by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Dec 11, 2016 | Alienation & Mental Health, Listening to the Land
by Will Falk / Deep Green Resistance
Recently walking up Main Street in Park City, Utah, I saw in the Visitor’s Center doorway what looked like a man holding a great-horned owl surrounded by children. As his voice carried across the street, I heard the man explain that this owl had been found with an injured wing after being struck by a car.
I love owls. I love the haunting sound of their hoots in the darkest hours before dawn. I love the joy that accompanies the lucky sight of a splash of brown feathers against newly-fallen snow when an owl makes the rare decision to reveal herself in winter daylight. I love how owls’ mysterious nature have made them omens in so many cultures’ imaginations. So, when I saw what I thought was a great-horned owl, I automatically crossed the street with a feeling of anticipation.
Many of a great-horned owl’s characteristics were observable in the creature the man held. There were beautiful, downy brown and white feathers flecked occasionally with yellow. There was a sharp, curved beak. There were powerful wide wings – though they were tightly-clasped as this creature hugged herself for comfort.
From a distance I could see her eyes had the same shape and colors of a great-horned owl’s – big and round with an orange ring circling black. I recalled the eyes of the great-horned owls I have seen watching me from the tops of ancient juniper trees in the chilly foothills of the Great Basin. The orange in their eyes flamed and blazed. Sometimes, the black reflected impenetrable depths of wisdom. At other times, the black became a pool reflecting the silver notes of stars in the Nevada sky. And, at still other times, the black became the night soaking up the shadows before lifting with flight to disappear into clouds.
As I approached, I saw that the man’s right forearm was wrapped in leather. Two steel rings pierced the leather. Connected to the rings was a chain, about two feet long, made of still more steel rings tightly wound and welded together so the chain would never break. The chain was wrapped around and tightened to the left leg of what I had mistaken for a great-horned owl.
This was no owl. Not anymore. An owl is so much more than her eyes, beak, and talons, than the small space she occupies, than the blinking, swaying, and beak clacking she is famous for. An owl is more than the physical collection of her feathers and bones.
An owl is the rabbits, hares, mice, and voles who become her body when she eats them. An owl is the tree she sits in, the sky she descends from, and the wind she rides on. An owl is the meaning revealed in her nature. An owl is an expression of all the relationships creating her. An owl is wild. An owl is free.
Stolen from the wind, kept in a cage, and chained to a man, this creature was no longer an owl.
For a brief moment, she lifted her eyes to connect with mine. And, I was horrified by what I saw.
The orange and black in her eyes were only echoes of color. Not even the faintest trace of light remained in them. It would have been better, easier to accept if sadness or anger or even desperation was found there. But there was nothing. Nothing, but emptiness.
I knew these eyes well. These were the eyes of a creature pushed beyond pain into numbness, overwhelmed with despair, and fading into the void. These were eyes I have seen on the street. These were eyes I have seen in zoos, in aquarium tanks, and in cages. These were eyes I have seen in prison, in psyche wards, and at funerals.
I knew these eyes because I have seen them reflected in the mirrors I have peered into before trying to kill myself. I knew these eyes because I have seen them in myself.
Disturbed and overcome with sorrow, I fled in horror.
***
What is the precise nature of the horror I saw in those eyes?
First, I was witnessing the aftermath of the destruction of an owl. Captivity deprives an animal of what makes the animal an animal. Principles of deep ecology confirm this. Deep ecology is the recognition that life is an ongoing process sustained by healthy connections between living beings. Through this recognition, deep ecology teaches that each living being is best understood as a specific collection of connections with other living beings.
A captive animal is no longer an animal when humans physically cut off the animal’s connections. Neil Evernden, a foundational deep ecologist, describes how this happens to a gorilla kept in a zoo in his brilliant work, The Natural Alien: Humankind and Environment. Evernden writes: “[An animal] is an interaction of genetic potential with environment and with conspecifics. A solitary gorilla in a zoo is not really a gorilla; it is a gorilla-shaped imitation of a social being which can only develop fully in a society of kindred beings.”
Evernden goes on to undermine one justification for keeping animals in zoos (preserving their genetic legacy) and in the process explains further why a gorilla in a zoo is not really a gorilla. He writes, “To attempt to preserve only a package of genes is to accept a very restricted definition of animality and to fall into the trap of mistaking the skin-encapsulated object for the process of relationships that constitutes the creature in question.”
In other words, an animal is not an object. An animal is an ongoing process of relationships. To destroy these relationships by restricting an animal’s physical ability to engage in the relationships that sustains the animal, you destroy the animal. When I saw the creature on the chain, I recognized how the driver who struck her and the man who chained her isolated her from the specific relationships that sustain owls. She had been reduced to the “skin-encapsulated object” Evernden describes.
It was impossible to see the creature on the chain and not think of all the creatures on chains, in theme park pools, and in zoo cages. I thought, specifically, of the way a growing amount of media attention is being given to the captivity destroying individuals of two species sharing many similarities with humans: orca whales and elephants.
Orcas are family-oriented and relatively long-lived. They speak a complex language and pass down traditional knowledge such as hunting techniques from generation to generation. These characteristics coupled with the history orcas have of protecting humans from sharks creates a special bond with them in the minds of many humans.
Dr. Naomi A. Rose, in her study “Killer Controversy: Why Orcas Should No Longer Be Kept in Captivity,” states the obvious, “Orcas are inherently unsuited to confinement.” To support this claim, Dr. Rose explains that orcas have significantly lower annual survival rates in captivity than in the wild. In fact, the annual mortality rate for orcas is more than two and a half times higher in captivity than in the wild.
Dr. Rose demonstrates how captivity attacks the bodies of orcas explaining that one of the most common causes of death in captive orcas is infection. Infection-caused mortality is linked to immunosuppression and, as Dr. Rose describes, pathogens that the immune systems of wild orcas would successfully manage become fatal to captive orcas due to chronic stress, psychological depression, and even boredom. So not only does captivity act on an orca’s mental health it attacks an orca’s physical health through the mental disorders it causes.
Elephants provide another example. Elephants, like orcas and humans, live in large, extended families, they develop complex social relationships, and they require large spaces to serve as their home ranges. With a similar declaration to the one Dr. Rose made about orcas, Ed Stewart – president of the Performing Animal Welfare Society (PAWS) that operates three wildlife sanctuaries in Northern California – explains the situation for captive elephants in a piece for National Geographic, “No Ethical Way to Keep Elephants in Captivity.”
To demonstrate why there is no ethical way to keep elephants in captivity, Stewart describes what captivity does to elephants: “The inadequacies for elephants in captivity will always be a source of disease and suffering for elephants. Cramped enclosures and hard surfaces cause a variety of problems, including deadly foot disease and arthritis, infertility, obesity, and abnormal repetitive behaviors such as swaying and head bobbing.” These “abnormal repetitive behaviors” are of, course, psychological disorders.
***
With my history of mental illness, when I learn about the psychological effects captivity has on orcas and elephants I wonder if there are connections between human mental health and other animals’ mental health.
Of course, there are. Just like psychological disorders open the way for other health problems in animals like orcas and elephants, mental illnesses like depression dramatically increase a human’s risk for other illnesses. Psychiatrist Dr. Peter Kramer notes in his book Against Depression that humans suffering from depression are four times as likely as those without to die from cardiac disease, five times as likely to die of coronary artery disease, and four times as likely to die from angina, coronary artery bypass surgery, and congestive heart failure. As a poet with major depression, the power of the metaphor created by the way depression literally attacks the heart is not lost on me.
I am certainly not the first person to investigate these connections. Since about 1980, westerners investigating these connections have called themselves “ecopsychologists.” Meanwhile, traditional peoples have worked to understand these connections since time immemorial.
