YOU KNOW THE ONE: that tree you first climbed and got stuck in as a kid, the one that you see every morning as you drink your coffee, the one whose leaves always fill your gutters, or even the favorite sought out by your dog on evening walks. Not just any tree. For this project, I ask people to tell me about a tree that holds some importance to them. These really end up being stories about the people, stories of loss and love and a lot in between. After I hear someone’s story, we work out a time to visit the tree together, and I give them a little pad of paper and ask them to draw the tree. Everyone says they can’t draw, but they do. While they are drawing, they share more of their tree story, and I tell them about their tree’s natural history. When they’re finished, I set up the camera and shoot a double exposure, one with their hands holding their drawing kind of lined up with the outline of the tree, and then a second exposure without the drawing. The whole thing usually takes about twenty-five minutes. I started the project with two dozen tree stories from residents of Los Angeles and plan to expand it to other cities across America.

FROM THE MOMENT I HEARD about Bidder #70 raising his paddle inside a BLM auction to outbid oil and gas companies in the leasing of Utah’s public lands, I recognized Tim DeChristopher as a brave, creative citizen-activist. That was on December 19, 2008, in Salt Lake City. Since that moment, Tim has become a thoughtful, dynamic leader of his generation in the climate change movement. While many of us talk about the importance of democracy, Tim has put his body on the line and is now paying the consequences.

On March 2, 2011, Tim DeChristopher was found guilty on two felony charges for violation of the Federal Onshore Oil and Gas Leasing Reform Act and for making false statements. He refused to entertain any type of plea bargain. On July 26, 2011, he was sentenced to two years in a federal prison with a $10,000 fine, followed by three years of supervised probation. Minutes before receiving his sentence, Tim DeChristopher delivered an impassioned speech from the courtroom floor. At the end of the speech, he turned toward Judge Dee Benson, who presided over his trial, looked him in the eye, and said, “This is what love looks like.” Minutes later, he was placed in handcuffs and briskly taken away.

After several transfers from three states, he is now serving the remainder of his time in the Herlong Federal Correctional Institution in California. When I asked Tim about his thoughts concerning prison, he responded, “All these people are worrying about how to keep me out of prison, but I feel like the goal should be to get other people in prison. How do we get more people to join me?” In fact, thousands of citizens are following his lead and are choosing to commit acts of civil resistance in protest of mountaintop removal, the construction of the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline, and as participants in the ever-expanding Occupy Wall Street movement. They recognize that we can no longer look for leadership outside ourselves. And that if public opinion changes, government changes.

On May 28, 2011, Tim DeChristopher and I had a three-hour conversation in Telluride, Colorado, during the Mountainfilm Festival. We talked openly and candidly with one another as friends. No one else was in the room. We are pleased to share this conversation with the Orion community.

—TTW

TERRY TEMPEST WILLIAMS: The first thing I want to say to you, Tim, is thank you. Thank you for what you’ve done for us, as an act of protest, as an act of imagination, and an act of true, civil resistance.

TIM DECHRISTOPHER: Well thank you.

TERRY: So let’s talk about your mother.

TIM: [Laughter.] Okay.

TERRY: You know, when I saw your mother, I had a better sense of who you are.

TIM: Why did you have a better sense of who I am?

TERRY: I watched her during the trial. And I imagined what it must be like for her, who loves you so much, who gave birth to you, who’s raised you—what that must have been like for her to have to sit there, not speak, you know, watch how political this was, watch your dignity, knowing what the consequences might be and, in fact, are going to be. And I never saw her waver. I mean the only person that I saw with as much composure in that courtroom as you was your mother. You couldn’t see her—she was sitting behind you—but she never wavered. Her spine was like steel.

TIM: Yeah. I think that’s definitely what I’ve gotten from her. I only have vague memories of when she was fighting the coal companies, when I was a little kid, in the early days of mountaintop removal—I don’t know if they were really my memories or stories that I’ve heard from the family. But I think a lot of my activism has been shaped by that. I remember hearing about when this coal miner stood up at this hearing and said, “My grandfather worked in the mine, my father worked in the mine, and I worked in the mine, and you people are telling us we can’t do this, and blah blah blah.” And my mom just fired right back and said, “And if you start blowing up these mountains, you will be the last generation that is ever a miner in West Virginia. You will kill the family tradition if you try to mine this way.”

TERRY: And how old were you?

TIM: I was really young. We moved away when I was eight.

TERRY: And so was this in the ’70s?

TIM: No, it was in the early ’80s.

TERRY: And you were born?

TIM: ’81.

TERRY: And what was the trigger point for your mother?

TIM: I don’t know. But then, as I got older, she got out of activism. She told me once that she pulled out of all the political stuff to focus on raising me and my sister. And I think that’s always been something that I carried with me. You know, that she had this role in the political sphere in our community, and she stepped out of that to put it into me. So I’ve always felt like I had somewhat of a greater responsibility to pull not just my own weight, but that extra weight that she put into me.

TERRY: And you were the oldest?

TIM: No, I’m the youngest. My sister’s two years older.

TERRY: And is it just the two of you?

TIM: Mmhmm.

TERRY: And what town in West Virginia?

TIM: I was born in a town called Lost Creek. And then when I was really little we moved to West Milford.

TERRY: And has anyone in your family been in the coal industry?

TIM: My dad worked his whole career in the natural gas industry.

TERRY: So you and I have that in common.

TIM: Yep.

TERRY: In what venue? Was he laying pipe?

TIM: He was an engineer, involved in the transmission side of things. And then rose up and became a manager and an executive.

TERRY: And what would you say the ethos in your home was?

TIM: You mean like politically?

TERRY: Yeah, and spiritually. You know, if there was a DeChristopher credo . . . I mean, in our family I’d say it was “work.” That was my father’s credo. That was his religion. And so it became ours.

TIM: I’d say in my family it was “knowledge,” or “logic.” It was very intellectual.

TERRY: So a typical conversation around your dinner table would be?

TIM: Around political issues. Local issues. My parents definitely identified as liberals or progressives. And I think especially when I was younger, they were rather free-thinking. But then got comfortable. As I got older.

TERRY: How so?

TIM: They started making more money.

TERRY: And how did that impact you?

TIM: Well, certainly in some good ways. I mean, they were able to help me with college and that sort of thing.

TERRY: Did you have a religion growing up?

TIM: No.

TERRY: So was there a particular spiritual tradition in your home?

TIM: No, more atheist, or humanist.

TERRY: And yet one of the things that’s been so impressive to me, Tim, is not only have you had this intellectual grounding—which you say comes out of your family—but you have had this very strong spiritual basis with the Unitarian church, with your own sense of wildness or landscape. This is a rumor, but I want to ask: I heard you were, like, a Born Again Christian?

TIM: At one point, yeah.

TERRY: Talk to me about that.

TIM: I became that way when I was eighteen. My senior year of high school. I’d always been a jock. That was my identity. And then I had this shoulder problem for a couple years, and I finally went to the doctor and he told me that I’d broken my scapula two years earlier.

TERRY: You were a wrestler.

TIM: Yeah. And I played football.

TERRY: Talk about that.

TIM: Oh, I don’t know. That’s not very interesting.

TERRY: I think it’s really interesting. You know, high school’s a big deal. It helps form you. Wrestling is a contact sport—not unlike politics. You were really good at it.

TIM: It’s combat, more than contact.

TERRY: And it’s also mental.

TIM: Mmhmm. I mean it bred a very combative mindset for me. Something that I struggled against for a while. It took me a while to recover from that.

TERRY: How so?

TIM: It taught me to look at things from a combative perspective, and a somewhat violent perspective. It was a part of myself that I really hated when I was in high school. I didn’t really like who I was.

TERRY: As a wrestler?

TIM: As a person.

TERRY: Was it anger? I mean, I’ve got three brothers. And I watched them go through adolescence. And what you do with that kind of physicality, power, strength, anger, frustration, you know what I mean?

TIM: Mmhmm.

TERRY: I mean, was it that?

TIM: Yeah, somewhat. It was a lot of confusion around what power and respect are, that I think a lot of young males struggle with.

TERRY: And where were you living?

TIM: In Pittsburgh.

TERRY: So you’d moved at this point?

TIM: Yeah.

TERRY: And, so you’d been told by the doctors that you had a shoulder problem.

TIM: Yeah, well, basically they took an X-ray and immediately the doctor said, “You’re done. You’re never going to wrestle again.” Because I’d broken the back of my scapula that held my shoulder in place. And so it had been sliding out for two years.

TERRY: And you had to have been in a lot of pain, right?

TIM: Yeah. And all of the soft tissue in my shoulder had stretched out, so I had to have this huge reconstructive surgery; they basically replaced everything in my left shoulder. At the end of the day, for my whole high school career, I’d go to practice. That was what I did. And it was like the second day after I’d gotten this news from the doctor that after school I didn’t have anywhere to go. I just sat in the senior lounge, and there were all these people kind of wandering around, and I had no idea what these people did with their lives. Then one of my teachers, who was a younger guy, sat down next to me and started talking. And the conversation drifted to a finding-meaning-in-life kind of discussion, and then we kept talking after that, and at some point that spring, we decided to do a religion study group kind of thing with me and a few other seniors. And so we were studying religion, and we were reading the Bible, and it was just kind of an informal thing. And then at some point I accepted it. I thought I’d found answers.

TERRY: You accepted what?

TIM: I accepted Christianity. And found something more meaningful than what I had before.

TERRY: Which was?

TIM: That, you know, there was this God who pays attention, and all that stuff. And when I went to college I got involved with some Christian clubs in a small church. And then officially became a Christian after that, and was baptized and everything.

TERRY: Which church?

TIM: It was a nondenominational Christian church. It was kind of an Evangelical church.

TERRY: Was this in Arizona?

TIM: Yeah, in Tempe. It was a big part of my life there. And then, once I moved to the Ozarks and dropped out of school, I was just kind of continuing my own search. And I gradually started to see that religion was less about having the answers and more about finding those answers—that that search was more of a lifelong process than about saying, “This is it. I’m eighteen and done.” [Laughter.]

TERRY: Was there a moment, a situation?

TIM: Around the time that I was leaving Missouri, I guess, was when I first admitted to myself that I wasn’t a Christian anymore.

TERRY: And how? How did you know that?

TIM: Just looking at my own beliefs, you know, about Jesus and things like that, and saying, “I don’t believe that in any sort of literal way. I guess that makes me not a Christian anymore.”

TERRY: I think I understand what you are saying. You know, I was raised Mormon, and a belief in Jesus Christ was an important component of my upbringing—even though there are those religious scholars who say Mormonism is not a Christian religion. But for me there really was a moment. I was teaching on the reservation, steeped in Navajo stories. In doing my thesis research, I came across Marie-Louise von Franz’s book Creation Myths. Among the many creation narratives, there was the story of Changing Woman in the Navajo tradition; there was Kali in the Hindu tradition; and then there was Adam and Eve. And I remember thinking, That’s blasphemous. Those are myths, but the story of the Garden of Eden is true. And then I thought, Really? Is that so? And it led me down this path of inquiry, not so much for meaning, but for understanding: What are the stories that we tell? You know, what are the stories that move us forward culturally. What are the stories that keep us in place? What are the stories that actually perpetuate the myths of a dominant culture or the subjugation of women? In the Book of Mormon, indigenous people are referred to as “Lamanites.” Suddenly, the doctrine I had been raised with was exposed as a form of racism. Or to say that African Americans were not worthy of the priesthood . . . issues of social justice rose to the fore. And I thought, I cannot, in good conscience, believe this. I felt like the scaffolding had been knocked out from under me.

TIM: Well, I think the powerful thing for me was when I got to the point of looking at Christianity and the Bible as more of a painting than as a photograph . . . that there were people who had this powerful experience with something bigger than themselves, and that this was their painting of it; this was how they articulated and painted that experience. But it wasn’t a photograph. And there were other groups of people in other parts of the world that had this other powerful experience with something bigger than themselves and they painted their picture of it. And, you know, we might have the same kind of experience, or have an experience with the same thing, and paint two very different pictures of it.

TERRY: A while back I was reading Albert Schweitzer’s book on historical Jesus. Do you see Jesus as a historical figure in terms of leadership?

TIM: Yeah, I do view him as an example of a revolutionary leader.

TERRY: How?

TIM: Well, he was saying very challenging things both to the people who were following him and to the dominant culture at the time. And it led to some radical changes in the way people were living and the way people were structuring society.

TERRY: What would you view as the most radical of his teachings?

TIM: Turning the other cheek, I think, is one extremely radical thing. That, I think, is his powerful message about civil disobedience. And the other, which might be even more radical, is letting go of material wealth. That’s so radical that Christians today still can’t talk about it. I mean, he said it’s easier to pass a camel through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to get into Heaven. And he told his followers to drop what they had, to let go of their jobs, to let go of their material possessions. Even let go of their families. If they wanted to follow him, they had to let go of everything they were holding onto, all the things that brought them security in life. They had to be insecure. That’s pretty radical.

TERRY: And when you look at religious leaders, when you look at St. Francis—certainly he came to that recognition. When you look at Gandhi, certainly. Thoreau was advocating simplicity. And if you look at those two tenets you just brought up, moving from the Old Testament “eye for an eye” to the New Testament’s teachings of Christ offering the alternative action of “turning the other cheek,” you see that this idea of letting go of materialism is tied to charity and love. These are two tenets that you address frequently in your speaking, right?

TIM: Mmhmm.

TERRY: Yesterday, weren’t you saying that rich people don’t make great activists?

TIM: Yeah. In front of a very wealthy audience.

TERRY: But people understood what you were saying. I mean, we’re all privileged, right? Especially as predominantly white Americans sitting in a film festival in Telluride, Colorado.

TIM: Yeah. I also think that’s why we’re bad activists. That’s why the climate movement is weaker in this country than in the rest of the world. Because we have more stuff. We have much higher levels of consumption, and that’s how people have been oppressed in this country, through comfort. We’ve been oppressed by consumerism. By believing that we have so much to lose.

TERRY: In John de Graaf’s film Affluenza, you see what a methodical, slow process that really was to turn American culture into a culture of debt through consumption. In the 1950s, as a country, we shunned credit cards. That was not part of the frugal mind of an American. And now, not only is our national debt skyrocketing, but our personal debt as well.

TIM: Yeah, it keeps people controlled.

TERRY: By our own appetites? By our insecurities? By whom?

TIM: By those who succeed in our current system. I think our economic model, in a big sense—our whole economic system—protects itself by making people dependent upon it. By making sure that any change, any departure from that system, is going to be hard. And it’s going to lead to hardship, both individually and on a large scale as well. We can’t change our economic system without it falling apart, without things crashing really hard. Just like as an individual you can’t let go of your job and all that stuff without crashing pretty hard.

TERRY: In personal terms, your life has been in limbo for the last two years. And that’s my word, not yours. But is it fair to say you haven’t known what your future is going to be? Because you didn’t know when you were going to go to trial, or whether you’d be convicted. How has that felt?

TIM: I think part of what empowered me to take that leap and have that insecurity was that I already felt that insecurity. I didn’t know what my future was going to be. My future was already lost.

TERRY: Coming out of college?

TIM: No. Realizing how fucked we are in our future.

TERRY: In terms of climate change.

TIM: Yeah. I met Terry Root, one of the lead authors of the IPCC report, at the Stegner Symposium at the University of Utah. She presented all the IPCC data, and I went up to her afterwards and said, “That graph that you showed, with the possible emission scenarios in the twenty-first century? It looked like the best case was that carbon peaked around 2030 and started coming back down.” She said, “Yeah, that’s right.” And I said, “But didn’t the report that you guys just put out say that if we didn’t peak by 2015 and then start coming back down that we were pretty much all screwed, and we wouldn’t even recognize the planet?” And she said, “Yeah, that’s right.” And I said: “So, what am I missing? It seems like you guys are saying there’s no way we can make it.” And she said, “You’re not missing anything. There are things we could have done in the ’80s, there are some things we could have done in the ’90s—but it’s probably too late to avoid any of the worst-case scenarios that we’re talking about.” And she literally put her hand on my shoulder and said, “I’m sorry my generation failed yours.” That was shattering to me.

TERRY: When was this?

TIM: This was in March of 2008. And I said, “You just gave a speech to four hundred people and you didn’t say anything like that. Why aren’t you telling people this?” And she said, “Oh, I don’t want to scare people into paralysis. I feel like if I told people the truth, people would just give up.” And I talked to her a couple years later, and she’s still not telling people the truth. But with me, it did the exact opposite. Once I realized that there was no hope in any sort of normal future, there’s no hope for me to have anything my parents or grandparents would have considered a normal future—of a career and a retirement and all that stuff—I realized that I have absolutely nothing to lose by fighting back. Because it was all going to be lost anyway.

TERRY: So, in other words, at that moment, it was like, “I have no expectations.”

TIM: Yeah. And it did push me into this deep period of despair.

TERRY: And what did you do with it?

TIM: Nothing. I was rather paralyzed, and it really felt like a period of mourning. I really felt like I was grieving my own future, and grieving the futures of everyone I care about.

TERRY: Did you talk to your friends about this?

TIM: Yeah, I had friends who were coming to similar conclusions. And I was able to kind of work through it, and get to a point of action. But I think it’s that period of grieving that’s missing from the climate movement.

TERRY: I would say the environmental movement.

TIM: Yeah. That denies the severity of the situation, because that grieving process is really hard. I struggle with pushing people into that period of grieving. I mean, I find myself pulling back. I see people who still have that kind of buoyancy and hopefulness. And I don’t want to shatter that, you know?

TERRY: But I think that what no one tells you is, if you go into that dark place, you do come out the other side, you know? If you can go into that darkest place, you can emerge with a sense of empathy and empowerment. But it’s not easy, and there is the real sense of danger that we may not move through our despair to a place of illumination, which for me is the taproot of action. When I was studying the Bosch painting The Garden of Earthly Delights, I was really interested in finding the brightest point in the triptych. I remember squinting at the painting and searching for the most intense point of light. To my surprise, the brightest, the most numinous point was in the right corner of Hell. That’s where the fire burned brightest. And that was something I recognized as true. My mother had just died, my grandmother had just died, my other grandmother had just died. You know, there’s a Syrian myth of going into the Underworld, and when you emerge, you come out with what they call “death eyes”—eyes turned inward. I had been given “death eyes.” I had been changed. I had a deeper sense of suffering but I also felt a deeper sense of joy. Hard to explain, but I remember someone saying to me, “Terry, you’re married to sorrow.” And I said, “No, I’m not married to sorrow, I just refuse to look away.” You stay with it—we are stronger than we know. But it isn’t easy. And you don’t have any assurance that you’re going to find your way out. And there’ve certainly been days where I’ve wondered . . .

TIM: Mmhmm. And the other powerful thing that was happening in my life in 2008 was that I was coming out of the wilderness. I mean it had always been a big part of my life growing up. All of our family vacations were in the wilderness.

TERRY: Where?

TIM: West Virginia. New Hampshire. Montana. Wyoming. Everywhere we could go. And so it always had an important influence on me. I remember when I was seventeen? Sixteen? I was struggling with all this teenage angst, and being overwhelmed with the world, and I had this feeling that I just wanted things to stop for a while so that I could catch up. And I told my mom at one point that I was going to pretend that I was crazy and get myself checked into a mental institution so that I could spend a few weeks where people wouldn’t expect me to do anything other than just stare out the window and drool. And she convinced me that that was a bad idea [laughter], with some potentially long-term consequences—like a lobotomy. And she said, “You need to go to the wilderness.”

TERRY: Wow.

