by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Sep 22, 2017 | Strategy & Analysis
Editor’s note: This is the third installment in a multi-part series. Browse the New Park City Witness index to read more.
by Will Falk / Deep Green Resistance
Author’s Note: A member of Park City’s city government recently asked me why I write about Park City when Park City is doing so much for the environment, compared to other communities. I hope my respect for this person and the question is reflected in the days I spent contemplating an answer. In order to answer this question, I must answer several related questions. These answers give me a chance to be transparent about my motivations for writing this New Park City Witness series.
Underlying the question “Why do I write about Park City?” is the question “Why do I write at all?”
One reason I write is reflected in an experience I had, a few days ago, in Summit Land Conservancy’s offices. On a shelf, in a conference room, a book’s plain green and white cover grabbed my attention. It was the first edition of Park City Witness, published in 1998. Having recently finished the second edition of Park City Witness, and learning the first was long out of print, I was excited to see an original copy. I asked Summit Land Conservancy executive director Cheryl Fox if I could borrow the book.
Books, as anyone who has read a few knows, have the power to choose their readers. While reading the preface to the first Park City Witness, I knew I had been chosen. Maybe Cheryl knew I needed to read the book, too, because she wrote the preface to the first Park City Witness. In this preface, she quoted author Stephen Trimble who, in 1997 “speaking to a collection of writers and slow-growth activists amid the crowded shelves of Dolly’s Bookstore…explained how important it is for people who can write to write.”
Twenty years later, and Trimble’s words feel like they were spoken directly to me. I can write and because I can write, it is important for me to write.
If it’s important for people who can write to write, it’s even more important for people who can write to write what needs to be read. While nearly two hundred species go extinct daily, while every mother’s breastmilk contains known carcinogens, while every major biosphere on Earth collapses around us, does anything need to be read more than encouragement for stopping the destruction?
I think the answer is obviously no. Many artists share this feeling. My favorite political cartoonist, Stephanie McMillan, in an essay titled “Artists: Raise Your Weapons” writes “…in times like these, for an artist not to devote her/his talents and energies to creating cultural weapons of resistance is a betrayal of the worst magnitude, a gesture of contempt against life itself. It is unforgivable.”
Derrick Jensen, reflecting on a decades-long writing career with over twenty published books, writes, “…if we judge my work, or anyone’s work, by the most important standard of all, and in fact the only standard that really matters, which is the health of the planet, my work (and everyone else’s) is a complete failure. Because my work hasn’t stopped the murder of the planet.”
***
I write about Park City because of the privilege and power that exist here.
It may or may not be true that Park City does more than other communities to protect the environment. We must remember that Park City’s human population depends on an ecologically unnecessary and problematic industry – tourism – for its continued existence. Ask yourself: Do corporate marketers spend millions of dollars on enticing hundreds of thousands of people to board greenhouse gas emitting planes from around the world to visit… Kamas? Are tons of coal burned to pump hundreds of millions of gallons of water up mountainsides to snow-making machines in…Heber?
There’s a sense in which it really doesn’t matter whether Park City is doing more than other communities. My almost-five-year-old niece is becoming notorious for her sassy one-liners and refusing to let adults get away with their bullshit. I shudder when I think about looking her in the eye when she’s my age. She’s not going to care if Park City did more than other communities to stop the destruction of the world. She’s going to care that she can raise children in a world with clean water, clean air, and a habitable climate. She’s going to care, if she does have a baby, that she can feed her baby without passing carcinogens through her breastmilk to her baby.
I write about Park City because it doesn’t matter which community is more environmentally-friendly. The only thing that matters, while life on earth collapses, is stopping the collapse. Stopping the collapse will require confrontation with those in power and this confrontation will require material resources. Close to 80% of Park City’s population is white and white people benefit the most from the exploitation of the natural world. People of color, around the world, have long formed the frontlines of the environmental movement. Justice demands that white people join them there. Similarly, the median property value in Park City is $868,100, and the median household income is $105,000, which is almost double the national average. Park City has more than most communities, so Park City should give more than most communities.
***
The most important reason I write is because I’m in love. I’m in love with Gambel oak, maple, and aspen. I’m in love with the way they offer one last display of visual ecstasy in their changing colors before sleeping for the winter. I’m in love with rain and snow, the mystical moment rain becomes snow on a northerly autumn wind, and the water both of them bring. I’m in love with my partner, who was born here. I’m in love with her big, gorgeous brown eyes. I’m in love with the way her eyes become even bigger with warmth when she hears joy in her loved ones’ voices.
In short, I’m in love with life – a life made possible by Park City’s natural communities. We may experience life because the water we drink here, the air we breathe here, and the food we eat here combine to give us physical bodies. To love life is to love our bodies and loving our bodies, we must listen to them.
My body tells me to write. If I go more than a few days without pen, notebook, and solitude, the physical symptoms of anxiety affect me. I become fidgety, easily distracted, and slightly sick to my stomach. The longer I go without writing something coherent, the worse these symptoms get.
My body speaks through these symptoms. Through fidgetiness, my body tells me to act; writing, after all, is an action. The troubles with concentration are a warning to use my focus or lose it. Nausea accompanies and symbolizes the writing process, for me. There are times I’ve tried to quit writing, tried to shirk the hours of rumination, research, and drafting. But, the best words are not mine. They are given to me. Unreleased, they pool like bile and there is no relief until they’re written.
I used to be embarrassed to admit that I write to feel better. This seemed selfish to me. It felt impure. But, now I know that I do not create the anxiety anymore than I create the swelling that accompanies rolling an ankle. The swelling is a gift, a gift from my body, from the forces of life creating my body. My body, through swelling, tells me not to walk on the rolled ankle, and tells me to let the ankle heal.
Wherever we look there are bodies swelling, wounded, and scarred. Forests are clearcut, rivers no longer flow to the sea, and canyons are flooded by reservoirs. Life speaks through bodies – ours’, forests’, rivers’, canyons’ and so many more. Life tells us to let these bodies heal.
Before healing can take place, the injury must be stopped. Life, everywhere, is being injured. It does not matter how we stop the injury. But, we must stop it. There are a growing number of us in Park City who are willing to do more than is currently being done. We are willing to place our bodies in front of those destroying the planet – bodies we love as much as you love yours. Many of us are young, lack the wealth of older generations, look at a future growing darker and darker, and say, “This must stop.”
We could use your help.
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Jul 8, 2017 | Alienation & Mental Health
One human language is much too small to convey the ever unfolding meanings at play in the world.
by Will Falk / Deep Green Resistance
I am an environmental activist. I have depression. To be an activist with depression places me squarely in an irreconcilable dilemma: The destruction of the natural world creates stress which exacerbates depression. Cessation of the destruction of the natural world would alleviate the stress I feel and, therefore, alleviate the depression. However, acting to stop the destruction of the natural world exposes me to a great deal of stress which, again, exacerbates depression.
Either, the destruction persists, I am exposed to stress, and I remain depressed. Or, I join those resisting the destruction, I am exposed to stress, and I remain depressed.
Depressed if I do, depressed if I don’t. So, I fight back.
I will always struggle with depression. I know it sounds like the typically fatalistic expression of a depressed mind, but accepting this reality releases me from the false hope that I will ever live completely free from the guilt, hopelessness, and emptiness that are depression. Accepting this reality, frees the emotional energy I spent clinging to false hope. Instead of using this energy searching for a cure that never existed, I can devote this energy to activism and to managing depression in realistic ways.
Coming to this realization was not easy. It’s taken me five years since I was first diagnosed with a major depressive disorder, confirmation of the diagnosis from three different doctors in three different cities, two suicide attempts, and more emotional meltdowns than I can count to finally accept my predicament.
***
Uintah Basin drilling at night. Credit: Wikimedia
A recent drive through the oil fields in Utah’s Uintah Basin reminds me why depression will haunt me for the rest of my life.
The drive east on U.S. Highway 40 from Park City, UT to Vernal leaves me nowhere to hide. In my rearview mirror, melting snow sparkles as it dwindles high on the shoulders of the Wasatch Mountains. Climate change threatens Utah’s snowfall and Park City may be bereft of snow in my lifetime. Pulling my gaze from the mirror to look through my windshield, tall thin oil rigs rise from drilling platforms to pierce the sky after they’ve pierced the earth. Next to the platforms, well pumps move lethargically, doggedly up and down. The wells are mechanical vampires, stuck in slow motion, sucking blood from the earth.
