Halloween

Halloween is tomorrow, and the Westies have quite the series of events lined up. Our beer pong tournament (beer optional) kicks off tomorrow night. We have an elaborate bracket which will eventually pare our twelve teams down to a single champion pair. I’ve decided to partner with Matthew in a somewhat dubious combination, given that he’s never had a beer or played pong, and my total experience is one game of water pong in my dorm lounge last year. However, our team is named “Geopolitical Schadenfreude”, so my hopes are high.

Naturally, we’re also planning costumes (current plans include a tent, Lady Gaga and Winnie the Pooh) and an epic dance party. My cook crew is on duty tomorrow as well, though I have no idea what we’re making for dinner.

We’ve spent the last few days doing a writing workshop (sadly, our last) will William deBuys, an author who focuses on the nature, culture and history of the Southwest and particularly New Mexico. We camped out on his land and worked on an organic farm for a day in order to draw inspiration for character sketches. We harvested carrots and sunchokes, learned how to plow with a mule team, went for walks while Bill told us about the history and ecology of Northern New Mexico and read to each other in a wide field punctuated by cow pies.

I’ll post my character sketch and some other writing from our workshop with Craig soon. And hopefully I’ll be back to my political musings (no doubt the election will give me plenty of fodder). But for now, I’m just excited for Halloween.

However, if you’re American, at least eighteen and not convicted of a felony, for the love of God, VOTE. And have a good Halloween.

Finding beauty in a broken world

This entry is part of my journal from Semester in the West. For all SITW journal entries, click here. For all SITW posts, including blog posts I wrote while on the program, click here. To learn more about the program, click here.

camp: with Bill deBuys, Northern New Mexico

Reading Finding Beauty in a Broken World. My thoughts are far from the West, though there are plenty of parallels to be drawn. How can people do this to other people? How do we lose our connections and common ground? How do we fail to see people as people? It’s Rwanda, Darfur, the Congo, apartheid, the Guatemalan civil war, Pinochet, the death houses in Juarez, the conquering of a continent. Where does it end? How do we see these things occurring and fall silent? How can I possibly focus my energy and commitment as an activist, a writer, a person? Trying to do anything but fix the planet and solve climate change is criminal, because all of our futures are at stake. Seeing the human suffering occurring in Congo or the girls sex-trafficked in India and choosing to care about polar bears instead is equally criminal. But I can’t be everywhere. I cry, wring my hands, call out in the night, beg a God I don’t believe in for forgiveness. I don’t want to be complicit. I don’t want to stand silent while people are tortured, animals are skinned while alive, habitats are bulldozed, ecosystems are paved over.

I find hope in the communities where people are starting to heal, to rebuild themselves with dignity. I trust in people’s ability to nourish their own communities, to find inner strength and courage even in the midst of unspeakable acts of cruelty. I pray, knowing it won’t change a thing, and I write, still hoping someday I’ll stumble across an answer, another small nugget of truth.

The border

This entry is part of my journal from Semester in the West. For all SITW journal entries, click here. For all SITW posts, including blog posts I wrote while on the program, click here. To learn more about the program, click here.

camp: with Bill deBuys, Northern New Mexico


The border fascinates me. I am drawn to stories of migrants staking everything on their ability to walk invisibly through the desert and compelled by the way so many twisted realities intersect just south of the places I have grown up calling home. I feel moved to help individuals, and part of me wants to drive to Nogales and stuff my trunk full of as many willing bodies as I can find before passing through a checkpoint back home. I feel powerless to change policy—when so many sessions of Congress have still failed to pass the DREAM Act, what hope is there for an open border? I want to speak Spanish with the authority of a journalist who cares. I want these people to know that in my eyes and the eyes of so many others like me, they are not illegal. I say a prayer—that everyone walking ceaselessly through the desert makes it to the Promised Land safely.

Climate nihilism

This entry is part of my journal from Semester in the West. For all SITW journal entries, click here. For all SITW posts, including blog posts I wrote while on the program, click here. To learn more about the program, click here.

camp: with Bill deBuys, Northern New Mexico

I am the last generation to be born and raised on cheap energy with the promise of a better life.

I am the first generation slated to be poorer and die sooner than my parents.

I drive past clear cuts, open pits of coal, landfills, smokestacks belching black clouds into the air. I am seduced by the vision of industry, impressed by the sheer magnitude of the changes we have made on this land. I don’t want a world without city-sized industrial fortresses or Superfund sites, because then I would have nothing left to fight.

I know we’re past the point of saving the planet. I hope we’re past the point of saving ourselves. I’ve always wanted to watch the apocalypse.

I like the idea of fighting a losing battle. Winning is black and white, its narrative a simple recollection of events. The story of losing requires nuance, character, tragedy. I’ve always found the Trojans a more compelling people, Hector a better hero than Achilles. Valor and heroism are determined not by how many victories you win, but by how your defeat finally occurs.

I find the world a more beautiful place with such clear imperfections. I like the causes, but no the effects. I find smokestacks terrifyingly beautiful, but not dissolving coral reefs. I see moral contradiction written on every landscape.

I know industrial capitalism is killing the planet. I don’t want industrial capitalism to go away because I want to see this awful comedy play out until the bitter, bloody end.

I’m tired of being sad and too numb to be angry. Some days, all I want is a house with a garden and lot of books so I can come home to someone I love and put all the frustration and passion and uncertainty I have into loving them, before we make dinner together and ignore the fire raging all around us.

Choosing not to eat meat

This entry is part of my journal from Semester in the West. For all SITW journal entries, click here. For all SITW posts, including blog posts I wrote while on the program, click here. To learn more about the program, click here.

camp: with Bill deBuys, Northern New Mexico

I read activists and revolutionaries who are determined to overthrow the system. I see what they see—the scale of our destruction, the countless human and non-human casualties—but I can’t imagine a better world wrought through revolution. Maybe it’s history or my conviction that people are neither wholly evil nor predisposed to do no harm. Maybe it’s the lack of a blueprint or roadmap to that better world, or the rhetoric that seems so hostile towards humanity telling me I should want to go there. I’m reluctant to deny personal responsibility, although I know my choices won’t end sweatshops or factory farming. It’s easier to blame the system and say I have no choice. But “the system” is made of people too. At what point am I affirming my own powerlessness by participating and at what point am I simply perpetuating injustices? If eating factory farmed meat is ok because I didn’t build the infrastructure that tacitly endorses torture, is it ok to work in a slaughterhouse? To manage the kill floor? To oversee inspections for the USDA? To be a PR rep for Tyson? What about board member, stockholder or CEO? The intricacies of industry make determining the least destructive option difficult, to be sure. But once you have, it becomes difficult to maintain the moral high ground that nothing I do matters.

