In Park City, the task is clear: Stop climate change, or the snow stops. Snowpack is the region’s freshwater supply and water is life. So, stop climate change or the community will lose life.
This is not news to most Parkites. And, thankfully, many Parkites have taken, at least, some kind of action. Park City Municipal Corporation hopes to achieve carbon neutrality, for the whole community, by 2032. An electric bike program was recently introduced, and electric city busses now run routes through town, in an effort to reduce carbon emissions. In a truly amazing display of community generosity, $38 million was raised to protect Bonanza Flats from development.
Meanwhile, there are a growing number of us in Park City, and across the country, who have lost faith in the traditional tactics employed by the environmental movement for creating change.
We voted. Many of us helped Barack Obama gain the presidency only to see American natural gas production increase by 34% and crude oil production increase by 88% since George W. Bush’s final year in office. Our votes couldn’t stop Donald Trump from gaining the presidency and everyday brings more news of his insanity. The EPA is gutted. The United States pulled out of the Paris Climate Accord. And, climate change deniers occupy many of the federal government’s most powerful positions.
We reduced, reused, and recycled. Then, we learned that the general consensus amongst climate scientists is that developed nations must reduce greenhouse gas emissions 80% below 1990 levels by 2050 to avoid runaway climate change. While it was still funded, the EPA reported that small businesses and homes accounted for 12% of total US greenhouse gas emissions while personal vehicles accounted for less than 26% of total US emissions. Based on these numbers, we realized that even if every small business and home in America reduced its emissions to zero and each American drove cars that emitted no greenhouse gas, the United States wouldn’t even come close to that 80% goal.
We participated in traditional conservation efforts. We helped to save Bonanza Flats from the bulldozers and chainsaws. But, we have not yet saved Bonanza Flats from the droughts, the wildfires, the fungus-killing aspens, and the pine beetles all made worse by climate change.
We are ready for escalation. We are ready for direct action.
**
Beneath the positivity, the small victories, and the feel-good atmosphere characterizing life in a mountain town like Park City, a desperation quietly grows. Climate change worsens, mass extinction intensifies, and natural communities collapse. Parents and grandparents fear for the futures of their children and grandchildren. Older generations approach the end of their lives worrying that they failed the younger generations. Younger generations wonder if they truly are disempowered, or if disempowerment is an illusion ensured by the apathy they’ve been labelled with.
For the most part, the desperation remains unacknowledged, unnamed, and repressed. Removed from the violence producing our material comforts and granting us the ability to live in a place like Park City, many never feel the desperation. Those who do doubt the authenticity of their intuition and wonder if the desperation is a sign of mental illness, proof that something is wrong with them, or a character flaw. When the desperation is expressed, those who point it out are called alarmists, conspiracy theorists, and sensationalists. When the reality described is too obvious to ignore, those who describe it are accused of causing paralysis and depression.
Nevertheless, the planet’s health is critically threatened. And, things are getting worse. We must act urgently and decisively. For those of us who know this, the question becomes, “How do we encourage others to act with the necessary urgency and decisiveness?”
***
In 2012, the Summit Land Conservancy published the second edition of Park City Witness: A Collection of Essays and Artwork Celebrating Open Space. In her introduction, Cheryl Fox – Executive Director of the Summit Land Conservancy – wrote, “Today we face unprecedented challenges to our natural environment. Solving this problem is the moral challenge of our century. The question we must ask is not ‘what can I do?’ but ‘what is the right thing to do?’”
I completely agree with her. Several months before I read her words, I wrote in my essay “Park City is Still Damned,” “Don’t ask, ‘What can I do?’ Instead ask, ‘What needs to be done?’”
So, what is the right thing to do? What needs to be done? Ms. Fox concluded her introduction with, “I encourage you to read this book. Then go out to the trails, the mountains, the creek that you have helped to save. Watch for angels or demons and the messages they send, and then bear witness…”
It’s been five years since Summit Land Conservancy published its celebration of open space in Park City Witness. In that time, the list of the indicators of ecological collapse has only grown longer. Witnesses, testifying in court, take an oath to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. There are angels on the trails, the mountains, and in the creeks. But, there are demons, too. If we only bear witness to beauty, to optimism, and to celebration, we are liars. Telling the whole truth demands that we confront the demons, no matter how horrifying they are.
I have devoted my writing career to two principles: The land speaks. And, I have a responsibility to communicate what the land says as best I can. I hear the land speak of beauty. I also hear the land speak of horror. In Park City, while most writers and most artists focus on stories of beauty, who will confront the stories of horror?
We need new Park City witnesses. I cannot ask anyone to do what I myself am not willing to do. So, I commit, publicly, to being a new Park City witness. One who lives as honestly as possible with two realities. There is beauty and there is horror. The horror will consume the beauty if it is not confronted, described, and resisted.
To give my commitment substance, I have acquired a reliable vehicle, spent weeks researching, cleared my schedule, and formed a plan to visit places in Park City and across Utah where horror threatens to overwhelm beauty. These are places like the planned site for the Treasure Hill development, the Uintah Basin, oil refineries in North Salt Lake, the White Mesa uranium mill, and the coal mines in Price. My experiences will form a place-based series. Each essay will grow organically from the natural community it is written from. I welcome community discussion, comments, and feedback. The Deep Green Resistance News Service has graciously agreed to publish the writing this journey produces and you can follow along here. Please feel free to contact me.
My purpose is simple: In each place, I will search for beauty and I will search for horror. Then I will ask of that place, “What do you need?” I will listen for as long as I need to, knowing that the land rarely speaks in English and rarely observes a time recognizable by common human patience. After this, I will write. I will write as honestly as possible.
I hope to give a voice to those who feel the desperation. I hope to comfort those who feel crazy for the intensity of their concern. I hope to demonstrate that their concern is justified. I hope to catalyze the courage we so desperately need to resist effectively.
Editor’s note: The following is from the chapter “The Problem” of the book Deep Green Resistance: A Strategy to Save the Planet. This book is now available for free online.
