The result of last week’s election was both unsurprising and, oddly helpful. It demonstrated what many of us already know; that most of the electorate are ill-informed, and incapable of making even a basic, reasonable decision. We know that the media is corporately controlled and designed to protect corporate interests. We know that this culture’s downward spiral is accelerating and that it will not voluntarily transform itself into the promised “better society”.
It was perhaps the starkest choice the British electorate has ever had to face. On the one hand a racist, sexist, upper class, proven liar at the head of a political party that offered very little (in reality) for the people. On the other, an imperfect but, seemingly, honest man with a history of integrity, who has fought for disadvantaged people for decades. A man at the head of a party whose policies might at least have helped those less well off in the UK, people who really needed immediate relief from austerity. I normally spoil my ballot paper because I want radical not incremental change . This year I voted.
I knew that my vote would not be enough. Corbyn’s policies, at least less destructive than the Sociopath’s, did not go nearly far enough in terms of halting the destruction of the earth. I knew that even if Corbyn won we would still have to resist. I voted because it was a choice between a vile self-centred man who craves power and a decent human being whose aim is to help the disadvantaged.
I was disappointed but not surprised when the country elected the Sociopath. This is a profoundly dishonest and sociopathic culture. Psychologist, J. Schumaker (2016) claims “Human culture has mutated into a sociopathic marketing machine dominated by economic priorities and psychological manipulation.”, so of course it would elect a dishonest sociopath to lead it. In actual fact, the more you learn, the more you realise the situation is far worse than that. Life on earth is facing extermination. Everyday 200 species disappear forever, climate change accelerates, this culture continues to poison our air, water and land. If life is to survive we need to create a vibrant diverse culture of resistance.
According to Umail Haque, Anglo-America is “entering a death spiral, from which there’s probably no return.” The “only two rich societies in the world with falling lifeexpectancies, incomes, savings, happiness, trust — every single social indicator you can imagine — are America and Britain.” In fact the whole world is in a death spiral, or rather, industrial civilisation is killing life on earth. Every single ecosystem is in decline. You might think this is an exaggeration, in which case I invite you to investigate. It is a hard truth to face but we ALL NEED TO face it and ACT. We need to resist or we die.
In the The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History (2014) Elizabeth Kolbert and the scientists she interviews, identify three main causes of global extinction; climate change/ocean acidification, habitat loss and foreign species introduction. Pre-industrialised humanity did not cause climate change and ocean acidification. Habitat loss was not caused by indigenous people, it was caused by agriculture and the spread of civilisation. Foreign species introduction only became a global problem with the rise of globalisation. Industrial civilisation is not causing the 6th mass extinction, rather it is committing the first mass extermination of life on earth. It is not an extinction event. It is genocide.
Johnathan Cook claims that this election has helped to burn the illusion that we live in a functioning democracy. We do not. As Chris Hedgespoints out, the corporate coup d’etat took place decades ago. The media is owned by the elite and they would not permit a man who posed a threat to their ability to thrive, to be elected. Cook also points to part of the solution, stating we must take to the streets. We know this alone will not be enough.
We need to stop the idiocy, we need to increase people’s ability to think things through, we need to take this whole mess down. We need a resistance movement that knows what the root cause of the problem is; industrial civilisation. A movement schooled in the strategies and tactics that have led to unlikely victories in the past. We need support networks. Sabotage. Educated, underground, militant, direct action groups, who are willing to take any necessary action to stop the machinery of this cannibalistic system from poisoning the air, the soil and the sea. We need peaceful protests. We need boycotts. We need strikes and we need people to support the strikers. We need all truly effective actions. We needed it decades ago. We need it now before it is too late.
This election result should not dispirit us. It must galvanise us. I WILL SEE YOU. I will see you in the streets, in the trees, and at the gates of the elite. I will see you at night dismantling the machines of destruction. I will see you in the jungles in front of bulldozers or chasing colonizers from your land. See you at the rivers letting them run free. See you anywhere life is under threat. I see as all working together to turn the tide of this merciless destructive culture. And I see us all regenerating this wild beautiful bleeding world. I see us.
Ben Warner is a longtime organizer with Deep Green Resistance UK. He is a white, urban-raised, middle-class male, who recognises that cities, white supremacy, male supremacy, human supremacy, and capitalism need to be dismantled.
Featured image: original artwork provided by the author.
The first time I was invited to speak to nature in my late twenties, I walked into the oak-hickory forest near the Blue Ridge Mountains, skeptical but eager. A former Outward Bound guide and a Wilderness Therapist, I loved nature and preferred being there to anywhere. I biked and backpacked, kayaked and rock climbed, always longing to be closer in some way, but I didn’t know how. It had never occurred to me that I could have a real conversation.
A squirrel began barking almost immediately. I felt surprised and captivated. The sound grew louder and closer. When I finally looked up, I saw a squirrel only ten feet from my head, looking straight into my eyes and barking loudly. I had witnessed squirrels bark before, but never one like this. He was persistent and emphatic. He barked while maintaining eye contact for a long time. Then he began to move up and down the tree and along several branches, still barking, before returning to the place where we first encountered one another. Again, he looked into my eyes. He seemed neither upset nor injured. It seemed clear this squirrel was tirelessly trying to communicate something, but I felt dense to his message.
I was participating in a Soulcraft Intensive, my first Animas Valley Institute program, and the guides had urged us to wander in nature alone and listen for who wants to speak with us. Soulcraft[1] springs from nature-based cultures, eco-depth-psychology, the poetic tradition, and wilderness rites of passage; it offers a contemporary path to soul discovery.
He must be talking to someone else, I concluded, but I looked around the forest, and there were no other squirrels or animals in site. He moved closer, looked into my eyes, and continued his sequence for more than an hour. I thanked the squirrel, feeling elated to have had this intimate connection even if its meaning was still mysterious.
Our deepest place of belonging is nature. Most young children instinctively sense this connection. They are enchanted by the flutter of hummingbird wings, the colors of wildflowers, and the sounds of a rushing river—until they’re separated from nature, placed behind walls, and removed from the sounds of leaves blowing in the wind and the smell of rain falling on meadows.
We reside within Earth; she’s our home and our greatest teacher. Re-attuning our perception—our sensing, feeling, and imagination—so that we’re able to listen to the Earth is imperative to the wellness of both humans and all of life. Author and activist Chellis Glendinning believes our “original trauma” is the horror of the domination paradigm in Western civilization that has systematically removed our lives from participation in the natural world, a psychic displacement or homelessness.[2] What if the anxieties and mood disorders of the DSM-V[3] are symptoms of this greater illness? What would our treatment be then?
