Over the past week, Nicaragua has erupted in protests. While this current crisis started over pension reform, its development has revealed far greater rifts. It appears Nicaraguans have finally had enough of the Ortega regime. They are demanding that the corruption and oppression end. For many, it may seem shocking that a country that re-elected President Daniel Ortega for his third consecutive term in November 2016, with a reported 72 percent of the national vote could now, less than two years later, have taken to the streets en masse demanding his immediate removal from office.
I first visited Nicaragua in 2012, and have spent extensive time in the country over the past two years undertaking ethnographic fieldwork as part of my PhD dissertation. Each time I arrived in Nicaragua, I heard more and more people express mounting levels of frustration with the political situation. Yet, it was a frustration that the majority internalized and kept mainly to themselves, mentioning it to me only in private spaces and usually when other Nicaraguans were not around. As someone explained to me on one of my first trips to the country, “On the street, we’re all Sandinistas. We have to be if we want to work and have our kids go to school. But in private… well, there you may hear another story.”
I began hearing people who had fought in the 1978-79 Sandinista Revolution and 1981-90 Contra War lament that the current government now resembled the Somoza dynasty they had fought so hard and sacrificed so much to overthrow. Many people told me they were still a Sandinista, just not a Danielista, highlighting their commitment to the ideals of the historic fight against dictatorship and the Sandinista Revolution, but fundamental disagreement with the current regime.
Hearing about corruption and repression is one thing, but witnessing it is another. In November 2017, in Bilwi, the capital city of the North Caribbean Coast Autonomous Region of Nicaragua, I watched the Ortega Administration steal a local election. As I felt the burn of tear gas deployed against peaceful protestors and watched National Police – trucked in from the capitol – fire live rounds at the crowds, perspective on Nicaraguan politics changed, permanently.
In the 2017 municipal elections in Bilwi, the primary match-up was between two parties: the FSLN (Frente Sandinista de Liberacion Nacional, Sandinista National Liberation Front) and the indigenous Miskitu party YATAMA (Yatama Aslatakanka Masrika Nani/Sons of the Mother Earth). I decided I would try and divide my time between the contacts I had from each party, hoping to remain impartial. On election day, I spent the morning with a contact who supported the FSLN. I accompanied them as they drove FSLN voters to the polls. At one point, they admitted to me that certain claims of the opposition were valid: Nicaragua was a dictatorship. But they countered that not all dictatorships were bad, exclaiming, “just look at all the progress in Cuba!”
Around 4 pm that afternoon, I arrived at a voting center with a YATAMA contact. Although the official closing time for the center was 6pm, elections officials were shutting its doors. People became angry that they were not being allowed to vote. The situation grew tense as a crowd formed. People reported facing harassment from authorities – including two women who told me about threats of sexual violence – when they tried to demand their right to vote. I remember thinking how my FSLN contacts had stressed to me that they would be voting early in the day, and making sure other FSLN supporters did the same. Did they know this would occur in the afternoon? Reports of similar problems soon emerged from other voting centers around Bilwi.
A few hours later, waiting outside the same voting center in a crowd of YATAMA supporters as they observed a contested re-count of votes, I noticed a new group of people arriving – all young and male. They began encircling the YATAMA supporters and jeering at them. One of the young men tossed a handful of dirt towards them, clearly trying to instigate a fight. Thankfully, the YATAMA supporters did not take the bait. But in that moment, I got a glimpse of the nature of the Sandinista turbas, the same groups of youths who are now terrorizing various parts of the Pacific coast and the capital city of Managua.
Once the FSLN victory was announced, YATAMA supporters took to the streets to protest what they perceived as a fraudulent outcome. While I had tried to remain politically neutral, I certainly empathized with their frustration. The irregularities at the voting centers seemed far too widespread to consider the FSLN win a fair one. Moreover, those who did vote for the FSLN often did so because they felt obliged to do so. As one young woman told me, she had wanted to support YATAMA, but voted for the FSLN since she was fearful of losing her university scholarship.
FSLN-controlled media outlets declared that the YATAMA supporters were causing mayhem in the city, but they were certainly not alone on the streets. Groups of the FSLN youth were out in force, fighting against the YATAMA supporters and vandalizing properties. The YATAMA house and radio station (which serves as one of the few Miskitu-language services in the region) and famous defiant Indian statue were all destroyed, which some audacious Sandinista sources blamed on YATAMA supporters. Through all of this, the protesters faced violent government suppression, including tear gas and even gunfire. Adding to the disarray, groups of criminals who claimed no political loyalties took advantage of the chaos to loot local businesses. One jokingly asked me if I wanted any new electro-domestic appliances from Gallo Más Gallo.
Injured protesters taking refuge in the YATAMA house, before it was burned to the ground. Photo by author.
After a day and a half of the protests, the local airport was shut down and rumors circulated that troops would soon blockade the road. I decided it was time for me to leave town.
Unbeknownst to me, a fight at the bus station broke out 15 minutes prior to my departure time. When I arrived, it was full of police and special forces from Managua, antimotines. As I approached the bus, eager to leave, an official stopped me. He claimed that he had seen me the day before at the protests and ordered that nearby police search my luggage as he closely examined my passport. He demanded my name, which he wrote down. Without my permission, he took a photo of my face with his phone to send to “central.” He also insisted that I hand over my cellphone and delete any protest photos.
The official also accused me of supporting YATAMA and of even working for the CIA – a potentially grave accusation in a country still reeling from the U.S. infringements of the 1980s. I insisted I was a poor graduate student incapable of backing any foreign political party and that I did not work for any government agency. (I was tempted to point out that a CIA agent would have nicer transportation than the local 18-hour “chicken” bus from Bilwi to Managua I was taking, but decided that snark would not help in this situation.) Finally, the official let me go and I boarded the bus. I have never been so relieved to take a seat and settle in for the grueling ride to the capital as I was at the moment the bus finally puttered out of the tiny Bilwi bus depot.
Upon arrival on the Pacific side of the country, a few of my friends joked that I needed to go buy some pro-FSLN swag to help improve my image in the eyes of the government. The Pacific side of Nicaragua was mostly calm after the municipal elections, and most of the people I spoke with dismissed the chaos in Bilwi as something unique to the dynamics on the indigenous-dominated and long-fractious Miskitu Coast. Yet, no Nicaraguan I spoke with was surprised by my tale of police harassment and voter suppression. The most common response to my depiction of the ways the FSLN had strategically manipulated the election outcome was laughter; this was all very old news to Nicaraguans.
Now, in April 2018, the protests are not specific to an election, led by an opposition party, or isolated in a remote part of the country. The protests are occurring all across the heartland of supposed FSLN support. The below photo is from Friday night in León, where the FSLN won the 2017 municipal elections with over 80 percent of the vote. While the government says right wing-backed criminals are responsible for the vandalism, witnesses say it was the Sandinista turbas who were, quite literally in this case, pouring gasoline on the fire.
Some Nicaraguans tell me that the situation has started to calm down. Others say it is just the calm before the storm. Regardless, even if things settle down this time, the mask of democracy has been torn off the Ortega regime. So far, during less than a week of protests, at least 63 people have been killed*, and many more are injured or missing. Nicaraguans are now publicly speaking out against their repressive government, and hundreds of thousands are taking to the streets. Yet, dictators rarely cede power in response to protest, and so this struggle is unlikely to be a fast or an easy one.
I initially wanted to write about what I witnessed in Bilwi, but I decided to stay silent, for the same reason that Nicaraguans do not like to talk about politics on the street: speaking out against the Ortega regime almost always has consequences in Nicaragua. This government has expelled several researchers and academics before me, threatening them along the way. But, now, like so many of my friends in Nicaragua and on their behalf, I am enraged by what is happening. It is hard to silently watch the videos of a journalist being shot in the head in a city that I have come to consider a second home, or of students and protestors being beaten, abducted, and even killed by government forces along streets I have walked too many times to count. As a friend in Managua recently told me, “it is difficult to feel so impotent, but you know what is beautiful? To be next to someone who you do not know but you help and you defend because they believe in the same thing you do.” I cannot be on the streets of Managua marching with the protestors right now, but I can provide a voice that amplifies the calls of those protesters – and as an academic, further evidence that supports their cause.
