My belief is we’re blinded to the real social things driving our societies by our obsessive focus on the…

My belief is we’re blinded to the real social things driving our societies by our obsessive focus on the daily team sports of ‘politics’, really just the names of teams in the same social melee. But here’s a rare window into the engine room. /1 https://t.co/LpgPbG9MGK https://t.co/2yrKeUxYSh

The idea of the ‘country’. Or the bush, as Australians like to call it. To paraphrase John Clarke, that place they like to pretend they live. Here’s the thing. There is no such thing as ‘the country’. Understanding why will reveal more ground truths of our cultures. /2

If you look at the history of pretty much every country town in Australia, for example, you’ll find the same thing. These were early extractive industries for the cities. The place they went looking for ‘resources’. Mostly farming and mining. /3

The fact these areas were sparsely populated by the farmers and miners created the fantasy that they were living an entirely different form of life to their city cousins. But they weren’t. Again, they were just extracting ‘resources’ from the land out there. /4

City/country is a fake divide. And you can see that in real time right now, in the article, how country towns simply disappear, once their extractive industries close up shop or stop employing anybody. Some try to stay alive becoming tourist destinations. /5

Transforming their towns into frozen-in-time theme parks for bored city dwellers looking for something to do in their time off. And/or gentrifying the towns, to replicate some of that exclusive leafy green feel of rich suburbs in cities, for less money. /6

Which mostly just floods the town with hipsters, who create nothing except expensive coffee, food and haircuts. Let’s get to the deepest cultural point here. /7

As old imperial cultures, by definition we never live IN the landscape. We never *inhabit* it. We live ON it. It’s only a resource to be plundered, to be returned to the centre of the empire. That’s what empires do. /8

We live inside maps, generated to facilitate transport of these resources. We then turn the rest of the world into the same, and make those locations our ‘bucket list’ of ‘places to see’. Like aristocratic youth on their eternal Grand Tour. /9

Just look at how much of our obsessive travel culture is about creating opportunities to generate selfies for our socials feeds. We never leave home, travel is just more fuel for our status games in our social groups. /10

Most of the ecological catastrophe of modern life is this simple, social/cultural fact. We have NO IDEA how to live IN a landscape. Only on it. We bulldoze most of it away to make room for our homes, which we then bid as casino chips in housing markets. /11

Longer term this means extinction. The landscape is all that ultimately sustains us, as many Indigenous peoples figured out over thousands of years. But how you do you live in it, rather than on it? /12

We pretend that means buying a big 4WD and churning it up on our wankpanzer Crocodile Dundee fantasies, of getting back in touch with our country. Just more theme park culture. Dundee is like the Elvis of landscapes in Australia, the white guy re-branding black culture. /13

Or the ‘back to nature’ crowd, worshipping the mess out there now as some holy object. Both at total arm’s length from actual habitation with the landscape. /14

There are no simple answers. It took our own Aboriginal culture thousands of years to create the landscapes we took off them. We idiotically thought they were ‘wild’ landscapes. They are now. Much of it a desolate wasteland. /end