This essay is a firsthand account of the author Michael Drebert’s visit to Boundary Bay, BC — a shallow bay fringed in-part by a man-made dike, and estuarine marsh. Through his recollection of the visit, Drebert discusses how different forms of ‘taking’ from a particular place can be both obvious, but also inconspicuous. Most importantly, the essay asks what a meaningful response to such activities might entail.
Last week, I decided to throw my bicycle into the back of my ancient Ford truck and head south out of the city. My destination was a place that I’ve been visiting since youth: Boundary Bay, a shallow body of saltwater spanning the municipalities of Tsawassen, Delta, Surrey, and White Rock.
It’s the White Rock portion of the bay that I recall from my youth. My grandmother would take my brother and I to its beach during summers, where we’d be allowed to range freely over the massive stretch of exposed sand at low tide. For hours, we’d wade into the warm tide pools, chasing sculpins, and small crabs. But the prize activity, was the building of a sand fort. Together, or apart, we’d spend what seemed like an entire day constructing raised platforms of sand that were then walled as best we could against the incoming tide. It was pure joy to be sitting in our ‘forts’ as the quickly approaching water of Boundary Bay moved towards us.
Thirty-five years later, I still return to the bay.
Less so to that stretch of perfect sand, but instead to an area on the opposite side. My excitement remains the same as in those early years, except that my attention has now shifted from its sand flats, to its mud flats.
In this section of the bay, there are preserved portions of what would have originally been coastal salt marsh. Less than 100 years ago, this form of habitat would have been prominent around the entire bay. With the influx of settlement by Europeans, residences were built along the shoreline. Attracted by, and taking advantage of the fertile, alluvial soils, these settlers engaged in intensive farming activities. As a result, dikes were built around the majority of the bay to protect the farms. These constructions cut off the usual flow of biological activity between the what is now the seaward, and landward portions of the salt marsh. Although some culverts were also inserted, these semi-permeable structures equally separated the two places, blocking fish, and small mammals from freely traversing back and forth.
Regardless of all these intrusions, a fringe of intact wetland still exists here.
I consider it a gem, and it has captured my heart. Martin Shaw describes the mysterious process of being attracted to a place as being “claimed.”1 And so, I might say something like: this particular shallow body of water, with its fringe of brown-sand beaches, and scruffy marshes, has claimed me. This is a romance that has been in the works for over 35 years.
On that blustery December day last week, after driving out of Vancouver over a couple of bridges, past farmland, eventually parking at Centennial Beach on the west side of the bay, I came to spend an entire day considering my attraction to such a place, and how I might best respond. And now, reflecting on this memory, another relationship to that place emerges: ‘taking’, in this case my ‘taking’ of this remembrance from Boundary Bay. I think about how so often, on my countless visits to different beaches around my home of Vancouver, and also abroad, I’d pick up some stone, or shell that ‘spoke’ to me. If it ‘spoke’ to me enough, I’d usually put it into my pocket, and carry it home. Once inside of my apartment, it would sometimes sit on a shelf, or placed in a box along with a clattering and dusty array of other mineral, and calcerific objects.
For over 35 years, I’ve barely questioned this.
“Of course,” I’d say to myself, “why wouldn’t I take a token to remember a special moment, a special place?” In particular, I have a small collection of agate stones that I collected from different beaches on Haida Gwaii. They now sit in a circle formation on the window sill of my bedroom. Whenever I look at them, my mind seems to become awash in something; something like the wind, or the sun, or the intermittent heavy rains that would pass over the lonely beaches around Rose Spit. So yes, that does have meaning for me, some connection to natural processes that are nearly impossible to express within language.
Even if I’ve taken these things to help me remember a particular place — and although they are often compelling in their own right, as objects outside the context that I found them in — were they not also beautiful on some rain-drenched beach? Were they not beautiful to someone else? Or useful, or necessary?
I want to compare this piece of writing and the memories it expresses to these taken objects — no different then a found cockle shell, or a set of fine, sun bleached bones that belonged to a western sandpiper. My 40-something year old body had to be there, in Boundary Bay — where one object encounters another, or, a material presence, encounters another material presence.
In other words, this essay would be impossible without the physical presence of my body making its way 50 kilometres south, out of Vancouver, where I met the earthen barriers which surround the bay. And once there, riding on my bicycle all day until the sun went down, sweating heavily beneath my Gore-Tex jacket and breathing in cold air which also made my eyes tear.
So, yes, I do believe I’ve taken something.
And, it’s not that I think this is entirely wrong, because all living things take things out of need, survival, happenstance. But usually, for the whole cycle to continue giving, and taking, it has to happen, in one place, or, it must circle back to the very place that the thing was taken from. Using a more more poetic sensibility, Gary Snyder posits another way of saying this: that in acknowledging our (human) need to consume, it would be proper etiquette to then offer a “[s]ong for your supper,”2 in respectful response.
The consequences of taking from somewhere and never giving back are, of course, obvious. Eventually, there is little left to glean, and eventually, when we move beyond the limits of particular places, they break. When it comes to material items, it’s easy enough to understand when there is a failure of reciprocity, but I think this same sentiment can be also be applied to ‘getting’ stories, as well.
To get this story (an account of some place where I do not live), I needed to go somewhere. This inevitably, and perhaps obviously implies ‘using’. My body needs certain things so that it can go places — it needs food, water, clothing, transportation. Where do these things come from? In the case of my visit to Boundary Bay, they almost certainly do not come from that place, but they do come from places, very real places.