Although I’d witnessed people grow and heal in the wilderness in my roles as guide and therapist, I’d intuited in my heart that even this connection wasn’t deep enough. Nature was still merely a backdrop for human healing. Indigenous nature-based peoples know a deeper way. When I read “conversations across the species border” on an Animas brochure, I knew I had to participate.
A couple weeks after returning home, I walked on the farm where I lived in West Virginia at dusk. Across the small pond, a red fox appeared. He stared at me, and then he too began barking. His bark was different from the squirrel’s, more shrill and piercing. He looked at me and barked for a long time before turning to continue his walk. “What were the squirrel and red fox saying?” I asked in an email to my Animas group. Lauren, my Animas guide, responded, “Perhaps they were noticing and welcoming your presence in the wild world?”
Whatever was happening, it was evoking aliveness and connection. As I remember the squirrel and red fox, I experience Mary Oliver’s words in Wild Geese. I feel the wild world offering itself to my imagination, calling out to me “harsh and exciting,” as if to announce my “place in the family of things.”
Replant Ourselves in Nature
It’s vital we realize that Earth and all its creatures are fully alive; to be healthy ourselves we must attend to our relationship with the Earth community. A “re-enchantment with the Earth as a living reality” is needed to stop the destruction humans are imposing. What we experience as alive and sacred, we naturally want to protect.[4] We can’t be healed separately from the planet, because the human soul exists within the world soul.[5]
Our wholeness comes from rooting in the rhythms and cycles of nature. When tending the health of a damaged ecosystem, we improve the soil quality and plant native species, rather than eliminating invasive species. Likewise, we tend the health of our psyches, not by getting rid of pathology, but by cultivating the “native species” within ourselves. Bill Plotkin’s Nature-Based Map of the Human Psyche offers a pathway to cultivate wholeness by replanting ourselves in the natural world; this occurs through allowing nature to be our primary guide.[6]
When we’re whole, we feel both Earth’s magnificence and her destruction, because we’re no longer separate. This awakening is urgent. “We belong to this world…[and] of all the dangers we face, from climate chaos to nuclear war, none is so great as the deadening of our response.”[7] Our ecological crisis is sourced in our species’ “collective perceptual disorder,”[8] a “collective myopia”[9] that has missed the basic reality of our innate connection to Earth, perhaps originating from “the historical and conceptual split between ‘in-here’ and ‘out-there’”[10] between self and world.
We become whole not only for ourselves, but also to strengthen our capacity to protect and serve our world. Protecting nature means resisting the dominant culture, industrial civilization, a way of life fueled by the perpetual exploitation of peoples and lands in a futile addiction to an unsustainable lifestyle. A strong resistance is one that is multi-faceted; a foundational ingredient is rooting the depths of our psyches in a genuine perception of the Earth as a living and breathing being with whom we can commune and listen.
We must let it direct us. “Nature is an incomparable guide if you know how to follow her.”[11] Laura Sewall offers five practices to cultivate ecological perception:
Learn to attend. With mindful awareness, we get out of our heads, and become open, receptive, and reverent to the forms, textures, and colors of nature.
Perceive the relationship between things. We look at the interface where everything meets everything else and see the Earth through “love eyes.”
Develop perceptual flexibility. We feel how human time interacts with the pace of Earth’s processes and grasp time scales beyond that of a human lifetime.
Re-perceive depth. We recognize that we are within and wholly dependent on the vaster body of Earth, living in a communion similar to that of a lover.
Receive images from Earth through the imaginal self, through body and psyche, like a force of nature entering us. We become co-creative.[12]
Most of us received messages in grade school that imagination isn’t real—that we must put it away like an outgrown toy. Yet nature-based peoples have always experienced imagination as a way to listen and commune with the world. Strengthening our imagination returns us to our primal roots; it’s an avenue to our aliveness. The deepest layer of this realm isn’t under our control, but bubbles up from some mysterious place deep down.[13] It’s not created from our minds, but has its own intelligence. Rather than trying to interpret it, we allow it to guide us; we partner with it in the process of co-creating the world.
Six months after my encounter with the squirrel and red fox, I quit my job, moved out west, and participated in an Animas Quest, a ceremony to be alone in conversation with the land for three days and nights while fasting. Nature was my greatest love, and I put my life on the altar and asked how I might serve. My question, however, was met either with silence or a simple response: “You’re not ready.”
I felt weakest on the third day of the fast. I’d just hiked back up the steep trail after placing a rock on the stone pile to signal I was okay. Every few feet, I had to stop. My heart beat so rapidly it scared me, reminding me of when I’d been diagnosed with non-Hodgkins lymphoma at the age of twenty-one. The two lymph nodes in front of my heart had grown a nine-centimeter tumor. Chemotherapy and radiation had been the prescription, and I was told there was a thirty-three percent chance it would work. It was then that I first learned to let go of my plans and truly listen.
Feeling unsteady from the hike, I sat on a large rock that had invited me to a high perch with its glimmer from across the red rock canyon. It comforted me. “What is my purpose?” I asked, more softly this time, directing my question to the juniper and pinyon trees covering the canyon.
“Brave Heart,” a nearby pinyon pine whispered. I felt disarmed.
“No, that’s a movie.” My response was rapid, but too late to stop the mysterious flood of memories, images, and emotions that ensued, including both moments I had been a brave heart, inciting tear-filled awe, and moments I’d turned away afraid, breaking my heart in utter disappointment. Some memories highlighted my courage to speak the truth and others were of times when I’d silenced my own voice.
Many a night in the months after the quest, this vision awakened me as if asking me to tend my newly de-thawing heart in its unraveling. I’d write poetry at 3 a.m. with tears running down my face, feeling as if a dam had burst and the inner river of my heart and soul and words were finding their way back to life.
Layers of understanding the meaning of “brave heart” unfurled over decades, persuading me that perhaps I was being asked to embody the strength of a warrior and summoning me to hear again the bark of squirrel and red fox as a call to speak out, make a lot of noise, perhaps through guiding or writing.
Restore Animistic Perception
When we listen to the Earth, we may receive the most important instructions of our lives. As Geneen Marie Haughen wrote in “Wild Imagination,” to listen to Earth requires we access our deep imagination; this is a necessary capacity to decolonize the mind and “revive animist perception”—a perception that experiences all things as alive or sentient. For those who experience the world as ensouled, and for whom bear, river, tree, and rock are regarded as intelligent, are more likely to fight against global industrial civilization. Yet it’s difficult to thwart the fragmented narratives that our colonized world urges us to live, and to engage, instead, directly with the natural world and our deep imaginations.[14] Perhaps in part, because this would require us to feel our grief and rage at the ongoing destruction of so many beloved wild places and beings.
One of the oldest belief systems in the world, animism isn’t a religion, but a way of experiencing the world. It suggests that soul or spirit exists not only in humans, but also in animals, plants, rocks, and geographic features such as mountains, oceans, or other entities of nature, including thunder, wind, and stars. Although each culture has different mythologies and rituals, animism is a foundational thread of indigenous peoples around the world.