Most people, or at least most people with a beating heart, have already done the math, added up the arrogance, sadism, stupidity, and denial, and reached the bottom line: a dead planet. Some of us carry that final sum like the weight of a corpse. For others, that conclusion turns the heart to a smoldering coal. But despair and rage have been declared unevolved and unclean, beneath the “spiritual warriors” who insist they will save the planet by “healing” themselves. How this activity will stop the release of carbon and the felling of forests is never actually explained. The answer lies vaguely between being the change we wish to see and a 100th monkey of hope, a monkey that is frankly more Christmas pony than actual possibility.
Given that the culture of America is founded on individualism and awash in privilege, it’s no surprise that narcissism is the end result. The social upheavals of the ’60s split along fault lines of responsibility and hedonism, of justice and selfishness, of sacrifice and entitlement. What we are left with is an alternative culture, a small, separate world of the converted, content to coexist alongside a virulent mainstream. Here, one can find workshops on “scarcity consciousness,” as if poverty were a state of mind and not a structural support of capitalism. This culture leaves us ill-prepared to face the crisis of planetary biocide that greets us daily with its own grim dawn. The facts are not conducive to an open-hearted state of wonder. To confront the truth as adults, not as faux children, requires an adult fortitude and courage, grounded in our adult responsibilities to the world. It requires those things because the situation is horrific and living with that knowledge will hurt. Meanwhile, I have been to workshops where global warming was treated as an opportunity for personal growth, and no one there but me saw a problem with that.
The word sustainable—the “Praise, Jesus!” of the eco-earnest—serves as an example of the worst tendencies of the alternative culture. It’s a word that perfectly meshes corporate marketers’ carefully calculated upswell of green sentiment with the relentless denial of the privileged. It’s a word I can barely stand to use because it has been so exsanguinated by cheerleaders for a technotopic, consumer kingdom come. To doubt the vague promise now firmly embedded in the word—that we can have our cars, our corporations, our consumption, and our planet, too—is both treason and heresy to the emotional well-being of most progressives. But here’s the question: Do we want to feel better or do we want to be effective? Are we sentimentalists or are we warriors?
For “sustainable” to mean anything, we must embrace and then defend the bare truth: the planet is primary. The life-producing work of a million species is literally the earth, air, and water that we depend on. No human activity—not the vacuous, not the sublime—is worth more than that matrix. Neither, in the end, is any human life. If we use the word “sustainable” and don’t mean that, then we are liars of the worst sort: the kind who let atrocities happen while we stand by and do nothing.
Even if it were possible to reach narcissists, we are out of time. Admitting we have to move forward without them, we step away from the cloying childishness and optimistic white-lite denial of so much of the left and embrace our adult knowledge. With all apologies to Yeats, in knowledge begins responsibilities. It’s to you grown-ups, the grieving and the raging, that we address this book.
***
The vast majority of the population will do nothing unless they are led, cajoled, or forced. If the structural determinants are in place for people to live their lives without doing damage—for example, if they’re hunter-gatherers with respected elders—then that’s what happens. If, on the other hand, the environment has been arranged for cars, industrial schooling is mandatory, resisting war taxes will land you in jail, food is only available through giant corporate enterprises selling giant corporate degradation, and misogynist pornography is only a click away 24/7—well, welcome to the nightmare. This culture is basically conducting a massive Milgram experiment on us, only the electric shocks aren’t fake—they’re killing off the planet, species by species.
But wherever there is oppression there is resistance. That is true everywhere, and has been forever. The resistance is built body by body from a tiny few, from the stalwart, the brave, the determined, who are willing to stand against both power and social censure. It is our prediction that there will be no mass movement, not in time to save this planet, our home. That tiny percent—Margaret Mead’s small group of thoughtful, committed citizens—has been able to shift both the cultural consciousness and the power structures toward justice in times past. It is valid to long for a mass movement, however, no matter how much we rationally know that we’re wishing on a star. Theoretically, the human race as a whole could face our situation and make some decisions—tough decisions, but fair ones, that include an equitable distribution of both resources and justice, that respect and embrace the limits of our planet. But none of the institutions that govern our lives, from the economic to the religious, are on the side of justice or sustainability. Theoretically, these institutions could be forced to change. The history of every human rights struggle bears witness to how courage and sacrifice can dismantle power and injustice. But again, it takes time. If we had a thousand years, even a hundred years, building a movement to transform the dominant institutions around the globe would be the task before us. But the Western black rhinoceros is out of time. So is the golden toad, the pygmy rabbit. No one is going to save this planet except us.
Jennifer Murnan and Max Wilbert of Deep Green Resistance interviewed Ruby Montoya and Jessica Reznicek following their press release claiming responsibility for multiple incidents of sabotage of the Dakota Access Pipeline and construction equipment. Listen to the audio, or read the transcript:
Jennifer: First, thank you so much, Jessica and Ruby, for having this conversation today. Could you talk a little bit about who you are?
Ruby: My name’s Ruby. I’m 27 years old. I found out about DAPL when I was a pre-school teacher in Boulder, Colorado, and that motivated me to quit my job and go to Standing Rock. I was following the issue very closely. When I arrived at Standing Rock, I was really relieved and comforted to see so many people there willing to do whatever kind of work was needed.
I saw that Standing Rock was really taken care of, and I noticed that there were 1200 other miles of pipeline that had to be stopped. I saw a news article in a local Iowa paper about Jessica Reznicek starting an encampment by herself down at the Mississippi River, the largest waterway here in the United States in the northern continent. I went down there, to Mississippi Stand. I plugged in immediately, willing to do whatever.
I worked on media and participated in boycotts and marches and the whole traditional model of civil disobedience, and here I am today talking today to you.
Jessica: My name’s Jessica Reznicek, 36 years old. I really started delving into activism about six years ago during the Occupy Wall Street movement. I joined the Zuccotti movement in New York. When I learned that back in my home city of Des Moines, Iowa, there was a local Occupy movement occurring, I returned home and plugged in there. I began working tirelessly on the Occupy campaigns on a local level in Iowa, in the Iowa state capital, and around the caucuses.
