Part one of this article.

WE NEED A COMPELLING VISION for a new future, a vision of a better country—America the Possible—that is still within our power to reach. The deep, transformative changes sketched in the first half of this manifesto provide a path to America the Possible. But that path is only brought to life when we can combine this vision with the conviction that we will pull together to build the necessary political muscle for real change. This article addresses both the envisioning of an attractive future for America and the politics needed to realize it. A future worth having awaits us, if we are willing to struggle and sacrifice for it. It won’t come easy, but little that is worth having ever does.

By 2050, America the Possible will have marshaled the economic and political resources to successfully address the long list of challenges, including basic social justice, real global security, environmental sustainability, true popular sovereignty, and economic democracy. As a result, family incomes in America will be far more equal, similar to the situation in the Nordic countries and Japan today. Large-scale poverty and income insecurity will be things of the past. Good jobs will be guaranteed to all those who want to work. Our health-care and educational systems will be among the best in the world, as will our standing in child welfare and equality of women. Racial and ethnic disparities will be largely eliminated. Social bonds will be strong. The overlapping webs of encounter and participation that were once hallmarks of America, “a nation of joiners,” will have been rebuilt, community life will be vibrant, and community development efforts plentiful. Trust in each other, and even in government, will be high.

Today’s big social problems—guns and homicides, drugs and incarceration, white-collar crime and Wall Street hijinks—will have come down to acceptable levels. Big national challenges like the national debt, illegal immigration, the future of social security, oil imports and the shift to sustainable energy, and environmental and consumer protection will have been successfully addressed. U.S. emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases will have been reduced to a tiny fraction compared to today.

Internationally, the United States will assume the role of a normal nation. Military spending will be reduced to a level close to Europe’s today; military interventions will be rare and arms sales small. The resources thus freed up will be deployed to join with other nations in addressing climate change and other global environmental threats, nuclear proliferation, world poverty and underdevelopment, and other global challenges. The U.S. will be a leader in strengthening the institutions of global governance and international regulation, and we will be a member in good standing of the long list of treaties and other international agreements in which we do not now participate.

Politically, implementation of prodemocracy reforms will have saved our politics from corporate control and the power of money, and these reforms will have brought us to an unprecedented level of true popular sovereignty. Moreover, government in America will again be respected for its competence and efficiency. And, yes, taxes will be higher, especially for those with resources.

Overall, the economy will be governed to ensure broadly shared prosperity and to preserve the integrity and biological richness of the natural world. It will simply be assumed that the priority of economic activity is to sustain human and natural communities. Investment will concentrate in areas with high social and environmental returns even where not justified by financial returns, and it will be guided by democratically determined priorities at the national and local levels. Corporations will be under effective public control, and new patterns of business ownership and management—involving workers, communities, and other stakeholders—will be the norm. Consumerism will be replaced by the search for meaning and fulfillment in nonmaterial ways, and progress will be measured by new indicators of well-being other than GDP.

This recitation seems idealistic today, but the truth is we know how to do these things. Our libraries are full of plausible, affordable policy options, budget proposals, and institutional innovations that could realize these and other important objectives. And today’s world is full of useful models we can adapt to our circumstances.

NEW VALUES
Many thoughtful Americans have concluded that addressing our many challenges will require the rise of a new consciousness, with different values becoming dominant in American culture. For some, it is a spiritual awakening—a transformation of the human heart. For others it is a more intellectual process of coming to see the world anew and deeply embracing the emerging ethic of the environment and the old ethic of what it means to love thy neighbor as thyself. But for all, the possibility of a sustainable and just future will require major cultural change and a reorientation regarding what society values and prizes most highly.

In America the Possible, our dominant culture will have shifted, from today to tomorrow, in the following ways:

• from seeing humanity as something apart from nature, transcending and dominating it, to seeing ourselves as part of nature, offspring of its evolutionary process, close kin to wild things, and wholly dependent on its vitality and the finite services it provides;
• from seeing nature in strictly utilitarian terms—humanity’s resource to exploit as it sees fit for economic and other purposes—to seeing the natural world as having intrinsic value independent of people and having rights that create the duty of ecological stewardship;
• from discounting the future, focusing severely on the near term, to taking the long view and recognizing duties to future generations;
• from today’s hyperindividualism and narcissism, and the resulting social isolation, to a powerful sense of community and social solidarity reaching from the local to the cosmopolitan;
• from the glorification of violence, the acceptance of war, and the spreading of hate and invidious divisions to the total abhorrence of these things;
• from materialism and consumerism to the prioritization of personal and family relationships, learning, experiencing nature, spirituality, service, and living within limits;
• from tolerating gross economic, social, and political inequality to demanding a high measure of equality in all these spheres.

We actually know important things about how values and culture can be changed. One sure path to cultural change is, unfortunately, the cataclysmic event—the crisis—that profoundly challenges prevailing values and delegitimizes the status quo. The Great Depression is the classic example. I think we can be confident that we haven’t seen the end of major crises.

Two other key factors in cultural change are leadership and social narrative. Leaders have enormous potential to change minds, and in the process they can change the course of history. And there is some evidence that Americans are ready for another story. Large majorities of Americans, when polled, express disenchantment with today’s lifestyles and offer support for values similar to those urged here.

Another way in which values are changed is through social movements. Social movements are about consciousness raising, and, if successful, they can help usher in a new consciousness—perhaps we are seeing its birth today. When it comes to issues of social justice, peace, and environment, the potential of faith communities is vast as well. Spiritual awakening to new values and new consciousness can also derive from literature, philosophy, and science. Consider, for example, the long tradition of “reverence for life” stretching back over twenty-two hundred years to Emperor Ashoka of India and carried forward by Albert Schweitzer, Aldo Leopold, Thomas Berry, E. O. Wilson, Terry Tempest Williams, and others.

Education, of course, can also contribute enormously to cultural change. Here one should include education in the largest sense, embracing not only formal education but also day-to-day and experiential education as well as the fast-developing field of social marketing. Social marketing has had notable successes in moving people away from bad behaviors such as smoking and drunk driving, and its approaches could be applied to larger cultural change as well.

A major and very hopeful path lies in seeding the landscape with innovative, instructive models. In the United States today, there is a proliferation of innovative models of community revitalization and business enterprise. Local currencies, slow money, state Genuine Progress Indicators, locavorism—these are bringing the future into the present in very concrete ways. These actual models will grow in importance as communities search for visions of how the future should look, and they can change minds—seeing is believing. Cultural transformation won’t be easy, but it’s not impossible either.

AVERTING DISASTER
High on any list of our duties to future generations must be the imperative to keep open for them as many options and choices as possible. That is our generation’s gift of freedom. Here, the first order of business is to preserve the possibility of a bright future by preventing any of today’s looming disasters from spinning out of control or otherwise becoming so overwhelming that they monopolize resources of time, energy, and money, thus foreclosing other options. My list of biggest threats includes the following:

• severe disruption of global climate
• widespread exhaustion, erosion, and toxification of the planet’s natural resources and life-support systems
• militarism and permanent war
• nuclear disaster
• major economic or financial collapse, possibly linked to failing energy supply and soaring prices
• runaway terrorism and resulting loss of civil liberties
• pandemics and antibiotic resistance
• social and cultural decay, including the rise of criminality
• hollowing out of democracy and the dominance of corporatocracy and plutocracy
• something weird from the lab (nanotech? robotics? genetic engineering? a new weapon system? indefinite life extension?)

Much ink has been spilled warning us about these threats, and we must take them very seriously. In America the Possible, these warnings have been taken seriously and the threats avoided. We can already see the problems leading to all of the threats listed, but we are not yet fated to experience their worst.

THE VIRTUES OF NECESSITY
Even with disaster averted, there are still powerful constraints and limits on future options. And there are the lessons from positive psychology about what contributes to happy, fulfilling lives. In fact, three sets of developments are coming together and are pushing us to nothing less than a new way of living: the imperative to protect the climate and the earth’s living systems; the need to adjust to the rise of scarcities in energy and other resources; and the desire to shift national priorities to things that truly improve social well-being and happiness.

If we manage these factors well, the result could be a blessing in disguise, leading us to a new and better place—and a higher quality of life both individually and socially. Life in America the Possible will tend strongly in these directions:

RELOCALIZATION. Economic and social life will be rooted in the community and the region. More production will be local and regional, with shorter, less complex supply chains, especially for food. Business enterprises will be more rooted and committed to the long-term well-being of employees and their communities, and they will be supported by local currencies and local financial institutions. People will live closer to work, walk more, and travel less. Energy production will be distributed and decentralized, and predominantly renewable. Socially, community bonds will be strong; relationships with neighbors will be unpretentious and important; civic associations and community service groups plentiful; levels of trust and support for teachers and caregivers high. Personal security, tolerance of difference, and empathy will be high, and violence, fear, and hate low. Politically, local governance will stress participatory, direct, and deliberative democracy. Citizens will be seized with the responsibility to sustainably manage and extend the commons—the valuable assets that belong to everyone—through community land trusts at the local level, for example, and an atmospheric trust at the national level.

NEW BUSINESS MODELS. Locally-owned businesses, including worker-owned, customer-owned, and community-owned firms will be prominent, as will hybrid business models such as profit-nonprofit and public-private hybrids. Cooperation will replace or moderate competition. Business incubators will help entrepreneurs with arranging finance, technical assistance, and other support. Enterprises of all types will stress environmental and social responsibility.

PLENITUDE. Consumerism, where people find meaning and acceptance through what they consume, will be supplanted by the search for abundance in things that truly matter and that bring happiness and joy—family, friends, the natural world, meaningful work. Status and recognition will go to those who earn trust and provide needed services. Individuals and communities will enjoy a strong rebirth of reskilling, crafts, and self-provisioning. Overconsumption will be replaced by new investment in civic culture, natural amenities, ecological restoration, education, and community development.

MORE TIME; SLOWER LIVES. Formal work hours will be cut back, freeing up time for family, friends, hobbies, continuing education, skills development, caregiving, volunteering, sports, outdoor recreation, exploring nature, and participating in the arts. Life will be slower, less frenetic; frugality and thrift prized and wastefulness shunned; ostentatious displays of conspicuous consumption avoided; mindfulness and living simply prized.

NEW GOODS AND SERVICES. Products will be more durable and versatile and easy to repair, with components that can be reused or recycled. Production systems will be designed to mimic biological ones, with waste eliminated or turned into useful inputs elsewhere. The provision of services will replace the purchase of many goods; sharing, collaborative consumption, lending, and leasing will be commonplace.

RESONANCE WITH NATURE. Environmental protection regulations will be tough and demanding, and energy used with maximum efficiency. Zero discharge of traditional pollutants, toxics, and greenhouse gases will be the norm. Directly or indirectly, prices will reflect the true environmental costs. Schools will stress environmental education and pursue “no child left inside” programs. Natural areas and zones of high ecological significance will be protected. Green chemistry will replace the use of toxics and hazardous substances. Organic farming will eliminate pesticide and herbicide use. Environmental restoration and cleanup programs will be major focuses of community concern. There will be a palpable sense that economic and social activity is nested in the natural world and that we are close kin to wild things.

MORE EQUALITY. Because large inequalities are at the root of so many social and environmental problems, measures to ensure greater equality—not only of opportunity but also of outcomes—will be in place. Because life is simpler, more frugal, more caring, and less grasping, and people will be less status conscious and possessive, there will be more to go around and a high degree of economic equality. Special programs will ensure that seniors have income protections and opportunities to pursue their passions in second and third careers.

CHILDREN CENTERED, NOT GROWTH CENTERED. Overall economic growth will not be seen as a priority, and GDP will be seen as a misleading measure of well-being and progress. Instead, indicators of community wealth creation—including measures of social and natural capital—will be closely watched, and special attention will be given to children and young people—their education and their right to loving care, shelter, good nutrition, health care, a toxic-free environment, and freedom from violence.

HUMAN SCALE AND RESILIENT. The economy and the enterprises within it will not be too big to understand, appreciate, and manage successfully. A key motivation will be to maintain resilience—the capacity to absorb disturbance and outside shocks without disastrous consequences. We can think of today’s American economy as a giant, unitary system—highly complex and thoroughly integrated and interdependent, so that the failure of one component such as banking causes a cascade of failures throughout the system. The economy in America the Possible is, by contrast, diverse and decentralized, a collection of more self-reliant but interacting units that provide redundancy and resilience.

GLOCALISM. Despite the many ways life will be more local, and the resulting temptation toward parochialism and provincialism, Americans will feel a sense of belonging and citizenship at larger levels of social and political organization, and will support global-level governance in the numerous areas where it is needed, such as environmental issues.

DEMOCRACY REBORN
It is simply unimaginable that American politics as we know it today will deliver the transformative changes needed. Political reform and building a new and powerful progressive movement in America must be priority number one. Above all else, we must build a new democratic reality—a government truly of, by, and for the people.

A foundation of democracy is the principle that all citizens should have a right to participate as equals in the actual process of governing. All should have a right to vote, to have access to relevant information, to speak up, associate with others, and participate. Votes should count equally, the majority should prevail, subject to respect for basic rights, and the issues taken up should be the important ones society faces. These are ideals by which America’s current situation as well as our political reform agenda should be judged. Viewed this way, we are coming up far short on democracy and political equality. What we are seeing instead is the steady emergence of plutocracy and corporatocracy.

That the list of most-needed reforms to our political system is so long is testimony to how flawed the current system actually is.

• We need to both expand and protect the process of voting. Voter registration should be the default position: upon reaching the age of eighteen, citizens would be automatically registered, as is common in advanced democracies. Once registered, voting can be made easier in a number of ways: early voting should be extended; election day should be made a national holiday; ballots should be made simpler and voting less confusing; and campaigns to discourage and suppress voting through intimidating and deceptive practices should be prohibited and penalized. A national elections commission should be charged with providing for election administration and monitoring by impartial and well-trained election officials; for certification and testing of voting machines; for voter-verified paper trails to serve as the official ballots for recounts and audits; and generally for the integrity and accuracy of the voting process.

• We need a constitutional amendment to provide for direct popular election of the president. As long as that remains a bridge too far, state legislatures should agree to assign all of a state’s electoral votes to the candidate winning the national popular vote for president, but only if and when enough states make the commitment to total at least 270 electoral votes (the number needed to win in the Electoral College). Thus far nine states—including California, Hawai‘i, Illinois, Maryland, New Jersey, Washington, and Massachusetts—with half the electoral votes needed to win, have made such pledges. Another way to bring more democracy to presidential elections would be to increase House membership by 50 percent, a good idea in its own right.