I draw that line at agency, I suppose. It’s so clearly wrong to systematically torture animals and so easy not to participate. Crops kill animals and so do dams, but crops are needed to make meat, and nothing systematically tortures animals quite like a factory farm. Saying I don’t want to eat that isn’t enough—it won’t stop those farms from existing and it won’t meaningfully change anything. But I still believe it matters. I’m not absolved of guilt or responsibility. I eat things that are still killing the planet, if a bit more slowly. I can’t articulate exactly why I feel so strongly about this, but I know absolutely that I do. Some things matter, and how I choose to live my life is one of them. I can’t change the world with that I eat for dinner, but I can help clarify my own vision and start painting a path to the world I want to live in.

Catholicism and revolution

This entry is part of my journal from Semester in the West. For all SITW journal entries, click here. For all SITW posts, including blog posts I wrote while on the program, click here. To learn more about the program, click here.

camp: Taos Pueblo, near Santa Fe, New Mexico

Something about churches always gets me. I wasn’t raised religiously, so maybe it’s because the event I most associate with churches is a funeral. I sat through services for Nonny, Papa, Grandpa Jim, Grandma Mary and Grandpa Dan. And I feel them whenever I’m back in a church. Especially Nonny. So much of my family history goes back to her, and I’ll always regret not having more time to hear those stories from her. Just the same way I’ll always regret not being old enough to argue politics with Grandpa Jim wen he was still sane enough to do it.

That church on the Taos Pueblo was really cool, though. Catholicism is so similar to pantheism in the way it’s practiced by some communities. Cultural fusion…I go back and forth on Jesus. He was a radical, a social revolutionary and basically a communist, yet that message has been lost in today’s world. Do the millions of poor and enslaved who still follow him find hope in the prospect of a better afterlife? Or do they pray for revolution in this one? Church can be a forum for social issues, a lightning rod for activism. Or to can just be a way to numb the pain. I love places that whisper revolution quietly, places that you know would take to the streets if the opportunity presented itself. But I’m still not sure about the church.

I was wrong (about eating meat)

After eleven years of vegetarianism, I started selectively eating meat again this summer. Since then, I’ve had a steak, two hamburgers, a piece of bacon, chili with beef, lamb, elk, elk sausage, beef jerkey and chicken enchiladas. And once again, I’m questioning the most ethical way to eat.

I stopped being a vegetarian because of a growing realization that most vegetarian diets involve a lot of carbohydrates and a lot of soy products. Carbohydrates aren’t very good for you, and they’re almost entirely grown in monocrop fields which rely on pesticides and a variety of other chemicals, not to mention genetically engineered seeds which are controlled almost entirely by one corporation (Monsanto). Pesticide manufacture kills people, animals and the planet everyday. The single largest industrial disaster in history was the Bhopal gas leak, which occurred in a Union Carbide pesticide plant in Bhopal, India and killed 20,000 people. Soy is also not very good for people to eat in the quantities many vegetarians, including myself, do. It’s grown in a similar way, and in developing countries, planting field of soy often means cutting down rainforest. The process used to extract protein from soybeans relies on hexane, a neurotoxin byproduct of gasoline refinement. Workers exposed to it in “natural foods” plants which make things like veggie burgers have chronic health problems from breathing too much in. And companies that make “natural foods” like Boca burgers, tofu and a lot of other things vegetarians rely on are generally owned by agribusiness giants like Kraft and ConAgra. Eating meat from a small local producer seems like a more ethical and environmental choice.

Since arriving at this decision, I’ve gotten a better look at meat production. I’ve learned a lot about cattle grazing on Semester in the West, and I’ve also read Eating Animals by Jonathan Foer, which is a very eloquent condemnation of factory farming. And I’m no longer sure that being a selective omnivore is the most ethical thing I can do.

Mostly, when I think about sustainable meat, I think about cows. Cows are the only animal raised for human food production on a large scale which still have a somewhat “natural” life, in that they get to spend a year outside grazing before they’re shipped to a feedlot and then to slaughter. It seems easy to retool this system—cut out the feedlot, let the farmer slaughter cows individually, and you have a sustainable system. One of the classic vegetarian arguments is that eating meat is inefficient—cows consume about nine calories for every calorie we get out of them. But if cows are fed only grass, they’re eating something we can’t and providing food for us without us having to completely destroy the land by plowing it and planting irrigated monocrops. Grass-fed cows seem to work their way around many arguments for vegetarianism.

But even grass-fed meat has enormous environmental problems. In the West, cattle grazing has completely transformed native ecosystems. Many ranchers planted nonnative grasses at the beginning of the century because they provided better forage, and overgrazing has allowed invasive species to take over many former grasslands. Entire portions of the West are covered in Russian thistle or sagebrush without a blade of native grass in sight. Ranchers have also been the interest group most responsible for the work of Wildlife Services, a branch of the federal government which kills “problem” animals. Last year, they killed over 20,000 coyotes and hundreds of wolves, bobcats, cougars, beavers and several hundred other species. Cattle grazing is the largest obstacle to wolf reintroduction. Healthy Western ecosystems are not incompatible with cattle, but they are difficult to achieve and maintain for even the most committed ranchers. The death toll of beef can be measured in more than cows—coyotes, wolves, beavers, switchgrass, aspen, willows and stream channels should be added to the list.

In addition, even grass-fed cattle require agriculture to sustain them. During the winter, cows are fed hay and other similar crops. Growing cattle feed takes up a huge amount of land—the majority of agricultural land in production in California is used to grow food for cows, not crops for people. While it’s better than sending them to a feedlot and feeding them corn or soybeans or other dead animals, growing hay takes up a lot of land and a lot of water. California uses more water from the Colorado than anyone else, and pumping that water to irrigated valleys where food is grown requires a ton of power. Glen Canyon Dam and the Navajo Generating Station owe their existence in part to California’s demand for water to grow crops. And while all of these problems apply to agriculture too, eating less beef, even grass-fed, allows this land to be used more efficiently to grow food for people. If I have to choose between eating plants grown unsustainably or eating cows fed hay grown unsustainably (nine calories of it for every one I eat), I’m going to go with the plants.

