John Shuttleworth, Founder of Mother Earth News, Interview Part I
(Page 12 of 17)
January/February 1975
By John Shuttleworth
On the other hand, the ten years was certainly not an uninterrupted round of solid hilarity. As I covered more and more ground and met the military-industrial complex and agribiz and the corporate structure and sprawling suburbs and blind human greed and planet-damaging shortsightedness around every bend in the road, I was often just completely overwhelmed. Crushed. Depressed. Damn. I was only one, and there seemed to be so many on the other side.
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But I turned that to my advantage, see. I figured that the guys selling all the schlock must have some powerful tools on their side, tools that could be used just as easily to sell clean air and self-sufficiency and less energy-intensive lifestyles. And I began worming my way into "the heart of the monster," so to speak, to learn what made it tick.
That's why I worked in an advertising agency right on New York's Madison Avenue, and why I put some time in with the crew that sold the SST — I like slower aircraft, but the SST is just an ecological disaster — to the FAA, and why I did a lot of the other things I did during that period of my life. I was looking for those levers of power, you know. I was trying to find out how "they" sold all that schlock to each other. I was a spy within the so-called system.
PLOWBOY: And what did you learn?
SHUTTLEWORTH: First, I learned that few people living in a modern, industrialized, urban society are 1/100 as alive as the simplest peasants I've spent time with in the Mexican countryside. Few are as vital as the old men and women I knew in Hawaii, men and women from the last, tattered fringes of the all-but-gone Polynesian culture. Few are as knowledgeable about real life and international matters as the remote homesteaders I've lived with on "back of beyond" cattle spreads hidden deep in the mountains of British Columbia.
Modern, industrialized man — I've found — does, as the saying goes, tend to "know more and more about less and less." He also tends to compound this ignorance by selectively closing his eyes and playing even dumber than he is when he thinks that such action is to his advantage. "What? My factory is polluting the river? Why I didn't know that." "Gee, you mean to say it takes energy and non-renewable resources to build stereo sets and press record albums?" "Yeah, I know they're strip-mining West Virginia to produce the electricity I use, but I don't think that leaving this one little light on will make any difference."
In short, our increasingly industrialized existence [1] tends to cut us off so completely from real life that we lose our ability to understand, comprehend and appreciate the natural world and [2] it tends to drug us so that we don't even want to be bothered by real life anymore. We live in a junkie culture that wants to be sold the next fix, and the one after that, and another and another. Which is a powerful advantage for the guys doing the selling.
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