I wrote this while sitting on a redwood deck,
shaded by cypress, overlooking the ocean and San Francisco. We are exorbitantly
lucky humans, enjoying the organic fruits of a capitalist system while
taking moral pleasure in condemning its faults. I thought it necessary
to pay homage to West Marin, as I am new here and living under the suspicious
glare of old-timers.
Not everyone in West Marin is well off, but even the
homeless here live better lives than their peers in Chicago or Calcutta.
The first world itself is a small bubble of consumptive prosperity and
civil rights. Much of the rest of the world lives in abject poverty
and filth, like the favela slums of South America, where children wade
through shit and pick through garbage. Within the first world bubble
is an even tinier microcosmos; the skinny-dipping, goat-milking, free-thinking
alternate universe of West Marin. This is as good as it gets.
The human migratory path is from the forest
to the city slum. Agricultural subsidies from the European Union, Japan,
and the United States make rural life all but impossible in many parts
of the world. West Africa has the most fertile soil for cotton –
dark and wet. But West African villagers can’t sell their cotton
above their price of production because the United States massively
subsidizes irrigated cotton farming in the California desert. Every
village of the world is now lit by the glow of satellite televisions
hooked to car batteries. And there is nothing more alluring than the
pop and sizzle of cosmopolitan life, of short shorts and Fanta. This
is best illustrated by Sabastio Salgado’s photographic book, Migrations.
We in West Marin are flying into the headwind of this
migration, battling our way from the cities to this small refuge of
wilderness. Turning off our televisions. We are undomesticated humans
who have lost our habitat and fled to the Wild Animal Park. I would
rather be nowhere else. Better to live in an artificially maintained,
museum piece of oceanfront forest, than none at all. Better to have
a Muir Woods with roped trails than no old-growth redwoods at all. Better
to live among the undomesticated, the heretics and eccentrics, the black
sheep and maladjusted, the wild entrepreneurs of life, than those who
are gluttonously happy shuttling between work, tract home and mall.