The Ohio River is the most polluted river in the United States. In this series of essays entitled ‘The Ohio River Speaks,‘ Will Falk travels the length of the river and tells her story. Read the first, second, third, fourth,fifth and sixth part of Will’s journey.
Red Oak Memories
On the banks of the Ohio River, in downtown Warren, PA, I stood under the long limbs of an ancient red oak wondering what this magnificent tree must have witnessed in her lifetime. Red oaks can live for 400 years or more and this one had a circumference of what looked like 25 or 30 feet. Even if she was only 300 years old, she would have witnessed the arrival of European settlers in the area.
I tried to imagine what the scene before me looked like when the red oak was young. The hulking asphalt bridge carrying traffic across the river vanished. When it did, the screeching brakes, honking car horns, and police sirens hushed. The multi-story buildings crowding the opposite shore, with their advertisements painted in loud colors, disappeared. The stone man dressed as a Union officer brashly observing the town’s movements from his perch on an obelisk dedicated to the area’s Civil War casualties disintegrated. From the brass crucifix on a steeple casting a shadow over the river, Jesus ascended to heaven. And, he took the church building with him.
Beyond my vision, the Kinzua Dam was inconceivable and the Allegheny Reservoir was unthinkable. The oil wells’ metal pumpjacks methodically sucking crude oil from the earth like mechanical vampires throughout the Allegheny National Forest were centuries away from invention. Warren’s United Refining Company was unnecessary because no one thought they needed the extravagant energy made possible by petroleum.
With all of the evidence of the town of Warren gone, I saw the red oak’s kin growing thick around me, showering the ground with acorns. I saw towering, straight white pines and thick-foliaged hemlocks. These trees had never heard the haunting sounds metal saws make as they slice their way through forests. I heard the songbird symphonies in their full glory. I watched the intense gaze of blue herons stalking crawdads. I delighted in the flamboyancy of the green herons displaying their plumage. Mergansers and mallards led their downy chicks in wobbly lines up and down the river. Black bear cubs wrestled and climbed trees while their mother eyed trout in the shallows.
I also saw humans. I saw the Senecas and their ancestors who had lived here for thousands of years. I saw adults working on a new canoe that would carry them and their trading goods as far as the MTississippi hundreds of miles away. I saw elders telling teenagers stories to live by. I saw parents let their children swim and splash in the river with no fear of untreated sewage spills, oil refinery pollution, toxic fertilizers, or radioactive fracking wastewater.
The red oak’s and my view of downtown Warren, PA.
There Must Be Something in the Water
These visions slowly drifted away until a blaring train horn brought me fully back to the present. It hurt to be back. I wished I could permanently transport to a time before asphalt bridges, oil refineries, and church steeples occupied the Ohio River basin. I wished I lived here before the town of Warren was built. I yearned for the time when traditional cultures governed these lands. I wished Europeans never found this land.
I began to feel sick to my stomach. I tried to recall if I had eaten something, but all I had eaten all day was an apple and a handful of cashews and almonds. This meal had never given me trouble before.
An acorn fell from the branches and bounced near my feet. The red oak’s branches caught my attention. I saw her leaves turning in the late afternoon sunshine. She glowed with a verdant light – one of the forest’s original colors. She glimmered with memories of times past. Then, a statement echoed in my mind: “There must be something in the water.”
My nausea intensified. It was a hot day and I was guzzling water. I had filled my water bottle up at several public fountains in town. Was something in the water? What was making me sick?
Above me, four flags snapped in the wind. One flag was a blue field with three gold fleur de lis. This was the old, royal French flag carried by French explorers in the area. One flag was the British Union Jack carried by British explorers. The third flag was the one carried by American forces during the Revolution. It showed 13 white stars arranged in a circle on a blue square with alternating red and white stripes. The last flag was the Seneca Nation’s. It was red and displayed the Seneca’s respect for nonhuman life with eight animals in a circle. They were deer, heron, hawk, snipe, bear, wolf, beaver, and turtle.
Below the flags, a plaque explained that originally this monument flew only the three imperial flags of the Europeans who claimed this land. Later, the Seneca Nation flag was added. That irony provoked in me a desire to learn the history of how indigenous peoples were pushed off this land. I hoped this would reveal what was in the water.
Settler Occupation Heartbreak
The history of the settler occupation of the Ohio River basin is heartbreaking. White settlers, especially Americans, engaged in decades of ethnic cleansing and genocide to open the region to settlement. This process is called settler colonialism. Historian Patrick Wolfe sums up the goal of settler colonialism as elimination of indigenous populations in order to make land available to settlers. And, in her essential book An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States, Dr. Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz elaborates:
“Settler colonialism, as an institution or system, requires violence or the threat of violence to attain its goals. People do not hand over their land, resources, children and futures without a fight, and that fight is met with violence. In employing the force necessary to accomplish its expansionist goals, a colonizing regime institutionalizes violence. The notion that settler-indigenous conflict is an inevitable product of cultural differences and misunderstandings, or that violence was committed equally by the colonized and the colonizer, blurs the nature of the historical processes. Euro-American colonialism, an aspect of the capitalist economic globalization, had from its beginnings a genocidal tendency.”
Air Force officer and Associate Professor of History at the United States Air Force Academy Lieutenant Colonel John Grenier goes so far as to call the extravagant violence perpetrated by Americans against indigenous peoples as the US military’s “first way of war.” He explains in his book The First Way of War: American War Making on the Frontier, 1607-1814:
“For the first 200 years of our military heritage, then, Americans depended on arts of war that contemporary professional soldiers supposedly abhorred: razing and destroying enemy villages and fields; killing enemy women and children; raiding settlements for captives; intimidating and brutalizing enemy noncombatants; and assassinating enemy leaders.”
The Ohio River basin is home to many indigenous nations including the Senecas, Shawnees, Miamis, and Delawares. Americans fought wars of extirpation against all of these nations. Grenier describes why:
“The one constant road block to the settlers’ expansion into the interior of the continent was always the Indians. Thus, if they could eliminate the Indians, the settlers could make North America their own. Limited wars…did little to drive the Indians from their lands. Americans thus chose the most effective means of subjugating the Indians they faced. They sent groups of men, sometimes a dozen, sometimes hundreds, to attack Indian villages and homes, kill Indian women and children, and raze Indian fields.”