Theodore Roszak, in his essay “Where Psyche Meet Gaia” written for the anthology Ecopsychology: Restoring the Earth, Healing the Mind, explains the history of ecopsychology. It is not new. He writes, “…in fact [ecopsychology’s] sources are old enough to be called aboriginal. Once upon a time all psychology was ‘ecopsychology.’ No special word was needed. The oldest healers in the world…knew no other way to heal than to work within the context of environmental reciprocity.”
While it appears that the incidence of mental illness in traditional societies is drastically lower than in civilized societies, perhaps we would do well to “work within the context of environmental reciprocity” as the oldest healers in the world have always done. Viewing human mental health through the lens of deep ecology is one way to do this.
The late Paul Shepard’s 1982 book Nature and Madness is a foundational text in ecopsychology. Shepard wrote the book to answer the simple question, “Why do men persist in destroying their habitat?” His answer is psychopathology. Or, in his words, “a kind of failure in some fundamental dimension of human existence, an irrationality beyond mistakenness, a kind of madness.”
How did some humans develop this madness? Shepard calls on a concept from biology – ontogeny – to explain the madness. Ontogeny is the development of an individual organism from the earliest stage to maturity. Shepard makes the simple, but brilliant observation, that to understand human behavior we must understand human development.
Ontogeny is most often studied as it pertains to animals, but Shepard is quick to note, “Anyone who thinks the human creature is not a specialized animal should spend a few hours with the thirty odd volumes of the Psychoanalytic Study of the Child or the issues of the Journal of Child Development.” Ontogeny, then, is as appropriate in the study of humans as it is in other animals.
Shepard goes on to explain that the ontogeny of traditional peoples “who seem to live at peace with their world” is healthier than that of civilized peoples. Shepard writes: “Their way of life is the one to which our ontogeny has been fitted by natural selection, fostering cooperation, leadership, a calendar of mental growth, and the study of a mysterious and beautiful world where the clues to the meaning of life were embodied in natural things, where everyday life was inextricable from spiritual significance and encounter, and where the members of the group celebrated individual stages and passages as ritual participation…”
So, humans require certain things to mature from children to adults. Human children need to be immersed in the natural world where they can interact with non-human others that will reveal to them the meaning of life. They also need intact communities with elders who understand the passages of human life to help the young celebrate through rituals. And, ultimately to become elders themselves. I am reminded, again, of Evernden’s statement that an animal is “a social being which can only develop fully in a society of kindred beings.”
Spend any time with children outdoors and you will see them find deep meaning in natural things. This is healthy human development. Shepard explains, “Animals have a magnetic affinity for the child, for each in its way seems to embody some impulse, reaction, or movement that is ‘like me.’ In the playful, controlled enactment of them comes a gradual mastery of the personal inner zoology of fears, joys, and relationships. In stories told, their forms spring to life in the mind, represented in consciousness, training the capacity to imagine.” This “gradual mastery of the personal inner zoology of fears, joys, and relationships” is essential to a human’s full development.
Shepard goes on, “The play space – trees, shrubs, paths, hidings, climbings – is a visible structured entity, another prototype of relationships that hold.” Forming relationships with trees and shrubs, then, is another essential element of human development.
***
My four-year old neice, Layla, and my nephew, her one-year old brother, Thomas, teach me that the ecopsychologists are right:
Photo by Will Falk
Beneath a cloudless mountain sky in late autumn, Layla kneels on a wooden bridge above a clear pool collecting where a beaver dam slows the cold Snake Creek in Midway, Utah. Mesmerized, her face is drawn slowly downward until a blonde strand escapes from the mess of hair made tangly by an afternoon of play to brush the pool’s face. Barely aware of her own motion, she brushes the wet strand back into place behind her ear. The icy drops that run down the back of her neck and disappear behind her jacket collar do not break her concentration.
I am so fascinated by her behavior that I almost let Thomas jump from my arms to join his sister on the bridge’s edge. Thomas is fascinated, too. I lower him down and let him find his balance with his new walking muscles as his little hand tightens around my right pinky and ring fingers.
We approach Layla as fast as Thomas’ legs will allow. “What are you doing, Layla?” I ask.
She still has trouble pronouncing the short ‘I’ in my name and says, matter-of-factly with a touch of annoyance that I cannot see the obvious, “Playing with the fish, Weel.”
She does not move her gaze from the water and when I get close enough I see what she is watching. There is a small, four inch, rainbow trout, facing upstream gazing right back at Layla. The wide beautiful blue in Layla’s eyes join with the sharp obsidian black in the trout’s eyes. From under a brown stone on the creek bed, a much bigger trout, fourteen inches or so, circles around the smaller one – as clearly curious as I am. The small trout, like my small niece, pays no attention to the approaching adult.
And then I understand what Layla means by “playing.” When Layla leans to her left, the trout whips her tail and swims to the right. When Layla leans to her right, the trout whips her tail and swims to the left. Layla is, obviously, playing with the fish.
Later that night, Layla is taking a bath. Layla’s mother is at the health clinic where she works as a physician assistant. Layla’s father is busy feeding Thomas and he asks me to check on Layla. When I walk into the bathroom, she quickly ducks under water and splashes around. Eventually, she must come up for air and I make the mistake again.
“What are you doing, Layla?” I ask.
Again, she is annoyed. “I’m not Layla, Weel,” she explains. “I’m a fish.” And, she ducks under water once more. I laugh and shake my head. Who am I to disagree?
***
Finally, I understand the precise nature of the horror I felt looking into that chained creature’s eyes: I saw myself, and so many like me, reflected in her eyes.
Just like an owl on a chain is no longer an owl, an orca in a theme park pool is no longer an orca, and an elephant in a cage at a zoo is no longer an elephant, humans cut off from the natural world are no longer human. We are animals and animals are an ongoing process of relationships. When those relationships become impossible, we lose ourselves.
I do not believe I go too far when I write, “We are no longer human.” By “we” I mean civilized humans who live much like I do.
I exist without most of the relationships that have made humans human throughout our history. I woke up this morning in a bed two-stories above an asphalt floor. I do not know how much asphalt I would need to dig through to reach soil. When I opened my eyes, before the sunrise, I did not see the dark, eternally mysterious forms of clouds traveling across sky. I did not see the pale courage of morning stars holding on to the coldest hours before dawn. I saw a ceiling made from the flesh of once-living, once-wild trees.
When I rolled out of bed, I did not pause at the edge formed by the warmth inside my home meeting the chill of a December mountain morning to enjoy the original pleasure in sensory diversity. I cursed because I let the heat in our apartment dip below 62 degrees Fahrenheit. I did not walk down to a river bank to draw my day’s water. I did not stop to watch the burning glow of the rising sun spread across the river’s face. I stumbled into the shower where I pulled a plastic handle and water stolen from rivers held captive behind dams was heated by the remains of ancient forests ripped from their resting place deep beneath the earth.
And, this was only the first five minutes of a day I have repeated over and over again in 30 years of life. If Shepard is correct, and a stunted ontogeny produces stunted humans, then I, and so many humans like me, are stunted. This does not make me sad, it makes me angry. And that anger feels like an animal reaction to an insane world. I know, as well, it is not too late for Layla or Thomas. It is not too late for their children and their children’s children. In many ways, Layla was right. She is a fish. She is a puppy. She is an eagle. She is all the relationships I have seen her form with the creatures she imitates. And, to protect her, we must protect them.
For further exploration of human control and imprisonment of animals, read Derrick Jensen’s Thought To Exist In the Wild: Awakening from the Nightmare of Zoos
To repost this or other DGR original writings, please contact newsservice@deepgreenresistance.org
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Nov 18, 2016 | Alienation & Mental Health, Listening to the Land
by Will Falk / Deep Green Resistance
This first appeared on Jason Howell’s Howlarium. Special thanks to Jason for his graphics.
