Lierre Keith on Biden’s Executive Order (transcript)

Lierre Keith on Biden’s Executive Order (transcript)

On this urgent episode of the Green Flame, Lierre Keith comments on a new development in the war on women. That development is Biden’s executive order on gender identity, an order signed the day of his inauguration which will eviscerate women’s rights. Lierre Keith is the founder of the Women’s Liberation Front (WoLF). She is a WoLF board member, a radical feminist for over 40 years and author of six books including the novel Skyler Gabriel, Conditions of War and The Vegetarian Myth: Food Justice and Sustainability.

You can view the video of the interview here.


Jennifer Murnan – Thank you so much Lierre for joining us for this urgent Green Flame. We will be getting this episode out as soon as possible. It is the 22nd and yesterday Biden

Lierre Keith – Two days ago.

JM – Two days ago now, okay…

LK – Two days since the inauguration.

JM – Oh, my god.

LK – He wasn’t even president five hours. Yeah, he did it immediately.

JM – So five hours into his presidency, he issued an executive order that begins to initiate some of the equality and completely circumvents the legislative kind of procedure around those kind of laws. Please explain this to us, what does an executive order do and what did this one do.

LK – Okay. So executive orders are legal. They have been ruled legal by the Supreme Court a long time ago, 100 years ago, a long time. This is a feature of the powers that the president has, that the executive branch holds and they can be very controversial. The way that the government is set up in the United States we’re supposed to have three branches of government. We have the executive, the legislative and we have the Supreme Court, the judicial branch, and they’re supposed to work, by providing checks and balances. We all learn this in first grade, right? The legislature is supposed to make the law, it’s literally what legislature means, that’s their job and the president isn’t really supposed to make the law, that’s not what he does or she does. So, you know of course they find workarounds, that’s what power does, so many, many presidents have done made executive orders. I mean, they have pretty much have all done it for 100 years like very famously Truman, president Truman, desegregated the US military using an executive order. So that’s, I mean, as far as the military goes, that’s for good. He just declared that there was not going to be segregation anymore in the armed forces. And a year or two later it was done. I mean, it’s just with the military they know how to follow orders and they did it. So that was the first major U.S. institution that was desegregated and it went very smoothly and before you know it, black people were ordering white people around and nobody thought anything of it because it was the military. So, there are reasons sometimes that they do this, but you know the downside is that it does circumvent the democratic process. We have a way to pass laws in this country and this is not it so, especially when you’re taking on something that is bound to be controversial, that’s going to change a whole bunch of stuff for a whole bunch of people you want that to happen in the light of day.

Every president does this and then the other side always says, well, this it is executive overreach, it’s this, it’s that. There are always contentious things that happen so I’m not blaming any particular president because, like I said, they all do it. This isn’t like a new evil thing that Biden came up with, but obviously this is one that women are going, we’re going to be hurting from this one. So the promise was that they were going to pass this piece of legislation that was called the Equality Act and that at least would have gone through the proper channels. It would have been in Congress, the Senate and the House of Representatives, there would have been debate. We all would all have had time to present our view on it; the way that laws are supposed to be passed and they didn’t do that so we’ve got this instead.

All right, so what does the executive order actually say? Well, it’s fairly short, you can read it. It’s online it’s been posted up, you can go to the White House website and look at it. It starts with a decision that happened last year from the Supreme Court that was called the Bostock Decision. Now, the Bostock Decision was three separate cases that were collapsed into one and part of it ruled that gay and lesbian Americans could not be discriminated against due to sexual orientation. That’s fine, nobody has a problem with that, the problem was this another case, the Amy Stephens case. This was a man who decided he was a woman one day and this could have gone two ways. You could have a man who says I would prefer to wear the women’s professional clothes to work instead of the men’s clothes, I’m a man but I want to wear these clothes. That would be a very different argument but that was not what Amy Stevens argued, he argued that he was a woman and therefore he should be wearing the women’s uniform. He worked at a funeral home, the funeral home really didn’t like this, I mean, you’ve got people coming who are in the worst grief of their lives and this was just not something that they wanted anybody to have to deal with. From a feminist perspective it’s just very simple: men cannot be women. Clothing in the United States, for employment purposes, employers are legally allowed to have separate dress codes for men and women. That is, I think, a problem but he’s not addressing that problem. He’s not saying “Well, we shouldn’t have separate dress codes”. I think that women could certainly make that argument, but the courts have ruled that is legal as long as it doesn’t put an undue burden on anybody, as long as they cost basically the same and whatever, don’t do this or that, you’re allowed to have those, still, in the United States it’s not illegal to have a separate dress code. Instead of trying to address that, to say actually anybody should be able to wear professional clothes in a professional environment, he instead argued “No, I’m a woman.” The real kicker here is that he demanded access to the women’s bathroom. His employer said no, so that was what the case was about. The Supreme Court ruled that the Civil Rights Act of 1964, [which is really all we have in the United States to protect a whole bunch of our civil rights], they ruled that it should include gender identity. This is a disaster for women.

In 1964 this didn’t exist as a concept. Gender identity was certainly not included under the category of sex. The people who wrote that legislation certainly didn’t intend that in any way, there’s no evidence that they did. It has protected women. Women have used the Civil Rights Act more than any other group in the United States and there’s a lot of interesting history there, but we don’t really have time to get into it, but anyway The Civil Rights Act is pretty much what we’ve got. In The Bill of Rights that we have there’s a series of what are called negative freedoms. The Bill of Rights restricts the reach of the Federal Government. So we don’t actually have a proactive right to speech under the First Amendment. What we have is a right not to be interfered with . So “the government shall make no laws…” That’s what the first ten amendments really are about. It’s trying to keep the government out of what are people’s sort of natural human rights. If you look back in history what you had at the founding of this country is you’ve got the rising mercantile class and what they’re fighting is essentially an older system which involved a king, hereditary power. The rising mercantile class was fighting them and saying “No, we have rights and we don’t want you to rule over us, we’re going to rule over ourselves.”

So what you had was a bunch of very rich, essentially white men, saying, “I won’t interfere with you, you don’t interfere with me and we’re going to call that freedom.” Now, as far as that goes it’s certainly been helpful, I’m glad we have a First Amendment but that’s as far as it ever went.
Regardless, here we are today, so what Biden has done, taking this Bostock Decision instead of sex, we’re going to have gender identity. So every place in the law that was protecting women as a group, as a class based on our biology, will now they’re going to instead say “gender identity.” They can’t define gender identity. It’s not in this executive order. There’s literally no definition. A few states that have tried to have definitions; I mean, in New Jersey “a gender identity is a gender-related identity” and I’m not making that up. It’s completely circular and this is because it’s complete nonsense. I know we all keep using the Emperor’s New Clothes as our big metaphor but I don’t have a better one. It’s just complete nonsense, it means nothing. Yeah, “a circle is a thing we call a circle,” great! Does not tell you what a circle is! The most ridiculous thing is that we all know what a man is and what a woman is. This isn’t actually up for debate. We have sexually dimorphic species for 500 million years on this planet. There’s just men and there’s women. This is actually not very complicated. They have made it complicated, but it is not complicated. We all know who can bear the babies and who doesn’t. For the whole history of Patriarchy, they’ve never had a problem figuring out who the women were: who was going to be sold as a child bride, was going to have her genitals mutilated, who was gonna have her feet bound, who wasn’t allowed to vote. I mean, in 1976 when my mother divorced my father she couldn’t get a credit card in her name, she couldn’t get a bank account. That didn’t happen to my father! We all know who that happened to and why we have a feminist movement.

