Introduction - How to Interact with the "Natural" World
In a perfect world such a book as this would be a pure superfluity—a redundant restating of the obvious. In a slightly improved world it would (let’s hope, will) be a book for children, a primer, holding little novelty for the average adult Californian.
But my guess is that it will, sadly, remain both more-or-less current and useful for quite the foreseeable future in fact, increasingly so.
It is only because I believe that there are ideas here that for quite a number of readers will be “cutting-edge” that I have summoned the nerve to resume this little tract into existence. Actually it is all as old as the hills, but every generation has to re-learn the world all over from scratch, and when we neglect to do so, we have to reinvent it all over again.
Not the world, but the way we understand it, and, most important, the way we interact with it.
In the current bout of reinvention we find ourselves in, we have been taking certain wrong turns, based on certain false assumptions, and listening to too much environmental “wisdom” of the doctrinaire, shoot-first-and-ask-later sort.
The truth eventually makes itself evident, of course, even when we follow such a hit-and-miss route, but inevitably at great and unnecessary cost to ourselves and the “environment”.
There are several ways to pick up the kind of valid, no-nonsense, efficacious knowledge that we need about how best to interact with the “natural” world.
- Ask the natives.
- Use the Scientific Method. Experiment
- Hit and miss, trial and error. And, the most practicable? for us now, with so little time and so little margin for error.
- Observation.
[Expand on each, with pros and cons, etc.]