From Jason: “Where it’s not uncommon for contemporary writers to root their work in mining—lived experience, the depth of the canon, the cultural moment, whatever—Will Falk, poet, lawyer, and environmental activist from Park City, Utah, makes the whole of his work about listening to the natural world. The effect, in this reader’s opinion, is a kind of anthropocentric-for-biocentric blood transfusion.
“I asked Will to describe what it took for him to get enough media and concrete out of the way so as to hear from the biosphere loud-and-clearly. As fate would have it, he and his partner were gearing up for a camping trip in southern Utah, so he’d have some space to think about it. Here’s what he came back with.”
Survival compels me.
My own survival, the survival of those I love, and the survival of the biosphere compel me. Listening to the land saves my life.
An old, gray seagull flying wobbly through thick, wet snow to speak to me from the concrete ledge of a window I watched Lake Michigan from while I recovered from a suicide attempt in St. Francis Hospital in Milwaukee, WI saved my life. A pregnant mother moose, who shared our single-track 17-mile snowmobile trail at the Unist’ot’en Camp turned to stare me in the eye giving me a glimpse into the wisdom of the wild, saved my life. The wind whispering questions through aspen leaves in Park City, Utah pulled me from my depressed mind a few weeks ago and, again, saved my life.
The compulsion will last as long as my survival. My survival will last as long as the compulsion. I suffer from major depressive disorder and general anxiety disorder caused by the same forces producing total ecological collapse. I must listen to the biosphere to resist depression and humans must listen to the biosphere to stop the destruction of Life.
A novice attorney, I wanted to die. I was so tired.
Before I was a writer, I was a public defender in Kenosha, WI doing my best to push back against a criminal justice system intent on perpetuating institutional racism. I spent all my time rotating between the wooden walls of the courthouse, the glass walls of the office, and the steel walls of the jail.
A novice attorney, I was determined not to let my inexperience affect my clients, but I made mistakes. The only solution I could come up with involved working more urgently and working longer hours. I woke up at 3AM to review my case files. I worked Saturdays and Sundays. I walked back to my beat Jeep Cherokee in the parking lot of the Kenosha County Jail after telling another client there wasn’t much I could do for her, and broke down sobbing with my forehead against the steering wheel in broad daylight. I became exhausted. I made more mistakes.
One night, I came home from dinner and took all the Ambien sleeping pills I had just been prescribed that morning. I wanted to die. I was so tired.
I was also living a life completely mediated by humans. This mediation was total. Physically, my life happened almost completely within atmospheres created by humans: the office, the jail, the courthouse, my apartment building. Spiritually, I had forsaken the Catholicism I was raised in, but instead of recognizing the sacred in every living being around me, my development into a mature member of a natural community stalled in an adolescent insistence that life had no meaning outside the meaning humans could create.
This insistence imprisoned me psychologically as surely as the jail physically imprisoned my clients. I became Sisyphus pushing my boulder up the hill, blind to the countless non-human others producing my life and cut off from natural allies in the biosphere.
As the pills entered my bloodstream and I settled into what I thought was my deathbed, time froze on my consciousness. I’m not sure I believe in a spiritual afterlife, but this last moment before I passed out was a functional eternity. I was confronted with the totality of my life and I realized that if I died this night, I would have failed my role. And, if the pain that was branded onto my mind with my recognition that I could give so much more to Life was the last experience frozen on my consciousness forever, then hell is very real, indeed.
A heavy snow began to fall.
After this suicide attempt, I spent a week in the psyche ward of St. Francis Hospital in Milwaukee. The St. Francis psyche ward was on the seventh floor of an eight-floor building. For exercise, and because there was nothing else to do, I braved the fluorescent lights outside my room and paced the long hallway that made up most of the seventh floor.
At each end of the hallway were wide windows. One looked west into the rows of old company housing for the Milwaukee Iron Company. The other looked east over the waters of Lake Michigan. Patients are not allowed off the seventh floor and there were rusty iron bars outside the glass just in case we were tempted to take that route to fresh air. I tried to open a window facing Lake Michigan anyway. It would not open. A heavy snow began to fall surrounding the hospital in more white. I pressed my forehead against the cold glass pane. The cold felt good.
It was not long before I saw an old spotted seagull awkwardly wheeling and diving through the falling snow. I was mesmerized by the odd gracefulness in his seemingly drunken turns through the snow. His circles brought him closer and closer to my window. I wondered why he was flying through such treacherous conditions. He was, of course, the only bird in the sky. As he flew closer, I was stricken with the beauty of his grayness against the white.
Gray. Color. A contrast to the blankness. I began to believe the drunk old gull was braving the snowstorm to speak to me. He passed a few feet from my window, dipped a wing, and wobbled back toward Lake Michigan. A few moments later he was back. He squeezed through iron bars over my window, faced me, made eye contact, and flew away.
The waves on the lake rippled gray, too. The heavy snow fell slowly, gingerly over the waters. The waves hesitated, hanging a moment in the air, before being swallowed by the lake. White became gray. I drank up the color for hours following one gray wave after another from their birthplace on the horizon until they washed not far below me onto the shore.
I was compelled to write this down. I’ve been watching and listening ever since.
Writing only for myself is masturbatory.
Depression is a chronic illness. Doctors know now that our biological stress response is largely responsible for depression. A body experiencing too much stress, for too long can overproduce stress response hormones. If these hormones are present for a long enough time they literally damage the brain. Depression results from this brain damage. The dominant culture (which I call “civilization”), based on ecological drawdown and enforced scarcity, creates profoundly stressful lives for its members.
Depression bends my mind over itself and makes listening a constant struggle. A classic depression symptom is social withdrawal and isolation. The brain reacts to depression in a similar way to other illnesses. When you get the flu, your body tells you to isolate. The same instinct is triggered with depression.
With the flu, the instinct is adaptive and good for the way it prevents contagion. But with depression the instinct can prove deadly. Isolation leads to rumination and rumination perpetuates the release of the very stress hormones that damage the brain and produce depression. In this way, withdrawal creates a vicious cycle and the cycle must be interrupted. Personally, I experience suicidal ideation too frequently making interruption of this cycle imperative for my personal survival.
Doctors strenuously encourage depressed patients to socialize even when every instinct tells them not to. Spending time with loved ones releases hormones that counteract stress hormones. Socializing also occupies the depressed mind so it cannot ruminate. When doctors insist that their patients spend time with loved ones, however, most people understand this to mean exclusively human loved ones.
That ancient seagull opened me to the vast possibilities for relationship in the natural world. The impulse to write about my experience with the seagull pulled me out of my depressed mind and gave me something to ponder beyond my own pain. I do not typically understand what non-humans are saying right away. Pinyon pine trees do not have tongues, the wind is too vast and too busy for words, and great blue herons do not speak English.
So, I have to ponder the experience. Life speaks in patterns, gestures, and themes that must be teased out. We understand through story and it is no wonder that we discover Life’s meaning in the act of telling stories. I feel that writing only for myself is masturbatory. It might feel good, but it doesn’t help anyone but me. Writing with the desire to share my experience publicly forces me to order my experience in such a way that it makes sense to other humans. In this way, writing becomes social on multiple levels. I listen to non-humans and then I begin public conversations with humans about what I think I’ve heard.
Listening to the biosphere goes well beyond my own survival.
The dominant culture exhibits many of the classic symptoms of depression as well. This culture has isolated itself from the biosphere and is suicidal—stepping ever closer to the brink of total ecological collapse.
This collapse, this suicidality, is produced, in part, by the dominant culture’s belief that humans are the only beings capable of speaking, the only beings worth listening to, the only beings capable of relating with. My friend, the brilliant environmental writer, Derrick Jensen, has given us a name for this phenomenon. He calls it “human supremacy,” and the myth of human supremacy is a foundational story the dominant culture is built upon.
