Corporate Campus Crimes

Corporate Campus Crimes²

Fortunately or unfortunately, I live in proximity to several corporate headquarters, and have had to include their campuses to get in a variable trek for my lengthy dog walkings. The experience from these trespasses has afforded me to develop a fledgling academic field by the name of Comparative Corporate Campus Ruminations. I say trespass, but from my perspective there is certainly also an impingement on me—and other lives much bigger than mine—which I suppose is the prime mover behind this post’s existence. So far all the walks have been very tranquil, whether on a weekday morning or a weekend evening. The natural sounds from crickets and locusts emanate from the tree packed margins—the “wild space” separating one corporate kingdom from its neighbor. Tree packed? It’s a relative term contrasted against the spacious, breathable, un-claustrophobic lawns occasioned by small tree islands. The scope of corporate lawns alone is an advertisement that these corporations are economy-driving job creators: think about how much mowing there is to benefit the backbone landscaping industry.

Tranquilized Environments: No More Kidding?

A third, “reserve” parking lot, thought what it’s reserving I can’t say. I think they couldn’t pass up on a “build two, get the third free” deal.

Why should I complain about something so pleasant, like having a free visit to a country club¹? Even the parking is free, that is if you can find a spot. So much of the landscape that isn’t lawn is taken up by an assortment of giant asphalt solar tarps, where to park the car? These passive solar heaters must have been installed to counter the air conditioning system that must make things inside oppressively cold. One good thing then, at least, is that the people that work inside the large five story building must be forced to walk through the greened campus from wherever they park their cars, or where public transportation drops them off. There are, of course, the occasional rebels that decide to park on the asphalt solar tarps, but I’m sure corporations have a means of dealing with people who break their rule(s), such as placing the offender in a south-facing corner office where they are forced to see a blue-tinted sunny landscape all day long, as opposed to a choice cubicle with four generic walls to keep them company.

“Then I guess we don’t have to worry about finding people in that water.”
“Or leeches!”
“What’s the difference?”

Changing Registers: No More Kidding!

In witness to overwhelming tragedy humans will sometimes make light of things to obscure the horror, as I have attempted above. However, I would like now to shine light on this particular tragedy because the voice of the ecosystem, which humans are generally deaf to, has now been eternally silenced. It’s hard to think of the past voices of grave-less plants, fungi, and animals when things are so quiet and peaceful; for me it is a sickening peace, the peace that follows a successful genocide.

With a little imagination the crime becomes obvious: 15 acres of tons upon tons of accumulated biomass—also known as life—virtually annihilated so that a few dozen humans can spend their “productive” hours sitting in a 1/4 acre office building. The crime is not past, and it is not contained to the crime scenery. An actively intoxicated water source—such as the pond in the picture above—is sure to spread toxicity in ways that a criminal designer and property manager had no thought of, or worse, cared little about. Otherwise, maybe their thinking is much more subtle, and entirely anti-life, such as:

“If we let mosquitoes breed, we will inevitably let a whole aquaculture ecosystem spawn full of mosquito predators on up the food chain, such as fish and frogs, and that is absolutely not acceptable. We dare not let mosquitoes be part of an ecosystem that will control their numbers far more efficiently and regularly than our own chemical industry allies.”

Not all corporate campuses will attempt the false glamour of a perpetually poisoned pond. Usually they will contribute their dose of waste and toxicity by implementing a water projecting fountain and be satisfied with chemically treated lawns and deserted mulch beds. With precaution, visit one of these campuses to analyze the health threats for yourself. These crimes are actively happening around us, whether we see them or not, and whether the laws recognize them or not. Don’t hold your breath for any black-robed dishonors to rescue us and correctly judge this as a crime—we must be the judges! We must figure out what is appropriate remediation and justice before our own victimage becomes too great a burden and we need to rely on others to defend us. If not, the case studies will continue to pile up along with ecosystem carcasses.