• Reform of our current system of primary elections is also in order. There are many possibilities here, but a key goal is to broaden participation in primaries beyond each party’s core. One way to do that is to have structured open primaries—where registered independents can vote in either party’s primary.

• The partisan gerrymandering of congressional districts should be stopped. District lines should be drawn by independent, nonpartisan commissions.

• We need to break the two-party duopoly. To do that, we need a process for voting that will encourage third parties without making them spoilers, will ensure that every vote counts in the end result and is not wasted, and will ensure that winners have the support of the majority of voters. This would be accomplished by instant-runoff voting (IRV), the process by which voters rank the candidates in order of preference. Low-scoring candidates—often third-party ones—are eliminated in the vote counting, and their voters’ second choices are added to those that remain until one candidate has a majority. Even more attractive, fusion voting allows a minority party to list as its candidate on the ballot the candidate of another party. Fusion thus allows third parties to bargain with the two major parties for the best representation they can get.

• The Senate needs a host of reforms, including abolishing the current practice of filibusters. Given the way filibusters are now managed, senators representing a mere 11 percent of the U.S. population can exercise effective control over legislation, at least in theory. And there is another, but difficult, way to bring more democracy to the Senate: with congressional approval, large states could decide to subdivide into two or more smaller ones.

• The most important prodemocracy reform is to undermine the power of money in our elections and in lobbying. The emphasis of campaign finance reform should be on encouraging small donor contributions and public funding of elections—the democratization of campaign finance itself. The Fair Elections Now Act, introduced in Congress in April 2011, embodies this approach for congressional elections and has many supporters in the House and Senate. Several states have already pursued the approach with success. Candidates who participated in “clean” or “fair” state election programs similar to Fair Elections Now hold about 85 percent of the legislative seats in Maine and around 75 percent in Connecticut.

• Major efforts should be pursued to address the many problems created by the Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United, which opened the floodgates to unrestricted campaign spending by corporations and unions. Amending the Constitution should be a priority, in the process depriving corporations of constitutional personhood. Or Congress could regulate the impact of the Supreme Court’s decision, as Democrats tried unsuccessfully to do in 2010 with the Disclose Act proposal. At least it would have required disclosure of the source of campaign spending. There are two other attractive ideas for regulation. One would require that corporate boards, or even the shareholders themselves, approve all campaign spending initiatives. A second regulation would greatly strengthen the requirement that these corporate contributions be truly independent—that is, not coordinated in any way with the candidate being supported. And, of course, the court could simply reverse itself, for example, if a new justice were appointed to replace one of the five in the majority.

• Candidate access to the media should be enhanced, and the power of money reduced, by ensuring that all carriers and service providers offer full access to political speech at rates offered to the most favored commercial customers and by requiring that broadcasters provide candidates with a minimum amount of free airtime as a condition of receiving their federal licenses.

• Much needs to be done to tighten regulation of lobbying. There should be a ban on registered lobbyists engaging in campaign fundraising—no contributions to campaigns from lobbyists, no lobbyist bundling of multiple contributions, and no other form of lobbyist fundraising for federal candidates. Connecticut enacted such a ban on “pay to play” in 2005. “Strategic consulting” for congressional offices should be classified as lobbying. Congressional staff should be further professionalized, enlarged, and better paid in order to reduce the current dependence on lobbyists’ information and analysis. The offices serving Congress, such as the Congressional Research Service and the Government Accountability Office, should be strengthened for these same reasons. Appropriate restrictions should be placed on the lobbying activities of large government contractors, and stricter revolving door provisions should be adopted. As an extension of federal laws regulating lobbying and requiring disclosure of lobbying expenditures, organizations should be required to disclose expenditures pursuant to major-issue campaigns aimed at affecting federal legislation, just as narrowly defined “lobbying” expenses are now disclosed. Also, all sponsors and direct or indirect funders of public-issue ads should be required to be identified in those ads along with an announcement like those in today’s campaign ads approving and taking responsibility for the contents.

Beyond these changes in the rules of American politics, other changes are needed to strengthen both journalism and government transparency, to restore disinterest to the courts, to rebuild large membership institutions like labor unions that can magnify the strength of the otherwise isolated voter, and to rebuild competency in our oft-maligned and now depleted civil services.

We won’t get far in addressing the challenges we now face unless we are a competent nation with a competent government. And this competence in turn requires, above all, education and public integrity. Education is essential not just for building the skills needed in today’s high-tech economy, but also for building a capacious understanding of the world in which we live. Public integrity includes not just integrity at the personal level, but also the capacity to elevate the public good over private gain.

A UNIFIED MOVEMENT
When one considers all the ways in which our politics begs for change and reform, it is easy to see why so little of what is needed is actually accomplished. A prodemocracy agenda like the one described here must move to top priority. Such an agenda should be a priority for all progressive communities, and should draw support from Americans across the political spectrum.

Let us never forget that faith in democracy and fighting for it are acts of affirmation. In democracy, we affirm that we trust our fellow citizens—that we count on each other. Whether we win or lose the coming struggle for democracy in America, we claim that high ground.

But to drive real change in politics and in public policy, we need to build a powerful, unified progressive movement. Few of the measures our country needs are likely to get very far without a vigorous social and political movement that we don’t now have. In today’s America, progressive ideas are unlikely to be turned into action unless they are promoted by powerful citizen demand.

Successful movements for serious change are launched in protest against key features of the established order. They are nurtured on outrage at the severe injustices being perpetrated, the core values being threatened, or the undesirable future that is unfolding. And they demand real change. Here one is reminded of Frederick Douglass’s famous 1857 statement about the challenge to slavery: “If there is no struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet deprecate agitation are men who want crops without plowing up the ground; they want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, and it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.” If progressives hope to succeed, then the movement must capture the spirit of Frederick Douglass.

What must now be built with urgency is a unified progressive community. The silos separating the various progressive communities must be breached. To succeed, there must be a fusion of progressive causes, the forging of a common agenda, and the building of a mighty force on the ground, at the grass roots. Progressives of all stripes must come together to build a true community of outlook, interest, and engagement, as well as the organizational infrastructure to strengthen the progressive movement on an ongoing basis.

Our best hope for real change is a movement created by a fusion of people concerned about environment, social justice, true democracy, and peace into one powerful progressive force. We have to recognize that we are all communities of a shared fate. In particular, progressives must focus on electoral politics far, far more than they have in the past. The 2008 Obama campaign shows what can be done. For the progressive movement to secure a powerful place in American politics, it will require major efforts at grassroots organizing, strengthening groups working at the state and community levels, reaching out to broaden membership and participation, and developing motivational messages and moral appeals. It will also require building partylike organizations, creating political action committees (PACs), and fielding candidates.

Regarding the language we use and the messages we seek to convey, I can see clearly now that we environmentalists have been too wonkish and too focused on technical fixes. We have not developed well the capacity to speak in a language that goes straight to the American heart, resonates with both core moral values and common aspirations, and projects a positive and compelling vision. Throughout my forty-odd years in the environmental community, public discourse on environment has been dominated by lawyers, scientists, and economists—people like me. Now we need to hear a lot more from the preachers, the poets, the psychologists, and the philosophers. And our message must be one that is founded on hope and honest possibility.

Former House Speaker Tip O’Neill famously said, “All politics is local,” and a progressive movement must stress building locally, from the bottom up. We all live local lives, and if more and more people are to become engaged politically, engaging them locally is imperative. When we add that most of the promising things happening in America today are happening at the community level, the case is compelling for linking progressive initiatives at the local level to building a national progressive movement—community action melded to a national strategy.

Movements gather strength when people realize that they are being victimized and that there are many others in the same boat, and it helps when they are able to identify and point to those responsible—the villains of the story. Many on the right work hard and with consummate cynicism to raise the specter of “class warfare” when, for example, efforts are launched to tax the rich a bit more. With admirable candor, businessman Warren Buffett, an advocate for fairer taxes and one of the wealthiest men in America, has said, “There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.” In 1936, Harold Lasswell wrote Politics: Who Gets What, When, and How. He declared that “the study of politics is the study of influence and the influential . . . the influential are those who get the most of what there is to get. . . . Those who get the most are elite; the rest are mass.” Today, the elite have gotten about all there is to get, and the great mass of people have gotten the shaft.

An invigorated American progressive movement must also embrace the accumulated knowledge that generations of thoughtful scholars have made possible. With the right seemingly disavowing good science at every turn, it is doubly important that progressives draw heavily on the contributions of our impressive scientific community. Nothing against faith, but the scientific content of public policy issues is increasing steadily, and progressives won’t be leading in the right directions without such an embrace. And while progressives should both appeal to moral values and kick up a ruckus, it remains important to ground appeals and campaigns on solid analysis, accurate history, and facts. They go together well. As Stephen Colbert has quipped, “The facts have a well-known liberal bias.”

In the end, the most meaningful changes will almost certainly require a large-scale rebirth of marches, protests, demonstrations, direct action, and nonviolent civil disobedience. Protests are important to dramatize issues, show the depth of concern, attract public and media attention, build sympathetic support, raise public consciousness, and put issues on the agenda. No one who followed events in Egypt or the Wisconsin State House, or who remembers the civil rights and anti-war protests of the 1960s and 1970s, can doubt their importance. Author and social critic Chris Hedges urges that “civil disobedience, which will entail hardship and suffering, which will be long and difficult, which at its core means self-sacrifice, is the only mechanism left.” Those words ring true to those who have worked for decades to elicit a meaningful response to the existential threat of climate change and who find, after all the effort, only ashes.

There are ongoing historical trends that require the development of the progressive movement sought here. The widespread persistence of relative poverty at home and absolute poverty abroad; the growth of economic inequality now matching that of 1928; the rapid exhaustion of the planet’s renewable and nonrenewable resources; the impossibility of continuous exponential growth on a finite planet; the destruction of the climate regime that has existed throughout human civilization; the drift to militarism and endless war—these warn us that business as usual is not an option.

America the Possible awaits us, if we are prepared to struggle—to put it all on the line. If the future is to be one we wish for our grandchildren, we had better get started building this progressive movement without delay. Given the deplorable conditions on so many fronts, the day will surely come when large numbers of Americans will conclude, with Howard Beale’s character in Network, “I’m as mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore!” The progressive movement must not only be ready for that day, it must also hasten its arrival.

OF ALL THE FEELINGS said to sweep over us in wild places—awe, peace, a sense of the divine—there are a few that rarely get mentioned. My last two-week trip into the woods, for example, was frankly depressing. The year had been a cold one, and the forest was not its usual refulgent self. A black bear was hanging around, skinny and sickly from the bad berry crop and probably bound for death by starvation in its winter den. Pink salmon had just begun to spawn in a nearby creek, where their battered bodies were a reminder of the grand cycle of life, yes, but were also an intimately dismal spectacle. Then I discovered a colony of bats, the year’s pups just learning to fly. Not a lot is known about the mortality rate of bats in this fledgling period, but I am inclined to predict it is high. The little ones peeped fearfully before their maiden flights, and with good reason—I watched several crash into the tall grass, unlikely ever to make it home again. They might, at least, make easy meals for the garter snake I saw that had somehow lost half its face.

All of this took place in a valley that, blessed with steep slopes, icy winters, wet summers, and remoteness from the world’s stock exchanges, has somehow retained the full complement of predators, including wolves, grizzly bears, and mountain lions. I do indeed feel awe in that place, but not much peace. By day I carry pepper spray, and by night I sleep with a twelve-gauge shotgun close at hand, because a couple of years ago a bear tried to break into my “cabin”—a ninety-year-old homestead shack that can’t even keep out the rain—in the first light of dawn. If a god is in charge of the area, he is surely of the mercurial, Old Testament variety.

The idea that nature is a bittersweet and sometimes forbidding place is not, as they say, currently trending. More prevalent is the view reflected in a recent caution from the Chicago Manual of Style editors that capital-N “Nature” is to be used only to denote “a goddess dressed in a flowing garment and flinging fruit and flowers everywhere.” The comment is tongue-in-cheek, but the point is well taken. The natural world is increasingly seen as a gentle and giving realm of the spirit. In some cases, this view is actively religious or quasireligious, whether we are speaking of the biosphere as the provident Earth Mother, the being-of-beings that is James Lovelock’s Gaia, or simply the handiwork of one or another god. But above all else, the actual experience of being in nature seems to affirm its essential holiness. The natural world feels like a spiritual respite: a literal sanctum, where we are safe to reconnect to what is larger than ourselves. Compared to the cosmic rhythms of mountain, sea, and sky, it is ordinary daily life—driving at rush hour, punching security codes, navigating a shape-shifting digital culture—that seems hostile.

Yet there is a serious problem with our idea of sacred nature, and that is that the idol is a false one. If we experience the natural world as a place of succor and comfort, it is in large part because we have made it so. Only 20 percent of the earth’s terrestrial surface is still home to all the large mammals it held five hundred years ago, and even across those refugia they are drastically reduced in abundance. The seas have lost an estimated 90 percent of their biggest fish. For decades there were almost no wolves, grizzly bears, or even bald eagles in the lower 48, and modern recovery projects have brought them back to only a small fraction of their former ranges. Scientists speak of an “ecology of fear” that once guided the movements and behavior of animals that shared land- and seascapes with toothy predators—an anxiety that humans once shared. In much of what’s left of the wild, that dread no longer applies even to deer or rabbits, let alone us. The sheer abundance and variety of the living world, its endless chaos of killing and starving and rutting and suffering, its routine horrors of mass death and infanticide and parasites and drought have faded from sight and mind. We have rendered nature an easy god to worship.

If humankind’s relationship to the wild were to be embodied by just one of the gods we have invented, I would nominate Janus, the twin-faced deity of the ancient Romans. Our sense of the divine can connect us to nature, but it can divide us from it as well. Spirituality can help us see ourselves as kindred to every living and nonliving thing, all sprung from the same celestial dust. This primeval understanding remains deep and broad today, revealed everywhere from the Garden of Eden story shared in one form or another by Christians, Jews, and Muslims; to the Tibetan name for Mount Everest, Chomolungma, the Holy Mother; to $2,995 shamanic journeys of reconnection to Mother Earth in Sedona, Arizona, complete with one-night vision quests, “weather permitting.” On the other hand, spirituality has long been used to place ourselves on a pedestal above the rest of creation. The Garden of Eden story includes instructions to “fill the earth and subdue it” and to “have dominion” over every living thing, among other phrases that amount to a mission statement for latter-day capitalism; Mount Everest is a challenge to be conquered; and that same Arizona wilderness retreat promises to refresh the “natural power that is your birthright.”