Through that movement, I met Catholic Workers who were at the forefront here in the local struggle. For about six years I’ve been plugging in and working on resistance via the Des Moines Catholic Worker house, and have been engaged non-stop in various campaigns, everything from anti-war to saving the planet and trying to save the human race!
I met Ruby here in Iowa last summer. It’s been an incredible journey with the two of us together, and I’m eager to share that journey at this point.
Jennifer: When you met each other, did you find common ground in motivation and inspiration?
Jessica: I think that’s how Ruby and I ended up pairing off. The bottom line for both Ruby and me was to stop this pipeline and to do it peacefully and nonviolently, and to explore and exhaust what you might call traditional avenues. Hundreds of thousands of people resisted this pipeline, so by no means did only Ruby and I care so deeply about these issues—but we really hit it off. Our personalities hit it off.
We did a hunger strike at the Iowa Utilities Board over the winter, boycotts, marches, lockdowns. Mississippi Stand was notorious for lockdowns, and they were effective. I think that’s where we got a taste of it.
One of the lockdowns I did with another close friend of mine was on a construction site, the boring site under the Mississippi River on the Iowa side. We locked onto a backhoe, and stopped the construction at the boring site for about four hours.
Ruby and I had some great conversations after that ― it was great to shut down a construction site for four hours, but ultimately we need more. We need to delay construction not just for days, but for weeks and months for the ultimate purpose of shutting this pipeline down and having investors pull out. Ruby and I were in that vein together.
Jennifer: You’ve been very courageous. Where do you pull that well of courage?
Ruby: Directly from my heart. I’ve tried to stop caring about this, honestly, and I can’t. I’ve been involved with other campaigns since DAPL, and those are also courageous, but I just can’t let this go. All of this destruction needs to be stopped, absolutely. But I saw with Standing Rock that DAPL in particular was a turning point for a lot of things, and we have yet to win a victory.
For me and for a lot of people, the bottom line was to stop the pipeline. That is what motivated me to act the way I have, having exhausted every other tactic.
I was a preschool teacher and I love kids. [chokes up with grief] We’re not leaving them anything. It’s scary, it’s scary what everyone is going through, and I see a lot of fear preventing people from acting. I was afraid as well, but it had to be done. That’s why I’m here talking to you now, because these are the conversations that we need to be having, as a collective, as a whole. How do we effectively stop this desecration that continues day in and day out?
Jennifer: Those are the questions that we all have to ask ourselves, and I’m really glad that you’re raising those questions. Thank you.
Max: The question of how we actually stop them is critical. So is recognizing that when what we’re doing isn’t working, we have to do something else. What was your psychology as you moved toward taking the actions that you did, and what did you actually end up doing?
Ruby: Our lockdowns gave us a teaser for stopping construction. One day, after another pullback had occurred at the Skunk River, Jessica and I got together and had this idea to mess with the engines of these heavy machines.
We brainstormed back and forth all day . . . you know, what if we take the oil out of the thing . . . we really don’t know how to do that. So why don’t we just burn it? Okay, I know how to light a fire. You strike a match. Going and doing that action was really liberating and empowering and at the same time scary. Oh my gosh, I just committed arson. But it had to be done. That was the first night that I really felt empowered as an individual. I did actually make a difference and a concrete contribution by my standards as a person.
So the psychology of it is you’re battling with fear, because we’re all living in this oppressive system. That’s something we have to overcome. Otherwise we continue to allow this to go on, and we continue to be oppressed. We have to liberate ourselves through our own actions.
Jennifer: I appreciate that your statement distinguishes living beings from objects when discussing violence. You point out that destroying infrastructure isn’t violence.
Jessica: I’ve been trying to get this message out to the activist community here in Iowa and elsewhere. Our culture and our society and we as people put so much emphasis on property, but we have to start understanding that these machines are desecrating the earth and the people and all of the earth’s inhabitants. We need to get out of that paradigm where we place property on such a high pedestal, especially when that property is destroying every natural resource available to us and not leaving a future for the generations to come.
It’s really difficult for people to understand that Ruby and I were actually preventing destruction. I like to focus on the property improvement that we’ve made versus property destruction. At every turn, we were acting from our hearts and from our spirits and with all life on this planet in mind. Absolutely no life was in jeopardy while we were acting, and in fact our goal was to save lives.
Max: The methods that we’re taught are acceptable for changing the world usually aren’t very threatening to those in power. I don’t think it’s a mistake, for example, that we get taught the history of Martin Luther King in school but we don’t get taught about the Black Panthers and Malcolm X. We learn about the struggle against apartheid, but we don’t get taught that Nelson Mandela organized and committed sabotage and engaged in actions that caused him to be labeled as a terrorist by the U. S. and South African governments.
You have a history and a background as activists trying to do the right thing and make the world a better place. What’s your understanding of how your actions fit into the history of social movements and people who are called to do what’s right even though it may be illegal?
Ruby: I know a little bit about the Black Panthers. I know that narrative that the government hijacked everything, but I didn’t know that Nelson Mandela organized sabotage. That’s awesome.
It was a very personal thing for me. It’s the right thing to do. I live here, in the United States, in a country that perpetuates violence everywhere, including here. I saw that I had the opportunity to act in this way, and that’s what motivated me.
Jessica: We’re not taught these things, so Ruby and I feel isolated or alienated from the wider movement when we decide to take these actions. That’s really unfortunate, not to feel in solidarity with a historical narrative. A lot of our energy is expended, unfortunately, on defending ourselves to the movement, and you just wonder . . . it’s disheartening when I don’t know whether I’m going to be supported by anti-pipeline activists.
We do go back over these stories. Fortunately, I’ve been intimately engaged for six years in the Catholic Worker Movement, which has a rich history and tradition of property destruction via a Biblical narrative. I’ve embraced this tradition and found my little niche.
I live in a small intentional community here in Des Moines, and when when we released our press statement a few days ago, we were immediately supported by our close friends and family. Thank goodness. That’s basically due to an ongoing historical struggle created in the 1930s with Dorothy Day. It gives us something to which we can attach ourselves and find legitimacy, which we’re having a really hard time finding in other circles. That’s due to lack of information and lack of being taught these histories as children.