Featured image: Police cam video of Daniel Shaver (pictured at right with his daughters) just before being killed by Mesa, Arizona Police Department officer Philip Brailsford. Brailsford was acquitted of second-degree murder in the case.
Cold air bites at the tip of my nose and the upper rim of my ears as I crunch across the driveway to the wood pile. Pulling from a rick consisting mostly of ash, I load my arms. We burned through the last rick of wood too quickly. Subzero temperatures moved in right after the winter solstice, and for weeks they held strong, the winds at night drawing the heat from our cabin through every crack and seam. Wool blankets cover the windows, and we trade light for heat. At night we nestle into our bed as a family, buried under our down comforter, which can effectively create an ecosystem all its own. Before sunrise though, I will feel my cheeks getting cold, and I will head to the kitchen to find the last embers of the fire on the verge of extinguishing. In the dark I will snap small sticks with my hands, then feed them into the steel belly of the woodstove, and layer split wood on top of that. I wait, watching, listening. When I am sure that the fire has taken, I head back towards bed with the orange flicker lighting the way.
—
The year has rolled over on the calendars of western humans, and the northern hemisphere has had its shortest day in this particular planetary revolution around the sun. It is a time of transitions and resolutions, reflections of the year passed and goals laid out for the year to come. Personally, I feel that we are in a time of exposure. Open secrets once whispered and acknowledge but never loudly spoken are no longer able to be contained. An obvious example of this is the so-called “me too” movement in which powerful men in politics and entertainment who used their status to sexually assault others were publicly exposed, which then blew open the door for women in a variety of industries and lifestyles to report on the bosses and colleagues who used their positions as leverage to seek and sometimes force sexual attention. Basically, a lot of men in a lot of places of power have been using that power to harass and assault women (and yes, sometimes other men) and a lot of dirty laundry has been aired all at once.
Open secrets are not uncommon in our society. Uncomfortable truths that we all come to know, but fear to speak about lest our murmurings disturb the delicate balance of our universe, and tip the whole order into disarray. One of these open secrets that is getting more and more attention is the fact that the police in the United States are arguably a bigger threat to many people than criminals. With nary a legal or civil consequence for their actions to be had, police killed another thousand or so Americans in 2017. The case of former Mesa, Arizona cop Philip Brailsford being acquitted of murdering Daniel Shaver attracted a lot of attention after the body cam video of the event was released, and the general public viewed what was essentially a snuff film with horror, aghast as Brailsford smugly derided the weeping father Shaver who begged for his life before being murdered. Most of the population now accepts that the police and justice systems by and large treat black Americans far differently, and far worse, than they treat white Americans.
Of course, when a nasty truth comes to light, especially a truth that cuts right through the heart of a person’s – or nation’s – identity, there are those who will flat refuse to believe it. In the case of the many exposed men who have been accused of sexual assault and rape, there are cadres of defenders who nit-pick each case looking to find where the accuser is either lying, or perhaps sought or deserved her treatment. It is just so with the issue of police in America. With each new horror show of a news story, even those complete with heartbreaking video as in the case of Daniel Shaver, there are defenders of the system, professional analyzers who find the moment the victim screwed up by not, in their moments of terror, following some command or by having made some innocuous and unconscious movement of the hand. Then they scream, “See! He deserved to die!”
To these reactionaries desperate to believe that everything is OK, women who are abused and harassed by their bosses and colleagues deserve it if they ever take a meeting with a man alone, and untrained and fearful civilians must act with professional precision while teams of academy graduates laden with military firearms and earning a government wage can ignore standards and statutes alike while engaging in murderous street justice.
However, if we believe all these stories of rape and assault, we then have to start examining our culture and try to understand their source. If we believe that the police are racist and unnecessarily violent and murderous, then we have to start examining our culture and try to understand why. Such digging leads to dangerous places for the egos and identities of many. Our lies are pillars that hold up entire institutions and ways of viewing ourselves and the world around us. We have cursed and damned so many people to live out their days in slums or cages, if we haven’t just flat out killed them. If these sentences of impoverishment, imprisonment, and death were all the extension of a society built on lies, then that would make us some pretty terrible people.
Yes, better to not look down that well.
—
I find myself in a bookstore fairly regularly, and I have noticed that over the past few years, there has been significant growth in the survival magazine market. Of course, there are the homestead magazines, the gardening magazines, the hunting magazines, and the straight up gun fetish magazines, but then the other day I noticed something new. It was a magazine that had on its cover a man, a boy, and a woman, all presumably a family. They carried packs, radios, and firearms. A setting sun painted their faces a golden hue, or who knows, maybe it was a distant nuclear blast, as they stood near a ruined vehicle in some scrubland. The father was handsome with chiseled cheek bones, and the lightest Hollywood smattering of dirt across his brow. In true marketing fashion, this was a magazine with a good looking family surviving a civilization-ending EMP blast, bug out bags in tow.
Seeing this I thought to myself that I think it is basically an open secret now that our society is fucked. We are fucked, and no one is coming to save us. Things are going to get steadily worse and worse until the entire façade of civil life breaks into a series of dysfunctional pieces, and deep down, everybody knows it.
A few weeks ago a friend came over to my house, and as she helped me truck firewood from the front of our land to the house, I made a comment about this to test my theory. I cannot now remember how I snuck it into the conversation, but at some point I said, “We’re fucked,” in regards to the future stability of our climate and the world of human comings and goings. She looked at me with a light, knowing smile, and very sincerely said, “Oh yeah.” I might as well have told her that the sun would set.
Of course, my friends are not exactly going to be a random sampling of the population, and they are all going to fall under an umbrella of social consciousness and ecological concern, to be sure, but the increase in television shows, magazines, and books that all orbit the topic of surviving the collapse of society, to me, is telling. For now, we can treat the topic with a bit of irony should we not find ourselves in like company, and laugh at the commercial selling dehydrated beef stroganoff that one can store in their closet for emergencies.
But the idea is out there. Years’ worth of promised solutions to energy and ecological woes have not been delivered. The fires are worse, the floods are more frequent, and still the powers that be are drilling and scraping for every last bit of hydrocarbon. I think most people assumed that somewhere, some group of serious people was laying out the roadmap of transition, and making sure that it would be implemented. The consequences are rolling in as expected, but the global solutions are nowhere to be found. A few companies absorb government subsidies and put out press releases to keep the investors chomping at the bit, but a look around does not show me a world much different than the one in which I walked as a child thirty years ago.
If it becomes understood that this society as it exists has no future, that would mean we have to ask ourselves serious questions about how, or if, we are going to survive. That is a deep, black well indeed.
—
With a night rain came warm air. Gray morning light expands through the wood revealing a half decayed carpet of leaves. Only islands of snow remain, and they are thin and vulnerable. I have eagerly awaited this warm front. The straw in duck and chicken houses needs tossing, and when out in the animal yards I begin to survey first the damage; a plastic rain collection barrel has burst at its base. Then I look to the work; scraping away the ground in front of every gate and door, as the heave of frozen Earth has made opening and closing most of them quite difficult, and no fix was to be had during zero range temperatures.
Animal gates and hen house doors that cannot be closed again once open are not a problem that can be ignored. Raccoons and foxes are particularly hungry this time of year, I can only imagine. A day or two above freezing are opportunities not to be squandered. Winter is only beginning.
Editor’s note: This is an edited transcript of Derrick Jensen’s December 8, 2013 Resistance Radio interview with Lierre Keith. You can read Part 1 here.