Back to my very real, ancient truck, and back to that particular day, last week — along with these questions saturating my thoughts, it was also to my journey ahead that my mind now turned. I arrived at Centennial Beach, on the western side of the bay, around 1pm. The sky was grey, and there was a stiff breeze blowing in from the Salish Sea. I was a little nervous. Was this the right day to be attempting such a long bike ride along the dike? Will the weather continue to deteriorate, turning into rain, and stronger winds? There wasn’t time for second guessing. If I was going to do this, I had to leave right away so that I could get back to my truck before the park ranger locked the gates at 5pm. So I gobbled down some hard boiled eggs, and then off I rode heading towards the Serpentine River located at the eastern terminus of the dike.
The wind was unusually cold, biting at my face and neck.
Except for one, very thin line of bright yellow out towards the Gulf Islands, the sky was solid cloud in all directions. Even though all of this felt less-than-ideal, there was no turning back — I was committed. It didn’t take long before I started seeing bald eagles standing on the mudflats, and perched overhead on the power lines. Eventually, it seemed there was an eagle on every pole, and when I passed beneath looking up, the massive raptors would return the stare. This exchange made me shiver in a way to which I was totally unaccustomed. I thought: “What is stopping these creatures from swooping down with their bright yellow feet, tearing at my neck and carrying off a piece of my flesh to be eaten casually on the mudflats?” I’ll admit that one particular stare was so intense that I lost composure on my bike, wobbling as I sensed a feeling of nausea rise in my throat.
Things were different here. Even though I could still see the distant high-rise buildings of Vancouver, it all seemed so fragile, so vulnerable. Or at least I felt vulnerable, coasting along that thin hump of land meant to keep the salt marsh and all of its inconsistencies out of our human hair.
Half way along the dike, I noticed that the sky had lightened. I wasn’t sure that the weather was going to flip towards ‘pleasant’, but I am a sucker for any sign of sun — it can change everything for me. I also wasn’t particularly cold anymore — probably because of my constantly pumping legs over the smooth, gravel path.
Aside from the eagles, I was distracted from my cycling by many other birds.
In particular, the red-tailed hawks, who would casually swoop across the dike looking for food in either the salt marsh, or the farming fields. I also noticed many birdwatchers, carrying cameras with lenses as big as my legs. I was glad to these folks. Perhaps I sensed a kind of kinship. I rarely take composed pictures of wildlife, but I do look, stare, soak in, and strain to store particular sights into my memory. I think it’s a very similar activity, except I cannot claim any craft here, which certainly plays a role in my fellow kin’s activity out there on the marsh.
However, a pang of discomfort hit me as I considered this commonality. Again, back to my thoughts and feelings of ‘taking’ something from a place. No doubt these camera operators are taking something. Taking images, but also, in order to take these snap shots, the very device used to do so contains within it an incredible array of ‘taking’. Those cameras, worth more that two years of my annual income, undoubtedly come from some place else. The industrial processes involved in procuring such materials, always does harm to particular places. Put more succinctly, Lierre Keith states that, “[i]n blunt terms, industrialization is a process of taking entire communities of living beings and turning them into commodities and dead zones.”3
Another example of this process is the building of dikes, in order to facilitate industrial agriculture. To my right, is a living (although greatly diminished) salt marsh, and to my left is a dead zone of industrial processes which includes pesticides, fertilizers, and heavy tilling. One side allows for myriad life forms to flourish, and the other side is manipulated solely for human-use.
Is it too heavy-handed to say that one side is beautiful, and the other, is ugly?
It might be good to return here to my own initial discomfort of being physically present at Boundary Bay. Clearly, I also use harmful things. The most obvious thing being my truck. And so in an exacting sense, Snyder’s admonition is unavoidable for me. Truly, what is my song for my supper? The supper in this case might be all the elements which got me out to Boundary Bay, but also for this feast of the senses which has turned into this essay.
Is this essay then, my song? In part perhaps, but it remains an incomplete melody. On its own, it lacks the consonance of return. What I mean is that as a piece of writing, it remains within the realm of human nourishment, or meaning. At worst, it only increases the echo chamber effect of human culture, further dividing humans from their true responsibilities to the real, material health of particular places. More so, it gives the illusion of a completed cycle, inevitably leading to further breakage, and increased ‘taking’.
The time it took to get to the Serpentine River was more than double than what I anticipated. I allowed myself to forget this momentarily as I was in need of food, tea, and a place to relieve myself. I only took 20 minutes to rest, where I sat on granite boulders gazing out at the exposed mud flats of the Serpentine River estuary.
The sky at this point had completely changed.
Late afternoon sun poured over the bay, and a near full moon was rising. To make it back to the truck before the gates were locked, I would have to increase my speed by double to make it. There wasn’t time to question my ability here. No one else was embarking along the dike towards Centennial Beach. It was likely too late in the day for most people — the temperature dropping, and nearly time for supper. With the bright moon continuing to rise, I raced out back along the dike, my legs pumping with renewed zeal.
Large birds still crossed overhead, but because the light had diminished, they now seemed like very unusual objects. They were vague, but still intimidating, blending with the browns and the purples of a day-about-to-end. There was one exception to this blurring of life, and it was a phenomenon that I’ve witnessed a few times before. Close to sundown, large flocks of western sandpipers appear together over the water’s edge. Not unlike a school of herring will move, their tiny bodies fly together as one shimmering, and amorphous shape. But what makes this particularly shocking to me, is what happens at sunset.
When the sky is pink, and I happen to be facing the direction that can then view their bellies, all of a sudden, I’ll see a burst of tiny pink flashes — their white undersides acting as perfect screens, reflecting the bay’s show of evening light. After witnessing the sandpipers, I could see that the moon had climbed to the top of the sky — against dark indigo, its snowy glow cast a reflection onto the calm waters of the bay. I had just entered the bounds of Centennial Beach, and felt a rush of calm — I made it, just in time.