When I read this history, the movements happening across the country to remove statues and memorials dedicated to genocidal men came to mind. How can anyone who has read the words of men like George Washington, words ordering Americans to ethnically cleanse the land of indigenous peoples, oppose efforts to remove memorials to these men?
There is Malice Enough in our Hearts
During the American Revolution, for example, Washington wrote instructions to Major General John Sullivan to take peremptory action against the Haudenosaunee (also known as the Iroquois confederacy which included the Ohio River basin’s Seneca) to “lay waste all the settlements around…that the country may not be merely overrun but destroyed…[Y]ou will not by any means, listen to any overture of peace before the total ruin of their settlements is effected…Our future security will be in their inability to injure us…and in the terror with which the severity of the chastisement they receive will inspire them.” Sullivan replied, “The Indians shall see that there is malice enough in our hearts to destroy everything that contributes to their support.”
In this spirit, in 1779, the Continental Congress mustered three armies against the Senecas. Dunbar-Ortiz describes how the three armies scorched “earth across New York and converged at Tioga, the principal Seneca town, in what is now northern Pennsylvania. Their orders were to wipe out the Senecas and any other Indigenous nation that opposed their separatist project, burning and looting all the villages, destroying the food supply, and turning the inhabitants into homeless refugees.” To encourage enlistment in these armies, Dunbar-Ortiz notes that the Pennsylvania Assembly authorized a bounty on Seneca scalps, without regard to sex or age and concludes, “This combination of Continental Army regulars, settler-rangers, and commercial scalp hunters ravaged most of Seneca territory.”
The end of the Revolutionary War did not ease the violence Americans employed against the indigenous peoples of the Ohio River basin. Grenier writes that, in March 1791, Secretary of War Henry Knox (the namesake of Knoxville, TN), directed Brigadier General Charles Scott to recruit 500 Kentucky mounted rangers to destroy Miami towns along the Wabash River, a major tributary of the Ohio. Scott sacked two of the Miami’s largest towns, captured 41 women and children, and then issued the following threat to the Miami:
“Your warriors will be slaughtered, your towns and villages ransacked and destroyed, your wives and children carried into captivity, and you may be assured that those who escape the fury of our mighty chiefs shall find no resting place on this side of the great lakes.”
The Shawnees received the same treatment. Dunbar-Ortiz recounts how George Washington charged alcoholic Major General “Mad” Anthony Wayne (the name sake of Fort Wayne, IN) with destroying the Shawnees. Wayne marched into what is now northwestern Ohio and established Fort Defiance. He then made this ultimatum to the Shawnees: “In pity to your innocent women and children, come and prevent the further effusion of blood.” When the Shawnee leader Blue Jacket refused submission, Wayne’s forces began destroying Shawnee villages and fields and murdering women, children, and old men. At Fallen Timbers, on August 20, 1794, the main Shawnee fighting force was overpowered and Wayne’s men created a 50-mile swath of destruction while laying waste to Shawnee houses and cornfields. Wayne and his men carried on for three days after the battle.
Photo of a painting depicting the Battle of Fallen Timbers taken by the Kentucky National Guard Public Affairs Office, I doubt the Kentucky National Guard Public Affairs Office endorses my work. My use of this image should not imply that the Office does endorse my work.
The history of the American invasion of North America is filled with stories like the ones described here. It would take pages upon pages to represent this history in its entirety. Anyone attempting to understand the reality of American history needs to contemplate what Dunbar-Ortiz points out: “The objective of US colonialist authorities was to terminate [native nations’] existence as peoples – not as random individuals. This is the very definition of modern genocide.”
Macutté Mong and the Wabash River
The following stories finally showed me what was in the water that made me feel so sick.
George Rogers Clark is considered a hero of the American Revolution. He was likely a psychopath. Outside of Vincennes, IN, in February 1779, Clark demanded the unconditional surrender of the British inside Fort Sackville. When Henry Hamilton, Fort Sackville’s commander, refused to accept Clark’s demands, Clark showed what Grenier characterizes as “the Americans’ darker side.”
Hamilton described the events in his journal. Clark had four Indian captives. He ordered these four men taken into the street in front of the fort’s main gate where the fort’s occupants could watch. Hamilton reported:
“One of [the Indians] was tomahawked either by Clark or one of his officers, the other three foreseeing their fate, began to sing their death songs, and were butchered in succession. A young chief of the Ottawa nation called Macutté Mong one of these last, having received the fatal stroke of a tomahawk in the head, took it out and gave it again into the hands of his executioner who repeated the stroke a second and a third time, after which the miserable being, not entirely deprived of life, was dragged to the river and thrown in with the rope about his neck where he ended his life and tortures.”
When Hamilton continued to argue for lenient terms, Clark began to wash his hands and face “still reeking” in Macutté Mong’s blood and threatened to put the entire British garrison to death if it did not surrender immediately. Hamilton opened the fort’s gates the next morning.
When I read that Macutté Mong was thrown into the Wabash River, I realized that what was left of his brutalized body was carried south towards the Ohio River. I did not know how long it takes rivers to break down human bodies. I did not know how far a body’s materials might be carried by a river, either. But, I did know that matter can neither be created nor destroyed.
Macutté Mong’s body was no doubt recycled by the Wabash and Ohio rivers over the centuries. Some of his body was likely eaten by fish and insects who in turn were eaten by other fish, insects, birds, and animals. His bones likely sank into the riverbed, reunited with the bones of countless primordial marine organisms that form the white limestone southern Indiana is famous for. His blood stained the water until the river could wash enough of it away. And, in this way, Macutté Mong was spread throughout the watershed where he was murdered. I was born in southern Indiana, not far from where Macutté Mong was dumped into the Wabash River. Ever since I encountered Macutté Mong’s story, I have been haunted by the possibility that a part of his body – no matter how minuscule – became part of my body.
In March 1782, three years after Clark used four Indian men to intimidate the British in Indiana, Delawares living along the Tuscarawas River at a Moravian mission in Gnadenhutten, Ohio were rounded up by a Pennsylvania settler militia under the command of David Williamson. These Delawares, who had converted to Christianity, were told they were being evacuated for their own safety. Then, the militiamen searched their belongings to confiscate anything that could have been used as a weapon. The militiamen accused these Delawares of giving refuge to Delawares who had killed white people and condemned them all to death.