Being that all humans are the descendants of indigenous peoples somewhere, we all have ancestors who once experienced the world this way. Therefore, it’s in our DNA to open to this way of sensing and perceiving. Bill Plotkin describes three possible ways to be indigenous: culturally (of a particular people or tribe), ecologically (of a particular ecosystem or geographical place), and terrestrially (of Earth).[15] Though only some of us are culturally or ecologically indigenous, we are all terrestrially indigenous. Remembering our relationship with Earth in our flesh and bones is a resource of the greatest significance and potency.
For nearly all of the time humans have been on the planet, regular conversations across the species border were an everyday natural part of life. Sadly, this seems like a strange invitation in our world today; most people have difficulty initiating such a conversation. Perhaps this is because we’ve been taught from a very young age to perceive nature as separate, a life-less object, a commodity. This mistaken perception seems to be at the foundation of our cultural ills.
In The Lost World of the Kalahari, Laurens van der Post writes about living among the Bushmen of the Kalahari Desert and describes how shocked they were that he couldn’t hear the stars. At first they thought he must be joking or lying. When they realized he really couldn’t hear the stars, they concluded he must be very ill and expressed great sorrow.[16] For the Bushmen knew anyone who can’t hear nature must have the gravest and deadliest sickness of all.
Humanity’s ability to perceive the sentience of Earth is critical to our survival and to all life on Earth. Eco-psychology reinforces insights from naturalists like E. O. Wilson, who suggests that we possess “an innately emotional affiliation with all living organisms,” a biophilia.
Longing to be in conversation with nature can catalyze us. And perhaps the natural world longs for this relationship with us too. Longing is not acquiring, as the vulnerability of failure feels all too possible. Instead, longing incites us into feeling the love-ache of what we really value, and it matures us into becoming and creating that which matters most, like an embodied prayer that lays our life on the altar to serve what we love.
One week after the Quest, I backpacked six miles into a remote and ancient red rock canyon in Arizona; dwellings and petroglyphs were abundant here, marking the lives of those who came before. It was the middle of the night, and I couldn’t sleep. The canyon seemed to be calling me out of my tent, to wander in the dark and be in conversation. I was afraid of the dark—tarantulas, rattle snakes, anything I couldn’t see—but I longed to engage with my surroundings as I had on the Quest. And I wanted to accept the invitation to be a brave heart.
I wandered to the creek that meandered through the canyon; it formed a large pool near a tall red rock wall; the stars glimmered in the water. Meanwhile, a memory from my Quest arose. I had picked up a heavy rock and tossed it down hard on several rock surfaces repeatedly. I was trying to crack it open, whilst asking nature to help me crack open my heart so that I could feel it fully. Sometimes I felt as if I lived imprisoned behind a protective shell. There were tears to cry and secrets to encounter, but I could not access them. Unsuccessful, I eventually fell over exhausted from my effort.
I tasted the possibility of failure. How would I ever become a brave heart if I couldn’t even feel my heart? I spoke to the rock wall and the creek, the spirits of the ancient ancestors who lived in this canyon and the cottonwoods, to any wild being who was listening.
I spoke of my longing to feel my heart, to free the dam of my emotions and cry, so that I could be a brave heart. When a few tears came, I offered them; they fell and splashed in the water. The wind and water seemed to respond to my words and tears in gusts and ripples. The light of the stars seemed to dance and grow brighter on the water.
I made rhythm with two small rocks, one red and one white, which I left at the edge of the creek. Some of my words later turned into a poem, the first I’d allowed myself to write since high school.
A mysterious ache in my chest keeps me from sleep.
Is this pain ~ heartbreak, longing, or love?
I survived by skipping my feelings.
Sensitivity grown tough.
Let the dam crumble.
Let the river flow free.
Let me cry for the Earth and all its people.
In the morning, I returned to the water. My two rhythm rocks were not on the ground where I had left them. They now sat elegantly atop a rock a few feet off shore, surrounded by water. Placed underneath them were red and yellow flowers. My heart began racing. How could this be? Who moved my rocks and put flowers underneath them? No other humans had hiked or camped out there since my arrival. I felt as if the canyon and its inhabitants had heard me and were grateful for my presence and words. This felt magical and touched my heart deeply.
This thread of my conversation with water has grown into an unfolding tapestry. Un-damming the waters of my own heart has ushered me into an inexplicable conversation with the ocean and river. The more-than-human world has become my family, my best friend, my muse, and my lover. They guide me to new edges every day.
Co-create & Dismantle with Earth
The rock canyons with whom I have lived see me more deeply than I see myself. Nonhumans are more intelligent and wiser than we are, although most humans believe they’re superior. Humans have a lot to offer, and our greatest contributions are inspired from a relationship with nature. If we can decolonize our minds and our lives by allowing the beings of nature and our deep imagination to be our guides, they may offer us genuine direction and possibilities we’ve never considered.
Surprising and even extraordinary occurrences arise personally, such as my experience with the rocks and flowers in the canyon, and they also exist on a grander scale. Thomas Berry calls them “moments of grace”—the star out of which our solar system was born collapsing in enormous heat, scattering itself as fragments in space; the first living cell, a prokaryotic cell capable of a metabolic process never known previously, involving the energy of the sun, the carbon of the atmosphere, and the hydrogen of the sea; or 2.5 million years ago in northeast Africa when the first humans stood erect.[17] These wondrous transformations certainly don’t lessen our responsibility to engage directly and act politically, but rather they encourage us to open our communication to those who are of greater intelligence, and the guidance, support, and potentialities they offer us.
The Earth community is in dire circumstances. Our old paradigms don’t work—individualism, patriarchy, imperialism, capitalism, human supremacy, and technology won’t save us. If we look at the environmental devastation and the political-economic corruption, there seems to be little hope. Ecological revolution by any means necessary is a moral imperative; we must do what we can to stop industrial civilization from destroying the planet.[18] We must listen closely to the animate natural world and be willing to engage through direct action. We must become visionaries and revolutionaries who tune in, engage, serve, and fight both in deep relationship with and on behalf of Earth.
What we co-create in concert with nature is far more powerful than anything our minds create in isolation. Through embodying the images that arise from nature and our deep imagination, perhaps we can dismantle and de-construct our pathological, adolescent civilization and co-conceive and remember alongside nature another way of being human in relationship with all of life on Earth.
Converse with Nature ~ an Invitation
Wander in a wild place, away from humans, and see who attracts, repels, or scares you (rock, tree, or wind). Speak aloud to the others as you attend to what’s happening. Introduce yourself out loud and tell the others what you notice about them. Share a deep truth or offer praise. Be curious. Perhaps communicate with song, dance, or movement. Listen with all your senses, intuition, feeling, and imagination. Notice shifts in the world around you as well as in your own perception.
