In this instalment of The Climate Trials, we learn a little bit of another project that the Old Ones are working on---the Land Gods. Can you tell what is Guelph's most obvious functional Land God? It's a human-built structure, but it was placed there by the planning department to protect the environment around it from future development. (If you can't think of it, here it is.)
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Recollections by Mikhail Bookchin
About the same time that I connected with the Elders, I noticed something odd happening in my home town.
Like everyone else, I’ve noticed the odd impromptu “shrine” at the side of the road where someone had died in a car accident. People leave flowers, sometimes a cross, sometimes with a picture. In the city, I’d seen the same thing once in a while. Flowers or tea lights where someone had been killed one way or another.
But then I started noticing something I’d never seen before, little “shrines” in places where some natural thing was particularly beautiful. The first example was an old, gnarly tree in a city park. It wasn’t terribly ostentatious, but you could see that someone had put up a tiny little altar where people were burning incense once in a while. There was also a little taiji---or “yin-yang”---unobtrusively carved into the trunk of the tree above where the incense was being burnt. I had the vague inspiration that this might have something to do with the Elders, so I emailed them and asked if they knew anything about it.
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A couple days later I got this:
The Land God Project
The Old Ones have several projects on the go at this time. One of them is an attempt to recreate in modern society the sort of reverence that ancient peoples used to have for the environment. We are doing this by trying to get individuals to start treating specific parts of the existing landscape as what the old Chinese called “Land Gods”.
Many literate people have heard of the old Chinese story about the carpenter and the “useless tree”. Briefly, it talks about a master carpenter who was travelling with a group of apprentices. Along the way they see a spectacularly huge and ancient oak tree. One of the young people asked the teacher whether or not the tree would be worth something. His reply was that obviously the wood was totally worthless or it would never have survived as long as it had in a public space. Maybe the grain was all twisted, or the wood rots very fast, or something else. The “take away” is that for anything to survive a long time it has to be something that is isolated from the ebb and flow of the human world around it. In the story’s case, this is done by the tree’s refusal to be of any utility.
What this popularly known story misses, however, is that it is described as “being the local shrine” (it’s in the Zhuangzi, if you want to look it up). In the Victor Mair translation, a student mentions this point
“If the oak’s intention is to be useless, then why does it serve as the local shrine? They asked.
“Silence! Don’t say another word! The oak is merely assuming the guise of a shrine to ward off the curses of those who do not understand it. If it were not a shrine, it would still face the threat of being cut down. Moreover, what the oak is preserving is different from the masses of other trees. If we attempt to understand it on the basis of conventional morality, won’t we be far from the point?”
Land Gods continue to exist in isolated parts of Taiwan, but have mostly died out in the modern world. But there seems to be a basic instinct among human beings to create shrines, which is why there are---as you noted---roadside shrines being spontaneously erected along highways where people have died. Some urban environments also have shrines plus the outline of a bicycle painted on the pavement where someone has died in a bicycle/car collision. In addition, some “mega shrines” have been created after a mass killing or the death of a celebrity---the pile of flowers, etc, dedicated to the memory of Princess Diana comes to mind.
One of the Elders proposed that if we were able to get the Land God meme working again in modern society it might create a useful “brake” that could slow down developers and other business enterprises from making money off bulldozing the environment. Since the opportunity cost of creating these impromptu shrines is very low, some of our operatives have been working creating memes with the hope that they will eventually hit critical mass and spread throughout society.
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Moreover I say unto you, the Climate Emergency must be dealt with!
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