Jennifer: I’m part of the Political Prisoner Support Group in Deep Green Resistance. What do you need right now? What do you need into the future, and how can we be part of that?
Ruby and Jessica: First of all, thank you.
Jessica: Thank you so much. We love you. Thank you for asking. It’s been kind of a blur for the last couple of days. Ruby and I got out of jail yesterday morning on pre-trial release. We’re scrambling now to do a couple of things before . . . who knows? The feds could come knocking at our door at any moment.
One thing is to get a website set up where we can have postings such as joint statements that Ruby and I release, and also future hearings, court dates, solidarity actions, and support network information.
We’re representing ourselves, but do have a fantastic federal attorney, Bill Quigley, out of Loyola Law School down in New Orleans, as a stand-by counsel. He’s a great guy and available, but we’d really like to find someone here in the Midwest who would be more accessible and willing to at least assist us in filing motions or communicating with a prosecutor, and serve as a stand-by counsel here locally in the case that Ruby and I are incarcerated and facing serious charges. It’s really difficult to work from inside the oppressive prison system, so it’d be valuable to have a legal advocate here locally that we can work with.
Ruby: Yeah, just the offer of support is amazing. Thank you for doing what you’re doing. I’m sure I’ll have a request or two once I’m inside. As Jessica said, if you know anyone for defense in Iowa, that would be really helpful. We’re having a hard time trying to find a lawyer in Iowa, I think because this stuff doesn’t go on in Iowa.
Max: I don’t know anyone off the top of my head, but we do have some friends in the legal community, activist lawyers, who we can talk to. We’ll definitely be in touch with you two.
Oftentimes speaking out can be dangerous. They try to discourage people from building solidarity and speaking about what they did. They want to keep people isolated in the legal system and afraid. Why did you feel called to speak out about what you did, even to the point of saying that you hope other people consider these kinds of similar actions as a way to effectively defend the planet?
Ruby: Because really we’ve tried everything, hot dog under the sun, man. I’ve exhausted my creative possibilities. The No DAPL campaign fragmented pretty quickly, and we lost focus on stopping the pipeline. We were called by The Intercept about two weeks ago for interviews, so I had hope that the No DAPL issues could stay alive in the media. But The Intercept focused instead on the illegal surveillance of activists.
So after we got off the phone, we talked together, and it was like, “Fuck it, man, let’s claim it.” Because we didn’t stop the pipeline. We both feel personally responsible for that, and this is the last thing we can do. And you know what? People need to talk about it.
I remember trying to talk about it with people that I trusted. I’m pretty fresh on the activist scene and security culture, but it felt like I was encountering a fear-based immediate shut-down, do not talk. That sucks because we need to be doing these things. Apparently this is the only way they’re going to actually listen.
We anticipated the repercussions of every action that we took. Although I view these repercussions as unjust, we were fully prepared going into it, in that mental mind game of “I’m driving myself to jail right now.” So we’ve been prepared for jail for several months, and we still feel passionate about this — I still can’t let this go because this is still really flipping important — and we both have the mental fortitude to step forward. Well, let’s step forward then.
People need to have these conversations. It’s important for our own evolution as a people, as a whole, to take a step back, look at what’s going on, look at what we’re doing and whether it’s effective. We want to stop the pipeline, or we want to save the old-growth forests. We have so many battles. So let’s do it. If the methods that we’re using aren’t working, let’s change the methods. Let’s not get stuck in some ego, celebrity, whatever.
Max: Reading your press release, I was struck with, frankly, how easy it seemed to be to pull off some of the actions. I went to an event recently with the Valve Turners, the people who shut down the tar sands pipelines. They talked about how they actually had pretty bad security culture in planning of their action. They didn’t know how to use the encryption technology well. They didn’t do a super-secretive job, and they expected that maybe the cops would be there waiting for them when they showed up to carry out their action.
But the cops weren’t. The action was a total surprise to the authorities. Could you speak to how easy some of this stuff is and how maybe most of the barriers we actually face toward shutting this earth destruction down is more in our minds and our hearts than in actual danger?
Jessica: Absolutely. I could not agree with you more. I think we created this whole narrative in our minds that this oppressive state and industry were listening to everything we were doing, following us everywhere we went, and that we would inevitably be caught.
Ruby and I did a sloppy job so much of the time at many points. I mean you hate admitting it, but it’s just the truth. We went to these places with knowledge self-garnered within a matter of weeks and were effectively halting construction for weeks on end just via one fire or one valve piercing.
We built our confidence up each time. Like wow, this is really doable. It’s insulting on some level, but it needs to be cleared up. Ruby and I acted solely alone. Nobody else was involved in any of these actions. I think it’s hard for people to believe ― “How could these two women pull this off so easily?”
It’s a matter of determination. It’s a matter of breaking through your own fears and doubts and perceptions of this undefeatable empire. Really this is doable for lots of people. That’s one of the main reasons we wanted to come out and tell people ― because this is easy stuff to do. If Ruby and I had had a crew that had doubled or tripled or quadrupled our numbers, we really could have stopped this thing, I truly believe at the bottom of my heart, just via actions like we did.
Ruby: I think that narrative that’s in our head that they’re always watching us and blah blah blah, it’s oppression, dude. They come out with the NSA and blah blah blah and their television shows with forensic evidence and this is how they catch a criminal. It’s all crap. It’s all crap. They are incompetent.
Have you ever talked to a cop? They are instructed to just follow orders. They do not know how to think critically. And that continues to worsen.
If you’re acting with integrity and utilizing your own critical intelligence, you can do a lot of good. Recognize that fear as oppression. Liberate yourself!
Max: Inspiring words. Thank you so much.
Jennifer: Yeah, thank you so much. It has been really great to be here with you today.
Ruby: We really appreciate talking to you. It seems that you all have a strong network of solidarity. That is super-hopeful; we need that kind of communal infrastructure. So thank you all.