The condemned Delawares spent the night praying and singing hymns. In the morning, the militiamen marched over ninety people – forty-two men, twenty women, and thirty-four children – in pairs into two houses and slaughtered them methodically. Daniel K. Richter, in his book Facing East from Indian Country: A Native History of Early America, found that one killer boasted he had personally clubbed fourteen Delawares to death with a cooper’s mallet. After killing these fourteen people, he handed the mallet to an accomplice and announced, “My arm fails me. Go on with the work.”
The Tuscarawas River flows into the Muskingum which flows into the Ohio. I never learned how these Delawares were laid to rest. But, considering the wanton cruelty the Pennsylvania militiamen demonstrated while slaughtering the Delawares, it is easy to conclude the militiamen used the Tuscarawas River to dispose of their dirty work.
I couldn’t drive the images of Macutté Mong pulling the tomahawk from his head or the cooper’s mallet falling on Delaware heads from my mind. The death songs sung by the men George Rogers Clark murdered drifted across time and space to give me nightmares. I heard the Delawares singing hymns in the distance. I saw skulls shattering. Clark’s man hesitated when Macutté Mong handed him the tomahawk back. The man swinging the cooper’s mallet grunted as he tired. Mangled bodies piled up. Blood spilled across floors, washed from door frames, and swirled with river currents. Crimson pools slowly expanded in formerly clean river water.
Shattered souls spill like blood
These visions taught me what the ancient red oak I stood under in Warren, PA was trying to tell me when she suggested there must be something in the water.
Some violence is so heinous that it shatters souls when it destroys bodies. Shattered souls spill like blood. Some of the shattered souls seep into the soil and make their way into groundwater. Some of the shattered souls flow with surface water to mingle with streams and rivers. These shattered souls contaminate water with the metaphysical equivalent of chemical carcinogens. They poison water with grief and dread.
Shattered souls litter the North American continent. When you confront this history, it is difficult to envision any water untainted by the horrors of settler colonialism. And, when you drink water polluted with shattered souls, you may get sick. Symptoms include a nagging angst, inexplicable grief, spiritual discomfort, the urge to flee, and sometimes physical nausea. There is no cure for this sickness. But, you will find relief facing the violence that shattered these souls, searching for the truth, and working to ensure that settler colonialism never shatters souls again.
Buildings crowding the river in Warren, PA.
This painting depicts Henry Hamilton’s surrender to George Rogers Clark at Fort Sackville near Vincennes, IN. Hamilton’s surrender came after George Rogers Clark tomahawked four native men to death at the fort’s gate to intimidate the British.
Will Falk is the author of How Dams Fall: On Representing the Colorado River in the First-Ever American Lawsuit Seeking Rights for a Major Ecosystem and a practicing rights of Nature attorney. Rights of Nature advocates work to transform the legal system so that it recognizes the “personhood” of natural beings. For the rest of 2020, Falk will travel through the Ohio River Basin asking the Ohio River the two questions he asks any client who steps into his office: “Who are you?” And, “What do you need?”
The Ohio River is the most polluted river in the United States. In this series of essays entitled ‘The Ohio River Speaks,‘ Will Falk travels the length of the river and tells her story. Read the first, second, third, fourth and fifth part of Will’s journey.
The Kinzua Dam forms the Allegheny Reservoir, a few miles east of Warren, PA. Two days before the Fourth of July, I studied the dam and reservoir from a parking lot built on the southern edge of the dam. I was angry. Below me, motorboats and jet skis ripped across the water. Classic rock and pop country playlists clashed as parties raged on pontoon boats. Behind me, motorcycles carrying humans on holiday rides tore down the highway. The noise foreshadowed the fireworks that would soon light up the nation. Hearing the exploding fuel in combustion engines racing around me, and imagining the fireworks’ gunpowder that would soon be exploding across the sky, I wondered why my fellow Americans blow so much shit up when they celebrate.
The star-spangled banner flying over a Seneca Nation flag on a pole above me caused me to consider whether Americans actually believe fireworks put on a better show than the setting sun or whether fireworks are so beloved because they remind Americans of “the rocket’s red glare, the bombs bursting in air” and their favorite pastime, colonial warfare.
The anger grew as I studied the 1900 feet of concrete, steel, gravel, and dirt that stretches between two hills and stands 179 feet tall to trap the Ohio River.
I scanned the Allegheny Reservoir until it disappeared behind more hills. I knew, from previous research, that the Allegheny Reservoir sprawled northwards into southern New York for 27 miles and reached depths of 120 feet. I knew, too, that Seneca land had been destroyed when the reservoir was formed. Meanwhile, the sounds of Styx – that river in Hell and an accursedly annoying rock band – playing “Come Sail Away” competed with Shania Twain’s “That Don’t Impress Me Much.” Singalongs and drunken laughter, amplified by the water, drifted up to me. Shania’s mood matched mine best. I asked the Ohio River how anyone could party in the midst of such destruction.
Eventually the boats turned a corner formed by the hills and vanished. The wind blew across the Allegheny Reservoir leaving a delicate wake. The reflection of the hills in the water danced and waved. The water enchanted me. I tried to picture what was under the water. And, that’s when the Ohio River’s answer came to me.
People can party in the midst of this destruction, they can drive their jet skis over indigenous burial grounds, they can dance on pontoon boats floating over stolen land because so much truth, today, is submerged. Truth is submerged by history. Truth is submerged by ideology and cultural conditioning. Truth is submerged by popular ignorance of the processes destroying the planet. Truth is literally submerged like Seneca land under the Allegheny Reservoir.
The history of the Kinzua Dam and Allegheny Reservoir submerges many truths.
These truths include theft of Native land, the forcible removal of Native people, and another treaty to add to the long list of broken promises the federal government has made to Native Americans. In 1936, the infamous St. Patrick’s Day Flood washed over the Ohio River Basin. Floods like the St. Patrick’s Day Flood had, for years, directly threatened Pittsburgh, one of America’s most important industrial cities at the time. Instead of considering whether it was prudent to allow massive human populations to congregate in areas prone to powerful floods, Congress responded with the Flood Control Acts of 1936 and 1938 and authorized the Kinzua Dam.
The completion of the Kinzua Dam in 1965 and the formation of the Allegheny Reservoir drowned 10,000 acres of the Seneca Nation’s most fertile lands. That 10,000 acres represented one third of the territory promised to the Seneca under the 1794 Treaty of Canandaigua signed by George Washington himself. The formation of the dam also required the removal of around 600 Senecas from their ancestral homelands.
