by DGR News Service | Sep 15, 2020 | Climate Change, Mining & Drilling, The Problem: Civilization
This is the fourth part in the series. In the previous essays, we have explored the need for a collapse, the relationship between a Dyson sphere and overcomsumption, and our blind pursuit for ‘progress.’ In this piece, Elisabeth describes how the Dyson sphere is an extension of the drive for so-called “green energy.”
By Elisabeth Robson
Techno-utopians imagine the human population on Earth can be saved from collapse using energy collected with a Dyson Sphere–a vast solar array surrounding the sun and funneling energy back to Earth–to build and power space ships. In these ships, we’ll leave the polluted and devastated Earth behind to venture into space and populate the solar system. Such a fantasy is outlined in “Deforestation and world population sustainability: a quantitative analysis” and is a story worthy of Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos. It says, in so many words: we’ve trashed this planet, so let’s go find another one.
In their report, Mauro Bologna and Gerardo Aquino present a model that shows, with continued population growth and deforestation at current rates, we have a less than 10% chance of avoiding catastrophic collapse of civilization within the next few decades. Some argue that a deliberate and well-managed collapse would be better than the alternatives. Bologna and Aquino present two potential solutions to this situation. One is to develop the Dyson Sphere technology we can use to escape the bonds of our home planet and populate the solar system. The other is to change the way we (that is, those of us living in industrial and consumer society) live on this planet into a ‘cultural society’, one not driven primarily by economy and consumption, in order to sustain the population here on Earth.
The authors acknowledge that the idea of using a Dyson Sphere to provide all the energy we need to populate the solar system is unrealistic, especially in the timeframe to avoid collapse that’s demonstrated by their own work. They suggest that any attempt to develop such technology, whether to “live in extraterrestrial space or develop any other way to sustain population of the planet” will take too long given current rates of deforestation. As Salonika describes in an earlier article in this series, “A Dyson Sphere will not stop collapse“, any attempt to create such a fantastical technology would only increase the exploitation of the environment.
Technology makes things worse
The authors rightly acknowledge this point, noting that “higher technological level leads to growing population and higher forest consumption.” Attempts to develop the more advanced technology humanity believes is required to prevent collapse will simply speed up the timeframe to collapse. However, the authors then contradict themselves and veer back into fantasy land when they suggest that higher technological levels can enable “more effective use of resources” and can therefore lead, in principle, to “technological solutions to prevent the ecological collapse of the planet.”
Techno-utopians often fail to notice that we have the population we do on Earth precisely because we have used technology to increase the effectiveness (and efficiency) of fossil fuels and other resources* (forests, metals, minerals, water, land, fish, etc.). Each time we increase ‘effective use’ of these resources by developing new technology, the result is an increase in resource use that drives an increase in population and development, along with the pollution and ecocide that accompanies that development. The agricultural ‘green revolution’ is a perfect example of this: advances in technology enabled new high-yield cereals as well as new fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides, irrigation, and mechanization, all of which prevented widespread famine, but also contributed to an ongoing explosion in population, development, chemical use, deforestation, land degradation and salinization, water pollution, top soil loss, and biodiversity loss around the world.
As economist William Stanley Jevons predicted in 1865, increasing energy efficiency with advances in technology leads to more energy use. Extrapolating from his well-proved prediction, it should be obvious that new technology will not prevent ecological collapse; in fact, such technology is much more likely to exacerbate it.
This mistaken belief that new technology can save us from collapse pervades the policies and projects of governments around the world.
Projects like the Green New Deal, the Democrat Party’s recently published climate plan, and the UN’s sustainable development goals and IPCC recommendations. All these projects advocate for global development and adoption of ‘clean technology’ and ‘clean industry’ (I’m not sure what those terms mean, myself); ’emissions-free’ energy technologies like solar, wind, nuclear and hydropower; and climate change mitigation technologies like carbon capture and storage, smart grids, artificial intelligence, and geo-engineering. They tout massive growth in renewable energy production from wind and solar, and boast about how efficient and inexpensive these technologies have become, implying that all will be well if we just keep innovating new technologies on our well worn path of progress.
Miles and miles of solar panels, twinkling like artificial lakes in the middle of deserts and fields; row upon row of wind turbines, huge white metal beasts turning wind into electricity, and mountain tops and prairies into wasteland; massive concrete dams choking rivers to death to store what we used to call water, now mere embodied energy stored to create electrons when we need them–the techno-utopians claim these so-called clean’ technologies can replace the black gold of our present fantasies–fossil fuels–and save us from ourselves with futuristic electric fantasies instead.
All these visions are equally implausible in their capacity to save us from collapse.
And while solar panels, wind turbines, and dams are real, in the sense that they exist–unlike the Dyson Sphere–all equally embody the utter failure of imagination we humans seem unable to transcend. Some will scoff at my dismissal of these electric visions, and say that imagining and inventing new technologies is the pinnacle of human achievement. With such framing, the techno-utopians have convinced themselves that creating new technologies to solve the problems of old technologies is progress. This time it will be different, they promise.
And yet if you look at the graph of global primary energy consumption:
it should be obvious to any sensible person that new, so-called ‘clean’ energy-producing technologies are only adding to that upward curve of the graph, and are not replacing fossil fuels in any meaningful way. Previous research has shown that “total national [US] energy use from non-fossil-fuel sources displaced less than one-quarter of a unit of fossil-fuel energy use and, focussing specifically on electricity, each unit of electricity generated by non-fossil-fuel sources displaced less than one-tenth of a unit of fossil-fuel-generated electricity.”