TIM: We were living in Pittsburgh at the time, and she sent me down to West Virginia, to the Otter Creek Wilderness, in the Monongahela National Forest, which was a place that I’d been to several times. And I spent eight days alone there. And it was a really powerful experience that led to my formation as an individual. I mean, it was the first time that I ever experienced myself without any other influences. Without any cultural influences, any influences from other people. And it was terrifying to experience that—I mean I really thought I was actually going crazy at that point. But it allowed me to develop that individual identity of who I was without anyone else around. And then it continued to play a bigger role in my life once I went to college. I started an outdoor recreation and conservation group my freshman year. And I spent every weekend out in the desert somewhere in Arizona. Then I dropped out after two years to go work with kids in the wilderness, in the Ozarks. And did that for three years, and then came to Utah to work for a more intense wilderness therapy program—with troubled teens. And during that time I was fully into the wilderness. Especially when I moved to Utah, I was out there all the time. That was where I lived. And I did feel like I had escaped, in a lot of ways. I felt free, I felt like whatever shit was going on in the world didn’t affect me. I didn’t watch the news, I didn’t know what was going on in the world. And I didn’t think it mattered to me.

TERRY: And what effect would you say the Utah wilderness had on you as a young man?

TIM: Well, it put me in perspective. I think especially the western landscapes have done that for me because they’re so big and so open. You know, when you spend all your time in a little room, you feel very big and very important, and everything that happens to you is a big deal. And when you’re out in the desert, you see that you’re really small. And that’s a very liberating sense—of being very small. Every little thing that happens to you isn’t that big a deal. Going to prison for a few years—it’s not that big a deal. But also just my views on how to live, and what actually makes me happy; how to form a little community out there with a few people; how human actions really work when there isn’t a TV telling us what to do—that all formed out there. And I think that’s part of why some people fight against wilderness, fight to extinguish all of it. I mean, I think there’s definitely a lot of folks who don’t understand it, and have never experienced it. But I think some of the opponents of wilderness really do understand it. They understand . . .

TERRY: Its power.

TIM: That it’s a place where people can think freely. Tyranny can never be complete as long as there’s wilderness. But eventually I wanted to come back. And that’s where I see one of those lessons of Jesus going out to the wilderness for a long time and then coming back and being an activist. What I experienced when I came out of the wilderness and went back to school was just outrage with society. And complete intolerance for the world. Just constantly saying, “How the hell could people live this way? How the hell could people accept this as being okay?” So many things about our society, I just kept looking at them after being in the wilderness for so long and saying, “How the hell could people accept this? This is outrageous.” And I think that’s one of the things that the wilderness does for us, you know, it allows us to live the way we actually want to live for a while. It puts things in the perspective of, “Wait, this isn’t inevitable. It doesn’t actually have to be this way. And this isn’t the way I want to live. It’s not okay.” I think activism at its best is refusing to accept things. Saying that this is unacceptable. And I felt that so strongly sitting there at the auction, watching parcels go for eight or ten dollars an acre. I mean that’s why I first started bidding—just to drive up the prices—because I had this overwhelming sense that this is not acceptable.

TERRY: I remember having a conversation with Breyten Breytenbach, who wrote The True Confessions of an Albino Terrorist, who spent time in prison in South Africa for being anti-apartheid. We were in a bus driving to Mexico City, and he said to me, “You Americans, you’ve mastered the art of living with the unacceptable.” And that haunted me. For decades, his statement has haunted me. From that point forward, I’ve kept thinking about what is unacceptable. And that’s what I hear you saying: that it was unacceptable from your standpoint that these public lands, these wild places that you knew by name and in a very physical, spiritual way, were being sold for eight dollars an acre.

TIM: Mmhmm. There’s so much acceptance. And, I don’t know, I think tolerance is the enemy of activism.

TERRY: That’s interesting. Because if you talk about empathy, and turning the other cheek, then tolerance takes on another definition. Doesn’t it?

TIM: I don’t know. I wouldn’t consider turning the other cheek “tolerating violence.”

TERRY: What’s the difference between tolerance and compassion? I don’t mean tolerating a situation, but really practicing tolerance.

TIM: The compassion actively works to undermine injustice and violence. For me, that’s kind of the misinterpretation of the whole turn-the-other-cheek thing, that it’s about tolerating the violence. I mean, to me it’s about actively ending the violence. It’s the most effective weapon we have against violence: turning the other cheek.

TERRY: But what about racial intolerance? Or intolerance of another species, like prairie dogs—if you turn that word around?

TIM: Yeah, but if you’re tolerating prairie dogs, it’s because you don’t like prairie dogs. I mean, I don’t like the idea of tolerating other races. I don’t like the idea that it’s something we put up with. The idea of tolerating different people, to me, is not something that I’m comfortable with—and when I look at the modern environmental movement, to bring it back to that, I think it’s defined by what we accept. By what we speak out against, but ultimately accept. You know, we’ll sign a petition, or even do an action, or even get arrested for a day, but ultimately we’re gonna go back to our normal lives. Ultimately we’re going to keep participating in this system.

TERRY: You know, it was interesting, I was listening to Robert Pinsky speak, and he was talking about the word medium. Like, what is the writer’s medium, what is the poet’s medium? And he was saying that a poet’s medium is his body, or her body. And that medium is “in between.” So that immediacy is “nothing in between.” And I hadn’t thought about that . . . that there are so many words where we don’t know what the root is, and knowing that could help inform our discussions. You know, what is an activist’s medium? I mean, what would you say your medium is? If a poet’s medium is his or her body—because it’s voice, it’s breath, it’s animating language, it’s sound—what would an activist’s medium be?

TIM: I would say it’s the same as a poet. I would say it’s my body or my life. It’s that which I use to reach other people. It’s the interaction between me and society.

TERRY: I mean, you are laying your body down. You sat your body down, right? In the auction.

TIM: I raised it up. [Laughter.]

TERRY: So tell me about that moment when you picked up the paddle and then started winning. You know, when you were bidding them up, but you weren’t really bidding to win. At the trial, Agent Love was saying, “And, if you looked, he was looking over his shoulder! Here’s the photograph that shows there was a deep conspiracy as he kept looking into his bag, you know, looking to see who else was in the room.”

TIM: Well, so many of the things he brought up were to try to frame me as, like, this shady character.

TERRY: And a medium for a bigger interest, right?

TIM: Yeah. Like the fact that I was looking over my shoulder, and they have this photograph. I remember that moment so clearly. I was amazed when I first saw that picture—I could see by the look on my face that that’s when I was looking at Krista [Bowers], who was on the other side of the room. And she was crying.

TERRY: And you knew her through the Unitarian church?

TIM: Yeah. And it was so clear to me that she was overwhelmed by the heartlessness of this whole scenario. And, you know, when you see a woman crying you feel like you have to do something about changing the situation that’s causing that.

TERRY: Was it really just an act of chivalry? Or when you saw her tears, were they really your tears too?

TIM: She was clearly feeling it as sadness. But for me, it was going into outrage. I was turning it more outward, where she was turning it inward—but the depth of her emotion justified the depth of my own emotion, and was something that pushed me to act. When Agent Love—

TERRY: Not to be confused with Bishop Love, from Abbey’s Monkey Wrench Gang . . .

TIM: Exactly. No, but when Agent Love was talking about how I was looking at my phone, he said that I was sending text messages. But I’d never even sent a text message at that point. What I was doing, once I was winning parcels, was pulling a phone number out of my phone and writing it down on the back of a business card and handing it to my roommate, who was sitting next to me, and saying, “You need to go call my friend Michael and tell him that I need help.”

TERRY: Paying for these.

TIM: Yeah. [Laughing.]

TERRY: Did you think about the consequences?

TIM: Yeah.

TERRY: And it was worth it.

TIM: Mmhmm.

TERRY: So you were there because of the wilderness. Was climate change part of it? Or did it become a larger issue afterward? Because I’m interested in how stories change, evolve.

TIM: It was much more climate change than the wilderness. For me, the wilderness was the third most important issue. The first was climate change, the second was the attack on our democracy, and the fact that people were locked out of the decision-making process with this. And, you know, something I realized last year, when I was on a panel with Dave Forman and Katie Lee, and they were talking about their motivations for protecting wilderness, doing this for the coyote, and all that stuff. And I realized that I was coming from a completely different place than them. I would never go to jail to protect animals or plants or wilderness. For me, it’s about the people. And even my value of wilderness is about what it brings to people. I have a very anthropocentric worldview.

TERRY: And do you think that goes back to your basic spiritual perspective that set you out on this path with Christianity?

TIM: I don’t know. I don’t think so.

TERRY: Because that is a much more human-centered philosophical starting point.

TIM: Yeah. Well, I think it goes beyond that. I think it’s just what I’ve learned to value in my life. I’ve spent a lot of time with people, and I’ve spent a lot of time with animals and the wilderness, and it’s the people that I really value, at a totally different level than anything else. And that’s when I started wondering whether I was actually an environmentalist. [Laughter.]

TERRY: Again, we go back to language. What does an environmentalist mean, anyway? What does a Christian mean? What does an activist mean? I mean, if we took away all these loaded words, or even stopped using war terminology . . . I’m aware of the aggression of language, of “fighting” or “combating” or “war.” How do we take the violence out of our language? How do we become less oppositional and more inclusive in how we talk about these issues? I don’t know. This is what I struggle with. Because I would say that your approach is confrontational.

TIM: Mmhmm.

TERRY: And yet, you’re asking that we sing songs. That it not be confrontational.

TIM: No. That it be more effective confrontation. That it be stronger confrontation than what violence can do.

TERRY: But the organization that you and Ashley [Anderson] began—Peaceful Uprising—I love those two words because they’re paradoxical, right?

TIM: Are they?

TERRY: Well, what I hear you saying in Peaceful Uprising is, “We will create an uprising, but it will be peaceful.” You know, “We will create a confrontational presence, but we will do it singing.”

TIM: Yeah. And I think that’s a strategic decision, rather than a moral one.

TERRY: How so?

TIM: I mean, my commitment to a nonviolent movement ultimately comes down to the fact that it’s more effective.

TERRY: And how did you come to know that?

TIM: I think the reality of the climate crisis—and all the other crises facing us as humanity today—justify the strongest possible tactics in response. Demand the strongest possible tactics. And I think that requires nonviolent resistance.

TERRY: Is violence ever justified?

TIM: Well, it’s justified. But that doesn’t mean it makes sense. I mean, if you’re talking moral justification, yeah—to prevent the collapse of our civilization, and the deaths and suffering of billions of people, it’s morally justified. But violence is the game that the United States government is the best in the world at. That’s their territory.

TERRY: And when you talk about growing up, it was your own confrontation with the violent part of yourself that was most problematic for you.

TIM: Mmhmm.

TERRY: And so, you’ve had to figure out how to use that anger or rage constructively.

TIM: Yeah, I mean that’s something I struggle with: the common liberal mindset that says, “Oh, we don’t want those negative emotions like anger and outrage and fear.” To me that doesn’t make sense—that those are negative emotions.

TERRY: In the same way we don’t want to grieve.

TIM: Those are real emotions. Those are part of human nature. We evolved with those emotions for a reason. Because all the people who were threatened, and didn’t feel fear, or whose children were threatened, and they didn’t feel outrage—those people all died off. And now that we’re facing these very real threats to ourselves and our children, if we don’t feel and find a way to constructively use anger and outrage and fear—

TERRY: And indignation.

TIM: —we should expect to meet the same fate as all those dead-end roads of human evolution.

TERRY: But if it’s true, what Terry Root first told you—that there is no hope—then what’s the point?

TIM: Well there’s no hope in avoiding collapse. If you look at the worst-case consequences of climate change, those pretty much mean the collapse of our industrial civilization. But that doesn’t mean the end of everything. It means that we’re going to be living through the most rapid and intense period of change that humanity has ever faced. And that’s certainly not hopeless. It means we’re going to have to build another world in the ashes of this one. And it could very easily be a better world. I have a lot of hope in my generation’s ability to build a better world in the ashes of this one. And I have very little doubt that we’ll have to. The nice thing about that is that this culture hasn’t led to happiness anyway, it hasn’t satisfied our human needs. So there’s a lot of room for improvement.

TERRY: How has this experience—these past two years—changed you?

TIM: [Sighing.] It’s made me worry less.

TERRY: Why?

TIM: It’s somewhat comforting knowing that things are going to fall apart, because it does give us that opportunity to drastically change things.

TERRY: I’ve watched you, you know, from afar. And when we were at the Glen Canyon Institute’s David Brower celebration in 2010, I looked at you, and I was so happy because it was like there was a lightness about you. Before, I felt like you were carrying the weight of the world on your shoulders—and you have broad shoulders—but there was something in your eyes, there was a light in your eyes I had not seen before. And I remember saying, “Something’s different.” And you were saying that rather than being the one who was inspiring, you were being inspired. And rather than being the one who was carrying this cause, it was carrying you. Can you talk about that? Because I think that’s instructive for all of us.

TIM: I think letting go of that burden had a lot to do with embracing how good this whole thing has felt. It’s been so liberating and empowering.

TERRY: To you, personally?

TIM: Yeah. I went into this thinking, It’s worth sacrificing my freedom for this.

TERRY: And you did it alone. It’s not like you had a movement behind you, or the support group that you have now.

TIM: Right. But I feel like I did the opposite. I thought I was sacrificing my freedom, but instead I was grabbing onto my freedom and refusing to let go of it for the first time, you know? Finally accepting that I wasn’t this helpless victim of society, and couldn’t do anything to shape my own future, you know, that I didn’t have that freedom to steer the course of my life. Finally I said, “I have the freedom to change this situation. I’m that powerful.” And that’s been a wonderful feeling that I’ve held onto since then.

TERRY: Are you surprised by this?

TIM: Yeah. And I think that’s where some of that lightness has come from. And also seeing that it’s having an impact. That it’s firing some other people up, that it’s embarrassing the government. I mean, one of the great things about the trial was seeing how vulnerable the U.S. attorney felt. He was freaking out all the time. And he was terrified. I mean, the government was terrified just that people showed up for the trial. They were terrified by the fact that all these other people are worrying about how to keep me out of prison—

TERRY: I’m one of them.

TIM: [Laughs.] I feel like the goal should be to get other people in prison. How do we get more people to join me? Because that’s where the liberation is, that’s where the effectiveness is.

TERRY: Is that the only alternative?

TIM: No. [Pause.] But it’s one that feels good.

TERRY: For you.

TIM: Yeah.

TERRY: So what are some of the alternatives for those who maybe don’t have that option. Maybe they’ve got children. You know what I’m saying?

TIM: Well, everybody has a reason why they can’t.

TERRY: But I was aware when I was arrested in front of the White House, protesting during the buildup to the Iraq war, that when I looked around, it was a lot easier for me to be arrested than others, you know? I didn’t have a traditional job, I didn’t have children. I mean, some people have more at stake than others. And you’re right, there’s every reason not to. But I’m just playing devil’s advocate. Civil disobedience is one path. It’s a path I’ve personally chosen at times—certainly not with the stakes as high as they are for you. But it’s an act that I powerfully support and believe in and have subscribed to. But what about other alternatives?

TIM: If people aren’t willing to go to jail, there are alternatives in which they can be powerful and effective. But if people feel they’ve got too much to lose—they’ve got all this other stuff in their life, and they might be risking their job, or their reputation, and things like that—I don’t think they can be powerful in other ways.

TERRY: So you can’t be powerful as an organizer or as a support person behind the scene? Or as a teacher or educator?

TIM: You can, but I don’t think people are going to realize their power as revolutionaries if they feel like they’ve got all this stuff to lose.

TERRY: If there’s only one way—which is arrest—then I would argue that you sound like a true believer.

TIM: No, I’m not saying that’s the only way. I’m saying that the willingness for that is what’s necessary. That willingness to not hold back, to not be safe. People can do it without getting arrested. But people can’t be powerful if their first concern is staying safe.

TERRY: Okay. So that’s different than being arrested.

TIM: Yeah. I’m just using that as an example of that level of risk.

TERRY: What I hear you saying is breaking set with the status quo, pushing the boundaries of whatever venue we choose to be active in.

TIM: Mmhmm.

TERRY: Because I think what is killing us is the level of comfort, this of complacency. What you have said repeatedly is one person can make a difference, we are powerful, we can  disrupt the status quo, right? Even at a multimillion-dollar oil and gas auction. And if the government isn’t going to do it for us, if our nonprofits aren’t going to do it, if the environmental movement isn’t going to do it, who’s going to do it? We can no longer look for leadership beyond ourselves.

TIM: Yeah, exactly. And I think our current power structures only have power over us because of what they can take away from us. That’s where their power comes from—their ability to take things away. And so if we have a lot that we’re afraid of losing, or that we’re not willing to lose, they have a lot of power over us.

TERRY: And that goes back to your own sovereignty of soul—of really knowing who you are, knowing what your intention is, and having the strength to go forward. That’s why I was so interested in what led you up to that moment, because in a way, your whole life prepares you for that moment, when you look your divine soul in the face and say, “Okay, do I have it in me to act now?”

TIM: Mmhmm.

TERRY: Because, for most of us, it’s not a planned thing—there is no choice to be made. It’s just, this is the next step that you take, because everything prior to that moment has prepared you for that, you know? Mardy Murie once said, “Don’t worry about your future. There’s just usually enough light shining to show you the next step you’re going to take.” And then, when that perfect alliance comes, when your spirit is aligned with your destiny, then an action occurs that’s revolutionary.

TIM: Something that I’ve related to through this is the Annie Dillard quote, “Sometimes you jump off the cliff first, and build your wings on the way down.” That’s how I felt in this whole process. First I didn’t know what I was going to do at the auction, but I knew I was going to disrupt it. And then, after disrupting it, I had no idea who was going to support me and how that was going to play out. And no idea whether or not I could handle that role. I mean, I can’t say I even had any understanding or expectation that it would put me in this kind of role. But even to the extent that I knew it would put me in some kind of role, I had no idea whether or not I could handle it.

TERRY: And how are you?

TIM: I feel like I’m perfectly suited for this.

TERRY: [Laughter.] I love your honesty! I mean, it appears so. Is that a surprise?

TIM: Yeah. I’d never given a public speech before this. And now I feel like I can just roll right into it any time. And people are responding when I speak. I mean, I had no idea that that would be the case. And I don’t even know that it ever would have been. I don’t know if any of these skills or abilities ever would have been developed had it not been for the necessity of the situation.

TERRY: And that’s where I would go back to intention. I think your intention was really pure. You didn’t know what the outcome was going to be. It feels like you just keep moving. And when we talk about a movement, I think you’re really showing us what that movement looks like. And I don’t even like the word movement. For me, it’s: how do we build community around these issues?

TIM: Yeah. I mean I gave a whole speech about that last fall, about the difference between a climate lobby and a climate movement. I talked about the need to build a genuine climate movement. But I like the idea of a community that supports people. I feel like that’s what we’re building with Peaceful Uprising.

TERRY: Each person has a role to play, according to what they do best. I love that you said, “I’m perfectly suited for this.” There are other people that aren’t.

TIM: Yeah.

TERRY: And so, I think for each of us to find our own path in the name of community, you know, if each of us finds our own niche, with our own gifts, each in our own way and our own time, change can occur. Radical change. And for me, Tim, this is how you have inspired me: We all need to take that next step, whatever that looks like, for the integrity of our own lives. And when I asked you, “How can I support you?” you said, “Join me. Get arrested.” But it’s easy to get arrested, really. I’ve done it more times than I can count. That’s not my risk, at this point, as a fifty-five-year-old person. But the challenge that I heard was: What’s the most uncomfortable thing you can do—the greatest risk, with the most at stake? And I can’t answer that right now. But I’m going to be thinking about that, and figuring out what that next step is for me both as a writer and a person.

TIM: I think what I was really trying to get across was the idea of not backing down. Because it’s important to make sure that the government doesn’t win in their quest to intimidate people into obedience. They’re trying to make an example out of me to scare other people into obedience. I mean, they’re looking for people to back down.

TERRY: Right. And I think democracy requires participation. Democracy also requires numbers. It is about showing up. And we do need leadership. And I think what your actions say to us as your community is, “How are we going to respond so you are not forgotten? So that this isn’t in vain?” And I think that brings up another question: we know what we’re against, but what are we for? Our friend Ben Cromwell asked this question. What are you for? What do you love?