There are two other problems I see with grass-fed meat. One: it’s not scalable. The things that make small, conscious producers better than factory farms also mean that grass-fed will never be able to produce enough meat to meet current global demand. And global demand is growing. Which means even if we accept grass-fed as sustainable, everyone needs to eat less meat to make it work. Since I have the means to be relatively healthy as a vegetarian, I’d rather people eating factory farmed meat switch to more sustainable producers. If all the sustainable meat revolution accomplishes is that a bunch of ex-vegetarians go back to eating meat and feeling environmentally conscious, factory farming will never go away. The other problem is that no matter how you raise them, cows are an incredible contributor to global warming. Their methane production is reduced when they’re fed grass instead of corn, but even then, they’re doing more to warm the planet than transportation. Global warming has gone beyond the point where it’s an environmental issue—it directly affects human health, national security and the very existence of some countries.

This is not to say that eating meat is always wrong. I would eat something wild I killed myself, and I would like to learn how to hunt elk or deer. But eating meat in our current food system, meat I didn’t produce for myself—I can’t justify that anymore. So I’m returning to being a vegetarian, but with a more conscious look at the foods I eat. Soy products and monocrops are incredibly environmentally problematic, and I want to make better choices as a vegetarian about the foods I do support. In an ideal food system, I would eat animals. Sustainable food systems rely on local permaculture, and if you aren’t going to use fossil fuels as fertilizer, you need manure. But I don’t live in that world. When I’m in a position to grow and raise my own food, I will, and I’ll make my choices accordingly. But for now, when I buy food from other people, I’m sticking with the plants.

The Navajo Nation

This entry is part of my journal from Semester in the West. For all SITW journal entries, click here. For all SITW posts, including blog posts I wrote while on the program, click here. To learn more about the program, click here.

camp: near Santa Fe, New Mexico

I wish we’d gotten to talk to more Navajos while we were on the reservation. Natural resources and social justice seem so applicable, as they are with any resource rich and cash poor area. Extraction and exploitation go hand in hand in the history book (excepting the newly revised Texas Curriculum Board ones) and I wish we’d heard more about current issues and negotiations over water and minerals. There was definitely a compelling undercurrent on the bulletin boards I saw, and I know I’ve read thing about uranium mining on Navajo lands in the Nation. I don’t know a lot about our tribes or reservations, but what I’ve read seems like a very bleak picture. It’s not just Native Americans, I suppose—it’s almost all impoverished communities with high unemployment sitting on valuable resources. And poverty is greatest in resource-rich areas—what does that say about the ruthlessness of capitalism? But to speak of sustainability seems like a paradox. Conserve the oil or uranium and prevent a public health emergency and the creation of two new Superfund sites? That’s ecologically sustainable, but you’ll starve to death. Rich people destroy the plant far better and faster than anyone, but up to a certain level, you can’t afford to card. You can’t afford to think long-term. So you let the corporations in, they take what they can, and you postpone starvation for a few decades. Not really economically sustainable, but also not economic suicide. Someone needs to give these communities a better option, or better yet, put them in a position to make changes for themselves.

Which seems like what Billy and the Shonto Community Development Corporation are doing. Trying to get through the bureaucracy to serve the community, trying to give people power. But to get rid of the coal plant, you need to create 600 jobs. Solar systems installation and monitoring are great, but there aren’t 600 jobs there. I hope the plant closes and a new one isn’t built. I hope we can find a better way to employ Navajos, a better way to feed Los Angeles, a better way to get power to Tucson. But as much as I hope, I don’t really believe.

Walking through a coal plant

This entry is part of my journal from Semester in the West. For all SITW journal entries, click here. For all SITW posts, including blog posts I wrote while on the program, click here. To learn more about the program, click here.

camp: Page, Arizona

context: This was written the day after we visited Navajo Generating Station, which is the sixth largest coal plant in the country. I ended up writing my final epiphany for the program about NGS. You can read it here and see a video of me reading it here.

The things we do and the scale we do them on completely defy comprehension. Speaking about the environmental ethics of a coal plant seems like talking about Hitler’s vegetarianism. This is ground zero for climate change; this is where the battle will be fought and slowly lost. Does your ppm SO₂ reading matter when the future of civilization it at stake?

But it does. I know it does. Less acidic skies and rain and forests matter. Community health matters. How many children get asthma matters. Those 545 full-time jobs matter for the Navajo. But it would still be cheaper to pay them their salaries to not pollute. $52 million a year in payroll benefits seems like a small price tag for one-quarter of Arizona’s emissions.

But reality. Civilization. Seven billion and counting. Las Vegas needs water. Phoenix needs water. Tucson needs water. And you need power to pump it there. More people should live in Page, still more should live in Western Washington or Vermont or never have been born at all. When does the planet and our collective health start to matter? How far are we willing to go in our quest to postpone our day of reckoning? The Second Coming seems easy by comparison. Jesus left us a whole manual on how to live on earth. No one told us how to feed seven billion people or raised cities in the middle of deserts.

Navajo Generating Station

Yesterday, we got a tour of the Navajo Generating Station. It's one of the ten largest coal-fired power plants in the country and produces enough power for about three million homes. It's owned by a variety of utilities and the US Bureau of Reclamation, which uses some of the power it produces to pump water from the Colorado River to Tuscon and Phoenix. Construction on the plant began in 1969, when the Navajo Nation granted a 50-year lease to the plant. It was built as a compromise with environmental groups like the Sierra Club who opposed two proposed power-generating dams on the Grand Canyon. Currently, the plant provides about 540 full time jobs for Navajos on the reservation, where unemployment is about 50%. It also provides jobs in the Kayenta Coal Mine, operated by Peabody Coal, which supplies three trainfulls of coal to the plant everyday (the train between the plant and mine was fictitiously blown up by the characters in The Monkey Wrench Gang as part of their efforts to stop the spread of industry in the West). The Navajo Generating Station is responsible for one-quarter of the carbon emissions for the entire state of Arizona.


Anyway, here's what it looks like inside a coal plant.

Desert Playground

This entry is part of my journal from Semester in the West. For all SITW journal entries, click here. For all SITW posts, including blog posts I wrote while on the program, click here. To learn more about the program, click here.

camp: Green River, Utah

Desert Playground

looking over the rim of a red rock canyon

trying to walk quietly

pretending to be 10,000 years old

stormy skies threatening downpour

orange water gathered in pools

the slickrock transformed into a slide

funnels down to mudflats

punctuated by a thing line of four-toed tracks

coyote ghosts

the storm when it hits with nowhere to go

curl on a rock ledge, hide from falling water

get up to follow the rain traversing ground

clothes are wet and loud

take them off, walk barefoot through mud

feet following this morning’s coyote

the rain stops

stand naked in the desert

and the slickrock smooths your feet

Writing with Craig Childs

We’ve spent the last four days doing a writing workshop with Craig Childs. It wasn’t at all what I’d pictured when I heard the words “writing workshop”. We were camped on BLM land about three hours outside of Moab, Utah. We were surrounded by canyons and desert, miles away from “civilization”. I assumed we’d be using the picturesque scenery as inspiration to write.