So Bostock has now come to fruition. We saw this in the ruling. Anybody can read it all, this information is public. That’s what they said, that “transgender status” defined a discreet group of people. Again, they never defined it because it’s not definable, it’s simply an internal feeling and it has nothing to do with physical reality. So this executive order, all the federal anti-discrimination statutes that cover sex discrimination, now they’re going to prohibit discrimination on the basis of “gender identity”. This involves all the Federal Civil Rights offices across the country which are now going to have to enforce this. This is where you used to go if you felt like there was workplace discrimination or something that was one of the legal remedies that you had. Women aren’t going to have that remedy anymore. Men will.

JM – That was definitely my question, what does this do to United States women immediately?

LK – Women are now going to be the people who are the problem, right? Men are going to come and say, “Women aren’t letting me do X, Y and Z.” “I’m not allowed in the women’s bathroom, I’m not allowed to take a woman’s job that’s been reserved for women”– and that’s discrimination. So women are going to have to give way. We are now the problem that has to be solved rather than the people who are being hurt, systematically hurt. It’s completely the opposite now–, we are the boundary that has to be broken. So, this is every federal agency. They’ve been directed to do comprehensive assessment of all their regulations and they have one hundred days to plan how they are going to now insert gender identity in the place of sex. How they’re going to interpret all this through the lens of gender identity? So this includes all American employers, it includes all the institutions and indeed eventually all the individuals. So you think about all the federal agencies, well that immediately includes housing and urban development (HUD) and they are the people who run all the, you know, (all the notreligious homeless shelters but) all the public homeless shelters. So now you’ve got an incredibly vulnerable group of women who are not going to be able to keep men out. There have already been cases where women have been sexually assaulted in homeless shelters.

There’s a case that’s still ongoing from Sacramento, California, where [thank God, women were able to find a lawyer but they have terrible experiences of how] a man was forced into the homeless shelter with them and they had to shower and share rooms with him and how terrifying this was and the things he did to them.

JM – Of course prisons, any federal prison.

LK – Yes, all the prisons now, and again there are already cases rolling. There’s Illinois, in there’s Texas, there’s Washington. I just want everybody to feel the horror of this; you are a woman locked in a 10 by 10 cell and now we have a man who’s very likely a violent offender, could be a sexual offender, is now put in your cell with you. You have literally no way to escape and this is what they’re going to do to women around the country. They’re already doing it, we just haven’t been able to get any press about it.

In UK, they had mister Karen White who insisted he was a woman and was put in a woman’s prison. He sexually assaulted women and it was all over the news and it really helped them in their fight it broke through into the mainstream. We have not been able to do that here and we have just as many horrifying cases here and nobody wants to hear it., The press is just the a great wall of silence at this point. What’s happening to the most vulnerable women? We know why women end up in prison. We know that they have been abused as children, battered as adults, that they’re in for economic crimes because they’re living in poverty, a lot of them are survivors of prostitution. They’re the women who have been hurt the most by this system and now they’re going to be locked in cells with men, with male predators. The left is who’s pushing this. The Democrats are supposed to be, you know, the side that’s anti-racist and the side that’s for progress, that’s for unity. That’s who’s bringing this. It wasn’t the Republicans who did this to women.

JM – What does this do to children in school systems?

LK – In school? So that’s the next thing.

JM – The federal level of control in this executive order is one of the most horrifying aspects to me about replacing gender identity with sex.

LK – The entire public school system, so anybody who gets federal money is going to have to absolutely give into this. Every school girl will not have a bathroom that she can use in school safely… * dog barks * Hang on one second, this is my dog.

JM – Hi, sweetie!

LK – Yeah, I don’t know why she thinks we’re in danger, we’re not in any danger.

JM – Actually, I think that it’s in our voices, we are in danger, we, really, really are, she knows she’s got sensible animal instincts, yeah. If you’d like to repeat that because we had the barking in the background.

LK – This is every single public school, that’s where the federal money goes. A private school, if you’re not getting federal money, you might not have to give in to this right away. But all the public schools are going to have to do it. Human rights groups around the world will tell you the number one thing that keeps girls out of school is a lack of safe toileting facilities. This is a huge human rights issue in poorer countries. It’s true when girls are very young but especially when they start to get their periods, when they hit adolescence it’s over. Girls just drop out in droves because they don’t have a safe place to attend to their menstrual needs. And for some reason we’re just gonna decide that girls in the United States don’t need this. The girls in India need it and girls in Sri Lanka need it and girls in Iran need it and girls in the Congo need it, but girls in the United States somehow it’s different. We have a different kind of man or boy here who would never hurt women and girls and women are perfectly fine to just drop their clothes and pee wherever they want. We all know this is not true. We all know that it is exactly the same here. We deal with predators every day as women and girls. We’ve already got stories of the girls who won’t pee all day long at school and are getting bladder infections and nobody cares.

JM – And then also I know that there was some headway, at least I thought, around the issue of women’s and girls’ sports in schools being totally eliminated because of this.

LK – There’s been push back for whatever reason. That’s an issue that has gotten more coverage. It’s gotten just a little bit, we’ve got a little more purchase on that one. I’m not sure why the sports one, I don’t care, you just take an issue and move. Yeah, there are big cases in Connecticut, there’s three girls, high school girls, who are on the track team and of course a boy joined and they just say there’s no point in running. You just can beaten them by a mile. So we all know this about men and women. W, we have different bodies, women have a bigger pelvis, it takes a half a second more every time we walk, just to take a step because we’re kind of making a right-hand turn there, a right angle, and there’s just no way that women are ever gonna run as fast as men. The fastest women in the world are just barely up to mediocre men. I remember when we had this amazing women’s soccer team in the United States that went to the Olympics and they played a game against high school boys and they lost. These are the best women in the world. We have physical differences, the lung size, the oxygenation, the heart size, muscle size, the strength of the joints, justdown the list. We all know that men and women have different bodies.