I only had a few minutes to load my bike.
The park ranger was weaving her truck slowly through the parking lot, orange lights flashing, letting everyone know that the gate closure was imminent. As my truck warmed up, I ate my remaining potato chips — I was utterly famished. Could I stay the night? Perhaps, but my cupboards were in another place. And so with mixed reluctance I drove my old truck out of the park bounds, pointed it northwards, and headed home towards Vancouver.
I’m writing this now, in my studio. I like to have the door open, but the weather is too cold — being mid-winter on the northwest coast. I like the door open so I can feel the breeze, and to better hear the bird calls. Though, because my yard and my neighbour’s yard are packed with plants, there are a lot of birds present regardless of the season. And even though the door is closed, I can still hear intermittent chirps, trills, and lilts. I don’t know what I would do without this lush garden, and all the visiting animals. Living in the city would be impossible, otherwise.
Given just a little more thought, my appreciation of this garden can flip, completely. In short: the horrors of the city are made acceptable, because of this tiny retreat. Take away my access to this, and I am a very different person. Even a degraded version of ‘land’ lends me the needed salve to continue an urban life. Less a salve perhaps than a balm, for I cannot attribute any medicinal qualities to its makeup.
This quality makes me think about the Tsawassen and Semiahmoo peoples who inhabited Boundary Bay long before European settlers.
It would seem that true medicine is ‘offered’ to those who live in a particular place, so that they can continueliving well in that particular place. Not to heal, and then leave. I would say that pocketing a unique shell, collecting an image in a camera, storing an experience in your mind and heart to be retold later, is similar to this ‘leaving’ experience. It is a draining off of life, taken from a place where it has no opportunity to perish, to decompose, to nurse new life — it breaks the elegance of a necessary cycle.
I don’t live at Boundary Bay, on the ‘right side’ of the dike. That would be impossible, mostly. My fumbling attempts at trying to hunt, forage, and build shelter would no doubt further harm that place. And so, in-line with my interest to pay for my debt of visitation, I decide to pause, and attempt to ask Boundary Bay: what is it you might want, or need? Although my asking is somewhat awkward — sitting in this small studio miles away — one answer comes surprisingly quickly: simply remove the poison.
In the physical, material world, poison is always harmful, and in many cases, deadly. What then might the material poisons in this particular place be? The dike which stretches along the bay, is a simple technology, but it only serves one species. It is effective, very effective in separating the wild processes, from the hyper domesticated processes of city living. But the harm of this dike, the poison of its material intrusion, affects thousands of species, negatively.
Pausing at my desk, my mind flickers back to those childhood memories of my brother and I building sand forts at White Rock Beach. During those countless afternoons, I would often glance back at my grandmother. She was usually sitting in a collapsible deck chair, perched on a sand bar — her oversized sunglasses turned in our direction — and always smiling. As the tide quickly approached, we rushed to complete our forts feeling safe, completely safe.
Even then, I knew that our efforts to keep the cool saltwater at bay, were ultimately futile, that our constructions would eventually collapse.
But still we did our best to play the game: whose fort would last the longest? I count these as some of the most fun, and enjoyable moments of my entire life. If an incoming tide ever began to break up the dike at Boundary Bay, I don’t think I’d be sad, or frustrated. I might even smile: understanding that this is how it should go, that this is natural, or helpful. I might also recognize my kinship with the cool saltwater of the bay, and decide in my own way how to lend-a-hand.
And while I did this work, I might even sense the smile of something, or someone, much older than I: her calm and caring love taking delight in the work of her family. Perhaps then, simply: acts which remove poisons, could be our songs for our supper — a chorus of gratitude for the gift of being alive. And perhaps this kind of singing will attract others to the work, creating meaning and social bonds amidst the places we love,4 healing divisions within human culture, and the land.
Michael Drebert is a writer, gardener, and member of DGR living in Vancouver, Canada. When he isn’t knee-deep in a salt marsh, or rowing a small boat in a local waterway, he’s writing about his love of coastal areas and the need to protect them.
1 Martin Shaw, Scatterlings: Getting Claimed in the Age of Amnesia (Ashland, OR: White Cloud Press, 2016).
2 Gary Snyder, Back on the Fire: Essays (Berkeley, CA: Counterpoint, 2007), 34.
3 Aric McBay, Lierre Keith, and Derrick Jensen, Deep Green Resistance: Strategy to Save the Planet (New York, NY: Seven stories press, 2011), 23.
4 Chris Hedges, “The Politics of Cultural Despair: That’s What’s Killing Us, Not Donald Trump,” Salon (Salon.com, November 1, 2020), https://www.salon.com/2020/11/01/the-politics-of-cultural-despair-thats-whats-killing-us-not-donald-trump.
In the following piece, Mark relates the population growth to patriarchy, exploitation, and capitalism.
Editor’s note: DGR does not agree with all opinions on this article.
by Mark Behrend
The population of Africa is soaring.
Since 1950, it has grown from 227 million to 1.343 billion — an increase of 590%. Over the same period, South America has grown by 425%, Asia by 330%, and North and Central America by 250%, while Europe has only grown by 35%.
There are many reasons for the disparity, though the basic factors are development, wealth, and education. With development, infant mortality generally goes down and life expectancy increases, driving population up. Development tends to increase prosperity, education, and opportunities, gradually bringing population growth to a halt. Under normal development patterns, this results in a huge population increase when an economy is fueled largely by primary industries. Population growth slows as the economy moves into secondary industries, and levels off in a tertiary economy, where wealth is amassed, service industries emerge, and domestic businesses expand into foreign markets. That’s the upside of industrialization.