Browse all episodes of Resistance Radio or listen to audio of this interview:
Jensen: Let’s just use an example of the local Tolowa Indians, who lived here for at least 12,500 years. Their lifestyle was based—their food, a lot of their caloric input, came from salmon. If they ate all the salmon, if they killed off the salmon somehow, then that means they would have to conquer someone else, or starve to death, right? Is that basically what you’re saying?
Keith: Yes. Or take the example of, it doesn’t even matter, any civilization. They’re generally going to be based on one of seven or eight crops—corn or wheat or barley or whatever. Every year there’s less and less of it because every year the soil is more and more degraded, there’s more salinization taking place, more salt, literally, in the soil. You will see this throughout history where both the archaeological record of things like the strata that they can just dig through, and then what’s actually in the cooking pots, and then if there are written records of history, you can see how one crop shrinks and shrinks and shrinks, so they try another one that’s more salt-hardy, and eventually that will collapse too. You even have written descriptions of how the surface of the land is glistening white with salt, and “What are we going to do?” They destroyed their land, doing agriculture.
You can pick your power center, but it’s always the same process. You’re using up what you’ve got, and in this process you’re also destroying the rivers and you’re pulling down more trees, and of course you need all those things to survive. Your population is too high to survive on what’s there.
That’s the problem with cities. Eight million people cannot live sustainably on the island called Manhattan. It just can’t be done. Resources have to come from somewhere else, the food, the water, the energy. And the problem is that nobody willingly gives up those things.
The people who live in the watershed next to you, they don’t want to give you what they need. Why would they willingly just die so you can have their trees, their water and their fish? They’re not going to do that. So you’re going to come into conflict. This is why agricultural societies end up militarized. And they do, always.
It doesn’t matter what beautiful, peaceful values those people might hold in their hearts. It doesn’t matter—their lovely art, their music, their paintings, their frescoes, what religion they might be—it doesn’t matter, materially speaking. They have used up their resources. They will starve to death without food. They’re going to have to go out and get it from somewhere else.
J: It’s a functional problem.
K: That’s why it always ends up militarized. That’s one big reason. Another reason is, as you mentioned, human slavery. This is backbreaking labor. Hunter-gatherers tend to work maybe 15 or 20 hours a week to provide for their basic resources, and the rest of the time they do spiritual activities, art, naps apparently are very important, and also gossip. So that’s what they love to do, and they’ve got a lot of free time to do it.
You can contrast that with farmers: it’s just neverending, from dawn to dusk. For anyone to have leisure time in an agricultural society, they have to have slaves. To put a real number on it, by the year 1800—a lot of people demarcate that as the beginning of the fossil fuel age—fully three-quarters of the human beings alive on this planet, three-quarters of them, were living in some form of slavery, indenture, or serfdom. That’s what it requires.
J: It was mainly agricultural, right?
K: Yes. We’ve forgotten how much work is involved because we’ve been using machines now to do that work. I can guarantee that when the fossil fuel runs out, we’re going to remember exactly what kind of work this is.
Once you have that number of the population living in slavery, you need someone to keep them there, and those people are called soldiers. When they go out into the hinterlands, into the colonies, to get those resources that everybody now needs, one of those resources is always going to be other human beings.
We talk about Athens, the great birthplace of modern democracy. Ninety percent of the population of Athens were slaves. That carries through until the year 1800. So that’s number two, slavery.
The other problem with agriculture is it creates a surplus. That’s how the whole thing keeps going. You have to make enough so that you have some surplus. Hunter-gatherers can just move on a little bit and there’s more food to eat, but with the agriculturalists, of course, starvation is always one season away, so there’s always this surplus. The thing is, if you can store it, you can steal it, so you always have to have somebody to guard the food stores. And again, those people are called soldiers.
J: In the first cities—I learned this from Lewis Mumford—the first cities did not have walls around the outside to protect them from so-called raiders. They actually had walls around the granary to make sure that the king was able to keep control of the food supplies because it was only through keeping control of the food supplies that he was able to keep control of the labor force.
K: Yes, so you see this makes a really vicious little circle. Another point to keep in mind is if you can picture one of those great big naval ships that the British Navy or whoever used to conquer various colonies, it can take 600 old-growth trees just to make one of those ships.
War is really resource-intensive. And it ends. A lot of things you might produce create value in this society, and the value can keep either building or at least transferring, but with things that revolve around war, it just dead-ends right there because it’s only got one purpose. And when it’s over, everybody’s dead and that’s sort of the end of it.
Those ships—entire forests of the world were pulled down to make ships just for war. And this is true everywhere. It’s not just the British Navy. It’s all of them. That’s what was required to build those great big fighting vessels.
So you’ve destroyed your forest to live in this energy-intensive way, and you’ve poured a whole bunch of resources particularly into your military, not in defeating people but into the military, and now around again in the vicious circle, you have to go out and conquer the people living in the region next to you so you can take their forest to make more ships to conquer more people.
This is the temporary advantage that agricultural societies have. Because they’re willing to destroy their forests, they can build these great big ships. They can do all this smelting of iron and make these incredible weapons, which are a lot harder than just wooden spears. So they’ve got this superior military force because it’s all draw-down.
Then you’re stuck in this position where you then have to conquer. You have to use that military to go out and get more resources because you’ve used up yours. But it gives you that temporary advantage over the people who aren’t willing to destroy their forests.
If you’re the people who aren’t willing, now you’re really stuck between a rock and a hard place. You either become militaristic and devote your forest to making an army—you kill your land—or you stand on principle and you’re killed and they take it. This is why war spreads. The gentle, peaceful matrilineal people that we all love to romanticize, and in our dreams that’s where we go, this is what happens. This is what they’re up against every time.
It’s a double bind. There’s not really any way out, and that’s why we’re in the state we’re in.
J: Since the problems are functional, as opposed to just something we can change by being nicer people, why are you telling us this? That’s one question. Another question is what do you want people to do with this information?
K: The reason I’m telling everybody is because I want to be hated. [Pause.] That’s supposed to be a joke.
The reason I’m telling everybody is because I feel like the people who care the most—and by that I mean radical environmentalists, radical feminists, people who are profoundly committed to the planet, to justice, to a better way—by and large do not understand the depth of the problem. And if we don’t address the actual problem, we’re never going to come up with solutions. That seems kind of obvious.
Even people who’ve dedicated their lives to these issues don’t understand that it all goes back to agriculture, that that’s the original activity that started us down this path of destruction. That’s the primary destruction. Eventually, global warming will outweigh that, but to date, it’s still the most destructive thing that people have done to the planet. Because that’s what it is. It’s not like agriculture on a bad day, agriculture done really badly. No, this is what it is. You pull down the forest. You rip up the prairie. You destroy those biotic communities, and you replace them with this monocrop for humans, for as long as it will last. That’s the problem.
Then once you start doing that, you’re stuck with this militaristic cycle because you’ve got to keep doing it again and again. When you’ve destroyed your own, you have to go out and get someone else’s. Militarism isn’t just, “Oh gosh, we happen to be warlike. We have a bad story in a book we consider holy. We’d better tell new stories.” I’m a writer. I’m all for new stories, but that’s not going to change this.
The problem is we have a way of life based on draw-down. Materially speaking, we’ve used it all up. And we need to face that. That’s why I’m trying to get people to understand this. It’s not because I actually want them to hate me although a lot of them end up hating me. I guess that’s just the way it goes when you go up against people’s beliefs.
We really have to get the basic wound that’s been done, the basic damage. This has got to be at the forefront of our consciousness as activists and environmentalists and feminists. We’re never going to be able to face it otherwise.
J: I want to comment on the whole hating you thing. What you’re saying is not actually new. Basically, every generation, there have been a number of people who say agriculture is destructive—can you just list a few of the people who have talked about this? There’s Jared Diamond and Richard Manning with Against the Grain, and how about Edward Hyams? Talk about a few of those precedents.