TIM: I’m for a humane world. A world that values humanity. I’m for a world where we meet our emotional needs not through the consumption of material goods, but through human relationships. A world where we measure our progress not through how much stuff we produce, but through our quality of life—whether or not we’re actually promoting a higher quality of life for human beings. I don’t think we have that in any shape or form now. I mean, we have a world where, in order to place a value on human beings, we monetize it—and say that the value of a human life is $3 million if you’re an American, $100,000 if you’re an Indian, or something like that. And I’m for a world where we would say that money has value because it can make human lives better, rather than saying that money is the thing with value.

TERRY: I think about the boulder that hit the child in Coal River Valley. What was that child’s life worth—$14,000? The life of a pelican. What was it—$233? A being that has existed for 60 million years. What do you love?

TIM: I love people. [Very long pause.] I think that’s it.

TERRY: I think that’s why people are inspired. Because I think they feel that from you. And I really feel if we’re motivated by love, it’s a very different response. Here’s an idea that I want to know what you think of: Laurance Rockefeller, as you know, came from a family of great privilege, and he was a conservationist. And in his nineties, he informed his family that the JY Ranch—the piece of land in Grand Teton National Park that his father, John D. Rockefeller, set aside for his family—would be returned to the American people. This was a vow he had made to his father. And he was going to “rewild it”—remove the dozens of cabins from the land and place them elsewhere. Well, you can imagine the response from his family. Shocked. Heartsick. Not pleased. But he did it anyway, and he did it with great spiritual resolve and intention. He died shortly after. I was asked to write about this story, so I wanted to visit his office to see what he looked out at when he was working in New York. Everything had been cleared out, except for scales and Buddhas. That was all that was in there. I was so struck by that. And his secretary said, “I think you would be interested in this piece of writing.” And she disappeared and she came back, and this is what she handed me: [Reading] “I love the concept of unity and diversity. Most decisions are based on a tiny difference. People say, ‘This was right, that was wrong’; the difference was a feather. I keep scales wherever I am to remind me of that. They’re a symbol of my awareness. Of the distortion most people have of what is better and what is not.” How would you respond to that? The key sentence, I think, is, “The difference was a feather.”

TIM: Yeah, the difference is a feather. I guess that’s why I believe that we can be powerful as individuals. Why we actually can make a difference. The status quo is this balance that we have right now. And if we shift ourselves, we shift that scale. I remember one of the big things that pushed me over the edge before the auction was Naomi Klein’s speech that she gave at Bioneers in November of 2008. She was talking about Obama, and talking about where he was at with climate change, and the things he was throwing out there as campaign promises, you know, the best things he was offering. And she was talking about how that’s nowhere near enough. That even his pie-in-the-sky campaign promises were not enough. And she talked about how, ultimately, Obama was a centrist. That he found the center and he went there. And that that’s where his power came from. She said, “And that’s not gonna change.” And so if the center is not good enough for our survival, and if Obama is a centrist, and will always be a centrist, then our job is to move the center. And that’s what she ended the speech with: “Our job is to move the center.” And it was so powerful that we actually got the video as soon as we could and replayed it at the Unitarian church in Salt Lake, and had this event one evening where we played that speech and then broke up into groups and talked about what it meant to move the center. And what I came away from that with was the realization that you can’t move the center from the center. That if you want to shift the balance—if you want to tilt that scale—you have to go to the edge and push. You have to go beyond what people consider to be reasonable, and push.

TERRY: I think that’s so true.

TIM: And that’s what I thought I was doing at the auction—doing something unreasonable.

TERRY: Rather than just standing outside with placards, you came inside.

TIM: To make the people standing outside with placards look reasonable.

TERRY: Which was Earth First!’s tactic early on, right?

TIM: Yeah.

TERRY: You know, with Breyten Breytenbach, going back to that comment, “You Americans have mastered the art of living with the unacceptable,” my next question to him was, “So what do we do?” And he said, “Support people on the margins.” Because it’s from the margins that the center is moved.

TIM: Yeah, that margin—that’s the feather. I mean, with climate change, the center is this balancing point between the climate scientists on one side saying, “This is what needs to be done,” and ExxonMobil on the other. And so the center is always going to be less than what’s required for our survival.

Scenes from a younger life # 1:

I am twelve years old. I am alone, I am scared, I am cold, and I am crying my eyes out. I can’t see more than six feet in either direction. I am on some godforsaken moor high up on the dark, ancient, poisonous spine of England. The black bog juice I have been trudging through for hours has long since crept over the tops of my boots and down into my socks. My rucksack is too heavy, I am unloved and lost and I will never find my way home. It is raining and the cloud is punishing me; clinging to me, laughing at me. Twenty-five years later, I still have a felt memory of that experience and its emotions: a real despair and a terrible loneliness.

I do find my way home; I manage to keep to the path and eventually catch up with my father, who has the map and the compass and the mini Mars bars. He was always there, somewhere up ahead, but he had decided it would be good for me to “learn to keep up” with him. All of this, he tells me, will make me into a man. Needless to say, it didn’t work.

Only later do I realize the complexity of the emotions summoned by a childhood laced with experiences like this. My father was a compulsive long-distance walker. Every year, throughout my most formative decade, he would take me away to Cumbria or Northumberland or Yorkshire or Cornwall or Pembrokeshire, and we would walk, for weeks. We would follow ancient tracks or new trails, across mountains and moors and ebony-black cliffs. Much of the time, we would be alone with each other and with our thoughts and our conversations, and we would be alone with the oystercatchers, the gannets, the curlews, the skylarks, and the owls. With the gale and the breeze, with our maps and compasses and emergency rations and bivy bags and plastic bottles of water. We would camp in the heather, by cairns and old mine shafts, hundreds of feet above the orange lights of civilization, and I would dream. And in the morning, with dew on the tent and cold air in my face as I opened the zip, the wild elements of life, all of the real things, would all seem to be there, waiting for me with the sunrise.

Scenes from a younger life # 2:

I am nineteen years old. It is around midnight and I am on the summit of a low, chalk down, the last of the long chain that winds its way through the crowded, peopled, fractious south country. There are maybe fifty or sixty people there with me. There is a fire going, there are guitars, there is singing and weird and unnerving whooping noises from some of the ragged travelers who have made this place their home.

This is Twyford Down, a hilltop east of Winchester. There is something powerful about this place; something ancient and unanswering. Soon it is to be destroyed: a six-lane motorway will be driven through it in a deep chalk cutting. It is vital that this should happen in order to reduce the journey time between London and Southampton by a full thirteen minutes. The people up here have made it their home in a doomed attempt to stop this from happening.

From outside it is impossible to see, and most do not want to. The name calling has been going on for months, in the papers and the pubs and in the House of Commons. The people here are Luddites, NIMBYs (“not-in-my-backyard” grumblers), reactionaries, romantics. They are standing in the way of progress. They will not be tolerated. Inside, there is a sense of shared threat and solidarity, there are blocks of hash and packets of Rizlas and liters of bad cider. We know what we are here for. We know what we are doing. We can feel the reason in the soil and in the night air. Down there, under the lights and behind the curtains, there is no chance that they will ever understand.

Someone I don’t know suggests we dance the maze. Out beyond the firelight, there is a maze carved into the down’s soft, chalk turf. I don’t know if it’s some ancient monument or a new creation. Either way, it’s the same spiral pattern that can be found carved into rocks from millennia ago. With cans and cigarettes and spliffs in our hands, a small group of us start to walk the maze, laughing, staggering, then breaking into a run, singing, spluttering, stumbling together toward the center.

Scenes from a younger life # 3:

I am twenty-one years old and I’ve just spent the most exciting two months of my life so far in an Indonesian rainforest. I’ve just been on one of those organized expeditions that people of my age buy into to give them the chance to do something useful and exciting in what used to be called the “Third World.” I’ve prepared for months for this. I’ve sold double glazing door-to-door to scrape together the cash. I have been reading Bruce Chatwin and Redmond O’Hanlon and Benedict Allen and my head is full of magic and idiocy and wonder.

During my trip, there were plenty of all of these things. I still vividly remember klotok journeys up Borneo rivers by moonlight, watching the swarms of giant fruit bats overhead. I remember the hooting of gibbons and the search for hornbills high up in the rainforest canopy. I remember a four-day trek through a so-called “rain” forest that was so dry we ended up drinking filtered mud. I remember turtle eggs on the beaches of Java and young orangutans at the rehabilitation center where we worked in Kalimantan, sitting in the high branches of trees with people’s stolen underpants on their heads, laughing at us. I remember the gold miners and the loggers, and the freshwater crocodiles in the same river we swam in every morning. I remember my first sight of flying fish in the Java Sea.

And I remember the small islands north of Lombok, where some of us spent a few days before we came home. At night we would go down to the moonlit beach, where the sea and the air was still warm, and in the sea were millions of tiny lights: phosphorescence. I had never seen this before; never even heard of it. We would walk into the water and immerse ourselves and rise up again and the lights would cling to our bodies, fading away as we laughed.

Now, back home, the world seems changed. A two-month break from my country, my upbringing, my cultural assumptions, a two-month immersion in something far more raw and unmediated, has left me open to seeing this place as it really is. I see the atomization and the inward focus and the faces of the people in a hurry inside their cars. I see the streetlights and the asphalt as I had not quite seen them before. What I see most of all are the adverts.

For the first time, I realize the extent and the scope and the impacts of the billboards, the posters, the TV and radio ads. Everywhere an image, a phrase, a demand, or a recommendation is screaming for my attention, trying to sell me something, tell me who to be, what to desire and to need. And this is before the internet; before Apples and BlackBerries became indispensable to people who wouldn’t know where to pick the real thing; before the deep, accelerating immersion of people in their technologies, even outdoors, even in the sunshine. Compared to where I have been, this world is so tamed, so mediated and commoditized, that something within it seems to have broken off and been lost beneath the slabs. No one has noticed this, or says so if they have. Something is missing: I can almost see the gap where it used to be. But it is not remarked upon. Nobody says a thing.

What took hold

It is nine-thirty at night in mid-December at the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century. I step outside my front door into the farmyard and walk over to the track, letting my eyes adjust to the dark. I am lucky enough to be living among the Cumbrian fells now, and as my pupils widen I can see, under a clear, starlit sky, the outline of the Old Man of Coniston, Dow Crag, Wetherlam, Helvellyn, the Fairfield Horseshoe. I stand there for ten minutes, growing colder. I see two shooting stars and a satellite. I suddenly wish my dad were still alive, and I wonder where the magic has gone.

These experiences, and others like them, were what formed me. They were what made me what I would later learn to call an “environmentalist”: something that seemed rebellious and excitingly outsiderish when I first took it up (and that successfully horrified my social-climbing father—especially as it was partly his fault) but that these days is almost de rigueur among the British bourgeoisie. Early in my adult life, just after I came back from Twyford Down, I vowed, self-importantly, that this would be my life’s work: saving nature from people. Preventing the destruction of beauty and brilliance, speaking up for the small and the overlooked and the things that could not speak for themselves. When I look back on this now, I’m quite touched by my younger self. I would like to be him again, perhaps just for a day; someone to whom all sensations are fiery and all answers are simple.

All of this—the downs, the woods, the rainforest, the great oceans, and, perhaps most of all, the silent isolation of the moors and mountains, which at the time seemed so hateful and unremitting—took hold of me somewhere unexamined. The relief I used to feel on those long trudges with my dad when I saw the lights of a village or a remote pub, even a minor road or a pylon, any sign of humanity—as I grow older this is replaced by the relief of escaping from the towns and the villages, away from the pylons and the pubs and the people, up onto the moors again, where only the ghosts and the saucer-eyed dogs and the old legends and the wind can possess me.

But they are harder to find now, those spirits. I look out across the moonlit Lake District ranges, and it’s as clear as the night air that what used to come in regular waves, pounding like the sea, comes now only in flashes, out of the corner of my eyes, like a lighthouse in a storm. Perhaps it’s the way the world has changed. There are more cars on the roads now, more satellites in the sky. The footpaths up the fells are like stone motorways, there are turbines on the moors, and the farmers are being edged out by south-country refugees like me, trying to escape but bringing with us the things we flee from. The new world is online and loving it, the virtual happily edging out the actual. The darkness is shut out and the night grows lighter and nobody is there to see it.

It could be all that, but it probably isn’t. It’s probably me. I am thirty-seven now. The world is smaller, more tired, more fragile, more horribly complex and full of troubles. Or, rather: the world is the same as it ever was, but I am more aware of it and of the reality of my place within it. I have grown up, and there is nothing to be done about it. The worst part of it is that I can’t seem to look without thinking anymore. And now I know far more about what we are doing. We: the people. I know what we are doing, all over the world, to everything, all of the time. I know why the magic is dying. It’s me. It’s us.

How it ended

I became an “environmentalist” because of a strong emotional reaction to wild places and the other-than-human world: to beech trees and hedgerows and pounding waterfalls, to songbirds and sunsets, to the flying fish in the Java Sea and the canopy of the rainforest at dusk when the gibbons come to the waterside to feed. From that reaction came a feeling, which became a series of thoughts: that such things are precious for their own sake, that they are food for the human soul, and that they need people to speak for them to, and defend them from, other people, because they cannot speak our language and we have forgotten how to speak theirs. And because we are killing them to feed ourselves and we know it and we care about it, sometimes, but we do it anyway because we are hungry, or we have persuaded ourselves that we are.

But these are not, I think, very common views today. Today’s environmentalism is as much a victim of the contemporary cult of utility as every other aspect of our lives, from science to education. We are not environmentalists now because we have an emotional reaction to the wild world. Most of us wouldn’t even know where to find it. We are environmentalists now in order to promote something called “sustainability.” What does this curious, plastic word mean? It does not mean defending the nonhuman world from the ever-expanding empire of Homo sapiens sapiens, though some of its adherents like to pretend it does, even to themselves. It means sustaining human civilization at the comfort level that the world’s rich people—us—feel is their right, without destroying the “natural capital” or the “resource base” that is needed to do so.

It is, in other words, an entirely human-centered piece of politicking, disguised as concern for “the planet.” In a very short time—just over a decade—this worldview has become all-pervasive. It is voiced by the president of the USA and the president of Anglo-Dutch Shell and many people in between. The success of environmentalism has been total—at the price of its soul.

Let me offer up just one example of how this pact has worked. If “sustainability” is about anything, it is about carbon. Carbon and climate change. To listen to most environmentalists today, you would think that these were the only things in the world worth talking about. The business of “sustainability” is the business of preventing carbon emissions. Carbon emissions threaten a potentially massive downgrading of our prospects for material advancement as a species. They threaten to unacceptably erode our resource base and put at risk our vital hoards of natural capital. If we cannot sort this out quickly, we are going to end up darning our socks again and growing our own carrots and other such unthinkable things. All of the horrors our grandparents left behind will return like deathless legends. Carbon emissions must be “tackled” like a drunk with a broken bottle—quickly, and with maximum force.

Don’t get me wrong: I don’t doubt the potency of climate change to undermine the human machine. It looks to me as if it is already beginning to do so, and that it is too late to do anything but attempt to mitigate the worst effects. But what I am also convinced of is that the fear of losing both the comfort and the meaning that our civilization gifts us has gone to the heads of environmentalists to such a degree that they have forgotten everything else. The carbon must be stopped, like the Umayyad at Tours, or all will be lost.

This reductive approach to the human-environmental challenge leads to an obvious conclusion: if carbon is the problem, then “zero-carbon” is the solution. Society needs to go about its business without spewing the stuff out. It needs to do this quickly, and by any means necessary. Build enough of the right kind of energy technologies, quickly enough, to generate the power we “need” without producing greenhouse gases, and there will be no need to ever turn the lights off; no need to ever slow down.

To do this will require the large-scale harvesting of the planet’s ambient energy: sunlight, wind, water power. This means that vast new conglomerations of human industry are going to appear in places where this energy is most abundant. Unfortunately, these places coincide with some of the world’s wildest, most beautiful, and most untouched landscapes. The sort of places that environmentalism came into being to protect.

And so the deserts, perhaps the landscape always most resistant to permanent human conquest, are to be colonized by vast “solar arrays,” glass and steel and aluminum, the size of small countries. The mountains and moors, the wild uplands, are to be staked out like vampires in the sun, their chests pierced with rows of five-hundred-foot wind turbines and associated access roads, masts, pylons, and wires. The open oceans, already swimming in our plastic refuse and emptying of marine life, will be home to enormous offshore turbine ranges and hundreds of wave machines strung around the coastlines like Victorian necklaces. The rivers are to see their estuaries severed and silted by industrial barrages. The croplands and even the rainforests, the richest habitats on this terrestrial Earth, are already highly profitable sites for biofuel plantations designed to provide guilt-free car fuel to the motion-hungry masses of Europe and America.

What this adds up to should be clear enough, yet many people who should know better choose not to see it. This is business-as-usual: the expansive, colonizing, progressive human narrative, shorn only of the carbon. It is the latest phase of our careless, self-absorbed, ambition-addled destruction of the wild, the unpolluted, and the nonhuman. It is the mass destruction of the world’s remaining wild places in order to feed the human economy. And without any sense of irony, people are calling this “environmentalism.”

A while back I wrote an article in a newspaper highlighting the impact of industrial wind power stations (which are usually referred to, in a nice Orwellian touch, as wind “farms”) on the uplands of Britain. I was e-mailed the next day by an environmentalist friend who told me he hoped I was feeling ashamed of myself. I was wrong; worse, I was dangerous. What was I doing giving succor to the fossil fuel industry? Didn’t I know that climate change would do far more damage to upland landscapes than turbines? Didn’t I know that this was the only way to meet our urgent carbon targets? Didn’t I see how beautiful turbines were? So much more beautiful than nuclear power stations. I might think that a “view” was more important than the future of the entire world, but this was because I was a middle-class escapist who needed to get real.

It became apparent at that point that what I saw as the next phase of the human attack on the nonhuman world a lot of my environmentalist friends saw as “progressive,” “sustainable,” and “green.” What I called destruction they called “large-scale solutions.” This stuff was realistic, necessarily urgent. It went with the grain of human nature and the market, which as we now know are the same thing. We didn’t have time to “romanticize” the woods and the hills. There were emissions to reduce, and the end justified the means.

It took me a while to realize where this kind of talk took me back to: the maze and the moonlit hilltop. This desperate scrabble for “sustainable development” was in reality the same old same old. People I had thought were on my side were arguing aggressively for the industrializing of wild places in the name of human desire. This was the same rootless, distant destruction that had led me to the top of Twyford Down. Only now there seemed to be some kind of crude equation at work that allowed them to believe this was something entirely different. Motorway through downland: bad. Wind power station on downland: good. Container port wiping out estuary mudflats: bad. Renewable hydropower barrage wiping out estuary mudflats: good. Destruction minus carbon equals sustainability.

So here I was again: a Luddite, a NIMBY, a reactionary, a romantic; standing in the way of progress. I realized that I was dealing with environmentalists with no attachment to any actual environment. Their talk was of parts-per-million of carbon, peer-reviewed papers, sustainable technologies, renewable supergrids, green growth, and the fifteenth conference of the parties. There were campaigns about “the planet” and “the Earth,” but there was no specificity: no sign of any real, felt attachment to any small part of that Earth.

The place of nature

Back at university, in love with my newfound radicalism, as students tend to be, I started to read things. Not the stuff I was supposed to be reading about social movements and pre-Reformation Europe, but green political thought: wild ideas I had never come across before. I could literally feel my mind levering itself open. Most exciting to me were the implications of a new word I stumbled across: ecocentrism. This word crystallized everything I had been feeling for years. I had no idea there were words for it or that other people felt it too, or had written intimidating books about it. The nearest I had come to such a realization thus far was reading Wordsworth as a teenager and feeling an excited tingling sensation as I began to understand what he was getting at among all those poems about shepherds and girls called Lucy. Here was a kindred spirit! Here was a man moved to love and fear by mountains, who believed rocks had souls, that “Nature never did betray the heart that loved her” (though even then that sounded a little optimistic to me). Pantheism was my new word that year.