In part, this is due to the fossil fuel energy required to mine, refine, manufacture, install, maintain, and properly dispose of materials used to make renewable and climate mitigation technologies. Mining is the most destructive human activity on the planet, and a recent University of Queensland study found that mining the minerals and metals required for renewable energy technology could threaten biodiversity more than climate change. However, those who use the word “clean” to describe these technologies conveniently forget to mention these problems.
Wind turbines and solar arrays are getting so cheap; they are being built to reduce the cost of the energy required to frack gas: thus, the black snake eats its own tail. “Solar panels are starting to die, leaving behind toxic trash”, a recent headline blares, above an article that makes no suggestion that perhaps it’s time to cut back a little on energy use. Because they cannot be recycled, most wind turbine blades end up in landfill, where they will contaminate the soil and ground water long after humanity is a distant memory. Forests in the southeast and northwest of the United States are being decimated for high-tech biomass production because of a loophole in EU carbon budget policy that counts biomass as renewable and emissions free. Dams have killed the rivers in the US Pacific Northwest, and salmon populations are collapsing as a result. I could go on.
The lies we tell ourselves
Just like the Dyson Sphere, these and other technologies we fantasize will save our way of life from collapse are delusions on a grand scale. The governor of my own US state of Washington boasts about how this state’s abundant “clean” hydropower energy will help us create a “clean” economy, while at the same time he fusses about the imminent extinction of the salmon-dependent Southern Resident Orca whales. I wonder: does he not see the contradiction, or is he willfully blind to his own hypocrisy?
The face of the Earth is a record of human sins (1), a ledger written in concrete and steel; the Earth twisted into skyscrapers and bridges, plows and combines, solar panels and wind turbines, mines and missing mountains; with ink made from chemical waste and nuclear contamination, plastic and the dead bodies of trees. The skies, too, tell our most recent story. Once source of inspiration and mythic tales, in the skies we now see airplanes and contrails, space junk and satellites we might once have mistaken for shooting stars, but can no longer because there are so many; with vision obscured by layers of too much PM2.5 and CO2 and NOx and SO2 and ozone and benzene. In the dreams of techno-utopians, we see space ships leaving a rotting, smoking Earth behind.
One of many tales of our Earthly sins is deforestation.
As the saying goes, forests precede us, and deserts follow; Mauro Bologna and Gerardo Aquino chose a good metric for understanding and measuring our time left on Earth. Without forests, there is no rain and the middles of continents become deserts. It is said the Middle East, a vast area we now think of as primarily desert, used to be covered in forests so thick and vast the sunlight never touched the ground (2). Without forests, there is no home for species we’ve long since forgotten we are connected to in that web of life we imagine ourselves separate from, looking down from above as techno-gods on that dirty, inconvenient thing we call nature, protected by our bubble of plastic and steel. Without forests, there is no life.
One part of one sentence in the middle of the report gives away man’s original sin: it is when the authors write, “our model does not specify the technological mechanism by which the successful trajectories are able to find an alternative to forests and avoid collapse“. Do they fail to understand that there is no alternative to forests? That no amount of technology, no matter how advanced–no Dyson Sphere; no deserts full of solar panels; no denuded mountain ridges lined with wind turbines; no dam, no matter how wide or high; no amount of chemicals injected into the atmosphere to reflect the sun–will ever serve as an “alternative to forests”? Or are they willfully blind to this fundamental fact of this once fecund and now dying planet that is our only home?
A different vision
I’d like to give the authors the benefit of the doubt, as they end their report with a tantalizing reference to another way of being for humans, when they write, “we suggest that only civilisations capable of a switch from an economical society to a sort of ‘cultural’ society in a timely manner, may survive.” They do not expand on this idea at all. As physicists, perhaps the authors didn’t feel like they had the freedom to do so in a prestigious journal like Nature, where, one presumes, scientists are expected to stay firmly in their own lanes.
Having clearly made their case that civilized humanity can expect a change of life circumstance fairly soon, perhaps they felt it best to leave to others the responsibility and imagination for this vision. Such a vision will require not just remembering who we are: bi-pedal apes utterly dependent on the natural world for our existence. It will require a deep listening to the forests, the rivers, the sky, the rain, the salmon, the frogs, the birds… in short, to all the pulsing, breathing, flowing, speaking communities we live among but ignore in our rush to cover the world with our innovations in new technology.
Paul Kingsnorth wrote: “Spiritual teachers throughout history have all taught that the divine is reached through simplicity, humility, and self-denial: through the negation of the ego and respect for life. To put it mildly, these are not qualities that our culture encourages. But that doesn’t mean they are antiquated; only that we have forgotten why they matter.”
New technologies, real or imagined, and the profits they bring is what our culture reveres.
Building dams, solar arrays, and wind turbines; experimenting with machines to capture CO2 from the air and inject SO2 into the troposphere to reflect the sun; imagining Dyson Spheres powering spaceships carrying humanity to new frontiers–these efforts are all exciting; they appeal to our sense of adventure, and align perfectly with a culture of progress that demands always more. But such pursuits destroy our souls along with the living Earth just a little bit more with each new technology we invent.