K: What you’re saying is absolutely right. Every generation there’s somebody who says the same thing, and you can go all the way back to ancient Greece to some of the earliest written texts that we have anywhere in the world, and you’ve got Plato, Socrates and Aristotle all mentioning the fact that the world was being destroyed, that the rivers were being flooded with this mud and silt, and so there were no more fish, and all the soil was washing down off the mountains.
In fact, some of the ports of the ancient Roman Empire had to be moved ten kilometers—ten kilometers—because so much silt ran off the mountains and clogged the harbors that they kept having to move, just literally move the cities, to a new spot where the ships could actually dock. This was all commented on. They knew what they were doing. It’s just that nobody knew how to stop it.
Then you have people like George Hill in the nineteenth century, then Edward Hyams in 1930, 1940, and more recently, you have David Montgomery and his book Soil, which is absolutely fabulous. Jared Diamond basically won a Pulitzer Prize for saying more or less the same thing. Richard Manning has this great quote that I love. I’d like to read this. It’s just a few sentences:
“No biologist or anyone else for that matter could design a system of regulations that would make agriculture sustainable. Sustainable agriculture is an oxymoron. It mostly relies on an unnatural system of annual grasses grown in a monoculture, a system that nature does not sustain or even recognize as a natural system. We sustain it with plows, petrochemicals, fences, and subsidies because there is no other way to sustain it.”
That’s it right there. It’s a war against the natural world.
No, I have nothing to say that’s particularly original. I think I put it together in my own way, but none of this is new information. It’s not getting to the people who care the most, and that’s why I feel impassioned about this.
J: So what do you want people to do on two levels, both the personal level and the social level?
K: I think that the social level is heads and shoulders, far and way above, way more important than anything that anybody can do in their personal lives. And I really want to emphasize that, because there are no personal solutions to political problems, and we should know that.
The problem is that a lot of the environmental movement—we’ve kind of been sold this idea that if we just make different consumer choices, we can somehow buy our way out of these massive, global political problems. We can’t. There’s no set of things you can buy that’s going to make a damn bit of difference on any of this. This is not a problem that you can address in your personal life and really have that make anything but a nano-difference. These are really just horrendous systems of power that we are going to have to challenge.
J: Can you say what you were going to say, but in addition can you give a three-minute liberal/radical distinction? Is that possible?
K: There are two main differences between liberals and radicals. The first is that liberals are idealist, and what that means is that liberals tend to think that social reality is an idea. It’s a mental event. And therefore, the way to make social change is education. You change people’s minds. And social change happens because people have some kind of consciousness transformation, or a personal epiphany, or even a spiritual revelation, but that’s how social change happens. It’s one by one and it’s through education or rational argument because it’s a rational problem, right? It’s just a mental event.
J: If we recognize that agriculture is destructive, then we’ll stop it.
K: Yes. Somehow if we just get the information to people, it will somehow just happen. It’s very different on the radical side because radicals think that material conditions are primary, that society is not made up of ideas, it’s made up of material conditions and material institutions that create those conditions. The way you change things is by taking power away from the powerful and redistributing that to the dispossessed. That involves struggle.
Down the line, you have to make decisions how you’re going to wage such struggle, whether it’s violent or nonviolent. All that is really important, and often very ethically grueling to come to grips with, but that’s a much later discussion.
The thing to recognize is this requires force. It’s not a misunderstanding. It’s not a mistake. The powerful aren’t there because the rest of us aren’t educated. They’re there because they have power, and they’re not going to give it up willingly.
You need to use some level of force, whether that’s nonviolent, whether it’s boycotts, whether it’s sit-ins—there are plenty of nonviolent ways that have worked, so it’s not about violence and nonviolence.
It’s simply to recognize that this is not a mistake or a misunderstanding because it’s not a mental event. It’s about material systems of power that have got to be changed, that have to be confronted and brought down. That’s idealism versus materialism.
The other big difference between liberals and radicals is the basic social unit. For liberals it’s always the individual. The individual is sacrosanct. It’s always the individual against society. And again, this leaves you with a strategy of sort of one on one. You’re going to change people one by one, and that’s how you change society.
For radicals, again, this is totally different. We understand that society is actually made of groups of people—so it’s always a class condition, whether it’s economic class, whether it’s a sex caste system of gender, whether it’s a racial caste system. These are groups of people, and some of those groups have power over other groups.
So it’s not about you as an individual. The bad things that happen to me aren’t because my name is Lierre and I have blue eyes and I like reading. The bad things that happen to me are because I’m a woman, because of the different class positions that I hold. Those are the things that happen to people who are in my position. Nothing to do with me as an individual.
Social change happens when the dispossessed come together and make common cause. The solution is really written into the problem. Groups of people have power, but the dispossessed can come together and fight for themselves to change that. There’s always hope in that condition.
That’s the difference between liberals and radicals, and the problem with a lot of the environmentalists of course is that they’ve completely taken up this liberalism. So it’s only going to change by education, and you’re only going to do it one on one. What has dropped out completely from of the conversation is that there are people in power, they’re making money, they control armies, and they’re in control of things like Exxon/Mobil. They are gutting the planet for their personal profit. They’ve got names and addresses, as Utah Phillips very famously said. We know where they live, and we can see how their power is organized.
Our job is to take that apart. It’s to take down those institutions in whatever way we can and redistribute the power so that we all have some say in the material conditions of our lives.
What do I want people to do? In really broad strokes I actually think that there’s still a lot of hope because the things that we need to do to solve these problems are actually things that we should be doing anyway if we care about justice. To get justice for people is also the only way we’re going to save this planet. It’s not human race vs. planet. I think it gets set up that way in people’s minds. It’s not. It’s actually quite the opposite.
So, to get down to brass tacks, the number one thing you can do to drop the birth rate is teach a girl to read. That’s a really profound statement. When women have even that much more power over their lives, it means they have a little more control over the uses to which men put our bodies, and that’s sexually, reproductively, economically. The number one thing that drops the birth rate across the globe is teaching a girl to read. And we should care about that because we care about girls.
As it turns out, it’s one of the main things we’re going to have to do to save the planet. Right now somewhere between one-half and two-thirds of all children that are born are either unplanned or unwanted. All we have to do is give women control over their bodies and the birth rate drops. That’s happened in 32 countries. We now have negative or zero population growth in 32 countries. This is not the human rights horrors of China or places like that where they’ve instituted these draconian and misogynist laws. This is simply giving women power over their lives. And that’s what happens when women have a little education and a little bit of power, over and over.
The number one thing that we have to do is empower girls, and that means confronting a system of power that’s called patriarchy. We’re all going to have to be feminists. Gosh, what a shame.
The other thing that drops the birth rate is when you increase people’s standard of living. People end up having lots of children when they’re very, very poor. So if you raise the standard of living, the birth rate drops, very quickly in fact. Often in a generation you can see this happen.
The reason that people are poor is not because they’re stupid. It’s because the rich are stealing from them. And that is a global system called capitalism. So we’re going to have to be against capitalism, and we’re going to have to do something about patriarchy. That is the only way that we’re going to save this planet.
Again, it’s not humans vs. planet earth. If you care about human rights, that is the only thing that’s really going to save this situation.
My goal is, over the next two or three generations, we could very easily, by simply caring about women and girls and giving them some rights over their lives, some decision-making power, we could drop the birth rate dramatically and then we could let the planet repair. We could be part of that repair. It’s actually not that hard, because the grasses and the forests want to come back. If we simply get out of the way, they will.
I’ll end with one final bit of information, and that’s really about grasslands. If we were to take 80 percent of the trashed out grasslands around the planet, which have been destroyed by agriculture and return them to the grasslands that they would like to be, within 15 years we could sequester all of the carbon that’s been released since the beginning of the Industrial Age. We could stop global warming in its tracks.
