up against it, part 2

For a day after I post something new, I watch my stats, mostly expecting to see a precipitous drop in subscribers and visitors. I've turned a corner in which I'm willing to extend the same hand in support and congeniality but also inclined to speak fiercely of things I feel more deeply than I thought possible. I'm no feel-good writer, that's for sure. I'm not a “50 Ways to Save the Earth” sort of person. I'm the opposite of those, actually. So while I'm not surprised that I remain so small-time in the field of activist writers, I am surprised that I've attracted even this many readers.

Just recently I've been reading over some past posts, trying to get some objective perspective – trying to read them as a person who struggles to get food on the table while yearning to do good in the world. In other words, an average person, which is what I am. And I get the feeling that I've become very depressing of late. I can't say you've simply misinterpreted me, if that's your perception as well. It's true that I've slipped into a sort of despair about the world, and because I write intimately, it's inevitable that this comes across to you.

I'm still digesting the events of the Deep Green Resistance workshop I attended back in May. Walking out of the workshop was like leaving a tent in the woods only to land immediately on a 6-lane highway. It was an absolute relief, a giddy relief, to finally be among folks who accepted as a given, a foundational reality, that this way of life is functionally irredeemable... but that was just a room, a small room with small people talking about ideas too big to carry by hand. Leaving that room, I started the long descent, and I'm still in it.

Since I wrote up against it, I've been trying to compile some follow-up comments. I recognize this impulse to apologize for everything I do in life, everything I say. I regret everything the minute it leaves my lips or fingertips. I don't know how to put anything into the world and then just leave it there. Immediately I want to call it back, or parry, or compromise, or back-pedal. It's so rare that I can say, "Take it or leave it." I don't know how I can feel something so intensely inside but be so reluctant to defend it once it leaves me.

I am so filled with despair some days that I find it difficult to function. I walk with my children in the amazing woods around our cabin and feel compelled to explain -- to plead with them to understand -- the importance of this land. I name for them every plant and animal that I can identify. I tell them the little bit that I know about the people who lived here for thousands of years before this civilization arrived and decimated the living.

It is in my son's nature to hug every tree he sees. He's in that delightful age of 6 and everything is just so damn funny and fantastic, his face is like a lamp, burning so brightly. He finds snakes and lizards and frogs and slugs and everything, everything is just so alive to him. Thinking that I was once that way and had it beat out of me, figuratively and literally, makes me want to curl up in a ball. The thought of this happening to him makes me feel ready to stockpile weapons and take the city by siege. A pit's been mined in my belly and I can't fill it right now. I just can't.

At the DGR workshop Derrick Jensen was asked how he retains hope against these impossible odds. He's a non-linear speaker just as much as a non-linear writer, so for a while he ruminated on the meaning of the word "hope" before saying, paraphrased, something like this.

"What I see right now is that people aren't doing shit. I think things will get a little worse and they still won't do shit. It will get much worse and they still won't do shit. Then it will really collapse and they still won't do shit. And in the aftermath they still won't do shit. I'm ninety-nine-point-seven percent certain that this is how it will go."

Then he turned to Aric McBay and asked his opinion.

Aric said, "Well, I think I'm a little less optimistic than Derrick."

And everyone laughed, because seriously, what else can you do?

 (Banana slugs are more effective.)

This is how I feel, too. I look around and ask around and I see that nobody's doing shit to help their landbase recover from industrialization -- and that includes me. At this exact moment, I'm typing on a laptop in a popular chain coffee shop with a paper cup full of imported coffee. I'm not doing shit to help my landbase recover from industrialization. For all the talk about underground vs. aboveground, security culture vs. signed agreements, direct action vs. petitions, pacifism vs. justified violence, most of us aren't doing shit. We're playing Dungeons & Dragons. We're role-playing. We're stroking ourselves that we're on the right side of this war (and it is a war), but they keep killing everything and we keep watching it happen.

And for most of us it's because we're rightfully paralyzed by ineffectiveness. We know that we can't strike anywhere in any capacity and have a lasting impact. Take out a dam and it's back up two weeks later. Sign a hundred-thousand petitions and see the same ol' assholes elected. Go to school for a hundred years to become an environmental lawyer and find yourself working on behalf of corporations. We're losing this fight.

So why am I still here? 

If not for my brief foray into patriarchal religion I probably wouldn't have had children, but if not for my children I might not have understood that religion for what it was, and escaped, and I might not have a clear picture of the devastation in this world, or such a desperate imperative to stop it. I see in my children that humans are not inherently violent, consumptive, or destructive. Instead we are intensely socialized into false traditions of obedience, gender, economics, patriarchy, media, government, religion, history, and other forces that work relentlessly to shuffle us into spirals of self-hatred, narcissism, hierarchy, mechanization, and spectacle until we are completely lost to ourselves and each other.

I see these forces at work constantly, and it is a full-time job teaching my children otherwise. It is a full-time job, grooming them to be fighters, to stay wildly in love with this Earth. And I suck at it. But how I can do anything else?