This constant push for progress through the development of new technologies and new ways of generating energy is the opposite of simplicity, humility, and self-denial. So, the question becomes: how can we remember the pleasures of a simple, humble, spare life? How can we rewrite our stories to create a cultural society based on those values instead? We have little time left to find an answer.
* I dislike the word resources to refer to the natural world; I’m using it here because it’s a handy word, and it’s how most techno-utopians refer to mountains, rivers, rocks, forests, and life in general.
(1) Susan Griffin, Woman and Nature
(2) Derrick Jensen, Deep Green Resistance
In the final part of this series, we will discuss what the cultural shift (as described by the authors) would look like.
Featured image: e-waste in Bangalore, India at a “recycling” facility. Photo by Victor Grigas, CC BY SA 3.0.
by DGR News Service | Sep 8, 2020 | Human Supremacy, The Problem: Civilization
Ross Carter offers a critical review of Naomi Klein’s Shock Doctrine. He arguably enriches Naomi’s own assessment of the situation by adding a DGR analysis.
By Ross Carter
Using crisis as an opportunity to get rich
In her book, the Shock Doctrine, Naomi Klein details a particular trope of modern capitalism. That of using and/or creating shock and disaster to advance its agenda. Like the majority of liberal literature this book left me with more questions than answers. For example, is it just capitalism that uses crises to advance? Was life amazing before neo-liberal capitalism came along? Are discussions about different shades of civilization a waste of time? Is this whole book a distraction? Although frustrating at times and limited in its perspective, the history mapped out in this book did still have a lot to offer and to ponder.
The Traumatised Traumatise
One thing I take home from this book is how modern Capitalism is civilization attempting to continue to function and sustain itself, while everything (eco-systems and social structures) collapse around it. Due to Naomi’s blind commitment to Democracy and liberalism this would not be a take home though without a mild awareness of the history of civilization, particularly how it has always depended upon war, colonisation, control of populaces (social structure, slavery, police, media, religion and law etc.), and environmental and technological expansion, to sustain a hold over humanity and the planet. Civilization has also always fed off of disaster. This can be clearly seen in the fact that although individual civilizations collapse, disasters in themselves, civilization itself has continued to spread across the planet eating up wildlife, including wild humans, in its path.
The story that Naomi tells is not an isolated story, it is one that has been going on in one form or another for as long as civilization has existed. The logic of Civilization is to protect itself at any cost, and that logic continues unabated. Without a deeper analysis you are stuck in the limited perspective that if only we could get rid of those horrible capitalists then everything would be ok. This is a naive over-simplification of the issues we face. It ignores the current and rapid murder of the planet by Industrial civilization.
It ignores the reality of the lives of passive desperation, the mental trauma, anguish and grief that humanity, as a whole, currently lives with.
Another lesson or reminder I took away from reading the book was how war and conflict is integral to civilization and its expansion and survival. All expansion (aka colonisation) has depended on violence and conflict and left destruction in its wake. Civilization in turn traumatises individuals, communities and cultures, then takes advantage of that trauma to grow and expand. This was true in Iraq in 2004 and it was true in Iraq (AKA the Fertile Crescent) in 6-8,000bc when one of the first civilizations is said to have formed/spread their leaving decimation and desert in its wake.
This needs repeating. The land that Iraq now sits on was being pillaged and destroyed by civilization 10,000 or so years ago. The language I am writing in, it is said, evolved out of the Middle Eastern languages of the time. The Shock Doctrine is part of a continuum. We, the civilized, are doing the same things now that civilized peoples were doing 10,000 years ago. Changing from neo-liberal capitalism to a more social capitalism, replacing oil wells with lithium and rare metal mines (for ‘green’ technologies), isn’t going to change anything. The Shock will continue until we do something about the problem at the core, civilization itself. Or until civilization reaches, what seems like an inevitable suicidal endgame. The almost complete end of life on this planet.
“I am not arguing that all forms of market systems are inherently violent” p20.
The Shock process that Naomi defines and recognises is at the core a continuation of colonialism. It is hyper-colonialism. It is a confirmation by those in power that they are in power and that they are willing to do anything to stay in power. It is an extra layer of colonialism. And therefore an extra layer of trauma and destruction. Competition is at the core of all civilized relationships and the civilized psyche itself. It is at the core of agricultural societies who fight each other and wild nature for the space to deforest and grow. It is at the core of modern civilization in all its teachings and all it upholds. Competition we are told is natural and good. We appear to have forgotten what is natural and good. We have seen no other path. We are conquerors and dominators. Takers. We do not know what it is to be human be-ings, only human war-ings. This is apparent in Naomi’s book.
From Chile to Iraq via New Orleans. The only direction we can go is towards increasing levels of control and dominance. Unless we change this mindset we will continue on this path indefinitely. Civilization can wear a facade of democracy or liberalism but it is merely that. A facade. Equality and co-operation are not possible in civilization. They are in direct contradiction to its inbuilt needs to expand and control.
Changing this mindset is an intense and thorough task, but it is the only one that will make a difference long term.