Human supremacy is propagated by the dominant culture because it derives its power from ecological destruction. Before you can destroy non-human others you must silence them. Deep ecologist Neil Evernden has pointed out that the first thing scientists do in vivisection labs is cut the vocal cords of the animals they are going to operate on. The dominant culture cuts the vocal cords of non-humans, of people of color, of women, of anyone it wants to dominate.
I ignored non-human voices for too long and I almost destroyed myself as a result. The dominant culture ignores and actively suppresses non-human voices and is destroying Life as a result. I am not naive enough to believe that writing alone will stop the murder of the biosphere, but writing helps me understand non-human voices, helps me resist the seductions of depression in the process, and is a tool to remind humans of their heritage. I always seek to contribute my writing to serious, organized resistance. I believe my role in this resistance is to combat human supremacy through reminding my readers of the countless, beautiful voices—human and non-human—to listen to in the biosphere.
I am in love with aspen trees, with pinyon-juniper forests, with my one-year old nephew, with my four-year old niece, with their aunt (my amazing partner), with a rainbow trout that tickled my feet in a pool I soaked them in after a 50 mile hike in the Sierras a few summers ago, with that seagull that woke me up to it all. I am in love, so I listen, and when I listen I hear murmurs of fear about ever-growing threats. When you’re in love, you act to protect your beloved. We cannot fail to stop the dominant culture, because if we fail every voice will be silenced forever.
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by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Jul 12, 2016 | Alienation & Mental Health
How our cognitive defence mechanisms are condemning us to death
By Sebastien Carew-Reid / Deep Green Resistance Australia
Most rational people with even a basic understanding of the scientific process will acknowledge that something is seriously wrong. From climate change and the mass extinction of species, to factory farming and the global violations of human rights, the symptoms should be obvious to anyone brave enough to look. Most will also concede that another few decades of “business as usual” would condemn us to a horrifyingly apocalyptic future.
So considering how adverse to pain, misery and death we all are – and rightly so – these realisations should be providing us with sufficient motivation to bring our collision course with chaos to a swift and permanent halt by any means necessary. Unfortunately this is obviously not the case. In fact, not only are our current environmental movements failing to prevent the accelerating rate of destruction, but upon closer inspection it becomes evident that business is, indeed, continuing as usual. So what’s going on? We have the facts, the mountains of peer-reviewed scientific evidence, and the powerful tools of reason and logic at our disposal – implementing an effective and permanent strategy to save the planet should be the easy part.
Our first problem is that the majority of our current solutions and strategies aren’t addressing or even recognising the root cause of our problems – industrial civilization. If the root cause of a problem isn’t targeted, all efforts are obviously doomed to remain ineffective and temporary solutions at best.
Our second problem is that our persistent failures to acknowledge and implement the only realistic solution available to us lie beyond the reach of reason and logic, deeply embedded in our animal brains. We are, after all, fallible biological creatures, slaves to the natural selection processes that crafted our survival behaviours over millions of years. In this case, the intricate, protective mechanisms of self-deception are to blame. The reality that our way of life requires systematic destruction and death to exist – and therefor needs to be dismantled – is simply too much for us to cope with, and stress hormones trigger a fundamental biological response to restore peace of mind at any cost. The result? We cling to the soothing false hopes that “green” technologies, altering personal consumption habits, or the right political party will somehow save the day.
Writer and environmental activist Derrick Jensen likens this deep aversion to life without industrial civilization to the symptoms of an addiction. “We have become so dependent upon this system that is killing and exploiting us, it has become almost impossible for us to imagine living outside of it…A primary reason so many of us do not want to win this war – or even acknowledge that it’s going on – is that we materially benefit from this war’s plunder. I’m really unsure how many of us would be willing to give up our automobiles and cell phones, hot showers and electric lights, our grocery and clothing stores. But the truth is, the system that leads to these things, that leads to technological advancement and our identity as civilized beings, are killing us and, more importantly, killing the planet.”
Coming to terms with these realities is deeply traumatic and destabilizing. FMRI studies have shown that this kind of cognitive distress activates the same areas of the brain that light up when we are being physically hurt: the anterior insula and the anterior cingulate cortex. In one study these regions were activated when people experienced social rejection from peers. In another study these same regions were activated in people looking at photographs of former romantic partners they had recently broken up with. Researchers in Italy found that even witnessing the social pain of another individual activated similar pain responses through empathy.
Our innate aversions to pain of any kind will fuel heroic efforts to minimise it. But to avoid mental anguish in a world where unpleasant realities are ubiquitous, we will inevitably spend a great deal of our lives actively censoring and altering the input of information we encounter. At the first sign that our worldviews and beliefs are being threatened, our mental “immune systems” get to work restoring cognitive comfort by changing the facts and biasing the logic, bringing us peace of mind at a severe cost.
Evolutionary theorist and Harvard professor Robert Trivers explores the science behind these firmly embedded defence mechanisms in his book Deceit and Self-Deception, pointing out that “this is way beyond simple computational error, the problems of subsampling from larger samples, or valid systems of logic that occasionally go awry. This is self-deception, a series of biasing procedures that affect every aspect of information acquisition and analysis. It is systematic deformation of the truth at each stage of the psychological process.” To put it bluntly: we manipulate the truth in order to reduce personal responsibility and validate inaction, condemning our responses to remain inappropriate and ineffective. Trivers points out that “the psychological immune system works not by fixing what makes us unhappy but by putting it in context, rationalizing it, minimizing it, and lying about it…Self-deception traps us in the system, offering at best temporary gains while failing to address real problems.”
When confronted with the very real problem of the environmental collapse our culture is causing, a great deal of self-deception and denial is required to justify inaction and simultaneously preserve a self-image that is ethically sound. In these situations we fall victim to the extensively documented self-deceptive processes of confirmation bias: our tendency to interpret any new information as validation for one’s existing beliefs or theories. In one example, researchers at The University of Michigan and Georgia State University found that when people holding beliefs based on misinformation were presented with corrected facts, not only did they rarely change their minds, but were prone to becoming even more convinced by their faulty views.
We don’t have to look far to see real world examples of this. Every time you encounter someone smoking a cigarette, you are witnessing real-time self-deception mechanisms in action. You simply cannot enjoy an activity while being conscious of the severe harm it is doing to your body, so the decision to continue smoking needs to be rationalized with the deluded justifications we are all familiar with: “I’m just a social smoker,” “I’ll quit before it’s too late,” “those things won’t happen to me.” The same deluded justifications are occurring with climate change deniers, “green” technology advocates, and anyone clinging to the hope that industrial civilization is somehow redeemable to avoid giving up their cosy, bloodstained lifestyles.
If we want any chance of saving what little remains of the natural world, we will need to put our egos and blind optimism aside, take responsibility, and base our actions on reality. As Jensen writes in “Beyond Hope”: “when we stop hoping for external assistance, when we stop hoping that the awful situation we’re in will somehow resolve itself, when we stop hoping the situation will somehow not get worse, then we are finally free — truly free — to honestly start working to resolve it. I would say that when hope dies, action begins.”
We need to realise that grief and anger are normal emotions when something we love is being threatened or destroyed. These emotions are trying to speak to us. We need to stop burying them in denial and start listening, because they are telling us that a line has been crossed. They are showing us where the limits are for what is ethically acceptable for one species to do to an entire planet. They are exposing the direction our hearts want us to go in, showing us where action is needed for true peace of mind. We need these emotions to fuel our motivations, our drive to never stop fighting for what we love, to never stop fighting for what is right.
We have the solution, we just need to get to work.
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Jun 10, 2016 | Alienation & Mental Health
by Will Falk / Deep Green Resistance
If fear is the mind killer, guilt is the heart killer. Experiencing guilt creates a wound. The wound is healed when the behavior producing the guilt is rectified. The scar that forms over the wound serves as a reminder to guide future behavior.