The downside is that both sides of this growth curve devastate the natural world.
With an exponential increase in the consumption and depletion of natural resources, degradation of air, land, and water, an ultimately fatal attack on biodiversity, and the exploitation of cultures on the back end of the development curve. Rooted in colonialism, the immediate threat to Africa’s people is that most of the benefits of development are going to European, American, and Chinese corporations. This does not appear likely to change. According to U.N. estimates, populations in North America, Europe, and Southeast Asia are expected to stabilize by 2100, while Africa’s is expected to triple.
Due to a variety of factors, including government inaction, corruption, and poor educational opportunities, birth rates remain high. To state it simply, unschooled girls and women have few options in life but to marry young and have four or more children. Ignorance can lead to the persistence of superstitions and regressive cultural practices, such as female genital mutilation, and beliefs that contraception causes promiscuity, infertility, and various health problems.
A recent news story reported that 10% of girls in Senegal are still subjected to female genital mutilation.
The practice remains common on much of the continent. A Senegalese activist said it continues, mostly among the poor and uneducated, who are afraid to defy old customs. He noted that victims often experience a high rate of lasting pain, along with a much higher than normal incidence of menstrual problems. A woman in favor of FGM, however, disagreed and said.
“If women are having problems, it’s because of contraception.”
The more obvious problem with contraception in Africa is that it is rarely used. The population of Senegal jumped from 2.4 million in 1950 to 16.3 million in 2018 — an increase of 675% in 68 years. On average, that’s the equivalent of adding 10% of a country’s current population every year, in perpetuity. The country with the greatest population growth, however, is Ivory Coast, with an astounding 978% increase over a similar period (2.6 million to 25.7 million, between 1950 and 2018). This can be linked directly to corporate exploitation, as the numbers clearly show.
Since independence in 1960, foreign corporations have virtually transformed Ivory Coast into one giant cocoa plantation, to feed the developed world’s voracious demand for chocolate. In 2019, the world cocoa market was worth over $44 billion, and is projected to top $61 billion by 2027. Along the way, Ivory Coast has become the world’s largest producer, with an estimated 38% of global production. In the process, however, 90% of the country’s forests have been sacrificed, and the illusion of economic growth has driven an unprecedented explosion in the Ivorian census.
Several foreign corporations are responsible for this, the principal offenders being Olam International (Singapore); Barry Callebaut (Switzerland); and the American companies Cargill, Nestle, Mars, and Hershey. They have much to be responsible for.
Capitalism’s guiding principle of creating an ever-growing demand at the lowest possible cost has led to more than rampant deforestation.
According to The Guardian an astounding 59 million children, aged five to 17, are working against their will in sub-Saharan Africa, mostly in agriculture. Due to the refusal of some agencies and governments to include family farms in forced labor statistics, however, estimates of the number of victims vary widely. Fortune Magazine, for instance , puts the number of child laborers in West Africa at “only” 2.1 million. Additional data from the U.S. Department of Labor indicate that over a million children under the age of 12 work in the cocoa industry in Ivory Coast and Ghana, which together produce more than two-thirds of the world’s supply.
Thousands are recruited from even poorer African countries, often with promises of good jobs and free education. Instead, they become victims of what is arguably the world’s largest human trafficking and slavery network. Even those working on family farms are often kept out of school to work in hazardous conditions, with 95% of them reportedly exposed to pesticides, and at risk of injury from using machetes and carrying heavy loads.
Pressured by organized boycotts by Europeans and Americans, the industry pledged in 2001 to reduce child labor 70% by 2020.
Instead, a new report says that since 2010, the number of West African children engaged in forced labor has increased from 31% to 45% of the total childhood population. The reason, again, is the basic mechanism of capitalism. Industry influences consumers to demand more, by producing more and advertising it at a lower price — thus enabling corporations to pay farmers even less. As a result, wholesale prices for cocoa have been cut in half since the 1970s. This has been achieved by paying West African farmers between $.50 and $.84 a day, while the World Bank’s poverty line is $1.90. Hence the 60% rise in cocoa production since 2010, the 45% jump in child labor, and the accelerated pace of deforestation. Farmers are compelled to produce more, just to make the same money they used to make for producing less.
The cocoa industry explains this by saying that it decentralized production (i.e., encouraged family farming rather than corporate plantations) to hold down costs. So, now it can’t meet its child labor goals, because family farms can’t be regulated like factory farms. Corporations call this good economics, while a neutral observer might call it legalized slavery.
A 2019 study, reported by The Guardian, says research indicates that the best way to end child labor is by educating girls and empowering women, in what remain highly patriarchal societies.
There are 18 steps in preparing cocoa for the wholesale market, and women and girls perform 15 of them. This is typical of labor patterns in much of the developing world. And it goes a long way toward explaining the poverty, overpopulation, and environmental destruction that plague the “Third World” — and, by extension, the planet as a whole. In Ivory Coast, the production demands and poverty forced on local communities has also forced roughly a million people to seek their livelihoods by illegally deforesting and farming in national forests and national parks. Recent surveys found that in 13 of 23 of these so-called “protected areas,” once thriving populations of chimpanzees and forest elephants have been totally eliminated.