Old Janus has been staring in these opposite directions a long time—the tension between being a part of nature and standing apart from it is elemental to what it means to be human. “The archaeological record encodes hundreds of situations in which societies were able to develop long-term sustainable relationships with their environments, and thousands of situations in which the relationships were short-lived and mutually destructive,” wrote the Arizona State University anthropologist Charles Redman in his seminal 1999 book Human Impact on Ancient Environments. The pattern Redman points to is not, as some might suppose, divided neatly between destructive societies in the lineage of so-called Western civilization and sustainable societies in the more earth-toned traditions often associated with, for example, Native Americans. A recent scientific review of human impacts on the oceans found “overwhelming” evidence that aboriginal coastal cultures “often” depleted their local environments; in fact, the editors speculate that it may have been the struggle to survive in increasingly degraded surroundings that gave rise to the conservation values that many Native Americans appear to have held at the time of European contact. If so, then 1492 was a clash of Janusian timing: European nations reveling in the discovery of God-given riches just as Native American cultures were formulating a spiritual understanding of natural limits.

We know which of those two worldviews prevailed in the centuries that followed—a history that astounds us with the extinction or near-extinction of even the most superabundant creatures, from the great auk to the buffalo to the Atlantic cod, though these iconic species are best thought of only as reminders of a wholesale assault on animate life that left no species unscarred. In the midst of it all, a countercurrent emerged. A small minority of people still mark the beginnings of that turning with the 1864 book Man and Nature, by George Perkins Marsh, a pioneer of ecological thought. With the exhausting thoroughness of autodidactic science-geekery, he presented an inventory of “the extent of the changes produced by human action in the physical conditions of the globe we inhabit.” For the most part, however, Marsh is a footnote, massively overshadowed by his more lyrical, less empirical contemporaries. I don’t even need to use their first names: nature writing in the tradition of Emerson and Thoreau, of Wordsworth and Coleridge, has called on us to see the face of God in every trembling leaf ever since. To do otherwise is to fall into the cold rationalism so often said to have betrayed the wild world.

This modern love of the earth is ironic—it is a reaction against the destruction of nature, but is also a product of that destruction. Witness Great Britain, once home to deep forests, bears, wolves, wild boars, wild oxen. We celebrate England’s Romantic poets for seeing divinity in a landscape that others found dark and threatening. Yet the Romantics were only opening their eyes to a new reality: Almost every threat posed by that wild landscape had been vanquished. By the time of the Romantics, Britain was much as it is today—a deforested island, its fauna largely reduced to butterflies, birds, and hedgehogs.

The pattern repeated itself on the American shore. Thoreau wrote from a forest that had lost its capacity to instill fear in a young man’s heart. (Marsh could have detailed this history for him; Marsh’s childhood home near Woodstock, Vermont, had in his lifetime lost its moose, wolves, and mountain lions, and seen its spruce and hemlock forests replaced with European trees.) Annie Dillard’s pilgrimage to Tinker Creek plays out in a denuded Virginia, and even Edward Abbey, that singular voice of wildest America, went to his deathbed never having seen a free-living grizzly bear. Such versions of nature still inspire wonder—I held a wild hedgehog in my hands last year and was speechless with the thrill of it. In fact, one might argue that the works that have brought us closest to nature have depended on a more welcoming wilderness. But another truth should be foremost in mind: that what we call nature today is a kinder, gentler, more depauperate world than at any time since at least the late Paleozoic, some 300 million years ago. Nature is not a temple, but a ruin. A beautiful ruin, but a ruin all the same.

According to recent statistics, most people on earth now live in cities, with few if any daily reminders of things ecological. There is considerable evidence that this disconnect costs us at a personal level. Among the most durable findings in the field of environmental psychology, for example, is that we prefer natural settings over the built environment. Among natural landscapes, we show the greatest preference for open spaces dotted with trees, with a little water nearby. (Picture the views from the apartments that border Central Park in Manhattan; as the biologist E. O. Wilson puts it, “To see most clearly the manifestations of human instinct, it is useful to start with the rich.”) These preferences have a consistency across cultures and generations that approaches evolutionary natural law.

I want to call attention to two aspects of these discoveries. The first is that the salient feature of our most preferred environments—savannalike spaces—is long sightlines, which would have helped us to survive the eons when our species was still a link in the wild food chain. In other words, we prefer nature when it is unthreatening, and on that count, we have had our wish. The second point is that we nonetheless have a deeply embedded psychological attachment to the living world. Having lost our daily communion with that world, our modern spiritualization of it can be seen as a kind of prosthetic—or, if you prefer, a way of turning up the volume on a signal that is increasingly faint. We have created an imaginary connection with nature because we lack a tangible one, and we carry that connection in spirit because we no longer follow it in body. The sense of the divine that many feel in wild places is less a bond with nature than it is another symptom of the absence of that bond.

Ecologically speaking, this sanctified nature is not nearly enough. “We live more and more in an enchanted illusion of what nature is, which I think is counterproductive to conservation,” says the Cornell University biologist Harry Greene. It’s the back half of that statement—counterproductive to conservation—that contains surprises. At the time, Greene was responding to the movement that seeks, in effect, to protect feral mustang horses in the American West from natural life and death, permitting neither human culling nor wild predation nor starvation from drought or harsh winters, and instead using pharmaceutical contraceptives to control the population. This approach falls close to the farthest end of the spectrum of enchantment, where we find “end of suffering” activists who see a high moral calling in technocratic intervention against every cruelty that regulates natural systems: no more frogs swallowed alive by snakes, no more calf elk gored by grizzlies in front of their mothers’ eyes, no more exhausted hummingbirds drowned during their arduous migration across the Gulf of Mexico. “Let’s aim to be compassionate gods,” concludes one essay from the end-of-suffering sect, “and replace the cruelty of Darwinian life with something better.”

But such extreme examples aren’t necessary. We might instead simply reflect upon the ecological consequences of our having created a wild world that has, for the most part, liberated us from fang and claw and distanced us from unseemly reality. Writing in the 2010 book Trophic Cascades, editors John Terborgh and James Estes, both prominent ecologists, describe the simplification of nature’s architecture by human actions as a crisis “every bit as serious, universal, and urgent as climate change.” When fishermen’s nets fill not with fish but jellyfish; when pestilent tsetse flies spread with the scrublands once held in check by browsing elephants; when overpopulating deer eat the flower gardens of suburban America—all of these bear the markings of the ecological cascade. Here’s one example that hints at the scale of the losses: The best available estimate suggests that whales before whaling ate up nearly 65 percent of the energy—as transformed into living things—produced yearly in the world’s oceans. Paradoxically, however, the same seas that teemed with ravenous whales also brimmed with other creatures great and small, from swordfish to shad to oysters. They did so, paradoxically, in seas that despite the whales’ ravenous appetites would have seemed nearly to burst with creatures great and small, from swordfish to shad to oysters. “We know very little about the direct and indirect effects of reducing whale populations by more than 90 percent, but they must be substantial,” note Terborgh and Estes, with the typical restraint of lifelong scientists. It’s knowledge that could be of some use to us right now. By conservative estimates, a single animal—us—now consumes at least a quarter of the annual productivity of the planet, with the critical difference that our myriad hungers are satisfied only at enormous expense to the abundance and variety of species.

Are we to blame a global society’s accumulating insults against the biosphere on people who meditate in the desert or find divinity beneath the redwoods? No. But the way you see the world determines much about the world you are willing to live in, and the spiritual lens has failed us as a tool for seeing clearly. Here are Terborgh and Estes again: “There is little public awareness of impending biotic impoverishment because the drivers of collapse are the absence of essentially invisible processes . . . and because the ensuing transformations are slow and often subtle, involving gradual compositional changes that are beyond the powers of observation of most lay observers.” Our collective response to these shifts in our surroundings, as Michael Soulé, a founding figure in conservation biology, puts it, is to “excuse, permit, and adapt.” The romanticization of a denatured living world is one such adaptation. We have turned a fierce and ambiguous nature into a place of comfort, and if we embrace the result as a sanctuary of the soul, to be visited every second or third long weekend, then we may ultimately see little purpose in returning to a deeper and more risky engagement. We’ll end up with the twin faces of Janus both looking the same direction, having found all the wildness we need in the tamed.

Every year, I try to return to that cabin where the bears roam and the salmon spawn and die, and the baby bats risk their new lives in fragile flight. There is no road; the access is by train, or by boat across a river of terrifying cold and current. I once told people that I went there for the peace and quiet, to escape into the sublime, and that was not entirely a lie. But I have to admit that I often feel a growing dread as the moment of entry into that wilderness approaches. It’s not the solace of mountain and forest that keeps drawing me back. It is something more demanding.

Every day in that wild place is an opportunity to pass time with eagles, ravens, toads, snakes, moose, grouse, salmon, and the year’s local black bear, which somehow always seems to be everywhere at all times. I often find myself filled with wonder, but the challenge of living nearer to nature will never be having to cope with more beauty, or that our hearts may explode from so much swelling. Instead, the challenge comes from the wilderness’s countless mortal shocks, from maggots teeming in the brainpan of a dead deer, to the steady watchfulness required of life among large predators, to weirdly disturbing realizations such as that adult mayflies have no mouths, no digestive tracts, no anuses. Yet another memory from this past year’s visit leaps to mind: a strange preponderance of bleeding tooth fungus, Hydnellum peckii, which weeps transparent beads of red liquid across the white pulp of its mushroom cap. If the bleeding tooth fungus is the answer to any question, that question could only be, “Why?”

If the modern spiritualization of nature is the product of distance and diminishment, observations such as these are the opposite, the outcome of muddy hands and scratched skin, of having time to waste in places where our species is a curiosity and potential source of protein. Slowly, haltingly, I am coming to see the community of species around my cabin with the same eyes with which I have come to see other communities—to the extent that even that word, community, sounds clinical and precious to my ears. Think instead of your friendships, or your neighborhood, those fragile constructions of toleration and embrace, of the heartwarming and the bleak. We understand our friends and neighbors as imperfect, even essentially tragic, and yet, at our best, we know that they are a part of us—that we are enriched when they are enriched, impoverished when they are impoverished. I am still new to the neighborhood of salmon, cedar, and raven, and I won’t claim any insight into their world that is more profound than this: I feel their absence when I leave, and it’s their presence that always draws me back again.

It hasn’t been my experience that full-force nature directs the mind toward thoughts of positive vibrations or divine master plans. Nature itself is enough, its stories written in blood and shit and electrons and birdsong, and in this we may ultimately find all the sacredness we seem to need.

One final story: Several years ago, I interviewed a woman named Sally Mueller who had moved with her family from New Mexico to the remote Tatlayoko Valley of British Columbia. She had, in effect, made the decision that I have never found myself quite ready to make—to seek a life in the wilderness. There, many happy years later, she was charged by a sow grizzly protecting her cubs. The animal stopped only inches away and, roaring, swiped with a paw, slicing through two layers of clothing and the flesh of Mueller’s thumb. Only then did the mother bear’s fury drain away. The grizzly retreated; the scales of life and death tilted back into balance; the crawl of time returned to its regularly scheduled programming.

“It was really a highly spiritual experience for me,” Mueller said. She shared that revelation cautiously, aware that it would be difficult to understand. But in those terrible instants, she said, she knew that the bear was only doing what it must, and so was she, and so, too, were even the meadow grasses and the trees, the earth and the sky, and all of it was blurred into a pattern too infinite and ancient to explain. At last, Mueller found the words for the feeling: “It was just like coming home.”

THIS IS HOW I CAME to be standing inside a sodbuster’s hut at the edge of the Badlands, breathing 1876 air and hearing Spanish in my mind . . .

Maybe it was Jim Morrison’s fault. Maybe it was Okie Bob’s. I have always had a mystical urge toward the biggest, emptiest, western landscapes—they promise mysteries and verities, room to spit and walk about. I spent barrio boyhood Sunday mornings with Okie Bob’s corral of cowboy movies and old western music in vivid black and white on channel six. But my nights? They belonged to The Lizard King. “The West . . . is the best,” he intoned. “Get here and we’ll do the rest.” Psychedelic cowboy tunes on the edge of the continental shelf.

I was as west as one could get in the lower 48; westering beyond San Diego would drop you right in the water. All that fascinating frontier stuff was actually east of my west. Unless it was south.

In Spanish, “frontier” is frontera. All the Tijuana license plates had FRONT on them, which I thought meant Tijuana was at the head of some great charge. Turns out, it was. Frontera does not only mean “frontier” in Spanish. It also means “border.” Pioneers and buckaroos, settlers and desperados was headin’ for me from two different directions. Here came The Virginian . . . and The Sinaloan.

IT IS TELLING THAT, although we allegedly live in Chicago now, my family lives thirty-five miles west of the city. The West remains the best in my mind, and I drag the fam on epic drives almost every year. I feel relief when I cross the Mississippi, and shivers of delight crossing the Missouri. When the land turns red and black and craggy, I feel echoes in my bones. I hear America singing, as Walt Whitman said, though my kids hear The Killers and Nine Inch Nails, their earbuds going sst-sst-sst-sst.

We head to South Dakota, toward my Lakota brothers at Pine Ridge. I always hanker to see my Oglala homeboys, Duane and Horses. Horses tells me stories about how Sioux boys used to be migrant farmworkers beside the Kerouac-era Messkins. “Why do you think guys at Pine Ridge are named Pedro?” he asks. Though there they say Pee-dro.

I remember Duane visiting me once in Colorado, and a local yelling from a passing truck, “Go back where you came from!” And Duane, shooting back, “Where to, South Dakota?”

And Horses once, on the phone, three beers down: “You think the Indian wars are over? The cavalry’s still chasing indigenous guys around the territories.”

Cornfields. Pecan logs. Plastic buffalo beside I-90. Jackalopes. The West is the best. I rush out into the empty horizon, and go deeper in.

MY MOM’S PEOPLE availed themselves of traditional Manifest Destiny—rolling west from their English roots. But my dad’s people were the Original Illegal Immigrants, Spanish conquistadores. The Urrea brothers came and took South America, then headed north. Their ancient roots seem to be in the Visigoth invaders of Iberia. We are migratin’ fools.