Living in a state of perpetual guilt, however, prevents the wound from ever healing. The wound festers. The guilt swells until it becomes an infection of empathy. The infected person devotes all her energy to coping with the constant pain of guilt. She spends all her time hunched over the wound, seeking to alleviate the pain. Focused on the wound like this, she cannot look beyond herself. A cycle develops. The guilt grows and becomes ever more painful. The pain strangles the infected’s capacity for empathy. Eventually, the infected loses her ability to act from a genuine concern for others and only acts to avoid the pain of more guilt.
The dominant culture produces this state of perpetual guilt for its members. One of the truly demonic characteristics of the dominant culture is that to survive we are forced to participate in the system that is destroying the planet. As long as this culture endures, our hands are soaked in blood.
It started long ago when some humans traded the long-term stability of true sustainability for myopic comfort. Agriculture developed. Grasslands and forests were destroyed for domesticated crops. Rivers were bled to death for the requisite water. And, climate change began.
With a more reliable food source than hunter-gatherers, agricultural humans’ population exploded. Cities developed and civilization began. Eventually, cities stripped their land bases of the necessities of life and they were forced to denude ever larger regions of natural life to support their populations. This process is thousands of years old and countless communities have fallen prey to the destruction.
Civilization rages on and most of us live on lands where the human population long ago overshot the land’s ability to produce the requisite calories and nutrition to sustain us. Wildlife populations are collapsing. More water is being poisoned every day. We are losing topsoil at an insane pace.
To make things even worse, the dominant culture enforces a system of land ownership that transformed the natural world into mere resources that could be bought and sold. Those with the most power (read: money) may exclude the rest of us from accessing what we need to live. Even in places where there is still enough animal life, clean water, and topsoil to support humans in a sustainable manner, chances are someone “owns” that land. In other words, if we took to hunting “their” animals, drinking “their” water, foraging on “their” property, they will appeal to a governmental system to provide armed men to remove us.
So, we must follow their rules to get what we need. We must participate in this murderous system just to survive. In order to eat, we must have money to purchase the food from someone who owns the land where the food was produced or from someone who owns the store who imported the food from far away. In order to sleep, we must have money to pay someone rent for the privilege of using their shelter. In order to make this money, we must offer our labor to those who control the money.
When we sacrifice our time and our money to those in power their power becomes stronger. Their stranglehold on life gets tighter. The destruction of the world intensifies.
Many people, recognizing this, experience overwhelming guilt. They live with that open, festering wound. The wound destroys their empathy and they stop looking beyond themselves. All they want is to be free of the pain. All they want is peace of mind. And, in this quest for peace of mind, they work only for personal purity. They engage in merely personal solutions to global problems.
As they spend their time recycling, signing internet petitions, and carpooling to work, they huddle over their inflamed conscience, whispering to themselves, “At least, I am not destroying the planet.”
I understand their pain. I know what it feels like to want nothing more than to soothe the wound. I have experienced the willingness to do absolutely anything to silence the constant chatter of guilt. I internalized the guilt this culture forces on us so completely I sought to destroy the guilt by destroying myself. Twice.
***
The dominant culture has a vested interest in neutralizing people through guilt. If it can convince enough people that the evil is their fault and paralyze those people in a lifetime of emotional sorrow, then far less physical force is needed to subdue the masses.
Spirituality has proven a very effective means of instilling this guilt.
When I search through my earliest memories to the roots of my consciousness, I find the life-sized crucifix hanging behind the altar at St. John the Baptist Roman Catholic Church in Newburgh, Indiana where I was baptized and attended Mass every Sunday in the beginning years of my life. Even the softening effect time has on memory cannot cloud the vivid clarity of the horror I see displayed there.
An emaciated man hangs by nails driven through his hands and feet into rough-hewn boards. A crown of thorns has been placed around his head, piercing his taut skin. Blood and sweat drip down his face. His eyes roll upwards as he looks for help from the sky. None comes.
The weight of his body on the nails in his hands tears the skin and bones in his palms. The same weight on the nails in his feet have curled his toes grotesquely against the wood. The man is suffocating. With each breath, he is forced to pull himself up against the nails in his hands and push against the nails in his feet. This makes the tearing worse. He pauses between each breath, each push and pull, caught between the desire to live, to take one more breath, and the reality of the pain accompanying each effort for each breath.
As if this struggle was not excruciating enough, I can see the black and blue swelling in the man’s thighs where his femurs have been broken to make it even more difficult to push up for oxygen. Then, I see a puncture wound in the man’s abdomen, under his ribcage. Someone has stuck a lance through his lungs and into his heart to ensure the man has finally died.
I feel deeply sorry for this man. My grandmother holds me in her lap beneath this scene as I ponder the intensity of the pain this poor man has felt. My grandmother looks from my eyes to the crucifix and a strange mix of sorrow and fear is reflected in her gaze.
“Who is that, Granny?” I ask.
“That’s Jesus Christ, our Savior,” she says.
The name and these words mean nothing to me. I am still only concerned with his pain. I cannot imagine why something this terrible would ever happen to someone. My only experience with the kinds of wounds I see on this Jesus are from needles in the syringes in shots doctors have given me.
I hate shots. I hate the way the needle first breaks through skin with a violent prick. I hate the sensation produced by the needle cutting through the grains of my muscle tissue. I shudder as I imagine the feeling of a whole lance pushing through my abdominal wall, grating against the bones forming my ribcage, and finally bursting into my heart.
“Why did they do that to him?” I ask in a whisper.
“He died for our sins,” my grandmother says. ‘Sins’ is another word I’ve never heard before.
“Oh. What are ‘sins’?”
“Sins are when you do something bad,” she explains. “Every time you do something bad, they drive another nail into him.”
This idea drives through me as surely as the nails. My mind recoils. “I don’t want them to hurt him anymore.”
“I know you don’t,” my grandmother comforts me. “Be a good boy, and they won’t have any reason to hurt him.” With this, the first poisons of overwhelming guilt trickled through my heart.
***
I attended Catholic elementary schools and a Catholic college. Whenever I forgot that life in this world is a life of suffering, I was referred back to a crucifix. I was taught that emotional pain is the cross humans must bear: the heavier the better. The completeness of my guilt was cemented when I was taught that all humans enter the world stained by original sin. Our mere existence was accompanied by guilt.
Guilt was an indication that I had harmed my relationship with God and I must never harm my relationship with God. Whenever I felt guilt, I was told I must repair my relationship with God or risk an eternity of suffering in Hell when I died. I was told I must never offend God. I must never do anything wrong and the only way I would know I was on the right path was to keep my conscience clean.
I left my Catholic faith in my early twenties, but the damage had been done. I had been convinced that I was fundamentally flawed. I killed the Catholic God of my youth, but countless other gods filled the void haunting me as they pointed out my failures. The wound was permanently opened and every action has the potential to scratch it.
Though I deserted the original source of my guilt – Catholicism – I still witnessed trauma daily. Trauma is another effective means to cause guilt. More than 40% of people diagnosed with PTSD, for example, report guilt associated with the traumatic events they’ve experienced. When survivors of trauma blame themselves for the trauma, they often paralyze their ability to act.
Even if the trauma is not happening directly to some of us, we are all surrounded by scenes of the destruction of the natural world. This indirect trauma has been named complex post-traumatic stress disorder by Harvard doctor, Judith Herman. Her research reveals that the guilt accompanying PTSD often accompanies complex PTSD, too.
The dominant culture has created a vicious, genius cycle. Trauma leads to guilt and guilts freezes the traumatized in inaction clearing the way for those in power to create more trauma.
***
My guilt has gotten so bad it solidifies as a recurring image in my mind. Guilt drags me into a bare, unfinished room. The floor is raw particle board. Splinters pierce any skin that touches the floor. No walls have been built to cover the studs holding the room’s roof up. Pink, fiberglass insulation – the kind that produces a scratching sensation just from seeing it – pokes out from the gaps between the studs.