Living Senecas were removed. And, so were some of the Seneca dead. In 1964, in an act of utter disrespect, the United States Army Corps of Engineers attempted to dig up the remains of one of the most famous Seneca war chiefs, Cornplanter, as well as the remains of more than 300 of his kin and descendants. If that wasn’t bad enough, apparently the Corps of Engineers did such a questionable job, that many Seneca wonder whether Cornplanter was ever truly moved and whether his resting place has been drowned by reservoir.
Truths are also submerged in plain sight by an ignorance of the industrial processes necessary to construct the Kinzua Dam.
Concrete is a good example. Despite being surrounded by concrete, I had never asked where concrete comes from. It turns out that concrete is one of the most destructive materials on earth. Using a study published by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a Guardian article I found estimated that concrete now outweighs the combined carbon mass of every tree, bush, and shrub on the planet. In simpler terms, there may be more concrete on Earth than plants.
According to London’s Royal Institute of International Affairs, the production of cement – a key ingredient in concrete – is responsible for 8 percent of global carbon dioxide emissions. And, perhaps most pertinent to the Ohio River, concrete sucks up almost a 10th of the world’s industrial water use. But, how is concrete made? It starts with ripping limestone, clay, sand, and other aggregates from the earth. Wild beings live in communities where this limestone, clay, and sand is ripped from the earth. So, this extraction destroys these beings’ homes. Extracting and transporting these materials requires industrial energy and produces dust pollution as well as greenhouse gas emissions.
Industrial energy production involves ripping fossil fuels from the earth, produces toxic waste, and also destroys habitat.
The limestone, clay, sand, and other aggregates must be crushed and mixed with water to a certain proportion. This crushing and mixing process also requires industrial energy, produces emissions, and consumes water. The mixture is then heated to around 2700 degrees Fahrenheit to decompose the limestone and produce what is called “clinker.” This heating process again requires industrial energy, produces emissions from the burning of fossil fuels, emissions from the burning of the aggregates, and hazardous waste. After the clinker is created, it is quickly cooled and ground up. The rapid cooling process requires industrial energy and the grinding process produces dust pollution.
The ground clinker is now dry cement which is bagged, shipped, and distributed to work sites. Bagging produces waste and involves paper production which requires deforestation. Shipping and distribution require energy for transportation which again produces emissions. Finally, the dry cement is mixed with potable water and another type of extracted aggregate including quarried stone, fly ash, slag, and sometimes recycled concrete. In other words, when I looked at the Kinzua Dam’s concrete, I was looking at a destructive process involving thousands of people engaged in dozens of ecocidal activities that produced all kinds of pollutants and consumed water, the most precious necessity of life.
After I learned how concrete was made, when I looked at the Kinzua Dam, I couldn’t help but see the gaping wounds quarries cut into the land, the lungs microscopically shredded by tiny rock fragments in dust pollution, and the water stolen from creeks, streams, and rivers only to be trapped for centuries in blocks of concrete.
Uncovering these submerged truths made me angrier.
I fantasized about sinking pontoon boats, pouring sugar in jet ski gas tanks, and slashing motorcycle tires. I fantasized about the ghost of Cornplanter drilling holes in the Kinzua Dam. I fantasized about the Ohio River gathering her power to overwhelm and destroy the dam.
While I pictured the Ohio River bursting through the Kinzua Dam, I noticed a sound my ears had not picked up before. So far, I had only viewed the dam from the east side, the side trapping the river. This new sound beckoned me to view the dam from the west. As I moved westward, I heard a growing roar. Then, on the dam’s west side, I saw the Ohio River gushing out of two floodgates. The sound was roughly similar to the sound a waterfall makes. But, it was not the same.
Rivers choose to leap from waterfalls. They shout with joy as they jump from cliffs and over stones. They thunder while proudly showing off the full power of their flow. At the Kinzua Dam, the Ohio River was not free to choose. She was forcibly squeezed through pipes called penstocks to turn hydroelectric generating turbines. Then, she was shoved from a ledge to slam into a concrete drainage control bed.
As I listened, I knew the Ohio River was screaming with anger. The hills rang with her rage. In this rage, I heard her explain how I could put the anger I was feeling to good use. She told me to dive into the depths and give voice to submerged truths.
The Ohio River is the most polluted river in the United States. In this series of essays entitled ‘The Ohio River Speaks,‘ Will Falk travels the length of the river and tells her story. Read the first, second, third, and fourth part of Will’s journey.
Sometimes I ask the Ohio River questions. And, sometimes she asks me. West of Salamanca, New York, a few miles before the Kinzua Dam traps the Ohio River in the Allegheny Reservoir, I sat in a kayak listening. She was speaking, but I did not understand.
The water was slow. The river’s face was smooth. And, the surface reflected a blue and white mosaic created by lazy cumulus clouds drifting across the sky. She pulled me ever so gently downstream. The sensation was powerfully familiar, but I did not know why.
A mother merganser swam with her five chicks along the closest shore. I smiled at what looked like exasperation on her face as she tried to keep her children moving in the same direction. For a few moments, she anxiously eyed a space downstream where a bald eagle had disappeared into the trees. When she looked back, one duckling had gone one way and one another. The other three didn’t know who to follow.
My mind slowed to match the river’s pace. The random, anxious firing of disparate images that form my moment-to-moment consciousness throttled down until my thoughts almost disappeared entirely. They were replaced by the fullness of my experience of the river. The sun, glinting off a passing dragonfly, left a trail of turquoise light. Bugs skimmed the surface, and appeared to me like the tips of invisible pens writing disappearing messages that only the bugs could comprehend. On the edge of my vision, I saw a splash and the telltale ripples of a leaping trout.
The enchantment continued until a wedge of passing Canada geese pointed right at me. They swept low and the goose flying point shat. The shit slapped my plastic kayak – a direct hit. The honking geese laughed. And, I did, too.
***
I knew the metaphors she presented me with were meaningful. What could be more meaningful than being shit on? But, I wasn’t sure what the Ohio River was trying to communicate until a few days later.