While the rigs inject poison and the pumps extract oil, it’s hard not to think of the addict’s needles. Scars form on the basin floor where once-thick pinyon-juniper forests and rolling waves of sagebrush are piled in heaps around the fracking operations. The swathes of destruction betray addiction as surely as track marks.
I pass countless tanker trucks parked next to round, squat oil storage containers. The trucks are filling up with yellow crude before hauling the oil to refineries in Salt Lake. From there, the oil will be shipped all over the West to be burned. Each oil platform, each rig, each well I pass strikes a blow to my peace of mind. Each truckload of oil burned pushes the planet closer to runaway climate change and total collapse.
My intuition is infected with a familiar dread. Looking around me, I am met only with trauma. So, I look to the future. I see sea levels rising, cities drowning, and refugees fleeing. I see oceans acidifying, coral reefs bleaching, and aquatic life collapsing. I see forests burning, species disappearing, and topsoil blowing away.
I don’t see a livable future.
My hands tighten on the steering wheel, the muscles in my face cramp, and I feel nauseous. My left foot is restless. My right foot, though it is busy with the accelerator, is restless, too. I am speeding. My body is confused. It has no evolutionary reference for being trapped in the cab of a car while traveling at highway speeds.
If you could see through my flesh and bone to the organs forming my stress response system, what would you see? You’d see my adrenal glands pumping out stress hormones. You’d see the stress hormones preparing my body and brain to fight or flee. After a few minutes, you’d see my shrunken, damaged hippocampus trying to signal my adrenal glands that the threat has passed and to stop flooding my frontal cortex with stress hormones. You’d see my hippocampus fail, my adrenal glands continue to pump out hormones, and my risk for sinking into a full-blown episode of depression rise.
Oil well in Duchense County, Utah. Credit: Wikimedia
***
Neurobiological research suggests that the highly recurrent nature of depression is, in part, linked to the way stress hormones can produce brain damage. Advances in neuroscience unveil a conception of depression as a vicious cycle in the body’s stress response system. In a healthy system, adrenals produce hormones in response to stress. The stress passes and the hippocampus signals the adrenals to stop hormone production.
When the frontal cortex – especially the hippocampus and amygdala – is exposed to too many stress hormones, for too long, the frontal cortex begins to shrink. A damaged hippocampus fails to stop the adrenals which continue to produce stress hormones which continue to damage the hippocampus. Mood, memory, attention, and concentration are all affected. Problems with mood, memory, attention, and concentration create their own stresses which intensify the cycle.
Recent psychiatric findings paint a bleak picture. The American Psychiatric Association describes depression as “highly recurrent,” with at least 50% of those recovering from a first episode experiencing one or more additional episodes in their lifetime, and approximately 80% of those recovering from two episodes having another recurrence. Someone with three or more episodes has a 90% risk of recurrence. On average, a person with a history of depression will have five to nine separate depressive episodes in his or her lifetime.
I have had four distinct episodes of depression which all but guarantees that depression will continue to recur for me. I do experience periods of remission where I am relatively free of the symptoms of depression. But, even in these times, depression lurks in the shadows forcing me into a perpetual vigilance, struggling to avoid relapse. Depression may fade, but memories of depression’s pain never do. I live in fear, daily, that the next episode is just around the corner.
Mainstream psychology stops the discussion, here, to prescribe avoidance of places that trigger depression, like the Uintah Basin and to conclude that a combination of improving the hippocampus’ ability to switch off stress hormones, eliminating as much stress from the depressed’s life as possible, and coping with the stress that can’t be eliminated is the key to recovery.
I have no reason to believe this wouldn’t work, in another time or another world. But, most of the planet has been turned into places like the Uintah Basin. There are precious few places free from civilized violence. While our homes are on the brink of annihilation, while horror adheres to our daily experience, while protecting life requires facing these horrors, is the elimination of stress possible? Is coping honest?
***
Credit: Gordon Haber, National Park Service
Ecopsychology shows that the elimination of stress is not possible in this ecological moment. Where psychology is the study of the soul and ecology is the study of the natural relationships creating life, ecopsychology insists that the soul cannot be studied apart from these natural relationships and encourages us to contemplate the kinds of relationships the soul requires to be truly healthy. Viewing depression through the lens of ecopsychology, we can explain depression as the result of problems with our relationships with the natural world. Depression cannot be cured until these relationships are fixed.
This explanation begins with stress and the body’s relationship with it. Stress is fundamentally ecological and can be understood as flowing through an animal’s relationship with his or her habitat. The classic example of the ecological nature of an animal’s stress response system involves the relationship between prey and predator. When a moose is beset by wolves, her stress response system produces hormones that help her flee or fight the wolves.
The relationship formed between the wolf, the moose, the moose’s stress hormones, and the moose’s stress response system is one of the countless relationships necessary for the moose’s survival. This is true for everyone. Other relationships animals rely on include air, water, and space, animals of other species, members of the animal’s own species, fungi, flowers, and trees, the cells forming the animal’s own flesh, the bacteria in the animal’s gut, and the yeast on the animal’s skin. Relationships give an animal life, and in the end, relationships bring the animal’s death. In an animal’s death, other beings gain life. The history of Life is the history of these mutually beneficial relationships.
Civilized humans poison air and water, alter space, murder species, destroy fungi, flowers, and trees, infect cells, mutate bacteria, and turn yeast deadly. In short, they threaten the planet’s capacity to support Life. Not only do civilized humans destroy those we need relationships with, they destroy the possibility of these relationships in the future. Every indigenous language lost, every species pushed to extinction, every unique acre of forest clearcut is a relationship foreclosed now and forever.
Living honestly in this reality, we open ourselves to depression. Losing these relationships, and seeing a future devoid of the relationships we need, creates unspeakable stress. Living with this stress every day can flood the frontal cortex with stress hormones, shrink the hippocampus, and push the stress response system past its ability to recover.
If this happens, you may be haunted with depression for the rest of your life.
To experience major depressive disorder is to know consciousness is an involuntary bodily function. Just like your heartbeat, you cannot turn consciousness off without chemicals, a blow to the head, or some other violence to the body and brain. Awareness is a muscle, and perceiving phenomena is how this muscle works. Depression is constant pain accompanying perception. In the civilized world, pain and trauma reflect from countless phenomena. The destruction has become so complete, consciousness finds nowhere to rest in peace, no place free from the reminders of violence.
***
Credit: Lain McGilcrest / Regent College
I know I have described a harsh reality for those of us living with depression. It is, however, the reality. For many of us, depression is a lifelong illness. In the long run, accepting a harsh reality is always better than maintaining denial. I have found that accepting this reality helps me manage my depression daily and enables me to be a more effective activist.
Accepting that I will always struggle with depression does not imply giving up. On the contrary, accepting this struggle requires a commitment to daily discipline. Several of my doctors have compared depression to diabetes. Just like many diabetics have to monitor their blood sugar, avoid certain foods, and regular exercise, depressives must build a daily practice into their lives. For me, this means regular cardiovascular exercise that helps my body deal with stress hormones, getting eight hours of sleep nightly, drinking alcohol sparingly, limiting situations where I am tempted to ruminate, and a consistent investment in my social relationships both human and nonhuman.
Coming to grips with the lifelong nature of depression has also given me firepower against depression’s perpetual guilt. The guilt associated with depression can become so pervasive it builds layers on itself. I feel guilty, for example, when I am tired, when I can’t seem to focus on writing, when I cannot find the mental fortitude to see the tasks I’ve promised to complete through to conclusion. I remind myself that lack of energy and problems with concentration and goal-oriented thinking are symptoms of depression. Then, I feel guilty for forgetting and guilty for letting myself feel guilty.
Accepting that I will always struggle with depression is accepting that I will always struggle with the symptoms of depression like guilt, too. Knowing this, when I find myself mired in cycles of guilt, I stop trying to rationalize my way through the guilt and simply place the guilt in a corner where it doesn’t matter if I should feel guilty or not.
Accepting the lifelong nature of depression relieves me of the search for a cure. The personal search for a cure is quickly converted by depression into pressure to get better. This pressure becomes a sense of failure when depression’s symptoms intensify. While the world burns, the stress causing depression is always present. I may defend myself from this depression effectively for awhile but, the violence is so total and the trauma so obvious, there will be times that the stress overwhelms my defenses. This is not a personal failing and this is not my fault. I fight as hard as I can, but I will not always win.