Instead, our days reminded me more of my days on Wilderness Awareness School wolf tracking expeditions. We got up at 6:30, just after first light, and followed the sound of Craig’s flute to a series of rocky ledges, where we sat and watched the sun rise. Craig played flute and talked to us about place, about how these canyonlands are the one place on earth he could watch the sun rise every morning for the rest of his life. We sat for an hour, watching the dark rainbow of the sky grow lighter and lighter, ravens flapping by with the eerie precision of their wings. When the sun finally started to come up, it shot beams of perfectly yellow light over the mountains which turned into a glowing halo. And then the sun came, it got light, and we watched.

After sunrise and breakfast, we went hiking. The BLM land we were on was vast and lacking any trails, so we wandered. Craig would pick a landmark in the distance, like “that piece of white rock shaped like a whale”, and we would set off, solo or in pairs or small groups, going over slickrock and down through washes, until we got there. And then we wrote short pieces—stories of what we’d seen, a letter to people 10,000 years from now about what it feels like to be here. But mostly, we walked and walked and walked. We descended into canyons, climbed over boulders, found tracks in the sand, hid in caves, watched lizards scurry under rocks. We got back to camp around 6pm everyday, having spent the entire day exploring the landscape.

I had an amazing time during the four days we did this. Initially, I questioned the value of this time as a writing workshop—there was nothing else I’d rather be doing, but I felt like we weren’t writing a lot. And then I realized that Craig’s instructional methods were a lot more valuable than any traditional “workshop” could have been. We’re all intelligent, educated people, and we all offer good feedback on each other’s writing. If I wanted to write things about the beauty of the desert or the politics of water or anything else we’ve experienced, I have twenty peers and a professor who would give me helpful feedback. What Craig gave us was something far more valuable. He showed us his process—how he, as an author, approaches writing. He gave us tools to develop our own processes and insights. He showed us how to take a landscape you’re passionate about and tell a story about it. And no matter what I end up doing with my life, that’s a skill I want to have.

Letter to a human 10,000 years from now

This entry is part of my journal from Semester in the West. For all SITW journal entries, click here. For all SITW posts, including blog posts I wrote while on the program, click here. To learn more about the program, click here.

camp: Back of Beyond, the Known Universe, Utah

Dear person ten thousand years from now,

Today it rained in the morning. The rocks around me are red-orange, made of sand stuck together, forming ridges and shelves as far as I can see. Here, I walk on my feet and sometimes my hands. The rain adds uncertainty to the land, so I slide twenty feet down bare rock faces, not able to control my speed, barely able to change direction. I almost fall into puddles of orange water pooled in the rock. I walk up sandstone ledges arranged like a staircase, each step a different width, half of them breaking off as soon as I put my weight on them. I let the shape of the rock guide me, abandoning the concept of efficiency. I want to move north, but the rock that way is too steep, and I risk falling, sliding down into a canyon three hundred feet deep. Instead, I go west, finding level ground, rocks that curve upward gradually, gentle enough to walk on.

I wonder if you still go outside, if you see the sky with clouds and with sun. I wonder if it still rains in the desert. I wonder if these canyons, sheer rock faces plunging down hundreds of feet, are still here or anywhere. I wonder if they’ve all been filled with trash or something radioactive, something with a half-life greater than the time between my death and your birth.

I hope you know what it is to be wet, to be cold, to feel so hot there’s sweat dripping off of you back and you can barely stand to smell yourself. I hope you’ve been hurt, feared for your life, known that one misstep might cause you to fall into an abyss, hopelessly trying to fly on your way down. I hope you’ve climbed on top of something and felt free to scream knowing no one can hear you.

I hope you’ve been alive, and been human.

love,

Rachel

Pretending to be old

This entry is part of my journal from Semester in the West. For all SITW journal entries, click here. For all SITW posts, including blog posts I wrote while on the program, click here. To learn more about the program, click here.

camp: Back of Beyond, the Known Universe, Utah

context: Our writing assignment for the day was to pretend we were ten thousand years old and wander around the canyonlands by ourselves.

I find home. A cave, open to sky, to rock, to mountain lion. Closed to rain, offset from wind. I see out, see everything. I am conspicuous, not curled inside a canyon. I have to fight to stay here. I keep inside, keep watch. I sleep. I eat. I wake.

Today, the sun doesn’t penetrate through my skin, doesn’t burn me alive, doesn’t dry me out until every pore in my body cries out for water. I am grateful for days like today.

I need to eat. There are deer tracks in all the washes, fresh, young. I know how to catch mice. I know how to make the bitter juniper berries edible. I follow tracks and trails in the sand. I can feed myself.

It rains and I do not want to get wet. I shelter myself under a ledge and watch the clouds move. I nestle my body between the rough sandstone and the soft earth below it. I face down, look out, see the falling drops of water an inch past the tip of my nose. It rains. I wait.

I move. I walk and the drops hit me infrequently, seemingly willing to let me through without a fight. I scramble up, careful to avoid slipping, deliberate in all of my movements. I can’t fall. I am alone. If I hurt myself, I will lie in the sand until I freeze to death or something finds me and eats me.

There are so many ways to go inside here, so many places to wedge yourself into, squeeze, squish, turn yourself into a rock and hide.

I wonder what is over those mountains. I’ve heard stories from the bottoms of canyons and the distant hills. I know where I am and my whole world looks like this. I have never been over the mountains.

I have too many clothes and they rustle. They make me visible, so I take them off. Boots, rain jacket, socks, shirt, pants fall softly to the ground. I stand naked and barefoot in wet sand and try to step quietly.

The wet ground is sympathetic to bare feet. The soil gives way slowly without the crunching that defines each bootstep on dry ground. I place my feet deliberately, carefully, feeling the soil and rock beneath them. They do not hurt. I am quieter. I feel the land like a rhythm, like a mantra as I walk, climb, run. I can go anywhere.

Tracking in the desert

This entry is part of my journal from Semester in the West. For all SITW journal entries, click here. For all SITW posts, including blog posts I wrote while on the program, click here. To learn more about the program, click here.

camp: Back of Beyond, the Known Universe, Utah

In the washes, there are sets of four-toed tracks compacting the dust, no longer than a nickel, made sometime before the rain this morning.