At the current rate, Ivory Coast’s irreplaceable flora and fauna will soon be gone, along with a carbon sink half the size of Texas. Similar scenarios are playing out across Africa, as global agribusiness becomes more invested in African lands. Incredibly, the Ivorian government’s response has been to pass a law that would effectively put the nation’s forestry protection under corporate control for the next 24 years. The argument behind this fox-guarding-the-henhouse policy is that corporations see the “big picture,” while local farmers only see their own immediate needs. The policy would expel those one million illegal farmers from public lands, with no assistance or other apparent options, apart from migration, starvation, or lives of crime.
Such is the grim reality of corporate resource extraction in nations that were European colonies less than a century ago, and today have become virtual colonies of E.U., U.S., and Chinese business. China now has a huge and ever-growing footprint, both in East Africa and in Latin America. On the surface, Beijing paints this as a “win-win” relationship, with China building “free” infrastructure, and bringing big business to the boondocks.
The reality, however, is a far different story — with pipelines and powerplants crossing the Serengeti, a superhighway across fragile Amazon headwaters, and a rival to the Panama Canal on its way to completion, in Central America’s most environmentally sensitive wetlands. And if supposedly accountable corporations in Western democracies can’t stop child labor in West Africa, what are we to expect from a secretive dictatorship like China?
Who will feed Africa as its population doubles and triples, with much of the farmland now leased to Chinese agribusiness?
How long can Africa’s (or Indonesia’s, or Brazil’s) rich biodiversity survive, with their habitat reduced to a corporate commodity? Who would you pick to win a competition between gorillas, elephants, giraffes, and zebras, on the one hand, and global extraction industries, on the other?
As the monocrop cocoa farms of Ivory Coast become infertile and lose their productivity, the booming population will inevitably face growing poverty, and a very real threat of starvation. That isn’t the “corporate plan,” of course. The corporate plan, as one Ivorian farmer observed, is simply to make as much money as possible as fast as possible. And African farmers either play along, or the cocoa companies find those who will. The cycle thus compels Africans to make more babies to work the land, and then rape the land to feed the babies.
When it comes to Africa, ‘supply and demand’ is merely a sanitized term for ‘slash and burn’. Capitalism has no long-term plan for the continent, because the corporations are beholden to non-African investors back home. Their competitive edge is based on exceeding the year-end dividends of their rivals. From a business standpoint, the practical meaning of the profit motive is to use up the planet as fast as possible, and report it for tax purposes as normal depreciation.
Crazy as it sounds, the long-term plan of industrial civilization is simply to have a good short-term plan.
Corporations are all about the current fiscal year, just as democratic governments are all about the next election cycle. Sensible goals (relatively speaking) may be discussed and agreed to in forums like the Paris Climate Accords. But that all presumes a world working toward a common goal. When the negotiators get back home, however, they’re in a competitive race again. It’s nation against nation, corporation against corporation — the “real world” of year-end reports and election cycles, where those “sensible goals” they agreed to in principle are put off until next year. And “tomorrow,” as the song says, “never comes.”
Such are the economic realities that prompted the International Panel on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) to project that by 2050, the world will face between 50 million and 700 million food refugees — a polite term for starving people, coming soon to a country near you. IPBES says the most likely number is between 200 and 300 million. At any rate, it will make Europe’s current crisis of African and Asian refugees (along with Latin American migrants fleeing to the United States) look like a picnic in the park, and today’s regional crisis will become tomorrow’s global disaster. Such is the future of corporate capitalism, where the rich plunder the resources of the poor, create a baby boom for cheap labor, and then — when there is no longer any profit in it — abandon both the people and the land.
The destruction can no longer be confined to the developing world.
This time the migrants will follow us home. Indirectly, their barren land will follow us, too — in the form of climate change, sea level rise, and the other unintended consequences of globalization, in what promises to be capitalism’s last century. There is simply nowhere left to run. As Chris Hedges describes it,
“It’s all Easter Island now.”
Returning to the education factor, population experts have long recognized the link between female education and employment opportunities on the one hand, and population stability on the other. Indeed, wherever women and girls have access to higher education, equal job opportunities, and the right to say “no” to having babies, population either stabilizes or decreases slightly.
For proof, one need only look to South Korea, where this otherwise positive formula is creating an economic problem of its own. Women there have achieved relative parity, in both education and employment. But with patriarchy persisting in the home, fewer than half of South Korean women now choose to marry, and the population is plunging.
In places like Senegal, on the other hand, “women’s liberation” is a largely meaningless phrase.
Only 63% of girls there so much as finish primary school, and less than half make it to high school. After all, what do corporate exploiters need with educated masses in the developing world? How could the plunder continue, if the plundered were taught why they’re being plundered, where their resources go, who reaps the profits, and what the developing world is getting in return?
Such are the hard truths behind industrial civilization. Insane as it sounds, increased population and planetary destruction are the inevitable consequences of “progress,” when sustainability and common sense argue for reducing population, minimizing technology and energy needs, replanting forests, and restoring the land. Corporate executives, of course, denounce such sustainable ethics as wild-eyed, radical nonsense. To their thinking, perpetual growth is the only way to avoid economic stagnation and collapse.
Super-techies like Elon Musk of SpaceX and Google’s Larry Page ignore the math, arguing that we can mine the asteroids, colonize Mars, feed a growing population with hydroponic agriculture, and produce endless clean energy and green jobs. (Former U.S. House Speaker Newt Gingrich went so far as to suggest human colonies on the moon. Gingrich apparently wasn’t aware that the moon has a monthly temperature swing of 540° Farenheit, due to its two-week-long days and nights, and total lack of an atmosphere. Mars, meanwhile, has a highly toxic atmosphere, and an average temperature of -67°. Minor details.)
Technological fantasies aside, these so-called leaders leave one question unanswered:
In what school of economics is it taught that when you knowingly and systematically destroy your home planet, you get another one to plunder for free? What part of “there is no Planet B” did they not understand?