Most importantly, acceptance makes me a better activist. I cannot separate my experience from the countless humans and nonhumans who make my experience possible. Fortunately, ecopsychology gives me a lexicon to communicate about the relationships creating my experience. Understanding that omnipresent stress, caused by the omnipresent destruction of the relationships that make us human, causes depression frees me from the voice telling me depression is my fault.
Before I could understand this, I had to open myself to the reality of these relationships. These relationships are our greatest vulnerability and our greatest strength. We cannot change this. The ongoing loss of these relationships is incredibly painful. If we want the pain to stop one day, we must fight back. That will be incredibly painful, too.
***
Credit: Pixabay
Life speaks, but rarely in English. One human language is much too small to convey the ever unfolding meanings at play in the world. Wind and water, soil and stone, fin, fur, and feather are only a few of Life’s dialects.
Tectonic plates tell mountains where to form. Blood in the water tells a shark food may be near. Foreign proteins on the surface of dangerous cells, tell your white blood cells to attack. A single chirp, formed in a prairie dog’s throat, lasting a mere tenth of a second, tells an entire colony the species and physical characteristics of an approacher.
You may not hear Life utter the words, “Stop the destruction.” But, Life’s languages are as diverse as the variety of physical experiences. The pain of depression is a physical experience, and it follows that Life speaks through depression. That pain will haunt me for the rest of my life. Life continues to speak. It says, “Fight back.”
Credit: Pixabay
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by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Apr 21, 2017 | Strategy & Analysis
by Will Falk / Deep Green Resistance
In my essay, Park City is Damned: A Case Study in Civilization, I described the vicious cycle Park City, Utah is caught in and explained how the city cannot exist for much longer.
There are far more humans in Park City than the land can support, so the necessities of life must be imported. Importing these necessities costs money and requires an industrial infrastructure. Park City makes its money through a tourist industry that relies on snow, but climate change, produced by the same industrial infrastructure bringing the necessities of life, is destroying the snow. The industrial infrastructure must be dismantled to stop climate change so the snow may survive. Either the snow or the industrial infrastructure will fail.
And, Park City will, too.
Not long after the essay was published, I attended a gathering for an emerging group PCAN! or Park City Action Network. The gathering’s goals included to “create a network for young professionals and build community, to learn what’s going on in local politics, and to find other like-minded individuals to create a strong collective voice.”
I think I’m still young (turned 30 in March), I have a law degree and license (in Wisconsin), and I’m interested in finding like-minded individuals to create a strong collective voice, so I went.
A man approached me, and said. “You’re Will Falk, right? You wrote that article?”
I was embarrassed and nervous people were going to hate me for what I wrote. But, his eyes and body language were sincere, so I told the truth. He asked, “So, you think Park City won’t last?
“Can’t physically last,” I clarified.
“ Right. And, solar power isn’t the answer? Wind power, either?”
“No,” I responded. He looked at me earnestly for a few seconds, looked around at the room of concerned, young professionals, and said, more to himself than to me, “Park City is still damned huh?”
“Still damned,” I said. He sighed and asked,“What the hell have we been working on all this time?”
I shrugged. I wasn’t sure what to say, but I could see acceptance in his face. I simply tried to meet his gaze. Finally, he asked, “What can I do?”
***
Park City’s vicious cycle is a reflection of the vicious cycle the global human population is caught in. There are far more humans than the planet can support sustainably, so the necessities of life must be stolen from non-humans and the future. This theft is managed through an industrial infrastructure powered by fossil fuels and the operation of this infrastructure is destroying the planet’s total life-supporting capacity. It is pushing the climate to temperatures too warm for most species, pushing oceanic life perilously close to total collapse, and contaminating, with toxins and carcinogens, the bodies of every civilized individual.
Unfortunately, with more than half the global human population now living in cities, most humans depend on this system for food, for clean water, and for shelter. Humans have backed themselves into a corner. If this system collapses, huge, urban populations of humans will be left without the necessities of life. But the system must collapse for the planet to survive. Ignorance of physical reality cannot save us from it; either the planet or the industrial infrastructure will fail.
Basic ecology gives us another way to understand this. In ecologic terms, humans have overshot the planet’s carrying capacity through dependence on a drawdown method of temporarily extending carrying capacity. Crash is inevitable, and the longer drawdown occurs, the smaller Earth’s total carrying capacity will be after the crash.
Humans are animals and, as animals, require habitat. Every habitat has a total life-supporting capacity, or carrying capacity. Carrying capacity is the maximum population of a given species which can be supported by a particular habitat indefinitely. Earth, even as the largest habitat, is finite with a specific carrying capacity.
In his ecological classic Overshoot: The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change, Dr. William R. Catton Jr. explains that civilized humans “have several times succeeded in taking over additional portions of the earth’s total life-supporting capacity, at the expense of other creatures.”
Catton’s phrase “at the expense of other creatures” is a nice way of describing extermination. Using 1970 population totals and current trends, the World Wildlife Fund recently published a prediction that by 2020 two-thirds of the Earth’s total vertebrate population (mammals, birds, fish, amphibians, and reptiles) will have been killed by human activities. Biologist Paul Ehrlich, who studies population at Stanford University, says that half of all individual life forms humans are now aware of have already disappeared.
Civilized humans have learned to rely on technologies that augment human carrying capacity in temporary ways. These augmentations are necessarily temporary because the finiteness of every habitat places physical limits on population growth. In other words, you can’t steal more than everything.
The latest and deadliest of the technologies humans have used to augment carrying capacity revolve around the exploitation of the “planet’s energy savings deposits, fossil fuels.” Through these exploitative technologies powered by fossil fuels, Catton argues, civilized humans are now engaged in a “drawdown method of extending carrying capacity.” This method is “an inherently temporary expedient by which life opportunities for a species are temporarily increased by extracting from the environment for use by that species some significant fraction of an accumulate resource that is not being replaced as it is drawn down.”
Daly West and Quincy Mines in Park City (circa 1911) / Wikimedia
This drawdown has allowed humans to overshoot the planet’s carrying capacity. Overshoot leads to a situation where a portion, or even all, of a population cannot be supported when temporarily available, and finite, resources are exhausted. When these resources run out, crash inevitably follows.Civilized humans are destroying countless so-called “resources” that are not being replaced as they are murdered. The extraction of fossil fuels is an easy example. But, civilized humans are also cutting forests and plowing grasslands faster than they can grow back, they’re stripping topsoil faster than it rebuilds, and they’re heating the planet more intensely than life can evolve to keep pace.
Richard Heinberg, Senior Fellow at the Post Carbon Institute, describes what is happening as the ecological phenomenon known as “population bloom” in his book The End of Growth: Adapting to Our New Economic Reality. When a species finds an abundant, easily acceptable energy source (in our case, fossil fuels), its numbers increase while taking advantage of the surplus energy. Speaking to the inevitability of crash, Heinberg writes, “In nature, growth always slams up against non-negotiable constraints sooner or later…Population blooms (or periods of rapid growth) are always followed by crashes and die-offs. Always.”
Crash following overshoot is bad enough, but the problem doesn’t end there. If a population exists in overshoot for too long, drawing down too many of its habitat’s necessities of life, the habitat’s carrying capacity can be permanently reduced. To use simple numbers, start with a carrying capacity of 1000 humans. What happens if 1200 humans, then 1500 humans, then 2000 humans live on the land for too long? Or those original 1000 humans steal other creatures’ carrying capacity and convert it to human use?
That land base’s carrying capacity can be permanently reduced to 800 humans, 400, and so on, over time, all the way to zero. Eventually, the population will crash and that land base will never be capable of supporting humans, or any other life, again. This is as true for the carrying capacity of a small locale like Park City as it is for the carrying capacity of the whole planet.
The horror we live with comes into focus. Most human lives are made possible by a system that will collapse, and the longer that system operates, literally eating Earth’s total carrying capacity, the less chance other lives – human and non-human – have to continue existing.
We have two choices. We can live in denial, even as the evidence of the planet’s murder piles around us. We can anesthetize ourselves with the comforts produced by this insane arrangement of power. We can pray for our own death before the worst of the collapse happens. In short, we can do nothing.