Be surprised. A response may come as a sign, synchronicity, dream image, vision, memory, or kinesthetic or emotional sensation. It may be immediate or delayed, auditory or visual (color, shape, movement). It may be unusual, and you may miss it or talk yourself into believing it was nothing. What’s mysterious is well worth pursuing, being with, and learning from!
Rebecca Wildbear is a river and soul guide who helps people tune in to the mysteries that live within the Earth community, dreams, and their own wild Nature, so they may live a life of creative service. She has been a guide with Animas Valley Institute since 2006 and is author of the forthcoming book, Playing & Praying: Soul Stories to Inspire Personal & Planetary Transformation.
Image by Doug Van Houten, “A Journey to the Depths of Soul” [Collage]
Upcoming Listening To the Land Program
Rebecca & Doug will offer an Animas Valley Institute program to Deep Green Resistance members and allies, June 26 – 30, 2020, A Wild Mind Intensive for Activists & Revolutionaries: Partnering with Earth & Dreams. We’ll engage in practices to replant ourselves in nature, restore animistic perception, co-create & dismantle with Earth…and more!
[1] Bill Plotkin, Soulcraft: Crossing Into the Mysteries of Nature and Psyche, New World Library, 2003
[2] Chellis Glendinning, My Name is Chellis and I’m in Recovery from Western Civilization (Boston: Shambhala Publications, 1994).
[3] Diagnostics and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, fifth edition.
[4] Thomas Berry, The Great Work: Our Way Into the Future (New York: Random House, 1999).
[5] James Hillman’s essay, “A Psyche the Size of Earth” was published as the foreword to Ecopsychology: Restoring the Earth, Healing the Mind by Theodore Roszak, Mary Gomes, Allen Kanner (New York: Random House, 1995).
[6] Bill Plotkin, Wild Mind: A Field Guide to the Human Psyche, New World Library, 2013
[8] David Abrams, Spell of the Sensuous, Vintage, 1997
[9] Laura Sewall’s essay “The Skill of Ecological Perception” was published in Ecopsychology: Restoring the Earth, Healing the Mind by Theodore Roszak, Mary Gomes, Allen Kanner (New York: Random House, 1995).
[10] Theodore, Rozak, The Voice of the Earth, Phanes Press, 2001
[12] Laura Sewall’s essay “The Skill of Ecological Perception” was published in Ecopsychology: Restoring the Earth, Healing the Mind by Theodore Roszak, Mary Gomes, Allen Kanner (New York: Random House, 1995).
[13] E.S. Gallegos, Ph.D, Into Wholeness: The Path of Deep Imagery, Moon Bear Press, 2002.
[14] Geneen Marie Haughen, Wild Imagination, Parabola, May 2019.
[15] Bill Plotkin, Wild Mind: A Field Guide to the Human Psyche, New World Library, 2013.
[16] Laurens van der Post, The Lost World of the Kalahari, Harcourt Brace & Company, 1977.
[17] Thomas, Berry, Moments of Grace, Yes! Magazine, Spring 2000.
[18] Max Wilbert, The Moral Argument For Ecological Revolution, Deep Green Resistance News Service, November 2019.
In November 2019, DGR UK hosted an event in London titled By Any Means Necessary? Diversity of Tactics in the Fight for Life on Earth. The event featured a panel discussion between four long-time environmental and social activists: Lierre Keith, radical feminist activist and writer, co-author of Deep Green Resistance: Strategy to Save the Planet; Simon Be, activist and co-founder of Extinction Rebellionl; Shahidah Janjua, feminist activist, writer and campaigner; and Nikki Clarke, anti-nuclear and anti-fracking activist, co-founder of South West Against Nuclear.
A video of the event is embedded here. Below the video, you can read the written text of the presentation by Shahidah Janjua:
by Shahidah Janjua
I see patriarchy as the overarching system of oppression over all sentient and non-sentient existence on the planet. In every instance any word you can come up with to describe the violence done to women, you can also apply to what is done to the environment, to the planet. The planet is a ‘she’, so you can do what you like to her. ‘Civilisation’ is the name given to a patriarchal, hierarchical and violent system of oppression. It rests on the idea of superiority. It also implies an opposite, ‘uncivilised’. Civilisation divides us on the basis of gender, sexuality, colour, ability, class. The most civilised are male, white, heterosexual, able bodied, and usually rich. The greatest challenge for us all is to become uncivilised. To become idigenised. To become one with our environment and with each other. By which I mean that our knowing, our being, our doing and relating is brought into every aspect of the communities we build. It means building harmonious, respectful, equal and just communities. It involves helping each other to undo the lies Patriarchy has told us. Our languages are filled with falsehoods and reversals.
I learned a great deal from Andrea Dworkin, radical Feminist activist and writer. She saved my life. She named the violence and oppression, male supremacy. She named my constant fear, my hyper vigilance. She broke down the barriers between women. She broke down barriers between women and men. Male violence is not genetic, inherent or inevitable, it is a product of a woman hating society. Misogyny is a blueprint for how power works.
We need a movement which honours everyone, every living entity, a movement which honours women, which acts upon violence done to all humans, to everything. We need a movement which doesn’t tell women to wait our turn, because there are other more pressing concerns. In that waiting too many of us are raped, murdered, disappeared, made slaves, prostituted and dehumanised. This is why women have not made alliances with men, because men have habitually put us last. For there to be a movement of all peoples, men need to look at what ‘civilisation’ has done to you. It has denied you your humanity in every conceivable way, got you to prop up its system of control, violence and oppression. It has terrorised women and made us complicit. We need to dig deep to unlearn these ideas and behaviours.
Mental health is a huge issue for people today. Here we are trying our best to live what are essentially a lot of lies. Is it any wonder we are driven to distraction. Relationships are atomised by patriarchy. The capitalist, patriarchal plan, promotes individualism, keeps us separate from each other, does away with community. Patriarchy makes it very hard for us to name our experiences and make connections with others. It fragments us down to a cellular level. Science, beaks us down, takes each piece of us and creates a specialism out of it. I take a drug to kill lung infection and it destroys my liver. One area of research is severed from another. Big pharma make money out of our illnesses, many of which are caused by them and by other corporations, who pollute and poison us, our environments, our planet.
There is nothing left untouched by patriarchal misnaming and patriarchal violence. Cruelty is manufactured and released into the unsuspecting minds of boys, the men of tomorrow, who have sensitivity, and curiosity. Boys go into porn sites for information on human bodies and sex. They are confronted with images of their future selves as torturers and murderers of women. The women in the pictures, in the videos are real women. Lately boys are shown that choking and strangling are the manly things to do to women, orgasm is their reward. Callous and careless about a being that closely resembles himself, how will a boy respond to any living creature that does not resemble him; the animals, the earth, the forests, the rivers? How will he care about the planet.