For this episode, we speak with Laura Cunningham of Basin and Range Watch about dozens of large solar energy projects threatening the Mojave and Great Basin deserts in Nevada and eastern California. We explore why utility-scale solar built on habitat is not a solution.
From this episode:
Now that I have seen ten years of solar build out. I was opposing the giant Ivanpah solar power towers in Eastern California deserts. That was a beautiful sloping desert next to the Mojave national preserve, full of Mojave yuccas, rare plants, wild flower blooms. We’d find horn lizards, black throated sparrows. cactus rinds, beautiful little slidewater snakes, harmless, just wanting to live in this area. Tortoises, a lot of tortoises. And it all got flattened, graded, run over by heavy machinery. Now it’s just a disturbed weed field with a giant fence around it. I looked about it. The whole of project – I think it was about 400 MW of energy, but it had a natural gas backup. Then we saw others, and others, still others. Tens of thousands of acres of deserts going under the blades of solar panels. I have not noticed a decline in carbon emissions. Of course, this is just one part of the world: the Mojave desert.
But it does make me think more recently: how much solar will it take to cover the desert before we see that downturn in carbon emissions? I think never. It’s this never ending scenario of needing more and more land, but we are not going to reduce our standard of living. I’ve heard different numbers regarding the pandemic: 17% decline in carbon emissions, maybe it was 12. A sort of a gigantic lowering of carbon emission, what we’d been wanting to have. But it took us really lowering our standard of living. Being much more efficient. Not burning a lot of fossil fuels. That’s actually, maybe, what we have to do in a non-pandemic situation: alter our whole way of living on the globe. And it’s a daunting task. Here we are going to build 60,000 acres of photovoltaic projects. Some of them will have Lithium-ion battery bank storage on protected Joshua tree habitats. That, I predict, will not lower carbon emissions one iota.
Our music for this episode is Melodi från Vest-Agder by Tim Eastwood of Dic Penderyn.
This event will introduce you to on-the-ground campaigns being waged around the planet, introduce various strategies for effective organizing, rebut false solutions through readings of the forthcoming book Bright Green Lies: How the Environmental Movement Lost Its Way and What We Can Do About It, and discuss philosophy of resistance. There will be opportunities to ask questions and participate in dialogue during the event.
The mainstream environmental movement is funded mainly by foundations which don’t want foundational or revolutionary change. Radical organizations like Deep Green Resistance therefore rely on individual donors to support activism around the world, which is why Drawing the Line is also a fundraiser. We’re trying to raise funds to support global community organizing via our chapters, fund mutual aid and direct action campaigns, and make our core outreach and organizational work possible.
Whether or not you are in a financial position to donate, we hope you will join us on November 22nd for this event.
Trinity La Fey writes of sharing walls with abusers, of poverty and work, of finding radical feminism, and of navigating relationships in the midst of a patriarchal society.
By Trinity La Fey
Background is always tedious; I’ll try not to bore. Poverty, racism and sexism were not things I gradually discovered. I spent early years with a ranch-based family, that I had no idea I wasn’t related to, that called me their n!&*$r baby when I reflexively braided my hair into manageable bits. We were all pale as the moon, all American mixed. Their racism confused me because I knew that we were not 100% whatever white was. Children get it. Coming from ranch families that had the grandmother trauma of the depression made the family frugal to the point of neglect. The single man coming from this environment who was responsible for the lives of my brother and I was destitute. There was no one to mitigate his desperate rage and isolation, or inherited, old-timey sexism. We had the lot of landing with a genuine psychopath, but those circumstances would have pushed even the most outstanding person. Because the level of violence and impunity was so extreme, however, there was just no getting out of it (sane or otherwise) without putting a few things together, both about how social power works and the difference between self-discipline, or self-control and say, punishment or manipulation.
Having made it out early, I was also dubiously blessed with the rare experience of living for extended periods of time with all kinds of arrangements: all males, except me; all older women, except me; all women of mixed ages; mixed sexes of different ages; mixed sexes of the same age; and living alone.
When I was outed as a lesbian, at thirteen, it was the most beautiful word I had ever heard. Sure, I was a pariah and I walked down the overcrowded halls of my middle school with my hands frozen in dread that they might graze someone in a way that would make it worse, but I knew that what I felt with her was nothing like I could ever feel with a male, any male, ever. Lesbian. I describe my felling toward men at that time like the glazed eyes of a dead fish. Nothing. I had experienced men and boys and really tried (like a well-trained pretty, pretty, princess sex-kitten). They were just irredeemably disappointing. Same when you get a massage: a woman just knows where and how in a way that men cannot. I’ve no doubt it’s the same for men with men. Over time, maybe it was hormones, maybe it was predation’s flattering persistence, but I did get to finding some of them kind of cute again. I should’ve left it there. They rarely did me anything but harm. By the time I left Narcotics Anonymous, at seventeen, I’d put in eighteen months. By the time I was eighteen, I’d done pretty much everything there was to do out there, for a bookworm.
Poverty is a Wall
A big, big, big, big wall. Barely graduating in between my busy schedule of getting kicked out of places, I knew that I could not afford college, even as the elders that I loved did not. I came from depression trauma people. You never, ever get into debt. So I skipped it. I had been working, after all, since I could remember. I knew what I could make in my little food service wage job that I would feel stuck at until I risked leaving for a slightly less horrid wage job that would have its own special mindfuck lying in wait, until it went under, and over and over. Poor is something that cannot be explained. I was a pedestrian. Unless you have lived in America (not NY, NY) without a car, there can be no understanding. It changes your brain. Like working in service (particularly food service): if you haven’t done it out of need, you cannot know what it is to submit, in this way: to sacrifice pride and dignity while simultaneously pretending to keep face, for a living. It is true in a much more profound way when it comes to pornography and prostitution. There were moments during my time in the industry where I balked, when I wanted to quit and wasn’t able. Some coercion was external, but then sometimes my training just kicked in and stole the voice right out of me. That was not only true “professionally” I recognized.