I feel the crunch of soil compacting under my show, step after step as I create a new trail across the desert and I feel guilty for all the fun I’m having.

There is a conversation taking place behind me, four people who used to be in my shoes telling each other stories whose words I can’t make out.

Tracking is a lot like journalism. You’re given pieces of information but left to piece them together, decide what’s relevant, and decipher meaning. You start casting a wide net, gathering as much data as you can. You write down anything you can, ask as many questions as you can think of. You get close, get obsessed, caught up in trying to find the story. You try angles, test theories, try to stay unbiased. Not every government project is hiding a larger social problem. Not every track with four toes and the perfect x above the metacarpal pad is a wolf track. You learn from everything imaginable, and your biases guide what you follow and where you choose to go. There are stories etched deep in every landscape if you look hard enough.

Today, following those coyote tracks, I found myself in a trance. It’s almost meditative, the inquisitive silence punctuated by gasps as you look down to see a print so clearly defined you could frame it and sell it as art. I got on all fours, trying out gaits, trying to decipher what I was seeing. I know the names—direct register walk, trot, lope—but I have so little practice picking them out in the sand. I want to be a better student, spend more time drawing and journaling and seeing everything the land has to teach me. But I like what Craig said today—try so hard to pay attention and you miss things. All of our minds wander. I’m no less holy or motivated because Ke$ha is stuck in my head, because I’m spending half of my walk across the canyonlands worrying about civil engineering. And those things that snap me out of my self-centered thoughts, the things that slap me across the face and make me sit up and pay attention—those are the things I want to learn about. And more of the than not, they’re tracks.

My opinion column

So it's occured to me that I haven't linked to my column for the Whitman Pioneer. I'm writing a bi-weekly(ish) opinion column for the Pio about issues we're learning about on Semester in the West. I have three published so far, and you can check them out here, along with all my news articles from last year.

Walking through canyonlands

This entry is part of my journal from Semester in the West. For all SITW journal entries, click here. For all SITW posts, including blog posts I wrote while on the program, click here. To learn more about the program, click here.

camp: Back of Beyond, the Known Universe, Utah

Sunrise is hope, renewal spreading across the horizon. I wonder about the wisdom of silence—we’re struck by awe, humbled at these sights. But maybe sounds can acknowledge what we feel when we see the sun. It gives us life, sustains us, feeds our bodies and nourishes our soul. Maybe we should dance, sing, be joyous.

Feet on dirt—crushing, compacting, like boots on snow. Feet on rock—a soft tap, not quite a click. The same genus as heels on a marble floor, but a very different species. Distant cousins. Water ripples in sand. Warm, not hot. A breeze so small you can barely discern direction. Juniper berries and twigs pool in the rock’s indentations. Pieces of crumbled rock are scattered on the slickrock. Moon soil, full of craters. One piece looks like a tortoise, grotesque, half-formed. It’s hotter. My abdomen tingles, my scalp itches. It’s an early warning. Seek cover, get inside. The crypto is like a minefield and those hills aren’t getting any closer.

I love the ripples on the rock. Water is so clear in its presence and absence. It carves over time, folding the surface in on itself, carving lines, curves, stream channels. It’s the face of time, seemingly permanent until you walk across it, and it cracks and crumbles, brittle sand, easier to change than the wet tide flats at the beach.

Accepting defeat

We’ve spent the last three days in Aspen, Colorado, talking about climate change and renewable energy. Among our speakers was Auden Schendler, head of the environmental division of Aspen Ski Company and author of the recent book Getting Green Done. Auden was by far the most inspiring speaker I’ve heard about the issue of climate change. His point was simple: we’re going to fail at solving this problem.

If we stopped emitting carbon tomorrow, it would take decades for our planet to stabilize. We’re already seeing rising sea levels, glaciers and ice sheets melting far more quickly than they were supposed to. Bjorn Lomborg, one of the most influential climate skeptics (meaning he questioned the urgency scientists were speaking with and the predictions being made, not the fact that climate change is occurring and human-caused), just completely changed his position and said we need to invest $100 billion a year in research and development to stop climate change. Several Pacific island nations like Tuvalu are looking at purchasing land in other places because their entire landmass will be under water soon.

So all this is already happening, and we’re still emitting carbon. US emissions have gone down a bit because of the recession, but once our economy picks back up, our carbon footprint is more than likely to follow. The political climate in the US is such that passing any legislation which will meaningfully impact emissions, like a carbon tax, will be nearly impossible. And even if we could, fixing this problem requires nothing less than redesigning our entire energy grid.

Auden likened our situation to fighting Muhammad Ali in the 1970s. You could cower in a corner, take the punches, get knocked out and dragged to the ER. You know you’re going to lose. You have no choice. But you still fight back, with everything you have. You fight to see how far you can get. You fight even though you’re unprepared and don’t know what to expect. You fight because you can’t just stand there and do nothing, no matter how much the odds are stacked against you. You know you’re going to lose—there’s no nagging worry, no uncertainty, just drive. We can’t fix this problem in the time we need to. Let’s go down fighting.

We can't solve climate change

This entry is part of my journal from Semester in the West. For all SITW journal entries, click here. For all SITW posts, including blog posts I wrote while on the program, click here. To learn more about the program, click here.

camp: Back of Beyond, the Known Universe, Utah

context: We had just come from Aspen, Colorado, where the Auden Schendler, who’s the VP of Sustainability for the Aspen Ski Company, told us that we can’t possibly solve climate change and that we need to try as hard as we can anyway.

Auden Schendler is absolutely right, and I needed to hear what he said. Because we’re absolutely going to fail. We can’t fix this problem in the time we need to. We’re up against Exxon-Mobil, Citizens United vs. FEC, the competing attention the recession is getting, a half-Republican Congress, CleanCoal^TM and the Tea Party. We’re going down in flames. And that’s exactly why we need to fight. We have nothing to lose by trying. We have a moral imperative to try as hard as we possibly can. We can slow our defeat or lessen its magnitude, but it is coming. So we sigh, relieved—we know our destiny. It’s a march to the gallows with heads held high, a fight to the death, and you can’t give up until you’re lying face down in a pool of your own blood with seventeen bullets in your back. Until then, we keep fighting. We fight with the urgency this problem deserves, willing to push the envelope, willing to try anything to delay facing death a little longer. We fight as long as there is breath in us. We fight.