Infants are born with a template. They can tell the difference between a male and a female face. We all can do this. I don’t know why they have made this so complicated. , Well, I do know why, but I don’t know why everybody’s falling for it. Okay, we’ve got the prisons, the housing, the battered women’s shelters … Can you imagine being a battered woman escaping your batterer and now he can say, “Oh, I’m a woman, take me into the shelter!” You think men aren’t gonna do that? You’ve ever dealt with a stalker, a batterer? Oh, they’re gonna do it., We know what these men are like. They’re gonna do it. That’s gonna happen and now the schools, it’s every girl in the nation is not gonna have a safe place, and we’re gonna lose sports. It’s a grim day. I mean, Trump was a nightmare and I think we’re all glad he’s was gone.Hhe did a lot to hurt this country and to really sort of degrade our democratic processes such as they are, but it just went from one to the other. We knew this was coming, Biden had promised it and he did it.

JM – And the left is a horrible nightmare in the war against women.

LK – Yeah, an absolute nightmare. The way that Eric Weinstein encapsulates it: we have MAGAstan on one side and we have Wokenstan on the other side.

JM – No…

LK – That’s it, right? Those are our choices in the United States. In terms of employment law, a man now can’t be fired for claiming to be a woman, but a woman can be fired for pointing out that he’s a man.

LK – There’s gonna be a lot of compelled speech coming down at us. Right now it’s sort of behind the scenes. There are articles in the law journals in which the lefty, Wokenstan people are horrified that court documents don’t refer to people using their “preferred pronouns.” This has already happened in England. I don’t know if you followed Maria Mclaughlin’s case, but she was assaulted by a man who thinks he’s a woman at a public talk. He punched her in the face and broke her camera. He assaulted her. She was told by the judge that she had to call him ‘her.’She was compelled to use female pronouns for a man who assaulted her. Now, I want you to picture you’ve got a rape victim in court and she’s being told that she has to refer to this man as a woman, “His female penis did this to me…”

JM – And the consequences of not following that compelled speech are fines?

LK – Contempt.

JM – You can be in contempt, of course.

LK – You could be thrown in prison for contempt of court.

JM – You can be thrown in prison.

LK – Absolutely.

JM – For non-compliance.

LK – That would be me, I’m not going to comply to this. But it you’re asking the average woman to have to stand up to this while she’s on trial after the worst trauma of her life, she’s going to have to refer to a man as a woman, I mean, my head is just kind of exploding here. This is where we are. And the outside influence of the United States is always… this is going to go everywhere now. It’s not just us. It’s going to go around the world. So it’s bad and we can’t get any public debate. We can’t get any news analysis., There’s no mainstream coverage of this. This has been the problem for, well, over a decade, where we just cannot get anybody to pay attention to it. We get a little bit of right-wing coverage but that’s it. The mainstream news they won’t touch it and it’s for the same reason, it’s institutional capture., They’ve already been captured. There are journalists terrified of losing their jobs, We hear from them all the time, they know the truth of this, but they can’t say it because they’ve got mortgages to pay, so I don’t know what’s going to break through, what’s it gonna take. Somebody’s gonna haveJM – You would think, of all the places where biological reality would still hold, it would be in health and health care and it’s not.

LK – No, it’s not.

DM – And the consequences of not having that, that’s one of the things where my head just explodes, frankly.

LK – Yeah, and there’s an even bigger problem. The actual doctors and nurses may well be compelled to perform these surgeries and provide these really dangerous drugs. Because what’s already been done legally, the argument is that if you already provide mastectomies for women with cancer or hysterectomies for women who have uterine cancer or other you know polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS) or whatever conditions, endometriosis, where you might actually have a medical need to have your uterus removed. If you do those procedures, you can’t make a distinction between somebody with a disease, you know, a medical problem and somebody who actually just wants it electively. You are not allowed to make that distinction. If someone calls themselves trans, you then have to provide the same care even though it’s a completely different situation. There’s nothing wrong with their bodies, their bodies are perfectly healthy. But the law will be they’re forcing doctors and nurses to have to do this these procedures. The law will be forcing insurance companies to have to pay for it. This just seems like the ‘right of conscience’ thing for doctors, I mean, they take an oath to do no harm and some of these patients people are just they’re children. We’re talking about 13-year-old girls having mastectomies here in California and in Oregon, that’s madness! You can’t drink, you can’t drive, you can’t vote, you can’t pierce your ears, but you can have your uterus removed, your breasts chopped off. When you’re a teenager you’re not thinking about whether you’re going to have children.

JM – No.

LK – So many people who never wanted children and then they turned 28 and fell in love. Then they had children, you know, found a partner, had have a baby and it just completely transformed their lives. It’s like the most incredible experience they’ve ever had, would do anything to protect those children. We know that having a baby can bring out the kind of love that brings out in people and it’s utterly life-altering. You can’t make that decision when you’re 12 or 13, you can’t make it when you’re 17. You have no idea what’s coming in your life, you’re a totally different person when you’re 30.

JM – Yes.

LK – And we’re letting these kids just… they’re saturated in self-hatred. The porn industry has completely taken over the culture. I have nothing but sympathy for these poor girls. I know why they hate their bodies. They’ve been given their own story, you know, –in my generation, we did anorexia and cutting, that was how we did our self-hatred and it was for the same reasons. We’d all been molested, we were all looking at a culture that considered our bodies public property: ridiculous, insulting, worthy of contempt; they weren’t ours to inhabit, they belong to men, they didn’t belong to us. We all had these experiences of being harassed or groped or terrified or maybe outright raped. I understand, there’s no question why young girls feel this way as they become teenagers.

You hit 11, 12 years old and it’s just a completely different world walking down the street. It’s terrifying and you realize you’re never going to be safe again. So I get why they’re doing it, but they don’t have “gender dysphoria.” They have life in Patriarchy and the only solution is, honestly, Feminism, It’s a political movement that’s gonna change men’s behavior. But they’re not being told that. What they’re being told is that it’s personal to them. They just happen to have a special human essence that was born in a sadly female body, but we can attend to that: you can take dangerous drugs, you can have these horrible surgeries and try to live under the wire as a kind of a faux man, and that’s the option out. There’s already a whole generation of these girls. A lot of them are lesbians, a lot of them are autistic, they never fit, none of the roles seemed right. Well, it doesn’t for most of us, but especially I think for some women it’s probably a little bit harder. Now they’re 21 years old and they’ve been in medical menopause for four years. They have all the problems that you get when you’re 60 or 70, you know, things like urinary incontinence, a 20 year-old needs to deal with that? The surgeries they do on the young men, I don’t even have words, what they did to Jazz Jennings on television. Millions of people watch this young man have his genitals permanently removed and this was supposed to be some kind of liberatory practice. The hatred of the human animal here just blows my mind. That we don’t protect the young, instead we’re going to do this to them. It’s just beyond me.

JM – That blows my mind as a parent too and I’ve heard multiple parents with their hearts ripped out because they’re watching their children be devoured by this insane culture and what is like the antithesis of being biocentric: complete denial of basic biological reality and being eaten alive and they’re gutted emotionally and mentally by what’s happened to their children, that’s one of the most horrifying aspects of gender identity piece so….