I was listening to an interview given by agricultural critic Richard Manning, author of Against the Grain: How Agriculture Hijacked Civilization and other great books. Manning was asked about the global food shortage and whether there would be enough food to feed the world’s human population over the balance of the 21st century. Manning answered no and pointed out how we are already failing to do so “drastically.” He explained that the people who say we are not failing often assume that humans need a certain amount of calories per day (2000 is the most common number). They multiply this number by the world’s total human population. Next, they calculate the total caloric value of the planet’s corn, wheat, and other grain production. Because the total caloric value of agricultural grain production is greater than the calories they claim are needed by humans, many people declare there is no food shortage.
Manning argued, however, that 2000 calories of carbohydrates are not adequate daily nutrition. He pointed out that high carbohydrate diets are, in fact, making humans sick, and that most humans are not getting the nutrition we have evolved to need. Omega-3 fatty acids are one of the most important things missing from most human diets. Omega-3 fats are vital for brain health and, thus, for achieving human potential.
A major problem, however, is that the world is running out of this essential nutrient. Omega-3 fats primarily come from animals, especially cold-water fish. Manning mentioned a study conducted by British scientists. I found the study titled “Is the world supply of omega-3 fatty acids adequate for optimal human nutrition?” by Norman Salem, Jr. and Manfred Eggersdorfer.
Eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA) and docosahexaenoic acid (DHA) are the most important Omega-3 fatty acids for human health. The study’s abstract stated that “EPA and DHA originate in the phytoplankton and are made available in the human food chain mainly through fish and other seafood.” However, “the fish catch is not elastic and in fact has long since reached a plateau.” These acids do occur in vegetables, but “vegetable oil-derived alpha-linolenic acid, though relatively plentiful, is converted only at a trace level in humans to DHA and not very efficiently to EPA, and so cannot fill” the gap in human need for EPA and DHA. The study “concluded that fish and vegetable oil sources will not be adequate to meet future needs, but that algal oil and terrestrial plants modified genetically to produce EPA and DHA could provide for the increased world demand.”
The realities of human nutritional needs, fish population collapses, and human population growth confronts us with a series of choices. We can attempt to provide all humans alive today with adequate nutrition. And, in the attempt, exhaust cold water fish, turn the oceans into algae farms, and violate the very DNA of terrestrial plants, while creating mutant plants to serve us. We can work to reduce human population to a point where humans and cold water fish can both thrive and exist. Or, we can do nothing. And, the most privileged among us may enjoy adequate nutrition – for a time – while more and more humans fall victim to malnutrition, while fewer and fewer of us may realize our full human potential.
I remembered the trout I saw leaping near the Allegheny Reservoir. I remembered the ripples whispering with the trout’s passing. I thought of other fish who provide Omega-3 fats: the mesmerizing schools of mackerel twirling like underwater whirlpools, the once mighty runs of red salmon who made so much noise swimming upriver you could hear them a mile away, and the hardy cod who call the deep, cold seas of the North Atlantic home.
***
While I was trying to understand the Ohio River’s message contained in these experiences, I went looking for information on her fish, specifically. I landed on the Ohio River Fish Consumption Advisory Workgroup’s website. This Workgroup is a “multi-agency workgroup consisting of representatives from the six main stem states (Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Ohio, Pennsylvania, West Virginia) as well as the US EPA and the Ohio River Valley Water Sanitation Commission.”
The website featured rows of photos of fishermen holding up individual fish of different species. Under each photo, text described how often each species can be eaten and the chemical reason for the advisory. Under a photo of a walleye, for example, the text read “1 meal per month – PCBs.” Under a photo of a sauger, the text read “1 meal per month – Hg.” Under a photo of a white bass, the text read “6 meals per year – PCBs.” But worst of all, under the photos of both a common carp and a channel catfish, the text read “Do not eat – PCBs.” PCBs, according to the Environmental Protection Agency “belong to a broad family of man-made organic chemicals known as chlorinated hydrocarbons.” Hg is mercury.
This made me nauseous. But, probably not as nauseous as eating a common carp or channel catfish would. I wondered how it made the fish feel. I wondered how the chemicals made other animals who eat the fish feel. Mergansers eat fish. Bald eagles do, too. Canada geese are primarily herbivores, but they occasionally eat fish. Hopefully, they observe the advisories and eat less than one meal per month or 6 meals per year.
As I thought of all these creatures, I sensed I was getting closer to understanding the Ohio River’s meaning. That’s when the familiarity I felt while floating in my kayak came back to me. The first physical sensations I ever experienced must have been those I felt floating in my mother’s womb. But, I’m not just my mother’s son. I spent the first, most formative years of my life drinking the Ohio River’s water. I am the Ohio River’s son, too.
But, that wasn’t all of it. The Ohio River pushed me on. My memory drifted farther into the past. Floating was likely our oldest ancestors’ first activity. Floating is familiar because the first motions of Life on Earth began in the movement of water. I saw the primordial oceans receding, glaciers melting, and the Ohio River being born. The Ohio River is a mother. She is also a daughter of the Earth.
Her voice became clear then. I understood what she was saying. On the kayak trip, she showed me her children – mergansers, a bald eagle, a dragonfly, and shitting geese. A few days later, she drew my attention to global problems confronting humans, fish, and her kin, the oceans. To understand these problems, I delved into studies describing the extent of global destruction and found the fish advisories. Then, as I considered the pain industrial poisons cause the Ohio River’s children, she evoked the familiar sensation of floating in a mother’s womb.
The key was the word “familiar.” The Ohio River was asking me for news of her family. She gossips with her sister, the Mississippi, when she joins her near Cairo, IL. But, the Mississippi only offers correspondence from around North America. She listens to her cousins in the global water cycle, the clouds. Clouds and rivers speak similar, but not the same, languages. Sometimes the wind brings tidings from the oceans. But, the wind talks too fast and never stays long. With access to global information at my fingertips, she wanted my help.
Her questions may have been clear all along. Perhaps, my heart prevented me from hearing.
***
The news, of course, is heartbreaking. The 2018 Living Planet Index and Zoological Society of London’s Living Planet Report found that on average the abundance of vertebrate species’ populations monitored across the globe declined by 60% between 1970 and 2014. The study’s authors explained that humans are causing this decline through overexploitation of species, agriculture, and land conversion. This means that, in just 44 years, humans have destroyed more than half the world’s vertebrates. Things are worse for global freshwater species of mammals, birds, amphibians, reptiles, and fish which have declined by 83 percent between 1970 and 2014, equivalent to 4% per year since 1970.