Joe Biden and solar panels are not going to cut it. Just as different leaders and more technology have never made a difference before. Only increased and sped up the expansion and control of civilization. There will be no simple solution or saviour. Our desperation to control and dominate from the White House and board room, to our patriarchal nuclear family, stems from the same place. Mass cultural trauma. As Naomi points out, a broken individual is easy to manipulate and control. And we are all broken by civilization. We are traumatised in the womb. We are traumatised in birth. We are born into generational trauma. We are traumatised within our dysfunctional families and social structures. We are traumatised by our ‘education’. We are traumatised by the boxes we are put in and the masks we have to wear. We are traumatised by pollution, by food, by technologies. Etc. Etc.
The traumatised mind is a warring and competing mind. It is one that cannot be satiated. Civilization commodifies and others us. It turns us into objects and roles. Slave, farmer, chief, wife, husband, etc. THAT is shock and awe. The shock that Naomi defines is an interesting story and one worth hearing, but it is also an addendum, and like all leftist analysis it ignores or denies the rest of the book. It ignores what led to that addendum. If we continue not to see how violence and (our own) trauma and shock are integral to the establishment and sustenance of civilization, not just neo-liberal capitalism, then our solutions and actions, like all leftist/liberal solutions, are going to achieve absolutely zero when facing the bigger picture of the murder and enslavement of the planet and of ALL life on it by civilization.
Our blindness to reality is related to our mass trauma, perpetuated by our education system and media.
The media are masters of shock. Naomi points out how the military targeted certain industries in Iraq to increase the shock to the populace. Just as important was the taking over of the media. Of the stories being told to the Iraqi people. The media pacifies through dumbing populations down, through fear mongering, and simply through lying or covering up the truth, It is quite amusing but also sad to note that Naomi, and all of her other liberal pals, are suffering from the very symptoms she herself defines. That of a forgetting. A cultural amnesia. A reconditioning, brainwashing (let’s call it what it is). Let’s not forget that liberals are traumatised too.
One only needs some basic understanding of the history of civilization to know that at its core since its inception it has depended on slavery (by the whip or by economic/cultural control), genocide, ecocide and colonisation. This is completely ignored though. Why? Why would liberals continue to preach for, and believe in, those very things which are used to oppress them? The Green New Deal and Democracy aren’t going to remove the shock to the system that living hollowed out lives on a hollowed out planet perpetually puts us through. Yet they are worshipped. How could you read this 533 page book, in your break at the office, or sitting in your city apartment, the sound of sirens and cars droning around you, smell of pollution in the air, zero wildlife, about how capitalism uses shock to further its agenda, and not recognise the shock, all around you and within you? The obvious answer is that liberals have been shocked themselves.
We have all been shocked.
Then in this lost, disconnected state we are all susceptible to the easy solutions of religion, gurus, demagogues and techno-fixes. We are all malleable. People do not willingly hand over their personal power and autonomy and that of their community, to civilization, unless they have first been broken as a human and built up again as a citizen. We will only really be able to think clearly and connect to one another and the earth again once we throw off the myths that civilization holds us down with. Once we, as individuals and communities, destroy civilization as a concept and a physical system. For it is only beyond civilization that we can really be free from continued shock and perpetual disaster.
Ross Carter is a sytems thinker, critic and DGR guardian based in the UK.
![[The Ohio River Speaks] When History Becomes Hallucination](https://dgrnewsservice.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/18/2020/08/lumber_mill_on_five_mile_cr_allegany_ny_chamberlain_001.jpg)
by DGR News Service | Aug 22, 2020 | Listening to the Land
The Ohio River is the most polluted river in the United States. In this series of essays entitled ‘The Ohio River Speaks,‘ Will Falk travels the length of the river and tells her story. Read the first, second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth and ninth part of Will’s journey.
On the Tidioute Bridge, where forests accompany the Ohio River through the round Pennsylvania hills, I fretted over my responsibilities as a writer to tell the truth as I experience it. So far, on my journey with the Ohio River, I had experienced beauty, but this beauty was always tempered by the horrific reality of the Ohio River’s abuse. I had experienced moments of peace, but this peace was eventually always drowned out by my anxiety over the river’s future.
Whenever I felt myself on the verge of accepting these contradictions in my experience, the words of a mildly famous environmental writer I had asked to review my book How Dams Fall about the Colorado River flashed in front of my eyes. This writer told me: “I feel your pain acutely and vividly – but it’s so overwhelming that I can’t find the countervailing balm and hope I need to write a decent endorsement.”
I didn’t want my writing about the Ohio River to overwhelm my readers to the point that they couldn’t muster the courage to act in her defense. At the same time, however, the reality of the Ohio River’s pain is overwhelming. Unable to resolve these contradictions, I asked the Ohio River for help.
Rain fell on white pine, hemlock, silver maple, and black willow trees. It dripped from leaf to leaf and branch to branch. It brushed over evergreen needles, washed over bark, seeped into soil, splashed into puddles, and blended with mud. Streams, strengthened by the rain, trickled melodically over stones, down the hills, and poured into the river. Below me, rising river currents turned over themselves and created a thousand little waves singing a thousand little tunes. The Ohio River hummed cheerfully and quickened her pace downstream.
In these sounds, I heard love songs. The forests and the Ohio River were celebrating their ancient friendship by singing ballads to each other.