Now I declared, to myself if no one else, that I was “ecocentric” too. This was not the same as being egocentric, though some disagreed, and while it sounded a bit too much like “eccentric,” this was also a distraction. I was ecocentric because I did not believe—had never believed, I didn’t think—that humans were the center of the world, that the Earth was their playground, that they had the right to do what they liked, or even that what they did was that important. I thought we were part of something bigger, which had as much right to the world as we did, and which we were stomping on for our own benefit. I had always been haunted by shameful thoughts like this. It had always seemed to me that the beauty to be found on the trunk of a birch tree was worth any number of Mona Lisas, and that a Saturday night sunset was better than Saturday night telly. It had always seemed that most of what mattered to me could not be counted or corralled by the kind of people who thought, and still think, that I just needed to grow up.

It had been made clear to me for a long time that these feelings were at best charmingly naïve and at worst backward and dangerous. Later, the dismissals became encrusted with familiar words, designed to keep the ship of human destiny afloat: romantic, Luddite, NIMBY, and the like. For now, though, I had found my place. I was a young, fiery, radical, ecocentric environmentalist, and I was going to save the world.

When I look back on the road protests of the mid-1990s, which I often do, it is with nostalgia and fondness and a sense of gratitude that I was able to be there, to see what I saw and do what I did. But I realize now that it is more than this that makes me think and talk and write about Twyford Down to an extent that bores even my patient friends. This, I think, was the last time I was part of an environmental movement that was genuinely environmental. The people involved were, like me, ecocentric: they didn’t see “the environment” as something “out there”; separate from people, to be utilized or destroyed or protected according to human whim. They saw themselves as part of it, within it, of it.

There was a Wordsworthian feel to the whole thing: the defense of the trees simply because they were trees. Living under the stars and in the rain, in the oaks and in the chaotic, miraculous tunnels beneath them, in the soil itself like the rabbits and the badgers. We were connected to a place; a real place that we loved and had made a choice to belong to, if only for a short time. There was little theory, much action, but even more simple being. Being in a place, knowing it, standing up for it. It was environmentalism at its rawest, and the people who came to be part of it were those who loved the land, in their hearts as well as their heads.

In years to come, this was worn away. It took a while before I started to notice what was happening, but when I did it was all around me. The ecocentrism—in simple language, the love of place, the humility, the sense of belonging, the feelings—was absent from most of the “environmentalist” talk I heard around me. Replacing it were two other kinds of talk. One was the save-the-world-with-wind-farms narrative; the same old face in new makeup. The other was a distant, somber sound: the marching boots and rattling swords of an approaching fifth column.

Environmentalism, which in its raw, early form had no time for the encrusted, seized-up politics of left and right, offering instead a worldview that saw the growth economy and the industrialist mentality beloved by both as the problem in itself, was now being sucked into the yawning, bottomless chasm of the “progressive” left. Suddenly, people like me, talking about birch trees and hilltops and sunsets, were politely, or less politely, elbowed to one side by people who were bringing a “class analysis” to green politics.

All this talk of nature, it turned out, was bourgeois, Western, and unproductive. It was a middle-class conceit, and there was nothing worse than a middle-class conceit. The workers had no time for thoughts like this (though no one bothered to notify the workers themselves that they were simply clodhopping, nature-loathing cannon fodder in a political flame war). It was terribly, objectively right wing. Hitler liked nature after all. He was a vegetarian too. It was all deeply “problematic.”

More problematic for me was what this kind of talk represented. With the near global failure of the left-wing project over the past few decades, green politics was fast becoming a refuge for disillusioned socialists, Trots, Marxists, and a ragbag of fellow travelers who could no longer believe in communism or the Labour Party or even George Galloway, and who saw in green politics a promising bolthole. In they all trooped, with their Stop-the-War banners and their Palestinian solidarity scarves, and with them they brought a new sensibility.

Now it seemed that environmentalism was not about wildness or ecocentrism or the other-than-human world and our relationship to it. Instead it was about (human) social justice and (human) equality and (human) progress and ensuring that all these things could be realized without degrading the (human) resource base that we used to call nature back when we were being naïve and problematic. Suddenly, never-ending economic growth was a good thing after all: the poor needed it to get rich, which was their right. To square the circle, for those who still realized there was a circle, we were told that “social justice and environmental justice go hand in hand”—a suggestion of such bizarre inaccuracy that it could surely only be wishful thinking.

Suddenly, sustaining a global human population of 10 billion people was not a problem at all, and anyone who suggested otherwise was not highlighting any obvious ecological crunch points but was giving succor to fascism or racism or gender discrimination or orientalism or essentialism or some other such hip and largely unexamined concept. The “real issue,” it seemed, was not the human relationship with the nonhuman world; it was fat cats and bankers and cap’lism. These things must be destroyed, by way of marches, protests, and votes for fringe political parties, to make way for something known as “eco-socialism”: a conflation of concepts that pretty much guarantees the instant hostility of 95 percent of the population.

I didn’t object to this because I thought that environmentalism should occupy the right rather than the left wing, or because I was right-wing myself, which I wasn’t (these days I tend to consider the entire bird with a kind of frustrated detachment). And I understood that there was at least a partial reason for the success of this colonization of the greens by the reds. Modern environmentalism sprang partly from the early-twentieth-century conservation movement, and that movement had often been about preserving supposedly pristine landscapes at the expense of people. Forcing tribal people from their ancestral lands, which had been newly designated as national parks, for example, in order to create a fictional “untouched nature” had once been fairly common, from Africa to the USA. And, actually, Hitler had been something of an environmentalist, and the wellsprings that nourished some green thought nourished the thought of some other unsavory characters too (a fact that some ideologues love to point to when witch-hunting the greens, as if it wouldn’t be just as easy to point out that ideas of equality and justice fueled Stalin and Pol Pot).

In this context it was fair enough to assert that environmentalism allied itself with ideas of justice and decency, and that it was about people as well as everything else on the planet. Of course it was, for “nature” as something separate from people has never existed. We are nature, and the environmentalist project was always supposed to be about how we are to be part of it, to live well as part of it, to understand and respect it, to understand our place within it, and to feel it as part of ourselves.

So there was a reason for environmentalism’s shift to the left, just as there was a reason for its blinding obsession with carbon. Meanwhile, the fact of what humans are doing to the world became so obvious, even to those who were doing very well from it, that it became hard not to listen to the greens. Success duly arrived. You can’t open a newspaper now or visit a corporate website or listen to a politician or read the label on a packet of biscuits without being bombarded with propaganda about the importance of “saving the planet.” But there is a terrible hollowness to it all, a sense that society is going through the motions without understanding why. The shift, the pact, has come at a probably fatal price.

Now that price is being paid. The weird and unintentional pincer movement of the failed left, with its class analysis of waterfalls and fresh air, and the managerial, carbon-über-alles brigade has infiltrated, ironed out, and reworked environmentalism for its own ends. Now it is not about the ridiculous beauty of coral, the mist over the fields at dawn. It is not about ecocentrism. It is not about reforging a connection between overcivilized people and the world outside their windows. It is not about living close to the land or valuing the world for the sake of the world. It is not about attacking the self-absorbed conceits of the bubble that our civilization has become.

Today’s environmentalism is about people. It is a consolation prize for a gaggle of washed-up Trots and, at the same time, with an amusing irony, it is an adjunct to hypercapitalism: the catalytic converter on the silver SUV of the global economy. It is an engineering challenge: a problem-solving device for people to whom the sight of a wild Pennine hilltop on a clear winter day brings not feelings of transcendence but thoughts about the wasted potential for renewable energy. It is about saving civilization from the results of its own actions: a desperate attempt to prevent Gaia from hiccupping and wiping out our coffee shops and broadband connections. It is our last hope.

The open land

I generalize, of course. Environmentalism’s chancel is as accommodating as that of socialism, anarchism, or conservatism, and just as capable of generating poisonous internal bickering that will last until the death of the sun. Many who call themselves green have little time for the mainstream line I am attacking here. But it is the mainstream line. It is how most people see environmentalism today, even if it is not how all environmentalists intend it to be seen. These are the arguments and the positions that popular environmentalism—now a global force—offers up in its quest for redemption. There are reasons; there are always reasons. But whatever they are, they have led the greens down a dark, litter-strewn, dead-end street where the rubbish bins overflow, the light bulbs have blown, and the stray dogs are very hungry indeed.

What is to be done about this? Probably nothing. It was, perhaps, inevitable that a utilitarian society would generate a utilitarian environmentalism, and inevitable too that the greens would not be able to last for long outside the established political bunkers. But for me—well, this is no longer mine, that’s all. I can’t make my peace with people who cannibalize the land in the name of saving it. I can’t speak the language of science without a corresponding poetry. I can’t speak with a straight face about saving the planet when what I really mean is saving myself from what is coming.

Like all of us, I am a foot soldier of empire. It is the empire of Homo sapiens sapiens and it stretches from Tasmania to Baffin Island. Like all empires, it is built on expropriation and exploitation, and like all empires it dresses these things up in the language of morality and duty. When we turn wilderness over to agriculture, we speak of our duty to feed the poor. When we industrialize the wild places, we speak of our duty to stop the climate from changing. When we spear whales, we speak of our duty to science. When we raze forests, we speak of our duty to develop. We alter the atmospheric makeup of the entire world: half of us pretend it’s not happening, the other half immediately start looking for new machines that will reverse it. This is how empires work, particularly when they have started to decay. Denial, displacement, anger, fear.

The environment is the victim of this empire. But the “environment”—that distancing word, that empty concept—does not exist. It is the air, the waters, the creatures we make homeless or lifeless in flocks and legions, and it is us too. We are it; we are in it and of it, we make it and live it, we are fruit and soil and tree, and the things done to the roots and the leaves come back to us. We make ourselves slaves to make ourselves free, and when the shackles start to rub we confidently predict the emergence of new, more comfortable designs.

I don’t have any answers, if by answers we mean political systems, better machines, means of engineering some grand shift in consciousness. All I have is a personal conviction built on those feelings, those responses, that goes back to the moors of northern England and the rivers of southern Borneo—that something big is being missed. That we are both hollow men and stuffed men, and that we will keep stuffing ourselves until the food runs out, and if outside the dining room door we have made a wasteland and called it necessity, then at least we will know we were not to blame, because we are never to blame, because we are the humans.

What am I to do with feelings like these? Useless feelings in a world in which everything must be made useful. Sensibilities in a world of utility. Feelings like this provide no “solutions.” They build no new eco-homes, remove no carbon from the atmosphere. This is head-in-the-clouds stuff, as relevant to our busy, modern lives as the new moon or the date of the harvest. Easy to ignore, easy to dismiss, like the places that inspire the feelings, like the world outside the bubble, like the people who have seen it, if only in brief flashes beyond the ridge of some dark line of hills.

But this is fine—the dismissal, the platitudes, the brusque moving-on of the grown-ups. It’s all fine. I withdraw, you see. I withdraw from the campaigning and the marching, I withdraw from the arguing and the talked-up necessity and all of the false assumptions. I withdraw from the words. I am leaving. I am going to go out walking.

I am leaving on a pilgrimage to find what I left behind in the jungles and by the cold campfires and in the parts of my head and my heart that I have been skirting around because I have been busy fragmenting the world in order to save it; busy believing it is mine to save. I am going to listen to the wind and see what it tells me, or whether it tells me anything at all. You see, it turns out that I have more time than I thought. I will follow the songlines and see what they sing to me and maybe, one day, I might even come back. And if I am very lucky I might bring with me a harvest of fresh tales, which I can scatter like apple seeds across this tired and angry land.

BUD PICKED ME UP at ten-thirty every night. We had to be at the campground by eleven, to start our shift among the slumbering campers sweltering beside the Southern California bay waters, hoping for some sea breezes amid the drought-parched palms. We checked in at the drop gate to be inspected by the guard, a Samoan roughly the size of a pro wrestler. He seemed to have forgotten our faces each night, and gave us grief—he being the last line of defense between the paying campers and the street scum and “illegal aliens” circling the perimeter. He eased up when I started asking him about his faith—hearing about Bahai was a more pleasant way to kick off the evening than flashlit interrogations.

The campground was in a reclaimed muck bed where a slough greeted the bay, a place of old clam flats and forgotten Indian settlements (we weren’t far from the remains of an Indian village obliterated by the confluence of I-5 and Highway 52). Like many camp-lands across the country, this one was basically a blacktop with screes of oleander, some beach, and elevated barbecue grates. An adjacent golf course lent a faux-nature vibe to the eastern perimeter.

All my life, I have found myself in these borderlands, these wasted landscapes on the edge of the world. I was a poverty child, caught between barrio and ghetto, and I learned about nature in dirt alleys, abandoned gravel lots with one dead truck in the corner, in the wars between red ants and black ants on the cracked concrete slabs between humanoid race wars in the apartment blocks. The ruins comfort me somehow. It’s the haunting, I think. The sense of secrets hiding in plain sight. Where weeds are visible signs of life prevailing. The wasteland is eternal.

BUD WAS TO PARK HIS CAR behind the service shed—no pleasure cruising through the property, lest we disturb the peace of the partying tailgaters chucking brewskis at the sides of each other’s RVs. We carried bag lunches for our three a.m. break, along with our collection of brooms, mops, buckets, rubber gloves, and squirt bottles of acid-based cleansers. Toilet/shower pods were scattered all over the property. Bud did floors and mirrors; I was the shower-and-shit man.

Feces, in all their variations, were a central theme of the place. Nature, aside from sunburning and Jet Skiing, was mostly held in abeyance. Gulls, yes. Even a pelican or two. So guano removal was also of profound interest to the management. We worked our paint scrapers around the property so long as we spoke quietly and never, especially in the high-fee parking areas, made a racket. The rare rainstorms that came in—monsoonal eruptions out of Mexico—caused the city sewers to overload and dump raw effluent into our bay. Then it was no-swimming, no-boating. Campers resigned themselves to fire rings and weenie roasts on the sand as the “California brown trouts” popped out of the pipe mouths and drifted offshore. And then there was the more interesting shit, the linguistic shit. This came from our crew bosses. It could be deconstructed into piquant category clusters:

We were shit-for-brains. We didn’t even dream of pulling no shit. We had, when under suspicion of malfeasance, shit-eating grins. We often did real shitty jobs working the mirror squeegees. If we told them about the naked mom sleeping in the shower stall in Unit 3: no shit—bullshit—you’re shitting me. Then there were the civilian campground invaders, who were up to some shady shit. And, during yet another of our insane silent chases in the dark, when we were reduced to being Jr. Border Patrol agents whirring around in electric golf carts after stampeding undocumented entrants, one of our crew bosses radioed: “We’re in the shit now!” Then he hit a speed bump, flew into the air, and broke both his axles.

The better sections of the campground were reserved for the RVs and fifth wheels. They had nice fat pullouts with room for an extra car or pickup, a little grass so they could unfurl their awnings and set up their lawn chairs. Electric and sewer hookups. It was deluxe, as far as blacktop roughing it went.

The smaller RVs, Class 1 and shorter, got tawdrier, smaller parking slots. Yellower grass in narrower strips. Fewer oleanders. Farther from the golf course. And the suckers who came with tents—who should have had the smarts to head up to the Cuyamaca Mountains and at least hear a blue jay—why, they were crammed over on the far side, near the beach, but also near the adjacent trailer park with its tweakers and nocturnal Bachman Turner Overdrive recitals. Stray cats from the trailer park cruised our property, but there wasn’t any policy about them. They kept rodents under control and might have even dissuaded the skunks, which really enjoyed the French fries and Sno Balls scattered around the trailers.

MY FATHER HAD BEEN A JANITOR. He had spent his immigrant life sweeping bowling alleys, putting those mothball cakes in urinals. Shaking foot powder into bowling shoes. He didn’t want me scrubbing toilets, but it made more sense than what I’d announced would be my career: writing stories. I never thought about what must have bugged him so much: he was a Mexican bending his knees to clean up the spatter of Americans who couldn’t bother cleaning up after themselves; I was a nature-lover who fooled myself into thinking the Boy Scout way—I’d help keep nature clean.

Nature? We don’t got no stinkin’ nature.

“We are here to provide the Outdoor experience,” our crew pontificated, a speech typed up by Management on mimeographed handouts and recited in a monotone. “We aim to make the camping adventure as comfortable as home, with amenities found at good hotels.” Bud and I ignored these pep talks since we all knew we were a cut below a KOA Kamping Kabin park. The crew boss was an asshole from a state college, and his frat bro Joey hung out all night smoking and filching beer with him while we slaved.

We hummed along in our cart, making our way downtown—that is, we started with the expensive toilets and ended up down at the brown-trout hatchery. I went from stall to stall, flushing for those who were too impaired to push the chrome buttons set into the walls. Often, there would be a fecal catastrophe so extreme that I’d call Bud and we’d gaze in awe. There didn’t seem to be any difference between men and women—sometimes, campers would enter the stalls, bend at the waist, then explode like the victims in the movie The Fury. I was great at getting these action paintings off the partitions. The acid, however, began burning into my right arm. I developed tiny red blisters, and the nail on my ring finger got bubbles in it and finally came right off.

Bud had figured out how to stick bubble gum on a wire and fish quarters out of the old pinball machine in the “arcade” where we skulked to eat our sandwiches. The coins would slip down between the loose facing and the coin-return slot, and we could get two or three free games while we ate. Which is where the frat bros caught us. They had been watching us for a few nights, so they knew Bud wasn’t stealing coins out of the actual machine. It was like finding quarters on the floor. Joey, we argued, actually stole beer. But they wrote us up for theft anyway, and Joey got our job, and we were kicked out of paradise. Just like that. It was so fast, we didn’t even get to eat our oranges.

We drove out silently just as the sky was lightening. That was the year my father went down to Mexico to retrieve his savings from the bank so I could get a jump on that writing career. His dearest gift to me, in spite of his misgivings. Our small American dream. But Mexican cops, hunting for lone travelers, caught him in the deserts of Sonora. Another wasteland, another story. My father would die there, far from home.

Back by the bay, the campers slept in peace. A raccoon was outside the fence, walking back and forth, trying to find his way in. Once Bud and I cleared the gate, we turned on the radio. Loud. We got on I-5 and Bud said, “Now what?”

In at least one sense, Tim’s life reflects the way the movement for nature has changed in the time since Orion was founded. The degree and kinds of danger humans face, and the level of urgency felt around that danger, is fundamentally different for Tim and his generation than that experienced by Orion’s first readers. Tim’s generation has only known presidential administrations that were satisfied to pretend that urgent action to protect our future was not necessary. They have grown up in a world in which big business not only tolerates greed, but is defined by it. As adults, they have never known airports that are not full of security systems and suspicion. They did not experience the optimism of the 1950s, they are too separated from the 1960s to be buoyed by the spirit of activism that was unfolding then, and they did not experience the vibrant and powerful environmental movement of the 1970s. Born in the 1980s, theirs is a generation that learned early on that it is fruitless to look to the people in power to create the change the world needs. And they are right. As Terry Tempest Williams writes in her introduction to her conversation with Tim, “we can no longer look for leadership outside ourselves.”

Terry wrote those words in reference to a thirty-year-old, but her tenet is not so different from the one that Orion and its contributors began with thirty years ago: that real action starts with the individual and an individual’s convictions; that cultural transformation cannot happen without personal transformation. However, those writers and artists also believed, or at least hoped, that justice would emanate as much from the top as from the bottom—and especially from political and economic systems. It goes without saying that it has not exactly played out that way. Government has failed to take any meaningful stand, and while many individual businesses have striven for economic and environmental responsibility, the corporate community as a whole has failed to emerge as an agent for positive change.

What Orion and its early contributors did not fully understand, it seems now, was how little we would be able to count on government and economics, and how true would be the conviction that personal action is the way change happens. As evidence, we would cite Occupy Wall Street, the challenge to the proposed Keystone XL pipeline, and the anti-hydrofracking movement as examples of recent efforts that show that the real thinking about our future is being spearheaded by individuals who, like Tim DeChristopher, will not stand by and watch our future be senselessly destroyed.