Notes (correctly disordered):

2 – Concisely Conveying Cronnie Congressmen Cordially Condoning Corporate Campus Crimes (3C²) is an alternate title,though this article doesn’t remark on legislators and other representatives. However, this alternate title is still fitting, for it’s no lie that elected (and unelected) officials are implicitly involved in allowing particular industrial and commercial practices to go unchecked, practices ironically that they sign bills to outlaw private citizens from undertaking. I know some people are upset that corporations have the same legal status as actual people, but I think they’d be more upset if they realized corporations have a higher legal status than us. A two tier system has been created with individuals placed at the sewer level.

1 – Country Club (2C¹)could be looked at as a euphemism for country clubbed down by modern industrial civilization. This relates to another, more sinister euphemism pointed out by Noam Chomsky: the Defense Department was the new title given to the War Department after WW2; the only thing that changed (other than the name) was the increasing amount of wars the USA would become involved with.

Update:

I “meme’ized” this picture:

and here’s another, arguably related:

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Stressed Out? It’s Because You Have Too Much Shit On Your Plate

If you live in the United States where the topsoil is quickly eroding and the topsoil that does remain is severely mineral depleted—low zinc and magnesium, to mention two of the most important—you are more susceptible to the negative effects of stress. This current phase of civilization we are suffering through is also particularly stressful, I’d argue, as we all have to endure the certain sense that comes with this slow wither; it’s pulling us all down, even if we aren’t fully sure why or from where it’s coming.

The societal decadence is realized in humans most directly by a function of our awful (SAD) diets. The food that you are (not) eating has a very big impact on your body. Take a lesson from animals, and think about any animal besides humans and how getting food is what their lives revolve around, and how they will drop everything for a chance at food. We are not prioritizing food enough—especially quality food—and we need to each change when we are healthy enough that a few years of proper eating can heal us without the need for debilitating western medical interventions. As for our relation to animals, we need training from them because the domestication of humans has pulled us so far from our olde animalistic patterns.

Instead of me regurgitating more cud for you to chew on, it’s better you go to the greener pastures to read what you have been missing:

• Zinc and Manganese Deficiencies and Psychological Disorders

• Standard American Diet in a (Pre)Historical Perspective

• Weston A Price Diet Guidelines

• Rebuilding Soil Using Permaculture Techniques

Petroleum Walking: Separate Yourself From the Wheat and the Chaff

I was looking at crowds of people in the park, making the best of a colder than ideal sunday, and couldn’t help but think about how ephemeral and dependent this whole situation was on fossil fuels. Rightly so, most people were being in the moment, but many of the preceding moments (decades and centuries) contained lots of “ungrounded” activities focused on combing the earth for more and more stores of natural resources, the current rage being fossil fuels, most especially oil.

Oil is how we drive, but because of the amount of oil being used to grow our food and in some cases heat our homes, it is how we walk. The oil can be traced in our bodies and blood, and is energizing (or enervating) our motion. As far as oil in food, we have “cleaner” petroleum free options, and for meat we too have organic as well as grass fed, but what is the grass fed itself? In so many industrial and residential practices, grass is fed petrol chemicals as if its been thirsty for millions of years when nature sans humans wasn’t providing it. What percentage of all of our bodies is petroleum byproduct? I have taken on a fairly strict paleo-ketogenic (bulletproof-esque) diet for the past few months, but I don’t delude myself into thinking that I am close to petrol free.

In contrast to a paleo diet, I’d like to mention the staple (funny, staples keep things stuck) crop of wheat, which because of its inefficient nutrient density and nutrient uptake, is very dependent on direct and indirect petroleum inputs for maintenance to keep the fields in a constant state of imbalance, relative to nature’s corrective yearnings. Wheat is destructive to the human species, more so now because of the partially petroleum laced chemical, glyphosate, now sprayed on the wheat before harvesting. But even before these additional petrol perils, western culture has survived despite eating wheat, not because of eating wheat (sorry Kropotkin, you didn’t know, but maybe we should change this title… or maybe its appropriate in the negative sense of bread). Whether you have problems with gluten or not, its best to separate yourself from both the wheat and the chaff.