This is the arithmetic of atrocity. Every year, due to human destructiveness, the Ohio River’s family grows smaller and smaller.
The 2016 version of the Living Planet Report found that almost half (48 percent) of global river volume had been altered by flow regulation, fragmentation, or both. The authors noted that completion of all dams planned or under construction would mean that natural hydrologic flows would be lost for 93 percent of all river volume.
Most of the Ohio River’s sisters, like she is, are held captive by dams.
Just like the numbers are grim for the animals who live in water, the news is gut-wrenching for the global water cycle. Water is being poisoned on a massive scale. For example, the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization states that every day 2 million tons of sewage and other effluents drain into the world’s water. Industry discharges an estimated 300-400 megatons of waste into water bodies every year. And, globally, it is likely that over 80% of wastewater is released back into the water cycle without adequate treatment.
The water forming the Ohio River’s body and the bodies of her relatives is being poisoned.
I read these statistics out loud to the Ohio River. I’m not sure how I thought she’d respond. I waited for several days. Nothing came through my dreams. Inspiration was absent. Writing about other aspects of the river failed. For the first time, the Ohio River had nothing to say to me.
In this writing, taken from ‘The Ohio River Speaks‘, Will Falk describes the communication, the journey and the relationship shared. Through documenting the journey with the Ohio River Will seeks to strengthens others fighting to protect what is left of the natural world. Read the first and second part of Will’s journey.
My physical journey with the Ohio River began where she seeps up through a mat of mud, maple, and bigtooth aspen leaves high in a hollow ringed by round hills in Potter County, Pennsylvania. The brilliant documentary filmmaker, journalist, and Potter County resident, Melissa Troutman and her energetic, thoroughly aquaphilic terrier Runo, took me to find what the maps label as the headwaters of the Allegheny River. If you were presented with a map that displayed only the blue lines of the Ohio River and her tributaries but did not label the tributaries’ names, and you were asked to identify the Ohio’s headwaters, you’d most likely point to the beginning of the Allegheny. In fact, the word “Ohio” is an anglicized version of Ohi:yo’ which is the name given by the Seneca to the whole passage of water beginning in Potter County that runs all the way to the Mississippi.
But, I arrived at another destination, there, too. It was a destination that cannot be driven, hiked, or boated to. It was an internal destination, a place inside of me I needed to reach. As we hiked, I searched for the best place to introduce myself to the river. The Ohio River bubbles up from dozens of springs scattered across the hillsides. She picks her way through tree roots and moss-covered stones before enough of her waters join together to form the first ribbon resembling a stream. Rivers measure time in distance. And, the Ohio River doesn’t wait long – maybe a quarter mile – before she’s three or four feet across. After another quarter mile, she’s ten or twelve feet across and two or three feet deep in places. Rare, small brook trout dart from shadow to shadow in some of the deeper pools and patches of delicious wild leeks crowd together on the muddy banks. We arrived where two ridges crowd together, creating steep inclines on either side of us.
Water noisily pushes out of a spring and over a crop of stones.
The stones must have been arranged by the glaciers who left them there to form a staircase into the secret rooms of the Earth. When the glaciers left, moss moved in to cover the staircase with their rich, green carpets.
This was the place.
I have formulated two basic questions for the Ohio River to guide this journey: Who are you? and, what do you need? When you ask someone these two questions, you should be prepared to answer them yourself. So, standing where spring water joined the young river, I began with who I am. I started with my name and explained that I am a writer and lawyer. I told her about my mother and father, my sister, my extended family, and how much of my family lives downstream from where I stood. I told her that I was hoping to write a book about her.
This was easy enough. But, I dreaded the second question. I dreaded it because of what it meant I’d have to share with the Ohio River. More than anything, I need help with the despair that haunts me. As I stood next to the river, an impulse came to me. In a gesture of raw and spontaneous honesty, I placed my palm in the water and touched the river’s face. While doing this, I opened myself to the memories of my worst struggles with despair. I let the images flow unhindered through my mind.
This is how I told the Ohio River what I need.
I cannot touch my readers. And, even if I could, it is not possible to pour my experiences into you like I poured them into the Ohio River. I will, however, try to distill these experiences into words to describe what depression feels like for me. A major part of me wishes to keep these experiences secret. But, if William Styron is correct, and the prevention of suicide will be hindered until there is a general awareness of the nature of the pain of depression, then perhaps my experiences will contribute to this growing general awareness.
When the night’s shadows begin climbing through the bedroom window, the distractions have run out, and the last remnants of peace flee, the whispers persisting at the edges of my consciousness grow louder.
The whispers sew dissatisfaction, discomfort, and despair. They gossip about my fears, inadequacies, and insecurities. I try two things at first. I ignore them. Then, I reason with them. Ignoring them works for a while, but they always come back, especially when I am tired or stressed. Stress seems perpetual. Writing publicly and honestly about ecocide is stressful because to do so you must gaze at the problem without looking away. Arundhati Roy was correct when she wrote: “The trouble is that once you see it, you can’t unsee it. And once you’ve seen it, keeping quiet, saying nothing, becomes as political an act as speaking out. There’s no innocence. Either way, you’re accountable.” Being a lawyer comes with a different set of stresses – the deadlines, the desire to represent my clients to the best of my ability, the undeniable, first-hand experiences of injustice in the so-called “justice” system, the frustration accompanying that sadistic irony…
Reasoning with depression works for as long as I have energy to argue with it. “If writing is so stressful, if being a lawyer is so difficult, why not quit?” the whispers ask. At the first, tiniest sign of doubt, the whispers become bolder, more aggressive. I scramble to fight them off, but I tire. My back spasms. My legs tremble, wobble, and cramp. The acid of anxiety rips through my gut. Finally, I collapse. The whispers seize their opportunity to feed and I sink deeper and deeper with ravenous doubts burrowing into me.
I’m desperate for peace, but I’d settle for the absence of war.
Sleep is a viable tactic, at first. But, when I sleep, I dream. And, depression poisons my dreams. Nightmares hold me in replays of the worst times in my life. Or, they project the worst possible futures. Night terrors force me awake as I spring up in bed screaming and shivering. I try to remember a time when I did not feel like this. Memory’s well opens before me. I know, from experience, the water is cold. Maybe the fear that accompanies my plunge attracts the worst. Or, maybe it’s a harsh rule of consciousness that says you cannot use memory to run from memory. Seeking any memory opens you to all memory.
