Discuss: Resistance Resisters

Some pragmatic questions:

How many generations does it take to change (evolve) a human species? (and I agree we could use some evolution…but…)

or

Who decides what a higher form of consciousness looks like?

and

Will either of these abstract ideas stop Plum Creek, for instance, from profiting off of the loss of Maine’s globally beneficial carbon sink?

Holly,

I suppose evolution (or devolution) depends on what each generation experiences and how that experience plays out. As a species, we in the West seem to be so plugged in that we often give precedence to the versions of stories seen on the news or elsewhere than to our own experiences or feelings. We also neglect history generally, and ecological history specifically. Doing so fails to bring us face to face with the kinds of catastrophes that would give us pause, cause us to reflect. I don’t know much about Plum Creek, but it looks as though someone buying into such a place has big holes to fill, psychic, emotional or spiritual holes that will not be filled even if/when the goal of living there is achieved. It will take enough people to realize that they shouldn’t fork over money to live in a place whose “goods and services” are far more valuable in an unbuilt state than they would be otherwise to stop such a project—that AND outcry from Mainers. The irony is that people want to move to such a place most likely to be closer to nature. So, the idea that we can “have” (meaning experience) and “let go” simultaneously is probably the crux. When we think about it, we never “have” anything and we will always fail if we hit the pause button on “have”, because there is no pause.

As for higher consciousness? Who knows? Maybe more along the lines of Gaia dreaming? Or just being “at one with” everything, everyone else? And then acting on the principles such dreaming or such feeling implies?

If Jensen and I were just talking across the table over a pint, I’d put one question to him: If you knew, for a fact, that the sacrifice of your own life would reverse the trend of ecological degradation of the last 200 years, would you do that? If he, or anyone else (who was not already suicidal)said “yes”, I’d call them liars to their faces. You see, the paradox for those who love the world is that a self-sacrifice might save it, but at the same time, removes you from it. That is exactly the kind of sacrifice he is proposing, and I call b.s. 

Those of us with immediate responsibilities to feed, clothe, nurse and house our loved ones are not permitted the luxury of day dreamed revolutions on the scale Jensen says are are “required.”

So, we do the best we can, schlepp along with half measures and small acts. Geologic time is the calendar we are on, and none of us will get to see the outcome, I’m guessing.  If he, or anyone else wants to call me out on that, I repeat: You first my friend. What are you waiting for? Go strap some C-4 to your chest and throw yourself into the maw of a steam turbine electrical power generator. He might be fearful to guess that it wouldn’t change much. But I’m doubting that he’s real eager to put that to the test. 

And that is the rubber of self-preservation hitting the road of radical environmentalism. I’ve suffered some poseurs in my time, but this cat takes the cake.

Wade

Both/and - absolutely! I just don’t get why people get so riled up over Jensen’s truth speaking regarding individual actions. Yes they’re important and no, they aren’t enough. We live in strange and difficult times. On the one hand there’s our individual (and family) lives, and there’s our place in the local community. The scale of these realities is “doable”. Changes we make feel potentially powerful. We can grow our food, compost our waste, implement projects and new ways of doing things. We can create and support CSAs, community currencies, etc. And we MUST!

At the same time there’s the global system, corporate controlled, elitist, greedy, uncaring, inhumane, a danger to all forms of life and the very survival of the planet. The only way our local/regional actions will ever impact that global system is by becoming so pervasive that so-called ordinary people in the developed world (though in the US would be an excellent start and have huge implications globally) can feed, shelter, clothe, and generally support themselves so that, en masse, we disengage from the system. When I lived in Vermont I believed this was possible because, at least where I lived, there appeared to be enough like-minded people with a diversity of skills that I could imagine it happening. But where I live now, no way do I see it as possible. Plus politics have changed so much over the past 15 years that despair, rather than belief in possibility, is the norm. And it seems even worse since Obama because that moment in time when things could have been changed due to the energy and enthusiasm of the potential is gone, and in its place is disillusionment. So the system seems that much more entrenched, more impossible to fight.

I remember when people actually did take to the streets in this country, but no more. Oh yeah, there are days when people converge on some institution to make a point but it accomplishes nothing of substance, especially now when the media refuses to focus on anything except the conservatives, tea baggers, whatever you want to call them. They may be in the minority, but they have all the political power.

I agree, the next phase of our evolution is a change of consciousness. I tell myself that this type of change needs to be put through the fire of despair and pain and loss in order to emerge. Holly, no one decides what a higher form of consciousness looks like, it evolves within enough human beings so that it begins (hopefully soon enough to stop Plum Creek but realistically, probably not) to have an expression and power of its own. Personally I believe the foundation will be compassion along with discernment and the kind of love that heals on all levels.