When I fell in love, at eighteen, with a lesbian couple, there was a lot in the way. Falling in love is a real thing for me. At the time, I’d come from this Conversations With God kick, retrospectively for survival. I cultivated affections wherever I felt them, advocating for open relationships and demanding it in my own. By then, my partner was the guy who didn’t go to the strip club with the guys when they turned eighteen. I made it clear that I didn’t want children and that I would never marry. He agreed and we went on to have thirteen tumultuous years together that taught me three things: in America, if you care about the person that you are having sex with and they have no one else, you need medical access to them that you cannot get unless you are married; everything you do wrong in the beginning, your partner will do wrong in the middle, but if you handle that well, the ending may be prolonged; and, male culture is real and men hide it from women when we learn to see it, then attempt to silence women when we teach ourselves to talk about it. Even the cute ones. We had, none of the four of us, learned any of this yet. My love for this couple taught me so many things: even radicals are territorial; even women loving women can act out gendered violence; I am not immune to jealously; substance abuse is abuse and leads to abuse; and, women have trauma that men don’t have. Men’s dehumanization is sometimes complete even to themselves and still, as a class, there just isn’t the level of crazy-making bullshit for them to deal with all the goddamn time that will give them even the baseline female stress until they go to prison or war. I didn’t understand that when I was with girls, when we were only just beginning to process and experiment. Even with all that surviving girlhood cost, we still had hope kinda’. Now I got it: they were acting out their respective abuse with all the subtlety and skill of people who knew what they were doing. “I met her when I was seventeen, Trin.” one said to me, well on her way to a scene straight out of The Feminist Mystique. They definitely understood the master’s tools. We just didn’t know how to not use them.
The love and the shock, the violence of it coming this time so unexpectedly, the resignation, the loss and change demanded of all of us from that experience changed me in a way I didn’t know I could change again (but have come to appreciate will happen again and again). The other woman that survived that relationship is, I hear, happily married to a woman she loves and has (hopefully still) no warrants out for her arrest. I have fallen in love with no woman since. I thought, for a time, that it was protective, or somehow an unconscious choice I had made. After all, how could I not be attracted to women? It just never came to love again. I still love her and I know I always will: the kind of love no man can know. I know that we are better apart.
Then Came the Epiphanies
Things a self primed by Howard Zinn and Daniel Quinn could not anticipate. Another aspect of poverty, though not limited to it, is that of sharing walls with abusers. There was not a single building in which I lived (and I’ve lived in more than my share) where abuse did not occur. I remember so clearly the way it first came to me. I had tried everything: cops, social services, spells, yelling, inquisition, helpful offers, intrusion, song, shame, public letters. At each new space, an old option had been considered, tried and discarded. I was standing in front of a window, losing vision, hearing it fade, going still and numb as can happen. I saw an individual life’s accumulated sexual terror, like a ground zero, from which a golden-grey shockwave of mangled souls was spreading out past the horizon in all directions. Visions are hard to describe or convey, like books are to movies, but I understood something that all the violation I had seen and endured could not make me understand. The scope, the breadth of it was so vast, so deep, so impersonal that I finally got it. Then again with Darfur. Then again with human trafficking. Then again with Juarez. Then again with porn. Each next-day, ashen-faced me was an increasingly different person along a trajectory I could not see.
About halfway through my twenties, internet access was finally available to me in the home. It was a slow YouTube crawl (ongoing) to find my people, although I didn’t know at the time that’s what I was doing. I would’ve just said I was doing research, because sifting through the chaff factory that is the internet was very educational. Not bothering with social media, I came in with just enough immunity to not get too distracted. I’d been following the work of Chris Hedges (whose speeches are excellent background for me) for years by the time he gave me the gift. It was an interview with Lee Lakeman and Alice Lee during which he said, and I heard for the first time in my life, the name of Andrea Dworkin. A researcher oughtn’t need to be told twice. I listened to all of her available speeches. Then I read all of her non-fiction. Then the non-fiction of the other second and first wave women (still at it; what a library our forewomen have made!), whose lectures were oases of helpful vocabulary, theory and reassurance.
Maybe it was just my wyrd, but considering how deliberately I made my conscious choice, before I found radical feminism, to never be with another man, I suppose I should’ve seen him coming, but I didn’t. When I met my future husband, in my thirties, I had finally gotten access to some public assistance that had helped me get out of a situation. Invasive, humiliating, void of human consideration or respect for human dignity, the system was not a favored lifestyle choice. It was a double-bind between having my home invaded every six months, while being periodically psychologically terrorized, or, being consistently psychologically terrorized and periodically having my body invaded. I chose the former. I don’t know what it is like to be stigmatized for the color of my skin, but I do know what it is like to be dismissed as trash. When black women organized to talk about how they cannot afford to be separatists, I partially understand why. The men I have loved, who have also been discarded, are not people I am prepared to stop working or associating with because, on a practical level, we need each other. We physically, materially, cannot do without each other; we are often too weak of clout, even inside our own sex-castes, to have any longevity, let alone political voice. We die young, more often publicly and saddled with stigma rightfully belonging to The Bum on the Plush. When I fell in love with my future husband, it was not like anything I’d experienced. I had a vision. Radical feminism wasn’t on my radar yet and I honestly thought he was gay. He was too fully human. He still doesn’t understand what I mean. Those who know, know. The way I feel about him, the way he looks at me, the way I am made certain of his respect and admiration is something I know is rare and something I value and nothing I would sacrifice to any ideology. He is real to me back.