As I listened, the Ohio River taught me about the role trees play in this cycle. My attention drifted across the river to where exposed tree roots clung to, and held up, the river’s banks. Like the water those trees drank from the Ohio River, my gaze was pulled up trunks, through branches and leaves, to the tree tops. As the trees sang with the rain, their breaths rose from the hills as fog to join heavy, low-hanging clouds. I followed the falling rain back to the river. And, one rotation in a cycle that’s been turning for time immemorial was complete.
Then, a truck carrying a pile of pine logs rattled over the bridge I stood on. The fragrance of freshly cut white pine competed with diesel fumes in an olfactory juxtaposition of beauty and horror. Fumes filled my lungs and scenes from the history of logging in the upper Ohio River basin filled my mind.
In the 1790s, men with muskets destroyed Seneca, Delaware, and Shawnee villages throughout the upper Ohio River basin. They slaughtered and scalped men, women, and children and burned crops and other food sources. With native warriors murdered and native governments crippled, men with saws flooded the region. Sawmills were established in the upper Ohio River basin as early as 1800. Contemporary accounts describe whole hillsides along the Ohio River stripped clean of trees. They started with the hills along the Ohio River and her tributaries’ banks because the loggers could easily drag timber into the waterways where they could be transported to distant city markets.
Words like ‘logs’ and ‘timber’ are dishonest words that fail to describe the full cruelty the Ohio River was forced to endure. These logs were the dead bodies of trees the Ohio River had helped to grow from saplings. This timber was the corpses of trees whose families the Ohio River had lived with for generations. So, not only did the Ohio River witness the murder of her friends, she was forced to carry her friends’ dead bodies away.
At first, the loggers came for the long, straight, and strong eastern white pines. When the easily accessible white pine stands were exhausted, the loggers came for the hemlocks. Hemlock bark was used in tanning leather, but the logs were often discarded and left to rot in the woods. Around 1860, railroads allowed even the most isolated timberlands to be destroyed. I found a story in the Warren Times Mirror and Observer newspaper, dated May 26, 1973, that reported:
“In 1903, the Central Pennsylvania Lumber Company installed a big steam and electrically powered band saw mill at Sheffield. It had a rated capacity of 130,000 board feet of lumber daily. But its all-time production record was on March 14, 1923, when 337,000 board feet of lumber were sawed in a ten-hour period. Between 1908 and 1941, when the C.P.L. closed down because of lack of timber, some one and a half billion board feet of lumber were sawed there.”
As I pondered this on the Tidioute Bridge, history became hallucination. Images of those I’d lived my whole life with joined me where I stood. I saw my mother’s eyes – a half shade of blue paler than mine – gleaming with the specific light that fills them when she tells me she loves me. I felt my father’s hand – a half shade of tan darker than mine – with the specific weight his hand carries when he tells me he’s proud of me. I heard my little sister’s laughter when we share an inside joke we’ve shared for longer than either of us remember.
I saw all the people who have helped me become the person I am today. I saw childhood playmates and grade school teachers. I saw football coaches and college professors. I saw my teammates on the University of Dayton football team. I saw old lovers and failed romances. I saw the friends who visited me in the hospital after I tried to kill myself. I saw my activist comrades struggling so hard for a better world.
Then, I saw them murdered.
Each of them.
All of them.
By men with axes, saws, knives, and machetes. Cut down, cut up, and piled in front of me by men who thought only of the price my dead friends’ bodies would fetch at market. The men who murdered my loved ones then slapped a rough harness on my back and snapped a whip over my head. But the load was too heavy to bear.
The sounds of the local water cycle brought me back to the present, but the music was angry. Lightning cracked across the sky with shrill staccato notes. Rumbling thunder added ominous bass notes in a minor key to the music’s low end. Where once they sang, the rain, the trees, and the Ohio River hissed.
Cold and trembling, I asked the Ohio River: “What do you need me to do?” All I heard was more hissing. So, I decided to trust the truth in my experience.
by DGR News Service | Aug 19, 2020 | Listening to the Land
The Ohio River is the most polluted river in the United States. In this series of essays entitled ‘The Ohio River Speaks,‘ Will Falk travels the length of the river and tells her story. Read the first, second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh and eighth part of Will’s journey.
As the bow of my kayak slid into the Ohio River at the Buckaloons Recreation Area boat launch, on a cloudy morning in late July, all I wanted was a quiet mind. I was full of an anxious, noisy din produced by several sources.
After eight weeks of listening to and writing about the Ohio River, the stories the river was telling me – stories about mass extinction, the practice of scalping, and massacres – were emotionally exhausting. Meanwhile, national news was generally terrifying. COVID-19 surged while many humans believed the pandemic was a conspiracy designed to restrict their personal freedoms. Police brutalized citizens protesting police brutality. Reports from cities including Portland and New York described federal agents arbitrarily grabbing citizens off the streets and detaining them in unmarked vehicles. And, president Donald Trump, trailing Joe Biden in the polls, floated the idea of suspending the presidential election for the first time in American history.
I was also running out of the money I saved up to travel with the Ohio River. I spent a week and a half with my head buried in a computer screen while I created and shared an online fundraiser. Guilt accompanied my request for money. I felt guilty for not saving enough money. I felt guilty for not using my money more efficiently. Then, I felt guilty for feeling guilty because I wondered if the Ohio River thought my guilt in requesting money for her suggested I didn’t think she was worth requesting money for. To top this cup of self-loathing I brewed for myself off, I also felt guilty for spending time creating an online fundraiser when I could have been listening to the river.