There are two versions of me in the room. The first me is crumpled in the far corner of the room, shaking and weeping. Standing over this version of me is an angry me with a baseball bat. The me-with-the-bat is screaming accusations and questions. He knows my deepest shames.
“How could you ask your parents for money, again?” the question echoes off the walls.
The me-on-the-floor dares not answer, knows that no words will suffice. No rational explanation will alleviate the guilt. The me-on-the-floor rubs himself into the floors and scratches into the insulation. “If I can just show him how much I am suffering,” I tell myself, “the me-with-the bat will be satisfied.”
But, it doesn’t work. I’ve seen the image so many times, I can read the Louisville Slugger logo on the meat of the bat as it slams across my ribs.
“You don’t make any money,” the me-with-the-bat says with derision as he swings the bat over his head.
The me-on-the-floor is resigned to wait out the beating. His only move is to roll feebly from the blow as it clacks across his spine this time.
The me-with-the-bat only continues with my litany of shame.
“The world is burning, and what are you doing?” The bat strikes.
“Do you know how you hurt everyone when you tried to kill yourself?” Wood to bone.
“Depression? Why do you keep using that as an excuse?” Thud.
I hope that soon the bat will find my skull and grant me unconsciousness.
When my mind is consumed with this image, how can I practice empathy? When I am dodging the questions and fleeing the blows of that Louisville Slugger baseball bat, how do I find energy to love? Obviously, I cannot. The bat I hit myself with in my mind pacifies my resistance as surely as any police baton in the real world could. This is, of course, the point.
***
It has become clear to me that the me-with-the-bat must be destroyed. The baseball bat must be knocked from his hands forever. I must rise from the floor of that unfinished room and burn it to the ground.
The dominant culture that is murdering the planet and neutralizing those with hearts still alive enough to feel the guilt associated with participating in planetary murder must similarly be destroyed. The longer we wait, the deeper the guilt will cycle, the more pain we will feel, and the longer we will be divorced from love.
In my personal life, I am taking action to destroy the control guilt has over my life. I am seeing a therapist who is helping me practice resistance when guilt seeks to drag me into the unfinished room where it will beat me with my shame. I am taking medication that helps me cut cycles of guilt short before they consume me.
On the cultural level, I’ve been presented an opportunity to stand alongside those serious about stopping the destruction. I will attend Extraction Resistance: A 3-Day Training in Direct Action to learn how to apply more than personal solutions to global problems.
***
The modern environmental movement is said to have started close to 60 years ago. In that time, the situation has only gotten worse. A primary reason the movement is failing is too many environmentalists are relying on personal solutions to stop global problems. We are not going to save the planet by using more efficient light bulbs. We are not going to save the planet by carpooling to work. We are not going to save the planet by eating a strictly vegan diet. Hell, we are not going to save the planet by eating strictly anything.
We’ve tried to reduce, reuse, and recycle our way to a sustainable future for 6 decades and the destruction of that future has only intensified. We need more than personal lifestyle changes. We need more than personally responsible consumption habits. We need organized, militant, direct action.
One of the reasons the environmental movement is failing is the dominant culture holds many of us in cycles of guilt. Blinded by guilt, many of us have become consumed by our own pain. Our world shrinks to the realm of our individual actions. We desire the false peace of mind that we’ve convinced ourselves comes when we can claim we are not personally involved in the destruction. We act only to feel better.
When we are stuck in our own minds, we tend to think that the problem is solved when we can put our minds at ease. But, the problem is not simply mental. The dominant culture is physically destroying the planet. When we rise above our guilt and look beyond ourselves, we will recognize that those countless others who give us life do not need our guilt, they do not need us to maintain our personal purity, they do not need our peace of mind. They need us to stop the destruction of the planet.
When we stop the destruction of the planet, we will recover our empathy. We will act from love instead of the fear of pain. And, the wound of guilt will be free to heal.
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | May 16, 2016 | Alienation & Mental Health
By Will Falk / Deep Green Resistance
Another episode with anxiety knocks me to my bedroom floor. Rational thought forsakes me. My body shakes with the strangled sobs of a man ashamed of his tears. Alicia bends over me. Her dark brown eyes – normally calm with the consistent rationality characterizing her personality – are wide with concern and weariness. We’re only several nights removed from the last episode. She must think, “Oh god, not again.”
Alicia seeks to hold me. I find a deep comfort in her touch – and a deep revulsion. It’s not her. The contradiction is born from the lies fear instills in me. Somewhere in the darkness, a voice reminds me that I am unlovable. I crave love but the voice whispers my lack of reasons to be loved. The closer Alicia gets to me, the closer she’ll get, I fear, to hearing those whispers, too. The closer she’ll get to realizing a man who cannot love himself should not be loved by anyone.
I crawl towards the space between the ground and the bed seeking to hide in the shadows offered there. A burn forms on my face where I grind it into the carpet. The pain provides a strange relief in its reality. The rash, the swollen skin, the heat pulsating on my forehead are sensations I can understand. The mental anguish exists nowhere that can be touched and yet hurts everywhere. This is a pain I cannot understand. I cannot locate the pain’s source to alleviate it. My only meagre power is the power of transformation. I force the emotional pain to materialize as physical pain on my face.
Memories, threatening to cross the boundary into hallucinations, condensate in my senses. I see my mother’s face, streaming tears, when she visited me in the psyche ward at a hospital in Milwaukee, WI after I tried to kill myself. I see her face again, this time in a psyche ward in San Diego after I tried to kill myself a second time. I see my father’s shoulders slumped as he sinks into the plastic of a hospital chair as I attempt to explain what I’ve done. I wonder if he’s given up on me.
I see the troubled glimpses my loved ones give me when they think I am not looking. It’s a look of bewilderment and exasperation. It’s a look that asks, “When will he try to kill himself again?” I see the twitches in my loved ones’ faces when they think I am going to explode into a mess of fear, worry, and despair.
How long can anyone love a human they perceive as a ticking bomb? Everyone would be better off without me, I imagine. If I could just disappear, they could get on with their lives. If the ground would swallow me up or an ocean wash me away, everyone would be relieved.
Eventually, I exhaust myself sobbing. The anxiety subsides. My mind quiets down. The tears slow and stop. I am still alive. The fear has not killed me.
The next morning, I rise from bed to brush my teeth. I cannot avoid my own gaze in the mirror. My loved ones tell me my blue eyes always betray the truth of my emotions. Some days the blues of my eyes are soft and accepting like warm waters to swim in. Today, the blues I see in the mirror are frozen and sharp. They are steely in their resolve.
I do not want to live like this. I am sick of being afraid. I am sick of anxiety. I am sick of cycles of worry stealing my life from me. Personal civil war makes a battlefield of my mind. I’ve been getting my ass kicked. But, that stops now.
***
My friends recently invited me to an event, Extraction Resistance: A 3-Day Direct Action Training in Eugene, OR over the Fourth of July weekend. The event will focus on developing skills related to all aspects of a direct action and will teach land defenders how to engage in the effective confrontation of those in power.
I almost said no. The whispers reminded me that it would be expensive to travel all the way to Eugene. They asked me if I wouldn’t prefer to stay home and relax on the Fourth of July. They recalled the depressed exhaustion I sometimes experience and they pointed out how fighting the anxiety takes much of my energy.
I could have used these whispers as excuses. My friends are deeply compassionate, and I’m sure they would not have pressured me. The whispers are lies, though, and I refuse to let them rule my life.
***
We are running out of time. Polar bears, coral reefs, and North Atlantic cod are all running out of time. Kiribati ran out of time. So did Golden toads. So did Monteverde harlequin frogs.
Climate change set the clock. It is ticking. If we do not stop climate change right now, we’re all finished. The good news is we know how climate change is caused, so we know how it can be stopped. Humans burning fossil fuels cause climate change. To stop climate change, to ensure the planet’s survival, we must act quickly and decisively to stop the burning of fossil fuels.