Rage is a Language Hard to Hear Through
If I had found radical feminism before meeting him, he wouldn’t have stood a chance. He would’ve been invisible to me and I would’ve forfeited all these glorious opportunities to be proven right or wrong about him, and men: to be disappointed and to be surprised. As it stood, we learned about it together. Though I carried all the initiative, he was a pretty good sport about being educated on the nature of his status as oppressor early on. Classic: I do all the work and he gets all the credit and praise for not throwing a tantrum at the suggestion of his need to change. We would watch Julie Bindel talk about how men can only be allies and he would just listen and accept. I would ask him for feedback and conversation and he would just listen and accept. The cop-outs didn’t take long to crop up; not everyone has the drive and stamina for this that I do. Even women. Still, I smell a cop-out and tend to pounce and so it was that I learned his limits as an ally and mine as an effective communicator. It is easy to say that it is not my responsibility to educate him, that we should’ve been important enough to warrant interest without coaxing, because that is true. It is also true that rage is a language hard to hear through. Like any female socialized into femininity, I have some pretty dysfunctional communication habits, especially around confrontation. Like I have specifically learned, I tend to go from Placation-Station to Gorgon with very little fair warning or opportunity given to make things right. How does anyone work with that? That is unworkable. This man seriously impresses me. I once saw him call a Coopers Hawk out of the sky. A wild one. He has my mother’s birthday. Day, not year. He is younger than I am. He scored a fucking zero to my full A.C.E. score. His experience of life is a mystery to me. I am infuriated by his lack of curiosity about me. He considers it respectful. When I tell him things, he listens and accepts. When I ask him things, he is afraid of me. He knows how I am. He doesn’t know that I understand that women are fully human in the worst ways too; that in our respective searches for the way, we have all done harm. We work on trusting each other to have these conversations. We both have messed that up too. We inch back toward it: the conversation.
By aligning with him in any way, I risk fundamentally in ways he will never be vulnerable to or fully understand. I married him and so forfeited my meager assistance for a much better deal. No more home invasions or periodic psychological terror, plus, I get to live with my best friend. But what about body invasion? Is it radical enough just to be able to ask the question? I would argue that you have to be able to ask the question and be able to say no. What about the patronization inherent in the very clear reality of my financial dependence? It affords me a better living situation and greater opportunity with more ease than I was able to scramble for myself. Must that not also mean that I will be less likely to risk his hatred or indifference? I would say fuckin’ please. Of course it does.
I decided that I would read Intercourse aloud to him, who has ADHD and cannot sit still for a second. After watching the panel Julia Long had put together of women speaking about it, I had some idea of what I was getting us into, but hadn’t read it yet. Whatever it was, we were going to do it together goddamnit. That’s when that magick started. He really started to annoy me. The cop-outs were a sharp noise to me now. Un-real dude. Now how are we gonna’ get anywhere if it’s like this? I would read a chapter and he would listen. I would try to get as many in as possible before he would beg off, my mouth dry and fumbling, not knowing when I’m going to get him back into a sitting position. It went on like that, passionate Andrea Dworkin chapter after disturbing chapter, until we hit the one. When I read The New Woman’s Broken Heart, the whole book was like that: there was a different person on the other side of that book, a more integrated, sober, resolute person. Just like all the other times, only this time. But every one of her books has a chapter that does that to me. When I got to that chapter for me in Intercourse, I could feel in the room how I was bigger, like I was filling up that whole room with my grief and recognition, like a radiant body whose skin stretches thin past the walls. I could feel him inside of that, bewildered and seeing me for the first time as I am and have been. He got it. Then forgot it. Because joy and enlightenment are fleeting and we have things to do, all of us. I get it.
Patriarchy: We Are Bound to Fail
But now, there is a frame of reference. Now there is, at least, some honesty and the conversation becomes possible. The question has been asked. He is not the only one who, from time to time, needs to be called out; neither is he the most frequent one to give feedback or the worst one at receiving it, between us. My idea and expression of sexuality changed dramatically with that book, as did his accordingly. How could they not? There had to be an accepted ‘no’ for the question to be real. When prodded for feedback about my decisions about what to build and what to destroy, he says he just accepts. He often has wisdom beyond me. I have feedback about everything.
Even though he wouldn’t have stood a chance if I’d been ‘properly’ educated, I had to laugh when Germaine Greer called herself ‘incurably heterosexual’. Seriously, if there was a cure for love, I would have found it, before radical feminism, instead of my husband. For all the horror, it didn’t reveal any one atrocity so much as help to integrate my story into ours. With the assistance of this theoretical framework it is impossible to ignore my own glaring domestication in the lack of address I have to that second problematic certainty: ability by the grace of another is not true ability, financial or otherwise. I can do things he could never do (not just make babies). I know things he will never have the opportunity to know (besides cramps). Inside this patriarchal framework, we are bound to fail, to be subject to all the predictable pitfalls, to feel our way toward the conversation in the darkness. We can but do our best. He brings home more scrilla. I refuse to clean up after him. He insists on watching Steven Universe in the middle of the damn night and Golden Girls in the evening. I handle crises situations very well. He can take instruction very well in a crisis. I know that I put the light in his eyes. He will never be my political focus. I will always have to battle on the personal and political front with him as my partner. He is an ally I remain proud of.
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