To Contact Jessica & Ruby’s Legal Support Team: Attorney Bill Quigley: 1-504-710-3074 AND quigley77@gmail.com
Editor’s note: Deep Green Resistance advocates a militant strategy for saving the planet: Decisive Ecological Warfare. We invite you to read this strategy, and to undertake a long and sober assessment of the situation we face. Time is short.
Note: Though the resistance movement will have different phases and parts, the Deep Green Resistance organization is, will always be, and is committed to only being an aboveground group.
I am an environmental activist. I have depression. To be an activist with depression places me squarely in an irreconcilable dilemma: The destruction of the natural world creates stress which exacerbates depression. Cessation of the destruction of the natural world would alleviate the stress I feel and, therefore, alleviate the depression. However, acting to stop the destruction of the natural world exposes me to a great deal of stress which, again, exacerbates depression.
Either, the destruction persists, I am exposed to stress, and I remain depressed. Or, I join those resisting the destruction, I am exposed to stress, and I remain depressed.
Depressed if I do, depressed if I don’t. So, I fight back.
I will always struggle with depression. I know it sounds like the typically fatalistic expression of a depressed mind, but accepting this reality releases me from the false hope that I will ever live completely free from the guilt, hopelessness, and emptiness that are depression. Accepting this reality, frees the emotional energy I spent clinging to false hope. Instead of using this energy searching for a cure that never existed, I can devote this energy to activism and to managing depression in realistic ways.
Coming to this realization was not easy. It’s taken me five years since I was first diagnosed with a major depressive disorder, confirmation of the diagnosis from three different doctors in three different cities, two suicide attempts, and more emotional meltdowns than I can count to finally accept my predicament.
***
Uintah Basin drilling at night. Credit: Wikimedia
A recent drive through the oil fields in Utah’s Uintah Basin reminds me why depression will haunt me for the rest of my life.
The drive east on U.S. Highway 40 from Park City, UT to Vernal leaves me nowhere to hide. In my rearview mirror, melting snow sparkles as it dwindles high on the shoulders of the Wasatch Mountains. Climate change threatens Utah’s snowfall and Park City may be bereft of snow in my lifetime. Pulling my gaze from the mirror to look through my windshield, tall thin oil rigs rise from drilling platforms to pierce the sky after they’ve pierced the earth. Next to the platforms, well pumps move lethargically, doggedly up and down. The wells are mechanical vampires, stuck in slow motion, sucking blood from the earth.
While the rigs inject poison and the pumps extract oil, it’s hard not to think of the addict’s needles. Scars form on the basin floor where once-thick pinyon-juniper forests and rolling waves of sagebrush are piled in heaps around the fracking operations. The swathes of destruction betray addiction as surely as track marks.
I pass countless tanker trucks parked next to round, squat oil storage containers. The trucks are filling up with yellow crude before hauling the oil to refineries in Salt Lake. From there, the oil will be shipped all over the West to be burned. Each oil platform, each rig, each well I pass strikes a blow to my peace of mind. Each truckload of oil burned pushes the planet closer to runaway climate change and total collapse.
My intuition is infected with a familiar dread. Looking around me, I am met only with trauma. So, I look to the future. I see sea levels rising, cities drowning, and refugees fleeing. I see oceans acidifying, coral reefs bleaching, and aquatic life collapsing. I see forests burning, species disappearing, and topsoil blowing away.
I don’t see a livable future.
My hands tighten on the steering wheel, the muscles in my face cramp, and I feel nauseous. My left foot is restless. My right foot, though it is busy with the accelerator, is restless, too. I am speeding. My body is confused. It has no evolutionary reference for being trapped in the cab of a car while traveling at highway speeds.
If you could see through my flesh and bone to the organs forming my stress response system, what would you see? You’d see my adrenal glands pumping out stress hormones. You’d see the stress hormones preparing my body and brain to fight or flee. After a few minutes, you’d see my shrunken, damaged hippocampus trying to signal my adrenal glands that the threat has passed and to stop flooding my frontal cortex with stress hormones. You’d see my hippocampus fail, my adrenal glands continue to pump out hormones, and my risk for sinking into a full-blown episode of depression rise.
Oil well in Duchense County, Utah. Credit: Wikimedia
***
Neurobiological research suggests that the highly recurrent nature of depression is, in part, linked to the way stress hormones can produce brain damage. Advances in neuroscience unveil a conception of depression as a vicious cycle in the body’s stress response system. In a healthy system, adrenals produce hormones in response to stress. The stress passes and the hippocampus signals the adrenals to stop hormone production.
When the frontal cortex – especially the hippocampus and amygdala – is exposed to too many stress hormones, for too long, the frontal cortex begins to shrink. A damaged hippocampus fails to stop the adrenals which continue to produce stress hormones which continue to damage the hippocampus. Mood, memory, attention, and concentration are all affected. Problems with mood, memory, attention, and concentration create their own stresses which intensify the cycle.
Recent psychiatric findings paint a bleak picture. The American Psychiatric Association describes depression as “highly recurrent,” with at least 50% of those recovering from a first episode experiencing one or more additional episodes in their lifetime, and approximately 80% of those recovering from two episodes having another recurrence. Someone with three or more episodes has a 90% risk of recurrence. On average, a person with a history of depression will have five to nine separate depressive episodes in his or her lifetime.
I have had four distinct episodes of depression which all but guarantees that depression will continue to recur for me. I do experience periods of remission where I am relatively free of the symptoms of depression. But, even in these times, depression lurks in the shadows forcing me into a perpetual vigilance, struggling to avoid relapse. Depression may fade, but memories of depression’s pain never do. I live in fear, daily, that the next episode is just around the corner.
Mainstream psychology stops the discussion, here, to prescribe avoidance of places that trigger depression, like the Uintah Basin and to conclude that a combination of improving the hippocampus’ ability to switch off stress hormones, eliminating as much stress from the depressed’s life as possible, and coping with the stress that can’t be eliminated is the key to recovery.
I have no reason to believe this wouldn’t work, in another time or another world. But, most of the planet has been turned into places like the Uintah Basin. There are precious few places free from civilized violence. While our homes are on the brink of annihilation, while horror adheres to our daily experience, while protecting life requires facing these horrors, is the elimination of stress possible? Is coping honest?