My journey with the Ohio River was taking much longer than I originally planned for. I knew the Ohio River could speak. But, I was unprepared for how much she had to say. In eight weeks, I had only traveled the first third of the first third of the Ohio River, the part most commonly known as the upper Allegheny. Her answers to my two questions – “Who are you? And, what do you need?” – were rushing past me in a torrent profoundly more powerful than the proverbial firehose.
There were topics I sensed she still wanted me to write about before moving on. Truck engines hauling radioactive fracking wastewater throughout northern Pennsylvania and the ubiquity of their screeching brakes whined for me to investigate how dangerous that wastewater truly is. Pennsylvanians’ proper sense of pride in the dwindling, clean streams that still run through the state conflicted with Pennsylvanians’ misplaced pride in the role the state played in America’s first oil boom. The iron taste these conflicting prides left in my mouth wouldn’t wash out no matter how hard I tried to spit it out.
Black and white photographs in county historical society buildings haunted me. They showed hundreds of logs, the corpses of towering trees, floating down the Ohio River. They showed the eerie, bare hillsides those trees were stolen from. When I saw these photos, I felt the agony and anger the Ohio River still carries for being used to haul her forest friends, the old growth white pines and hemlocks that once grew along her banks, away. Once I felt this agony and anger, ghosts climbed from the shadowy photographs and cried out for attention.
Competing voices in my head struggled to be heard. One voice said, “Quick look away. Forget you saw it.” Another voice screamed angry obscenities. One voice asked, “Where’s my beer? Where’s my weed? What’s on Netflix?” My constant companion, the unwelcome guest in my head, the one who always tells me my writing sucks, acquired a bullhorn somewhere and was testing its volume against my ear drum. I despaired and thought maybe he was right that I had neither the time nor the talent to tell these stories adequately.
A few minutes before I pushed my kayak in the water, I saw a sign posted on the door to the Buckaloons men’s restroom. The sign warned visitors that “WE are STILL IN A PANDEMIC” before asking restroom users to keep the area clean and to adhere to social distancing. The sign concluded with: “We know that this place feels different, and it is! It can be a nice change of pace from the world; please help us keep it open.”
The realities underlying the sign’s rhetoric frustrated me. I knew the reason “that this place feels different” is because relatively undeveloped sections of rivers like the one at Buckaloons are becoming more and more rare. The reason a place like Buckaloons “can be a nice change of pace from the world” is because, for most people, “the world” is primarily human. “The world” is an office, a city block, a suburban house. “The world” exists online and onscreen, in headsets and TV sets. “The world” is no longer forests, rivers, mountains, and seas. The real world has become “a nice change of pace.”
***
Noise carries over water. And, just a few minutes after I pushed my kayak into the water, a family of nearby canoers began blaring Kenny Chesney from portable speakers. Someone asked the woman in charge of the music, “You like country music, huh?” And, the woman responded, “Yeah, there’s a time and a place for it.” I suppressed an urge to tell her this was neither the time nor the place.
Melissa Troutman accompanied me again. She graciously offered me one of her family’s kayaks and help with shuttling vehicles between the put-in at Buckaloons and the take-out fourteen miles away at the Bonnie Brae boat launch, just outside of Tidioute, PA. We originally planned to float about three miles down to Thompson’s Island where we would spend the day and camp for the night. We would float the remaining eleven miles the next day.
I was excited about Thompson’s Island because the island is home to some of Pennsylvania’s last remaining old growth forests. These forests were protected from the loggers by the relative inaccessibility posed by the Ohio River surrounding the island. But, when we stopped on the island, the skies darkened and the clouds released a downpour.
The noise in my mind must have been so loud while I was preparing for the trip that I neglected to listen to the voice that suggested I bring rain gear on a day the weather services virtually guaranteed would rain. In addition to ignoring the need for rain gear, I left my phone in my car. Melissa, fortunately, had hers and checked the weather. Thunder storms were approaching and would likely last well into the next day. Not wanting to chance lightning while on the water, we decided to hustle the eleven miles down to the takeout. As our plans turned from a leisurely day resting on a beautiful island into a long day of paddling in a rainstorm, the noise’s volume increased.
Back in our boats, I was disappointed to find that houses and even a few mansions were built along much, if not most, of our route, despite the fact that it ran through the Allegheny National Forest. I had heard that this section of the river was one of the most well-preserved sections of the Ohio River basin. That may be, but my definition of “well-preserved” was different from what I found between Buckaloons and Tidioute.
There was beauty. I saw my first green heron. And, then my second and third. The last two looked like brothers with the big brother constantly running away from the little brother who really wanted to play. The joy I felt in seeing these green herons was undermined by my fear that encroaching development for vacation homes and fishing lodges would destroy the herons’ nesting grounds.
I saw half a dozen or so bald eagles. I even saw one make a successful dive for a fish. But, I soon lost myself pitying bald eagles for being chosen as the mascot for the American Empire. I hoped no one in the future would blame bald eagles for the sins of a nation they never asked to represent.
A couple of hungry ducks followed Melissa and I around for half a mile, quacking at us for food. Melissa gave them some bread and I wondered out loud whether diets high in carbohydrates could give ducks diabetes like those diets do to humans. When I saw a great blue heron silhouetted against invasive knotweed, I worried about the plants the knotweed was crowding out instead of admiring the heron’s legendary grace.