Robin Morgan says, and I paraphrase, ‘If I had to name one genius of patriarchy it would be compartmentalisation’. ‘Intellect severed from emotion…. The earth itself divided.
How did we get to this point? We have had little or no history of our own to refer to. We’ve dug out what we can, but we haven’t heard or read it in any systematic, ongoing way. The oppressor writes history. The message patriarchy gives us is that this system, of cruelty, violence, greed, war, money, has always existed, it is natural, it is unchangeable. This is precisely why it disappears or destroys our histories. They would expose the patriarchal lies
I thought democracy meant I had a say in the way society was run, that it was about people making decisions about how we live, that the people we vote for have our interests at heart, our need for shelter, warmth, food, medicine, education. Where everyone is a valued member of the community, cared for and respected. This too is a deeply ingrained patriarchal lie. Democracy was conceived in Greece by people who owned women and slaves. Historically numbers of people have been denied voting rights, because they were the wrong sex, the wrong colour, in prison, without property. Today there are millions of people who are disenfranchised. Voting is a way of co-opting us into an unjust, exploitative, oppressive system. It has harmed us, made us poor, jobless, homeless, cold, hungry and ill. Who has ever voted for that? The liars are powerful and the lie persists.
There had been many waves of women’s activism prior to the so-called first wave. There remain some egalitarian societies in existence today. We are not told about them. There was no mention of the Syrian Kurdish Rojava region, where women and men are striving together to create a just and equal society. This is the community that is being bombed out of existence. The so-called first wave women’s movement started when women protested sexual abuse, violence, rape, prostitution. Men divided that movement, some women were brought into the patriarchal fold and promised the vote, the ability to change laws, to bring women into equal power. Today we have no equal pay, rapists go unpunished, prostitution with all its violence, is seen as a job, women in the UK are murdered at the rate of 3 per week. I see no point in counting the numbers of women in governments, in corporations, in work-places, when these structures are patriarchal. That is not equality, it is co-option.
Some feminists have spent decades trying to change laws, work alongside governments, work in state institutions to bring about change from the inside. We have worked hard and tirelessly. None of it has worked. We have been doing the master’s work. Breaking our backs and our hearts to illustrate how we are hurt in these systems of oppression. We have done the research, named the violence. Created platforms for vulnerable and hurt women to speak out. We have begged and pleaded. We have given the master the language we use, and he has turned it against us. More recently we have witnessed how quickly the laws, the rights, the concessions we have fought so hard for, can be swept away at the stroke of a pen. At the same time there are movements across the world which are using laws to claim what is rightfully theirs. Some are winning. The lessons we have learnt would point to the transitory nature of these gains.
I believe it is absolutely necessary to draw lessons from our past struggles against patriarchy. It is necessary to develop new strategies; to unravel the influence patriarchy has had on our thinking. I believe we need to make connections. Pornography, prostitution, violence against women, rape, are part and parcel of the patriarchal means of control of not only women, but also everything else. Colonialism, capitalism, industrial civilisation are on the same continuum. The subjugation of women is the blueprint for oppression. We cannot continue to fudge this reality, if we are serious about the business of our survival as a species, and if we truly hold to the principles of valuing all life equally.
I believe we need to understand that we cannot ask for justice from a system which is deeply invested in injustice. Our strategies, including civil disobedience, have in time wrought the same long-term realities; that we have been assimilated into the power structures, or had the substance of our challenges subverted in some other way. To quote Audre Lorde, black lesbian, activist, writer, ‘We cannot use the master’s tools to dismantle the master’s house.’
I believe that we would need to have a multi-pronged strategy of resistance, one arm being the one that informs, educates, promotes understanding, that encourages involvement and activism; that is on the streets, consistently visible. Another arm engaged in developing alternative ways of living, according to local environments and local knowledge. This would mean existing villages, parts of towns, blocks of flats, housing estates, becoming self- managed, with non-hierarchical, non-patriarchal arrangements; working towards taking themselves off the grid. There is one example in the heart of New York. This will be how we build community.
In the process of indigenising, there is everything to be learned from indigenous peoples. From those who have hung on to their histories, language, knowledge, lived in deep connection with their local environments, honouring how it nourishes them and how they can nourish it in return. We need to learn how to live in harmony with our immediate environment, and with the planet.
I have for very many years believed in non-violent action. I have revisited the question from time to time, principally when I thought I could murder traffickers, rapists, pimps, pornographers…. the list goes on. However, I do believe that dismantling the infrastructure ‘industrial civilisation’, is another arm of a necessary strategy towards destroying it. There are many historic and current, mostly hidden, examples of this.
My fear is that unless men look with deep scrutiny at their place in the patriarchal construct of society, how it destroys their humanity, how it fragments them, how it buys them off with the promise of power and control …… these actions become what any other war instigated by the oppressors looks like, a struggle for power, not a struggle to destroy industrial civilisation and to restore balance to the planet.
We are here to find solutions together. There may be many different solutions, depending on where we live, how we live, who we are learning from, who we work with. I do believe that we cannot have a single centre, or centralised power, which tells us what to do and when to do it. At the same time we do all need a shared moral and ethical base, which upholds everything we are fighting for, a genuine deep respect for each other, for the environment, for the planet, a just and fair place, a place of safety.
by Sean Butler and Will Falk / Featured image: an aerial photograph showing harmful algae blooms in Lake Erie in August of 2017. These are believed to be caused by the effluent runoff from factory farms in the watershed. Public domain photo by NOAA.
Rights of nature advocates often repeat the words, “The structure of the legal system makes meaningful environmental protection illegal.” It’s a bold claim, but for most people it’s too vague to mean anything. Most folks (understandably) don’t know the difference between a federal district court and a circuit court of appeals, let alone what we mean by the “structure” of the legal system.
But it’s actually quite simple. We’re referring to two aspects of the American legal system: (1) laws and regulations at the federal, state, and local (city and county) levels and the relative hierarchy among them; and (2) the holdings of various state and federal courts throughout the history of our country, which establish “precedent” for what those laws and regulations actually mean.
Perhaps nowhere in recent memory has the “structure of the legal system” been laid bare more clearly than in the aftermath of the passage of the Lake Erie Bill of Rights by the citizens of Toledo, OH in February 2019. The Lake Erie Bill of Rights (LEBOR) grants Lake Erie the rights to exist, flourish, and naturally evolve; grants the residents of Toledo a right to a healthy environment; and “elevates the rights of the community and its natural environment over powers claimed by certain corporations.”
Although remarkable on its face, LEBOR is only one of dozens of similar local laws that have been passed in recent years in cities and counties across the United States. What is truly remarkable is the response LEBOR has received from existing institutions.