Re: a new story. As Thomas Berry and Brian Swimme have beautifully articulated, the new story will place the human in the universe and cosmos in such a way that we become part of it, much the way the ancient creation stories did, for our times given the knowledge and technology that we have today. If you haven’t already done so read any of all: The Dream of the Earth (T. Berry), The Universe Story (T. Berry/B. Swimme), The Universe is a Green Dragon (B. Swimme). Hopefully you’ll be glad you did.

Meanwhile I can’t help but hope we see more of that in-you-face activism in this country. While at this point one may feel we aren’t as desperately in need of it (as in Nigeria, for example), the time will come, probably sooner than later . . .

As usual,Jensen has managed to give me a good swift kick in my complacency (not that I’m all that complacent, really).  He reminds me of William Morris in his heyday as a social activist, after realizing that he couldn’t redesign the world by making better wallpaper.  In News From Nowhere (1890) he imagined a new and improved London (looking ahead to 2006) after a bloody revolution in the fifties that would lead to vast social and environmental change.

Of course it never came to pass, and by the fifties we had invented multiple ways of completely exterminating ourselves; a bloody revolution might well have ended all our present problems by ending us.

I don’t particularly want “us” to end, but we seem bent on doing ourselves in and taking vast numbers of other species along with us. Because of this, my resistance—perhaps futile, but I won’t live long enough to know for sure—has to take the form of composting and creating my own carbon sink to offset some of what I contribute, in writing and talking and teaching, in growing food, cutting consumption, and, yes, taking shorter showers.

I don’t quite see the effort as hopeless, but Jensen may be right nonetheless. I spent much of my youth fighting the good fight, but I’m old and tired now, and not nearly as sanguine as I once was.  I can’t help but think that if it all ends badly, we’ll have truly reaped what we have sown, and my hope then would be that evolution would take a better course without us.

Plowboy, that conversation over a pint is something I’ve had, many years ago when my life was different and I’d speak and offer workshops at conferences around the country on what I call Gaian Economics. I remember someone asking me that exact question. And I really had to think about it. The thing is, if you’re dead how would you know your death accomplished what you were told it would? My response was that, yes, I would if I knew for a fact. But facts change as we all know. My problem wasn’t so much from not wanting to leave this life - my belief system is such that I believe physical death is not the end, plus I believe in reincarnation - but from a lack of trust. You’re right, too, that none of us will get to see the outcome. Ever. No matter what we do to the Earth, she will survive and life, of whatever sort, will continue and evolve and so on.

What we are attached to (speaking for myself anyway) is this beautiful planet as she is now, as I remember her in my childhood, as I pray my grandchildren and so on and so on get to experience her. I’ve traveled enough to see how ugly and toxic people have made some places on this Earth and I am very fortunate to live in one of the most beautiful places (in the foothills of the White Mountains on the ME/NH border). Every day I wake up and look out my windows at the mountains and my yard, now under snow, my garden dormant waiting for spring, an ancient crab apple bravely holding onto life for yet another year. It’s not perfect, people cut and clear too many trees, pave too much Earth, build ugly, useless buildings to sell crap we don’t need made by child slaves overseas . . . you get the idea.

I can close my eyes, however, and see it ruined because I’ve seen other ruined places, that I’m sure were just as beautiful in their own unique way at one time. For every place a friend or colleague has saved or restored or protected many more places are razed and destroyed. This is the reality of today. It hurts my heart, it makes me cry, it fills me with despair. And sometimes I think the only gift I can give the Earth is the gift of my pain and my love. If I really believed my death would make it right, fine. But it wouldn’t, and you know it wouldn’t and the very question is absurd.

Holly,

I’ve volunteered hundreds and hundreds of hours in conservation activism, including, specifically, activities directed at stopping Plum Creek as I live in Montana.  I know some of what it takes and certainly know the need for urgent action. Moreover, I like stirring the pot myself in the form of blizzards of letters to the editor, for as Ed Abbey once said, “Life is like a stew, if you don’t stir the pot you get a lot of scum on top.  But when Ed did it I laughed and got fired up, when Jensen does it I get irritated.  This business of saving the Earth, despite the grim, really dire times we live in, need not be such a grim business.  Activism is fun, it’s work too, some of it tedious, but I get a real charge out of it, especially when I get Republicans and right wingers really pissed off, which distracts them from their work of leading this country to ruin.