In this issue, Tim describes being transformed by the experience of standing up for his beliefs. “I thought I was sacrificing my freedom,” he says, “but instead I was grabbing onto my freedom and refusing to let go of it for the first time.” If you feel the urgency for change that Tim does, allow yourself to be transformed. If you want to be transformed, then look to nature, to the power of creativity, and to the people around you, because it is here that you will find what you need. Nature, creativity, community—these are the values for which Orion has stood for the last thirty years. We are honored to be here with you for the next thirty.

A FEW DAYS BEFORE Thanksgiving, my wife, Eryn, came home from town with our two young daughters, both of whom had been administered the traditional Thanksgiving myth at school that day. Three-year-old Caroline was as proud as could be of her paper turkey, made from a cut-out drawing of her own little hand. And Hannah Virginia, our loquacious six-year-old, began blurting out her holiday lecture the moment she came through the door: “Dad, I bet you didn’t know that Thanksgiving comes from the Pilgrims and the Indians helping each other a bunch and then having a peace party and eating a really big supper with crazy-colored corn and turkeys and those turkeys were wild!” With this she donned her construction-paper Pilgrim hat with its big, fake buckle and gave me a huge smile.

I took a long sip of my whiskey and tried to formulate a response. The Thanksgiving feast the girls had learned about did in fact occur—at Plymouth Plantation in 1621—but by the following year violent conflict between colonists and Native Americans had already erupted, and devastating Indian wars soon swept New England. There weren’t many turkeys shared at Mystic River in 1637, for example, when the Pilgrims burned and hacked to death at least four hundred Pequots, mostly women and children, as they slept. The Pilgrim leader William Bradford—who had actually been present at that much-celebrated first Thanksgiving—had this to say about the slaughter: “It was a fearful sight to see [the Indians] thus frying in the fire and the streams of blood quenching the same, and horrible was the stink and scent thereof; but the victory seemed a sweet sacrifice, and [we] gave the praise thereof to God.” Just as I was pondering how best to explain this genocide in a way that might somehow be compatible with the ennobling concept of Thanksgiving the girls had learned at school, Hannah pointed excitedly at the muted TV behind me and shouted, “It’s turkey time!” I turned to see that the news had given way to the image of a large, white turkey. A turkey at the White House, in fact. A turkey that was about to receive a formal pardon from the president of the United States.

For many people, Thanksgiving is about bringing together family and friends; for some, it is centered around the ancient autumnal harvest festival; for others, it is an opportunity to count and express our most precious blessings; for yet others, it is a holiday devoted to copious amounts of football and alcohol. I believe deeply in all these versions, but for me Thanksgiving is very much about the pardoning of turkeys.

The tradition of the presidential turkey pardon is wonderfully rife with distortion, ambiguity, and error—as all good stories should be—but what is most perplexing about this bizarre ritual is our uncertainty about its origins. Some claim that the turkey pardon began with President Lincoln, who, hoping to promote national unity amid the social fragmentation of the Civil War, did in fact declare our first official day of national thanksgiving in 1863. That same year Lincoln’s ten-year-old son, Tad, so the story goes, became so attached to a Christmas turkey that the president relented and agreed to spare “Jack” from the family table. More common is the claim that Harry Truman was the first president to save a turkey, but while Truman was indeed the first commander in chief to receive a holiday gift bird from the National Turkey Federation—a custom begun in 1947 and continued to this day—the evidence suggests that Truman, like most presidents who followed him, hadn’t the slightest compunction about eating his gift. It was President Kennedy who first broke with his predecessors by declaring, just four days before he was assassinated, that—despite the sign reading GOOD EATING that the Turkey Federation had hung around the bird’s neck—he would let his fifty-five-pound gobbler live.

Even though President Reagan delivered a few respectable one-liners about sparing his turkey (and was every bit as charismatic with his bird as he was with that cute chimp in the movie Bedtime for Bonzo), the Gipper promptly gobbled up all of his gobblers. And it is here that bird pardoning lore moves from speculation to historical fact, for in 1989 George Herbert Walker Bush had the honor of becoming the first president to formally issue a pardon to a turkey—an innovative leadership move that no doubt helped to secure his legacy. Since Bush Senior, every president has participated annually in this strange ritual—which held special pleasure for presidents Clinton and George W. Bush, each of whom embraced the event as an occasion for the kind of political theater that offered welcome distraction from the kind of political theater that occupied them at all other times. It seemed to me that President Clinton always shot his birds an amorous look while pardoning them, and his uncharacteristic restraint in looking but not touching may have been indirectly attributable to our old friend William Bradford, who, in his seventeenth-century page turner, Of Plymouth Plantation, carefully documented the execution of one of his fellow Pilgrims for the unpardonable sin of sodomizing a turkey. Bradford’s troubling account leaves me with three questions: Can there be anything more disgusting than having sex with poultry? How, exactly, would you go about doing it, anyway? And, finally, is this really something you ought to kill a guy for? It seems to me that it would have been more humane, more punishing, and also more entertaining to simply make fun of him for the rest of his life. It wouldn’t take much—you could just gobble a little under your breath as he passed your pew in church. Of course, none of the Pilgrims’ distasteful Indian killing or turkey raping stopped President George W. Bush from executing a 2007 pardon for “May” and “Flower,” birds whose names offered a clear allusion to Bradford’s intrepid congregation.

The tradition of the presidential turkey pardon has continued to evolve in surprising ways. In the early years the exonerated gobblers were sent to Kidwell Farm, a petting zoo in northern Virginia where, as turkey rock stars, they lived a life featuring excessive drug use and media attention but only the brief fame their overbred and steroid-addled condition would allow. Since 2005, however, the ritual has become more surreal: the pardoned bird is now immediately flown to Disneyland or Disney World, where it serves as grand marshal of the Thanksgiving Day parade at the creepily self-proclaimed “Happiest Place on Earth.” And if the idea of Americans spending their Thanksgiving holiday at a theme park watching a fat bird lead a Mickey Mouse parade seems depressing, it is encouraging to note that the birds are flown to their new posts first class, so while in transit they enjoy a comfortably wide seat and a lot of free gin-and-tonics. It beats the hell out of that cramped poultry yard with its hormone-dusted cracked corn, and since the birds are so overbred as to find it barely possible to waddle (pardon the pun) much less fly, their trip to the Happiest Place is in fact the only flight they will ever know.

President Obama apparently recognized the surreal quality of the ceremony when he remarked, “There are certain days that remind me of why I ran for this office. And then there are moments like this, where I pardon a turkey and send it to Disneyland.” Of course now that the pardoned bird is a national celebrity, it has become necessary to pardon an alternate bird each year in case the National Turkey is unable to fulfill its duties—as occurred in 2008, when “Pecan” fell suddenly ill and required its understudy, “Pumpkin,” to receive the honors. A similar rationale informs the security protocol preventing the president and vice-president from traveling together. So if something unfortunate should befall President Obama—if, say, he gets too close to the propane tank out back of the White House while sneaking a cigarette break during a cabinet meeting—I find it comforting that Joe Biden would survive to pardon the next brace of toms.

In our family it is a hallowed tradition—one as sacred and as ceremoniously performed as cheering on the opening day of baseball season—to witness and celebrate the annual presidential pardoning of the turkeys. Indeed, I consider myself the Cal Ripken of turkey pardoning, having never missed one since the initiation of the ritual more than twenty years ago. As is the case with other Thanksgiving traditions, I find it helpful to drink while participating in this one, so I annually toast the birds’ reprieve with stout tumblers of what I call Meleagris gallopavo cocktail, which is Wild Turkey straight up, the “cock-tail” mixed in only as an avian pun. After all, nothing is more threatening to one’s mental health than to be caught uncomfortably sober when it comes time for the leader of the free world to issue a televised and legally binding pardon to a bird.

Although I have long found the pardoning of the turkeys to be among the more entertaining things to transpire in our nation’s capital each year, even the levity of this ritual has become compromised by politics. In particular, the bloodthirsty vegetarians have complained that the annual pardoning amounts to free advertising for the poultry industry, and have suggested that the president would set a better example by accepting a “cruelty-free” Tofurkey, whose life before being pressed into a gelatinous loaf of shimmering curd presumably consisted of cavorting innocently through fragrant bean fields while in absolutely no danger of being sodomized. The Humane Society has also objected, making the hard-to-dispute point that turkeys produced by industrial poultry farming have about as unpleasant a life as one can imagine, and while two birds do get to fly first class to Anaheim or Orlando each year, 250 million others aren’t so lucky. Each year following the pardoning, PETA is served a whopping slice of free media pie when it describes in gory detail the miserable lives of these factory-farmed birds.

My objection to such complaints is certainly not that they are groundless—they must be at least as compelling as the idea that the leader of 300 million people should waste his time, not to mention his political capital, pardoning a turkey—but rather that they are unpardonably lacking in humor. It is not, after all, a Supreme Court deliberation we are talking about, but rather a turkey pardoning. So here, perhaps, is a useful rule of thumb for animal-rights activists: if George W. Bush and a turkey are more entertaining than you are, it can hardly be surprising that your client is headed for decapitation. With a little creativity, such activists might dramatize their objections in ways that would be more in the spirit of the event. How about staging a parody of the turkey pardoning in which a PETA activist, costumed as a giant turkey, pardons Dubya for his misdeeds? The potential for humor here is also suggested by the comic irony of an actual event involving none other than Sarah Palin. Back in the days before Fox and failed reality shows and rewriting the history of the American Revolution, the Alaska governor, having just pardoned a turkey (yes, many state governors also participate in this tomfoolery), waxed rhapsodic on camera about the virtues of compassion and forgiveness, while unbeknownst to her a worker in the background was busy decapitating and bleeding out turkeys. The YouTube video of this interview, which is far funnier than any Saturday Night Live sendup of it could possibly be, has been viewed more than 1 million times.

If I were to object to the turkey pardoning—which, of course, I haven’t the slightest intention of doing—I would do so on the grounds that to render a turkey a fit subject for pardon, we must presume the bird’s guilt. To be pardoned, one must first be in violation of some communal law or code. While enjoying Thanksgiving dinner, for example, we don’t “beg your pardon” unless we belch, fart, or otherwise violate the community ethic by which the meal is conducted. A pardon is both an expression of mercy and a certificate of absolution; it is both amnesty and exoneration.

To pardon, after all, is to forgive. And, if we’re talking about a turkey, it becomes difficult to discern what criminal or immoral behavior on the bird’s part may be said to establish the necessary preconditions for its forgiveness. Now if Ben Franklin had won the argument, and the turkey had become our national symbol, the case might be different. You may recall that Ben, whom many consider the true Father of our Country, argued that the bald eagle made a poor national symbol because “he is a bird of bad moral character.” This, incidentally, from a man who advocated choosing for a mistress an older woman because “there is no hazard of children, which irregularly produced may be attended with much inconvenience”; who invented bifocals so he might focus on prostitutes both up close and from slightly farther away; and who is credited with proffering the timeless verity that “beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy.” So much for moral character. Unfortunately, Ben’s failed lobbying prevented the fat gobbler from making it onto the presidential seal, though I do still like to imagine a plump tom turkey with an olive branch in one scrabbly claw and a sheaf of gleaming arrows in the other, as if to say: I’m a jolly, peaceful old bird, but don’t fuck with me. Given its failure to achieve the status of national icon, I would argue that the turkey—being innocent of everything save its cowardly squandering of the rare opportunity to peck viciously at the president of the United States—cannot in fact be legally pardoned. And if the annual pardon is both presidentially sanctioned and demonstrably illegal, then it is also necessarily unconstitutional, and therefore constitutes legitimate grounds for impeachment.

My point here is not that a U.S. president should be impeached for pardoning a turkey—though I won’t stand in the way if that’s how it ultimately goes down—but rather that we might benefit from asking what human vanity or lust for power inspired the presumption that we could pardon a bird. On his final day in office, Bill Clinton pardoned 140 people, including a few whose deeds might lead you to conclude, by comparison, that even the turkey sodomizer wasn’t such a bad guy. Upon what grounds were these many villains exonerated? Just these: I’m an outgoing president, and you can’t stop me. That is to say, the grounds of power alone, and not those of morality or justice. Although most industrialized democracies on the planet have abolished capital punishment, more than two-thirds of U.S. states continue to respond to violent crime with the awkwardly violent response of sending people to the death chamber. And we still aren’t done quibbling about what constitutes torture, and whether our nation should sanction its use in extreme circumstances. But, as Thomas Jefferson well knew, it is the political expediency of those in power that defines the extremity of the circumstances. Men, as James Madison observed, are not angels.

I realize this is pretty heavy stuff to include in an essay about pardoning turkeys—and for that I hope I too may be pardoned—but the plain truth that we are so flawed, so very far from being angels, is directly relevant to this story. It is we who burn the village, execute the criminal, approve the torture. How is it that we are so sure of ourselves, so certain about the infallibility of our judgment and our authority? I wonder if there is some relationship between our presumption of power and this desire to pardon—even the desire to pardon an innocent, feathered, nonhuman being. I wonder if perhaps we have a vague sense that it is some guilt of our own that must be assuaged: that we, whose power has so often been used to judge, might ourselves be redeemed by some corollary power to forgive, that exoneration might at the eleventh hour become the bright shadow of a looming condemnation.

Of course the National Turkey—which, for all we know, might wisely prefer death to Disney World in any case—doesn’t require our mercy in the slightest. It is we who need the bird, desperately so, for through it we are permitted to express our deep human desire to grant amnesty to those who would otherwise suffer. From where I sit it is difficult to determine whether the granting of a pardon constitutes an assertion of power or a relinquishment of it. But for allowing us a momentary, if symbolic, reprieve from our role as judge and executioner, we have ample reason to give thanks to these turkeys—so many thanks, in fact, that it probably is a good idea to be on the safe side and pardon one every now and then.

I pour another tumbler of bourbon and look again at Caroline’s sweet little handprint turkey. Then I look at Hannah’s beaming face, which so clearly registers her innocent excitement that President Obama—with his own two little daughters by his side—has made it possible for these otherwise doomed gobblers to go free. I think about that mythic first Thanksgiving that we describe to our children, even as a long shadow of violence threatens to reduce it to historical insignificance. I think of the presidential turkey pardoning being performed in a world so replete with greed and conflict, suffering and injustice. I think of the fact that the ratio of turkeys annually pardoned and given free gin-and-tonics to those raised under horrendous conditions and unceremoniously slaughtered is approximately 1:125,000,000.

“Girls!” I suddenly hear myself exclaim. “This is the best day ever! The president has made sure that the turkeys will be free, and now they get to fly in a plane to Disney World, and they even get to be the stars in the big parade! And today you girls have learned all about how Thanksgiving is a holiday of peace and forgiveness, and soon we’ll have a wonderful Thanksgiving dinner of our own. This is truly a day to count our blessings!”

Eryn instantly furrows her brow, as if contemplating whether to take my bottle away. Then Caroline starts counting aloud, “One, two, free, four!” and Hannah claps her hands and chants, “The birds are free! The birds are free!” I glance again at Eryn, who is looking at me as if I’ve started something she will have to finish. It is a difficult moment, I must admit. And so, I do the only thing I can. I do what I think any father would have done under the circumstances. I set my whiskey down slowly, and then begin jumping up and down, clapping and shouting along with Hannah, and then Caroline, and, at last, even Eryn: “The birds are free! The birds are free! The birds are free!” Before our celebration reaches its breathless finish, we have segued from our avian freedom chant into “Turkey in the Straw,” “Five Fat Turkeys Are We,” and, for our big closer, “Freebird.” There is much playing of air guitar, and when we finish singing we all stand panting, heads bowed, holding our imaginary lighters ceremoniously above our heads.

It will be all too soon before my children’s veneration of the First Thanksgiving gives way to a painful awareness of the Mystic River Massacre. In the meantime we will celebrate not history, which is so often a monument to human failure, but rather myth, which is the necessary dream that a better future might excuse the errors of the past. Perhaps we each deserve a pardon. Maybe, whether we are doomed prisoner or executioner, we each need to receive that last-minute phone call in what would otherwise be our death chamber. We forgive the birds, and in so doing, we hope desperately that they might forgive us.

Earlier this year, my state’s governor asked if I’d give an after-lunch speech to some of his cabinet and other top officials who were in the middle of a retreat. It’s a useful discipline for writers and theorists to have to summarize books in half an hour, and to compete with excellent local ice cream. No use telling these guys how the world should be at some distant future moment when they’ll no longer be in office—instead, can you isolate themes broad enough to be of use to people working on subjects from food to energy to health care to banking to culture, and yet specific enough to help them choose among the options that politics daily throws up? Can you figure out a principle that might undergird a hundred different policies?

Or another way to say it: can you figure out which way history wants to head (since no politician can really fight the current) and suggest how we might surf that wave?

Here’s my answer: we’re moving, if we’re lucky, from the world of few and big to the world of small and many. We’ll either head there purposefully or we’ll be dragged kicking, but we’ve reached one of those moments when tides reverse.

Take agriculture. For 150 years the number of farms in America has inexorably declined. In my state—the most rural in the nation—the number of dairies fell from 11,000 at the end of World War II to 998 this summer. And of course the farms that remained grew ever larger—factory farms, we called them, growing commodity food. Here in Vermont most of the remaining dairies are big, but not big enough to compete with the behemoths in California or Arizona; they operate so close to the margin that they can’t afford to hire local workers and instead import illegal migrants from Mexico.

But last year the USDA reported that the number of farms in America had actually increased for the first time in a century and a half. The most defining American demographic trend—the shift that had taken us from a nation of 50 percent farmers to less than 1 percent—had bottomed out and reversed. Farms are on the increase—small farms, mostly growing food for their neighbors. They’re not yet a threat to the profits of the Cargills and the ADMs, but you can see the emerging structure of a new agriculture composed of CSAs and farmers’ markets, with fewer middlemen. Which is all for the good. Such farming uses less energy and produces better food; it’s easier on the land; it offers rural communities a way out of terminal decline. You could even imagine a farmscape that stands some chance of dealing with the flood, drought, and heat that will be our destiny in the globally warmed century to come. Instead of the too-big-to-fail agribusiness model, this will be a nimbler, more diversified, sturdier agriculture.

And what works on the farm works elsewhere too. Think about our energy future—the phrase that engineers like to use now is “distributed generation.” Since our old fuels were dense in BTUs and concentrated in a few locations, it made sense to site a few giant generating stations where coal or uranium could easily be brought and burned. But the logic of sun and wind is exactly the opposite: millions of rooftops and ridgelines producing power. You can do it in cities as easily as in the country—new satellite and airplane mapping of New York City’s five boroughs showed that the city’s rooftops could provide half its electricity. If you can do that in New York, imagine Shaker Heights, not to mention Phoenix. And once you’ve done it, you’ve got something practical and local: an interconnected grid where everyone brings something and takes something away. A farmers’ market in electrons.

Many of us get a preview of life in the age of small and many when we sit down at our computers each day. Fifteen years ago we still depended on a handful of TV networks and newspaper conglomerates to define our world for us; now we have a farmers’ market in ideas. We all add to the flow with each Facebook post, and we can find almost infinite sources of information. It’s reshaping the way we see the world—not, of course, without some trauma (from the hours wasted answering e-mail to the death of too much good, old-school journalism). All these transitions will be traumatic to one extent or another, since they are so very big. We’re reversing the trend of generations.

But the general direction seems to me increasingly clear. Health care? In place of a few huge, high-tech hospitals dispensing the most expensive care possible, all the data suggest we’d be healthier with lots of primary and preventive care from physicians’ assistants and nurse practitioners in our neighborhoods. Banking? Instead of putting more than half our assets in half a dozen money-center banks that devote themselves to baroque financial instruments, we need capital closer to home, where loan officers have some sense for gauging risk and need.

