These are the bibliographical notes of my book, A Natural Language, which exposes the environmental narrative as propaganda and puts bottom-up solutions in front of the actual problem.
Compiling a bibliography seemed off given the looming famine. Something also needs to be said about the institutionalization of knowledge. It has been one the most insidious developments of the past centuries. Pedantic expectations about credentials, format, jargon use, and sources have effectively shut out non-academic voices from conversations. This is unfortunate and unwarranted. To wit, you can learn more about most topics covered in these pages with simple internet searches. This is true even for ideas I vaguely entertain as original. Authors who have time to read, like Paul Cudenec, always seem to know ancient Greek writers and more recent ones who made points similar to mine eons ago. This is as such a collective work in more ways than not. My contribution was to merely connect dots and retrace paths traced by others. This book is theirs as much as it is mine. Errors are of course all my own, as is the irreverence.
My path towards permaculture followed in the steps of Bill Mollison, Geoff Lawton, and Rob Avis. For short and to the point crash courses, check out Andrew Millison’s videos. For soil science, excellent places to start are Matt Powers, John Kempf, and Diego Footer. Their work features many soil specialists like Elaine Ingham and James White. A lot of podcasts are also worth your time, like the Regenerative Agroforestry Podcast. For kitchen gardening and small farming, great sources include Steven Cornett, Curtis Stone, Richard Perkins, Jesse Frost, Keith Arkenberg, Charles Dowding, Huw Richards, Kevin Espiritu, Mark Valencia, Rob Bob, and Kathleen from Oak Abode. For health, Mike Adams, Zach Bush, Andrew Kaufman, Doc Anarchy, and the team behind Children’s Health Defense. For mental health, Robert Cialdini, Robert Sapolsky, and Gabor Maté. For spiritual nuggets, the team behind After Skool.
Sources are trickier to convey for environmentalism, so a backtrace might be a better format. Emily Grossman wrote a great overview of the scientific literature for Extinction Rebellion. It is propaganda, but still a great reference. Josh Schlossberg’s Green Root podcast has numerous guests with sound counterpoints to the latter. The voices at the COP26 Coalition as well, with a focus more on anti-colonial and anti-mining questions. Movies like Planet of the Human, Burned, Kiss the Ground, and More of Everything do too. The latter two lay out the source of the carbon hockey stick in passing. Good next steps include Stephen Corry, Chris Lang, and the teams at Survival International, the World Rainforest Movement, the Green Finance Observatory, and the Corner House. Reviled critics like Patrick Moore or Steven Koonin are good follow-ups to question the science propaganda. Analysts like Cory Morningstar, Whitney Webb, Iain Davis, and Paul Cudenec are good places to go from there for the agenda. For a daily walkthrough of the propaganda, find Ryan Cristián at thelastamericanvagabond.com. For primers, find James Corbett at corbettreport.com. For the assault on our food supply, find Christian Westbrook at iceagefarmer.com.
The idea that nature is language, which permeates this book, is less easy to backtrack. Ioannis Kannelos introduced me to formal logic and linguistics in artificial intelligence classes. Thibault de Swarte, to psychoanalysis and Michel Maffesoli while I was into social psychology. Later influences were plenty, but too diverse to recall off the top of my head and it would have been a nugget every here and there anyway. The insight that symbols have two facets is from a second hand account of Christopher Alexander. Sahd Guru discusses it explicitly when he distinguishes fate from destiny. Allan Savory, implicitly, when he distinguishes systems that you can direct from those what you must manage. Permaculture introduced me to designing around minimized input and waste rather than to maximized output, which made the rest fall into place.
The link between nature, language, social psychology, and holistic thinking ties into the liar’s paradox and Gödel’s theorem. Both hinge on confusing inner and outer contexts. What we experience as reality, tell as lore, write as scripture, demonstrate as science, or worship as idols are all beliefs. What our mind does is materialize emotions. Memory formation is essentially proof by repetition, with emotional density serving as a catalyst — hence trauma and tricks to get better recall by entangling context. What we perceive and believe exactly matters less than our ability to communicate about our beliefs and arrive at a shared interpretation of what they mean. Truths and falsehoods are actually about the way we relate to our beliefs. We readily associate ourselves with empowering truths (pull, self), and we actively dissociate ourselves from disempowering falsehoods (push, other). Or put succinctly, there is only truth in love.
My beloved wife Andrea and our daughter Anna get full credits for empowering me with their love and support while I was writing these pages.
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