As the mental noise intensified, I began to ask myself: What sort of neurosis prevents a person from enjoying the sight of playful green herons? What kind of person worries that tossing ducks a few bites of bread would give them diabetes? Why can’t I silence this angst and simply enjoy the trip?
I thought about asking the Ohio River for help. But, each time I considered asking, I shot the idea down, chiding myself that the journey was about the river’s needs, not mine. Regardless, with a mile left to go and my surgically repaired shoulders screaming with every paddle stroke, the Ohio River gave me what I longed for.
I don’t know how she knew what I needed. Maybe her intuition is so strong she hears thoughts and emotions like humans hear the spoken word. I was paddling hard and sweating. Maybe the water forming my sweat rolled off my skin, fell into the river, and shared my secrets with her.
I sat in a strong current, resting with my paddle across the kayak’s bulkhead. I let the river do the work of pulling me to the dry warmth of my Jeep parked at the take-out. My physical weariness tuckered out the petulant voices in my head. I heard the rain falling on the Ohio River’s face. The infinite sound of individual rain drops joining the river in a communion of life-giving water created a murmur. The river and the rain hummed softly. A whisper shimmered in the air. The Ohio River said, “Shhh, shhhhh, shhhhhhhh.”
Then, a dark, majestic shape lit from a white pine branch hanging no more than twenty yards above my head. A golden eagle! She flew a wide arc over the water. And, as she turned upstream, another golden eagle lifted into the sky from another branch to join her. Their wings pulled the noise away from me. As the golden eagles disappeared in the distance, the Ohio River whispered, once again, “Shhhhh.”
And, my mind was quiet.
by DGR News Service | Jul 29, 2020 | Colonialism & Conquest
The Ohio River is the most polluted river in the United States. In this series of essays entitled ‘The Ohio River Speaks,‘ Will Falk travels the length of the river and tells her story. Read the first, second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth and seventh part of Will’s journey.
The Wind That Shakes The Goose Wings
By Will Falk / The Ohio River Speaks
“‘Twas hard the woeful words to frame, To break the ties that bound us, ‘Twas harder still to bear the shame, Of foreign chains around us…”
— Robert Dwyer Joyce, The Wind That Shakes the Barley
The Ohio River carried my ancestors to me. Arriving through traumatic memories recorded in history books and through a vivid nightmare, my ancestors’ presence was painful at first. Then, I asked my ancestors for help creating strength from the pain and they answered through wild geese.
When I was researching how settler colonialism affected the original peoples of the Ohio River basin, I also learned how settler colonialism affected my Irish ancestors. I read Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’s An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States. She characterizes the Protestant colonization of Ireland (along with the Christian Crusades) as “dress rehearsals for the colonization of the Americas.” During the late 1500s and early 1600s, at the same time English colonies in Virginia and Massachusetts were being established, Dunbar-Ortiz describes how
“the English conquered Ireland and declared a half-million acres of land in the north open to settlement. The settlers who served early settler colonialism came mostly from western Scotland. England had previously conquered Wales and Scotland, but it had never before attempted to remove so large an Indigenous population and plant settlers in their place as in Ireland. The ancient Irish social system was systematically attacked, traditional songs and music forbidden, whole clans exterminated, and the remainder brutalized. A ‘wild Irish’ reservation was even attempted.”
I learned that the brutal practice of scalping originated in Ireland. Dunbar-Ortiz explains:
“The English government paid bounties for Irish heads. Later only the scalp or ears were required. A century later in North America, Indian heads and scalps were brought in for bounty in the same manner. Although the Irish were as ‘white’ as the English, transforming them into alien others to be exterminated previewed what came to be perceived as racialist when applied to Indigenous peoples of North America and to Africans.”
I found a connection with the ancestors of the original peoples of the Ohio River basin when I learned that many Englishmen who were involved in the colonization of Ireland were also involved in the colonization of North America. In the late 1500s, the English Governor of the newly conquered Irish province of Ulster, Sir Humphrey Gilbert, invaded the Irish province of Munster (where my ancestors lived), and ordered that
“the heddes of all those (of what sort soever thei were) which were killed in the daie, should be cutte off from their bodies and brought to the place where he [Gilbert] incamped at night, and should there bee laied on the ground by eche side of the waie ledying into his own tente so that none could come into his tente for any cause but commonly he muste passe through a lane of heddes which he used ad terrorem…[It brought] greate terrour to the people when thei sawe the heddes of their dedde fathers, brothers, children, kindsfolke, and friends.”
Dunbar-Ortiz writes, “The same Sir Humphrey Gilbert who had been in charge of the colonization of Ulster planted the first English colonial settlement in North America in Newfoundland in the summer of 1583.”
Reading this breached a dam within me. I was flooded with ancestral memory.
I saw the gruesome lane Gilbert constructed. I tried to keep my eyes on the path ahead of me. Hurry through, I told myself. These heads are too rotten, too disfigured to recognize. But, some of my loved ones had yet to come home. The desire for closure was too strong.
Why does that nose look so familiar? Is it my brother’s? Is that red hair? My sweetheart’s hair is red. But, she was miles from the fighting. She’s safe. Isn’t she? Each step down the lane became more difficult. Each head I passed made the terror stronger. My grief became so overwhelming that I envied the lifeless eyes staring at me as I passed, oblivious to the horrors they manifested.