Because it’s not us doing it. It’s the plants that are doing it. It’s those incredible grasses that would do it for us. Because life wants to live. And they will do that. The one thing they are really good at is building soil. That’s what prairies do. The basic component of soil is carbon, so they’ll suck it out of the air and they’ll store it once more in the ground, and that could be the end of global warming.
But we’ve got to stop being these monsters and destroyers. A lot of times people make this argument that this is human nature. My response is that it’s not. We were on this planet for over two million years and we didn’t destroy anything. In fact, you can look at the first art that we ever made, and to me it’s a celebration. You have the mega-fauna and the mega-females. Those were our first art projects, these giant animals and these giant women. To me that says that in our bodies, in our brains, in our bones, we have that awe and that thanksgiving, that we were trying to say thank you for our lives and for our homes, and so that was what we celebrated.
I don’t think it’s that far from us still. I think we could repair this planet and remember how to participate rather than dominate.
Editor’s note: This is an edited transcript of Derrick Jensen’s December 8, 2013 Resistance Radio interview with Lierre Keith.
Browse all episodes of Resistance Radio or listen to audio of this interview:
Jensen: Today’s guest is Lierre Keith, the author of multiple books including The Vegetarian Myth and Deep Green Resistance.
Jared Diamond has said that agriculture is the biggest mistake that humans ever made, and Dick Manning had some things to say about it too. Can you talk about what’s wrong with agriculture?
Keith: Yes, and I would like to first explain why that’s important. The reason it’s important is because agriculture is the basis of civilization, and I think the whole point of this show is to make people understand that this is a living arrangement that had no future. So the end was written into the beginning.
And the reason is, primarily, because agriculture is an inherently destructive activity. So you have to understand what agriculture is.
In very brute terms, you take a piece of land, you clear every living thing off it—and I mean down to the bacteria— then you plant it to human use. So it’s biotic cleansing. All those other millions of creatures who should be living there have nowhere to go. That’s a long way of saying mass extinction. Because that’s what agriculture is.
There are a few problems. The first is that it lets the human population grow to some rather large numbers because instead of sharing that land with all those other creatures, you’re only growing humans on it. So we had this catastrophic rise in human numbers which we’ve seen over the last 10,000 years.
The second problem is that you’re destroying the topsoil, and topsoil is the basis of terrestrial life. We owe our entire existence to six inches of topsoil and the fact that it rains. Right now 80 percent of the food calories that are used to support the current human population come from those agricultural foods.
It’s only possible to support this number of people by taking over vast swaths of the planet from all these other creatures and then using it to support human beings.
So, except for the last 46 remaining tribes of hunter-gatherers, the human race has made itself dependent on this inherently destructive activity, on agriculture, and it’s killing the planet.
This is not a plan with a future. It’s draw-down. The end was written into the beginning. What you’re mostly drawing down is fossil soil. We’ve all heard of fossil fuel, probably fossil water, but fossil soil is another really basic concept that we should all be familiar with.
It takes many, many centuries to grow an inch of soil, and in a very brief period of time agriculture destroys that. In one season of planting your basic row crop—wheat or corn or soy or whatever—you can destroy 2000 years of soil.
And if you don’t believe me, you can go to Google Images and type in “Dust Bowl first day.” You can see pictures of these farms in South Dakota that literally lost all their topsoil, all of it, in a 12-hour period, on the first day of the Dust Bowl. That’s draw-down and it’s draw-down in a really big way.
J: How does agriculture actually actually work? How does it actually, first, commit the biotic cleansing? And second, how does it destroy the soil? What happens?
K: I want all the listeners to think about what’s outside their bedroom window or their back door or even their front door. Probably it’s a little piece of land, ten feet by ten feet. Maybe you live in the country, but if you live anywhere urban or suburban, you’re going to see a tiny little patch of land, and it’s mostly going to be grass, probably Kentucky blue grass or something like that, that was put there as a decoration.
If you want to grow a garden, you have to dig up that grass. You can’t just throw lettuce seeds on top of it and hope for the best. I can tell you what will happen, and it’s exactly nothing. There is no way that the annual seeds of those domesticated vegetables are ever going to out-compete that grass. Grass is fabulous stuff. It does not die; it’s pretty much invincible.
To remove it you have to apply a whole bunch of labor. Then, with the soil bared, you can plant whatever annual crop you were thinking of planting. To have a garden, it would be lettuce or tomatoes or squash or whatever. But those are annual crops. They only come once. They’re not going to be here again next year. That’s what an annual means, that they only grow for an annum, one year.
That’s in contrast to perennials, which grow many years. Trees are perennials, clearly. They can grow 2000 years out here in the redwoods. Grasses are perennials. There are annual grasses, but most grasses are perennials. Then there are lots of things in between that are also perennials, like shrubs and vines and whatnot. But then there’s another category of plants that are annuals, and they only grow for one year, or maybe two or three seasons, then they’re done.
These two different categories of plants have very different functions in nature. Everything of terrestrial life depends on those perennials being in place. They do a couple of really basic things, one of which is, because they live a long time, they have the capacity to have a really deep root system. Their roots go down really far, because they have many years to get there. Once they’re there, they can break up rock, the substrata that our planet is made from, and by breaking up that rock they make the minerals available to every other living creature on the planet. They are the ones who recirculate those minerals and keep them coming up to the surface, so that other plants and soil creatures and ultimately animals can eat them. Without those minerals we’re all dead.
J: Like iron.
K: Yes, like iron.
J: Calcium.
K: Like zinc, manganese, anything, you name it. Selenium. It’s the plants that do that, and they’re the only ones that can do that.
Annuals do not have deep root systems. This is really important for people to understand. They don’t live long enough to develop root systems. It’s not part of their genetic code to make deep root systems. They have one purpose, and that’s to create a giant seed head. That’s what annuals do. They have a really short period of time. They’re only going to live two or three seasons, and everything is about the continuation of the species. Their one shot at a future is to have a great big seed head. It’s to produce that baby and wrap it in as many nutrients and as many defenses as it can. And that gives you a great big seed. That’s why annual seeds tend to be way bigger than perennial seeds. It’s got to last. It’s got to make sure that that plant baby survives when the time comes.
Not only do those perennial plants break up the rock and do the mineral thing, but also those really deep root systems are what let the water table recharge because every little tiny filament of root helps water. Every time it rains, the water can now enter the soil down through that channel of the root system. When the community needs that water again, later in the summer, say, when it’s dry, it’s like a great big sponge. Those perennial plants can pull on that water as they need it and keep the whole community alive. That’s what perennials do.
The third really important thing is they keep the soil covered at all times. If you think about a forest, or a prairie, you do not see bare soil. You’ll see duff in a forest, which is decaying plant matter. And of course in a real prairie, you’re not going to see any bare soil. You’re just going to see plants for as far as the eye can see. It will just be perennial grasses.
That’s really important because without being protected, the soil, just like the rest of us, it dies when it’s exposed. The sun bakes it, the wind blows it away, the rain compacts it, and you just end up with dust essentially instead of living matter. So that’s what perennials do.
There are opportunities in nature for annual plants. If there’s an emergency situation, some kind of disaster like a fire or a flood, an earthquake, a landslide when the ground might be bared for some reason—that’s an emergency in nature because that’s the basis of life now being degraded. So immediately the annuals spring to life. It’s because the perennials have been cleared away by this disaster.
You can picture the bank of a river that’s been wiped clean by a flood. It’s just mud. The first thing that happens is all those annual seeds, they’ve been waiting in the soil for their moment. There’s no competition now from the perennials and the perennial root systems, so now they can spring to life, . They will cover that bare soil for a year or two.