Your average state or city leader could help push change in those directions: small investments in, say, slaughterhouses and canneries will help local farmers diversify. New zoning regulations can make rooftop solar quicker and easier to install. Higher reserve requirements will move money from Wall Street’s casinos back to Main Street’s banks. None of them will produce utopia—we will still have endless problems, but they’ll be more limited. A careless local farmer can still sicken his customers, but he can’t sicken millions of them at once. A corrupt banker can wreak havoc in his community, but not so much havoc that it topples the financial system. Problems will stay problems, instead of ramifying into disasters. If a hailstorm wrecks my solar panels, I’ve got an issue, but it’s not blacking out the East Coast. 

All economic life is a bet—many small wagers at decent odds won’t make anyone a billionaire, but they should keep most of us out of the poorhouse. And that’s both the virtue and the trouble with this transition. The virtue is obvious; the problem is that there are always a few people determined to hit the jackpot. In our world, most of those people are not actually persons—we call them corporations. But their power over our democracy is very real, and on the farm and on the trading floor and in the hospital ward they’re doing their very best to block the transitions we need. Their money, earned under the old bigger-is-better paradigm, gives them great power to block change: just look at how skillfully the fossil fuel industry has used the Tea Party to stifle legislation that would speed the transition to renewable energy. Watch Big Ag write the next Farm Bill—it won’t be pretty. Big Pharma would happily keep our current medical system, never mind that it’s bankrupting us all even as we fall further behind other nations on everything from life expectancy to infant mortality.

It’s possible they can delay the transition too long—the physics and chemistry of climate change, for instance, demand quicker change than many of our systems can easily manage. But all the money in the world can’t, in the end, hold back history. It’s heading toward something different and new and interesting. Or many many somethings, each of them small and beautiful.

For my daughter’s benefit, so that she might know the enemy better, know what he looks like, where he nests, and when and where to throw eggs at his head, we start the tour at Wall Street. It’s hot. August. We’re sweating like old cheese.

Here are the monuments that matter, I tell her: the offices of Deutsche Bank and Bank of New York Mellon; the JPMorgan Chase tower up the block; around the corner, the AIG building. The structures dwarf us, imposing themselves skyward.

“Linked together like rat warrens, with air conditioning,” I tell her. “These are dangerous creatures, Léa. Sociopaths.”

She doesn’t know what sociopath means.

“It’s a person who doesn’t care about anybody but himself. Socio, meaning society—you, me, this city, civilization. Patho, like pathogen—carrying and spreading disease.”

Long roll of eyes.

I’m intent on making this a teachable moment for my daughter, who is fifteen, but I have to quit the vitriol, break it down for her. I have to explain why the tour is important, what it has to do with her, her friends, her generation, the future they will grow up into.

On a smaller scale, I want Léa to understand what New York, my birthplace and home, once beloved to me, is really about. Because I’m convinced that the beating heart of the city today is not its art galleries, its boutiques, its restaurants or bars, its theaters, its museums, nor its miserable remnants in manufacturing, nor its creative types—its writers, dancers, artists, sculptors, thinkers, musicians, or, god forbid, its journalists.

“Here,” I tell her, standing in the canyons of world finance, “is what New York is about. Sociopaths getting really rich while everyone else just sits on their asses and lets it happen.”

Cancer
Talk is cheap, anger without action is a turnoff, and even at fifteen my daughter sensed that her father’s rage was born of impotence. I thought of Mark Twain’s line, “The human race is a race of cowards; and I am not only marching in that procession but carrying a banner.” A few weeks later, Léa was gone, back to France, where she lives with her mother. I had new material to chew into bitter cud. It was a report titled “Grow Together or Pull Further Apart?: Income Concentration Trends in New York,” issued in December 2010 by a Manhattan-based nonprofit called the Fiscal Policy Institute (FPI). The twenty-five-page report only quantified in hard data what most New Yorkers—the ones struggling to survive (most of us)—understood instinctively as they watched their opportunities diminish over the past three decades.

New York, the FPI informs us, is now at the forefront of the maldistribution of wealth into the hands of the few that has been ongoing in America since 1980, which marked the beginning of a new Gilded Age. Out of the twenty-five largest cities, it is the most unequal city in the United States for income distribution. If it were a nation, it would come in as the fifteenth worst among 134 countries ranked by extremes of wealth and poverty—a banana republic without the death squads. It is the showcase for the top 1 percent of households, which in New York have an average annual income of $3.7 million. These top wealth recipients—let’s call them the One Percenters—took for themselves close to 44 percent of all income in New York during 2007 (the last year for which data is available). That’s a high bar for wealth concentration; it’s almost twice the record-high levels among the top 1 percent nationwide, who claimed 23.5 percent of all national income in 2007, a number not seen since the eve of the Great Depression. During the vaunted 2002–07 economic expansion—the housing-boom bubble that ended in our current calamity, this Great Recession—average income for the One Percenters in New York went up 119 percent. Meanwhile, the number of homeless in the city rose to an all-time high last year—higher even than during the Great Depression—with a record 113,000 men, women, and children, many of them comprising whole families, retreating night after night to municipal shelters.

But here’s the most astonishing fact: the One Percenters consist of just 34,000 households, about 90,000 people. Relative to the great mass of New Yorkers—9 million of us—they’re nobody. We could snow them under in a New York minute.

And yet the masses—the fireman, the policeman, the postal worker, the teacher, the journalist, the subway conductor, the construction worker, the social worker, the engineer, the architect, the barkeep, the musician, the receptionist, the nurse—have been the consistent losers since 1990. The real hourly median wage in New York between 1990 and 2007 fell by almost 9 percent. Young men and women aged twenty-five to thirty-four with a bachelor’s degree and a year-round job in New York saw their earnings drop 6 percent. Middle-income New Yorkers—defined broadly by the FPI as those drawing incomes between approximately $29,000 and $167,000—experienced a 19 percent decrease in earnings. Almost 11 percent of the population, about 900,000 people, live in what the federal government describes as “deep poverty,” which for a four-person family means an income of $10,500 (the average One Percenter household in New York makes about that same amount every day). About 50 percent of the households in the city have incomes below $30,000; their incomes have also been steadily declining since 1990. During the gala boom of 2002–07, the trend was unaltered: the average income in the bottom 95 percent of New York City households declined.

According to the FPI, the wealth of the One Percenters derives almost entirely from the operations of the sector known as “financial services,” whose preoccupation is something they call “financial innovation.” The One Percenters draw the top salaries at commercial and investment banks, hedge funds, credit card companies, insurance companies, stock brokerages. They are the suit people at Goldman Sachs and J. P. Morgan and AIG and Deutsche Bank. To get a sense for how their fortunes have blossomed, consider the fact that the largest twenty financial institutions in the U.S., almost all of them headquartered in New York, now control upward of 70 percent of the country’s financial assets, roughly double what they controlled in the 1990s.

And what do the suit people do to earn such heaping returns? At one time, the financial sector could be relied upon to allocate capital for the building of things that society needed—projects that also invariably created jobs. But productivity is no longer its purview. Lord Adair Turner, a financial watchdog and former banker in the city of London—the other world capital of finance—recently denounced his class as practitioners and beneficiaries of a “socially useless activity.” Paul Woolley, who runs a think tank in London called the Centre for the Study of Capital Market Dysfunctionality, observed that the “presumption that financial innovation is socially valuable” was a kind of metaphysics. “It wasn’t backed by any empirical evidence,” Woolley told John Cassidy, a staff writer for The New Yorker. Structured investment vehicles, credit default swaps, futures exchanges, hedge funds, complex securitization and derivative pools, the tranching of mortgages—these were shown to have “little or no long-term value,” according to Cassidy. The purpose was to “merely shift money around” without designing, building, or selling “a single tangible thing.” The One Percenter seeks only exchange value, as opposed to real value. Thus foreign exchange currency gambling has skyrocketed to seventy-three times the actual goods and services of the planet, up from eleven times in 1980. Thus the “value” of oil futures has risen from 20 percent of actual physical production in 1980 to 1,000 percent today. Thus interest rate derivatives have gone from nil in 1980 to $390 trillion in 2009. The trading schemes float disembodied above the real economy, related to it only because without the real economy there would be nothing to exploit.

Behold, then, the One Percenter in his Wall Street tower. He creates “value” by tapping on keyboards and punching in algorithms. He makes money playing with money, manipulating abstractions. He manufactures and chases after financial bubbles and then pricks them. He speculates on mortgages, car loans, credit card debt, the price of gas that keeps the real economy moving, the price of food that keeps the labor pool alive, always hedging his bets so that he comes out ahead whether society wins or loses. A study from the New Economics Foundation in England found that for every pound made in financial services in the city of London, roughly seven pounds of social wealth is lost—meaning the wealth of those in society who do productive work.

Finance as practiced on Wall Street, says Paul Woolley, is “like a cancer.” There is only maximization of short-term profit in these “financial services”—they are services only in the sense of the vampire at a vein. There is no vision for allocating capital for the building of infrastructure that will serve society in the future; no vision, say, for a post-carbon civilization; no vision for surviving the shocks of coming resource scarcity. The finance nihilist doesn’t look to a viable future; he is interested only in the immediate return.

Rotten Vegetables
The optimist will say that the wealth disparities in New York have been far worse in the past, and the optimist would be correct. When in 1869, for example, a young journalist named Henry George arrived in New York, already the most opulent city in America, he found that “amid the greatest accumulations of wealth, men die of starvation, and puny infants suckle dry breasts.” The inequalities got worse. There came the Panics of 1873 and 1884, which resulted from the speculation and stock fraud of the city’s financial and business elite. Epicentered in lower Manhattan, the panics—we’d call them crashes today—produced nationwide shock waves of mass unemployment, homelessness, hunger, years of depression and dislocation, and, at times, the specter of all-out chaos. President Grover Cleveland, aghast at the scope of the division between the few very rich and the many poor, concluded that the “wealth and luxury of our cities,” primarily enjoyed by the industrial monopolists and the financier and Wall Street class, was “largely built upon undue exactions from the masses of our people.” The exactions in New York, as with every city where unregulated industrial capital ran amok, were most felt in the profitable horrors of wage slavery: the fourteen-hour workdays, the miserable pay, the children forced into labor, the dangerous conditions on factory floors, the rents extracted by landlords for the opportunity to live in windowless, rat-infested, soul-destroying tenements.

In answer, across New York City throughout the 1880s there were strikes, marches, boycotts, gigantic torch-lit demonstrations. New York’s Central Labor Union (CLU), a branch of the Knights of Labor, whose national membership approached 700,000, welcomed all the “producing classes,” skilled and unskilled: the bricklayers, the jewelers, the printers, the industrialized brewers and machinists, the salesclerks, bakers, cloak makers, cigar makers, piano makers, musicians, tailors, waiters, Morse operators, Protestants, Catholics, Jews, whites and blacks, men and women. The only people they refused to welcome in their ranks, wrote historians Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace, were “bankers, brokers, speculators, gamblers, and liquor dealers”—what the Knights and other radicals of the time called the “fleecing classes,” the “parasites,” the “leeches.”

The CLU and the Knights organized the first Labor Day parade in the United States, on September 5, 1882, marching twenty thousand strong from City Hall to Union Square, unfurling banners that said: LABOR BUILT THIS REPUBLIC AND LABOR SHALL RULE IT. And: NO MONEY MONOPOLY. And: PAY NO RENT. The seamstresses along the route waved handkerchiefs from windows and blew kisses at the marchers. When the ladies at their sills saw cops and thugs hired by the fleecing classes, they rained down rocks, eggs, rotten vegetables.

By 1886, the labor coalition was looking for a radical candidate for mayor, and they found one in Henry George, who by then had become a famous writer, known on four continents. Seven years earlier, he had published a book of economics called Progress and Poverty that during the last decades of the nineteenth century would outsell every book but the Bible. His chief contribution was to acquaint the lay American with the problem of “economic rent” in society. This was defined as revenue with no corresponding labor or productivity; economic rent was unearned income.

Those who benefited from this income were known as rentiers, and the most egregious rentier in George’s day was the landlord, who, sitting on land as it rose in value, got rich on the backs of his tenants “without doing one stroke of work, without adding one iota to the wealth of the community.” Political liberty required also economic liberty, said George, and economic liberty required doing away with the privileges of the rentier. “We are not called upon to guarantee all men equal conditions…but we are called upon to give to all men an equal chance,” said George. “If we do not, our republicanism is a snare and a delusion, our chatter about the rights of man the veriest buncombe.” George also proclaimed, “It is not enough that men should vote; it is not enough that they should be theoretically equal before the law. They must have liberty to avail themselves of the opportunities and means of life.”

In declaring his candidacy, George decried the “principle of competition upon which society is now based.” He announced to an ecstatic public that his intention was “to raise hell!” He saw only corruption in government as it was then comprised, and suggested that “a revolutionary uprising might be necessary to turn out the praetorians who were doing the corporations’ bidding in government office.” But George was defeated in the 1886 campaign, and new and more advanced rentiers, typified by J. P. Morgan, with his offices at 23 Wall Street, rose to dominate the American political economy. By the turn of the twentieth century, Morgan had directed a massive consolidation of banking and, through the leverage of credit and debt, industry. This superconsolidation, which came to be known as monopoly finance capitalism, extended the influence of New York bankers nationwide to the point that, as Woodrow Wilson observed in 1911, “all our activities are in the hands of a few men” who “chill and check and destroy genuine economic freedom.”

It would take decades of labor unrest and protest, coupled with the near total collapse of monopoly finance capitalism after 1929, to smash the power of New Yorkers like Morgan and secure some measure of economic equality in the United States. The institutions exploited by the bankers—commercial banks, investment banks, insurance companies, stock brokerages—were broken up and regulated. Antitrust law barred the supersizing of corporations in mergers and acquisitions. The incomes of the very rich were heavily taxed. The finance rentier was placed in the cage where he belonged.

New York City stood at the forefront of the new progressivism. It was here that the nation’s first large-scale system of low-cost housing was built, here that some of the earliest labor and social welfare policies were developed and enforced—efforts to regulate working conditions on factory floors, reduce working hours, mandate equal pay for women. New York developed one of the largest social services sectors of any city in the United States. Its universities were free. It had twenty-two public hospitals. Its public transit system was the largest in the world, and cheap—you could ride fifteen miles for fifteen cents. It was still a city, with all the attendant ills of a metropolis, in many ways too big, entangled in bureaucracies, full of corruption and crime, congestion and pollution, racial and ethnic division. Yet by 1945, it was home to a strong and stable middle class, anchored in industry and the trades. It was becoming a city of equals. During this period of relative economic equality, roughly from World War II to around 1980—a period known to economic historians as the Great Compression, as income and wealth leveled out nationally following the reforms of the 1930s—the city also experienced a series of artistic and creative revolts that cemented its reputation as a cultural mecca. Jazz flowered here, so did folk music, so did the avant-garde of modern art, so did the Beats, so did punk and hip-hop.

Rent
A few years ago, an old family friend, whom I’ll call Anthony, went homeless at the age of sixty-eight and ended up sleeping in my dad’s Brooklyn basement, living on coffee and cigarettes. He had survived for years in a garret on the top floor of a brownstone on Strong Place, in the area once known as South Brooklyn, exchanging his labor for a roof and a toilet, his only foothold in a neighborhood where he’d worked for fifty years as an electrician and carpenter and plumber. But eventually the owner of the brownstone could see nothing more than cash in the pile of stone on Strong Place. A lot of landowners in South Brooklyn caught the greed bug during this time, when the real estate bubble began to inflate in 2002. The owner, who liked Anthony and told him he was sorry, sold to a speculator, left Brooklyn, and the brownstone was converted to condos.

Anthony, who never graduated high school, was a smart man, self-educated, and knew history. He knew that what was happening was part of a transformation of class, the wiping away of the class that wasn’t in hot pursuit of money. He was born in South Brooklyn on the eve of what he called the Great War. The Irish and the Italians fought in gangs on the waterfront, the mafia dumped bodies in the bay, and the merchant marines came and went in the boardinghouses and in the whorehouses. There were dockworkers, ironworkers, shipbuilders, grocers, laborers of all kinds, and, on occasion, there were weirdos who wrote books or painted on canvas for a living. Anyone could live here, because most anyone could afford it. I will not pretend that this is all the neighborhood amounted to; but it’s how Anthony remembered it, and for decades he had thrived, working where the work could be found, fixing whatever needed fixing. He had little interest in money, property, accumulation; his status, I gathered, was primarily tied to the quality of his workmanship. Then the ground fell out from labor in New York as industry fled at the dawn of globalization, and the stability of a life like Anthony’s was gone overnight—600,000 manufacturing jobs were lost from the city between 1968 and 1977. Over the next two decades, two-thirds of the city’s manufacturing jobs would disappear. The first wave of the gentrifiers arrived in the 1970s. They were my parents, who bought in South Brooklyn when property was still cheap.

“You have a single class now in the neighborhood, the mono-class of the rich,” Anthony told me one day. We were walking up and down Court Street, a stretch of shops and theaters and restaurants, looking for places and people he recognized. “No industry, no trades, no jobs for the average person to pull himself up. Now it’s all restaurants that the old-timers can’t afford. Now we got the Television Watchers, the Cell Phone Talkers. A whole class of men and women who watch TV or some version of it, like this internet thing. Sad. Free-thinking goes in the toilet. The Television Watchers start thinking alike, looking alike, buying alike, and they don’t know why.” After that conversation, I’d see him often on sunny days pacing Court Street, looking as lost as a child.

It’s a classic case study in gentrification: the old man gets pushed out by a land-value bubble as the new generation—white, affluent, professional—crowds in with gibberish about slow food and microbrews and Wi-Fi access. There have been real estate booms and busts throughout the history of New York—prices skyrocketing, enriching speculators, impoverishing renters, then impoverishing the speculators when prices crash—but this latest boom does not appear to be cyclical. It looks permanent, for it is driven by the permanency of the One Percenters, who can afford to bid up prices and keep them up while corralling an ever-larger portion of the city’s wealth. New York is thus increasingly ghettoized by class. Forty years ago, Daniel Friedenberg, a real estate developer who became disgusted at his line of business, predicted that the city would come to resemble “a grotesquely enlarged medieval town with each caste in its own quarter.” It has come to pass. As for Anthony, I do not know where he is today. He might be dead.

Sterility
And what of the city as engine of culture? The art critic Robert Hughes pronounced New York a fading star as early as 1990—just ten years into our new Gilded Age—“when the sheer inequality of New York became overpowering,” he wrote. “Could a city with such extremes of Sardanapalian wealth and Calcutta-like misery foster a sane culture?” Hughes declared it could not. Between 1980 and 1990, the One Percenters in New York roughly doubled their take of income, from 12 percent to 20 percent, and this conspicuous concentration of money inflated the art market, which was soon “run almost entirely by finance manipulators, fashion victims and rich ignoramuses.” The “impulses of art appreciation and collecting,” lamented Hughes, were now “nakedly harnessed to gratuitous, philistine social display.” At the same time, rents skyrocketed, driven by speculative real estate development. By the 1980s, wrote Hughes, “the supply of affordable workspace for artists in Manhattan finally ran out.” In a somber observation, Hughes noted, “It was always the work of living artists, made in the belief that their work could grow best there and nowhere else, that fueled New York. The critical mass of talent emits the energies that proclaim the center; its gravitational field keeps drawing more talent in, as in the combustion of a star, to sustain the reaction. The process is now dying.”

Thirty years on, with rents at historic highs, this has been a long death march, swallowing in its pall not only the artist, but the writer, the poet, the musician, the unaffiliated intellectual. The creative types sense that they are no longer wanted in New York, that money is what is wanted, and creative pursuits that fail to produce big money are not to be bothered with. But it is rent, more than anything else, that seals their fate. High rent lays low the creator, as there is no longer time to create. Working three jobs sixty hours a week at steadily declining wages, as a sizable number of Americans know, is a recipe for spiritual suicide. For the creative individual the challenge is existential: finding a psychological space where money—the need for it, the lack of it—won’t be heard howling hysterically day and night.