Storm on the river

We’re back from our rafting trip after surviving two storms on the river. The first one struck after we had finished setting up camp on the first night. Torrential rain came cascading down from a sky which had been dry seconds earlier, and we all ran for shelter under the tarp. Then the wind hit, throwing sand in our faces, snapping lines, picking up tents staked out with fifteen pound rocks on all corners. We moved as a frantic unit, grabbing tarp edges and pulling down with all of our strength. We screamed to be heard over the wind. We watched lightning flash overhead and thunder boom over the wind while the sky turned an angry grey. We dove on top of tents, life jackets, kitchen utensils and shoes. We held on and prayed together.

After it was over, we surveyed our camp. The kitchen had collapsed and been hastily packed away. Our tarp shelter lay in a dilapidated puddle with half a dozen journals and chairs strewn under it. At least two tents had been relocated by the wind. A life jacket had blown down the river.

Together, we moved the kitchen and cooked dinner in a cave. We ate pasta plain with steamed broccoli, and it tasted so good you could almost ignore the bits of sand sandwiched between the noodles. We set tents back up and got into warm, dry sleeping bags. For at least half of us, it was the best night of sleep we’d had all semester.

Starving land (my second epiphany)

I’m looking at an ocean of sagebrush and wondering what it would be like to starve to death.

I remember myself at six, thrilled when I could convince my vegetarian mother to cook hot dogs for dinner. I stopped eating meat when I was eight, no longer able to stand the thought of killing a cow to feed myself. I saw Finding Nemo and cut out fish too. I lived secure in the knowledge that no animals were being killed to feed me. I lied to myself for eleven years.

I’m looking at an ocean of corn and seeing death. I see Bhopal, India, 1984, where a Union Carbide pesticide plant leaked methyl isocyanate and 2,259 people lay dead in the street while the company denied the chemical had been leaked, then denied it was toxic. Years later, with the death toll estimated at 20,000 the CEO would be convicted of negligence in a US court and fined $2000: the maximum allowed by law, or about $10 per human life. I see a river where walls of concrete stop salmon from spawning and take the water away to irrigate fields growing crops we don’t need or want. I see workers in a “natural foods” plant with neurological diseases from breathing in too much hexane, the gasoline refinement byproduct used to extract protein from soybeans. These are the things we allow in the name of cheap food. This is our hierarchy of values, etched on the land.

I’m looking at an ocean of sagebrush and thinking about eating a cow. Cows eat grass where they find it, transforming grasslands into a mosaic of sagebrush and bare ground. Cows put the cost of their existence in front of us, and we cry foul at the moonscape of incised channels and cowpies that results. Seeing this reality, we’re willing to stop eating beef. If our fields were lined with billboards showing every Superfund site where pesticides have been manufactured, every rainforest clearcut to grow soy, every mother who has had to watch her child die of cancer caused by exposure to agricultural runoff, would we give up monocrops?

I’m looking into the eyes of a cow and seeing a violation of nature. Here, in the feedlot, nine calories of blood-soaked corn will be shoved down its throat for every calorie I will eventually eat. Here, the water runs brown and pregnant women are told not to drink it. Here, the names Tyson, Cargill, Monsanto and Simplot are carved into the land, deeper than the channels their cows incise.

I’m walking through a farmer’s market and trying to have hope. Know my farmers, have a garden and a goat, learn how to can fruit and buy local—I know how to feed myself. If I become a locovore, grow my own vegetables and only eat grass-fed, organic meat, will I feel any better when the next Bhopal happens? If I never touch another drop of high fructose corn syrup, will it wash the blood of Indian children off my hands?

I’m scanning packages of 99 cent ground beef and praying for revolution. More often than not, this is what food stamps pay for. Lentils and quinoa may be cheap, but they take time, and time is a precious commodity for someone with three kids, two jobs and a green card that expired ten years ago. Sometimes, at 10pm, a mother will come through my line with two screaming toddlers who should be in bed and tell me she just got off work. She buys a gallon of milk, some candy to quiet the screaming, and her food stamp card is declined—not enough left to cover the three dollar purchase. As she counts quarters and dimes out on the counter, I wonder at the optimistic liberals who think we can save the world with local, organic, grass-finished beef that costs $6 a pound.

I’m looking at an ocean of sagebrush, knowing seven billion people have to eat. In the name of feeding the world, we razed the grasslands, plowed the soil, and replaced rain with dams. Maybe it’s time to cut my losses and accept reality. People live in the Mojave and the Sonoran. They have to eat, so we pipe water in from the Colorado or truck food in from the East. I can’t force Phoenix to relocate, make farm subsidies go away or bring back the salmon.

I’m dreaming of a grassland I have never seen. A carpet of switchgrass, swaying gracefully in the breeze, so beautiful I almost forget I am starving. My stomach aches, crying out for food, but there is nothing I know how to eat here. Panicked, I start to run, and collapse, exhausted. The grass encircles me, stroking my hair, whispering to me, and I know I will die here. Resigned, comforted, I lie down, no longer feeling the emptiness of my belly. And a bulldozer comes, plows up the grass and plants wheat in its place. Someone hands me a piece of bread. I eat, ravenous, only looking up when it’s too late. The grass has vanished, and I wake up from a nightmare where I can eat to my heart’s content.

I’m looking at an ocean of sagebrush and hoping against hope we can turn it back into grass. Maybe we can teach people to keep chickens in the city, turn food deserts back into Eden with a bit of compost and a lot of love. Maybe we can take kids outside and show them the beauty of a pronghorn sprinting, whisper that sometimes at night, you can hear wolves howl here. Maybe we can share our knowledge and our kale with neighbors, take it to food banks, preach it in church, on the bus, and in the classroom. Maybe, if everyone with a dream in one hand and dirt in the other decided to do more than just opt out, we could learn to feed ourselves and take care of each other. Maybe we could make space for wild grasslands in the West.

My food podcast

This entry is part of my journal from Semester in the West. For all SITW journal entries, click here. For all SITW posts, including blog posts I wrote while on the program, click here. To learn more about the program, click here.

camp: Paonia, Colorado


Time to think about food again. Maybe my next column and maybe my podcast will be about food, in all its permutations. Food justice—how we can get good, sustainable food to people making minimum wage or less. Sustainability—how we can feed ourselves in a way that doesn’t destroy the soil or warm the planet. Ironic that so many things in my life are pushing me in this direction and I don’t even know how to make a quesadilla. Ok, I do now. But that’s definitely a recent development. Food is so intimate, so political, so much a product of culture and upbringing and values. Food is community, the least threatening way to get people to talk to each other. Trying to bring ranchers and environmentalists together, we invite them to share a meal. After a storm, a long day in the cars or a wet day in the field, we gather together for a warm dinner, comforted by the conversation and the ability to feel nourished. But food nourishes us without nourishing the land. Agriculture is crazy. Beef isn’t any better. What do I say, in five minutes, about the topic that connects everyone in the world? I want to speak to poverty and the struggle to put food on the table at all, but there’s no solution to that problem. No one has a real answer when I pose the question, except Eric Porter, and I don’t want a world where poor people can only eat his beef. Someone needs to figure this out, but I can’t do that in a five minute podcast. If no one we’ve talked to can give me an answer, I risk making an audiobook of my last epiphany. What else can I say about food? Where’s the story I’m missing? Maybe it’s a tragedy or an unfinished quest. But that’s not the story I want to tell. Maybe it’s the wrong subject. Maybe I should stick to water. Or water politics. Nevada politics. But something always calls me back to food. I’m hungry. We’re all hungry, looking for a better world, a better way to eat. We need to free ourselves from corporate agriculture and American democracy. We need to remember how to take care of ourselves.