Mere hours after the City of Toledo certified LEBOR’s election results, entrenched interests opposed to environmental protection leveraged the existing structure of American law to mount an urgent opposition to LEBOR. Drewes Farms Partnership (“Drewes Farms”), represented by a corporate law firm, sued the City seeking an injunction against enforcing the law on the basis that LEBOR violates Drewes Farms’ “civil rights.” The State of Ohio was allowed to intervene in the case to argue for LEBOR’s invalidation while the grassroots community group, Toledoans for Safe Water – who drafted LEBOR and ushered it through Ohio’s citizen initiative process — was barred from the case by the federal judge. Then, the Ohio State legislature (at the request of the Ohio Chamber of Commerce) included in its 2019 budget a provision explicitly making it illegal for local governments to make or enforce laws ascribing legal rights to nature.
In short, the existing legal system and those who profit from it brought the full weight of the legal system against LEBOR. To really understand what is meant when we say that the structure of the legal system makes meaningful environmental protection illegal we need to dig into the specifics of this onslaught.
LEBOR’s opponents make primarily two legal arguments against it. First, they claim that LEBOR should be invalidated because it infringes on corporate constitutional rights. Second, they argue that LEBOR is preempted by state and federal law that reserves the right of the state of Ohio and the federal government to legislate on environmental matters.
Drewes Farms makes the corporate constitutional rights argument very clearly in the complaint it filed in federal court, claiming that:
“LEBOR causes real and concrete harms on Drewes Farms by violating the United States Constitution including but not limited to:
Depriving Drewes Farms of its fundamental right to freedom of speech and to petition the courts under the First Amendment;
Violating Drewes Farms’ right to equal protection by targeting it for liability based solely on the fact that it operates as a partnership business entity;
Violating the Fifth Amendment protection against vague laws by exposing Drewes Farms to strict criminal liability and massive damages and fines under a standardless Charter Amendment; and
Depriving Drewes Farms of its rights without due process.”
This 2010 map shows the location of major factory farming operations in Ohio and corresponding water quality readings. Ohio has among the highest density of CAFOs (Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations) of any U.S. state. Map by Kim Michalson.
Just so we’re clear, Drewes Farms, a non-human legal entity, lays claim to rights under the First, Fifth, and Fourteenth Amendments to the US Constitution AND claims that those rights are violated by a law that recognizes nature’s right to exist, flourish, and naturally evolve.
Meanwhile, the State of Ohio, in its Complaint for Declaratory Judgment and Injunctive Relief plainly states that “[t]he Ohio Constitution art. XVIII § 3 does not allow a municipality to enact an ordinance that prohibits regulated activity authorized under state permits issued pursuant to state laws of general applicability.” To support its claim, the State cited a recent Ohio case in which the judge ruled “[s]tate laws with state-wide application preempt local ordinances that discriminate, unfairly impede, or obstruct general laws regulating oil and gas activities.” In other words, the Ohio state constitution itself specifically prohibits any local government to enact laws that prohibit activities that are permitted by state laws.
The fundamental issue with both of these arguments is…they are absolutely, totally, and completely right. Under current American jurisprudence, Drewes Farms does have civil rights under the First, Fifth, and Fourteenth Amendments (among others), and LEBOR does violate principles of preemption.
And that is precisely the problem.
Because American law has long recognized corporate civil rights and has long used preemption to invalidate local laws that provide for stricter regulations than federal or state governments, the State of Ohio and Drewes Farms would have us believe that this should be the end of the discussion. But, ending the discussion here leaves several problematic assumptions unchallenged. Arguing that LEBOR should be invalidated because it infringes on corporate rights only makes sense if corporations should enjoy those rights under our system of law. And arguing that LEBOR should never be enforced because it violates established principles of preemption only makes sense if preemption is beneficial to American citizens.
So, we must dig deeper. We must ask: Why do corporations exist? What are corporate rights? Why does the American legal system afford corporations rights in the first place? We must also ask: Why does preemption exist? Why does the American legal system protect the state and federal governments’ power to preempt laws passed by local communities? And, is there a connection between growing corporate power and preemption?
While there is a debate about what corporations should exist to do, the fact remains that corporations exist to amass wealth, or to borrow one of corporate apologists’ favorite phrases, to “maximize shareholder value.” We can see this argument clearly in the hugely influential essay published in 1970 by the Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman in The New York Times Magazine aptly-titled “The Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase its Profits.” Environmental author and philosopher Derrick Jensen, in The Culture of Make Believe, is more direct:
“To expect corporations to function differently than they do is to engage in magical thinking. We may as well expect a clock to cook, a car to give birth, or a gun to plant flowers. The specific and explicit function of for-profit corporations is to amass wealth. The function is not to guarantee that children are raised in environments free of toxic chemicals, nor to respect the autonomy or existence of indigenous peoples, nor to protect the vocational or personal integrity of workers, nor to design safe modes of transportation, nor to support life on this planet. Nor is the function to serve communities. It never has been and never will be.”
Wealth is power. This is especially true in the legal system. Many people envision law as an all-powerful list of rules that dictates what someone can or cannot do. Similarly, many people think of rights as a list of privileges that specify what a person is entitled to do or entitled to be free from. As such, many people imagine that they can simply invoke these rights to be safe. But, it is a mistake to think that rules written somewhere in a book of statutes or rights listed in the Constitution have the power to jump off the paper where they are written and enforce themselves.
The key to understanding law and rights lies in understanding how they are enforced. Judges enforce law and rights by making decisions in court. And those decisions in court, in turn, are enforced by the police who are entitled to use physical force to ensure a judge’s decision is adhered to. When most people think about how this works, they envision examples such as President Eisenhower’s use of the National Guard to desegregate schools to uphold African Americans’ Fourteenth Amendment rights. But, a more apt and contemporary example is reflected in how the police were used at Standing Rock. Dogs, water cannons, and military-style weapons were turned against nonviolent protesters once the owner of the pipeline project, a corporation, won a favorable court ruling. These corporate rights-holders harnessed the state’s police power through the courts.
A typical “animal waste lagoon.” These containment ponds continuously leach into groundwater, and often overflow. Public domain photo by NRCS.
Rights, then, are power, too. When shareholders form a corporation, the corporation gains the privilege of “corporate personhood.” Because American courts treat corporations as “persons,” corporations have long exercised rights, including those afforded the highest level of protection under the Bill of Rights’ Contracts Clause, Due Process Clause, Fourteenth Amendment Equal Protection Clause, First Amendment, Fourth Amendment, Fifth Amendment Takings and Double Jeopardy Clauses, Sixth Amendment, and Seventh Amendment.