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Credit: Gordon Haber, National Park Service
Ecopsychology shows that the elimination of stress is not possible in this ecological moment. Where psychology is the study of the soul and ecology is the study of the natural relationships creating life, ecopsychology insists that the soul cannot be studied apart from these natural relationships and encourages us to contemplate the kinds of relationships the soul requires to be truly healthy. Viewing depression through the lens of ecopsychology, we can explain depression as the result of problems with our relationships with the natural world. Depression cannot be cured until these relationships are fixed.
This explanation begins with stress and the body’s relationship with it. Stress is fundamentally ecological and can be understood as flowing through an animal’s relationship with his or her habitat. The classic example of the ecological nature of an animal’s stress response system involves the relationship between prey and predator. When a moose is beset by wolves, her stress response system produces hormones that help her flee or fight the wolves.
The relationship formed between the wolf, the moose, the moose’s stress hormones, and the moose’s stress response system is one of the countless relationships necessary for the moose’s survival. This is true for everyone. Other relationships animals rely on include air, water, and space, animals of other species, members of the animal’s own species, fungi, flowers, and trees, the cells forming the animal’s own flesh, the bacteria in the animal’s gut, and the yeast on the animal’s skin. Relationships give an animal life, and in the end, relationships bring the animal’s death. In an animal’s death, other beings gain life. The history of Life is the history of these mutually beneficial relationships.
Civilized humans poison air and water, alter space, murder species, destroy fungi, flowers, and trees, infect cells, mutate bacteria, and turn yeast deadly. In short, they threaten the planet’s capacity to support Life. Not only do civilized humans destroy those we need relationships with, they destroy the possibility of these relationships in the future. Every indigenous language lost, every species pushed to extinction, every unique acre of forest clearcut is a relationship foreclosed now and forever.
Living honestly in this reality, we open ourselves to depression. Losing these relationships, and seeing a future devoid of the relationships we need, creates unspeakable stress. Living with this stress every day can flood the frontal cortex with stress hormones, shrink the hippocampus, and push the stress response system past its ability to recover.
If this happens, you may be haunted with depression for the rest of your life.
To experience major depressive disorder is to know consciousness is an involuntary bodily function. Just like your heartbeat, you cannot turn consciousness off without chemicals, a blow to the head, or some other violence to the body and brain. Awareness is a muscle, and perceiving phenomena is how this muscle works. Depression is constant pain accompanying perception. In the civilized world, pain and trauma reflect from countless phenomena. The destruction has become so complete, consciousness finds nowhere to rest in peace, no place free from the reminders of violence.
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Credit: Lain McGilcrest / Regent College
I know I have described a harsh reality for those of us living with depression. It is, however, the reality. For many of us, depression is a lifelong illness. In the long run, accepting a harsh reality is always better than maintaining denial. I have found that accepting this reality helps me manage my depression daily and enables me to be a more effective activist.
Accepting that I will always struggle with depression does not imply giving up. On the contrary, accepting this struggle requires a commitment to daily discipline. Several of my doctors have compared depression to diabetes. Just like many diabetics have to monitor their blood sugar, avoid certain foods, and regular exercise, depressives must build a daily practice into their lives. For me, this means regular cardiovascular exercise that helps my body deal with stress hormones, getting eight hours of sleep nightly, drinking alcohol sparingly, limiting situations where I am tempted to ruminate, and a consistent investment in my social relationships both human and nonhuman.
Coming to grips with the lifelong nature of depression has also given me firepower against depression’s perpetual guilt. The guilt associated with depression can become so pervasive it builds layers on itself. I feel guilty, for example, when I am tired, when I can’t seem to focus on writing, when I cannot find the mental fortitude to see the tasks I’ve promised to complete through to conclusion. I remind myself that lack of energy and problems with concentration and goal-oriented thinking are symptoms of depression. Then, I feel guilty for forgetting and guilty for letting myself feel guilty.
Accepting that I will always struggle with depression is accepting that I will always struggle with the symptoms of depression like guilt, too. Knowing this, when I find myself mired in cycles of guilt, I stop trying to rationalize my way through the guilt and simply place the guilt in a corner where it doesn’t matter if I should feel guilty or not.
Accepting the lifelong nature of depression relieves me of the search for a cure. The personal search for a cure is quickly converted by depression into pressure to get better. This pressure becomes a sense of failure when depression’s symptoms intensify. While the world burns, the stress causing depression is always present. I may defend myself from this depression effectively for awhile but, the violence is so total and the trauma so obvious, there will be times that the stress overwhelms my defenses. This is not a personal failing and this is not my fault. I fight as hard as I can, but I will not always win.
Most importantly, acceptance makes me a better activist. I cannot separate my experience from the countless humans and nonhumans who make my experience possible. Fortunately, ecopsychology gives me a lexicon to communicate about the relationships creating my experience. Understanding that omnipresent stress, caused by the omnipresent destruction of the relationships that make us human, causes depression frees me from the voice telling me depression is my fault.
Before I could understand this, I had to open myself to the reality of these relationships. These relationships are our greatest vulnerability and our greatest strength. We cannot change this. The ongoing loss of these relationships is incredibly painful. If we want the pain to stop one day, we must fight back. That will be incredibly painful, too.
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Credit: Pixabay
Life speaks, but rarely in English. One human language is much too small to convey the ever unfolding meanings at play in the world. Wind and water, soil and stone, fin, fur, and feather are only a few of Life’s dialects.
Tectonic plates tell mountains where to form. Blood in the water tells a shark food may be near. Foreign proteins on the surface of dangerous cells, tell your white blood cells to attack. A single chirp, formed in a prairie dog’s throat, lasting a mere tenth of a second, tells an entire colony the species and physical characteristics of an approacher.
You may not hear Life utter the words, “Stop the destruction.” But, Life’s languages are as diverse as the variety of physical experiences. The pain of depression is a physical experience, and it follows that Life speaks through depression. That pain will haunt me for the rest of my life. Life continues to speak. It says, “Fight back.”
