Deep Green, part 1: two visions for the future

This post is (theoretically) part one of a three part series on deep green activism. Part one defines “deep green” and addresses my views on the various routes humans might take in trying to solve environmental problems. Part two will look at some problems I have with deep green philosophy. Part three will address the question of how to take effective action to solve environmental problems.

I saw If a Tree Falls: A Story of the Earth Liberation Front earlier this week, and it’s gotten me thinking a lot about where I stand in terms of activism and ideology. I’m also in the middle of reading Deep Green Resistance, which starts from the premise that civilization is inherently unsustainable and then discusses practical strategies for direct activism, including illegal resistance measures.

I’m conflicted about the deep green movement—I think their analysis is spot on in some cases but overly simplistic in others. If you’ve never heard the term, “deep green” is basically environmentalism based on most or all of the following premises:

1) The economy, our culture and all other institutions are dependent on the existence of ecological systems which can sustain us. This means that the needs of ecological communities and the planet come before the needs of any economic system, country, etc.

2) Environmental destruction, as well as social injustices, are caused by existing power structures (which usually includes capitalism and may include civilization, depending on who you’re talking to).

3) Most injustices are systematic and deliberate, and will not be righted without radical changes.

4) Without radical changes, people will destroy the ability of the planet to support life, both human and nonhuman.

5) Our culture will not make any voluntary transition to a sustainable way of living. Those in power will not voluntarily give up power; they must be forced to do so.

6) Solutions to environmental problems which do not question existing power structures will ultimately be ineffective.

7) Technology causes more problems than it solves, and will not “save” us from the consequences of our destructive behavior. This includes things like fuel efficient/electric cars, solar power, etc.

8) Protective use of force, including illegal actions, are justified in defense of our landbase. Depending on the group, this may include nonviolent illegal activities, such as barricades, or property destruction.

I agree that we’re headed in a very bad direction very quickly, and that existing solutions seem unlikely to solve anything. As I’m writing this, the State Department is going ahead with plans to approve the Keystone XL pipeline, which would transport oil from Alberta’s tar sands to the Gulf Coast. Tar sands are probably the most environmentally destructive way you can imagine to extract oil—the processing releases way more carbon dioxide than conventional oil, and the extraction itself leaves land full of scars and carcinogenic chemicals which increase cancer rates in surrounding communities. This pipeline is an environmental nightmare, and in spite of tireless work by activists against it, it’s probably going to be built. This is one example, but I could list dozens of others. Our country and our civilization are not on the fast track to sustainability, even the pro-capitalist Al Gore variety.

The deep greens seem to think that without serious action, humans are going to kill off the planet and cause a collapse of civilization. The idea behind a lot of deep green stuff I’ve read is that by shifting away from civilization now, we can avoid the worst of the worst effects of this transition. Oil is going to run out, and the sooner we recognize that and start shifting to primitive, hyper-local, sustainable ways of living, the less sudden and violent the crash will be.

I’ve read and thought about this a lot, and I don’t buy the idea of a complete crash. I think we can continue on this destructive track for a while. We won’t get rid of capitalism or fix global inequality, obviously, but I think we’re smart and crazy enough to engineer our way to a world where we can (mostly) feed nine billion people, the rich are relatively comfortable, we have solar panels and maybe electric cars or high speed trains. Really, our only limiting factor is energy—water can be desalinized once it gets scarce enough for that to be cost effective, and I think we can figure out how to compensate for topsoil loss. I’m not saying the transition won’t be messy—people will die when we truly start running out of oil. I’m not saying this will be a good world, but I don’t think it will be completely awful either. It will be incredibly unequal, especially with the worst effects of climate change disproportionately targeting low income people in the Global South. But I think we can keep going as a civilization for a while, with a bit of new technology and some new sources of energy.

Here’s the thing: I don’t really want to live in that world. I got into being insanely liberal and radical because I love the outdoors, basically. But as I’ve read and learned more about global politics and social justice, I’ve come to realize how intertwined these issues are. That’s one of my favorite things about deep green philosophy—the recognition that the same sense of entitlement which enables men to rape women with impunity is also responsible for the violent seizure of indigenous lands for oil extraction. Poverty, slave labor, war, famine and rising cancer rates are not isolated problems—they’re inevitable consequences of the same destructive systems. If we don’t move to seriously address these issues by challenging existing power structures, we’re still going to have a very unequal world. Standards of living might keep rising, but the wealth gap isn’t going to close. And that’s a problem for me.