I am met, first, with the darkest images. I thrash about trying to get away and then, failing that, simply to produce some warmth for myself. My personal history appears to me in those freezing waters like a funnel. I see my life descending, even from birth as if it was predestined, to those chilling moments where I stand in front of the bathroom mirror grinding sleeping pills into a powder with a butter knife. In my countless replays of these memories, I have pressed my consciousness so forcefully over the events that the details are preserved in crystalline clarity. I remember how wrinkly the dress shirt I still wore that evening from my day’s work as a public defender was. I remember the satisfaction I felt upon realizing I’d never have to wear a tie again. I see the wry smile that formed on my lips as I opened my wallet to find one single dollar bill – my bottom dollar. I remember the smell of lacquered wood through the paper as I pressed my nostril to one end of the rolled bill while pushing the other end into the powder. I remember the mild, humorous surprise at the ease at which the actions came to me. Where did I learn to do this? I had never snorted anything before.
After I inhaled the ground pills, I dumped the rest of the bottle into my hand. I remember how one pill stuck in the lines on my palm. I wondered what a palm reader would say about that. I remember the way the pills clacked against my teeth. The scariest detail I remember – the memory that haunts me the most – is the strange sense of calm that washed over me as I put on my pajamas, climbed into bed, pulled the blanket to my chin, and folded my hands on my chest. The pain, I knew, would soon be over. There was ecstasy in that knowledge. I wish I never felt that ecstasy. It can be so seductive sometimes, so welcoming, as it reaches towards me with a warm smile offering what it promises is the ultimate antidote for the pain.
I flee the memory and swim as hard as I can for the surface, but shades of guilt catch me on the way up. There’s the residue of guilt that surrounds my memories of attempting suicide. There’s the guilt that attaches to my inability to stamp the memory of that poisonous ecstasy out. There is also the guilt that accompanies my realization that I am cycling again, that I have forgotten all that I have learned, all that I have promised myself about revisiting the past.
I wonder if I am an addict – addicted to despair, addicted to guilt. I remember that the word “addict” comes from the Latin addicere. The definition of addicere includes “to be bound to” or “to enslave.” I definitely feel enslaved, bound against my will, to depression.
At times, these memories cause me to want to fall to the ground, punching and kicking like a child throwing a temper tantrum. I am angry, but more than anything I want to convert the emotional pain into a physical pain. Physical pain, at least, has an identifiable source. The pain of depression is rooted nowhere, but hurts everywhere.
I do not punch and kick the ground. Instead, I weep. Eventually, I exhaust myself. I sit wet from sweat and tears. My mind settles down, but an empty, hungover feeling takes hold. It’s happened again like so many times before. I am scared it will never not happen again. The void remains.
Sharing is dangerous. Writing these experiences on a page gives them a physical reality.
Speaking them out loud – even softly, just above the sounds of flowing water – gives them a life they did not have before. And, what is shared, cannot be unshared. Though I was exhausted, I was reluctant to pull my hand from the water and the Ohio River’s face. I was reluctant to break this connection with the her. When at last I did, I found a stone to sit on, and sighed. I gathered myself and finally asked the Ohio River who she is and what she needs. At first, all I heard was my own anxiety. Is that how you introduce yourself to a river? Will the Ohio River think I’m just feeling sorry for myself? Am I just feeling sorry for myself? As these thoughts bounced around my skull, the breeze blew some lingering rain from the aspen branches above me.
The drops fell into a nearby pool with the small sounds of distant chimes. And, the song began.
I focused on the rain water dropping into the pool for a few moments. Then, a few feet away, my ears located the liquid murmurs of water brushing a submerged stone’s face. After a few seconds, my hearing drifted to a melodic trickle deftly running over a bed of gravel. Each instance of moving water colliding with a pebble created a new and unique note. Each of these notes formed a tune more complex and soothing than any human has ever played. I don’t know how long I sat there. My consciousness spilled across the landscape, gently beckoned by a diversity of sensory details. My awareness flowed over each inch of water I could see. Inch by inch, I experienced new delights and fascinations.
Finally, I slipped back into myself. As I returned, I realized my mind was empty of anxiety.
The river pulled me from the war in my head and embraced me with her calming voice. She approached me sensually, intimately. She showed me her softest parts, those fragile motions of water that form her body. When I asked the Ohio River what she needs, she answered with what I need. Peace.
In this writing, taken from ‘The Ohio River Speaks‘, Will Falk describes the urgency in which he seeks to protect the natural world. Through documenting the journey with the Ohio River he strengthens others fighting to protect what is left of the natural world. Read the first part of the journey here.
The first headwaters of my journey with the Ohio River are located in despair. Despair and I have a long-term, intimate relationship.
Seven years ago, I tried to kill myself. Twice.
Suicidal despair is a failure to envision a livable future. The future never comes, so the future is built with the only materials at hand – experience. At times, my experience is so painful, and the pain lasts so long that, when I peer into the future, I only see more pain. When this happens, I sometimes ask: If life is so painful, if life will only remain so painful, why go on living?
I cling to my reason. I live for my family. I have seen the pain my two suicide attempts have caused my mother, father, and sister. My family also includes the natural world. I have been enchanted by the stories the Colorado River tells. I have watched the stars next to ahinahina (silverswords) on the slopes of Mauna Kea. I have seen a great horned owl dance on setting sunlight filtered through pinyon-pine needles.
This doesn’t mean, however, that I do not experience despair anymore.
Sometime last year, a spark flew from our shared global experience to fall into a tinderbox of my recent personal experiences and ignited the strongest inferno of despair I’ve felt in a long time.
I ended a long-term romantic partnership with a woman who, at one time, I thought was the love of my life. I moved in to my parents’ basement in Castle Rock, CO. And, an environmental organization I love working for almost internally combusted.
These realities are personally painful. But, they’re not unique. It is a global reality – the intensifying destruction of the natural world – that is the deepest source of my despair.
The love I feel for my mother and father, for my sister, for rivers, mountains, and forests, for ahinahina, great-horned owls, and pinyon-pines makes me deeply vulnerable. It wasn’t until I noticed the way people have been obsessively tracking confirmed cases of COVID-19 that I realized most people do not pore over studies about rates of ecological collapse like I do.
