"McKenna - Plan-Plant-Planet" - читать интересную книгу автора (McKenna Terence)

The matted floor of a tropical rain forest is an environment of great chemical diversity; the topology approaches that of brain tissue in its complexity. Within the network of interconnected roots, complex chemical signals are constantly being transmitted and received. Coadaptive evolution and symbiotic relationships regulate this entire system with a ubiquitousness that argues for the evolutionary primacy of these cooperative strategies. For example, mycirrhizal fungi live in symbiosis on the outside of plant roots and gently balance and buffer the mineral-laden water that is moving through them to the roots of their host.

Whole-system fine tuning. If the phenomena associated with biological harmony and resonance could be understood, then such large-scale systems as global banking or global food production could be more properly managed. The gaian biologists, Lovelock, Margulies, and others, have argued persuasively that the entire planet has been self-organized by microbial and planktonic life into a metastable regime favorable to biology and maintained there for over two billion years. Plant-based Gaia has kept a balance throughout time and space,--and in spite of the repeated bombardment of the earth by asteroidal material sufficient to severely disrupt the planetary equilibrium. We can only admire--and we should seek to imitate such a Tao-like sense of the planet's multidimensional homeostatic balance. But how? I suggest we look at plants--look more deeply, more closely, and with a more open mind than we have done before.

Recycling. Like plants, we need to recycle. On a cosmic scale we are no more mobile than plants. Until this point in history we have modeled our more successful economic systems on animal predation. Animals can potentially move on to another resource when they exhaust the one at hand. Since they can move to new food sources, they potentially have unlimited resources. Plants are fixed. They can not easily move to richer nutrients or leave an area if they foul or deplete it. They must recycle well. The fostering of a plant-based ethic that emulates the way in which the botanical world uses and replaces resources is a sine qua non for planetary survival. All capitalistic models models presuppose unlimited exploitable resources and labor pools, yet neither should now be assumed. I do not know the methods, but I suggest we start turning to the plant world to discover the right question to ask.

Photovoltaic power. Appreciation of photovoltaic power is part of the shift toward an appreciation of the elegance of solid state that plants possess. Plants practice photosynthetic solutions to the problems of power acquisition. Compared to the water or animal-turned wheels, which are the Ur-methaphors for power production in the human world, the solid-state quantum-molecular miracle that involves dropping a photon of sunlight into a molecular device that will kick out an electron capable of energetically participating in the life of a cell seems like extravagant science fiction. Yet this is, in fact, the principle upon which photosynthesis operates. While the first solid-state devices arrived on the human cultural frontier in the late 1940's, solid-state engineering had been the preferred design approach of plants for some two thousand million years. High efficiency photovoltaics could today meet the daily needs of most people for electricity. It is the running of basic industries on solar energy that has proved difficult. Perhaps this is nature's way of telling us that we aspire to too much manufacturing.

A global atmosphere-based economy. The approach of vegetational life to energy production is called photosynthesis. This process could be modeled by the creation of a global economy based on using solar energy to obtain hydrogen from seawater. Solar electricity could supply most electricity needs, but the smelting of aluminium and steel and other energy-intensive industrial processes make demands that photovoltaic electricity is unlikely to be able to meet. However, there is a solution; plants split atmospheric carbon dioxide to release energy and oxygen as by-products. A similar but different process could use solar electricity to split water to obtain hydrogen. This hydrogen could be collected and concentrated for later distribution. Plants have been very successful at finding elegant solutions based on materials present at hand; a hydrogen economy would emulate this same reliance on inexhaustible and recyclable materials.















The notion is a simple one really; it has long been realized by planners that hydrogen is the ideal resource to fuel a global economy. Hydrogen is clean: when burned it recombines with the water it was chemically derived from. Hydrogen is plentiful: one-third of all water is hydrogen. And all existing technologies--internal combustion engines, coal-, oil-, and nuclear-fired generators--could be retrofitted to run on hydrogen. Thus we are not talking about having to scrap the current standing crop of existing power production and distribution systems. Hydrogen could be "cracked" from seawater at a remote island location and then moved by the already existing technology that is used for the ocean transport of liquid natural gas from its production points to market. The objection that hydrogen is highly explosive and that proven technologies for handling it do not exist has largely been met by the LNG industry and its excellent safety record. Hydrogen accidents could be extremely destructive, but they would be ordinary explosions--local, nontoxic, and without release of radioactivity. Like plant life itself, the hydrogen economy would be nonpolluting and self-substaining; burned hydrogen recombines with oxygen to again become water.

An internal effort of extraordinary scope would be neccessary to begin to move toward a proof of concept demonstration of the feasibility of a hydrogen economy. Granted, there are many possible problems with such a scheme. But no plan for the production on energy sufficient to meet the demands of twenty-first century is going to be without difficulties.

Nanotechnology. The era of molecular mechanism promises the most radical of green visions, since it proposes that human-engineered quasibiological cells and organelles take over the manufacturing of products and culture. nanotechnology takes very seriously the notion that manufacturing techniques and methods of manipulating matter on the microphysical scale can affect the design process of the human-scale world. In the nanotech world, dwellings and machines can be "grown", and everything that is manufactured is closer to flesh than stone. The distinction between living and nonliving and organic and artificial is blurred in the electronic coral reef of human-machine symbiosis contemplated by the savants of nanotechnology.

Preservation of biological diversity. The life on this planet and the chemical diversity that it represents is likely to be the only source of biologically evolved compounds until the day that we discover another planet as teeming with life as our own. Yet we are destroying the living diversity of our world at an appalling rate. This must be stopped, not only through the preservation of ecosystems but also through the preservation of information about those ecosystems that has been accumulated over thousands of years by the people who live adjacent to them. It is impossible to underestimate the importance for human health of preservation of folk knowledge concerning healing plants. All the major healing drugs that have changed history have come from living plants and fungi. Quinine made conquest of the tropics possible, penicillin and birth control pills remade the social fabric of the twentieth century. All three of these are plant-derived pharmaceuticals. My partner Kat and I work in this area by managing Botanical Dimensions, a botanical garden in Hawaii that seeks to preserve the plants utilized in Amazonian shamanism, one of the many such systems of knowledge that are fast disappearing.

The measures outlined above would tend to promote what might be called a sense of Gaian Holism, that is, a sense of the unity and balance of nature and of our own human position within the dynamic and evolving balance. It is a plant-based view. This return to a perspective on self and ego that places them within the larger context of planetary life and evolution is the essence of the Archaic Revival. Marshall McLuhan was correct to see that planetary human culture, the global village, would be tribal in character. The next great step toward a planetary holism is the partial merging of the technologically transformed human world with the archaic matrix of vegetable intelligence that is the Overmind of the planet.


I hesitate to call this dawning awareness religious, yet that is what it surely is. And it will involve a full exploration of the dimensions revealed by plant hallucinogens, especially those structurally related to neurotransmitters already present and functioning in the human brain. Careful exploration of the plant hallucinogens will probe the most archaic and sensitive level of the drama of the emergence of consciousness; it was in the plant-human symbiotic relationships that characterized archaic society and religion that the numinous mystery was originally experienced. And this experience is no less mysterious for us today, in spite of the general assumption that we have replaced the simple awe of our ancestors with philosophical and epistemic tools of the utmost sophistication and analytical power.

Our choice as a planetary culture is a simple one:
go Green or die.

From The Archaic Revival by Terence McKenna
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THE GAIAN MIND
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