Despite my ancestors’ prodding, I was sick of confronting the violent history of settler colonialism. I was still reeling from my writing about Macutté Mong and the slaughtered Christian Delawares. I was self-conscious that much of my writing about the Ohio River, so far, had been dark and heavy. I wanted to write about something beautiful, something hopeful, something that didn’t involve massacres.
Then, my ancestors sent me a nightmare.
It was a sunny afternoon. I stood in waist-high, fragrant grass next to a wide, slow river. Despite my waking mind being fixated on the Ohio River, the shape of the land and the dark, almost mahogany color of the water suggested this was not the Ohio River. I was reminded of a river I spent some time with in Ireland in 2018 – the River Blackwater in Munster, not far from my McCarthy ancestors’ home.
The nightmare began with beauty. I ran my hands through the thick grass. My bare feet sunk pleasantly into damp, warm soil. The grass imitated the river’s face as the breeze rippled in similar patterns over both. As the tune to “The Wind That Shakes the Barley” filled my ears, beauty slipped into melancholy.
Peace shattered when angry men came running over a distant hill. Sunlight glinted off weapons. I ducked down hoping the grass would hide me. The men spread out along the river bank. I saw their hands covered in mud and blood reach into the grassroots. I watched them wrap grass around their hands, intertwining their fingers with grass stalks. Then, they tore the grass up in patches, leaving flayed spaces of naked dirt. Each time they ripped, I felt pain like someone was ripping skin from my body.
I did not want the men to see me. At first, I managed to contain the pain in soft whimpers. Eventually, with each patch of grass ripped from the earth, the pain became unbearable. I screamed. The men noticed me, grabbed me, and rubbed my face in the bare dirt. When they wrapped the hair on my scalp around their hands, intertwining their grubby fingers with my hair, I knew the pain that was coming. They ripped the hair from my forehead to the top of my skull. I woke writhing and screaming.
At first, I thought this nightmare was simply a message to remind my readers of the cruel settler colonialism Ireland endured – especially my Irish American readers who have benefited so much from the colonization of North America. After I wrote the section about the colonization of Ireland being a dress rehearsal for the colonization of North America, however, my ancestors were not satisfied. I felt an itchy determination to bring some beauty out of this terrible history.
While I was researching and writing about this history, several times I found myself absent-mindedly humming the tune of the “The Wind That Shakes the Barley.” When I remembered that the tune was in my nightmare, I knew I had to learn more about the song.
“The Wind That Shakes the Barley” is a haunting Irish ballad that was written by Robert Dwyer Joyce in the mid-1800s about theIrish Rebellion of 1798. The song tells the tale of a young Irish rebel who says good-bye to his lover before he joins the rebellion. His lover is shot during the fighting and the young rebel returns home to bury her.
Barley is a symbol of Irish resistance to colonization.
Irish rebels, most of whom were woefully impoverished, often carried barley in their pockets to eat while on the march. Many of these men wore their hair closely cropped as a sign of opposition to the powdered wigs worn by British aristocrats. Because of this, these Irish rebels were called “croppies.” When the Irish Rebellion of 1798 was brutally suppressed, the British threw slaughtered rebels into mass unmarked graves known as “croppy-holes.”
The barley in the pockets of the slain rebels grew from the croppy-holes. And, just as the barley grows every spring from the croppy-holes, fed by the bodies of Irish rebels, Irish resistance to colonization sprouts anew in each generation, fed by the memories of our ancestors – those men and women brave enough to sacrifice everything to resist colonization.
I wept when I learned about the barley growing from the mass graves of massacred Irish rebels. I wept for their courage. I wept for the beauty of their story. I also wept because I yearned for a symbol with as much power as barley that could remind the Irish in America of our ancestors’ legacy of resistance.
When I finished weeping, my ancestors gave me the symbol I yearned for.
I heard the Canada geese before I saw them. My ancestors’ songs carried with the honking geese songs to announce their arrival. The geese swept low in a disciplined formation over the Ohio River. In flying columns, they evoked the rebels of old on the march. They got so close I could see their silver feathers quivering as they descended. I sensed my ancestors on the wind that shook the goose wings.
Originally used to describe the departure of an Irish Catholic army to France after being defeated by William of Orange’s Protestant army in 1691, the term “wild geese” has been used in Irish history to describe Irish soldiers who left to fight in foreign armies. Most of these soldiers fled poverty. Many of them joined foreign armies to fight against the British. Some of these soldiers joined foreign armies to gain valuable training that they could return with and use to defend their homes.
I am American because some of my ancestors fled Ireland in the early 1850s, just after the Potato Famine and British colonial policies killed millions of Catholic Irish. Like the Irish wild geese, my ancestors fled poverty and starvation. They survived. So, I live.
Now, whenever I hear echoes of honking geese, I hear my ancestors. They are with me. They say: Resist.
Will Falk is the author of How Dams Fall: On Representing the Colorado River in the First-Ever American Lawsuit Seeking Rights for a Major Ecosystem and a practicing rights of Nature attorney. Rights of Nature advocates work to transform the legal system so that it recognizes the “personhood” of natural beings. Throuout 2020, Falk will travel through the Ohio River Basin asking the Ohio River the two questions he asks any client who steps into his office: “Who are you?” And, “What do you need?”