While COVID-19 is very scary, I find reports like the one from Living Planet Index and the Zoological Society of London in 2018 documenting a gut-wrenching 60% decline in the size of mammal, bird, fish, reptile, and amphibian populations in just over 40 years to be even scarier.
I am cursed with a profound sense of urgency to stop the destruction of the planet.
If millions of people are killed every year by air pollution, then each passing year is, to me, a heinous disaster. If dozens of species are driven to extinction every day, then each passing day is an unspeakable tragedy. If thousands of acres of forest are cleared every hour, then each passing hour is a horrific loss.
If all these things are true, then each passing moment screams more loudly than the last for the destruction to stop. I haven’t found many others who possess a similar sense of urgency. I haven’t even found many others who possess this sense of urgency among fellow environmentalists. The lack of urgency displayed by environmentalists is especially frustrating because environmentalists are aware of the problems we face. Despite this awareness, most environmentalists are still drinking a stale Kool-Aid brewed with the substanceless sugar of ineffective tactics.
For example, I am a practicing rights of nature attorney. In 2017, I helped to file a first-ever federal lawsuit seeking rights for a major ecosystem, the Colorado River. For the past few years, I’ve worked for a nonprofit law firm, the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF), that has developed a strategy for enshrining rights of Nature in American law.
American law defines Nature merely as property. Property is an object that can be consumed and destroyed. CELDF’s strategy, specifically, and rights of Nature, generally, seek to transform the status of Nature from that of property to that of a rights-bearing entity. This is similar to how ending American slavery required transforming the legal definition of African Americans as property into African Americans as rights-bearing citizens. Those with rights have power over those without rights.
And, in a culture based on competition, those with rights oppress those without rights.
A key component of CELDF’s strategy involves helping communities affected by environmental destruction to use their local lawmaking functions to enact laws granting Nature the rights to exist, flourish, regenerate, and naturally evolve. These laws also give Nature legal “personhood” which empowers community members to bring lawsuits to enforce Nature’s rights. Currently, under American law, if community members want to sue to stop environmental destruction, they must frame the problem as violating their rights as citizens. It is often more difficult to prove that environmental destruction directly harms humans than it is to prove that an activity harms an ecosystem.
If Nature was recognized as a legal person and communities simply had to prove that an activity violated the rights of Nature, then many destructive activities would become illegal. On the surface this may seem like a great strategy. However, this strategy depends on convincing too many people in power, who directly benefit from the status quo, to embrace and enforce rights of Nature. The powerful derive their power by exploiting Nature. Enforcing Nature’s rights would undermine their power. This is why they react so violently whenever their power is truly threatened. Even if convincing all these people to give up their power is possible, it will likely take decades to change the legal system into one that respects rights of Nature.
In CELDF, we are working hard to reinvent our strategy to reflect the recognition that legal change, by itself, is taking far too long.
Nevertheless, most tactics employed by environmentalists are based on achieving a voluntary transition to a sane and Earth-based culture. But, do we really think this voluntary transition is possible? And, even if we do, don’t we have to admit that this voluntary transition is taking a long time? As time slips away – and so much is destroyed and so many are murdered – shouldn’t we be most concerned with stopping the dominant culture as quickly as possible? When I suggest that we have an open and frank conversation about what it will take to truly stop the destruction, I am often dismissed as being unrealistic and too extreme.
This causes me to despair. When I despair for too long I become depressed and anxious. When I am depressed and anxious I shake, tremble, fidget, and pace. Over the years, I’ve learned that when this happens, my body is telling me to move. Unsurprisingly, one of the best medicines I’ve found for mental illness is exercise. Lately, though, my typical regimen for managing despair hasn’t been working. No matter how much I exercise, no matter how much stress I shed from my day, no matter who I spend time with, the flames of despair keep on licking the edges of my consciousness. The lack of urgency I find reflected around me also causes me to question my perception of reality.
Are things really as bad as I think they are?
It is natural to seek validation from other humans. But, most humans I know would rather not join me in my despair. Psychologist R.D. Laing in The Politics of Experience was correct when he wrote:
“If Jack succeeds in forgetting something, this is of little use if Jill continues to remind him of it. He must induce her not to do so. The safest way would be not just to make her keep quiet about it, but to induce her to forget it also.
Jack may act upon Jill in many ways. He may make her feel guilty for keeping on ‘bringing it up.’ He may invalidate her experience. This can be done more or less radically. He can indicate merely that it is unimportant or trivial, whereas it is important and significant to her. Going further, he can shift the modality of her experience from memory to imagination: ‘It’s all in your imagination.’ Further still, he can invalidate the content: ‘It never happened that way.’ Finally, he can invalidate not only the significance, modality, and content, but her very capacity to remember at all, and make her feel guilty for doing so into the bargain.
This is not unusual. People are doing such things to each other all the time. In order for such transpersonal invalidation to work, however, it is advisable to overlay it with a thick patina of mystification. For instance, by denying that this is what one is doing, and further invalidating any perception that it is being done by ascriptions such as ‘How can you think such a thing?’ ‘You must be paranoid.’ And so on…”
Similarly, it is easy to seek answers from television and computer screens. The internet provides more access to certain forms of information – like graphs, statistics, and written reports – than ever before. However, answers provided by graphs, statistics, and written reports will always be secondhand. I do not want to risk the invalidation of the experience of others that many humans are so adept at. Neither do I want to settle for secondhand answers.
I want to see for myself.
Earth is vast. Ecocide is extensive. I have neither the time nor the resources to rely solely on firsthand knowledge. Fortunately, the Ohio River is vast enough to implicate global reality while remaining small enough for me to witness with my limited budget and finite time. Meanwhile, my body urges me to move. So, why not put that movement to good use? Instead of killing birds, I’ll kill two drones with one stone, by embarking on a journey with the Ohio River. I can write, with eyewitness testimony, about how bad ecocide has become in the Ohio River basin. At the same time, I can ask the Ohio River if her waters can quell this despair burning within me.
I know I am not alone in my despair.
William Styron wrote in his poignant exploration of despair, Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness: “The pain of severe depression is quite unimaginable to those who have not suffered it, and it kills in many in stances because its anguish can no longer be borne. The prevention of many suicides will continue to be hindered until there is general awareness of the nature of this pain.”
As I travel with the Ohio River, witnessing her many wounds, I will describe my pain. If she will help me bear that pain, I hope my story will show how a river can save your life.
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