It’s like if you cut yourself, you would put a Band-Aid on it. That’s what those annuals do. They provide that Band-Aid. Eventually your skin is going to knit back together, and that’s the perennial grasses or the forest trees coming back in and and you don’t need the Band-Aid anymore. In the same way, the annuals—you won’t see them anymore in the landscape. And their seeds again lie buried until they’re needed for an emergency.
So it’s not like annuals are bad and perennials are good, it’s just that most of the plant matter, the cellulose matter on the planet is going to be perennials. But the annuals have their moment. And it’s when those emergencies happen.
The problem with agriculture is it’s that emergency over and over and over. In order to plant those giant seed heads, in order for them to have a chance, you’ve got to clear the land. You have to remove the grasses or pull down the forests and then you can plant those seeds—corn or wheat or whatever it’s going to be. That’s the only way that you can do it. You cannot simply sprinkle them in the grass and hope for the best or sprinkle them in a forest. Nothing will happen. We all know this as gardeners.
So just extend that across the planet. That’s where all of those annual monocrops come from, by destroying the grasslands of the world and ultimately pulling down a lot of forests as well. These are the demands of agriculture. You can’t just do it once. It has to be done over and over. It is a war against the living world. Because the world doesn’t want to be a monocrop. This is a living planet, and it wants to stay alive. That means protecting that topsoil. It also means that all those plants and animals really want their homes. So you’re going to be fighting a war against all those plants and animals that want to come back, all the perennial grasses, all the trees. Anybody who’s gardened knows that you’re forever fighting the grasses that want to be there.
If you let it go for a few years, what will eventually come back is of course is the succession of either the forest or the prairie, which in one way is ultimately the hope. If we just get out of the way, this planet will repair. That drive, that life wants to live, it’s such a profound impulse in every living creature, that they would take their homes back if we simply stopped fighting that war.
But that’s what agriculture is. A lot of people don’t understand this. I think it’s because we’ve been living in an agricultural society for really 10,000 years now. Ultimately this started way back in ancient Mesopotamia, the Fertile Crescent, and all that, but it’s a direct line. Eventually it conquers Europe. Then the Europeans bring it to North and South America, and they do a bunch of conquering as well, and eventually this is what you end up with; the whole world is just covered with these annual monocrops, as much of it as could be.
We’ve reached the end. By 1950 the world was out of topsoil. Since that point we’ve actually been eating fossil fuel instead of soil. Because the soil’s gone. We’ve skinned the planet alive. So fossil fuel took over instead, which certainly brings with it another whole set of horrors, which are frankly worse.
J: I want to mention a book I recently read, which was pretty fabulous, and pretty heartbreaking. It was called A Country So Full of Gain. It was early European explorers’ accounts of Iowa.
I know for most of us that when we think of Iowa, we think of nothing but cornfields, but Iowa was one of the most wildlife-rich regions of the country, with the sort of interplay between the eastern forests and the Great Plains. When I think of Iowa, I don’t actually think of a place that’s rich in wildlife. That’s a great example of what agriculture does.
K: Yes, and of course another example is Indiana, which, again, we don’t think of as being a place filled with wetlands, but there was the Limberlost, which was a swamp essentially, just a great big wetland. It was made famous by a series of books. The Girl of the Limberlost was the first one of these novels that were written, in the 1930s and 40s. Many, many people still go there. There’s a state park that memorializes the place where these books took place. And everyone wants to see the Limberlost. It’s not there. So over and over these park rangers have to say, “It’s gone. It’s completely eradicated. It was drained and turned into a cornfield. You can’t see it because it’s not here anymore.”
The girl in that book—it’s a novel, but you can imagine that some of this might be true—is living in terrible poverty, with a really abusive situation with her family, but she’s very determined to get herself to school. She does this by being essentially a naturalist because she knows the place so well and loves, particularly, the butterflies and the moths. This is how she’s able to provide for her school fees.
In that way, they are amazing books, because the woman who wrote them, Jean Stratton Porter, really loved that swampy area, that wetland. It’s gone. It’s all been turned into corn.
J: I just read last night that this year has been a complete catastrophe for monarch butterflies, that even recently where they would still have a few we are seeing none. In this case it’s because of milkweed, because Roundup has been killing all the milkweed.
K: And that’s so we can all have soybeans, right? And there are descriptions not even from that long ago, a hundred years ago, of swarms of butterflies miles long. If you can imagine ― a cloud of butterflies miles long on the horizon. And this was just a regular sight that people would see everywhere across the Americas.
J: Can we talk for just a moment about the Fertile Crescent?
K: Everybody has seen pictures of the Iraq War at this point. It’s been going on for ten years or whatever. You picture that region, and you picture rock and sand. Nobody on the planet would call that place the Fertile Crescent, but it was once upon a time quite fertile. You can go to all the places where agriculture first started, in seven places around the globe, and pretty much all of them look like that now.
That is the inevitable endpoint. That’s what happens when you clear away the forests and the grasslands and you drain the wetlands. You remove the life that wants to be there.
You can keep that going for somewhere between 800 and 2000 years. That’s the length of every civilization. They last as long as their topsoil. When their topsoil is gone, they collapse.
Look at ancient Rome, or at any of these giant power centers from history, and it’s the same pattern over and over. By the end, Rome was so desperate that Egypt, with the wonderful fertility of the Nile River, was a personal possession of the emperor of Rome. Anybody who interfered with the off-loading of grain into the Roman ports along the coastline—summary execution. Because that’s where they were getting all their food from at that point. If you did anything to interfere with the off-loading of that food, you would be killed on sight. Everybody got that this was the end.
So the whole thing collapses. Then it starts over somewhere else.
But that entire region around the Mediterranean was destroyed piece by piece by those successive empires—the Phoenicians and the Egyptians and then the Greeks and finally the Romans. Then it collapsed. And the only thing that saved Northern Europe from the Romans was the Alps, mountains that they simply couldn’t cross. Eventually, though, agriculture pushed its way up through there as well. There are only four freely flowing rivers left in Europe now. The rest have been dammed.
J: You’re talking about this not being sustainable. But I don’t know how you can say that it’s not sustainable when there are seven billion humans on the planet, and clearly humans are continuing to multiply, so doesn’t that mean that this way of living works? I’m thinking about a New York Times op-ed I just read about a week ago, that said that ecology doesn’t actually matter to humans because human survival is based on technology and innovation, as opposed to the world. The guy who wrote it is a scientist, so he must know.
K: [laughs] I would say that human survival depends on having a livable planet and recognizing its limits. If you don’t start there, you’re going to end where we ended. 98 percent of the forests are gone and 99 percent of the prairies, and we are looking at complete biotic collapse. It’s just insanity. To not recognize basic physical limits just seems so out of touch with reality.
J: But there’s still a lot of humans. There’s like seven billion humans on the planet, so obviously we’re doing really well.
K: Yeah, and counting. What we are doing, what we have been doing for 10,000 years, is what’s called draw-down. This is when some—we can call it a resource, but maybe there are better words—a living community, and that community is being dismantled piece by piece and used. While that dismantling is happening, while the soil is being destroyed, while the rivers are being drained, while all the fish are being killed, while the topsoil is sliding off the mountain, clogging the harbors around the Roman Empire—or take your pick of empires—and the trees are going, and everything is being pulled down, yes, there’s a temporary blip, where the population gets larger.
But of course you’re not letting the world replenish, you’re not taking from it in an actually sustainable way. That’s why it’s called draw-down, because you’re drawing down the capacity of the world to replenish itself. You’re taking the soil. You’re taking the trees, whatever. Eventually you hit zero, and that’s when the thing collapses.
I referenced fossil fuel. What’s been happening since 1950—that’s the beginning of what’s called the Green Revolution. Scientists figured out through the Haber-Bosch process how to take oil and gas and turn it into usable nitrogen.