So far, most of the tactics used to stop the burning of fossil fuels have proven inadequate. We sold our cars, started biking to work, and bought city bus passes. We voted. When we learned the lesser of two evils was still evil, we signed countless petitions begging governmental leaders to take action. We sent checks to non-profits and then wondered what happened to our money. We boycotted Shell, Chevron, and British Petroleum. We bought into the idea that so-called green technology would allow us to continue our current lifestyles free of the guilt accompanying environmental destruction.
But, it hasn’t worked. Achieving personal net zero, reducing our individual carbon footprint, has done little to slow the worldwide consumption of fossil fuels. Focusing too much of our energy on personal consumption habits has reduced each one of us to single consumers. Playing by the government’s rules leaves each one of us only the meagre power of a single vote.
Too many of our tactics rely on someone else to stop climate change for us. Voting and petition signing relies on politicians to do the right thing. Boycotts rely on corporations to voluntarily halt fossil fuel development. Even if every individual American achieved carbon neutrality, the US military would still be the largest institutional consumer of fossil fuels in the world, burning over 100 million barrels of oil a year. This means that changing our personal habits is only a tiny piece of the solution.
We have learned that we cannot trust others to stop the madness for us. If we’re going to stop climate change, we’re going to have to do it ourselves. We can remove others’ ability to burn fossil fuels if we prevent oil, gas, coal, etc. from ever leaving the ground. Once fossil fuels have been extracted we can preserve them in unburned states by blocking their transportation to worldwide markets.
We must re-evaluate our tactics and recognize that escalation is needed. We must physically intervene to stop the destruction of the planet. We must place our bodies between the destroyers and those we love. We must cut the destroyers off from the fuels they require.
So, what’s stopping us?
Fear is stopping us. The processes destroying the planet are destroying our strength of heart. While ice sheets melt so quickly that rising sea levels sink entire nations, while intensifying storms destroy coastal communities, and while salt water poisons freshwater sources, climate change floods the world with fear.
The island nation of Kiribati, which may be inundated by rising sea levels
The murder of species is coupled with the murder of hope. Whole species are being murdered at a rate the planet has not seen since an asteroid crashed into Earth 65 million years ago. Over the last 40 years, half of all animals have been killed including 75% of all freshwater species. Scientists predict that if present trends continue 41% of all amphibian species and 26% of all mammals will disappear into the eternal night of total extinction. If drastic changes are not made quickly, humans might be one of those lost mammalian species. In fact, some scientists already doubt that humanity will survive the end of the century.
We have seen what happens to those who effectively resist. Effective resistance often brings confrontation with police and soldiers. This confrontation can be understandably terrifying especially when you know 4,800 Americans suffered arrest-related deaths from 2003-2009. We know, too, that at least 116 environmental activists were murdered in 2014. We’ve heard the clack of batons on bones, watched crowds scatter before the thud of rubber bullets, and seen faces swollen with terror and pepper spray.
There is so much to fear that too many of us have become paralyzed. Too many of us are stuck in the knowledge of the atrocities too terrified to act. We must overcome this fear. The continuation of life on Earth depends upon it.
***
As you might have guessed, I experience the debilitating kind of fear diagnosed by psychologists as general anxiety disorder and major depressive disorder. For most of my adult life, I have felt too much fear, for too long that it developed into an illness. This summer, I plan on keeping this Direct Action Journal chronicling my experiences struggling to overcome fear while striving to participate in effective actions. I hope the narration of my experiences will help others.
I was diagnosed with mental health disorders while I practiced as a public defender in Kenosha, WI. I was under constant stress. I worked under the fear that my mistakes would send my clients to prison. The State of Wisconsin mandated that we accept close to 3 new cases a day. I often worked 12-hour days and brought my case files home. When I woke up at 3 AM horrified that I missed a detail in a case scheduled for the next morning, I jumped out of bed, put on some coffee, and worked some more.
At the same time, I lived three blocks from Lake Michigan’s shore and I watched in horror as climate change drove the Lake’s water levels to ever deeper lows. Walking the beach trails, I saw countless bass and perch carcasses – their homes destroyed by the Lake’s recession. I followed global environmental news and knew the scene was similar everywhere.
Eventually, a constant sense of dread dominated my consciousness, even when rationality recognized no threats existed. I became exhausted and tried to kill myself twice. I have not tried to kill myself in 3 years, but I still experience extended cycles of anxiety.
***
Psychiatry teaches the best antidote for despair is action. Doctors now understand that the brain is flexible and malleable. Experiences literally form the brain’s structure. Experiencing intense fear or stress for a long time or at frequent-enough intervals can cause malfunctions in the parts of the brain responsible for responding to threats by releasing hormones to support defensive, physical actions like fighting for our lives or running away.
With too much fear, too much trauma, the brain can develop a hypersensitivity to anything that might be a threat causing the brain to more-or-less constantly release the fight-or-flight hormones. The greater this hypersensitivity becomes, the more likely a person is to exist perpetually in the fight-or-flight mode. This can be paralyzing. People suffering from general anxiety disorder often hesitate at the verge of action because they see potential threats in every course they could take.
Climate change and the possible destruction of the planet is a constant, serious threat. In fact, it is the most serious threat confronting us today. It follows that living with this ever-present nightmare is producing the symptoms of general anxiety disorder across the human species.
To live in this fight-or-flight mode constantly, to live perpetually in fear, becomes exhausting. A person can forget that there was ever a time she existed outside of the exhaustion. She could develop the belief that her life will forever be exhaustion. Despair sets in. Where there was once only fear, there is now an absence of hope and a belief that bravery in the face of fear is impossible. This is major depressive disorder.
Depression is the inability to envision a future worth living in. While water is being poisoned, air polluted, and species eliminated, the building blocks of life are being pulled from under us. While our future is being stolen by environmental destruction, is it any wonder more and more people are being neutralized by despair?
The good news is the brain’s malleability allows new habits to form. If, instead of reacting to fear with hesitancy and paralysis, a person chooses to act and creates a habit of action, the brain will reform itself to support that habit. Anxiety and depression, then, can be reversed. Fear’s domination can be undermined.
***
The invitation to participate in the Direct Action Training event coincides with my commitment to release the grip mental illnesses sometimes take over me. I believe there is significance in this. I have prayed for help and Life is answering.
What is Life suggesting? My personal fear threatens to destroy me just like our cultural fear threatens to destroy the planet. My struggle to overcome fear is bound up with the struggle to return the planet to true peace. Winning my struggle and bringing all my power to bear will benefit Life.
Engaging in direct action terrifies me. The old whispers stir. I hate their lies. I refuse to let the lies terrify me. The more often I resist their lies, the closer I come to silencing the whispers, forever.
Climate change terrifies me. Despair rises as I confront the global situation. I hate despair. I refuse to let it’s exhaustion overcome me. The more often I resist despair, the closer I come to ridding myself of it, forever.
I know that anxiety and depression are emotions. I know from my experiences that emotions by themselves cannot kill me. Physical action can kill me. I can swallow a whole bottle of pills, jump from a bridge, or put the gun to my temple. But, in each case, it would be the physical action – and not the emotion – that would actually kill me.
If it is true that only action can kill me, then it is true that only action can save me. It is not enough to hope the anxiety will go away. It is not enough to pray for the depression to disappear. If I want to get better, I have to act. It is armed with this knowledge that I’ve started seeing a therapist again for the first time in 2 and a half years. I’m being treated by a psychiatrist and have started a medication regimen that is helping. I will pair personal therapy with the therapy of direct action.
Climate change causes a cultural anxiety disorder and widespread despair, but these emotional states by themselves are not what is destroying the planet. Real, physical processes – like fossil fuel combustion – are destroying the planet. To survive, we must act in the real, physical world. To survive, we must make fossil fuel combustion impossible. This will be scary, but we must overcome our fear. When we overcome our fear and end this nightmare of climate change, we will overcome the greatest fear of all: planetary destruction.