A windmill blade knocks the head off a Cooper’s hawk interrupting the late afternoon peace in Spring Valley, just outside Ely, Nevada.
The blade tosses the hawk’s body onto yellow gravel the power company spread, over living soil, in circles around their windmills.
The ever-present Great Basin breeze, who usually whispers with a soothing tone through pinyon needles, juniper branches, and sage tops, becomes angry. Grazing cows pause their chewing and look up to consider the scene.
Heads of cheat grass poke through the gravel, only to droop with sorrow for the splayed feathers and twisted wings at their feet. Taller than cheat grass and crowding around the gravel’s edge, crested wheatgrass shakes and shutters with horror in the wind.
The collision’s suddenness and the sickening sound of the blade striking the hawk’s small skull breaks my awareness open with a pop. I seep across the valley floor. I mingle with the wounds on the land and recognize pain in places I previously overlooked. The windmills, the invasive plants, the cows, and the empty scars on the foothills marking pinyon-juniper clearcuts are all evidence of violence.
The gravel at my feet is the remains of stones and boulders that were exploded and crushed, loaded into trucks, and transported to Spring Valley as part of Pattern Energy’s Spring Valley Wind Farm project. Windmill construction means so much involves land clearances, building maintenance roads, and operation of fossil-fuel intensive heavy machinery.
Before the gravel was dumped and the construction project started, the ground I stand on was covered in a complex mosaic of lichens, mosses, microfungi, green algae, and cyanobacteria that biologists call a “biological soil crust.”
Across the Great Basin, biological soil crusts are integral to protecting soil surfaces from erosion. They are also vulnerable to disturbance by construction projects like the one that brought the windmills here. The lichen components of these disturbed crusts can take 245 years to recover. Far worse, soil losses due to erosion following mechanical disturbances can take 5,000 to 10,000 years to naturally reform in arid regions.
The windmills that tower above me fill the air with a buzzing, mechanical sound. Built only four miles from a colony of millions of Mexican free-tailed bats at the Rose Guano Cave, the windmills killed 533 bats in 2013, triple the amount allowed by federal regulations. The majority of these bats are killed by barotrauma. Rapid or excessive air pressure change, produced by windmills, causes internal hemorrhaging. In less abstract language, the bats’ lungs explode.
Both cheatgrass and crested wheatgrass are invasive species. Global shipping routes, which have long been tools of colonialism, brought cheatgrass to North America through contaminated grain seed, straw packing material, and soil used as ballast in ships. Cheatgrass outcompetes native grasses for water and nutrients. It drops seeds in early summer before native grasses and then drys out to become highly flammable.
When wildfires rip through areas cheatgrass has invaded, native grasses are destroyed without seeding. In the fall, after native grasses have burned, cheatgrass seeds germinate and cheatgrass dominance expands. This dominance has been disastrous for the Great Basin. Fire return intervals have gone from between 60-110 years in sagebrush-dominated systems to less than 5 years under cheatgrass dominance.
While cheatgrass was imported by accident, crested wheatgrass was imported from Asia in 1898. By the 1890s, Great Basin rangelands were depleted of water, soil, and economically useful vegetation. Ranchers needed cheap feed for their livestock and crested wheatgrass provided it. It outcompetes native grasses, grows in tight bunches that choke out other species, quickly forms a monoculture, and reduces the variety of plant and wildlife species in places it takes hold. Worst of all, crested wheatgrass supports a destructive ranching industry that should have collapsed decades ago.
Ranching is one of the most ecologically destructive activities in the Great Basin. Livestock grazing depletes water supplies, causes soil erosion, and eliminates the countless trillions of small plants forming the base of the complex food web supporting all life in the region. Ranchers have nearly killed off all the top carnivores on western rangelands and jealously guard their animals against the re-introduction of “unacceptable species” like grizzly bears and wolves.
Ranchers, always searching for new rangeland, encourage government agencies like the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) and the US Forest Service (USFS) to clear-cut forests and remove sagebrush to encourage the growth of graze for their livestock. In the hills north of the wind farm, pinyon pines and junipers lie in mangled piles where they were “chained.”
Chaining is the preferred method for destroying forests here. To chain a forest is to stretch a US Navy battleship anchor chain between two crawler tractors which are then driven parallel to each other while ripping up every living thing in their path.
Ship chain used to clear forests. Photo: Wikimedia Commons
Nevada Highway 893 runs to my left along the west side of the valley. If I followed the road north a few miles, I would run into one of the Southern Nevada Water Authority’s (SNWA) test wells. SNWA installed these wells in the preparation of its Clark, Lincoln, and White Pine Counties Groundwater Development Project that would drain Spring Valley of water and, then, transport the water by pipeline to support Las Vegas’ growing population.
Fortunately, the project has been successfully stalled in court by determined grassroots activists. But, if SNWA eventually prevails, Spring Valley will quickly dry up and little life, endemic or invasive, will survive here.
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The reminders of violence I encounter in Spring Valley reflect global problems. Windmills are a symptom of the dominant culture’s addiction to energy. The roads here will carry you to highways, highways to interstates, and interstates to airports.
There is virtually nowhere left on Earth that is inaccessible to humans with the privilege, power, and desire to go wherever they will. To gain this accessibility, these humans are so thoroughly poisoning the atmosphere with greenhouse gas emissions global temperatures are rising.
Invasive species – cows, cheat grass, crested wheatgrass, European settlers – are colonizers. They each colonize in their own way. The cows replace elk, pronghorn, wolves, and bears. The grasses eliminate natives by hoarding nutrients and water. They reproduce unsustainably and establish monocultures. When that doesn’t work, they burn the natives out. And, the settlers do the same.
The violence of civilized life becomes too obvious to ignore and the land’s pain threatens to overwhelm me. Despair accompanies these moments. When all I see is violence, it is easy to conclude that violence is all there is, all there ever was, and all there ever will be. Claims I’ve heard repeated countless times echo through my mind.
Humans are selfish. This is just what we do. We will kill ourselves, but the planet will recover…eventually. Humans have been butchering each other for centuries and we’ll butcher each other for centuries more if we don’t destroy the world first.