Crain’s New York Business, not known as a friend of the arts, reports the endgame of the trend identified by Hughes, namely that the young painter and sculptor are now sidestepping New York altogether, heading instead to cities like Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Cleveland, and overseas to Berlin—wherever the rents are low and the air doesn’t stink of cash. The Times reports that freelance musicians in New York are killed off in a marketplace that no longer has need for them. The once-great Philharmonics, mainstay of a New York tradition, are crippled from lack of listeners, lack of funding; Broadway replaces the live musician in the well with the artifice of sounds sampled out of computers. New York loses its “standing as a creative center,” reports Crain’s. It becomes “sterile.” It is “an institutionalized sort of Disney Land” where “art is presented but not made.” Henceforth it will no longer be “known as a birthplace for new cultural ideas and trends.”

In Brooklyn, I bump into a newspaper editor I once worked with who tells me he is abandoning the city. He talks of Costa Rica, the dark side of the moon, even Los Angeles. Anywhere but New York. “It’s just too depressing to watch what’s happened,” he tells me. “The place is creatively bankrupt.” He had freelanced at the paltry rates that freelancers are expected to survive on—the wages dropping always lower, the marketplace for journalism devalued by “content mills” and “information aggregators” staffed by content serfs producing blog entries. Then he attempted to start a small newspaper in Brooklyn. The investors weren’t interested. “They want digital projects that promise an all-or-nothing billion dollars,” he tells me. “I just don’t get that buzzy creative vibe from New York anymore. I see mercenarianism. Cynical ambition. Monied dullness. People trying to get rich and cash out. It’s always a CEO and CTO and CFO launching a new web property. Not writers and editors getting together because they have common visions.”

This is old news. Technologic advances in the digital world order now mandate that the journalist vies in the editorial room with technocrats advising on the method for tweaking headlines and articles to the rhythm of Google. The model is from advertising: find what people want to hear, then echo it in the news so that they will be attracted to hear more of it. “If you want to know what’s really going on in a society or ideology, follow the money,” writes author Jaron Lanier. “If money is flowing to advertising instead of musicians, journalists, and artists, then a society is more concerned with manipulation than truth or beauty. If content is worthless, then people will start to become empty-headed and contentless… Culture is to become precisely nothing but advertising.” No surprise then that the most lucrative “creative” jobs in New York for the “aggregating” of “content” are not in journalism but in corporate media, advertising, and marketing—the machines of manipulation and deceit.

Affluenza
“Everyone was broke and no one cared,” said a friend of mine recently, describing Brooklyn in the 1970s. The people he knew back then, before New York degenerated into a city run by and for the rich, “lived it up. They were freer and they were happier, because they weren’t so uptight about the money thing.” I think what my friend was saying was this: it was easier not to care about appearing to have money, easier on mind and spirit not to have to worry about the appurtenances of affluence.

His observation happens to be supported by a good deal of scholarship in the social sciences. Among developed nations, the evidence shows that healthier and happier societies—societies that are more sane, less uptight, whose members for the most part are enjoying life—are usually those with more equal distribution of wealth and income. The opposite correlation holds true: regardless of total wealth as measured by GDP, unequal societies appear to be less healthy and less happy—suffering, for instance, lower life expectancy, lower educational achievement, higher rates of obesity, more infant mortality and more mental illness and more substance abuse.

Richard Wilkinson, an emeritus professor of social epidemiology at the University of Nottingham in England, offers a sweeping hypothesis to explain the causality in the correlations. Economic inequality, he and coauthor Kate Pickett write in The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger, “seems to heighten people’s social evaluation anxieties by increasing the importance of social status. . . . If inequalities are bigger, so that some people seem to count for almost everything and others for practically nothing, where each one of us is placed becomes more important.” The result is “increased status competition and increased status anxiety,” whose effect on well-being is not to be underestimated. Scientists measuring stress-induced hormones in human beings have found that subjects were most stressed when faced with a task that included the opportunity for others to judge their performance—a “social-evaluative threat” to self-esteem and status, where the fear is that others might judge you negatively. A stressed person typically has higher cortisol, a steroid hormone that prepares body and mind to fend off danger and manage in an emergency. But if cortisol is high much of the time, it can act as a slow poison: the immune system is weakened, blood pressure rises, learning is impaired, bone strength is reduced, and, in some instances, the appetite is grossly stimulated. Wilkinson argues that, in a more unequal society, people become more stressed and insecure, vying in the hierarchy of status—more prone to feeling inadequate, defective, incompetent, foolish. And more sick both in body and mind.

The literature of the psychosocial effects of status competition and anxiety, to which Wilkinson’s work is only the latest addition, points to a broad-stroke portrait of the neurotic personality type that appears to be common in consumer capitalist societies marked by inequality. I see it all around me in New York, most acutely among young professionals. The type, in extremis, is that of the narcissist: Stressed, to be sure, because he seeks approval from others higher up in the hierarchy, though distrustful of others because he is competing with them for status, and resentful too because of his dependence on approval. He views society as unfair; he sees the great wealth paraded before him as an affront, proof of his failure, his inability, his lack. The spectacle of unfairness teaches him, among other lessons, the ways of the master-servant relationship, the rituals of dominance, a kind of feudal remnant: “The captain kicks the cabin boy and the cabin boy kicks the cat.” Mostly he is envious, and enraged that he is envious. This envy is endorsed and exploited, made purposeful by what appear to be the measures of civilization itself, in the mass conditioning methods of corporatist media: the marketeers and the advertisers chide and tease him; the messengers of high fashion arbitrate the meaning of his appearance. He is threatened at every remove in the status scrum. His psychological compensation, a derangement of sense and spirit, is affluenza: the seeking of money and possessions as markers of ascent up the competitive ladder; the worship of celebrities as heroes of affluence; the haunted desire for fame and recognition; the embrace of materialistic excess that, alas, has no future except in the assured destruction of Planet Earth and of every means of a sane survival.

Exhaustion
Look not to the youthful counterculture to challenge this madness. I am thinking here of the phenomenon of New York’s postmodern “hipster.” Forget that the term originated in the urban black subculture of the 1940s, primarily in New York, where the hipster maintained a style and language of nonconformity that was also implicitly a political statement, for the hipster stood apart from white authority (read: the cops) and was therefore menacing, subversive. Forget that the “white Negro” hipster of the 1950s, characterized in an essay of that name by Norman Mailer (a New Yorker) and represented in the ranks of the Angry Young Men and the Beatniks (also New Yorkers), stood by choice and necessity outside the mainstream, for yesteryear’s hipster wanted nothing to do with ’50s affluence, the cult of advertising, the postwar national security state, its standing armies and atom bombs.

The neohipster is a grotesque perversion of the original. If he fetishizes and hybridizes the cultural costumes of old hip—borrowing from the Beat poet, the jazzman, the rapper, the skater, the punk—it is only as a mockery of authentic anti-authoritarian countercultures. The neohipster is a creature of the advertisers: affluent and status-anxious, which means that he is consumerist and, in the manner of all conspicuous consumers, conforming to the demands of narcissistic chic. The “hipster zombies,” writes journalist Christian Lorentzen, are “more likely to be brokers or lawyers than art-school dropouts.” They are “the idols of the style pages, the darlings of viral marketers and the marks of predatory real estate agents.” They are fauxhemians. And not much in the way of creative product has issued from their midst. The “hipster moment,” per New York Magazine, did not “produce artists.” It produced tattoo artists. “It did not produce photographers, but snapshot and party photographers… It did not produce painters, but graphic designers. It did not yield a great literature, but it made good use of fonts.”

Hipster culture today, writes author Jason Flores-Williams, “is harmless culture. And that’s an epic tragedy because being hip used to mean that you were heroic and dangerous. That you waged war on soullessness and greed through art and resistance. Being hip meant that you wanted upheaval in society. Being hip meant you were intense lower class, not detached upper class. Being hip meant being revolutionary.”

The cultural nihilism of the neohipster—it is nothing less—has its corollary in financial nihilism: they each arose at roughly the same moment, and they each have produced nothing of value. That the counterculture has no fist raised against the banker is obviously to the banker’s benefit. Every generation of youth since World War II has attempted to smash old customs and unjust systems—and terrified the elders. But not this one.

Politically, it is a disaster. The annals of popular resistance in America—in which turmoil and disruption have historically been the only means for achieving economic equality and social justice—teach us that without the energy of youth organized in the streets, there is little chance of progressive change. Culturally, what we are witnessing in the phenomenon of the neohipster is pattern exhaustion, which paleoanthropologists define as that moment in Stone Age societies when the patterns on pottery no longer advance. Instead, old patterns are recycled. With pattern exhaustion, there can be only repetition of the great creative leaps of the past. The culture loses its forward-looking vision and begins to die.

Cry Out!
It is August again, one year later, and my daughter is back in town. She brings with her a gift from Paris: a little book, barely a pamphlet, published in French under the title Indignez-Vous! which translates as “Cry Out!” or “Get Indignant!” or, perhaps more accurately, “Get Pissed Off!” It sold 600,000 copies in France when it was published last spring.

The author is a ninety-three-year-old French diplomat named Stéphane Hessel, who, during World War II, trained with the Free French Forces and British secret service in London, parachuted into Vichy France ahead of invading Allied troops in 1944, fought in the Resistance on his native soil, was captured by the Gestapo, and did time in two concentration camps. In “Cry Out!” Hessel reminds us that among the goals of the fight, as stated by the National Council of the Resistance following the defeat of Nazism, was the establishment in France of “a true economic and social democracy, which entails removing large-scale economic and financial feudalism from the management of the economy.” “This menace,” he writes—the menace of the fascist model of finance feudalism—“has not completely disappeared.” He warns that in fact “the power of money, which the Resistance fought so hard against, has never been as great and selfish and shameless as it is now.”

For the One Percenters are a global threat, found in every city where the technocratic managers of global capital seek to make money without being productive. They are in Moscow, London, Tokyo, Dubai, Shanghai. They threaten not merely the well-being of peoples but the very future of Earth. The system of short-term profit by which the One Percenters enrich themselves—a system that they have every interest in maintaining and expanding—implies everywhere and always the long-term plundering of the global commons that gives us sustenance, the poisoning of seas and air and soil, the derangement of ecosystems. A tide of effluent is the legacy of such a system. An immense planetwide inequality is its bequest, the ever-expanding gap between the few rich and the many poor.

Therefore, cry out—though the hour is late.

What is needed is a new paradigm of disrespect for the banker, the financier, the One Percenter, a new civic space in which he is openly reviled, in which spoiled eggs and rotten vegetables are tossed at his every turning. What is needed is a revival of the language of vigorous old progressivism, wherein the parasite class was denounced as such. What is needed is a new Resistance. We face, as Hessel describes, a system of social control “that offers nothing but mass consumption as a prospect for our youth,” that trumpets “contempt for the least powerful in society,” that offers only “outrageous competition of all against all.”

“To create is to resist,” writes Hessel. “To resist is to create.”

Such creativity, alas, is unlikely in New York. The city is regressing, and this sparks no protest from its people. Too many New Yorkers, it appears, want to join the One Percenters, want the all-or-nothing billion dollars. New York City, once looked upon as a crowning achievement of our civilization, one of its most progressive cities, is now the vanguard for the most corrosive tendencies in society. My daughter would probably do better to forget about this town.

[To read the author’s postscript, written since the occupation of Wall Street began, see Orion’s blog.]

ON AN UNSEASONABLY WARM day in the middle of March, I traveled from New Hampshire to the moist, dim sanctuary of the New England Aquarium, hoping to touch an alternate reality. I came to meet Athena, the aquarium’s forty-pound, five-foot-long, two-and-a-half-year-old giant Pacific octopus.

For me, it was a momentous occasion. I have always loved octopuses. No sci-fi alien is so startlingly strange. Here is someone who, even if she grows to one hundred pounds and stretches more than eight feet long, could still squeeze her boneless body through an opening the size of an orange; an animal whose eight arms are covered with thousands of suckers that taste as well as feel; a mollusk with a beak like a parrot and venom like a snake and a tongue covered with teeth; a creature who can shape-shift, change color, and squirt ink. But most intriguing of all, recent research indicates that octopuses are remarkably intelligent.

Many times I have stood mesmerized by an aquarium tank, wondering, as I stared into the horizontal pupils of an octopus’s large, prominent eyes, if she was staring back at me—and if so, what was she thinking?

Not long ago, a question like this would have seemed foolish, if not crazy. How can an octopus know anything, much less form an opinion? Octopuses are, after all, “only” invertebrates—they don’t even belong with the insects, some of whom, like dragonflies and dung beetles, at least seem to show some smarts. Octopuses are classified within the invertebrates in the mollusk family, and many mollusks, like clams, have no brain.

Only recently have scientists accorded chimpanzees, so closely related to humans we can share blood transfusions, the dignity of having a mind. But now, increasingly, researchers who study octopuses are convinced that these boneless, alien animals—creatures whose ancestors diverged from the lineage that would lead to ours roughly 500 to 700 million years ago—have developed intelligence, emotions, and individual personalities. Their findings are challenging our understanding of consciousness itself.

I had always longed to meet an octopus. Now was my chance: senior aquarist Scott Dowd arranged an introduction. In a back room, he would open the top of Athena’s tank. If she consented, I could touch her. The heavy lid covering her tank separated our two worlds. One world was mine and yours, the reality of air and land, where we lumber through life governed by a backbone and constrained by jointed limbs and gravity. The other world was hers, the reality of a nearly gelatinous being breathing water and moving weightlessly through it. We think of our world as the “real” one, but Athena’s is realer still: after all, most of the world is ocean, and most animals live there. Regardless of whether they live on land or water, more than 95 percent of all animals are invertebrates, like Athena.

The moment the lid was off, we reached for each other. She had already oozed from the far corner of her lair, where she had been hiding, to the top of the tank to investigate her visitor. Her eight arms boiled up, twisting, slippery, to meet mine. I plunged both my arms elbow deep into the fifty-seven-degree water. Athena’s melon-sized head bobbed to the surface. Her left eye (octopuses have one dominant eye like humans have a dominant hand) swiveled in its socket to meet mine. “She’s looking at you,” Dowd said.

As we gazed into each other’s eyes, Athena encircled my arms with hers, latching on with first dozens, then hundreds of her sensitive, dexterous suckers. Each arm has more than two hundred of them. The famous naturalist and explorer William Beebe found the touch of the octopus repulsive. “I have always a struggle before I can make my hands do their duty and seize a tentacle,” he confessed. But to me, Athena’s suckers felt like an alien’s kiss—at once a probe and a caress. Although an octopus can taste with all of its skin, in the suckers both taste and touch are exquisitely developed. Athena was tasting me and feeling me at once, knowing my skin, and possibly the blood and bone beneath, in a way I could never fathom.

When I stroked her soft head with my fingertips, she changed color beneath my touch, her ruby-flecked skin going white and smooth. This, I learned, is a sign of a relaxed octopus. An agitated giant Pacific octopus turns red, its skin gets pimply, and it erects two papillae over the eyes, which some divers say look like horns. One name for the species is “devil fish.” With sharp, parrotlike beaks, octopuses can bite, and most have neurotoxic, flesh-dissolving venom. The pressure from an octopus’s suckers can tear flesh (one scientist calculated that to break the hold of the suckers of the much smaller common octopus would require a quarter ton of force). One volunteer who interacted with an octopus left the aquarium with arms covered in red hickeys.

Occasionally an octopus takes a dislike to someone. One of Athena’s predecessors at the aquarium, Truman, felt this way about a female volunteer. Using his funnel, the siphon near the side of the head used to jet through the sea, Truman would shoot a soaking stream of salt water at this young woman whenever he got a chance. Later, she quit her volunteer position for college. But when she returned to visit several months later, Truman, who hadn’t squirted anyone in the meanwhile, took one look at her and instantly soaked her again.

Athena was remarkably gentle with me—even as she began to transfer her grip from her smaller, outer suckers to the larger ones. She seemed to be slowly but steadily pulling me into her tank. Had it been big enough to accommodate my body, I would have gone in willingly. But at this point, I asked Dowd if perhaps I should try to detach from some of the suckers. With his help, Athena and I pulled gently apart.

I was honored that she appeared comfortable with me. But what did she know about me that informed her opinion? When Athena looked into my eyes, what was she thinking?

WHILE ALEXA WARBURTON was researching her senior thesis at Middlebury College’s newly created octopus lab, “every day,” she said, “was a disaster.”

She was working with two species: the California two-spot, with a head the size of a clementine, and the smaller, Florida species, Octopus joubini. Her objective was to study the octopuses’ behavior in a T-shaped maze. But her study subjects were constantly thwarting her.

The first problem was keeping the octopuses alive. The four-hundred-gallon tank was divided into separate compartments for each animal. But even though students hammered in dividers, the octopuses found ways to dig beneath them—and eat each other. Or they’d mate, which is equally lethal. Octopuses die after mating and laying eggs, but first they go senile, acting like a person with dementia. “They swim loop-the-loop in the tank, they look all googly-eyed, they won’t look you in the eye or attack prey,” Warburton said. One senile octopus crawled out of the tank, squeezed into a crack in the wall, dried up, and died.

It seemed to Warburton that some of the octopuses were purposely uncooperative. To run the T-maze, the pre-veterinary student had to scoop an animal from its tank with a net and transfer it to a bucket. With bucket firmly covered, octopus and researcher would take the elevator down to the room with the maze. Some octopuses did not like being removed from their tanks. They would hide. They would squeeze into a corner where they couldn’t be pried out. They would hold on to some object with their arms and not let go.

Some would let themselves be captured, only to use the net as a trampoline. They’d leap off the mesh and onto the floor—and then run for it. Yes, run. “You’d chase them under the tank, back and forth, like you were chasing a cat,” Warburton said. “It’s so weird!”

Octopuses in captivity actually escape their watery enclosures with alarming frequency. While on the move, they have been discovered on carpets, along bookshelves, in a teapot, and inside the aquarium tanks of other fish—upon whom they have usually been dining.

Even though the Middlebury octopuses were disaster prone, Warburton liked certain individuals very much. Some, she said, “would lift their arms out of the water like dogs jump up to greet you.” Though in their research papers the students refer to each octopus by a number, the students named them all. One of the joubini was such a problem they named her The Bitch. “Catching her for the maze always took twenty minutes,” Warburton said. “She’d grip onto something and not let go. Once she got stuck in a filter and we couldn’t get her out. It was awful!”

Then there was Wendy. Warburton used Wendy as part of her thesis presentation, a formal event that was videotaped. First Wendy squirted salt water at her, drenching her nice suit. Then, as Warburton tried to show how octopuses use the T-maze, Wendy scurried to the bottom of the tank and hid in the sand. Warburton says the whole debacle occurred because the octopus realized in advance what was going to happen. “Wendy,” she said, “just didn’t feel like being caught in the net.”

Data from Warburton’s experiments showed that the California two-spots quickly learned which side of a T-maze offered a terra-cotta pot to hide in. But Warburton learned far more than her experiments revealed. “Science,” she says, “can only say so much. I know they watched me. I know they sometimes followed me. But they are so different from anything we normally study. How do you prove the intelligence of someone so different?”

MEASURING THE MINDS OF OTHER creatures is a perplexing problem. One yardstick scientists use is brain size, since humans have big brains. But size doesn’t always match smarts. As is well known in electronics, anything can be miniaturized. Small brain size was the evidence once used to argue that birds were stupid—before some birds were proven intelligent enough to compose music, invent dance steps, ask questions, and do math.

Octopuses have the largest brains of any invertebrate. Athena’s is the size of a walnut—as big as the brain of the famous African gray parrot, Alex, who learned to use more than one hundred spoken words meaningfully. That’s proportionally bigger than the brains of most of the largest dinosaurs.

Another measure of intelligence: you can count neurons. The common octopus has about 130 million of them in its brain. A human has 100 billion. But this is where things get weird. Three-fifths of an octopus’s neurons are not in the brain; they’re in its arms.

“It is as if each arm has a mind of its own,” says Peter Godfrey-Smith, a diver, professor of philosophy at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, and an admirer of octopuses. For example, researchers who cut off an octopus’s arm (which the octopus can regrow) discovered that not only does the arm crawl away on its own, but if the arm meets a food item, it seizes it—and tries to pass it to where the mouth would be if the arm were still connected to its body. 