Or, accepting responsibility as people who love each other, love our non-human kin, and love life, we can stop the industrial system from destroying our beloveds.
Once you’ve decided to stand on the side of life, the question becomes, How? How do ensure as much life as possible will survive the coming crash? How do we stop industrial civilization from permanently reducing the planet’s carrying capacity to nil?
***
Longtime environmental activists and writers Derrick Jensen, Lierre Keith, and Aric McBay created a concrete strategy for an effective resistance movement in their book Deep Green Resistance. They named that strategy “Decisive Ecological Warfare (DEW).”
Before you object to the term “warfare,” consider this: In the past, wars killed humans. Today, with human activities killing 200 species daily, we are engaged in a war where whole species are exterminated. We readily recognize the chemical warfare characterizing so many conflicts of the last century and, today, industrial processes create a reality where every mother on the planet now has dioxin, a known carcinogen,in her breast milk.
This is a war. And, we are losing. Badly. If we’re going to win this war, we need to act like a serious resistance movement.
DEW gives us a comprehensive strategy. It is centered on two primary goals. Goal 1 is “to disrupt and dismantle industrial civilization; to thereby remove the ability of the powerful to exploit the marginalized and destroy the planet.” Goal 2 is “to defend and rebuild just, sustainable, and autonomous human communities, and, as part of that, to assist in the recovery of the land.”
Disrupting and dismantling industrial civilization is primary. If industrial civilization is not stopped, then the second goal will be impossible. The land will be pushed past its ability to recover and there will be too few necessities of life left to support autonomous human communities.
Accomplishing these goals will involve five smaller strategies. First, resisters will “engage in direct militant actions against industrial infrastructure.” This may frighten some people and others may feel physically incapable of actions like these. If you can’t engage in these kinds of actions, the people who can will need your material support. In a place like Park City, steeped in privilege, the most obvious form of support the community could offer is money. Those in power are incredibly well-funded. We’ll never match them dollar for dollar. But, that doesn’t mean money can’t be put to good use.
Second, they will “aid and participate in ongoing social and ecological justice struggles; promote equality and undermine exploitation by those in power.” My friend Rachel Ivey, a brilliant feminist writer and organizer, often connects social and ecological justice with the truth that, “Oppression is always tied to resource extraction.” This means that industrial civilization has been built on the backs of people of color, indigenous peoples, the poor, and women. These groups are often on the movement’s front lines, fighting for survival. We must join them in true solidarity.
Third, they will “defend the land and prevent expansion of industrial logging, mining, construction, and so on, such that more intact land and species will remain when civilization does collapse.” Pipeline and port blockades, tree sits, and other forms of non-violent direct action aimed at physically preventing those in power from destroying more of the land is an essential piece of the puzzle. There are roles in the resistance for pacifists and others personally and philosophically unwilling to engage in more militant actions.
Fourth, they will “build and mobilize resistance organizations that will support the above activities, including decentralized training, recruitment, logistical support, and so on.” A serious resistance movement needs artists, writers, and those skilled in marketing and mass media communications. It also needs quartermasters, organizational psychologists, and others trained in logistical thinking.
Finally, resisters will “rebuild a sustainable subsistence base for human societies (including perennial polycultures for food) and localized, democratic communities that uphold human rights.” As collapse intensifies, we are going to need permaculturists, gardeners, and urban farmers to produce food when the industrial networks, currently transporting food, fail.
All kinds of skills will be necessary to stop industrial civilization, but the most important thing is that industrial civilization is actually stopped. All of our efforts must support this primary goal. Right now, the dominant system is barreling down a path that ends in total ecological collapse. Not only is the human species endangered with extinction, but every species – save, maybe a few microscopic species of bacteria – is threatened with annihilation. Before anything else, we must knock the dominant system off that path.
***
I return to answering the question, “What can I do?”
This is the wrong question. Don’t ask, “What can I do?” Instead ask, “What needs to be done?”
Go outside. Look around. Take a deep breath. Feel the oxygen, exhaled by trees, seep into your lungs. Let your breath go, and listen as the trees inhale the carbon dioxide your breath releases. Ask those trees what they need.
Climb to the top of the nearest hill. Find a boulder to sit on and wait. Match the land’s patience. Let gravity pull your bones closer to their ancestors, the bones of the earth. Watch the ants march, dutifully performing work for their community. Listen to the geese arriving for the spring, celebrating their return. Ask the stones, the ants, and the geese what they need. Ask them what needs to be done.
They’ll tell you they need to live.
The trees will tell you that warming temperatures cause cavitation, or bubbles, in the water flowing from their roots to their topmost leaves and that these bubbles kill them as surely as artery blockages kill humans.
The stones will tell you how quickly everything has changed. They will tell you how species they used to watch disappeared faster than stones, who exist on geologic time, can contemplate. They will tell you about mountain top removal, open-pit mining, and earthquakes caused by fracking.
The ants will tell you how they’ve long been involved in planetary cooling processes. They’ll show you how they’re working as hard as they can to build limestone by freeing calcium carbonate from minerals in the soil. And, in the process, trapping as much carbon dioxide as they can.
The geese will tell you of frantic searches for disappearing wetlands, of once wild rivers dammed, drying, and no longer flowing to the sea.
When you stop asking “what can I do?” to begin asking “what needs to be done?” it is true, you may expose yourself to a world in pain. But, you’ll also find countless allies asking the same questions you are. You may rip the scar tissue of denial that has been shielding your eyes from the near-blinding truth. But, once you let the sunlight in, once you step outside into the real world, you’ll open yourself to a world fighting like hell to survive.
We’ve been waiting for you.
Will Falk moved to the West Coast from Milwaukee, WI where he was a public defender. His first passion is poetry and his work is an effort to record the way the land is speaking. He feels the largest and most pressing issue confronting us today is the destruction of natural communities. He received a Society of Professional Journalists, San Diego Chapter, 2016 Journalism award. He is currently living in Utah.
To repost this or other DGR original writings, please contact newsservice@deepgreenresistance.org
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Feb 18, 2017 | Alienation & Mental Health, Human Supremacy, Listening to the Land
Featured image: Mauna Loa, night time view (Photo: Rustedstrings/Wikimedia/CC BY-SA 3.0)
by Will Falk / Deep Green Resistance
So many indigenous people have told me that the levels of sustainability their traditional cultures achieved prior to the arrival of colonizers were based on lessons learned from non-humans. Implicit in these lessons is the truth that humans depend on non-humans. This dependence is not limited to the air we breathe, the water we drink, or the food we eat. This dependence sinks into our very souls.
For many indigenous people I have listened to, the basic reality of human dependence demands that humans regard non-humans, regard life, regard the universe with deep humility.
If we simply learn to listen, we will hear non-humans demonstrating humility everywhere. Trees know they are nothing without soil, so they build forests as monuments to soil health – collecting, storing, and restoring nutrients to their life-giver. Salmon know they are nothing without forests to hold river banks together, so they swim deep into the cold oceans to feed, bring their bodies back upriver to die, and, in death, feed the forests. Phytoplankton know they are nothing without a climate that allows warm and cold ocean waters to mix, producing currents that bring them their food. So, phytoplankton feed the salmon that feed the forests that store carbon that has the potential to destroy the climate that feeds the phytoplankton.
Approach non-humans with humility, and you may find them willing to teach you.
******
It was the stars who put me in my place. I know this, locating myself in my memories of cold nights in the open air and my sleeping bag, watching the clear sky from the shoulders of sacred Mauna Kea in Hawai’i. I rest north to south. The Southern Cross sits low on the horizon, just above the outline of my toes warmly wrapped in down. I arch my back and look high above me where Polaris holds the sky steady. To my right, the sun pulled the darkness over like blankets on a bed and fell asleep. In the space between Venus and Orion’s Belt, there are more shooting stars than I have wishes. To my left, a faint anxiety grows. When the sun wakes, its siblings – the stars – will disappear.
“I” diminish in these moments. My mind quiets and and there are only the gifts the stars give.
Stars are so fundamental to our existence they give us the ability to contemplate the process that allows us to perceive them. Perhaps, this is why stars are so beautiful. When we view them, we see the beginning of everything.