These rights have, for the most part, been judicially created and have consistently expanded throughout American history. The word “corporation” is found nowhere in the Constitution. Despite this, in 1819, in Dartmouth College v. Woodward, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the Contract Clause of the Constitution granted private business corporations protection from governmental interference in internal governance. In 1886, in Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company, the Supreme Court ruled that a corporation is a person under the law and is therefore entitled to equal protection under the Fourteenth Amendment. In 1922, the Supreme Court ruled in Pennsylvania Coal Company v. Mahon, that coal corporations were entitled to protection under the Fifth Amendment “Takings Clause” and that the government must compensate corporations for property value lost due to mining regulations. In 2010, the Supreme Court ruled that federal laws which limited corporate spending in elections violated corporate First Amendment “free speech” rights in Citizens United v. Federal Elections Committee. Then, in 2014, the Supreme Court, in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, allowed corporations to deny its employees health coverage of contraception to which the employees would otherwise be entitled because corporations are entitled to First Amendment freedom of religion protection.
This might not seem problematic on its face, but recall that rights only have practical effect to the extent that rights holders can access the courts in order to ask a judge to enforce those rights. Corporations, that exist to, and have grown quite adept at, amassing wealth, have greater means to put behind the legal enforcement of rights. This naturally means more cases won by corporate plaintiffs, more caselaw upholding corporate rights, and therefore, by extension, more caselaw expanding the sphere of corporate civil rights. And the sheer number of cases bear out this reality. As an example, consider this: between 1868, when the Fourteenth Amendment was ratified, and 1912, the Supreme Court ruled on only 28 cases involving the rights of African Americans and an astonishing 312 cases on the rights of corporations, it is easy to conclude that the Fourteenth Amendment has done a better job protecting the rights of corporations than that of African Americans.
At the same time, the expansion of rights in one sphere necessarily produces the curtailing of rights in another. Deep ecologist John Livingston describes the problem:
Effluent discharge pipe. Public domain image from USDA.
“We sometimes forget that every time a court or legislature – or even custom – confers or confirms a right in someone, someone else’s right is nibbled at: the right of women to equal employment opportunity is an infringement of the freedom of the misogynist employer; the right to make a profit is at someone else’s cost; the right to run a motorcycle or a snowmobile reduces someone else’s right to peace and quiet in his own backyard; the rights of embryos impinge upon the rights of the women who carry them. And so on.”
In other words, the expansion of corporate rights shrinks the rights enjoyed by citizens and communities. Because American law extends to corporations many of the same constitutional rights humans enjoy and because corporations exist to accumulate wealth, we should not be surprised when corporations use their power to do exactly that at the expense of the rights of human beings and nature.
The other major legal argument made against LEBOR is that it is preempted by state and federal law. Preemption is a doctrine that says the law of a higher jurisdiction should displace the law of a lower jurisdiction when the two jurisdictions conflict. The American legal system is divided basically into three jurisdictions: federal, state, and local law (local law is a general term for the law of the smallest legislating entities American law allows, entities such as municipalities, cities, or villages). When federal and state law conflict, American courts interpret the Supremacy Clause of the United States Constitution (Article VI, Section 2) to mean that federal law should displace state law. Similarly, state law usually trumps local law when the two conflict.
Corporations, using their superior wealth and their constitutional rights, have found tremendous success in influencing federal and state legislatures, especially pro-business, conservative legislatures and persuading them to enact aggressive new preemption laws. When local governments pass laws with stricter restrictions than the federal or state legislatures, corporations lobby legislatures to employ preemption to attack these local laws. This typically happens in one of two ways. First, government lawyers, primarily attorneys general, assert the doctrine of preemption in court. The State of Ohio’s arguments against LEBOR are a perfect example. Second, legislatures pass legislation known as “blanket” preemption to expressly forbid local ordinances that contradict state law. And, in fact, the Ohio House of Representatives recently employed blanket preemption when it adopted its 2020-2021 budget with provisions that prohibit anyone, including local governments, from enforcing rights of nature laws.
That’s what preemption is. The more important question is: Why does American law protect the federal and state governments’ power to preempt laws passed by local communities? The answer, quite simply, is corporate power.
The modern preemption doctrine was born from an 1868 decision written by Iowa Supreme Court Chief Justice John Dillon in The City of Clinton v. The Cedar Rapids and Missouri River Railroad Company. The case involved an attempt by the people of Clinton, Iowa to prevent railroad corporations from building railroads through their town. An ordinance was passed by the Clinton city council which prohibited any “railroad company from constructing its track through or upon any street within the limits of the city, and from occupying the same for right of way or other railroad purposes.”
In the decision, Dillon struck down Clinton’s ordinance and described his philosophy of the limited powers of municipal corporations and other local governing entities. This philosophy is now known as “Dillon’s Rule.” He wrote:
Municipal corporations owe their origin to, and derive their powers and rights wholly from, the legislature. It breathes into them the breath of life, without which they cannot exist. As it creates, so it may destroy. If it may destroy, it may abridge and control. Unless there is some constitutional limitation on the right, the legislature might, by a single act, if we can suppose it capable of so great a folly and so great a wrong, sweep from existence all of the municipal corporations in the State, and the corporation could not prevent it. We know of no limitation on this right so far as the corporations themselves are concerned. They are, so to phrase it, the mere tenants at will of the legislature. 24 Iowa 455, 475.
A pig at a factory farming operation. These industrial farms are the largest source of nutrient pollution in Lake Erie. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/ Via Mercy for Animals.
And, Dillon’s Rule was later adopted by the United States Supreme Court in 1907 in Hunter v. Pittsburgh.
As you can see, from the outset, preemption has been, quite literally, about corporations “railroading” local communities who do oppose destructive corporate projects. Today, preemption has grown into a powerful tool wielded by, especially, conservative, pro-business state legislatures. Judge Jon D. Russell and Aaron Bostrom, in a white paper titled “Federalism, Dillon Rule and Home Rule” recently written for the American City County Exchange (an organization that “helps to advance limited government and free market principles in local government through model policies, conferences, and online collaboration”), provide a solid example of the rationale employed by state legislators to defend preempting local laws.
Russell and Bostrom write:
The Dillon Rule guarantees a certain level of uniformity throughout the state…Rather than having vastly different policies and codes in each local jurisdiction, the state can create uniform tax codes and licensing policies, making it a business-friendly environment. Without commonality between local governments on these issues, businesses find more red tape than opportunity, making it difficult for the state and businesses to prosper.
Dr. Lori Riverstone-Newell, an expert in the interaction of governments in the American system, describes how in the past few years, “a growing number of state officials have sponsored and supported preemption legislation with the intent to weaken local authority and to thwart local progressive policies.” In simpler terms, conservative state legislators are learning how to use preemption to prevent progressive communities from enacting progressive laws.