I stand paralyzed under a windmill, with a decapitated hawk at my feet, struggling through my thoughts for who knows how long, when the blue feathers of a pinyon jay catch my eye. At first, it’s the simple beauty of her color that attracts my attention. But, it’s the strangeness of the phenomenon that keeps my attention.
Rows of windmills form the wind farm. I stand under the northernmost row and about one hundred yards separate the rows. The jay lands on a barbed wire fence post about halfway between the row I’m standing under and the first row south of me. Her presence is strange for two reasons. First, pinyon jays prefer to live in pinyon-juniper forests and there are no trees for a mile in either direction. Second, pinyon jays are very intelligent, and she must have known that to brave the circling windmill blades is to brave the same death the Cooper’s hawk just experienced or the barotrauma so many bats experience.
The despair I felt a few moments ago is fading. As I approach the jay I see her picking through a pinyon pine cone. She picks deftly at it before she pulls a pine nut from the brown folds of the cone. It’s not until she lifts her head, with the pine nut in her beak, that I understand.
She flew down from the forests, through dangerous windmill blades, to show me a pine nut.
Pinion Jay – Photo: Wikimedia Commons
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Pine nuts represent the friendship humans and pinyon-juniper forests have shared for thousands of years. Pinyon charcoal and seed coats have been found in the 6,000-year-old Gatecliff Shelter in central Nevada. Pinyon seed coats have been found with 3,000-year-old artifacts in Hogup Cave in northwestern Utah. Many of the Fremont culture’s ruins (circa 1000 AD) in eastern Utah also show pinyon use.
Pine nuts are symbols of true sustainability. I’ve heard many traditional, indigenous people explain that sustainability requires making decisions with the succeeding seven generations in mind. When the health of the seventh future generation guides your relationship with the land, overpopulation, drawdown, pollution, and most forms of extraction become unthinkable. European settlers arrived to find indigenous peoples in the Great Basin, like so many indigenous peoples around the world, living in cultures that existed for centuries in balance with the land.
And, the pine nut made these cultures possible.
The Washoe, Paiute, and Shoshone all developed cultures centered on pine nuts. Pinyon pine expert, Ronald Lanner notes, “Just as life on the plains was fitted to the habits of the buffalo, life in the Great Basin was fitted to the homely, thin-shelled nut of the singleleaf pinyon.” Pinyons give their nuts freely and harvesting them involves no damage to the trees. In fact, pine nuts are seeds. Animals who collect and gather the seeds – like pinyon jays, rats, mice, and humans – help the trees reproduce.
It’s a beautiful relationship: pinyon pines offer animals food, and animals offer pinyon pines regeneration. At a time when the survival of life on Earth depends upon humans embracing their role as animals, the relationship the Washoe, Paiute, and Shoshone built with pinyon pines serves as a model for the world.
Relying on the research of American Museum of Natural History archaeologist David Hurst Thomas, Lanner describes the central role the annual pinyon festival played in Western Shoshone life. He writes, “…when pinyon harvest time arrived, Shoshone bands would come together at a prearranged site. There they would harvest nuts, conduct communal rabbit drives, and hold an annual festival. The pinyon festival was the social highlight of the year and was often attended by several hundred people. At night…there was dancing…There was gambling among men and courting among the young. Marriages were arranged and sexual liaisons conducted.”
Pine nut crops, like all natural processes, are subject to variation. There are good yields and bad yields. Human cultures dependent on the land are constantly confronted with a choice. Either humans can tighten their belts and reduce their populations voluntarily. Or, they can exploit the land, stealing resources from the future to meet the needs of the present.
Lanner describes how Western Shoshone sustainability was maintained, “…the pinyon festival was used as an opportunity for regulating the future size and distribution of Shoshone populations. If at the festival the intelligence from all areas foretold a failure of next year’s crop, then measures could be taken to avoid mass starvation…Births could be limited by sexual abstinence or abortion. One or more twins could be killed at birth, as could illegitimate children…The sick and the old could be abandoned. A widow might be killed and buried beside her husband.”
Some of these measures may seem harsh to us today. But, when we consider the violence necessary to sustain today’s civilized, human populations, we will realize that some of these difficult decisions are what true sustainability looks like. Killing a twin or abandoning the sick is small violence compared to the mass violence of deforestation, anthropogenic desertification, and climate change.
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The pinyon jay in Spring Valley shows me both a pine nut and the history of human sustainability. Even though Spring Valley, with the rest of the world, currently reflects too much human violence, the vast majority of human history reflects true sustainability. Modern humans have existed for 200,000 years. For the vast majority of that time, most of us lived in cultures similar to the Western Shoshone. We must not forget where we come from.
Meanwhile, ecological collapse intensifies. Violence against the natural world is so pervasive it must be considered a war. Perceiving this war hurts. The pain offers us two choices: endurance or cure. Either the pain is inevitable, an unavoidable fact of life that must be endured. Or, the cause of the pain can be treated and healed.
The pervasiveness of violence tempts us to conclude that it is inevitable. When everywhere we look, we are met with human destruction, it is easy to believe that humans are inherently destructive. This is one reason why the dominant culture destroys the natural world so zealously. If violence is inevitable, there is no reason to stop it.
This is also why the dominant culture works to destroy those non-humans we’ve formed ancient friendships with. If the dominant culture eradicates bison, it destroys our memory of how to live sustainably on the Great Plains. If the dominant culture eradicates salmon, it destroys our memory of how to live sustainably in the Pacific Northwest. If the dominant culture eradicates pinyon-juniper forests, it destroys our memory of how to live sustainably in the Great Basin.
There is a war being waged on the natural world and wars are fought with weapons. The pinyon jay brings me a weapon against the despair I feel recognizing pervasive violence in Spring Valley. She shows me that the violence is not inevitable. She shows me the path to true sustainability, and in doing so, shows me the path to peace.
To learn more about the effort to protect pinyon-juniper forests, go to Pinyon Juniper Alliance. You can contact the Alliance here.