Once into Mexico, el destino manifiesto sent them north again. Toward the frontier that was later retranslated by the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo into the present border. Thus, my inevitable entry: Mom’s migration met Dad’s and we washed up on the farthest beach.

This may seem like old history to you, but Newt is on CNN right now calling Spanish a ghetto language, and Mitt was on last night telling us to self-deport, and all candidates seem to get real traction on the backs of the “invading hordes,” on beaner border-jumpers, though the evidence shows that we are at zero net immigration.

I remember when Slow Turtle, elder of the Wampanoag, came to my college and said, “You boat people keep overcrowding my continent.” On my endless speaking tour, people like to counter my comments with the inevitable, “Yeah, my family was immigrants, too, but we came here legally.” And I ask, “Who stamped their visas, Crazy Horse or Geronimo?”

I FEEL UNWORTHY of the Black Hills, of the vast Badlands. Is it weird to want to embrace a bison? (Well, I’ll be the first to admit it is kind of foolish.) I’m a liberal patriot: don’t tread on me, cabrones!

There is a rainbow arching from the emerald prairies to the glowing whiteness of the Badlands—the dark violet sky behind makes the hoodoos and monuments seem to be glowing from within. It’s a scene that would be too archetypal and rich for the postmodernists with whom I teach. It’s so unironic. But, as David Quammen once wrote: God gets carried away, to his credit.

There are the signs along the road: SEE! ORIGINAL SODBUSTER HUTS! And: FEED! PRAIRIE DOGS! Well now, our next detour is decided upon—Maw and Paw want to see real sodbuster huts, and the kids can toss peanuts to the ‘dogs.

I USED TO WORK with a relief organization on the south side of the frontera. We worked among beggars, orphans, prostitutes, drug addicts, street gangs, killers, and prisoners. We fed widows and killed lice. It was some rough country—it was Deadwood, in Spanish. The detritus and ruin of a contested frontier.

What was interesting to me always was the debased grandeur of hope. The beauty of scraping together castoff wood and paper and somehow building a shelter against the wind and the beasts and your roving enemies. The stink of these shacks, the endemic gray-black color that seeped in. The newspapers on the walls to keep out the cold. The vermin that fell out of the roofs. The wobbly handcrafted tables these small families gathered at by candlelight to pick over their plates of beans.

These huts were scattered across a dirt landscape devoid of grass or flowers. The city of Tijuana piled dead animals at the edge of their settlement and set fire to the carcasses. Run-over dogs, poisoned goats, dead cows and horses burned in great bony pyres. And the wind never stopped.

MY WIFE AND I STORM up the path toward the sodbuster homes while the kids, giddy with the whistling little wag-tail dogs, spend all our loose change on peanuts.

We bend to get in the door of the first hut, sunk into a slight hillock. Still musty with the phantom odors of sleepers and cooking fires and sweat and hope, the little hut is redolent in a ghosty way. The table is off plumb and has clearly been hammered together from wagon parts. And the floor is hard-swept dirt. It feels like church; we start to whisper.

And the dust is gray-black. The newspapers are still on the walls. And beetles fall out of the ceiling. And for a moment I lose my bearings. I know it. I know that smell. I know that dust. I have met those beetles. I have sat on that crooked and dirty old bed.

We hurry out and rush to the next hut. And the haunted feelings intensify. The soft shock. That small still voice of revelation comes upon me there on the bare fields of the sodbuster settlement. This is the same story. The depraved and filthy huts of the Tijuana garbage-pickers, poised on the edge of their frontera, are exactly the same constructions as these noble and brave huts poised on the edge of their frontier. The garbage-picker is simply part of the wrong story—those settlers are heading north, which is the wrong direction. These good people were heading west. It is our national story. Our drama. Our heritage. And it is beautiful.

Of course, nobody checked their footnotes with Duane or Horses.

Continuing on our westward journey, we take a detour into Custer State Park. It is overrun by bikers, all of them heading for Sturgis. We come to a crossroad with hills on one side, prairies behind us, and shadowy forest ahead. All around our van, a run of Hells Angels, flying their colors, rumble on their Harleys. We all pause at the stop sign and become aware of a deeper rumbling than the bike engines. Suddenly, a real-life stampede of buffalo breaks out of the trees and charges between and around us in a tidal crashing of hooves. Angels yelling, “Oh my God!” The van shaking and rolling. The kids flying from window to window, shouting. America’s shaggy heart has burst open around us.

We are all laughing.

But why do I have tears running down my cheeks?

Why can I not breathe?

Once the bison are gone, we drive on, into the West again.

ALDO LEOPOLD was a righteous man—in a midwestern sort of way. When it came to nature, he disapproved of “tinkerings,” as when domestic species are substituted for wild ones, and he advised against “readjustments” of the land’s circulatory system. In fact, he insisted calmly, the land should be appraised not as a commodity but as a living community that commands our respect because it is the source of both human culture and human freedom.

To narrate the message, the father of wildlife conservation took us to his own beloved plot of land on an abandoned farm in Sand County. Which, as all good students of Leopold know, is really Sauk County, but his larger literary and geological point was that west-central Wisconsin is essentially a sandbox, and that when you clear the forest and try to plow in the usual extractive way, ruination and defeat are the likely results.

Cease being intimidated by the argument that right action is impossible because it does not yield maximum profits.

Well, sensible Aldo, I was with you for years. Unintimidated. Right up until I interacted with the interactive map (source: Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources) captioned “Counties With Frack Sand Mines And/Or Processing Facilities” that the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel provided as a sidebar to the story “Fracking Expanding: Mining for Sand Used in Oil and Gas Exploration is Booming in Western Wisconsin, and the DNR Has No Plans for New Regulations.”

Basically, Sand County is being loaded into rail cars and hauled away, metric ton by metric ton. Bluffs, hills, coulees. They’re all going.

Every day, at least one full train of mined sand leaves Wisconsin for gas fields in Pennsylvania or oil fields in North Dakota. The number of operating sand mines in the state has doubled over the past five months. Each one is five hundred to one thousand acres in size, which is ten to twenty times larger than the average gravel pit. “It’s huge,” says a mineral commodity specialist quoted in the Associated Press. “I’ve never seen anything like it, the growth. It makes my head spin.”

So, there you have it. Even the commodities guy—the commodities guy, Aldo—is intimidated.

Meanwhile, Sand County streams are filling with silt, rural roads are filling with 24/7 truck traffic, and rural air is filling with the noise of loading rail cars and crystalline silica.

Crystalline silica causes cancer. More specifically, crystalline silica dust is listed by both the World Health Organization and the U.S. National Toxicology Program as a known human lung carcinogen. Unlike tobacco smoke, silica dust does not provoke tumors via genetic mutations. Instead, its method of injury is to trigger inflammation and suppress immune functioning. It also causes silicosis, a disabling and sometimes fatal condition in which fibrous nodules fill the spongy pulmonary chambers, prompting infections and heart failure. For both reasons, crystalline silica is regulated by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. There are legal limits to how much silica dust a person operating a sandblaster can inhale.

Before midwestern sand counties were turned inside out—and towering, windblown dunes of powdery silica began appearing within view of people’s kitchen windows—the general public was not thought to suffer appreciable exposures. There are thus no standards for us. No research program has ever addressed the possible impact of silica dust on, say, pregnancy outcome or the lung development of children. Lack of study on public health effects means that the occupational carcinogen crystalline silica is not regulated as a hazardous air pollutant. At least not in Wisconsin and not at this writing.

A SAND COUNTY ALMANAC was published in 1949. In the same year, an oil-field service company called Halliburton fracked its first commercial well and so ushered in a new method for extracting oil and gas by using pressure, water, chemicals, and sand to blow up shale. The function of the sand is to hold the stone doors ajar so that the hydrocarbons can flow out and up.

But the shale boom didn’t really take off until 2005, the year that fracking received exemptions from most major federal environmental regulations (the now-famous “Halliburton loophole”). By 2008, Wisconsin sand had become a highly prized quarry. The Samson of silica, its grains were the ideal size, shape, and strength for propping open cracks a mile or more below the earth’s surface. And that’s how the nation’s Devonian bedrock became the new destination spot for Sand County. That’s how Aldo Leopold’s farm in central Wisconsin could end up fracking Rachel Carson’s childhood home on the Marcellus shale of western Pennsylvania.

In 2009, the last year for which data are available, 6.5 million tons of U.S. sand were mined, washed, processed, loaded onto trucks and trains, carried to wellheads, and shot into the center of the earth. Six and a half million tons is the approximate weight of the Great Pyramid of Giza. According to commodities analysts, that figure probably doubled in 2010 and likely doubled again last year.

THE OLD WOMAN PROFILED in a recent news story about Wisconsin’s sand rush is moving away. She admitted to the reporter that she had sold her land to the mining company. Her husband has Alzheimer’s and needs help. She lives north of your farm, Aldo.

IF A SAND COUNTY ALMANAC is about the loving restoration of logged hills and depleted farm fields, Sand County, the Sequel is about turning those hills and fields into open pit mines. It’s about the exhuming of Wisconsin’s sandstone foundation—put in place by the last glacier—and its reburial into fossilized seabeds one or two time zones away. Except that, once wedged into the cracks of shattered shale, the processed and pulverized sand is not really laid to rest. Generations from now, long after the fracked wells are exhausted of oil and gas, the zombie sand will go on, eternally holding open geological passageways. The question remains: what manner of subterranean stuff—methane, benzene, toluene, radon—will thereby find escape routes?

I, too, grew up in sand county—on the east bluff of the Illinois River, which flows through the riverbed of the ancient Mississippi. Just below the streets, fields, rail yards, and playgrounds of my hometown are the original dunes that lined its preglacial shores. As the girl whose name was Sandy, I was pleased to know they were down there. In Sunday school, I imagined talking to Jesus about that parable of the foolish builder whose house was constructed on sand. C’mon.

Last January, my hometown newspaper brought word that the LaSalle County board has approved strip mining for frack sand along the boundary of Starved Rock State Park, which is a marvel of sandstone outcroppings and gorges. The county board was swayed by the promise of thirty-nine jobs, which start at eighteen dollars an hour. So, absent further intervention, the beloved landscape of my childhood may be carted off and shoved into the fractured landscape of my children’s childhood.

We now live atop the Marcellus shale, surrounded by land leased for gas extraction.

By any measure, the gas and oil industry is the wealthiest, most powerful industry in the world. Maximizing profits is what they do. I am intimidated, Aldo. But I am not resigned. And there is a difference.

In this department of the magazine, we offer a space for people to exercise their sixth sense and tell us about their place, their connection to it, its history and future and imaginary life. It’s a web feature as well.

Priscilla Kinter

Hexenkopf Hill, Pennsylvania

HEXENKOPF, the witch’s head. Mountain summit in Northampton County. Peak elevation: 791 feet. Isolated prominence on a ridge of South Mountain. Home. The ghost of a headless hunter, the ghosts of witches, and strange lights have been seen here. Strange sounds come from the woods.

The stone that makes up Hexenkopf Rock is embedded with tiny flecks of mica, reflective scales that once covered the rock’s entire surface. The mica has largely eroded away, but during the various times when the densely wooded hill was clearcut by owners trying to squeeze an income from their rocky property, the mica would mirror the moon and glow white in the night. Morgan le Fay could easily have lived in the brambly woods covering Hexenkopf, fingertips sparking.

When German families settled in Northampton County, their homes and barns were inhabited by haus geister, house spirits—leprechauns, púca, brownies, or Robin Goodfellow to those of other ethnic origins—half-animal creatures that lived in the caves and hills and hunted in the woods. When the Magyars (including my great-grandparents) arrived from Hungary, they found that the manók elves and goblins, the foxy törpék dwarves, the cave-dwelling bubus spirits, and fene illness demons were already there. The Germans kept watch for the ghostly Der Schimmelreiter who would lead his spectral army through the hills, the Hungarians for the guta demon who beat his victims to death.

In the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it was understood that any wind blowing from Hexenkopf carried contagion and pestilence and that the entire hill was cursed and haunted, not to be trespassed on or abused. When Hexenkopf Rock glows in the moonlight, devils and spirits and ghosts roam the hill. German witches still practice on its slopes.

Perhaps it is ironic that, growing up, I never knew our hill was supposed to be cursed, or haunted, or harrowing in any way, never heard about headless ghosts or contagion winds, about mysterious lights and sounds in the trees, never knew any of it until I was decades older and far away. Or perhaps this is simply a lamentation for the richness once located just outside my back door, all too easily left behind in an urge to discover what lay beyond the next ridge.

Bob Gray

Housatonic, Massachusetts

I LIVE IN one of Clark Comstock’s pastures. I know this because fifty years ago I walked through here to fish and swim in the Williams River, the meandering west border of Comstock’s farm. If his cows were fording the river, we’d try to jump into the swaying hollow of their hips to see if they’d carry us across. On our way we dodged fresh cow pies or whiffled them at each other when they were sun-dried.

Yet I cannot legally raise a chicken on the acre of land I tenant.

Houses, not nettles or ox-eye daisies, spring up in Mr. Comstock’s fields now, like they do at another once-farm down North Plain Road a mile or so. Identical prefab colonials hug the road, staring blank-faced through the few spared evergreens.

Out back used to be a five- or six-acre white pine grove. The trees marched in orderly rows mustered by the man who bought the old farmhouse and desired exclusivity. Crows in their hundreds dropped from the pink-purple autumn evenings to roost there. When I felt mischievous, I stalked among the trees at sunset and clapped my hands just to hear the whirling racket of caws and the stage whispers of pinions. But this dusky chaos was just a weary, cautious circling, before a one- or two- or three-crow settling down again into the dark.

Deer made bold by winter’s harshness walked stealthily up from the river and between our houses in the early dark to shelter from blizzards they sensed before the first flakes fell, tentative, unsure of their welcome.

Now even the pines are gone, clearcut by a developer whose dreams apparently died with the trees. Crops of thorns, sumac, and poison ivy thrive.

As I made my garden, made in the real sense with three decades of grass clippings, manure, and leaves dug into the gravelly undersoil, I unearthed an occasional rusty shovel, horseshoe, mattock blade, the sparse, circumstantial evidence of what once flourished here.

Lisa Hupp

Kodiak, Alaska

A NASA astronaut’s blog photo went viral this week in our community: a full moon rising over interior Alaska, the frozen white landscape curving into a blue haze. Delicate, almost lacelike snowy islands spread over the foreground, anchored in a deceptively calm North Pacific Ocean. Rugged mountains appear flattened, fjords and bays radiate out from the long spine of uplifted sea floor at the archipelago’s center, and there is little sign of life.