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Apr 18, 2016 | Alienation & Mental Health, Indigenous Autonomy
Featured image: An indigenous youth from Kwalikum First Nation sings. Photo: VIUDeepBay @flickr. Some Rights Reserved.
By Courtney Parker and John Ahni Schertow / Intercontinental Cry
The spiraling rate of suicide among Canada’s First Nations became a state of crisis in Attawapiskat this week after 11 people in the northern Ontario community attempted to take their own lives in one night.
The First Nation was so completely overwhelmed by the spike in suicide attempts that leaders declared a state of emergency. Crisis teams were soon deployed by various agencies to help the community cope with the horror. Meanwhile, as news coverage of the shocking situation spread, activists occupied the Toronto office of Indigenous and Northern Affairs to demand the federal government provide immediate and long-term support to properly address the situation in Attawapiskat.
At least 100 people from the small Cree community have attempted suicide since September. This alarming number—5 per cent of Attawapiskat’s population—is symptomatic of a larger and more pervasive problem in Canada.
While cancer and heart disease are the leading causes of death for the average Canadian, for First Nations youth and adults up to 44 years of age the leading cause of death is suicide and self-inflicted injuries.
According to Health Canada, the suicide rate for First Nations male youth (age 15-24) is 126 per 100,000 compared to 24 per 100,000 for non-indigenous male youth. For First Nations women, the suicide rate is 35 per 100,000 compared to 5 per 100,000 for non-indigenous women.
Handling this situation through a lens of crisis management simply will not do.
In order to bring an end to this long-standing crisis, there are systemic, cyclical and multi-generational issues that must first be addressed, with special attention given to ongoing disruptions in individual and cultural identity.
Historical impacts of colonization, compounded by Canada’s ongoing policies of forced assimilation, are pulling today’s First Nation youth further and further away from their core cultural identities. These identities and cultures have the power to protect and sustain all First Nation youth, and provide them with the resilience they need to overcome whatever individual factors may place them at risk for suicide.
Noting that the Pimicikamak Cree Nation in central Manitoba also responded to the epidemic by declaring their own state of emergency in March, national chief of the Assembly of First Nations, Perry Bellegarde recently proclaimed:
“We need a sustained commitment to address longstanding issues that lead to hopelessness among our peoples, particularly the youth.”
Bellegarde further lamented the lack of specially trained community health workers. He also cited Attawapiskat First Nation’s need for a mental health worker, a youth worker, and proper fiscal support to train workers in the community to respond.
Mainstream media has its own role to play.
Research has shown that merely talking about the devastating indigenous suicide epidemic can have unspeakably damaging consequences.
In 2007, a Canadian research team compiled a comprehensive report entitled, “Suicide Among Aboriginal People in Canada.” The text goes into great detail about how the media should—and should not—handle this extremely delicate subject matter.
“Mass media—in the form of television, Internet, magazines, and music—play an important role in the lives of most contemporary young people. Mass media may influence the rate and pattern of suicide in the general population (Pirkis and Blood, 2001; Stack, 2003; 2005). The media representation of suicides may contribute to suicide clusters. Suicide commands public and government attention and is often perceived as a powerful issue to use in political debates. This focus, however, can inadvertently legitimize suicide as a form of political protest and thus increase its prevalence. Research has shown that reports on youth suicide in newspapers or entertainment media have been associated with increased levels of suicidal behaviour among exposed persons (Phillips and Cartensen, 1986; Phillips, Lesyna,and Paight, 1992; Pirkis and Blood, 2001). The intensity of this effect may depend on how strongly vulnerable individuals identify with the suicides portrayed.
Phillips and colleagues (1992) offer explicit recommendations on the media handling of suicides to reduce this contagion effect. The emphasis is on limiting the degree of coverage of suicides, avoiding romanticizing the action, and presenting alternatives. There is some evidence that this may actually reduce suicides that follow in the wake of media reporting (Stack, 2003). Many Canadian newspaper editors have adopted policies to minimize the reporting of suicide to reduce their negative impact (Pell and Watters, 1982). Suicide prevention materials can also be disseminated through the media. The media can also contribute to mental health promotion more broadly by presenting positive images of Aboriginal cultures and examples of successful coping and community development.”
Even greater than the need for more socially responsible media, is the need for more proactive and community-specific solutions on the ground.
There is a growing body of evidence demonstrating the value of taking protective measures to prevent suicide by preserving and promoting the regular use of traditional indigenous languages.
In 2008, researchers Chandler and Lalonde published a report entitled, “Cultural Continuity as a Protective Factor Against Suicide in First Nations Youth.” In their review, they touched on an inherent risk in raising the conversation on the indigenous suicide epidemic to the international level – though it is particularly severe in Canada, it is indeed global – describing how it may obstruct community-based and community-specific solutions from emerging. Findings also confirmed that individual and community markers of cultural continuity – such as language retention – can form a protective barrier against the staggering incidence rates of suicide ravaging First Nations like Attawapiskat and the Pimicikamak Cree Nation.
Chandler and Lalonde conclude that:
“First Nations communities that succeed in taking steps to preserve their heritage culture, and that work to control their own destinies, are dramatically more successful in insulating their youth against the risks of suicide.”
In 1998, the same research team—Chandler and Lalonde—published a preliminary report detailing some of the most salient markers of cultural continuity among First Nations. Noted protective factors included: land claims; self-governance; autonomy in education; autonomy in police and fire services; autonomy in health services; and the presence of cultural facilities.
Interestingly, indigenous self-governance was discovered to be the strongest protective factor of all. Lower levels of suicide rates were also measured in communities exhibiting greater control over education, and in communities engaged in collective struggles for land rights—or, as they often call it Latin America: ‘La Lucha’!
In 2009, another research team that included Art Napoleon, Cree language speaker, language and culture preservationist and faith-keeper, issued a call for more research on the association between native language retention and reduced rates of indigenous youth suicide. They also called for more inter-tribal dialogues and community based, culturally tailored, strategy building. Their report detailed a host of other significant protective factors such as: honoring the connection between land and health; recognizing traditional medicine; spirituality as a protective factor; maintaining traditional foods; and, maintaining traditional activities.
Yet, perhaps the most compelling evidence to date connecting cultural continuity—and specifically, language retention—with reductions in First Nation suicide rates came in 2007, from research team, Hallett, Chandler and Lalonde. Their analyses demonstrated that rates of language retention among First Nations had the strongest predictive power over youth suicide rates, even when held amongst other influential constructs of cultural continuity. Their conclusions hold shocking implications about the dire importance of native language preservation and retention efforts and interventions.
“The data reported above indicate that, at least in the case of BC, those bands in which a majority of members reported a conversational knowledge of an Aboriginal language also experienced low to absent youth suicide rates. By contrast, those bands in which less than half of the members reported conversational knowledge suicide rates were six times greater.”
It is important to drive this point home. In the First Nation communities where native language retention was above 50 per cent (with at least half of the community retaining or acquiring conversational fluency) suicide rates were virtually null, zero. Yet in the bands where less than half of community members demonstrated conversational fluency in their native tongue, suicide rates spiked upwards of 6 times the rates of surrounding settler communities.
It is also worth noting how overall spikes in suicide prevalence found in Indigenous communities around the world indicate a strong correlation with the socio-political marginalization brought on by colonization. In other words, the suicide epidemic—which is at heart a crisis of mental health—is directly related to, if not directly caused by, the loss of culture and identity set in motion by colonialism.
Cultural continuity—and perhaps most specifically, native language preservation and retention—plays a crucial role in overcoming the ongoing native suicide epidemic—and indeed near universal barriers to indigenous mental health—once and for all First Nations, on a community by community basis.