Stars are the oldest nuclear reactors. The gases they burn produce energy at such great magnitudes they are visible on Earth from hundreds of thousands of lightyears away. They burn like this for time unfathomable until they die in great explosions. When stars explode, the violence alters hydrogen and helium to shower the universe with materials like carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, iron, and sulfur. These materials are the basis of life.
Stars give me the ability to experience. I can experience because I have a body. The elemental showers dying stars produce have organized- first as neutrons and protons, then as atoms, and finally as air, water, soil, stone, and flesh – to form my body. But, stars don’t form only human bodies, they form bones, fur, and fins; skin, scales, and exoskeletons; mountains, oceans, and the sky.
Stars give the universe the first wisdom: For there to be life, there must be death. After a life spent in service as a sun, warming a community of planets, a star dies. It is a violent death – a death that destroys a solar system. But, it is a necessary death. A death that transforms the old into a possibility for the new.
******
My last essay in this ecopsychology series “The Destruction of Experience: How Ecopsychology Has Failed” generated some curious responses from, specifically, ecopsychologists and ecotherapists. Many of them were provoked to defensiveness, denial, or both by my words. In fact, one commentator Thomas J. Doherty, a psychotherapist, was moved to write an essay for the San Diego Free Press where he characterized my report of the failure of ecopsychology as “greatly exaggerated.”
The responses suggest that some of my readers felt like I was attacking their life’s work. Of course, I was. Ecopsychologists, however, need not feel alone in their failure. With the destruction of the planet intensifying at an ever-faster pace, we are all failing.
As I’ve sought to understand the responses I received, I’ve realized that many students of ecopsychology employ a different definition of “success” than I do. Quite simply, their definition is infected with human supremacism.
One way to understand the difference is to ask: Would extinct species characterize reports of the failure of ecopsychology as “greatly exaggerated?” Would Pinta Island Tortoises, Pyrenean Ibexes, Falklands Wolves, Rocky Mountain Lotuses, Great Auks, Passenger Pigeons or any of the 200 species that were pushed to extinction yesterday, the 200 species that were pushed to extinction today, or the 200 species that will be pushed to extinction tomorrow characterize reports of the failure of ecopsychology as “greatly exaggerated”?
Lonesome George Pinta giant tortoise Santa Cruz (Source: putneymark/Flickr/CC BY-SA 2.0)
******
What is human supremacism?
In his 2016 book The Myth of Human Supremacy, Derrick Jensen coined the term “human supremacism” and gave human animals the analysis we so badly need to understand the murder of our non-human kin.
Human supremacism is a system of power in which humans dominate non-humans to derive material benefit. Agriculture is a classic result of human supremacism Agriculture requires clearing the land of every living being in order to plant and harvest a single crop which is then used to feed humans.
Human supremacism makes the fossil fuel industry possible. To produce electricity, to fuel cars, planes, and ships, to produce fertilizers for their crops, humans poison water, rip the tops off mountains, carve scars into landscapes, and fundamentally alter the climate. Even so-called “green energy” is produced by humans dominating non-humans as fragile desert ecosystems are destroyed for wind farms, rivers are dammed for hydroelectricity, and the land is gutted for metals and minerals like copper and aluminum to be used in solar panels.
The power humans have gained over non-humans is rooted in human supremacists’ maintenance of a monopoly of the means of violence over non-humans and their human allies who dare to challenge human supremacism.
The history of wolf-hunting in civilized nations, as just one example, demonstrates this monopoly. Despite centuries of demonization, wolves pose little direct threat to humans. However, when agriculture encroaches on the homes of wolves’ traditional prey causing these species’ populations to collapse, wolves will eat domesticated animals. Human supremacists throughout history have responded with wolf extermination campaigns. The extinction of so many wolf species while many other wolf species tinker on the edge of extinction is testament to the wrath of human supremacism.
Deep ecologist, Neil Evernden, pointed out that scientists in vivisection labs cut the vocal cords of the animals they experiment on. If humans heard the screams of their non-human kin, they would not murder them. Human supremacism takes this practice to the psychological level. You can physically cut the vocal cords of individual non-humans you plan to torture. Or, you can achieve a total silencing of the non-human world if you convince whole human societies that non-humans are incapable of communicating, incapable of screaming, incapable, even, of feeling pain.
Human supremacism cuts the vocal cords of the non-human world, and achieves this silencing, by developing cultural myths teaching that non-humans are “resources” to be used by humans. Living forests are no longer living forests; they are so many square feet of board lumber. Wild rivers are no longer wild rivers; they are so many cubic meters of water. Old-growth prairies are no longer old-growth prairies, they are so many acres of tillable farmland.
Another myth human supremacism propagates is the notion that humans are superior to everyone else. Because humans are superior, human domination of non-humans is completely justified and natural. Jensen shows how strongly humans cling to this sense of superiority. He writes, “Human supremacists – at this point, almost everyone in this culture – have shown time and again that the maintenance of their belief in their own superiority, and the entitlement that springs from this belief, are more important to them than the well-being or existences of everyone else.”
Human supremacists cannot tolerate anyone who reminds them of the insanity of human supremacy. They systematically annihilate traditional cultures and indigenous peoples with sustainable cultures based on human humility. Despite their best efforts to silence the non-human world, on a fundamental level the task is impossible and human supremacists come to hate non-humans for refusing to die quietly. And no one dies quietly. Human supremacists hate the reminders, so they must destroy the reminders, and in the destruction they are reminded again. If we do not stop human supremacists, their vicious cycle will only end when there is total silence.
******
The responses I received for daring to suggest that ecopsychology has failed reveal that the maintenance of human supremacism is more important to many ecopsychologists than ensuring the survival of life on earth.
Let me be clear: There are positive trends within ecopsychology. At its best, ecopsychology uncovers the connection of human souls to the soul of the world, illustrates human dependence on the non-human, and demands effective action to protect the soul of the world and the non-humans we depend on. At its worst, ecopsychology privileges human psychological health at the expense of non-humans, seeks to use the natural world to promote false feelings of peace, becomes an anesthetic in the face of planetary collapse, and is infected with insidious human supremacy.
Ecopsychology’s human supremacist infection is as understandable as it is unforgivable. All of us born into the dominant culture have been indoctrinated to the central tenets of human supremacism. Radical psychologist R.D. Laing, who spent a brilliant career trying to understand how we arrived at a moment where humans were empowered to destroy the planet through forces like thermonuclear war, explained how deeply this indoctrination runs. He wrote, “Long before a thermonuclear war can come about, we have had to lay waste our own sanity. We begin with the children. It is imperative to catch them in time. Without the most thorough and rapid brainwashing their dirty minds would see through our dirty tricks. Children are not yet fools, but we shall turn them into imbeciles like ourselves with high I.Q.s if possible.”
Despite these high I.Q.s that even good-hearted ecopsychologists are equipped with, human supremacism is so entrenched that it is almost invisible. On his way to ripping the mask off human supremacism, Jensen wrote in his study of hatred The Culture of Make Believe that “hatred felt long and deeply enough no longer feels like hatred, but more like tradition, economics, religion…” And, when ecopsychologists place the primacy of human mental, emotional, spiritual, and even, physical health over the continued existence of forests, mountains, rivers, non-human species, and the planet’s capacity to support life, we must extend Jensen’s idea to conclude: Hatred felt long and deeply enough no longer feels like hatred, it feels like ecopsychology.
Too many ecopsychologists, ecotherapists, and so-called environmentalists spend the vast majority of their time devising means to promote human mental health and feelings of peace, hope and acceptance through phenomena like what Doherty calls in his essay “nature contacts.”
Reducing non-humans to “nature contacts” objectifies them. Human supremacist ecopsychologists view living forests as therapy tools. They view rivers as anti-depressants. When humans view forests and rivers as objects to use to gain mental health, they act like men who view women as objects to use for sexual gratification, and white people who view people of color as objects to use for economic benefit.
But, living forests and wild rivers live for themselves.The world is not filled with “nature contacts.” It is filled with aspen groves, great-horned owls, elk, black bears, pinyon-juniper forests, rainbow trout, this smooth blue pebble, that red rock canyon, a particular wisp of fog moving through sage brush. In short, the world is filled with living beings who exist for their own purposes that you and I may never understand.