It also gives me hope to live where I do. I've no doubt that this area could be entirely self-sufficient again in food, water, and energy. Though we have our problems, this place hasn't been bludgeoned just yet; if we backed off even a bit this land could snap back to its rightful glory. There are places on this Earth where life still runs wild, where a sizable portion of the human population is intent on keeping it that way. Somehow, I landed in one of those places, and I'll do whatever I can to tread lightly. It gives me tremendous hope to see this collective effort coming to fruition here. It's a privilege to live here and not one I take lightly.

And finally, I have some hope because of emails like the one I received from Ashley Sanders, a Salt Lake City activist. She made a list of all the amazing things she's doing right now: writing plays, books, and documentaries to support the oppressed; creating community; developing and hosting trainings and classes; and working politically to stop local companies from poisoning the land.

I felt exhausted just reading this list. But then she went on to say that she worried nothing she did counted for anything. She was too exclusive or not exclusive enough, or received accusations of being too radical or not radical enough; but no matter what, she was not effective. She was not ending industrial civilization, or capitalism, or oil dependence, or social stratification, or oppression of women or the queer community or people of color, today.

But then she went on to say that she's pulling back on the concern about absolute effectiveness. She explains,

I remember being down in Arizona with R., who was doing everything he knew to stop the imprisonment and killing and hatred of undocumented immigrants. We were talking about solidarity, the buzzword of buzzwords in the punk community. “We can’t just go into some town somewhere and bring food and water and build a house,” everyone would repeat. “We have to have solidarity.” But one night, in a very honest moment, R. said to me: “You know what? Sometimes I feel I am back where I started. Sometimes I feel like solidarity, in the end, looks a whole lot like the diluted travel philanthropy we all make so much fun of. Sometimes I think that maybe the best thing you can do is to bring that one person some of that one kind of food. Sometimes I think that a house after a hurricane is the real thing. Sometimes I think it is all about however you can become someone’s friend.” 

Sometimes I wonder if you get to a point of radicalism where you are back to trying everything, back to supporting every small good deed -- but this time with some serious savvy and some serious desperation. Sometimes I think true radicalism is seeing the world with one eye on the species and one eye on the individual.

And I think she's right.

After my post I heard a lot of this: "So what are you going to do?" I expected it to come. I wished, for a while, that I had some prepared answer. I had a hard time articulating my plans. After a while, though, I thought back to something Derrick Jensen has said about "replacing" industrial civilization. He says he wants not one culture but thousands, hundreds of thousands. And when asked about direct action vs. petitions he says we need it all. We need every single small and large action of resistance to this culture. So what I will do is not terribly relevant to you. What does your ecosystem need? What's standing in the way of your landbase recovering? And what can you do to remove those obstacles -- what seeds can you plant that will burst through them? These are the questions I hoped would sprout from my post.

At the workshop it was said succinctly: almost everyone develops resistance aboveground. A tiny minority work underground on direct action. I'm in the aboveground. I'm saying here where anyone can hear me: this civilization is fucked, and we'll be fucked with it if we don't stop sitting on our hands. The collective conscience being soothed by corporate greenwashing has so much more potential than back-slapping about hybrid cars. I want to hear people recognize that "voting with our dollars" will not help the planet, and not because I think it's healthy to feel depressed and helpless, but because if we stop fooling ourselves about this then we can move on to the real work.

But first, we have to hit bottom. We have to die to these lies, throwing up our hands because we simply cannot pray or pay our way out of ecological disintegration -- much more is required of us, and most of the time, our efforts will fail. Coming to this knowledge is a process of deepest despair. It is a physical ache, a sense of loss like the death of a beloved friend, and sometimes I worry that I won't be able to come out the other side of it, or that another side doesn't exist. But it does: when we dismiss this approach there will be nothing left but to confront the fundamental sickness of this culture. And the results of that confrontation can only be positive.

More from Ashley:

Rio Tinto, one of the wealthiest mining companies in the world, owns the largest copper mine in the world -- a giant pit just west of Salt Lake City. At hand was a permitting question: should Rio Tinto be allowed to expand that mine by 30%? A lot of people came and said a lot of things, but that doesn't matter -- it didn't matter to the outcome of the decision and it doesn't matter to this story.

The only thing I want to say about it is that I remember this lady being there, blonde hair and blue pumps and a sensible jacket. She stood up. She spoke into the microphone.  "Hello," she said,  "I am the director of sustainability for Rio Tinto/Kennecott." She explained that she was in charge of the Idle Free campaign at the site, which banned trucks from idling while they waited for new shipments of ore. They had saved so many measurements of CO2 from entering the atmosphere.

I saw her opponents nodding, reconsidering, losing their nerve. There were many more comments, some praising her for her campaign and others deriding it. But you know what was never said? No one ever asked how it was sustainable to stop a few trucks from idling at the edge of the largest copper pit in the world. No one ever asked about the mine at all.

I have no idea how to bring this down. I think Jensen and McBay are correct about our long-term prospects. But I have to believe -- I can only stay alive if I believe -- that our small deaths count for something, as we die to this culture and are reborn in the real world. We're part of something more ancient than this mess, something sprouting from our very marrow that despises the concept of disposability, whether it's people or plastic or pigs that are being thrown away.

Even if our work comes to naught, we're reaching our root-hairs down into this Earth and remembering those first laws -- what will remain after the dominant culture passes on.