Originally that was used for making bombs, for killing people. Scientists were well aware of the fact that we were going to run out of nitrogen and that was one of the basic things plants need. If you’re a gardener you know this. There wasn’t going to be enough nitrogen left on the planet to keep doing agriculture. So they thought they hit a bonanza when they figured out they could use this Haber-Bosch process. By 1950 they’d taken all these munitions plants and turned them into fertilizer factories for farming. Then all of a sudden . . .
J: Which is one reason you can end up with a fertilizer factory exploding in Texas.
K: Yes, it’s explosive. It’s exactly the same process, so it’s, very dense energy essentially. They also did a lot of plant breeding and made the plants shrink, so less plant energy has to go to things like stems and leaves, and more can go to that giant seed head to make it even bigger with less input. They’re very clever. They do these things. But of course the ultimate problem is that it’s still draw-down. Except we’ve moved on from soil, since that’s all gone, and now we’re drawing down fossil fuel.
Fertilizer plant explosion in the town of West, Texas.
As long as oil and gas are cheap enough, we can keep eating oil on a stalk, but again this is not a plan with a future. I think everybody listening probably knows that oil doesn’t reproduce. The little drops of oil don’t get a birds-and-bees talk from the big drops of oil. It’s not going to come again once those resources are gone, so it’s still draw-down, only it’s an even more destructive kind of draw-down because with fossil fuels, of course, you’ve got the oil spills, the global warming and all the rest of it.
So having blown through the topsoil of the planet, they’re now using what’s under the earth as well. There’s no happy ending here. The only way this can end is with total collapse. You can’t keep drawing down resources that are going to come to an end and think there’s any kind of future. This was not a way of life that was ever going to last.
J: A couple of other problems with agriculture are if you are drawing down your own land base, that’s going to lead you to militarism. It leads you to conquest because if you don’t conquer somebody else you’re going to starve. So basically once you’ve drawn down your own land base, then you have a choice. You can either collapse or you can expand. So can you talk about the relationship between agriculture and expansion, and also the fact that agriculture is really hard work, so agriculture and slavery?
K: That’s the pattern of civilization everywhere. There is no exception. There can’t be an exception, because once you’ve used up your own resources, you have to go out and get them somewhere else.
J: Let’s just use an example of the local Tolowa Indians, who lived here for at least 12,500 years. Their lifestyle was based—their food, a lot of their caloric input, came from salmon. If they ate all the salmon, if they killed off the salmon somehow, then that means they would have to conquer someone else, or starve to death, right? Is that basically what you’re saying?
K: Yes. Or take the example of, it doesn’t even matter, any civilization. They’re generally going to be based on one of seven or eight crops—corn or wheat or barley or whatever. Every year there’s less and less of it because every year the soil is more and more degraded, there’s more salinization taking place, more salt, literally, in the soil. You will see this throughout history where both the archaeological record of things like the strata that they can just dig through, and then what’s actually in the cooking pots, and then if there are written records of history, you can see how one crop shrinks and shrinks and shrinks, so they try another one that’s more salt-hardy, and eventually that will collapse too. You even have written descriptions of how the surface of the land is glistening white with salt, and “What are we going to do?” They destroyed their land, doing agriculture.
You can pick your power center, but it’s always the same process. You’re using up what you’ve got, and in this process you’re also destroying the rivers and you’re pulling down more trees, and of course you need all those things to survive. Your population is too high to survive on what’s there.
That’s the problem with cities. Eight million people cannot live sustainably on the island called Manhattan. It just can’t be done. Resources have to come from somewhere else, the food, the water, the energy. And the problem is that nobody willingly gives up those things.
The people who live in the watershed next to you, they don’t want to give you what they need. Why would they willingly just die so you can have their trees, their water and their fish? They’re not going to do that. So you’re going to come into conflict. This is why agricultural societies end up militarized. And they do, always.
It doesn’t matter what beautiful, peaceful values those people might hold in their hearts. It doesn’t matter—their lovely art, their music, their paintings, their frescoes, what religion they might be—it doesn’t matter, materially speaking. They have used up their resources. They will starve to death without food. They’re going to have to go out and get it from somewhere else.
I am an environmental activist. I have depression. To be an activist with depression places me squarely in an irreconcilable dilemma: The destruction of the natural world creates stress which exacerbates depression. Cessation of the destruction of the natural world would alleviate the stress I feel and, therefore, alleviate the depression. However, acting to stop the destruction of the natural world exposes me to a great deal of stress which, again, exacerbates depression.
Either, the destruction persists, I am exposed to stress, and I remain depressed. Or, I join those resisting the destruction, I am exposed to stress, and I remain depressed.
Depressed if I do, depressed if I don’t. So, I fight back.
I will always struggle with depression. I know it sounds like the typically fatalistic expression of a depressed mind, but accepting this reality releases me from the false hope that I will ever live completely free from the guilt, hopelessness, and emptiness that are depression. Accepting this reality, frees the emotional energy I spent clinging to false hope. Instead of using this energy searching for a cure that never existed, I can devote this energy to activism and to managing depression in realistic ways.
Coming to this realization was not easy. It’s taken me five years since I was first diagnosed with a major depressive disorder, confirmation of the diagnosis from three different doctors in three different cities, two suicide attempts, and more emotional meltdowns than I can count to finally accept my predicament.
***
Uintah Basin drilling at night. Credit: Wikimedia
A recent drive through the oil fields in Utah’s Uintah Basin reminds me why depression will haunt me for the rest of my life.
The drive east on U.S. Highway 40 from Park City, UT to Vernal leaves me nowhere to hide. In my rearview mirror, melting snow sparkles as it dwindles high on the shoulders of the Wasatch Mountains. Climate change threatens Utah’s snowfall and Park City may be bereft of snow in my lifetime. Pulling my gaze from the mirror to look through my windshield, tall thin oil rigs rise from drilling platforms to pierce the sky after they’ve pierced the earth. Next to the platforms, well pumps move lethargically, doggedly up and down. The wells are mechanical vampires, stuck in slow motion, sucking blood from the earth.
While the rigs inject poison and the pumps extract oil, it’s hard not to think of the addict’s needles. Scars form on the basin floor where once-thick pinyon-juniper forests and rolling waves of sagebrush are piled in heaps around the fracking operations. The swathes of destruction betray addiction as surely as track marks.
I pass countless tanker trucks parked next to round, squat oil storage containers. The trucks are filling up with yellow crude before hauling the oil to refineries in Salt Lake. From there, the oil will be shipped all over the West to be burned. Each oil platform, each rig, each well I pass strikes a blow to my peace of mind. Each truckload of oil burned pushes the planet closer to runaway climate change and total collapse.
My intuition is infected with a familiar dread. Looking around me, I am met only with trauma. So, I look to the future. I see sea levels rising, cities drowning, and refugees fleeing. I see oceans acidifying, coral reefs bleaching, and aquatic life collapsing. I see forests burning, species disappearing, and topsoil blowing away.
I don’t see a livable future.
My hands tighten on the steering wheel, the muscles in my face cramp, and I feel nauseous. My left foot is restless. My right foot, though it is busy with the accelerator, is restless, too. I am speeding. My body is confused. It has no evolutionary reference for being trapped in the cab of a car while traveling at highway speeds.
If you could see through my flesh and bone to the organs forming my stress response system, what would you see? You’d see my adrenal glands pumping out stress hormones. You’d see the stress hormones preparing my body and brain to fight or flee. After a few minutes, you’d see my shrunken, damaged hippocampus trying to signal my adrenal glands that the threat has passed and to stop flooding my frontal cortex with stress hormones. You’d see my hippocampus fail, my adrenal glands continue to pump out hormones, and my risk for sinking into a full-blown episode of depression rise.
Oil well in Duchense County, Utah. Credit: Wikimedia
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Neurobiological research suggests that the highly recurrent nature of depression is, in part, linked to the way stress hormones can produce brain damage. Advances in neuroscience unveil a conception of depression as a vicious cycle in the body’s stress response system. In a healthy system, adrenals produce hormones in response to stress. The stress passes and the hippocampus signals the adrenals to stop hormone production.