Ecopsychologists demonstrate where their concern lies through their actions, or what they actually do in their day-to-day lives. When students of ecopsychology are more concerned with how the natural world improves human mental health than they are with the murder of the natural world, they are acting as human supremacists. When their day-to-day lives are spent leading “wilderness immersion trips” for the sake of healing human minds while that very wilderness is threatened with human-induced collapse, they are acting as human supremacists. When their day-to-day lives are spent in the clinic office helping clients “cope” and “adjust to” the insanity of civilized culture while that culture threatens the existence of life on earth, they are acting as human supremacists.
******
I am writing this series because I know there are students of ecopsychology who want to wield ecopsychology’s insights to make the environmental movement more effective, as I do. But to do this, we must be willing to take an honest assessment of ecopsychology that goes beyond human health, to the health of the natural world.
Exploring the different definitions of ecopsychological success helps us make this assessment. It is only possible to consider ecopsychology a success if you subscribe to a liberal, human supremacist worldview.
The human supremacist definition of success begins with what appears, at first glance, to be a series of obvious conclusions. First, human actions are causing planetary collapse. and humans actions flow from human psyches. So, it follows that changing human psyches is the path to stopping planetary collapse. For human supremacist ecopsychologists, planetary collapse is a tragedy, but it is a tragedy for the trauma it causes humans.
While I have no problem with the conclusion that human psyches need to change, I do have a problem with the means liberal ecopsychologists think will achieve this change. Most people on the Left attach positive connotations to “being liberal” and may be surprised by my criticism of the liberal worldview. Nevertheless, one reason planetary collapse is intensifying is the failure of the Left to forsake liberalism for a radical analysis.
The brilliant author Lierre Keith has devised an accurate articulation of the liberal worldview. She explains that, for liberals, the basic social unit is the individual. For liberals, individuals can be understood separate from the social environment constructing them. Liberals believe that attitudes are the sources and solutions of oppression, that pure human thought is the prime mover of social life, and, therefore, education and rational argument are the best engines for social change.
Liberal, human supremacist ecopsychology, because it embraces the notion that the basic social unit is the individual, focuses on healing human psyches one individual at a time. Because liberal ecopsychologists obsess over human thought as the primary culprit in psychopathology, they insist that individual education and rational argument are the best ways to heal widespread, cultural psychopathology. The prevalence of ecotherapy, whether its the healing of individuals in the clinic office, on wilderness immersion trips, or simple talk-therapy sessions conducted outside, is the result of a liberal belief that individual education will save the world.
The liberal, human supremacist worldview allows for ecopsychological success to be achieved on a personal and individual level. For liberal ecopsychologists every person, who alleviates depression with walks in a forest, or engages in grief work to come to acceptance of mass extinction, or finds a personal sense of joy amidst the destruction, is a success.
******
My definition of success, on the other hand, is biocentric and radical. A biocentric definition of ecopsychological success recognizes that non-humans have souls, too, that human souls and non-human souls are expressions of Life’s soul. And, with these souls, comes a right to exist on their own terms. Humans are responsible for planetary collapse and changing human psyches is necessary to stop the collapse. But, the biocentric definition of success recognizes that the human psyche is fundamentally dependent on relationships with non-humans. So, the development of healthy human psyches requires, before anything else, a healthy biosphere.
My definition is also radical. Though most people misunderstand “radical” to mean “extreme,” radical simply means “getting to the roots.” For radicals, “getting to the roots” means understanding, and then dismantling, oppressive power structures on a global level. As part of this, radicals see groups and classes as the basic social unit. An individual’s group or class socially constructs the psyche. Most importantly, radicals understand that material power – the physical ability to coerce – is the prime mover of society. Social change, then, requires organized resistance geared at wielding power.
While I am very happy for individuals with access to existent natural communities who alleviate their mental illnesses through ecotherapy, these individual victories will be more and more difficult to come by so long as more and more natural communities are destroyed. As natural communities are destroyed, rates of human psychopathology will accelerate. Humans will become evermore insane while they cause ecological collapse and, causing ecological collapse, they ensure the impossibility of the physical survival of life.
Liberalism – with its individualism – and human supremacism – with the narcissism it facilitates in the human species – encourages ecopsychologists to ask “What can I do?” This question is no longer adequate. A biocentric, radical analysis pushes us beyond asking “What can I do?” to ask: “What needs to be done?”
More than just human individuals need to be saved. Human cultures where widespread psychopathology is impossible need to be created. To achieve these cultures requires dismantling the power structure causing ecological collapse, the power structure crushing sustainable cultures, and the power structure thwarting efforts to recreate sustainable cultures. Civilization – defined as a culture resulting from and producing humans living in populations so dense they require the routine importation of food and other necessities of life – is this power structure.
Civilization must be dismantled. This will not be achieved in the mind. Civilization is not an emotional state. It is not a misunderstanding. It will not be cured with rational argument.
Civilization is maintained by force. Men with guns and bombs ensure that business is conducted as usual. These guns and bombs give human supremacists power. They give human supremacists the ability to coerce everyone else. Human supremacists gain their guns and bombs, the physical force they require to protect civilization, through destruction of natural communities. Guns and bombs require mines, pipelines, and factories and the pollution mines, pipelines, and factories produce. To deprive human supremacists of their power requires depriving human supremacists of their physical ability to exploit natural communities. It requires dismantling mines, pipelines, and factories.
The question is, what are we waiting for?
******
In the end, we are waiting for death. This death can be psychological. We can let the misguided hope in ineffective tactics die. We can let the mistaken belief that human well-being on a collapsing planet is possible die. We can let the insane insistence that we are more valuable than non-humans die.
Or, all of us will die.
I return to the stars. The stars illuminate our radical dependence on the non-human world for our existence. The stars teach that death brings new life. Death can be painful. I’m sure the death of a star, and the incineration of a solar system, is incredibly painful. But, after the pain, after the death of the old, a new life begins. Human supremacism must die, so a new human humility can begin.
Will Falk moved to the West Coast from Milwaukee, WI where he was a public defender. His first passion is poetry and his work is an effort to record the way the land is speaking. He feels the largest and most pressing issue confronting us today is the destruction of natural communities. He received a Society of Professional Journalists, San Diego Chapter, 2016 Journalism award. He is currently living in Utah.
To repost this or other DGR original writings, please contact newsservice@deepgreenresistance.org
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Jan 14, 2017 | Alienation & Mental Health
by Will Falk / Deep Green Resistance
I do not remember the first time I saw my mother’s face, though I know she remembers the first time she saw mine. It was the very beginning of my life, my birth. I do not remember the first time I saw my mother’s face, but, I do remember the first time I saw my mother’s face at what would have been the end of my life after I tried to kill myself.
This is what I’m thinking about as I hold my fifteen-month-old baby nephew Thomas while he falls asleep.
A soft darkness blankets the room. The curtains are tied back on either side of the room’s only window and the night pours in. A wet snow falls with the starlight in a sprinkling of silver and gray. A few nights before full and the moon is strong. Shadows flicker on the floor below the window. A pine whispers outside where the wind brushes powder from her branches.
His head is nestled between my chest and shoulder. I lean back into a wide chair, careful not to let my elbow bump the armrest and jostle Thomas’ little head. Thomas’ eyes are open as he watches the snow fall with me. In the spaces between the clouds, the sky is revealed as a deep blue. The moon’s glow gently pulls the blue down where it settles as the same color in Thomas’ eyes.
The snow sets a contemplative rhythm. As the flakes grow and the snow slows, Thomas’ eyelids become heavier until his eyes no longer stay open. I cannot decide whose rest is more peaceful: Thomas’ or the snow’s. In the stillness, holding Thomas close, I feel two heartbeats. Mine is slower and heavier, while Thomas’ is gentler, quicker. Once in a while, the beats sync together and it feels like a chord plucked far away strikes us gently, runs through us, and echoes on.
Outside, the falling temperature is indicated by fog growing on the corners of the window. Inside, I feel the familiar warmth that grows in my chest whenever I hold Thomas. It’s not just Thomas’ small heat emanating through his pajamas and his favorite blanket into my body.
The warmth’s source is gratitude. Holding Thomas like this, listening to the smallness of his breaths and the gentleness of his heartbeat, I recognize the way Thomas is wholly dependent on those who love him for his life. First, his body was nurtured for nine months in his mother’s body. After his birth, he required his mother’s milk for sustenance. As he grows, he needs his mother, his father, and all those who love him to feed him, to clothe and bathe him, to provide shelter, to attend to any illness he experiences, and to make sure he has hands to fall into now that he climbs everything his strength will allow. Right now, he needs me to provide his nightly bottle, to hold him close and steady as he falls asleep, and then to lay him down in his crib.