Watchmen as metaphor

This entry is part of my journal from Semester in the West. For all SITW journal entries, click here. For all SITW posts, including blog posts I wrote while on the program, click here. To learn more about the program, click here.

camp: Paonia, Colorado, home of High Country News

I want to be a journalist so badly. I don’t know the first thing about fact-checking, establishing scientific contacts, editing sound, long-form writing or really anything professional at all. I know how to write and be interesting, I think. I know how to care about stuff. And I’ll always be doing things like that in my spare time—blogging about environmental issues, making podcasts, maybe—but I love the identity and access that comes from being a legitimate journalist. I want to fight and change the world, but I also want to teach and inspire. So many possible combinations—the ecoterrorist/journalist, the outdoor educator/activist, the concerned ecologist who advocates for a reduction in allotments…am I an Ed Abbey, passionately and unashamedly advocating my own point of view and ignoring its contradictions? A Derrick Jensen, refusing to compromise my ideals or accept anything less than the end of civilization? A Jane Goodall, doing quiet, soft-spoken research and turning to advocacy once my reputation is well-established?

I always end up thinking about Watchmen. Dan and Laurie trying to make the world better in increments—put out a fire, stop a timber sale in court. Dr. Manhattan detaches himself from the question of nuclear annihilation and leaves Earth behind. He’s the indifferent “environmentalist”/scientist, resting secure in the knowledge that some species will survive any global cataclysm and the sun’s going to burn out eventually anyway. Rorschach is the brutal idealist, willing to use whatever means necessary to reach justice. “Never compromise, even in the face of Armageddon,” he says, and I can’t help but see Jon Marvel or Derrick Jensen. Probably Derrick, because ultimately, his allegiance is to the truth, however horrific it might be. And Adrian, Ozymanides, who engineers the brutal but brilliant scheme to kill millions of people in order to end the threat of nuclear holocaust. A radical compromise, really. Its environmental equivalent is harder to pin down—Mary O’Brien, willing to sacrifice half the public lands to keep cattle off the rest? Mike, accepting square lakes because they mean some birds come back and the toxic dust clouds no longer blow over the Owens Valley? If this is our best model for solving global problems, god help us. Or else Watchmen isn’t a perfect allegory, Rorschach isn’t a villain and Adrian isn’t a hero. But Adrian accomplished lasting peace because he understood both sacrifice and political reality. He traded in human lives—New York, London, Paris, Tokyo and a handful of others for the rest of the world. We strike deals over wolves, cows, ecosystems. We gamble with the lives of other species.

Floyd Dominy and justification

This entry is part of my journal from Semester in the West. For all SITW journal entries, click here. For all SITW posts, including blog posts I wrote while on the program, click here. To learn more about the program, click here.

camp: Along the Green River, Dinosaur National Monument, Colorado/Utah 


Did Floyd Dominy* never go rafting as a child? Well anyway, that’s a stupid reason not to build a dam. Habitat seems more important, and the species loss downriver of Flaming Gorge is apparently about 50% on the Green River and 80% after it seems the Yampa (80% are still around, that is). Maybe engineers should be requires to take a river ecology course. Or a microeconomics course focused on appropriate cost-benefit accounting. I wonder if anyone involved in Flaming Gorge or Glen Canyon saw what they were doing and thought the river would be better left alone but went along with it because their salary depended on it. Maybe they went along because they knew they were powerless to stop the machine that was Dominy, the Bureau and Congress. The holy trifecta of dams. I wonder if they’ll ever start taking them out?


*Dominy was the commissioner of the Bureau of Reclamation during the era when they went on a crazy dam-building spree.

Storm on the river (journal)

This entry is part of my journal from Semester in the West. For all SITW journal entries, click here. For all SITW posts, including blog posts I wrote while on the program, click here. To learn more about the program, click here.

camp: Along the Green River, Dinosaur National Monument, Colorado/Utah

Holy shit that storm was epic. There’s something so perfect about the timing—after we set up camp, it hits and everyone functions together, almost like an ant colony or an army unit. Hold it down together, through the wind and the rain like your life depends on it. Because it does, in a way. You’re dripping wet, covered in sand, glasses a splattered mosaic of turbid river water and ice cold raindrops. Your legs are so covered in goose bumps they feel sharp to the touch and your knees are rattling together so loudly you can hear them over the wind. But you hold that line, wrangle the tarp back to earth, sprint after the raft and dive on top of it. This is your life, and you have to take charge, grab it by the horns and fight. The river and the storm don’t owe you life. You could trip, fall in, be swept downstream, feet held in place by a submerged log, face screaming silently in the murky green, and the river would go on flowing. You could be blown away, left alone with no shelter, no food, no dry clothes and sit on a rock, slowly succumbing to the creeping cold of water and the storm would rage on around you. Here, you are alone. Here, you don’t matter. But you know you do, so you fight your insignificance together, hold down tables, tie rafts in place and pray for the end. And the wind stops and the rain calms itself to a trickle and you thank gods you’ve never believed in that you’re still here, still alive.

Off for the river!

Tomorrow, we set off on the river. We’ll be floating on the Green River for three days, doing some service projects involving plants and seeing the site at Echo Park where the Bureau of Reclamation proposed a dam in the 1950s. Conservationists, led by David Brower of the Sierra Club, were successful in mountain widespread public opposition to the proposal, largely based on the fact that there was explicit legislation in place prohibiting a dam or reservoir from encroaching on a national park or monument. This issue came up again with Glen Canyon Dam, which was agreed to under the assurance that Rainbow Bridge National Monument would be protected from the waters of Lake Powell. In spite of its status as a national monument, no measures were taken to prevent the lake from encroaching on it, in part because some conservationists reluctantly admitted that another dam would be required to protect the monument. Building a dam near Rainbow Bridge would have required roads, machinery and many other things which would have disrupted the natural beauty of the place. So today, Rainbow Bridge can be reached by boat on Lake Powell.