So, back to the picture above, we can say that the people themselves wouldn’t be the same if petroleum wasn’t a part of our world. Certainly the dress would be different, more earthly perhaps (definitely no nylon), and they would on average be substantially healthier, despite whatever petroleum dependent medical advances might have to offer.

Would there be less people, in this colder climate, if fossil fuels weren’t there to support their needs? There would certainly be fewer people if there was a reversion to agriculture as it was practiced in the pre-industrial revolution era, with its obviously poor understanding of how to produce the lushest high quantity and quality yield on a given piece of land… permaculture excels at considering the needs of the land to be the most versatile and productive. If these permaculture principles were the mainstay of our agricultural practices (and we were “oil sans”, opposed to Canada), the densely populated state of New Jersey could be as populated or even moreso, with a lot more (meaningful) employment, and less commuting across the Hudson River to the hollow “shelled out” city of New York.

The Meal Ordeal: Is Grassfed Veal the Real Deal?

So I was at Wholefoods and looking for grass fed beef liver and they only had grassfed veal liver. My skeptical self, I couldn’t help but wonder if grassfed veal is another scamming, cheapskatish way of selling you “bullshit”… eerily close to a pun.

They have grass fed and then grass finished, nuanced uses of words that probably allow the industries to not deliver what they are purporting to, but I wonder if there is a notion with veal of “grass beginning”? Basically, my skepticism is that the industry is having calves be born from “traditionally” grain-fed mothers who are dumping all their toxic load onto the calf—a similar mechanism which has been theorized for how autistic kids derive their super-toxicity. They then feed the veal nothing but grass for its short life before they slaughter it, and can now label it “grass fed”, when really we can all figure out that the most important considerations is what its mother was fed (grass or grains) while the calf was in uterro (not to mention whether or not it was given its mother’s milk before or in conjunction with being grass fed).

Anyways, I am no cattle expert, and I think this is what the meat industry is hoping for—that most of us know so little about their world that they can maximize profit by changing as little of their bad practices.

When You Catch the Plague…

…Return to the earth, before you are placed there regardless of your best efforts to prevent it! Anyone’s plague susceptibility (anyone in western society, at least) is in large part due to our general distance from the earth and all the balancing properties intrinsic to it. I mean this a lot more literally than you might thus far think:

For a long time I’ve held and—when feeling jolly and okay with taking on the role of a friendly goof—spoken that if one is ever very sick, especially with a high fever and an unknown diagnosis/prognosis, the best remedy is to bury oneself naked, standing/leaning most of the way under the soil with just your head exposed. There is something very intuitive to this idea that I could never dismiss as being absurd, and also it is the most holistic thing I think you can do for yourself, even perhaps before you are deathly ill. We all ultimately are made of the earth, no? Why not reduce our surface exposure when we are most vulnerable, and let the mother protect us? It’s compelling to think of being surrounded by a cooling soil when you are highly fevered; or having this firm, reassuring hug when you have the chills; or allowing a solid substance to absorb and dissipate your waves of nausea.

Of course this is not something that I would personally brave to do if I were seasonally sick or unwell, being so stupidly invested in polite society and trying to appear as normal as possible… but if I woke up with a Lou Gehrig feeling of a countdown to my death, I would get my ass into a muddy hole very quickly.

I think this notion might have stemmed out of noticing how much better I feel lying on the floor than up on a bed while enduring a stomach virus, and there daydreaming of being outside and feeling even better (of course its ironic that when people are very ill they are kept inside, even when it is a beautiful day). When sick I would also do things to numb my senses by throwing a towel over my head and closing my eyes to make everything seem more distant. I have a feeling that the earth has incredible abilities to mute our minds when they are reeling in agony. Our senses which enable us to be highly mobile and defend ourselves in a faster paced above ground scenario, will be rightfully allowed to put their guards down, and we can allow ourselves to become tree-ish and effectively weather the onslaught.

So what of the seasonally frozen tundra that so much of western society has stubbornly deployed itself upon? I think the ground being frozen is a big message to all of us that we aren’t supposed to be living here, or that we need to hibernate.