Yet as it was posted and reposted online, a collective local pride labeled the photo as home sweet home. For many of us living on Kodiak, this image maps memories along each indentation of rocky coast. 



At the north end of the archipelago, I can see Shuyak Island, where I spent my first summer here as a backcountry ranger kayaking among salmon, seals, and the occasional migrating orca. Along the western fringe, I find Uganik Bay, where my friends and neighbors fish commercially from set-net sites along the shore. I think about sitting on their cabin porch, watching the sun set across the Shelikof Strait as we drink beer from mismatched cups, the tall stalks of fireweed on the tundra illuminated bright pink in low light. 



My eye skips over the landscape, remembering: the red bicycle resting against the mercantile at Larsen Bay Cannery, the Christmas we hunted deer along the icy rocks of Viekoda Bay, the downtown docks and the familiar fishing boats. Learning to weave a traditional Alutiiq grass basket at the beach. An early morning at the edge of a river, watching a bear stalk through the mist and deftly snag a passing fish . . .



It is an unlikely home, seen from space. A solitary rock in a blank blue sea. But those of us who live in this place have a different view: a rich bounty, a survival story, a confluence at the top of the world.

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Part one of two. Part two was published in the May/June 2012 issue.

LIKE YOU AND OTHER AMERICANS, I love my country, its wonderful people, its boundless energy, its creativity in so many fields, its natural beauty, its many gifts to the world, and the freedom it has given us to express ourselves. So we should all be angry, profoundly angry, when we consider what has happened to our country and what that neglect could mean for our children and grandchildren.

How can we gauge what has happened to America in the past few decades and where we stand today? One way is to look at how America now compares with other countries in key areas. The group of twenty advanced democracies—the major countries of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), including the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Japan, the Nordic countries, Canada, and others—can be thought of as our peer nations. Here’s what we see when we look at these countries. To our great shame, America now has

• the highest poverty rate, both generally and for children;
• the greatest inequality of incomes;
• the lowest social mobility;
• the lowest score on the UN’s index of “material well-being of children”;
• the worst score on the UN’s Gender Inequality Index;
• the highest expenditure on health care as a percentage of GDP, yet all this money accompanied by the highest infant mortality rate, the highest prevalence of mental health problems, the highest obesity rate, the highest percentage of people going without health care due to cost, the highest consumption of antidepressants per capita, and the shortest life expectancy at birth;
• the next-to-lowest score for student performance in math and middling performance in science and reading;
• the highest homicide rate;
• the largest prison population in absolute terms and per capita;
• the highest carbon dioxide emissions and the highest water consumption per capita;
• the lowest score on Yale’s Environmental Performance Index (except for Belgium) and the largest ecological footprint per capita (except for Denmark);
• the lowest spending on international development and humanitarian assistance as a percentage of national income (except for Japan and Italy);
• the highest military spending both in total and as a percentage of GDP; and
• the largest international arms sales.

Our politicians are constantly invoking America’s superiority and exceptionalism. True, the data is piling up to confirm that we’re Number One, but in exactly the way we don’t want to be—at the bottom.

These deplorable consequences are not just the result of economic and technological forces over which we have no control. They are the results of conscious political decisions made over several decades by both Democrats and Republicans who have had priorities other than strengthening the well-being of American society and our environment. Many countries, obviously, took a different path—one that was open to us as well.

I wish that were all the bad news. Unfortunately, international comparisons only give us a glimpse of what we now face. They miss many of the most important challenges, including in the critical areas of social conditions, national security, and politics. I will spare you the litany of environmental bad news; most of you have already heard it.

When it comes to social conditions, it’s important to recognize that nearly 50 million Americans now live in poverty—one in six. If you’re in poverty in America, you’re living on less than $400 per week for a family of four. Poverty is the bleeding edge of a more pervasive American shortcoming—massive economic insecurity. About half of American families now live paycheck to paycheck, are financially fragile, and earn less than needed to cover basic living expenses, let alone save for the future.

Back in 1928, right before the Great Depression, the richest 1 percent of Americans received 24 percent of the country’s total income. Starting with the New Deal, public policy favored greater equality and a strong middle class, so that by 1976, the share of the richest 1 percent of households had dropped to 9 percent. But then the great re-redistribution began in the 1980s, so that by 2007, right before the Great Recession, the richest 1 percent had regained its 1928 position—with 24 percent of income.

As for national security, the U.S. now spends almost as much on the military as the rest of the world combined. If one totals military and other U.S. security spending, the total easily climbs to over $1 trillion annually, about two-thirds of all discretionary federal spending. In what has been called a key feature of the American Empire, America now garrisons the world. Although the Pentagon officially reports that we maintain a mere 660 military bases in 38 countries, if one adds the unreported bases in Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, and elsewhere, there are likely as many as 1,000 U.S. military sites around the world. By 2010, we had covert operations deployed in an estimated 40 percent of the world’s 192 nations. On the home front, in 2010, the Washington Post reported that the top-secret world the government created in response to 9/11 now contains some 1,300 government entities and 1,900 private companies all working on programs related to counterterrorism, homeland security, and intelligence in some 10,000 locations across the United States.

When you’ve got an armful of hammers, every problem looks like a nail, and the U.S. has tended to seek military solutions to problems that might be addressed otherwise. The costs have been phenomenally high. When all told, our wars since 9/11 will cost us over $4 trillion and more than 8,000 American lives, with another 99,000 U.S. troops already wounded in action or evacuated for serious illness.

Another sorrow is the huge, draining psychological burden that U.S. actions have on its citizens. We see our own military, the CIA, and U.S. contractors engaged in torture and prisoner abuse, large killings of innocent civilians, murders and the taking of body parts as souvenirs, renditions, drone assassinations, military detention without trial, collaboration with unsavory regimes, and more.

Meanwhile, outside our borders, a world of wounds has festered without much help, and often with harm, from the United States. We are neglecting so many problems—from world poverty, underdevelopment, and climate change to emerging shortages of food and water and energy, biological impoverishment, and transnational organized crime.

The following are among the many treaties ratified by all nations, except for a few rogue states—and the United States: the Convention of the Rights of the Child, the Convention Against All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, the Land Mine Convention, the International Criminal Court convention, the Biodiversity Convention, the Law of the Sea, the Kyoto Protocol of the Climate Convention, and the Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants. The U.S. is the main reason we do not now have a World Environment Organization.

In these respects and in many others, the U.S. posture in the world reflects a radical imbalance: a hugely disproportionate focus on the military and on economic issues and a tragic neglect of some of the most serious challenges we and the world now confront.

These many challenges require farsighted, strong, and effective government leadership and action. Inevitably, then, the path to responding to these challenges leads to the political arena, where a vital, muscular democracy steered by an informed and engaged citizenry is needed. That’s the democracy we need, but, unfortunately, it is not the democracy we have. Right now, Washington isn’t even trying to seriously address most of these challenges. Neglect, stalemate, and denial rule the day. It is estimated that American politics is more polarized today than at any time since Reconstruction. Polarization, of course, is father to gridlock. Gridlock and stalemate are the last thing our country needs now.

The American political system is in deep trouble for another reason—it is moving from democracy to plutocracy and corporatocracy, supported by the ascendancy of market fundamentalism and a strident antiregulation, antigovernment, antitax ideology. The hard truth is that our political system today is simply incapable of meeting the great challenges described here. What we have is third-rate governance at a time when the challenges we face require first-rate governance.

America thus confronts a daunting array of challenges in the maintenance of our people’s well-being, in the conduct of our international affairs, in the management of our planet’s natural assets, and in the workings of our politics. Taken together, these challenges place in grave peril much that we hold dear.

The America we must seek for our children and grandchildren is not the America we have today. If we are going to change things for the better, we must first understand the forces that led us to this sea of troubles. When big problems emerge across the entire spectrum of national life, it cannot be due to small reasons. We have encompassing problems because of fundamental flaws in our economic and political system. By understanding these flaws, we can end them and move forward in a very different direction.

I THINK AMERICA GOT OFF COURSE for two primary reasons. In recent decades we failed to build consistently on the foundations laid by the New Deal, by Franklin Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms and his Second Bill of Rights, and Eleanor Roosevelt’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Instead, we unleashed a virulent, fast-growing strain of corporate-consumerist capitalism. “Ours is the Ruthless Economy,” say Paul Samuelson and William Nordhaus in their influential textbook, Macroeconomics. And indeed it is. In its ruthlessness at home and abroad, it creates a world of wounds. As it strengthens and grows, those wounds deepen and multiply.

Such an economy begs for restraint and guidance in the public interest—control that can only be provided by government. Yet, at this point, the captains of our economic life and those who have benefited disproportionately from it have largely taken over our political life. Corporations, long identified as our principal economic actors, are now also our principal political actors. The result is a combined economic and political system—the operating system upon which our society runs—of great power and voraciousness, pursuing its own economic interests without serious concern for the values of fairness, justice, or sustainability that democratic government might have provided.

Our political economy has evolved and gathered force in parallel with the course of the Cold War and the growth of the American Security State. The Cold War and the rise of the American Empire have powerfully affected the nature of the political-economic system—strengthening the already existing prioritization of economic growth, giving rise to the military-industrial complex, and draining time, attention, and money away from domestic needs and emerging international challenges. This diversion of attention and resources continues with our response to international terrorism.

So what are this operating system’s key features, which have been given such free rein by these developments? First, ours is an economy that prioritizes economic growth above all else. We think of growth as an unalloyed good, but this growth fetish is a big source of our problems. We’ve had plenty of growth in recent decades—growth while wages stagnated, jobs fled our borders, life satisfaction flat-lined, social capital eroded, poverty and inequality mounted, and the environment declined. Today, U.S. GDP has regained its prerecession level, but 15 percent of American workers still can’t find full-time jobs.

Another key feature of today’s dysfunctional operating system is how powerfully the profit motive affects corporate behavior. Today’s corporations have been called “externalizing machines,” so committed are they to keeping the real costs of their activities off their books. Profit can be increased by keeping wages low and real social, environmental, and economic costs externalized—borne by society at large and not by the firm. One can get some measure of these external costs from a recent analysis of three thousand of the world’s biggest companies. It concluded that paying for their external environmental costs would erase at least a third of their profits. Profits can also be increased through subsidies, tax breaks, regulatory loopholes, and other gifts from government. Together, these external costs and subsidies lead to dishonest prices, which in turn lead consumers to spur on businesses that do serious damage to people and planet.

Given such emphasis on inexorable growth and profit, the constant spread of the market into new areas can be very costly environmentally and socially. As Karl Polanyi described in his 1944 book, The Great Transformation, “To allow the market mechanism to be sole director of the fate of human beings and their natural environment . . . would result in the demolition of society. . . . Nature would be reduced to its elements, neighborhoods and landscapes defiled, rivers polluted, military safety jeopardized, the power to produce food and raw materials destroyed.” With its emphasis on privatization, commercialization, and commodification, American capitalism has carried this demolition forward with a vengeance.

But the system that drives the capitalism we have today includes other elements. The corporation—the most important institution and agent of modern capitalism—has become both enormous and hugely powerful. Of the hundred largest economies in the world, fifty-three are corporations. Of the three hundred largest corporations in the world, a third are U.S. companies. American business wields great political and economic power and has routinely used that power to restrain ameliorative governmental action. Our corporations have driven the rise of transnational capital as the basis for economic globalization, along with all the challenges that equation introduces.

Then, there is what our society has become. Dominant American values today are strongly materialistic, anthropocentric, and contempocentric. Today’s consumerism and materialism place high priority on meeting human needs through the ever-increasing purchasing of goods and services. We say the best things in life are free, but not many of us act that way. Instead we’ve embraced an endless cycle of work and spend. The anthropocentric view that nature belongs to us, rather than we to nature, facilitates the exploitation of the natural world. And the habit of focusing on the present and discounting the future leads us away from a thoughtful appraisal of the long-term consequences of the world we are making.

Next, there is what our government and politics have become. Growth serves the interests of government by boosting politicians’ approval ratings, keeping difficult social justice and other issues on the back burner, and generating larger revenues without raising tax rates. Government in America doesn’t own much of the economy, so it must feed its growth habit by providing what corporations need to keep growing. Meanwhile, Washington today is hobbled by partisanship, corrupted by money, and typically at the service of economic interests. It is focused on the short horizons of election cycles and guided by a pathetic level of public discourse on important issues. Finally, our government seeks to enhance and project national power, both hard and soft, in part through economic strength and growth and in part through sustaining a vast military deployment.

And there is what our system of money and finance has become. We think of money as the cash in our pockets or the bank, but, in truth, virtually all the money in circulation today is created by the banking system when loans are made. If everyone paid off all their debts, there would be hardly any money. Money is a system of power, and Wall Street wields that power. Today, among other things, the big banks are financing the destruction of the planet’s climate. In 2010, Citi raised more than $34 billion for the coal and oil industries. Within Citi’s portfolio is $1 billion raised for the proposed pipeline intended to carry tar sands oil from Alberta to Gulf Coast refineries. Since January 2010, ten big banks have supported mountaintop removal coal mining to the tune of more than $2.5 billion.

These features aptly characterize key dimensions of today’s operating system—the political economy of today’s American capitalism. It’s important to see these features as a system, linked and mutually reinforcing. Taken together, they have given rise to an economic reality that is both colossal and largely out of control. An unquestioning society-wide commitment to economic growth at any cost; powerful corporate and banking interests whose overriding objective is to grow by generating profit, including profit from avoiding social and environmental costs; a government beholden to corporate interests and thus not strongly inclined to curb corporate abuses; and a rampant consumerism spurred endlessly on by sophisticated advertising—all these combine to deliver an ever-growing economy insensitive to the needs of people, place, and planet.

The prioritization of economic growth is among the roots of our problems. Today’s reigning policy orientation holds that the path to greater well-being is to grow and expand the economy. Productivity, profits, the stock market, and consumption must all go up. This growth imperative trumps all else. Growth is measured by tallying GDP at the national level, and sales and profits at the company level. The pursuit of GDP and profit can be said to be the overwhelming priorities of national economic and political life.

Economic growth may be the world’s secular religion, but for much of the world it is a god that is failing—underperforming for most of the world’s people and, for those in affluent societies, now creating more problems than it is solving.  The never-ending drive to grow the overall U.S. economy undermines families and communities; it is leading us to environmental calamity; it fuels a ruthless international search for energy and other resources; it fails at generating the needed jobs; and it rests on a manufactured consumerism that is not meeting our deepest human needs.