Anyway, I’m slightly apprehensive about this trip. I’ve never been on a river trip, with the exception of about two hours of rafting in Costa Rica, and there it was incredibly hot and sunny. We’re spending nights on the river, and while I’m used to being in remote areas, something about putting water in the mix seems like tempting fate. Not that I’m not excited—this is going to be incredibly fun and probably very educational. And when I think of John Wesley Powell setting off on the virgin Colorado in the 1870s with a raft and no idea of what lay ahead, the idea of worrying seems ridiculous. So hopefully, I won’t die and I’ll report back in three days.

The last week...

We’re on the road again, this time towards the Colorado, where we’ll embark on a rafting trip on Wednesday morning. Everybody’s working on our second epiphanies, which we’ll read on the river. We’ll also be learning about the dam proposed at Echo Park in the 1950s, which would have flooded Dinosaur National Monument (so named because there are a lot of dinosaur bones in the area). Conservationists and the Sierra Club were successful in opposing the dam, but in exchange, they agreed to let the Glen Canyon Dam go through without trying to fight it. So now, we’re free to float down the Colorado and see the unspoiled beauty of Dinosaur, and Glen Canyon remains buried under Lake Mead.

We’ve spent the last week in northern Nevada and Idaho looking at grazing on public lands. Most of the public lands in the West are grazed by cattle or sheep. Ranchers generally have a base property where cattle spend the winter, and one or more allotments of BLM or Forest Service land where cattle spend some portion of the spring, summer and fall. Calves are born in the spring or early summer—the time varies depending on the ranch. They’re turned out to graze, brought back in for the winter and generally sold to a feedlot shortly after. At the feedlot, they’ll be fattened for about three months, then slaughtered. Cows heading to a feedlot weigh between 800 and 1000 pounds, and will weight up to 1300 when they leave the feedlot.

Our guests this week included Jon Marvel, the Executive Director of Western Watersheds (an organization which wants to end all grazing on public lands), Mike Stevens, who runs Lava Lake Lamb (a sheep grazing operation near Craters of the Moon, Idaho which sells all-natural and organic lamb to a largely urban market) and Robin and Steve Boies, ranchers who run the Hubbard Vineyard Ranch. I ate my first lamb steak, which was delicious, and learned a lot about the various sides of the grazing issue. I’m still having some trouble figuring out where I stand when you draw the lines in black and white, which some people like to do. But I have some ideas, which I’ll blog about later when I’m not so tired. Eleven hours in a car will do that to you.

Fixing grazing policies

This entry is part of my journal from Semester in the West. For all SITW journal entries, click here. For all SITW posts, including blog posts I wrote while on the program, click here. To learn more about the program, click here.

camp: Greenfire, Idaho

I think I know Jon Marvel is right, but I still can’t bring myself to agree with him. Subsidies as a matter of something I pay for have stopped bothering me. But Eric is right—a subsidy makes otherwise marginal land profitable, causing it to be ranched when it shouldn’t be. Ranching already has externalities, so theoretically it should be taxed. But taxes and subsidies get more complicated when the government is the one selling AUMs in the first place. And I don’t want to have to tell people their way of live isn’t viable. I’d rather kill a grassland than look Todd Nash in the eye and tell him the truth. What does that make me?

So maybe the solution is a gradual phase-out. Buy out willing ranchers, push for conservation easements, revoke corporate allotments (because who’s going to lose sleep over J.R. Simplot?) And I’ve just proposed the most politically infeasible solution since Carter tried to cut all those dams from the appropriations bill. But the gradual buy-out, maybe? Why is it so hard to get Congress to act when the economics are so clear? Ok, I know why, but I wish we had more fearlessness in Congress. More idealists—a critical mass so they wouldn’t have to sell out and swap favors to get anything done. More people like Alan Grayson. And god, I wish they would overturn Citizens United. But that won’t fix it. The system is inevitably going to work slowly and inefficiently and that’s ok. But not too stupidly. Maybe the 16^th amendment was a bad idea. Maybe the people have too much power. But…grazing. I feel like smaller policy changes—fixing the tax incentives for conservation vs. ranching, allowing smaller cattle numbers to be run, retiring willing allotments—would help speed up a seemingly inevitable tide. Ranchers are growing old and getting out. And I don’t want to see the lifestyle go away, but it doesn’t make sense—economically or environmentally—in the West. Cows should stay east of the 100^th meridian and all of us should probably eat less beef.

Hope for the grasslands

This entry is part of my journal from Semester in the West. For all SITW journal entries, click here. For all SITW posts, including blog posts I wrote while on the program, click here. To learn more about the program, click here.

camp: Lava Lake, Idaho

What would it take to get the grasslands back? I want to believe we can, because I hate the idea that there are whole ecosystems I’ll never get to see. How did we let ourselves fail so completely? How is it that in an era where so many people depended on the land to sustain them, so few realized that they were doing to it? We’re conscientious now of better management and we’re trying to restore, but the fact that we have virtually no grasslands left makes the scale of the project almost beyond comprehension.

I am, at my core, an optimist. But I read a lot, and it’s hard to do both. I want to believe we can solve things, but when I really pull back the curtain and breathe deep, politics is corporate, capitalism murders brown people (and poor white ones) every day, and climate change is accelerating. How do I acknowledge this reality and keep hope? I don’t want to be a radical. Or I do, but I want to be a radical like making people sweat, muckraking, being skeptical and calling Democrats on their shit. I don’t want to spike trees or burn down horticulture labs. Not because I’m opposed to violence and not because I’m unwilling to go to jail for what I believe in, but because I don’t think it will help. I know civilization and seven billion are unsustainable, but I don’t believe in ignoring reality when talking about solutions. I don’t want to tell two billion people to go die. I can’t move LA, Las Vegas or Phoenix. But those cities are ignoring reality be existing, and even knowing that, I feel powerless to resist. I can work on smaller issues and compromise, because that’s all I know how to do. I can teach kids to see the world differently, because that’s the one place I see hope. Maybe it’s cheesy (ok, it’s definitely cheesy), but I believe I can change more teaching kids how to garden and identify wolf tracks than I’d ever be able to change lobbing Congress. That thought should make me worry, but I guess I have up on Congress a while ago. At least for environmental things. But I still have hope, even if it’s silly and misguided. There are still wolves, trees, streams and people who care. And for now, I have to pray that’s enough to keep us moving and alive.