LK – No one will help them. The people who should be helping us are the ones who are doing the damage. You’d think that doctors and therapists and school teachers and all these institutions that are supposed to be progressive and leftward leaning, that are supposed to care about human rights and are supposed to care about women and children and every last one of them has been captured. Now we have this executive order, that it’s just like nailing in more nails on the coffin here for these young people. I am not hopeless, we are not giving up, we are going to fight, but it is very hard. This is a hard week.

JM – WoLF has done spectacular work around fighting legislation or working that line of being able to be politically effective in the face of this and I know that it’s really hard, but I don’t know what to do with an executive order. Do you have any ideas about where we begin to fight back on them?

LK – Executive orders are not free from judicial oversight. They can be declared unconstitutional. The very first legal action that WOLF took was actually to try to sue the Obama Administration over the first time that this happened. That was when Obama did it at the end of his term, he went ahead and did these same executive orders. He made everything be ‘by gender identity’ instead of sex and that was the first lawsuit that we filed.
So, we need a few things. One is a whole bunch of money because none of this comes cheap. Which is sad, but it’s just reality. It can be millions of dollars to run a lawsuit. And then we need a plaintiff, you have to have somebody who would support this. It can’t happen right away. We have to find somebody, somewhere, who can say that this executive order has somehow infringed on her basic rights. Or it could be a man, too, I mean, it’s going to hurt young guys as well. We need somebody to come forward and help and be that person in the lawsuit. That’s a big ask because we know what happens to people who put their heads up above the parapet on this issue., We know it can destroy your life rather permanently at this point, but it has to be done. While we’re waiting to do that, we’ve got a bunch of other stuff sort of coming down the pipeline, but the main thing is that we can try to fight this in the courts. But it’s gonna take time, it’s not gonna happen overnight.

I want people to understand another thing about this as well, which is the reason that Obama did it, which is probably the same reason that Biden did it: in the United States, (people who don’t live here don’t get how bad some of this stuff is) first the Supreme Court, well over 100 years ago, ruled that corporations are people so they have the same rights as an actual human being would have. Then they ruled that included the First Amendment, so they have speech rights like you and I would have. Then, not that long ago they ruled that you can’t actually restrict the amount of money that people donate to political candidates because that’s a form of political speech. It’s a very important speech. You can’t put in any kind of line under it. So the floodgates opened and what was left of our political system was completely captured by the wealthy corporations. In people’s daily lives they don’t understand why things have gotten even worse and worse. In my lifetime, it has certainly happened, and that’s one of the main reasons. The magic trick is done completely above board because it’s not craft graft, it’s not paying bribes behind the scenes. It’s done completely openly and legally. The very wealthy– who aren’t even people, they are corporations– are allowed to simply ‘buy’ candidates. I’m not picking on Obama here, every last candidate you see running has these kind of backers. It’s the only way. They need millions of dollars to get their candidates and their candidacies up and running. To run a candidate for president, I don’t even want to think how much money that costs. The only way to do it is to get these backers. In terms of Obama, he’s from Illinois and one of the big big billionaire families out there is the Pritzkers and they’re a pharmaceutical company. This is all public information, they owned an airline, they own the Hyatt hotels, just on and on the amount of businesses churning money they made. Pharmaceuticals is huge for their wealth, and they’re billionaires and they bought him his first senate seat in Illinois. They put a bet on him and their horse won. Then they bought him his senate seat in Washington. Then he became, in the federal government, he was senator. Then they put more money on him. They got him into the White House. They’re not the only ones, there certainly were other corporate interests behind it. Again, I’m not picking on him., This is how the system works. It’s how the Court said it should work and it’s working fine for them, but this is what we’re up against. So Pritzkers put him in and then it was payback time and they also have a very famous member of their family: Jennifer Pritzker who I think was born, what was his original name? I don’t even remember, James, maybe, it started with a J. Jonathan, yeah, he’s a man who thinks he’s a woman. They’ have got a big trans in their family so that was the payoff. When it was his second term, two years in Obama went ahead and did all these executive orders. It was quite clearly just what they wanted so he gave it to them. That was the payoff.

JM – So, is this a replay?

LK – Yeah, it is because Penny Pritzker was a huge backer of Biden. She actually ran the fundraising for Biden. This is public information, I am not making this up and this is not, I just want to be really clear, this is not a crazy conspiracy. This is literally how the American political system works, okay? This is legally how it’s done above board, they just buy themselves candidates and that’s what they did. We are up against billionaires, the Pritzkers are billionaires and they wanted this legislation, they wanted these executive orders. How many of us are there? A few hundred? Okay, here’s my ten dollars. This is what we’re fighting.

We have truth, we have righteousness, we have our love for women, we have our love for the planet. I don’t want to instill more despair in anybody who’s listening. We are not giving up, I will not surrender and I don’t think any of you will either, but this is definitely David versus Goliath and this didn’t come out of nowhere. These men have been planning this for decades. They had an entire plan, it’s called the Yogyakarta Principles. They all got together in 2006 and made a list of what their demands were going to be. One by one they’ve done it. But they’re the billionaire class, they have all this money, they could do it. A lot of people are like, “Where did this all come from? It dropped out of nowhere.” It feels It may feel that way if you’re kind of ignoring it,but I’ll tell you as someone who’s been fighting this since the 80s: oh, no, it didn’t drop out of nowhere. They got billions of dollars. They had a political plan and they’ve gotten it done. Now here we are and all the women and girls in the United States are going to pay the price. So that’s where we are. We’re not going to lose,
We also have truth on our side. It is simply true that men cannot become women and no matter what kind of post-modern gobbledygook they want to put on, it can’t be done. You are the sex you are. You cannot be born in the wrong body, that’s like a prayer. As far as I’m concerned you have one body. It’s your one chance to be alive. You got to be born. How is that not enough? Just to be alive! And I understand all the things that happen to us that make us hate our physical embodiment, but it’s all we’ve got. It’s still a miracle every morning to breathe, to wake up, take that breath of air, look at the green trees and the yellow, the sun and feel the warmth and know that you’re loved and pet your dogs and hug your children. Every single, sensual moment of that is just a miracle! How did we lose sight of that to the point where we think our bodies are lego blocks so we can buy parts and remove them and slap them back on?, It’s a very poor simulacrum at best.

JM – It sounds like Mary Shelley’s nightmare.

LK – It is! She was on it! She was always saw it coming, she really did. She saw the arrogance of that scientific mind and what that had to do with male domination and the male violation imperative., She got it all, and she was just a teenager when she wrote that book., She saw it coming.

JM – It comes to you in dreams and it comes to you out of your heart. That’s so inspiring, Lierre, in the face of such a nightmare. Is there anything else that you’d like to share with listeners about where to look? Because you’re not going to stop fighting and we want to support you and we want to support all women everywhere in the United States. We’re going to have to grind through this and and defeat this nightmare. So where do we look? What do we look to? Who inspires you that you’d like to leave us with?

