss, and the whole world must watch the sad comic display, if your still free start running away,
(cause we’re comin’ for ya’).”

(Oberst, Landlocked Blues)


Chapter Eight: New Beginnings

The Modern notion of time must be recreated. We must look at it as nonlinear. For, in making global decisions humans need to look at the big picture, not the next ten or 50 years, but how we can learn from the past and plan for the future. What we can we learn of the past and predict for the future will sustain our people and our planet, this is cyclic time, non linear. Humans must stop thinking in terms of countries and start acting in terms of global equality and ONE-WORLD mentalities.

This means treating humans with equal dignity and respect, dismantling the Modern systemic doctrines of the West and maintaining sustainable, renewable resources. Corporations and governments must begin to act responsibly when it comes to commodity as well as packaging and garbage. Businesses should be as responsible for all their waste, as well as individual responsibility for all their personal waste, taxing the buyer and the corporation for usage of the Modern disposable item.

New doctrines for the insurance of survival means, setting up systems where the natural environment is first and foremost the priority of governments. Education needs to take place immediately, so as to rehabilitate the people (especially of the West,) at once. Active participation in consumer reduction of commodity should be a united front of all Nations. Products that are at all hazardous to the earth should be forgotten altogether, so as to rid the land and waters and inhabitants of toxic poisons.
Ensuring the survival of humanity past the Modern/Post Modern age, means securing the survival of plants and plant life, animals, and mammals and their environments and habitats. The ecosystem, biosphere is you, is me. Each of us as individuals is the centre of our own universe, and as such, must create a life worth living. Taking back the individual rights to water, food, shelter, and clothing means redefining the “Make it New” mentality, perhaps promoting a new age of: Make it Last.

Finally, modern man may disappear by his own creation of destructive enterprise, yet
nature, strong, pure: nature shall recover
and always shall nature prevail.


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