“Meeting an octopus,” writes Godfrey-Smith, “is like meeting an intelligent alien.” Their intelligence sometimes even involves changing colors and shapes. One video online shows a mimic octopus alternately morphing into a flatfish, several sea snakes, and a lionfish by changing color, altering the texture of its skin, and shifting the position of its body. Another video shows an octopus materializing from a clump of algae. Its skin exactly matches the algae from which it seems to bloom—until it swims away.

For its color palette, the octopus uses three layers of three different types of cells near the skin’s surface. The deepest layer passively reflects background light. The topmost may contain the colors yellow, red, brown, and black. The middle layer shows an array of glittering blues, greens, and golds. But how does an octopus decide what animal to mimic, what colors to turn? Scientists have no idea, especially given that octopuses are likely colorblind.

But new evidence suggests a breathtaking possibility. Woods Hole Marine Biological Laboratory and University of Washington researchers found that the skin of the cuttlefish Sepia officinalis, a color-changing cousin of octopuses, contains gene sequences usually expressed only in the light-sensing retina of the eye. In other words, cephalopods—octopuses, cuttlefish, and squid—may be able to see with their skin.

The American philosopher Thomas Nagel once wrote a famous paper titled “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” Bats can see with sound. Like dolphins, they can locate their prey using echoes. Nagel concluded it was impossible to know what it’s like to be a bat. And a bat is a fellow mammal like us—not someone who tastes with its suckers, sees with its skin, and whose severed arms can wander about, each with a mind of its own. Nevertheless, there are researchers still working diligently to understand what it’s like to be an octopus.

JENNIFER MATHER SPENT MOST of her time in Bermuda floating facedown on the surface of the water at the edge of the sea. Breathing through a snorkel, she was watching Octopus vulgaris—the common octopus. Although indeed common (they are found in tropical and temperate waters worldwide), at the time of her study in the mid-1980s, “nobody knew what they were doing.”

In a relay with other students from six-thirty in the morning till six-thirty at night, Mather worked to find out. Sometimes she’d see an octopus hunting. A hunting expedition could take five minutes or three hours. The octopus would capture something, inject it with venom, and carry it home to eat. “Home,” Mather found, is where octopuses spend most of their time. A home, or den, which an octopus may occupy only a few days before switching to a new one, is a place where the shell-less octopus can safely hide: a hole in a rock, a discarded shell, or a cubbyhole in a sunken ship. One species, the Pacific red octopus, particularly likes to den in stubby, brown, glass beer bottles.

One octopus Mather was watching had just returned home and was cleaning the front of the den with its arms. Then, suddenly, it left the den, crawled a meter away, picked up one particular rock and placed the rock in front of the den. Two minutes later, the octopus ventured forth to select a second rock. Then it chose a third. Attaching suckers to all the rocks, the octopus carried the load home, slid through the den opening, and carefully arranged the three objects in front. Then it went to sleep. What the octopus was thinking seemed obvious: “Three rocks are enough. Good night!”

The scene has stayed with Mather. The octopus “must have had some concept,” she said, “of what it wanted to make itself feel safe enough to go to sleep.” And the octopus knew how to get what it wanted: by employing foresight, planning—and perhaps even tool use. Mather is the lead author of Octopus: The Ocean’s Intelligent Invertebrate, which includes observations of octopuses who dismantle Lego sets and open screw-top jars. Coauthor Roland Anderson reports that octopuses even learned to open the childproof caps on Extra Strength Tylenol pill bottles—a feat that eludes many humans with university degrees.

In another experiment, Anderson gave octopuses plastic pill bottles painted different shades and with different textures to see which evoked more interest. Usually each octopus would grasp a bottle to see if it were edible and then cast it off. But to his astonishment, Anderson saw one of the octopuses doing something striking: she was blowing carefully modulated jets of water from her funnel to send the bottle to the other end of her aquarium, where the water flow sent it back to her. She repeated the action twenty times. By the eighteenth time, Anderson was already on the phone with Mather with the news: “She’s bouncing the ball!”

This octopus wasn’t the only one to use the bottle as a toy. Another octopus in the study also shot water at the bottle, sending it back and forth across the water’s surface, rather than circling the tank. Anderson’s observations were reported in the Journal of Comparative Psychology. “This fit all the criteria for play behavior,” said Anderson. “Only intelligent animals play—animals like crows and chimps, dogs and humans.”

Aquarists who care for octopuses feel that not only can these animals play with toys, but they may need to play with toys. An Octopus Enrichment Handbook has been developed by Cincinnati’s Newport Aquarium, with ideas of how to keep these creatures entertained. One suggestion is to hide food inside Mr. Potato Head and let your octopus dismantle it. At the Seattle Aquarium, giant Pacific octopuses play with a baseball-sized plastic ball that can be screwed together by twisting the two halves. Sometimes the mollusks screw the halves back together after eating the prey inside.

At the New England Aquarium, it took an engineer who worked on the design of cubic zirconium to devise a puzzle worthy of a brain like Athena’s. Wilson Menashi, who began volunteering at the aquarium weekly after retiring from the Arthur D. Little Corporation sixteen years ago, devised a series of three Plexiglas cubes, each with a different latch. The smallest cube has a sliding latch that twists to lock down, like the bolt on a horse stall. Aquarist Bill Murphy puts a crab inside the clear cube and leaves the lid open. Later he lets the octopus lift open the lid. Finally he locks the lid, and invariably the octopus figures out how to open it.

Next he locks the first cube within a second one. The new latch slides counterclockwise to catch on a bracket. The third box is the largest, with two different locks: a bolt that slides into position to lock down, and a second one like a lever arm, sealing the lid much like the top of an old-fashioned glass canning jar.

All the octopuses Murphy has known learned fast. They typically master a box within two or three once-a-week tries. “Once they ‘get it,’” he says, “they can open it very fast”—within three or four minutes. But each may use a different strategy.

George, a calm octopus, opened the boxes methodically. The impetuous Gwenevere squeezed the second-largest box so hard she broke it, leaving a hole two inches wide. Truman, Murphy said, was “an opportunist.” One day, inside the smaller of the two boxes, Murphy put two crabs, who started to fight. Truman was too excited to bother with locks. He poured his seven-foot-long body through the two-inch crack Gwenevere had made, and visitors looked into his exhibit to find the giant octopus squeezed, suckers flattened, into the tiny space between the walls of the fourteen-cubic-inch box outside and the six-cubic-inch one inside it. Truman stayed inside half an hour. He never opened the inner box—probably he was too cramped.

Three weeks after I had first met Athena, I returned to the aquarium to meet the man who had designed the cubes. Menashi, a quiet grandfather with a dark moustache, volunteers every Tuesday. “He has a real way with octopuses,” Dowd and Murphy told me. I was eager to see how Athena behaved with him.

Murphy opened the lid of her tank, and Athena rose to the surface eagerly. A bucket with a handful of fish sat nearby. Did she rise so eagerly sensing the food? Or was it the sight of her friend that attracted her? “She knows me,” Menashi answered softly.

Anderson’s experiments with giant Pacific octopuses in Seattle prove Menashi is right. The study exposed eight octopuses to two unfamiliar humans, dressed identically in blue aquarium shirts. One person consistently fed a particular octopus, and another always touched it with a bristly stick. Within a week, at first sight of the people, most octopuses moved toward the feeders and away from the irritators, at whom they occasionally aimed their water-shooting funnels.

Upon seeing Menashi, Athena reached up gently and grasped his hands and arms. She flipped upside down, and he placed a capelin in some of the suckers near her mouth, at the center of her arms. The fish vanished. After she had eaten, Athena floated in the tank upside down, like a puppy asking for a belly rub. Her arms twisted lazily. I took one in my hand to feel the suckers—did that arm know it had hold of a different person than the other arms did? Her grip felt calm, relaxed. With me, earlier, she seemed playful, exploratory, excited. The way she held Menashi with her suckers seemed to me like the way a long-married couple holds hands at the movies.

I leaned over the tank to look again into her eyes, and she bobbed up to return my gaze. “She has eyelids like a person does,” Menashi said. He gently slid his hand near one of her eyes, causing her to slowly wink.

BIOLOGISTS HAVE LONG NOTED the similarities between the eyes of an octopus and the eyes of a human. Canadian zoologist N. J. Berrill called it “the single most startling feature of the whole animal kingdom” that these organs are nearly identical: both animals’ eyes have transparent corneas, regulate light with iris diaphragms, and focus lenses with a ring of muscle.

Scientists are currently debating whether we and octopuses evolved eyes separately, or whether a common ancestor had the makings of the eye. But intelligence is another matter. “The same thing that got them their smarts isn’t the same thing that got us our smarts,” says Mather, “because our two ancestors didn’t have any smarts.” Half a billion years ago, the brainiest thing on the planet had only a few neurons. Octopus and human intelligence evolved independently.

“Octopuses,” writes philosopher Godfrey-Smith, “are a separate experiment in the evolution of the mind.” And that, he feels, is what makes the study of the octopus mind so philosophically interesting. 

The octopus mind and the human mind probably evolved for different reasons. Humans—like other vertebrates whose intelligence we recognize (parrots, elephants, and whales)—are long-lived, social beings. Most scientists agree that an important event that drove the flowering of our intelligence was when our ancestors began to live in social groups. Decoding and developing the many subtle relationships among our fellows, and keeping track of these changing relationships over the course of the many decades of a typical human lifespan, was surely a major force shaping our minds.

But octopuses are neither long-lived nor social. Athena, to my sorrow, may live only a few more months—the natural lifespan of a giant Pacific octopus is only three years. If the aquarium added another octopus to her tank, one might eat the other. Except to mate, most octopuses have little to do with others of their kind.

So why is the octopus so intelligent? What is its mind for? Mather thinks she has the answer. She believes the event driving the octopus toward intelligence was the loss of the ancestral shell. Losing the shell freed the octopus for mobility. Now they didn’t need to wait for food to find them; they could hunt like tigers. And while most octopuses love crab best, they hunt and eat dozens of other species—each of which demands a different hunting strategy. Each animal you hunt may demand a different skill set: Will you camouflage yourself for a stalk-and-ambush attack? Shoot through the sea for a fast chase? Or crawl out of the water to capture escaping prey?

Losing the protective shell was a trade-off. Just about anything big enough to eat an octopus will do so. Each species of predator also demands a different evasion strategy—from flashing warning coloration if your attacker is vulnerable to venom, to changing color and shape to camouflage, to fortifying the door to your home with rocks.

Such intelligence is not always evident in the laboratory. “In the lab, you give the animals this situation, and they react,” points out Mather. But in the wild, “the octopus is actively discovering his environment, not waiting for it to hit him. The animal makes the decision to go out and get information, figures out how to get the information, gathers it, uses it, stores it. This has a great deal to do with consciousness.”

So what does it feel like to be an octopus? Philosopher Godfrey-Smith has given this a great deal of thought, especially when he meets octopuses and their relatives, giant cuttlefish, on dives in his native Australia. “They come forward and look at you. They reach out to touch you with their arms,” he said. “It’s remarkable how little is known about them . . . but I could see it turning out that we have to change the way we think of the nature of the mind itself to take into account minds with less of a centralized self.”

“I think consciousness comes in different flavors,” agrees Mather. “Some may have consciousness in a way we may not be able to imagine.”

IN MAY, I VISITED Athena a third time. I wanted to see if she recognized me. But how could I tell? Scott Dowd opened the top of her tank for me. Athena had been in a back corner but floated immediately to the top, arms outstretched, upside down.

This time I offered her only one arm. I had injured a knee and, feeling wobbly, used my right hand to steady me while I stood on the stool to lean over the tank. Athena in turn gripped me with only one of her arms, and very few of her suckers. Her hold on me was remarkably gentle.

I was struck by this, since Murphy and others had first described Athena’s personality to me as “feisty.” “They earn their names,” Murphy had told me. Athena is named for the Greek goddess of wisdom, war, and strategy. She is not usually a laid-back octopus, like George had been. “Athena could pull you into the tank,” Murphy had warned. “She’s curious about what you are.”

Was she less curious now? Did she remember me? I was disappointed that she did not bob her head up to look at me. But perhaps she didn’t need to. She may have known from the taste of my skin who I was. But why was this feisty octopus hanging in front of me in the water, upside down?

Then I thought I might know what she wanted from me. She was begging. Dowd asked around and learned that Athena hadn’t eaten in a couple of days, then allowed me the thrilling privilege of handing her a capelin.

Perhaps I had understood something basic about what it felt like to be Athena at that moment: she was hungry. I handed a fish to one of her larger suckers, and she began to move it toward her mouth. But soon she brought more arms to the task, and covered the fish with many suckers—as if she were licking her fingers, savoring the meal. 

A WEEK AFTER I LAST VISITED ATHENA, I was shocked to receive this e-mail from Scott Dowd: “Sorry to write with some sad news. Athena appears to be in her final days, or even hours. She will live on, though, through your conveyance.” Later that same day, Dowd wrote to tell me that she had died. To my surprise, I found myself in tears.

Why such sorrow? I had understood from the start that octopuses don’t live very long. I also knew that while Athena did seem to recognize me, I was not by any means her special friend. But she was very significant to me, both as an individual and as a representative from her octopodan world. She had given me a great gift: a deeper understanding of what it means to think, to feel, and to know. I was eager to meet more of her kind.

And so, it was with some excitement that I read this e-mail from Dowd a few weeks later: “There is a young pup octopus headed to Boston from the Pacific Northwest. Come shake hands (x8) when you can.”

The author discussed this article with a panel of animal intelligence experts during an Orion live web event.

There’s a new octopus in Sy Montgomery’s life! The author of this article has now met Octavia, Athena’s successor at the New England Aquarium, and her experience teaches us even more about these intelligent beings. New on our blog.

IN ISRAEL, not far from the place where Jesus is said to have walked on water and fed thousands with just five loaves of bread and two fish, government engineers have performed a miracle of their own—they’ve made a river disappear. The Jordan River leaves the Sea of Galilee on its way to the Dead Sea in a slow laze past a series of campsites to a concrete complex, beside which white-robed pilgrims submerge themselves in its waters. From there, it pushes onward, winding through olive groves, farmers’ fields, and patches of brushwoods. Then, suddenly, it stops. At a pumping station less than three kilometers from the river’s source, five broad green pipes dip like elephant trunks to suck the water out. Beyond this point, the river has been reduced to less than 2 percent of its original flow.

The disappearance of the Jordan River, much like the area’s dropping aquifers, is a symptom of the struggle for water that has shaped the modern Middle East. The flow of a river that once irrigated the fields of the West Bank has been channeled through pipes, pumps, and canals to gush from the taps in Tel Aviv, and to “make the desert bloom” in the Negev. This diversion of water may be a technical marvel, but it’s emptying rivers and leaving critical aquifers dangerously susceptible to the intrusion of salt water and raw sewage.

Many, including Israel’s former prime minister Ariel Sharon, have described the 1967 Six-Day War as the first modern water war, escalating as it did from clashes between Israel, Jordan, and Syria over competing claims to the flow of the river. The war’s outcome treated the region’s water as a spoil to be divvied up among contestants, with the lion’s share going to the victor. Trace your finger along a map of the Golan Heights, which Israel seized from Syria, and you’ll encircle the entire Jordan River basin. And beneath the West Bank, which Israel captured from Jordan, lies the country’s most important aquifer.

Meanwhile, on the losers’ side of the borders, Jordan and Syria set about snatching up what they could by building dams, digging wells, and diverting as much water as possible. In the decades since the fighting, each nation has secured the water in the areas they control. The 1994 peace treaty between Israel and the Kingdom of Jordan included provisions for managing shared water resources—but it left little for the rivers, and the Palestinians who live beside them.

Once the Jordan River reaches the pumping station, the celebrated waterway quickly loses any hint of its biblical glory and hardly resembles a baptizing site. What’s left of its flow is soon soiled with sewage that enters the river as a thin, frothy, brown rivulet, widened by the addition of brackish discharge from springs unfit for drinking or irrigation. This fetid mixture meanders for another half-dozen kilometers inside Israeli territory to the border with the Kingdom of Jordan, where it is joined by the river’s largest tributary, the Yarmouk River, another waterway that has been robbed of its former glory as the region’s rivals—mostly Jordan and Syria—rush to suck up as much as they can. The Yarmouk used to power a hulking hydropower plant that still straddles the once-powerful tributary’s banks. “Today, the river couldn’t even turn a mouse wheel,” says Mira Edelstein of Friends of the Earth, which is campaigning for the river’s restoration.

To follow the river onward you have to leave its banks and drive south, parallel to its course, where, after a short stretch of farmland, a military checkpoint marks the entrance to the West Bank. Up until this point, the war over the Jordan River’s water has been a cold one, with the damage having mostly been done. But for the rest of its length, the Jordan slips through land where water conflict is still smoldering.

Once inside the Palestinian territories, the landscape undergoes a transformation. Most of the fields are yellow and barren, and shredded plastic sheets flutter on what were once greenhouses. Although out of view, the water’s presence is tauntingly clear if you look at the Jordanian side of the valley. On land the color of spinach, greenhouses line up like city blocks, a testament to what the soil can produce when properly irrigated.

Just before reaching the city of Jericho, one passes through the Palestinian village of Al-Auja. As recently as ten years ago, the village farmers were famed for their bananas, a tropical fruit they managed to grow in desertlike conditions. The village was founded in the flatlands below a mountain spring, which was carefully divided among the various families in the village. In the winter, the fields would sprout with wheat. In the spring, they’d produce vegetables. In the summer, when the rippling heat prevented the cultivation of most crops, the farmers would channel the spring’s abundant flow into their banana plantations.

But recently, production has been disrupted. Al-Auja’s farmers blame Israeli wells, which tap deep into the aquifer, for causing the spring to stutter—first the spring drops dramatically, and then, especially during the summer months, it stops altogether. The Israeli wells in Al-Auja were sunk near the springhead in order to regulate water in the deeper parts of the aquifer, pumping it out when it’s full, and allowing it to slowly replenish when it drops. The water that the wells produce enter the national system, where it’s rationed and sold to Israeli settlers and Palestinians alike. But as long as the water in Al-Auja is sold at market prices, the Israeli settlers—with superior capital, expertise, and access to the markets—are able to outbid their impoverished neighbors. The surrounding stretch of the Jordan River Valley is home to several Israeli settlements that boast orchards, vineyards, and farms. And while many of the crops are irrigated with recycled wastewater, at least some of the water is from the wells that villagers blame for drying up their spring.

Jerusalem controls 80 percent of the groundwater under the West Bank, much of which it accesses from springs inside Israel proper. To prevent overuse of the aquifer, Israel has placed heavy restrictions on the drilling of new wells—effectively freezing water consumption at dramatically unequal levels. As a result, the average Israeli consumes four times as much water as the average Palestinian, who receives well under the hundred liters a day the World Health Organization recommends as a minimum.

Contributing to the tension is the way the two populations think about water. To Israel, it is a resource to be captured, controlled, and carefully doled out—a common good, best managed by the state. For most Palestinian farmers, it’s nature’s bounty—to be divvied up in the way of their forefathers. One culture invented drip irrigation; the other relies heavily on flood agriculture. One is investing billions in state-of-the-art desalination plants; the other can barely keep its government together.

The region’s water scarcity is so severe that it makes reaching a final peace accord between the two sides presumably even more remote. Meanwhile, as both sides dither, there’s no longer enough water flowing into the Dead Sea, where the Jordan River ends its journey, to keep up with evaporation. The once mighty river simply peters out as a weak trickle into the sea’s northern tip, which is 422 meters below sea level and dropping. Combine that with a persistent drought—a worrisome foretaste of the long droughts that scientists expect from climate change—and the result is that the lowest place on earth is losing roughly one meter of water a year. At the Ein Gedi Spa, where tourists line up for mud baths and saltwater treatments, visitors now reach the sea by shuttle—a full kilometer from where the waves once lapped.