LK – A few things right away, We have a petition, if you go to the WoLF website you can sign the petition. More important: write a letter. Write a letter to the Biden administration., Write a letter to Kamala Harris. Write a letter to your legislatures. Call your senators on the phone. Tell them you’re upset about this. Explain to them what’s going on and then reach out to your state legislatures too, because this is going to be a state-by-state battle as well. It’s already a state-by-state battle. You’ve got to get involved and, I know it’s terrifying, I do know that. The people who come at us really mean it, they’re unhinged, they’re violent. They will destroy your life if they decide to. You will lose your job. You can lose your house. There’s not a woman I know who hasn’t had serious losses to this. Some of us have lost our careers entirely. I know people about to leave the country, it’s… I’m not gonna sugarcoat what you may be up against, to come out on this one. But it has to be done. So contact every single, you know, anybody who represents representative you have in any government at all, from the local to the to the federal level, reach out to them, talk to them, get your talking points ready, go with a friend. They have to see you if your you’re a constituent., That is your right. They have to let you come and talk to them. You may only be able to see staffers if they’re big people, but they still they have to take your information, they have to sit and listen to you. So, get yourselves together, practice beforehand, but do it. We have to learn how to engage with the political process. I think a lot of us who are more on the radical edge, we a lot of times spend our lives kind of rolling our eyes on at it because it just seems so reformist. But there are times and places where we have to engage and this is definitely one of them. Otherwise they win. If we don’t show up to do our part, they’re going to win. Because there’s no fight back and they have captured everything at this point. We’ve got to start pushing back. We’ve got to learn to do that. Go with a friend, just, you know, put on your your big girl’s shoes and just get it done. They’re just people, honestly. I’ve done it, I’ve lobbied, they’re just people like me and you and they don’t know more than we do either, especially not on this issue. It doesn’t matter whether you have democrats or republicans representing you, they all need to hear it. They have not heard a feminist analysis, they don’t understand how this is going to hurt women and girls. Everybody thinks it’s kind of gay plus and it’s not. It’s not anything like gay and lesbian rights, nothing like it at all. So we’ve just got to speak up. And then speak to everybody in your life about it. I know that’s hard. People are going to be very mad at you, but it has to be done. Whoever you are, if you’re listening to this you probably have really nice friends, you’ve got good family, they probably have really good hearts. They want what’s best for everyone. They need to understand how this is going to hurt women and girls and that you’re not helping young people who hate their bodies by letting them do permanent damage that they will regret in five years. So, anyway, all of that, you know, get yourselves together, but we’ve got to talk to people, our friends, our family, our neighbors and then everybody in a position of political power. Sign our petition, write a letter, and if you want to join WoLF, join, because we need help. We need volunteers in every single state. This is going to be massive and it’s going to take all of us. But never surrender.

JM – Never surrender.

LK – Never surrender.

JM – Never. Thank you, Lierre, for all of that thank you.

LK – Thank you.

LK – Thank you.

JM – Yeah, you are so welcome and I’m so glad that the Green flame is going to be able to put this out there with such an eloquent voice. We thank you so much for taking some time because I know you are working tirelessly for everybody, women and girls and the real world.

LK – A lot of us are, so join hands. We gotta do it.

JM – We will.

On The Murder Of Sarah Everard And The Denial Of Women’s Rights

On The Murder Of Sarah Everard And The Denial Of Women’s Rights

In response to the murder of Sarah Everard, here in the UK, women and men have risen up and protested in support of women’s right to be safe. The peaceful public protests have instigated further violence against women under the guise of pandemic restrictions.

This is one DGR member’s response to the discussions about the level of violence against women and girls and the root causes. We need more men to speak out against patriarchy.

“Your silence will not protect you” Audre Lorde


Most of the women I know, intelligent woman all, are not as afraid as they should be. You can see how high the wall of patriarchy is as you look up at it. I can see from my perch up here also how thick the wall is and how many men are behind it, holding it up.

Men like me, every man, is dripping in entitlement. If you do not learn it in the family, they teach it at school. If school does not programme a boy then our culture will drown them in it. We are all swimming, all the time, in patriarchy. It is everywhere.

It works like a steroid for men and a poison for women. Sure, not all men react violently when on steroids but everything I do is based on my privileged position. My privilege is entirely normalized within society and entirely rationalized within me. Every man in Western culture is privileged and entitled due to patriarchy.

Can we dismantle patriarchy?

I am familiar with the argument that societies contain just the odd bad man; I disagree with this over simplified assertion. My view is that patriarchy is an offshoot of the ability to accumulate wealth and thus create perpetuating systems of oppression. The first systemic accumulation of wealth was the seizing and guarding of food grown in agriculture. Agriculture further has the effect of forcing us to learn to objectify living things (soil,nature, women) to keep our self-belief, our ‘right’ to take. Agriculture had the direct effect of causing violence in the pursuit of resources.

Of relevance, to this argument is the ‘abduction of a Sabine Woman’. Women were needed, viewed as a resource, and taken by those blue printers of modern society, the Romans. Forget that liberal Harari and his “I don’t know why women are oppressed”. Women have a value to conquering armies, not as fellow humans but as bounty of the conquerors. The rest follows a direct causal path. So, it is possible that patriarchy is not going anywhere whilst capitalism is here and objectification is the norm.

Can men do something, anything to improve the current situation?

Yes, of course. For all the reasons women state, for all the reasons women are protesting for. The law is on the side of men and we know that law shapes power. If it was a crime, with a significant consequence, for men to harass women in the street, if it was an aggravated offence after 8pm, then violence against women and girls would reduce. If the porn industry was recognised as harmful and measures put in place to curtail it then male entitlement might lessen women and girls may not be groomed, exploited, or damaged as much. If it was a serious crime for men to purchase women’s bodies then men would do it less and the support systems such as trafficking would be less profitable and therefore smaller.

I apologise for the terrible metaphor, but you must score when you are in the opponent’s penalty box. When was the last time that this issue was so central in the mainstream media? When will it be again? In the UK we could get something into law on this wave of interest. There will be a backlash. Men are lying low at the moment, but they will be back with a vengeance. I can imagine a male plain-clothed policeman patrolling a nightclub being interviewed for the Daily Mail and explaining how all the women dressed and danced in a provocative manner – the implication being … well you, women already know. You have been here before, fought before, hard won rights.

Do we have someone to rally behind?

Those in power throughout the ages, religion, political parties, the media, woke campaign groups have done a remarkable job of dividing women, turning them onto themselves on a personal level and fuelling horizontal violence at a structural level. The ruling classes are effective when oppressing dissenting voices.

The male driven denial of women’s rights, enforced at every turn by violence, is causal and symptomatic of an overwhelming amount of personal suffering and the unrelenting cycle of biome degradation.


This was written by a man, father and guardian in DGR.

For more on the creation of patriarchy, read Gerda Lerner’s The Creation of Patriarchy, or read this transcript of a talk Lerner gave on the topic.