We can see why some commentators argue we live in a corporate state. If the fundamental element of a democracy is the right of the people to enact and enforce the laws to which they are subject, then preemption is fundamentally an anti-democratic concept, especially as the doctrine has been influenced and wielded by entrenched economic interests and the state and federal legislators who support (and who are, of course, supported by) those interests.
Indeed legislators are not working alone; they are implementing policies pushed by corporate lobbyists. Dr. Riverstone-Newell explains, “Recent preemption efforts can be understood, at one level, as part of longstanding campaigns waged by industry groups hoping to stop or limit progressive local policies in order to create a friendlier business environment for themselves.” She describes how industry groups and trade associations first began pressuring state legislatures to rein in their cities in the late 1980s. R.J. Reynolds, the tobacco corporation, “pressed states to enact preemption laws in the 1980s as a central strategy to overcome local smoking restrictions and bans.” Abby Rapoport, a journalist writing for The American Prospect, reports how the National Rifle Association launched a campaign in the 1990s for state preemption of local gun regulations. This campaign was so successful “43 states now have some form of maximum preemption preventing localities from passing additional gun regulations on top of state law.”
It may very well be that “a certain level of uniformity” of laws in different jurisdictions enables business to “prosper,” but having reached the point in our nation’s history where we are confronting ecological collapse, we have to ask ourselves, whether blanket uniformity and unchecked economic growth and prosperity are the only values that matter to us. Or, instead, might it be that local environmental protection laws are key to protecting local ecology? Might it be that the unique ecosystems in one ‘jurisdiction’ require unique laws and regulations in order for them to thrive? Why should we expect that laws protecting swamplands in Florida be the same as those protecting the Nevada desert? If we are to see our way through the current environmental crisis, we can’t simply accept the doctrine of preemption on its face; we must consider the value of it, and its history and development, in order to determine whether or not it is compatible with the future we want for our grandchildren and the planet.
The failure to recognize how American law makes sustainability illegal is a primary reason environmentalists have failed to keep the health of the North American continent from deteriorating over the last century. Because we fail to recognize this, we keep seeking to protect the natural world through legal and political processes that do not – cannot – work. The late corporate anthropologist Jane Anne Morris described our predicament clairvoyantly:
Lake Erie (left) is the 11th largest lake in the world. Public domain NASA photo.
“Our campaigns follow the gambling addiction model. The last bet didn’t pay off but the next one might if…if…if we just had a new, improved tripod, three more experts, more labor or church support, ten more elected officials on our side, a hundred more people at the demo, or a thousand more letters in the mail…Who are we kidding? We are just doing the ‘same old thing’ over and over again and fooling ourselves that it might work next time. We are stuck in a feedback loop where our failures are interpreted as signs that we should repeat our failed tactics, but try harder. This is what it is to be colonized.”
Lawyers, and their clients, are especially vulnerable to falling victim to Morris’ gambling addiction model. The adversarial, competitive nature of law where two or more sides jockey for the approval of a judge makes it easy for losing parties to conclude that if they just hired a more expensive law firm, or if they just argued an issue differently, or if they just cited this case instead of that case then they would have won. The problem, however, is not that we need to try harder; the problem is that the structure of American law prevents our ability to implement strong enough measures to truly protect the natural world.
The people of the City of Toledo, recognizing that corporate rights and preemption must be confronted and overturned to protect Lake Erie and all those who depend on her, voted to enact the Lake Erie Bill of Rights. The arguments made by the State of Ohio and Drewes Farms Partnership are currently the law en vogue. This is one of the major reasons American law makes sustainability illegal. This must change if the natural world, and all of us who depend on her, are going to survive the current ecological predicament. To achieve a sane, sustainable culture, corporate rights and preemption must go.
Each winter, storms knock out the electricity to my home. I live in the country, over hills and past muddy pastures and brown meadows. Snow and ice grip the trees, pulling them towards the breaking point, and the lights flicker and die.
The first thing I notice is the quiet. The hum of the refrigerator, the ticking of the hot water heater, the barely perceptible vibration of the electrical system itself. The sounds drop away. That is how I awoke this February morning; to silence, just the murmur of a million wet snowflakes settling onto the trees, the grass, the cabin roof.
As a child, I craved power outages. School canceled, all obligations swept aside — an excuse to bypass the siren song of television, jobs, routine, and to instead place candles on the table and sit together around the flickering light. All this, of course, after the obligatory snowball fight.
Luck and privilege underlie my experience; the luck of living in a temperate climate, where a small fire and sweatshirt keep us warm inside; the privilege of a family with just enough money to relax and enjoy power outages despite not being able to work.
Power outages are still magical times for me. Now, grown, I live far enough away from the city that outages can last many days. We sit around the wood stove after a day of chores, cooking dinner slowly on the stovetop, snow melting in a pot for tea. Nothing is fast. There is no rush, and nowhere to go, and nothing to be done beyond: talk, read, cook, wash dishes in a tub with fire-warmed water. It is a balm to a soul chafed by the demands of modernity — speed, productivity, constant connectivity.
These days, I dream of power outages that last forever. I dream of hydroelectric dams crumbling and salmon leaping upstream, coming home. I dream of coal power plants going dark and rusting away, and of our atmosphere breathing a deep, clean sigh of relief. I even dream of wind turbines creaking to a halt and solar panels gathering dust, eventually buried by shifting Mojave sands, and of the birds and bats and our slow-moving kin, the desert tortoises, moving freely again through their desert home. I dream of power lines toppling beneath thick layers of ice and snow.
It has been said that the electric grid is the biggest machine in the world. What would it mean to turn off that machine, to throw a wrench in its gears? What would it mean to the living Earth? What would it mean to us?
I have heard that, years ago, the city of Los Angeles lost power, and darkness reigned, and frightened people called the police to report strange lights in the sky: the stars. We are far along the wrong path when we no longer recognize the stars, our billion-year-old companions in the night.
When the power comes back on, as it did tonight, it is a bitter transition for me. Yes, power does make life easier. It washes our clothes and our dishes. It provides our entertainment and our light. It prepares our food and offers heat. It powers the production of life-saving medicines and hospitals. But these benefits of the grid accrue only to the wealthy, to the first world. And power corrupts, too. For countless people, the coming of power is a disaster: displacement, genocide, privatization, proletarianization. The World Commission on Dams estimates that at least 40 to 80 million people have been displaced by hydroelectric dams alone — many of them Indigenous and poor.
Perhaps it is time for us to have no power again. And not just for a day or a week, but for as long as it takes for the salmon to come home, for the desert tortoises to reclaim their dens, for us to remember our place in the world.
I dream of standing on a hill above a vast metro-necropolis, and watching the lights go out in a wave, watching darkness reclaim her land, watching night return to life.
The salmon, the tortoises, and I — we will all be ready.