When the frontal cortex – especially the hippocampus and amygdala – is exposed to too many stress hormones, for too long, the frontal cortex begins to shrink. A damaged hippocampus fails to stop the adrenals which continue to produce stress hormones which continue to damage the hippocampus. Mood, memory, attention, and concentration are all affected. Problems with mood, memory, attention, and concentration create their own stresses which intensify the cycle.
Recent psychiatric findings paint a bleak picture. The American Psychiatric Association describes depression as “highly recurrent,” with at least 50% of those recovering from a first episode experiencing one or more additional episodes in their lifetime, and approximately 80% of those recovering from two episodes having another recurrence. Someone with three or more episodes has a 90% risk of recurrence. On average, a person with a history of depression will have five to nine separate depressive episodes in his or her lifetime.
I have had four distinct episodes of depression which all but guarantees that depression will continue to recur for me. I do experience periods of remission where I am relatively free of the symptoms of depression. But, even in these times, depression lurks in the shadows forcing me into a perpetual vigilance, struggling to avoid relapse. Depression may fade, but memories of depression’s pain never do. I live in fear, daily, that the next episode is just around the corner.
Mainstream psychology stops the discussion, here, to prescribe avoidance of places that trigger depression, like the Uintah Basin and to conclude that a combination of improving the hippocampus’ ability to switch off stress hormones, eliminating as much stress from the depressed’s life as possible, and coping with the stress that can’t be eliminated is the key to recovery.
I have no reason to believe this wouldn’t work, in another time or another world. But, most of the planet has been turned into places like the Uintah Basin. There are precious few places free from civilized violence. While our homes are on the brink of annihilation, while horror adheres to our daily experience, while protecting life requires facing these horrors, is the elimination of stress possible? Is coping honest?
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Credit: Gordon Haber, National Park Service
Ecopsychology shows that the elimination of stress is not possible in this ecological moment. Where psychology is the study of the soul and ecology is the study of the natural relationships creating life, ecopsychology insists that the soul cannot be studied apart from these natural relationships and encourages us to contemplate the kinds of relationships the soul requires to be truly healthy. Viewing depression through the lens of ecopsychology, we can explain depression as the result of problems with our relationships with the natural world. Depression cannot be cured until these relationships are fixed.
This explanation begins with stress and the body’s relationship with it. Stress is fundamentally ecological and can be understood as flowing through an animal’s relationship with his or her habitat. The classic example of the ecological nature of an animal’s stress response system involves the relationship between prey and predator. When a moose is beset by wolves, her stress response system produces hormones that help her flee or fight the wolves.
The relationship formed between the wolf, the moose, the moose’s stress hormones, and the moose’s stress response system is one of the countless relationships necessary for the moose’s survival. This is true for everyone. Other relationships animals rely on include air, water, and space, animals of other species, members of the animal’s own species, fungi, flowers, and trees, the cells forming the animal’s own flesh, the bacteria in the animal’s gut, and the yeast on the animal’s skin. Relationships give an animal life, and in the end, relationships bring the animal’s death. In an animal’s death, other beings gain life. The history of Life is the history of these mutually beneficial relationships.
Civilized humans poison air and water, alter space, murder species, destroy fungi, flowers, and trees, infect cells, mutate bacteria, and turn yeast deadly. In short, they threaten the planet’s capacity to support Life. Not only do civilized humans destroy those we need relationships with, they destroy the possibility of these relationships in the future. Every indigenous language lost, every species pushed to extinction, every unique acre of forest clearcut is a relationship foreclosed now and forever.
Living honestly in this reality, we open ourselves to depression. Losing these relationships, and seeing a future devoid of the relationships we need, creates unspeakable stress. Living with this stress every day can flood the frontal cortex with stress hormones, shrink the hippocampus, and push the stress response system past its ability to recover.
If this happens, you may be haunted with depression for the rest of your life.
To experience major depressive disorder is to know consciousness is an involuntary bodily function. Just like your heartbeat, you cannot turn consciousness off without chemicals, a blow to the head, or some other violence to the body and brain. Awareness is a muscle, and perceiving phenomena is how this muscle works. Depression is constant pain accompanying perception. In the civilized world, pain and trauma reflect from countless phenomena. The destruction has become so complete, consciousness finds nowhere to rest in peace, no place free from the reminders of violence.
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Credit: Lain McGilcrest / Regent College
I know I have described a harsh reality for those of us living with depression. It is, however, the reality. For many of us, depression is a lifelong illness. In the long run, accepting a harsh reality is always better than maintaining denial. I have found that accepting this reality helps me manage my depression daily and enables me to be a more effective activist.
Accepting that I will always struggle with depression does not imply giving up. On the contrary, accepting this struggle requires a commitment to daily discipline. Several of my doctors have compared depression to diabetes. Just like many diabetics have to monitor their blood sugar, avoid certain foods, and regular exercise, depressives must build a daily practice into their lives. For me, this means regular cardiovascular exercise that helps my body deal with stress hormones, getting eight hours of sleep nightly, drinking alcohol sparingly, limiting situations where I am tempted to ruminate, and a consistent investment in my social relationships both human and nonhuman.
Coming to grips with the lifelong nature of depression has also given me firepower against depression’s perpetual guilt. The guilt associated with depression can become so pervasive it builds layers on itself. I feel guilty, for example, when I am tired, when I can’t seem to focus on writing, when I cannot find the mental fortitude to see the tasks I’ve promised to complete through to conclusion. I remind myself that lack of energy and problems with concentration and goal-oriented thinking are symptoms of depression. Then, I feel guilty for forgetting and guilty for letting myself feel guilty.
Accepting that I will always struggle with depression is accepting that I will always struggle with the symptoms of depression like guilt, too. Knowing this, when I find myself mired in cycles of guilt, I stop trying to rationalize my way through the guilt and simply place the guilt in a corner where it doesn’t matter if I should feel guilty or not.
Accepting the lifelong nature of depression relieves me of the search for a cure. The personal search for a cure is quickly converted by depression into pressure to get better. This pressure becomes a sense of failure when depression’s symptoms intensify. While the world burns, the stress causing depression is always present. I may defend myself from this depression effectively for awhile but, the violence is so total and the trauma so obvious, there will be times that the stress overwhelms my defenses. This is not a personal failing and this is not my fault. I fight as hard as I can, but I will not always win.
Most importantly, acceptance makes me a better activist. I cannot separate my experience from the countless humans and nonhumans who make my experience possible. Fortunately, ecopsychology gives me a lexicon to communicate about the relationships creating my experience. Understanding that omnipresent stress, caused by the omnipresent destruction of the relationships that make us human, causes depression frees me from the voice telling me depression is my fault.
Before I could understand this, I had to open myself to the reality of these relationships. These relationships are our greatest vulnerability and our greatest strength. We cannot change this. The ongoing loss of these relationships is incredibly painful. If we want the pain to stop one day, we must fight back. That will be incredibly painful, too.
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Credit: Pixabay
Life speaks, but rarely in English. One human language is much too small to convey the ever unfolding meanings at play in the world. Wind and water, soil and stone, fin, fur, and feather are only a few of Life’s dialects.
Tectonic plates tell mountains where to form. Blood in the water tells a shark food may be near. Foreign proteins on the surface of dangerous cells, tell your white blood cells to attack. A single chirp, formed in a prairie dog’s throat, lasting a mere tenth of a second, tells an entire colony the species and physical characteristics of an approacher.
You may not hear Life utter the words, “Stop the destruction.” But, Life’s languages are as diverse as the variety of physical experiences. The pain of depression is a physical experience, and it follows that Life speaks through depression. That pain will haunt me for the rest of my life. Life continues to speak. It says, “Fight back.”