As for “higher consciousness,” I agree that a weaknesses of my earlier post is that I did not define what this is but left it up there, hanging, a buzz word with a lot of buzz (like “sustainability”).  I will attempt to be more specific: I often imagine the next stage in human evolution, and it is not a physiological evolution, a genetic mutation, nor, like the last stage, an evolution toward a higher intelligence.  I most certainly do not imagine humans becoming part cyborgs, grotesque, genetically and nanotechnologically manipulated degradations of our humanity.  The only possible evolution I can imagine, if humans are to survive, is toward a higher consciousness (and I will define this in more specific terms).  Humans will not look any different, but they will be wholly different creatures.  A physiological evolution would be irrelevant.  An evolution toward higher intelligence would make humans even worse; they will be even more adept and lethal at warfare and more devastating to the environment, ensuring their swift and sure demise.  Therefore, I disagree with Barbara Kingsolver when she argues against the idea that making war is human nature.  Making war, unfortunately, is human nature at least at this present stage in our evolution.  Continued human survival will depend on a shift from being creatures predisposed (in our present consciousness) as we are now to violence, territoriality, tribalism, ideology, self-interest, and destructive use of nature to being creatures predisposed to awareness, mindfulness, compassion, peaceableness, generosity, love, mutual help and cooperation and, in Wendell Berry’s terms, “kindly use of nature.”  I cannot imagine a successful evolution being otherwise.  And it will hinge in large part on a better story.

And what is the better story?  I think it may be to renew our connections with nature, to create a Gaia consciousness maybe, but more crucially I think to embrace life and to defend and protect the local watershed and community, the places where we actually live and know. and to treat those places with love and affection. I now know that love is the real reason I stand in staunch opposition to power-hungry evil, injustice, violence, the hoarding of wealth, and environmental destruction; and why I speak out for all that is life-giving, life-affirming—friendship, family, community, and the experience of the natural world.  So the story I want to tell is the very hour my feet touched the Earth and I reconnected.  It was August 1991.  I was sitting in front of a campfire in northern Minnesota, watching the full moon rise over the silhouetted pines when I realized I was witnessing a primordial scene that put me in the presence of a far more ancient world than the one I knew.  Now I understood and could name the vague discontent inside me, a discontent that, before, had no name.  Once I could name it, I could no longer abide the way industrial civilization proposes to spread, grow, and dominate the natural world, ignoring nature’s arrangements in the process.  My heart ached for wild places, and for the fullness of life.  I think each of us who has these stories need to tell them. One of the most powerful is Doug Peacock’s story of his first close encounter with a GRIZ, when he had a gun pointed right between the bear’s eyes and decided to lower his weapon and put it away. At that moment the bear went his way, leaving Peacock to go his.  The point of this story is that the bear is not a friend (as Tim Treadwell wrongly believed), but the bear is our teacher, and we humans need to renew that essential connection and not be afraid of the old animal inside us.

I think another problem with Derrick Jensen is that he does not give us any specific guidance.  How can we resist when we don’t know what form it can or should take?  And what form should it take?  Maybe it needs to take the form of resisting the resisters because the major resistance movement in the country are the Tea Partiers and offshoots such as the paramilitary Oath Keepers who place NO value on the natural world, who advocate unbridled capitalism and all-out natural resource development.  They advocate sedition, the overthrow of the government and their world will be no world that I would want to see. Maybe resistance could take the form of living on a household income well below the national median income, limiting our ability to engage in excess consumption and travel (so we have to ride our bicycles).  And, yes, it can take the form of composting, raising your own food, shopping farmer’s markets because this bypasses the world of industrial food and threatens the existence of Monsanto.  As for me, my entire adult life has been predicated on bitter resistance to late capitalism and modern industrial civilization. Not that I have been totally opposed to it, but Industrialism should be just a passing phase that gained us some beneficial advanced technology that can be put to good use.  Perhaps the new consciousness in the post-industrial age will be something along the lines of wedding high technological sophistication with a Paleolithic sense of closeness to the earth, the marriage of the new with the very ancient.  We need to hear the ancient voices to know what constitutes the appropriate use of technology. 

And we need to be, as Abbey suggested, half-assed crusaders, part-time fanatics and leave time for friends, family, dancing in the street, and getting out in what is left of the wilderness. We need to simply embrace life and defend it against death-dealing
ideological, militaristic, nature exploiting, nature destroying homo economicus.

Cheerio, mates!

Susan, yes, the very question is absurd. You see very well, I think, the absurdity of sleight of hand artists like Mr. Jensen. As a vent for inchoate rage, he serves very well, but past that I don’t see anything useful in his veiled ultimatums calling for…what exactly?

To love anything as you should is to break open your heart, whether for a person or a place, or a planet. Yes, and rage is one reaction you can count on your average human to have. On the other hand, some of us have mined the broken heart for more useful things.

A.G…Your account of that evening in MN was a joy to read. I guesss that I got luckier than most, because I truly don’t remember a time when I didn’t have those experiences. They come less frequently on that grand a scale I regret to say, but I probably have a hundred smaller ones over the course of a day. I think that I could be content just looking at bare winter trees for the rest of my days. You are either grateful, or you aren’t. If you aren’t, your only hope is a conversion experience like you described, or a merciful death.

Wade