Featured image: Abduction of a Sabine Woman (or Rape of the Sabine Women), a large and complex marble statue by the Flemish sculptor and architect Giambologna. Photograph by Mary Harrsch, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
Editor’s note: That this incident from Roman mythology, in which the men of Rome committed a mass abduction and rape of young women from the other cities in the region has been a frequent subject of artists and sculptors, shows clearly how obsessed this patriarchal culture is with rape and violence against women.

Bright Green Lies book launch with Derrick Jensen, Lierre Keith, and Max Wilbert

Bright Green Lies book launch with Derrick Jensen, Lierre Keith, and Max Wilbert

Our Dear Readers are invited to join the launch of the new book “Bright Green Lies” by Derrick Jensen, Lierre Keith, and Max Wilbert.


There are two events happening today, Tuesday 16th, 2021:

The first one you can join via Zoom. It will start 4pm Pacific Time (Los Angeles):

Register for the meeting here:
https://zoom.us/j/97416977102 (map)

Derrick Jensen returns to The Stoa, along with Lierre Keith and Max Wilbert, his co-authors of the new book: Bright Green Lies: How the Environmental Movement Lost Its Way and What We Can Do About It (Politics of the Living).

This event caps our meta-crisis symposium and it also serves as a book launch party.


The second event will start right after the first at 5pm Pacific Time (Los Angeles) and will be hosted on Facebook:

Event by Bright Green Lies: How the Environmental Movement Lost Its Way and Monkfish Book Publishing Company

The authors of the book “Bright Green Lies: How the Environmental Movement Lost Its Way and What We Can Do About It” are  hosting a virtual launch party. The event will feature the authors Lierre Keith, Derrick Jensen, and Max Wilbert.
WHAT: You are invited to an online event with Facebook Live
DATE: Tuesday, March 16, 2021 at 5 PM Pacific Time
COST: Free
You can use this link to find the facebook page.
Public Anyone on or off Facebook
Lithium Mining War That Could Poison the Nevada Desert Water

Lithium Mining War That Could Poison the Nevada Desert Water

Editor’s note: In this excerpt, Samir offers an outline of the rationale for the harmful development of lithium mines. In parallel we are also offered an outline of the development of the protest camp. While we are happy that a popular outlet like Vice News is writing about our campaign, we do not agree with all of the author’s statements. DGR is strongly opposed to any kind of industrial processes like mining because they are inherently destructive to life on planet earth. Hence we do not believe that there can be a “greener” kind of industrial resource extraction.


A mining giant wants to extract lithium from the Nevada desert to power electric cars. But a more sustainable future doesn’t come without costs.

One of the largest known lithium deposits in the world has sat undisturbed under the Nevada desert for centuries. Now, a mining giant wants to extract the resource to power electric cars using a potentially harmful method.

Before bringing in its equipment, however, the company will have to go through a blockade of environmental protesters that have been camped out at the site since December.

“Like the wildlife, we hunker down when the weather gets very bad and wait for the storm to break,”

said Max Wilbert, who started the Protect Thacker Pass, the grassroots organization leading the occupation.

“But we’re not backing down. What is at stake here is the soul of the entire environmental movement.”

Right now, Thacker Pass, a section of public land stretching hundreds of acres in northern Nevada, is several environmental permits—and lawsuits—away from becoming a massive open-pit mining project run by Canada-based Lithium Americas. The metal excavated from the planned 18,000-acre site will be used to manufacture rechargeable lithium-ion batteries for electric cars.

But a more sustainable future doesn’t come without its costs:

The proposed mining process at Thacker Pass uses sulfuric acid, which could seep into the water supply. The operation also requires tapping into groundwater, which could decrease its availability. Both would impact the ecosystems of several at-risk species, like golden eagles, pronghorn antelope, and Nevada’s state fish, the Lahontan cutthroat trout.

In an effort to protect the land, dozens of protestors from across the country have posted up at the site in freezing nighttime temperatures with heated tents and portable mini-toilets. Local ranchers, concerned about the welfare of their land and water supply, have also joined the cause.


The original article can be read in full on Vice News.

For more on the issue:

Photo by Niklas Schweinzer on Unsplash

Boundary Bay: A Place Divided

Boundary Bay: A Place Divided

This essay is a firsthand account of the author Michael Drebert’s visit to Boundary Bay, BC — a shallow bay fringed in-part by a man-made dike, and estuarine marsh.  Through his recollection of the visit, Drebert discusses how different forms of ‘taking’ from a particular place can be both obvious, but also inconspicuous. Most importantly, the essay asks what a meaningful response to such activities might entail.   


Keywords: physical world, place-based, wetlands, memory, story, political resistance, reciprocity, kinship

Boundary Bay: A Place Divided

By Michael Drebert

Last week, I decided to throw my bicycle into the back of my ancient Ford truck and head south out of the city.  My destination was a place that I’ve been visiting since youth: Boundary Bay, a shallow body of saltwater spanning the municipalities of Tsawassen, Delta, Surrey, and White Rock.

It’s the White Rock portion of the bay that I recall from my youth.  My grandmother would take my brother and I to its beach during summers, where we’d be allowed to range freely over the massive stretch of exposed sand at low tide.  For hours, we’d wade into the warm tide pools, chasing sculpins, and small crabs.  But the prize activity, was the building of a sand fort.  Together, or apart, we’d spend what seemed like an entire day constructing raised platforms of sand that were then walled as best we could against the incoming tide.  It was pure joy to be sitting in our ‘forts’ as the quickly approaching water of Boundary Bay moved towards us.

Thirty-five years later, I still return to the bay.

Less so to that stretch of perfect sand, but instead to an area on the opposite side.  My excitement remains the same as in those early years, except that my attention has now shifted from its sand flats, to its mud flats.

In this section of the bay, there are preserved portions of what would have originally been coastal salt marsh.  Less than 100 years ago, this form of habitat would have been prominent around the entire bay.  With the influx of settlement by Europeans, residences were built along the shoreline.  Attracted by, and taking advantage of the fertile, alluvial soils, these settlers engaged in intensive farming activities.  As a result, dikes were built around the majority of the bay to protect the farms.  These constructions cut off the usual flow of biological activity between the what is now the seaward, and landward portions of the salt marsh.  Although some culverts were also inserted, these semi-permeable structures equally separated the two places, blocking fish, and small mammals from freely traversing back and forth.

Regardless of all these intrusions, a fringe of intact wetland still exists here.

I consider it a gem, and it has captured my heart.  Martin Shaw describes the mysterious process of being attracted to a place as being “claimed.”1   And so, I might say something like: this particular shallow body of water, with its fringe of brown-sand beaches, and scruffy marshes, has claimed me.  This is a romance that has been in the works for over 35 years.

