For related articles and more information, please visit OCA’s All About Organics page and our Politics and Democracy page.

The hummingbird successfully crossing the Gulf of Mexico is adapted mile by mile to the distance. It does not exceed its own physical and mental capacities and it makes the trip exactly like pre-industrial human migrants, on contemporary energy.

For humans, local adaptation is not work for a few financiers and a few intellectual and political hotshots. This is work for everybody, requiring everybody’s intelligence. It is work inherently democratic.

What must we do?

First: we must not work or think on a heroic scale. In our age of global industrialism, heroes too likely risk the lives of places and things they do not see. We must work on a scale proper to our limited abilities. We must not break things we cannot fix. There is no justification ever for permanent ecological damage. If this imposes the verdict of guilt upon us all, so be it.

Second: We must abandon the homeopathic delusion that the damages done by industrialization can be corrected by more industrialization.

Third: We must quit solving our problems by moving on. We must try to stay put and to learn where we are – geographically, historically and ecologically.

Fourth: We must learn, if we can, the sources and costs of our own economic lives.

Fifth: We must give up the notion that we are too good to do our own work and clean up our own messes. It is not acceptable for this work to be done for us by wage slavery or by enslaving nature.