Americans are substituting growth and consumption for dealing with the real issues—for doing the things that would make us, and the country, better off. Psychologists have pointed out, for example, that while economic output per person in the United States has risen sharply in recent decades, there has been no increase in life satisfaction, and levels of distrust and depression have increased substantially. We have entered the realm of what ecological economist Herman Daly calls “uneconomic growth.” Environmentally, we see a world in which growth has brought us to a situation where more of the same will quite literally ruin the planet. Politically, the growth imperative is a big part of how we the people are controlled: the necessity for growth gives the real power to those who have the finance and technology to deliver it.

IT IS UP TO US AS CITIZENS to inject values of justice, fairness, and sustainability into this system, and government is the primary vehicle we have for accomplishing this. Typically, we attempt to do so by working within the system to promote needed reforms. We work the media and other channels to raise public awareness of our issue, and try to shift public understanding and discourse in our favor. We lobby Congress, the current administration, and government agencies with well-crafted and sensible proposals. When necessary, we go to court. With modest resources, we devote what we can to the electoral process and to candidates for public office. And we hope somehow that lightning will strike and events will move in our favor.

But it is now abundantly clear that these reformist approaches are not succeeding. The titanic forces unleashed by the American brand of capitalism are too powerful. The ceaseless drive for profits, growth, and power and other system imperatives keep the problem spigot fully open. Reform rarely deals with the root causes—the underlying drivers. The forces that gave rise to these problems in the first place continue to war against progress. And our enfeebled political life, more and more in the hands of powerful corporations and individuals of great wealth, is no match for these forces.

Pursuing reform within the system can help, but what is now desperately needed is transformative change in the system itself. To deal successfully with all the challenges America now faces, we must therefore complement reform with at least equal efforts aimed at transformative change to create a new operating system that routinely delivers good results for people and planet.

At the core of this new operating system must be a sustaining economy based on new economic thinking and driven forward by a new politics. The purpose and goal of a sustaining economy is to provide broadly shared prosperity that meets human needs while preserving the earth’s ecological integrity and resilience—in short, a flourishing people and a flourishing nature. That is the paradigm shift we must now seek.

I believe this paradigm shift in the nature and operation of America’s political economy can be best approached through a series of interacting, mutually reinforcing transformations—transformations that attack and undermine the key motivational structures of the current system, transformations that replace these old structures with new arrangements needed for a sustaining economy and a successful democracy.

The following transformations hold the key to moving to a new political economy. Consider each as a transition from today to tomorrow.

• Economic growth: from growth fetish to post-growth society, from mere GDP growth to growth in human welfare and democratically determined priorities.
• The market: from near laissez-faire to powerful market governance in the public interest.
• The corporation: from shareholder primacy to stakeholder primacy, from one ownership and motivation model to new business models and the democratization of capital.
• Money and finance: from Wall Street to Main Street, from money created through bank debt to money created by government.
• Social conditions: from economic insecurity to security, from vast inequities to fundamental fairness.
• Indicators: from GDP (“grossly distorted picture”) to accurate measures of social and environmental health and quality of life.
• Consumerism: from consumerism and affluenza to sufficiency and mindful consumption, from more to enough.
• Communities: from runaway enterprise and throwaway communities to vital local economies, from social rootlessness to rootedness and solidarity.
• Dominant cultural values: from having to being, from getting to giving, from richer to better, from separate to connected, from apart from nature to part of nature, from transcendent to interdependent, from today to tomorrow.
• Politics: from weak democracy to strong, from creeping corporatocracy and plutocracy to true popular sovereignty.
• Foreign policy and the military: from American exceptionalism to America as a normal nation, from hard power to soft, from military prowess to real security.

We know that systemic, transformative change along these dimensions will require a great struggle, and it will not come quickly. The new values, priorities, policies, and institutions that would constitute a new political economy capable of regularly delivering good results are not at hand and won’t be for many years. The truth is we are still in the design stage of building a new operating system. That system won’t be yesterday’s socialism, by the way, but it won’t be today’s American capitalism either.

It follows that effectively addressing the many serious challenges America faces will take a lot more time than we would like. Meanwhile, America’s decline will persist—“decline” here not referring to losing world power relative to China and other countries, but to decline in human and natural conditions. That is a very depressing conclusion, but we must face it. More importantly, we must use it as a framework for understanding what we must now do. Indeed, there can be a very bright light at the end of this gloomy tunnel. There is the great gift of plausible hope that we can find our way forward.

In this period of decline, the imperatives we face as citizens are threefold: to slow and then halt the descent, minimizing human suffering and planetary damage along the way and preventing a collapse, the emergence of a fortress world, or any of the other dark scenarios plotted for us in science fiction and increasingly in serious analysis; to minimize the time at the bottom and start the climb upward toward a new operating system; and to complete, inhabit, and flourish in the diversity of alternative social arrangements, each far superior to ones we will have left behind.

But if we are failing at modest, incremental reform, how can we hope to achieve deeper, transformative change? The decline now occurring will progressively delegitimize the current order. Who wants an operating system that is capable of generating and perpetuating such suffering and destruction? One good thing about the decline of today’s political economy is that it opens the door to something much better. People will eventually rise up, raise a loud shout, and demand major changes. This is already happening with some people in some places. It will grow to become a national and global movement for transformation, demanding a better world.

As the old system enters its death throes, we are already seeing the proliferation of innovative models of “local living” economies, sustainable communities, and transition towns, as well as innovative business models, including social enterprises and for-benefit and worker-owned businesses that prioritize community and environment over profit and growth. Initiatives that may seem small or local can be starter wedges that lead to larger changes. These initiatives provide inspirational models for how things might work in a new political economy devoted to sustaining human and natural communities. Such initiatives are growing rapidly in America.

While the struggle to build a new system goes forward, we must do everything we can to make the old system perform. For example, if we do not act now on climate change, both nationally and internationally, the consequences will become so severe that the dark visions of those predicting calamity will become all too real. The situation we face in regard to climate disruption is already very grave. Should we fail to act now on the climate front, the world will likely become so nasty and brutish that the possibility of rebirth, of achieving something new and beautiful, will simply vanish, and we will be left with nothing but the burden of climate chaos and societies’ endless responses to it. Coping with the wreckage of a planetary civilization run amok would be a full-time job. On this issue and others, then, reform and transform are not alternatives but complementary and mutually reinforcing strategies.

Important here is a “theory of change.” The theory adopts the view that people act out of both fear and love—to avoid disaster and to realize a dream or positive vision. The theory affirms the centrality of hope and hope’s victory over despair. It locates the plausibility of hope in knowledge—knowing that many people will eventually rise up and fight for the things that they love; knowing that history’s constant is change, including deep, systemic change; and knowing that we understand enough to begin the journey, to strike out in the right directions, even if the journey’s end is a place we have never been. The theory embraces the seminal role of crises in waking us from the slumber of routine and in shining the spotlight on the failings of the current order of things. It puts great stock in transformative leadership that can point beyond the crisis to something better. The theory adopts the view that systemic change must be both bottom-up and top-down—driven by communities, businesses, and citizens deciding on their own to build the future locally as well as to develop the political muscle to adopt system-changing policies at the national and international levels. And it sees a powerful citizens’ movement as a necessary spur to action at all levels.

So imagine: As conditions in our country continue to decline across a wide front, or at best fester as they are, ever-larger numbers of Americans lose faith in the current system and its ability to deliver on the values it proclaims. The system steadily loses support, leading to a crisis of legitimacy. Meanwhile, traditional crises, both in the economy and in the environment, grow more numerous and fearsome. In response, progressives of all stripes coalesce, find their voice and their strength, and pioneer the development of a powerful set of new ideas and policy proposals confirming that the path to a better world does indeed exist. Demonstrations and protests multiply, and a powerful movement for prodemocracy reform and transformative change is born. At the local level, people and groups plant the seeds of change through a host of innovative initiatives that provide inspirational models of how things might work in a new political economy devoted to sustaining human and natural communities. Sensing the direction in which things are moving, our wiser and more responsible leaders, political and otherwise, rise to the occasion, support the growing movement for change, and frame a compelling story or narrative that makes sense of it all and provides a positive vision of a better America. It is a moment of democratic possibility.

In the end it all comes down to the American people and the strong possibility that we still have it in us to use our freedom and our democracy in powerful ways to create something fine, a reborn America, for our children and grandchildren. We can realize a new American Dream if enough of us join together in the fight for it. This new dream envisions an America where the pursuit of happiness is sought not in more getting and spending, but in the growth of human solidarity, real democracy, and devotion to the public good; where the average American is empowered to achieve his or her human potential; where the benefits of economic activity are widely and equitably shared; where the environment is sustained for current and future generations; and where the virtues of simple living, community self-reliance, good fellowship, and respect for nature predominate. These American traditions may not prevail today, but they are not dead. They await us, and indeed they are today being awakened across this great land. New ways of living and working, sharing and caring are emerging across America. They beckon us with a new American Dream, one rebuilt from the best of the old, drawing on the best of who we were and are and can be.

***
Part two of this article can be found here.

RECENTLY, I’VE BEEN THINKING about something I wrote fourteen years ago, which has become one of my most quoted passages: “Every morning when I wake up I ask myself whether I should write, or blow up a dam.” Despite having faith in my work as a writer, I knew that it wasn’t a lack of words that was killing salmon in the Northwest. It was the presence of dams.

Since that time, things have gotten much worse for salmon, and for almost everything on the earth. By now we all know the numbers, or we should. Two hundred species per day driven extinct, 90 percent of the large fish in the oceans extirpated, more than 98 percent of native forests destroyed, 99 percent of prairies, and on and on. Virtually every biological indicator is pointing the wrong direction. Native communities—human and nonhuman—are under assault. Where I live, frog populations have collapsed, as have newt populations, butterfly populations, crane fly populations, dragonfly populations, banana slug populations, songbird populations. Crow populations have collapsed. Bat populations. Woolly bear populations. Moth populations. Bumblebee and solitary bee populations. And these are just some of the absences I’ve noticed. Salmon of course have continued to collapse. At this point I give salmon fifteen years. If we can bring down industrialized civilization in the next fifteen years, I think salmon, in time, will be fine. Much longer and they will not survive.

So where does writing fit in? Far too many of us have forgotten, or never knew, that words can be used as weapons in service of our communities. Far too many of us have forgotten, or never knew, that words should be used as weapons in service of our communities. For far too long, too many critics and teachers have told us that literature should be apolitical (as though this were possible), and that even nonfiction and journalism should be “neutral” or “objective” (as though this, too, were possible). If you want to send a message, they told us, use Western Union. I once spoke with a nature writer who refused to lend his name to a campaign to protect a species about whom he had written, giving as his reason, “I’m a writer. I have to remain neutral.”

When the world is being murdered, such a position is inexcusable. It is immoral. And it reveals a great ignorance for what it means to be a writer. Have these people never heard of Steinbeck, Dickens, Crane, Hugo? Charlotte Perkins Gilman? Rachel Carson? Frederick Douglass? Harriet Beecher Stowe? Alexandra Kollontai? George Eliot? Katharine Burdekin? Zora Neale Hurston? Andrea Dworkin? B. Traven? Upton Sinclair? A little Tolstoy, anyone?

I would not be who I am and I would not write what I write without having learned from some of my elders who refused to believe that writers should or can be apolitical or neutral or objective. The truth is most important, they said. It is more important than money. It is more important than fame. It is more important than your career. It’s more important than your preconceptions. Follow the truth—follow the words and ideas—wherever they lead. Words matter, they said. Art matters. Literature matters. Words and art and literature can change lives, and can change history. Make sure that your words and your art and your literature move people individually and collectively in the direction of justice and sustainability. They said literature that supports capitalism is immoral. A literature that supports patriarchy is immoral. A literature that does not resist oppression is immoral. But you can help to create a literature of morality and resistance, as each new generation must create this literature, with the help of all those generations who came before, holding their hands for support, just as those who come after will need to hold yours.

I was also taught that art can be and is and, to be moral, must be a combat discipline.

Recognizing that art can be a combat discipline is part of a process necessary for social change, but it’s not all of it. If too few of us remember that words can be weapons, even fewer of us remember that, as weapons, words cannot fight alone. Words themselves do not topple dictators, they do not stop capitalism, they do not stop oppression, they do not halt species extinction, they do not stop global warming, they do not remove dams. At some point someone actually has to do something. At some point someone needs to physically dismantle the infrastructures that allow capitalism to metastasize, oppression to continue, species extinction and global warming to accelerate, dictators and dams to stand.

That job is up to all of us.

A friend and mentor once asked me, “What are the largest, most pressing problems you can help to solve using the gifts that are unique to you in all the universe?” That question shows precisely where I have succeeded as a writer and human being, and precisely where I have failed.

There are many ways my writing life could so far be considered a success far beyond anything I daydreamed about when I was younger. I have twenty books out. People seem to enjoy reading them and coming to my talks, both of which honor me beyond belief. Despite the truth of the old cliché about writing, that it is a terrible way to make a living and a great way to make a life, for at least the last few years I’ve been able to financially support myself through writing. More important than all of these, however, is that I have been true to my muse, and have at least attempted to tell the truth as I have come to understand it. And I have sometimes succeeded in articulating some of those things I know in my heart to be true, and in so doing have, I hope, helped some others to articulate some of those things they may know in their hearts to be true.

This is all to the good. But the fact remains that 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. Nor has anyone else’s. We haven’t even slowed it down. It’s embarrassing to have to explain why this is the only standard that really matters, but at this point embarrassment is the least of our problems. The health of the planet is the only standard that really matters because without a living planet nothing else is important, because nothing else exists. Compared to this, the number of books one has published doesn’t matter. How beautifully or poorly they are written doesn’t matter. Financially supporting oneself doesn’t matter. Life itself is more important than what we create.

These days when I wake up, I’m even less certain that my decision to write is the right one. I know that a culture of resistance needs every form of action, from writing to legal work to mass protests in the streets to physically dismantling destructive infrastructures. And that too few people are calling for actions that are commensurate with the threats to the planet. And so, for better or worse, most mornings, articulating the truth and defending it and rallying others to defend it in whatever ways they know how is the method of combat I choose.