Thomas teaches me about my own dependence. The warmth I experience holding Thomas bonds me to him. This connection makes threats to his well-being threats to my own. If he is hurt, I will be hurt, too. Feeling this warmth and understanding the connection forming, I feel I am participating in an ancient emotional ritual. One of the circles of life is completed in this experience. I know, now, what my mother must have felt holding me. The humility in the feeling is staggering.
I wish nothing would ever disturb this little creature asleep in my arms. I wish he could live his whole life laughing like he does when his hands find a new texture they’ve never experienced before. I wish he could live his whole life the way he dances in a style completely lacking self-consciousness anytime music becomes audible. I wish he could live his whole life confident that a loved one will envelop him in a sincere embrace whenever he reaches out for one.
There is horror in my wish. I know no one who has ever loved a child could guarantee the child’s total safety. But, in today’s world where we are poisoning our water, making our air nearly unbreathable, burning our soil at dizzying paces, and irreversibly altering our climate, children born today may find their homes unlivable when they reach my age. In fact, generations of children born in the colonies and sacrifice zones have already found their homes unlivable.
I think back to the worst two days of my life. They weren’t the two days I tried to kill myself. They were the two days after when I sat across from my mother, trying to meet the sky’s dusk blue in her eyes, while I explained to the woman who sacrificed so much to give me life why there was nothing more she could have done to prevent me from trying to take that life.
While I am holding Thomas, I cannot stop the visions of his future from forming. Feeling the love I feel for him right now, I cannot imagine the pain I would feel if he sat across from me, head bent under the invisible weight of despair, as he explained how there was nothing I could have done to stop the major depression he experiences. And in my memories of my mother and visions of Thomas’ potential future, I recognize the truth: Even if we succeed in keeping our children physically safe, in this time of ecological collapse we cannot shield their souls from the psychological effects of the destruction.
My nephew, Thomas. Photo by Paula Bradley.
***
We live in a hell where our very experience is being destroyed.
Ecopsychology was supposed to lead us out of this hell. It was going to do this by bringing together ecology and psychology to attack the illusion that we are fundamentally isolated from each other, the natural world, and ourselves. Theodore Roszak cites a 1990 conference held at the Harvard-based Center for Psychology and Social Change entitled “Psychology as if the Whole Earth Mattered” as one of the seminal events in the new ecopsychology movement. The ecopsychologists gathered there summed up one of ecopsychology’s defining goals: “if the self is expanded to include the natural world, behavior leading to destruction of this world will be experienced as self-destruction.”
A few years later, in 1995, the term “ecopsychology” entered the popular lexicon with the publication of a collection of writing by psychologists, deep ecologists, and environmental activists titled, “Ecopsychology: Restoring the Earth, Healing the Mind.” In what would become a foundational text in ecopsychology, Lester R. Brown, author and founder of the Worldwatch Institute and the Earth Policy Institute, provided an introductory piece, “Ecopsychology and the Environmental Revolution: An Environmental Foreword.”
Brown’s excitement was so high, he predicted “a coming environmental revolution” and wrote, “Ecopsychologists…believe it is time for the environmental movement to file… a ‘psychological impact statement’. In practical political terms that means asking: are we being effective? Most obviously, we need to ask that question with respect to our impact on the public, whose hearts and minds we want to win over. The stakes are high and time is short.”
If we use the 1990 conference as a beginning, ecopsychology has had 27 years to teach “Psychology as if the Whole Earth Mattered.” It has had 27 years to answer Brown’s question, “are we being effective?” It has had 27 years to win over the hearts and minds of the public. And, the stakes are only higher, time is only shorter.
Ecopsychology has failed. Ecologically, the diversity of life around the world is worse off with the rate of species extinction only intensifying in recent years. Psychologically, the rate of mental illness is even worse than in the 90s. And, as far as the “hearts and minds of the public”? Well, close to 63 million Americans just elected a climate change denier to the most powerful political position in the world.
Ecopsychology’s failure stems from an unwillingness to carry the material implications of the very insights ecopsychologists have made to these implications’ logical conclusion. These insights can be distilled into a few, potent premises.
***
I. The human mind originates in its experiences of its environment. In other words, the human mind is experiences of environment.
What do I mean by “environment”? For my purposes, the environment is the sum of all relationships, conscious and unconscious, physical, emotional, and spiritual, creating our lives.
Some of these relationships are as obvious as the sun’s heat, the moon’s pull, and the stars’ mysteries. Some of these relationships need no explanation: the nearness of your lover’s body, the taste of ripe blackberries, the sound of an elk bugle over the next ridgeline at dusk. Some of these relationships are as widely-studied as our dependence on our mothers’ bodies in the earliest stages of our development, as the dominance abusers gain over the abused, and as the influence modern advertising has on our desires. Some of these relationships – like the ones lost with the disappearance of hundreds of species daily, like the disintegration of connections with our ancestors, like the inability to make any sense of our dreams – have been ignored by the dominant culture for far too long.
One of the defining characteristics of ecopsychology, is a rejection of Descartes’ “I think, therefore, I am.” Ecology, recognizing that life is sustained by countless connections between living beings, replaces Descartes’ statement with “We relate, therefore, we are.” James Hillman articulates this rejection as a demonstration of the “the arbitrariness of the cut between ‘me’ and ‘not me’” that has dominated civilized thought for the past 4 centuries.
Out of this rejection comes the necessity for what Anita Burrows calls an “expanded view of self.” Drawing on her clinical experience with children, in her essay “The Ecopsychology of Child Development” Burrows argues, “If we see the child inextricably connected not only to her family, but to all living things and to the earth itself, then our conception of her as an individual, and of the family and social systems in which she finds herself, must expand.”
It is here that we first encounter implications that ecopsychology has proven unwilling to respond to. What do we find when we expand our vision of self to include “all living things and to the earth itself”? We find all living things under attack and the earth threatened with total collapse.
***
II. Human behavior originates in the human mind. So, human behavior originates in experiences of environment.
The origination of human behavior in the mind is neither new nor controversial. The origination of human behavior in experiences of environment is also largely accepted in mainstream psychology as long as that environment is limited to human social interaction.
Radical psychologist R.D. Laing, whose work brilliantly describes the alienation infecting Western humanity, succinctly explains the situation in his work The Politics of Experience, “Our behavior is a function of our experience. We act according to the way we see things.” Laing illustrates the importance of human relationships in our conception of self, “Men can and do destroy the humanity of other men, and the condition of this possibility is that we are interdependent. We are not self-contained monads producing no effects on each other except our reflections. We are both acted upon, changed for good or ill, by other men; and are agents who act upon others to affect them in different ways.”
Laing, for all his wisdom, examines only a small part of the environment producing the human mind. We can correct his vision and come to a deeper understanding of the human psyche if we accept the definition of “environment” I created above. Expanding Laing’s conception of self, we can re-write his analysis as: Humans can and do destroy the relationships sustaining life, and the condition of this possibility is that we are interdependent on countless connections. The natural world, which includes us, is both acted upon, changed for good or ill, by the totality of these connections. Our environment, whether it is a healthy natural community or an artificial human one, acts upon others to affect them in different ways.
***
III. Changes in experiences of environment lead to changes in human behavior. Healthy experiences of environment produce healthy behavior. Unhealthy experiences of environment produce unhealthy behavior.
This premise is Paul Shepard’s thesis in Nature and Madness. Beginning with the question, “Why does society persist in destroying its habitat?”, Shepard blames the physical destruction wrought by civilization and the way this destruction influences human ontogeny. A primary strength of Shepard’s analysis is the way he removes human destructiveness from abstractions like greed or evil and places them in concrete processes like biological development. In doing so, he robs those who blame human nature for the destruction of the planet of their excuse for inaction. He also pulls the rug from under ardent liberals who claim we need transformations of human hearts and that the best way to achieve these transformations is through therapy, education, and one-heart-at-a-time crusades.