On that blustery December day last week, after driving out of Vancouver over a couple of bridges, past farmland, eventually parking at Centennial Beach on the west side of the bay, I came to spend an entire day considering my attraction to such a place, and how I might best respond.  And now, reflecting on this memory, another relationship to that place emerges: ‘taking’, in this case my ‘taking’ of this remembrance from Boundary Bay.  I think about how so often, on my countless visits to different beaches around my home of Vancouver, and also abroad, I’d pick up some stone, or shell that ‘spoke’ to me.  If it ‘spoke’ to me enough, I’d usually put it into my pocket, and carry it home.  Once inside of my apartment,  it would sometimes sit on a shelf, or placed in a box along with a clattering and dusty array of other mineral, and calcerific objects.

For over 35 years, I’ve barely questioned this.

“Of course,” I’d say to myself, “why wouldn’t I take a token to remember a special moment, a special place?”  In particular, I have a small collection of agate stones that I collected from different beaches on Haida Gwaii.  They now sit in a circle formation on the window sill of my bedroom.  Whenever I look at them, my mind seems to become awash in something; something like the wind, or the sun, or the intermittent heavy rains that would pass over the lonely beaches around Rose Spit.  So yes, that does have meaning for me, some connection to natural processes that are nearly impossible to express within language.

Even if I’ve taken these things to help me remember a particular place — and although they are often compelling in their own right, as objects outside the context that I found them in — were they not also beautiful on some rain-drenched beach?  Were they not beautiful to someone else?  Or useful, or necessary?

I want to compare this piece of writing and the memories it expresses to these taken objects — no different then a found cockle shell, or a set of fine, sun bleached bones that belonged to a western sandpiper.  My 40-something year old body had to be there, in Boundary Bay — where one object encounters another, or, a material presence, encounters another material presence.

In other words, this essay would be impossible without the physical presence of my body making its way 50 kilometres south, out of Vancouver, where I met the earthen barriers which surround the bay.  And once there, riding on my bicycle all day until the sun went down, sweating heavily beneath my Gore-Tex jacket and breathing in cold air which also made my eyes tear.

So, yes, I do believe I’ve taken something.

And, it’s not that I think this is entirely wrong, because all living things take things out of need, survival, happenstance.  But usually, for the whole cycle to continue giving, and taking, it has to happen, in one place, or, it must circle back to the very place that the thing was taken from.  Using a more more poetic sensibility, Gary Snyder posits another way of saying this: that in acknowledging our (human) need to consume, it would be proper etiquette to then offer a “[s]ong for your supper,”2 in respectful response.

The consequences of taking from somewhere and never giving back are, of course, obvious.  Eventually, there is little left to glean, and eventually, when we move beyond the limits of particular places, they break.  When it comes to material items, it’s easy enough to understand when there is a failure of reciprocity, but I think this same sentiment can be also be applied to ‘getting’ stories, as well.

To get this story (an account of some place where I do not live), I needed to go somewhere.  This inevitably, and perhaps obviously implies ‘using’.  My body needs certain things so that it can go places — it needs food, water, clothing, transportation.  Where do these things come from?  In the case of my visit to Boundary Bay, they almost certainly do not come from that place, but they do come from places, very real places.

Back to my very real, ancient truck, and back to that particular day, last week — along with these questions saturating my thoughts, it was also to my journey ahead that my mind now turned.  I arrived at Centennial Beach, on the western side of the bay, around 1pm.  The sky was grey, and there was a stiff breeze blowing in from the Salish Sea.  I was a little nervous.  Was this the right day to be attempting such a long bike ride along the dike?  Will the weather continue to deteriorate, turning into rain, and stronger winds?  There wasn’t time for second guessing.  If I was going to do this, I had to leave right away so that I could get back to my truck before the park ranger locked the gates at 5pm.  So I gobbled down some hard boiled eggs, and then off I rode heading towards the Serpentine River located at the eastern terminus of the dike.

The wind was unusually cold, biting at my face and neck.

Except for one, very thin line of bright yellow out towards the Gulf Islands, the sky was solid cloud in all directions.  Even though all of this felt less-than-ideal, there was no turning back — I was committed. It didn’t take long before I started seeing bald eagles standing on the mudflats, and perched overhead on the power lines.  Eventually, it seemed there was an eagle on every pole, and when I passed beneath looking up, the massive raptors would return the stare.  This exchange made me shiver in a way to which I was totally unaccustomed.  I thought: “What is stopping these creatures from swooping down with their bright yellow feet, tearing at my neck and carrying off a piece of my flesh to be eaten casually on the mudflats?”  I’ll admit that one particular stare was so intense that I lost composure on my bike, wobbling as I sensed a feeling of nausea rise in my throat.

Things were different here.  Even though I could still see the distant high-rise buildings of Vancouver, it all seemed so fragile, so vulnerable.  Or at least I felt vulnerable, coasting along that thin hump of land meant to keep the salt marsh and all of its inconsistencies out of our human hair.

Half way along the dike, I noticed that the sky had lightened.  I wasn’t sure that the weather was going to flip towards ‘pleasant’, but I am a sucker for any sign of sun — it can change everything for me.  I also wasn’t particularly cold anymore — probably because of my constantly pumping legs over the smooth, gravel path.

Aside from the eagles, I was distracted from my cycling by many other birds.

In particular, the red-tailed hawks, who would casually swoop across the dike looking for food in either the salt marsh, or the farming fields.  I also noticed many birdwatchers, carrying cameras with lenses as big as my legs.  I was glad to these folks.  Perhaps I sensed a kind of kinship.  I rarely take composed pictures of wildlife, but I do look, stare, soak in, and strain to store particular sights into my memory.  I think it’s a very similar activity, except I cannot claim any craft here, which certainly plays a role in my fellow kin’s activity out there on the marsh.

However, a pang of discomfort hit me as I considered this commonality.  Again, back to my thoughts and feelings of ‘taking’ something from a place.  No doubt these camera operators are taking something.  Taking images, but also, in order to take these snap shots, the very device used to do so contains within it an incredible array of ‘taking’.  Those cameras, worth more that two years of my annual income, undoubtedly come from some place else.  The industrial processes involved in procuring such materials, always does harm to particular places.  Put more succinctly, Lierre Keith states that, “[i]n blunt terms, industrialization is a process of taking entire communities of living beings and turning them into commodities and dead zones.”3

Another example of this process is the building of dikes, in order to facilitate industrial agriculture.  To my right, is a living (although greatly diminished) salt marsh, and to my left is a dead zone of industrial processes which includes pesticides, fertilizers, and heavy tilling.  One side allows for myriad life forms to flourish, and the other side is manipulated solely for human-use.

Is it too heavy-handed to say that one side is beautiful, and the other, is ugly?

It might be good to return here to my own initial discomfort of being physically present at Boundary Bay.  Clearly, I also use harmful things.  The most obvious thing being my truck.  And so in an exacting sense, Snyder’s admonition is unavoidable for me.  Truly, what is my song for my supper?  The supper in this case might be all the elements which got me out to Boundary Bay, but also for this feast of the senses which has turned into this essay.