The time for waiting is long gone. It is time to stop this culture from destroying life on earth. So take my hand. Take the hands of all those who came before us. But keep your other hand free, to make a fist or to pick up a pen. The health of the oceans, the forests, the rivers, the salmon, the sturgeon, the migratory songbirds, are all more important than you or I individually, and they are more important than your or my accomplishments. Their health will be the measure of our success.

IT’S SPRING WHEN I REALIZE that I may never have children, and around that time the thirteen-year cicadas return, burrowing out of neat, round holes in the ground to shed their larval shells, sprout wings, and fly to the treetops, filling the air with the sound of their singular purpose: reproduction. In the woods where I live, an area mostly protected from habitat destruction, the males’ mating song, a vibrating, whooshing, endless hum, a sound at once faraway and up-close, makes me feel like I am living inside a seashell.

Near the river, where the song is louder, their discarded larval shells—translucent amber bodies, weightless and eerie—crunch underfoot on my daily walks. Across the river, in a nest constructed near the top of a tall, spindly pine, bald eagles take turns caring for two new eaglets. Baby turtles, baby snakes, and ducklings appear on the water. Under my parents’ porch, three feral cats give birth in quick succession. And on the news, a miracle pregnancy: Jamani, an eleven-year-old female gorilla at the North Carolina Zoo, is expecting, the first gorilla pregnancy there in twenty-two years.

I visit my reproductive endocrinologist’s office in May and notice, in the air surrounding the concrete and steel hospital complex, a strange absence of sound. There are no tall trees to catch the wind or harbor the now incessant cicadas, and on the pedestrian bridge from the parking deck everyone walks quickly, head down, intent on making their appointments. In the waiting room, I test the leaf surface of a potted ficus with my fingernail and am reassured to find that it is real: green, living.

The waiting room’s magazine selection is scanty: a couple of years-old New Yorkers, the address labels torn off, and a thick volume of the alarmingly titled Fertility and Sterility. On the journal’s cover, on a field of red, is a small, square photograph of an infant rhesus monkey clasped by unseen human hands in a white terry-cloth towel. The monkey wears a startled expression, its dark eyes wide, its mouth forming a tiny pink oval of surprise. A baby monkey hardly seems the thing to put in front of women struggling through the confusion and uncertainties of fertility treatment—what are those mysterious, grayish blobs on the ultrasound, anyway?—but, unsure how long I’ll wait before my name is called, I reach for the journal. Flipping through, I find another photograph of the monkey and its monkey siblings, and the corresponding article about fertility preservation in human and nonhuman primates exposed to radiation. This monkey’s mother, along with forty-three other monkeys, was given an experimental drug and exposed to the same kind of radiation administered to women undergoing cancer treatment. On other pages, I find research about mouse testicular cells, peritoneal adhesions in rats, and in vitro fertilization of baboons. 

Of course, this research was designed to study human, not animal, infertility. Nonhuman animals don’t expose themselves to fertility-compromising radiation therapy, nor do they postpone reproduction, as I have, with years of birth control. Reproducing and ensuring the sexual maturity of offspring is a biological imperative for animals—their success depends on it, and in species after species we see that both males and females will sacrifice everything, their lives even, to achieve it. But in species with more complex reproductive systems—the animals genetically closest to humans—scientists have documented examples of infertility, hormonal imbalances, endometriosis, and even reproductive suppression. How do they cope? I wonder, staring at the photo of the baby rhesus monkey, its round, wide-set eyes designed to provoke a maternal response. Do they deal with infertility or the inability to become parents any better—or any differently—than we do?

My name is called, and a doctor I’ve never met performs a scan of my ovaries. I take notes in a blank book I’ve filled with four-leaf clovers found on my river walks: Two follicles? Three? Chance of success 15–18 percent.

On the way out, I steal the journal with the monkey on the cover. Back home, under the canopy of oak and hickory trees, I open the car door and sound rushes in, louder after its absence. Cicada song—thousands and thousands of males contracting their internal membranes so that each might find his mate. In Tennessee it gets so bad that a man calls 911 to complain because he thinks it’s someone operating machinery.

A FEW DAYS LATER, I visit the North Carolina Zoo, where Jamani, the pregnant gorilla, seems unaware of the dozens of extra visitors who have come to see her each day since the announcement of her condition. She shares an enclosure with Acacia, a socially dominant but somewhat petite sixteen-year-old female, and Nkosi, a twenty-year-old, 410-pound male. The breeding of captive lowland gorillas is managed by a Species Survival Plan that aims to ensure genetic diversity among captive members of a species. That means adult female gorillas are given birth control pills—the same kind humans take—until genetic testing recommends them for breeding with a male of the same species. Even after clearance, it can take months or years for captive gorillas to conceive. Some never do.

Humans have a long history of imposing various forms of birth control and reproductive technologies on animals, breeding some and sterilizing others. In recent years, we’ve even administered advanced fertility treatments to endangered captive animals like giant pandas and lowland gorillas. These measures, both high- and low-tech, have come to feel as routine as the management of our own reproduction. We feel responsible when we spay and neuter our cats and dogs, proud when our local zoos release photos of baby animals born of luck and science.

Jamani and Acacia were both brought to the North Carolina Zoo in 2010, after Jamani was recommended for breeding with Nkosi, which was accomplished simply by housing the animals in the same enclosure. The zoo staff confirmed Jamani’s pregnancy through an e.p.t. pregnancy test, the kind you can buy at a drugstore.

I ask Aaron Jesue, one of her keepers, if either Jamani or Acacia seem to have registered Jamani’s pregnancy, if they’ve noticed any changes in behavior, but so far the only change is the increase in zoo visitors to the gorilla exhibit, and the many scientists and zookeepers they have consulted to help prepare for the birth. “Jamani is still the submissive female,” Jesue says. “We’ll see if that stays the same.”

MANY INFERTILE WOMEN SAY that the worst part of the experience is the jealousy they feel toward pregnant women, who seem to be everywhere when you are trying (and failing) to conceive. At the infertility support group I attend, in the basement of another hospital an hour away, the topic of jealousy and petty hurts frequently begins our conversations.

“I don’t mind babies and children, but I hate pregnant women,” says one woman, trim and pretty, with a sensible brown bob. “I hate them, and I don’t care how that sounds.”

So we talk about that for a while: deleting Facebook friends whose frequent status updates document their gestational cycle, steering clear of baby showers and children’s birthday parties. We talk about our fears that we will be left out, left behind, while our friends and relatives go about the business of raising their ever-growing families.

The family as a socially isolating unit is an idea not limited to humans. In the wild, infants represent competition for resources, and it is not uncommon for a mother’s job to be primarily about hiding and protecting their infants from members of their own species. Jane Goodall observed chimpanzee mothers completely protecting their infants from contact with other nonsibling chimpanzees for the first five months of life, pulling their infants’ hands away when they reached for nearby chimps.

In a marmoset community, the presence of a pregnant female can actually cause infertility in others, though the result is not isolation but rather increased cooperation. Marmosets are tiny South American monkeys that participate in reproductive suppression; that is, typically only one dominant female in a breeding group reproduces, often giving birth to litter after litter before any of the others has a chance. This is accomplished through behavior—some females simply do not mate—and also through a specialized neuroendocrine response to the perception of subordination, which, like the pill, inhibits ovarian follicular development and ovulation. Some never get their chance, but remain in the submissive, nonbreeding category all their lives.

Marmosets are a mostly peaceful, cooperatively living animal. They make their nests in rainforest canopies and live in groups of three to fifteen, feeding on spiders, insects, and small vertebrates. Common marmosets are infrequently aggressive, with aggressive acts usually centering on the establishment of the breeding dominance of a female. Cooperation is remarkable among marmosets, particularly in regard to infant care. All group members over five months of age—male, female, dominant, subordinate—participate, and a dominant female will allow her offspring to be carried by other group members from the first day of life. Scientists have speculated that this dependence on helpers—marmosets usually give birth to twins—is the reason for behavioral and hormonal reproductive suppression. The phenomenon of suppression occurs both in the wild and in captivity.

Occasionally a subordinate female will reproduce, although her infant has a diminished chance of survival. One reason is the practice of infanticide, which researchers have observed eight times in the wild (more frequently, the tiny infants just disappear). Infanticide most commonly occurs when a subordinate female gives birth during the pregnancy of the dominant female, who is often the attacker. Despite the apparent brutality of such a system, it does not seem to diminish social relationships or cooperation among the marmosets.

Sometimes cooperation is so extensive that it becomes difficult for researchers to establish which female is the biological mother. In one instance, recorded by Leslie Digby in Brazil in 1991, two adult females gave birth to twins in the same week. Less than a month later, two of the infants had disappeared, but because both mothers continued to nurse both surviving infants, it was impossible to tell which female was the biological mother or “even whether those that disappeared were members of a single litter,” according to Digby’s report.

Like ours, the animal world is full of paradoxical examples of gentleness, brutality, and suffering, often performed in the service of reproduction. Female black widow spiders sometimes devour their partners after a complex and delicate mating dance. Bald eagle parents, who mate for life and share the responsibility of rearing young, will sometimes look on impassively as the stronger eaglet kills its sibling. At the end of their life cycle, after swimming thousands of miles in salt water, Pacific salmon swim up their natal, freshwater streams to spawn, while the fresh water decays their flesh. Animals will do whatever it takes to ensure reproductive success.

FOR HUMANS, “whatever it takes” has come to mean in vitro fertilization (IVF), a procedure developed in the 1970s that involves the hormonal manipulation of a woman’s cycle followed by the harvest and fertilization of her eggs, which are transferred as embryos to her uterus. Nearly 4 million babies worldwide have been born through IVF, which has become a multibillion-dollar industry.

“Test-tube baby,” says another woman at the infertility support group, a young ER doctor who has given herself five at-home inseminations and is thinking of moving on to IVF. “I really hate that term. It’s a baby. That’s all it is.” She has driven seventy miles to talk to seven other women about the stress and isolation of infertility.

In the clinics, they call what the doctors and lab technicians do ART—assisted reproductive technology—softening the idea of the test-tube baby, the lab-created human. Art is something human, social, nonthreatening. Art does not clone or copy, but creates. It is often described as priceless, timeless, healing. It is far from uncommon to spend large amounts of
money on art. It’s an investment.

All of these ideas soothe, whether we think them through or not, just as the experience of treating infertility, while often painful and undignified, soothes as well. For the woman, treating infertility is about nurturing her body, which will hopefully produce eggs and a rich uterine lining where a fertilized egg could implant. All of the actions she might take in a given month—abstaining from caffeine and alcohol, taking Clomid or Femara, injecting herself with Gonal-f or human chorionic gonadotropin, charting her temperature and cervical mucus on a specialized calendar—are essentially maternal, repetitive, and self-sacrificing. In online message boards, where women gather to talk about their Clomid cycles and inseminations and IVF cycles, a form of baby talk is used to discuss the organs and cells of the reproductive process. Ovarian follicles are “follies,” embryos are “embies,” and frozen embryos—the embryos not used in an IVF cycle, which are frozen for future tries—are “snowbabies.” The frequent ultrasounds given to women in a treatment cycle, which monitor the growth of follicles and the endometrial lining, are not unlike the ultrasounds of pregnant women in the early stages of pregnancy. There is a wand, a screen, and something growing.

And always: something more to do, something else to try. It doesn’t take long, in an ART clinic, to spend tens of thousands of dollars on tests, medicine, and procedures. When I began to wonder why I could not conceive, I said the most I would do was read a book and chart my temperature. My next limit was pills: I would take them, but no more than that. Next was intrauterine insemination, a relatively inexpensive and low-tech procedure that requires no sedation. Compared to the women in my support group, women who leave the room to give themselves injections in the hospital bathroom, I’m a lightweight. Often during their discussions of medications and procedures I have no idea what they’re talking about, and part of the reason I attend each month is to listen to their horror stories. I’m hoping to detach from the process, to see what I could spare myself if I gave up.

But after three years of trying, it’s hard to give up. I know that it would be better for the planet if I did (if infinitesimally so), better for me, in some ways, as a writer. Certainly giving up makes financial sense. Years ago, when I saw such decisions as black or white, ight or wrong, I would have felt it was selfish and wasteful to spend thousands of dollars on unnecessary medical procedures. Better, the twenty-two-year-old me would have argued, to donate the money to an orphanage or a children’s hospital. Better to adopt.

The thirty-four-year-old me has careful but limited savings, knows how difficult adoption is, and desperately wants her body to work the way it is supposed to.

A LARGE PART OF THE PRESSURE and frustration of infertility is the idea that fertility is normal, natural, and healthy, while infertility is rare, unnatural, and means something is wrong with you. It’s not usually a problem you anticipate; from the time we are very young, we are warned and promised that pregnancy will one day happen. At my support group, someone always says how surprised she is to be there.

My parents married in their early twenties and moved to the country to live on a farm and raise a family. It took them thirteen months to conceive me, and my mother says that during those months of waiting she thought she had been ruined by her previous years of birth control. That’s how she put it—ruined—as if the rest of her working body, her strong back, her artist’s hands, her quick wit, did not matter.

Although I married almost as young as my mother—I was twenty-six—it never occurred to me to have children right away. In my first year of marriage, I was teaching writing workshops to kindergarteners in Brooklyn, and at the beginning of the year I remember drawing and labeling a diagram of my bedroom on a big pad of paper while my students worked in their own notebooks. Daniel, a bright and charming five-year-old, pointed at the drawing of my bed—“Why are there two pillows?” he asked. “One for me, and one for my husband,” I said. He gasped. “You’re going to have a baby!” I laughed and shook my head. “I’m too young to have a baby,” I said, though on parent-teacher night I realized that Daniel’s own parents were younger than I was.

Three years later, I invited a public health nurse to speak to a group of fifth graders I was teaching in North Carolina. The subject of her talk was “your changing bodies,” a reliable source of giggles, but the nurse, a beautiful and soft-spoken woman who happened to be blind, brought a hushed seriousness to the talk. She angled her face upward so that her lecture took on the air of prayer, and she handled the plastic anatomical models of the vagina and uterus reverently. “Your bodies are miracles,” she told the girls in a separate session. “They are built to have babies. That is the reason for menstruation, the reason for the changes your body will go through.”

“Your brains are miracles, too,” I told them later. “Bigger miracles than your uteruses. You don’t have to have a baby if you don’t want to.” But my words sounded feeble and undignified next to the nurse’s serene pronouncement.

I’m always surprised when my students, boys and girls alike, from kindergarteners to high school seniors, talk about the children they will have someday. “My kids won’t act like that,” they say, watching an unruly class of kids on a field trip. Or, worriedly, “I bet I’ll have all boys. What will I do with all boys?” It seems far more common for them to imagine the children they might have than the jobs they might do or the places they might live.

Perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised. Perhaps imagining ourselves as parents is not only the expression of a biological drive, but essential to understanding the scope of our lives, who we are and who we might become. For years I have dealt with a dread of old age and death by reminding myself that I have not yet given birth. I can imagine the moment clearly—my husband is there next to me, my parents are waiting to meet their grandchild—and the fact that it hasn’t happened (always, it is at least nine months away) reassures me that some new stage of life is still to come. I’m not sure when people started asking me if I have children—a couple of years ago, I think. “Not yet,” I always say.

Tillie Olsen’s groundbreaking, feminist book Silences includes a chapter called “The Damnation of Women” on the choice many women writers made between work and children. Olsen writes that it is not until the twentieth century that “an anguish, a longing to have children, breaks into expression. In private diaries and letters only.” Her selections from Virginia Woolf’s diaries in particular are extraordinary for their candor and pain. Woolf, who never had children, struggled with the idea of that loss for more than a decade, writing:

. . . and all the devils came out—heavy black ones—to be 29 & unmarried—to be a failure—childless—insane too, no writer . . .

She seems to have conflated the failure to reproduce with a failure to write well, though she is only two years away from finishing her first novel. In her thirties, still childless, just a few years from writing Mrs. Dalloway, she writes of “having no children” and “failing to write well” in the same sentence. At forty-four, she describes the dread she feels observing her sister’s life as an artist and mother:

Let me watch the wave rise. I watch. Vanessa. Children. Failure. Yes. Failure. Failure. The wave rises.

It is only after embracing her writing as an “anchor” that she makes peace with her childlessness:

I can dramatise myself as a parent, it is true. And perhaps I have killed the feeling instinctively; or perhaps nature does.

Because we spend much of our young lives dramatizing and imagining ourselves as parents, it isn’t surprising that even the strongest of us let the body’s failure become how we define ourselves. But nature, which gives us other things to do, tells us otherwise. The feeling of grief subsides; we think through our options and make choices. We work, travel, find other ways to be successful. After completing The Waves, at forty-eight, Woolf writes of a feeling of intoxication that comes from writing well:

Children are nothing to this.

I’m no Virginia Woolf, but on occasion, after a good stretch of writing or time spent happily alone, I’ve had that feeling. It’s thrilling, like taking a drug or riding a bicycle down a steep hill. Probably it isn’t that different from the feeling a new mother has, looking at her child. Not yet, I’ve thought, suddenly protective of my time, my privacy, my freedom.

I once asked my father, “Does having kids really squash all your dreams?”

He thought for a minute. “Yep,” he said. “And it takes all your money too.”

ON THE NORTH CAROLINA ZOO’S Facebook page, Jamani’s keepers have posted a video of her latest sonogram. In a practiced pose, Jamani stands upright in an indoor room, clutching the steel grate that separates her from the zoo’s staff. Her belly is accessible through a small gap in the grate. Humans and gorillas are so closely related that staff members wear hospital masks to protect themselves and Jamani from viruses.

“Hands up, hands up,” one zookeeper says, clicking a training noisemaker while another keeper feeds her from a platter of vegetables. “Belly.” Jamani does not move her hands, but the keeper repeats the commands every few seconds. She is praised for her compliance, and the black-and-white image of her baby, looking not unlike the human sonograms I’ve seen on Facebook, appears on the veterinarian technician’s laptop. I’ve watched it a dozen times, studying Jamani’s face for clues to her comprehension.

So neat! comments one poster beneath the link.

She is doing great, says another.

The Baby is a cutie already, writes another.

Waiting in the outdoor enclosure during the filming, childless Acacia must be sitting on her haunches, chomping lettuce or carrots, oblivious to the fuss being made over Jamani, unaware of the fuss to come. Part of the reason for the attention from the media, from veterinarians, and from zoos across the country is the pregnancy’s rarity among captive gorillas, and its uncertainty. In 2010, only six successful gorilla births were recorded in American zoos, and even when infants are born healthy, there’s the chance that the mother will reject her young. If this happens, Jamani’s keepers plan for Acacia to take over as a surrogate. Meanwhile, Acacia mates with Nkosi regularly though she has taken birth control pills since 2001 and will remain on birth control until the Gorilla Species Survival Plan determines that she is compatible with Nkosi. She may never conceive, but according to her keepers, she seems content.

Nonhuman animals wait without impatience, without a deadline, and I think that is the secret to their composure. Reproductively mature for more than half her life, Acacia waits without knowing she is waiting. The newly hatched cicadas will wait underground for another thirteen years. The submissive marmoset who declines sex, or whose ovaries fail to produce mature follicles, waits and waits—maybe forever.

Though infertile women are aware of the passing of months and years—marked by charts, appointments, prescriptions, and pregnancy tests—we have something animals lack, which is the conscious possibility of a new purpose, a sense of self not tied to reproduction. I think it comes on us eventually, as Woolf suggests, but perhaps knowing that it comes, and understanding infertility as a natural, perhaps even useful phenomenon, can provide us with a measure of peace. Marmoset communities would not survive without their reproductively suppressed, caretaking females. Had Virginia Woolf been a mother, she may not have given us Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, A Room of One’s Own, The Waves.

The cicadas stop their noise at the end of May. The adults are dead—eaten by other animals, worn out from their reproductive frenzy—and their wings litter the ground that will protect and nurture their young.

The silence is startling at first—I step outside each morning expecting to hear that seashell sound—but it’s also a relief. I wait for some other wave.

Postscript: Jamani, expected to give birth in August, lost her infant to stillbirth in late June. Her keepers closed her exhibit to visitors and allowed her to hold and carry the baby until she made peace with the loss. Jamani did not allow Nkosi or Acacia to get close to the infant, but spent the day holding it, cleaning it, and trying to stimulate movement and feeding. Eventually, she set the infant down and walked away, signaling that she had grieved enough.

WALTER BENJAMIN AND OTHER THEORISTS of the present day argue we’ve turned from a word-based culture back to a visual one like that of the Middle Ages, when the illiterate learned their Bible stories from fresco cycles. Anyone who has been to a medieval church understands the shivery power of visual storytelling: the spires stretching up to heaven, gargoyles whose ferocity wards off the ever-present threat of evil. Nowadays, we’re steeped in the seductive visuals of advertising, like the images of nature that sell us unrelated consumer goods: breaching whales for insurance; canoe rides between cliffs for a herpes drug.

As imagery from all media feeds our imaginations, it grows more and more controlled by those who have a vested interest in how it’s perceived—government, mainstream news and entertainment, the corporations that want us to buy their products and ignore their transgressions. We live in the world of spin, while much modern art remains in the throes of the mid-nineteenth-century idea of ars gratia artis—art for art’s sake. Increasingly, though, contemporary art is pushing its way back into the political arena.

The Beehive Design Collective, headquartered in Machias, Maine, works to take back visual narrative with artwork that offers rich, politically charged stories untold by our news media. On completing their signature mural-type banners, members of the collective travel to schools, rallies, and other events to present the artwork in the form of “picture-lectures” on subjects from monoculture to coal mining. The Beehive group, which describes itself as “word-to-image translators,” has six “backbone bees” who live in a house in Machias when not on the road and dozens of others who participate in Beehive projects.

I drove down to Seattle in the summer of 2011 to see the collective in action at a conference on the problem of our nation’s expanding coal use. The collective sent to the conference a Bee and a banner—a recent project, titled “The True Cost of Coal,” focused on mountaintop removal mining in Appalachia. I have coal very much on the brain lately. I live in Bellingham, a few miles from a site where, if Peabody Energy and Goldman Sachs have their way, an enormous coal terminal will soon be built, largely to ship coal to China.

Still in its environmental study and permitting phase, the terminal at peak capacity would mean twenty more trains through my small city, half the trains loaded with unenclosed coal, smudging the air with a new load of particulates. The site already has two oil refineries and an aluminum smelter. I live close to the tracks in this place, still heart-churningly beautiful to me after twenty years, snug on the Puget Sound. I sleep to the cranky, loud grinding of trains switching tracks. I am picturing the trains doubled, my son devolving back to the boy whose asthma, sinusy rattle, and cough have haunted my sleep over the years.

I am fascinated by what the Beehive presentation will be, and a bit skeptical. This is Goldman Sachs and Peabody Energy—the king of mountaintop mining—we’re up against. A poster is, well, a poster: an illustration, a picture summing up what we already know.

I meet Emma Bee, today’s Beehive presenter, a composed and articulate young woman in an urchin’s cap and jeans. Everyone from the collective, she tells me, goes by the name Bee when representing the group (Emma signs her e-mails con miel, “with honey.”) A copy of the Beehive Collective’s “True Cost of Coal” banner, printed on a sixteen-by-eight-foot cloth, hangs on the wall of the Seattle University lecture hall.

The visual power of the banner offers a clear and intricate story that draws the eye everywhere at once, fascinating in its detail—the perfectly rucked cap of a morel, hairs on the legs of a woodwasp—and overwhelming in its breadth. With its symbolism and visual density—a family of frogs drinking black water from a poisoned well, European starlings migrating to Appalachia with Bibles, babies, and bluegrass guitars—it feels like the artwork Hieronymus Bosch would have created if he had been an activist. It sweeps through time, moving from prehistory through early mining and reform to the present-day dynamiting of mountaintops. Human characters are represented by birds, animals, and insects, many endangered, drawing together all of our struggles to survive in a degraded landscape.

To present the banner, Emma leaps from rickety desk to rickety desk, talking us through the detailed visuals. The banner consists of five “chapters,” each representing a stage of the history of mining in Appalachia. The first shows the deep past, with the ferns and horsetail plants that would become the coal fueling twentieth- and twenty-first-century extraction battles. Clear waters flow; a Cherokee drum and discarded treaty represent the Native Americans who first lived on this land.

In chapter two, European starlings appear, symbolizing the arrival of the Scots-Irish and Welsh. With the industrial revolution comes the onslaught of mining. Trees are cut off at the base. Rifle barrels bristle out of the headquarters of the private police force next to the company store with the jacked-up prices that forced miners into a lifetime of debt. It’s a grim chapter of the story, but not without hope; this section also shows the rise of labor unions.

“We have to remember,” Emma tells us, “that in the end the workers won. The right to an eight-hour day, to health care.”

In the third chapter, the banner moves to the present day. A continuous mining machine extracts coal, taking away the need for workers—Emma notes that 100,000 former mining jobs in West Virginia have now fallen to 15,000. A family of frogs represents a coal family, put in the impossible position of having to blow up the mountain peaks they love to earn a living wage. Frogs are bent and ill; some shake out Oxycontin pills—a scourge in mining communities—from prescription bottles. Wells pump blackened water. One frog growing a patch of tomatoes stares in horror at a blotched fruit; Emma tells us of tomato plants in mining towns that have come up from the ground covered with orange slime caused by heavy metals.

The fourth chapter is about resistance. Social movements and organizing come into focus. A group of endangered species, from snails to wolves, gather in the roots of an ancient tree. Two moths represent two grandmothers in West Virginia who sued Peabody Energy over coal dust damage and won. Finally, in chapter five we see regeneration—contaminated water cleaned by cattails, mushrooms, and other species that absorb toxins; creatures harvesting rainwater. Wasps in an urban hive, complete with solar panels, show the possibility of a new kind of city—not an “extraction point” but a producer of energy and resources.

The coal poster presents a linear progression from the deep past of untouched greenery to its legacy—coal—and the resistance to extraction. Poster users can also fold over chapters one and five to create a different image, “healing over the linear story of extraction in a circular way,” as Emma says. This image knits together those horsetails and untouched mountains of early Appalachia with a sustainable future: women canning, small-scale farmers packing boxes for community supported agriculture shares.

I find my skepticism gone by the end of the presentation, replaced by the excitement of viewing artwork that feels more like an experience than an image, communicating time, change, story, and possibility. As disturbing as some images are, the dynamism of the whole suggests no single ending to the narrative arc is inevitable.

After the presentation, Emma and I drift outside to talk. It is gently difficult to interview a Bee. Mine has a good-humored resistance to talking about herself or the collective’s founders.

“It’s not about them or about me, it’s about all of us,” Emma responds to many of my questions. The Bees are also an anticopyright group—anyone can access their website (beehivecollective.org) and download posters and clip art. The collective operates on the belief that its work should get out into the world and self-replicate. The hive accepts donations for posters and picture-lectures, but has a policy of giving away half of both.

“We don’t own these stories,” explains Emma. “These are lots of people’s stories. The posters are an educational tool. We want people to use them.” Later, she adds, “The people whose stories are illustrated in the images know how to best use them . . . . We are just translators who try to amplify voices that are often silenced.”

Before the “True Cost of Coal” banner, the collective did most of its work on Latin America, on issues such as corporate globalization and colonialism. Its founders are self-taught artists who began as a mosaic cooperative focused on biodiversity. The “True Cost of Coal” banner took ten Bees and three years to complete, a typical length of time for the collective. Image creation for the bees comes only after a slow process of information-gathering from the people involved. For the coal banner, members of the collective traveled to Appalachia, collecting oral histories and drawing “mind maps” that laid out stories visually and drew connections. They then crafted individual scenes that each represent a story told to a member of the group.

Each Beehive Collective project team has illustrators, researchers, designers, and what the group calls “metaphor crafters” who focus on developing visual metaphors like the wasps’ nest that represents sustainable urban life. Members of the team keep returning to the region in question bearing “drafts” of the banner, receiving feedback, and revising. The completed project is always considered a part of the community it reflects: half of the coal posters printed went to the Appalachian region that generated its stories.

This year marks the tenth anniversary of the Beehive Collective, during which time the group has distributed 100,000 posters, almost all at Beehive presentations.

I make my donation and take my copy of the coal poster home, stretching it out in my living room, without saying a word, hoping the images soak into the girl-and-video-game-saturated consciousness of my teenage son. When, after a few days, he asks what it “means,” I feel the work of the collective’s pollination begin as I point and launch into the history of coal in Appalachia.

The need for the Beehive Collective’s work is great. When we think about taking back influence over the media, we tend to think of cell-phone photos, images of martyrs spread through Facebook in Egypt, and a corporate news that avoids pictures of unpopular truths. We forget that crafted visuals—art—tell stories as powerfully as captured images do. In an age of visual learners, narrative images capture—and educate—the popular imagination.