Shepard blames the knowledge and human organization developed by civilization claiming it “wrenched the ancient social machinery that limited human births” and that “it fostered a new sense of human mastery and the extirpation of non-human life.” This resulted in not just psychopathic individuals, but in psychopathic cultures. Psychopathic cultures produce psychopathic individuals who, in Shepard’s words, heedlessly occupy “all earth habitats,” who physically and chemically “abuse the soil, air, and water,” who cause “the extinction and displacement of wild plants and animals,” and who practice “overcutting and overgrazing of forest and grasslands.”
Healthy human behavior, for Shepard, will only be achieved, then, by a return to the global existence of human hunter-gatherer societies. In doing so, we will return to a way of life in “which our ontogeny has been fitted by natural selection, fostering cooperation, leadership, a calendar of mental growth, and the study of a mysterious and beautiful world where the clues to the meaning of life were embodied in natural things.”
***
IV. Human behavior is destroying the environment. Destroying the environment produces unhealthy experiences of the environment which, in turn, produce unhealthy human behavior.
I am writing this looking out the glass windows of a coffee shop separating me from the reality of a -8 degrees Fahrenheit temperature in Park City, Utah. I can see the digital numbers on the coffee shop’s thermostat: 73 degrees.
I consider what lets me sit here, in comfort, while ten feet away, on the other side of the window, the air would cause the skin on my knuckles to crack and bleed. The energy required to keep this room warm is produced by burning a combination of natural gas sucked from beneath the earth’s surface where it played an integral role in forming the earth’s skin and coal formed by the decomposing remains of ancient forests ripped from wounds in the land. The combustion of the natural gas and coal produces great heat, but it also produces poisonous fumes that trap the earth’s heat in and melt polar ice caps, disturb rain patterns, contribute to species extinction, and threaten life with total collapse.
The glass, wood, aluminum, and steel that forms the wall between reality and me, and holds the warmth in, also allows me to focus my attention on the artificiality of my computer screen. For most of the morning, I am unaware of the gold flickering with the communion of the winter sun on frozen pine branches. I do not see the crystal purity of the cold blue sky. I cannot rejoice in the magic moment water freezes in mid-air to sparkle in a twisting sheen with the breeze.
I am also ignorant in the warning pain caused by cold. Without the sacrifice of the gas and coal, without the theft of the wood and minerals needed for the glass, maybe Winter’s voice would be too stern to withstand. Maybe, the cold is a command to humans to forsake the heights where the region’s pure waters collect. Maybe, the chill is telling us we are too clumsy, too awkward not to foul the waters that will support all of life here through the spring, summer, and fall.
In short, the destruction that produces my comfort allows my narcissism and encourages my apathy, while I continue to contribute to the destruction.
***
V. The cycle of violence perpetuates itself over generations and intensifies as unhealthy experiences of environment become the norm for most humans.
Freud asked, “If the development of civilization has such a far-reaching similarity to the development of the individual and if it employs the same methods, may we not be justified in reaching the diagnosis that, under the influence of cultural urges, some civilizations – or some epochs of civilization – possibly the whole of mankind – have become neurotic?”
It is not the “whole of mankind” that has become neurotic because there exist, and always have existed, original peoples who live in balance with their land bases. But, civilization itself, is insane. Derrick Jensen defines civilization as “a culture—that is, a complex of stories, institutions, and artifacts— that both leads to and emerges from the growth of cities, with cities being defined—so as to distinguish them from camps, villages, and so on—as people living more or less permanently in one place in densities high enough to require the routine importation of food and other necessities of life.”
Civilization is insane because the civilized strip their land bases of the physical possibility of life. As civilization spreads, it leaves an ever-widening circle of destruction. The human minds that develop in this circle of destruction, have had their experience destroyed, and carry their destruction with them to destroy more lands. Each successive generation exists on lands more impoverished than the preceding generations experienced. The environmental catastrophe confronting us is the result of this insane cycle.
***
VI. The environment is finite. Eventually, humans will destroy the possibility of experiences of environment.
The relationships creating our lives can be diminished. Loved ones die, rivers run dry, mountaintops are removed, and species vanish forever. While this process intensifies, the first thing that happens is the diversity of our relationships is destroyed. To borrow Richard Louv’s phrase, we begin to suffer from “nature-deficit disorder.” As humans proliferate and “heedlessly occupy all earth habitats,” most human relationships become relationships with other humans.
R.D. Laing wrote, “If our experience is destroyed, our behavior will be destructive. If our experience is destroyed, we have lost our own selves.” If we expand Laing’s definition of “experience” to include non-human relationships, then we begin to see that not only is our experience destroyed, but the very possibility of experience is threatened.
The material world makes experience possible. Quite simply, without flesh to compose our bodies and brains, without water to carry nutrients to our bodies and brains, without minerals to facilitate electrical impulses, we cannot experience. As we destroy more topsoil, irreversibly alter the climate, and poison the world’s water supplies, we come ever closer to the moment flesh cannot grow, water is transformed from life-giver to death-bringer, and minerals are all trapped in steel beams rusting where they collapsed under civilization’s gluttonous weight.
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VII. We must change human behavior. To change human behavior we must change human experiences of environment.
Medicine tells us that prevention is better than cure. And, eradication of illness is the ultimate prevention. Ecopsychology provides the map for the eradication of the psychopathology currently affecting civilized culture. If we want to prevent this psychopathology from infecting and destroying future generations of human and non-human life, we need to fundamentally alter the sick, disappearing, human-centric environments human minds are currently formed in. We must physically dismantle civilization to give the natural world a chance to heal and truly sustainable human cultures to thrive across the planet once more.
I’ve written several essays, now, making this same point and I’ve received a lot of feedback. Few people disagree with me, but I’ve been very disheartened to learn that many of my readers take my call to dismantle civilization as essentially an internal process. I’ve had writers tell me we need to “re-wild our minds” (as if that is possible without re-wilding the environments producing our minds), we need to grieve planetary and species’ destruction (and while we are grieving more of the planet is destroyed and more species lost which will, I assume, also need to be grieved creating a never-ending cycle of grief), and I’ve even been invited to live in a commune, off-the-grid in South America.
But, civilization is not a mental event. Civilization is a global, physical process that is destroying the planet. While it is producing climate change, ocean acidification, massive deforestation and desertification, there is nowhere to escape.
Unfortunately, too many students of ecopsychology who recognize this, instead of facing the need to physically dismantle the systems causing this collapse, too often retreat to the position that only personal therapy is possible and that the planet can only be saved by curing one mind at a time.
How can James Hillman who has provided so much insight, for example, write: “Psychology, so dedicated to awakening human consciousness, needs to wake itself up to one of the most ancient human truths: we cannot be studied or cured apart from the planet.” And, then, literally in the very next sentence write, “I write this appeal not so much to ‘save the planet’ or to enjoin my fellow therapists to retrain as environmentalists…My concern is also most specifically for psychotherapy…”?
How can Terrance O’Connor, practicing psychologist, narrate a story in which he answers the question “Why should we want mature relationships?” at a conference for divorced people with an outburst that included these statements: “The status quo is that the planet is dying!…healthy relationships are not an esoteric goal. It is a matter of our very survival and the survival of most of life upon this earth” and, then conclude his essay with “What is the responsibility of a therapist on a dying planet? Physician, heal thyself”?
The answer is found in the strength of the very ideology ecopsychology seeks to undermine. Planetary destruction is reduced to an ailment in individual human minds. While ecopsychology wisely recognizes that the human mind is formed by material relationships and that physical threats to these material relationships are physical threats to the human mind, when ecopsychologists concern themselves primarily with psychotherapy they contribute very little to the effort to prevent psychopathology. Ecological psychotherapy, as a practice to heal mentally ill individuals, is merely a band-aid over a gunshot wound.
The natural world does not need more ecotherapists, it needs ecomilitants. It needs strategic, organized resistance to civilization. I say this as someone whose life has been saved by ecotherapy. My life and the lives of those lucky few privileged enough to gain access to ecotherapy are nothing compared to annihilation of life on Earth. If we do not concentrate all our efforts at physically toppling the systems destroying the planet, no amount of therapy is going to save us.
I recall the starlight on Thomas’ peacefully sleeping face. I don’t want my nephew to experience the illnesses causing someone to seek the services of a therapist – ecological or otherwise. I want him to live in a world where the physical richness of his experience guarantees his healthy psychological development. I want him to live in a world that isn’t being destroyed.
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