Is this essay then, my song?  In part perhaps, but it remains an incomplete melody.  On its own, it lacks the consonance of return.  What I mean is that as a piece of writing, it remains within the realm of human nourishment, or meaning.  At worst, it only increases the echo chamber effect of human culture, further dividing humans from their true responsibilities to the real, material health of particular places.  More so, it gives the illusion of a completed cycle, inevitably leading to further breakage, and  increased ‘taking’.

The time it took to get to the Serpentine River was more than double than what I anticipated.  I allowed myself to forget this momentarily as I was in need of food, tea, and a place to relieve myself.  I only took 20 minutes to rest, where I sat on granite boulders gazing out at the exposed mud flats of the Serpentine River estuary.

The sky at this point had completely changed.

Late afternoon sun poured over the bay, and a near full moon was rising.  To make it back to the truck before the gates were locked, I would have to increase my speed by double to make it.  There wasn’t time to question my ability here. No one else was embarking along the dike towards Centennial Beach.  It was likely too late in the day for most people — the temperature dropping, and nearly time for supper.  With the bright moon continuing to rise, I raced out back along the dike, my legs pumping with renewed zeal.

Large birds still crossed overhead, but because the light had diminished, they now seemed like very unusual objects.  They were vague, but still intimidating, blending with the browns and the purples of a day-about-to-end. There was one exception to this blurring of life, and it was a phenomenon that I’ve witnessed a few times before.  Close to sundown, large flocks of western sandpipers appear together over the water’s edge.  Not unlike a school of herring will move, their tiny bodies fly together as one shimmering, and amorphous shape.  But what makes this particularly shocking to me, is what happens at sunset.

When the sky is pink, and I happen to be facing the direction that can then view their bellies, all of a sudden, I’ll see a burst of tiny pink flashes — their white undersides acting as perfect screens, reflecting the bay’s show of evening light.  After witnessing the sandpipers, I could see that the moon had climbed to the top of the sky — against dark indigo, its snowy glow cast a reflection onto the calm waters of the bay.  I had just entered the bounds of Centennial Beach, and felt a rush of calm — I made it, just in time.

I only had a few minutes to load my bike.

The park ranger was weaving her truck slowly through the parking lot, orange lights flashing, letting everyone know that the gate closure was imminent.  As my truck warmed up, I ate my remaining potato chips — I was utterly famished.  Could I stay the night?  Perhaps, but my cupboards were in another place.  And so with mixed reluctance I drove my old truck out of the park bounds, pointed it  northwards, and headed home towards Vancouver.

I’m writing this now, in my studio.  I like to have the door open, but the weather is too cold — being mid-winter on the northwest coast.  I like the door open so I can feel the breeze, and to better hear the bird calls.  Though, because my yard and my neighbour’s yard are packed with plants, there are a lot of birds present regardless of the season.  And even though the door is closed, I can still hear intermittent chirps, trills, and lilts.  I don’t know what I would do without this lush garden, and all the visiting animals.  Living in the city would be impossible, otherwise.

Given just a little more thought, my appreciation of this garden can flip, completely.  In short: the horrors of the city are made acceptable, because of this tiny retreat.  Take away my access to this, and I am a very different person.  Even a degraded version of ‘land’ lends me the needed salve to continue an urban life.  Less a salve perhaps than a balm, for I cannot attribute any medicinal qualities to its makeup.

This quality makes me think about the Tsawassen and Semiahmoo peoples who inhabited Boundary Bay long before European settlers.

It would seem that true medicine is ‘offered’ to those who live in a particular place, so that they can continue living well in that particular place.  Not to heal, and then leave.  I would say that pocketing a unique shell, collecting an image in a camera, storing an experience in your mind and heart to be retold later, is similar to this ‘leaving’ experience.  It is a draining off of life, taken from a place where it has no opportunity to perish, to decompose, to nurse new life — it breaks the elegance of a necessary cycle.

I don’t live at Boundary Bay, on the ‘right side’ of the dike.  That would be impossible, mostly.  My fumbling attempts at trying to hunt, forage, and build shelter would no doubt further harm that place.  And so, in-line with my interest to pay for my debt of visitation, I decide to pause, and attempt to ask Boundary Bay: what is it you might want, or need?   Although my asking is somewhat awkward — sitting in this small studio miles away — one answer comes surprisingly quickly: simply remove the poison.

In the physical, material world, poison is always harmful, and in many cases, deadly. What then might the material poisons in this particular place be?  The dike which stretches along the bay, is a simple technology, but it only serves one species.  It is effective, very effective in separating the wild processes, from the hyper domesticated processes of city living.  But the harm of this dike, the poison of its material intrusion, affects thousands of species, negatively.

Pausing at my desk, my mind flickers back to those childhood memories of my brother and I building sand forts at White Rock Beach.  During those countless afternoons, I would often glance back at my grandmother.  She was usually sitting in a collapsible deck chair, perched on a sand bar — her oversized sunglasses turned in our direction — and always smiling.  As the tide quickly approached, we rushed to complete our forts feeling safe, completely safe.

Even then, I knew that our efforts to keep the cool saltwater at bay, were ultimately futile, that our constructions would eventually collapse.

But still we did our best to play the game: whose fort would last the longest?  I count these as some of the most fun, and enjoyable moments of my entire life. If an incoming tide ever began to break up the dike at Boundary Bay, I don’t think I’d be sad, or frustrated.  I might even smile: understanding that this is how it should go, that this is natural, or helpful.  I might also recognize my kinship with the cool saltwater of the bay, and decide in my own way how to lend-a-hand.

And while I did this work, I might even sense the smile of something, or someone, much older than I: her calm and caring love taking delight in the work of her family.  Perhaps then, simply: acts which remove poisons, could be our songs for our supper — a chorus of gratitude for the gift of being alive.  And perhaps this kind of singing will attract others to the work, creating meaning and social bonds amidst the places we love,4 healing divisions within human culture, and the land.


Michael Drebert is a writer, gardener, and member of DGR living in Vancouver, Canada.  When he isn’t knee-deep in a salt marsh, or rowing a small boat in a local waterway, he’s writing about his love of coastal areas and the need to protect them.

1 Martin Shaw, Scatterlings: Getting Claimed in the Age of Amnesia (Ashland, OR: White Cloud Press, 2016).

2 Gary Snyder, Back on the Fire: Essays (Berkeley, CA: Counterpoint, 2007), 34.

3 Aric McBay, Lierre Keith, and Derrick Jensen, Deep Green Resistance: Strategy to Save the Planet (New York, NY: Seven stories press, 2011), 23.

4 Chris Hedges, “The Politics of Cultural Despair: That’s What’s Killing Us, Not Donald Trump,” Salon (Salon.com, November 1, 2020), https://www.salon.com/2020/11/01/the-politics-of-cultural-despair-thats-whats-killing-us-not-donald-trump.