 The other reason I don’t want to go the technology route is because I think I know how it ends. The endgame of technology is a world where almost nothing humans don’t directly need exists. There are about 200 species going extinct every day. Most of them are probably things we’ve never heard of. Most of them aren’t charismatic megafauna—polar bears, pandas, tigers and the like. People don’t really care about random species of lichen and beetles, and besides their potential pharmacological benefit, there’s no particular reason why they should. But I’m young and stupid and I love life and the world too much to say that that’s ok. I want biological diversity for its own sake, not just because it might be useful to us someday. I want land that exists for its own sake, not for us to drive and live and plant food on. I know we can do whatever the hell we want to the planet, and I know we will if it comes down to it. But I want a world where there are still spaces that exist for other things, and I don’t want them to all be carefully parceled “wilderness areas” delineated by Congress or some other governmental body. I want the wild, whatever that means. And I don’t think that’s too much to ask.

Coming tomorrow (ish)—my issues with deep green philosophy and some thoughts on the construction of human, nature and wilderness. In the meantime, if you want to read more about Deep Green, check out Fertile Gound, an awesome organization based in Bellingham, Washington.

Quoted: Lierre Keith on liberalism and the necessity of oppositional culture

I'm currently reading Deep Green Resistance, which is a joint effort of Aric McBay, Lierre Keith and Derek Jensen. All three of them are radical, anti-civilization, deep green activists. I've loved their other stuff (Lierre wrote The Vegetarian Myth, Derrick wrote Endgame, which is 900 pages about why civilization is killing the planet, and Aric and Derrick teamed up to examine waste in What We Leave Behind). But this book is knocking it out of the park. Anyone who has ever thought about being a serious activist for any social or environmental issue should go read it right now.

Lierre has an awesome chapter in which she discusses the history of the left and liberalism and the difference between an alternative culture (one which rebels against the mainstream in matters of culture, art, etc.) vs. an oppositional culture (one which challenges mainstream economic and political power structures):

"[The] focus on individual change is a hallmark of liberalism. It comes in a few different flavors, different enough that their proponents don't recognize that they are all in the same category. But underneath the surface differences, the commonality of individualism puts all of these subgroups on a continuum.


[The continuum] ends at the far extreme where personal lifestyle becomes personal purity and identity itself is declared a political act. These people often have a compelling radical analysis of oppression, hard won and fiercely defended. This would include such divergent groups as vegans, lesbian separatists and anarchist rewilders. They would all feel deeply insulted to be called liberals But if the only solutions proposed encompass nothing larger than personal action--and indeed, political resistance is rejected as "participation" in an oppressive system--then the program is ultimately liberal, and doomed to fail, despite the clarity of the analysis and the dedication of its adherents."

The importance of choice

Disclaimer: This post involves me talking about my reproductive system in a personal and political manner. If you’re easily offended, get over it or go elsewhere. This post has been cross-posted on the Feministing Community blog.

This month, my period was nine days late.

Days one and two, I didn’t worry. My cycle is pretty regular, but it fluctuates a bit, and a day or two past due isn’t anything unusual. Days three and four, I started worrying a bit. I crossed my fingers and told myself it wasn’t a huge deal.

 Day five, I told my mom, just in case. I’ve had one or two seriously late periods before, and for me, the point when you tell someone else makes a big difference. If only you know, your worries are all theoretical. What if I am pregnant? you ask yourself. Who would I tell? How would I tell them? As soon as you tell someone, as soon as you verbally acknowledge the possibility, you move on to planning. Ok, you say, my mom/boyfriend/best friend knows this is happening. They’re going to be with me no matter how this plays out. You start thinking about options and choices.

 Day six, I took a home pregnancy test. It came back negative, but still no period. I had a doctor’s appointment scheduled anyway, and since the last thing I wanted was to head off to Ecuador and discover that I really was pregnant once I got there, I asked my doctor to do a blood test. It came back negative on day nine, and my period finally started within two minutes of me getting off the phone.

I was lucky. But it could have gone the other way. I could have been pregnant now or this spring or last year or a dozen other times. I’ve had one or two other minor pregnancy scares, but none of them—not even this one—has been a truly scary experience for me. The reason for that is because I know that where I live, it’s still legal for me (and only me) to decide what I want to do if I do get pregnant.

I’ve never been pregnant, so I can’t say what I would do in that situation with 100% certainty. But I’m 99% sure I would have an abortion. I’m twenty years old and in school. I’m about to spend four months in Ecuador. I want to travel the world and be an investigative journalist and do a bunch of other things that would make me a terrible, negligent parent for the next five or ten years. I believe that there are too many people on earth, and I have no interest in carrying a pregnancy to term only to let someone else raise my child. I promised myself a long time ago that I would never let someone else raise one of my children.

During the week or so where I was worrying and thinking about my options, I had this conversation with my mom and my doctor. I asked my mom if my gynecologist’s office does abortions, and she said yes. Before I got the blood test, I asked my general practitioner if anyone in her office does abortions, and she said they did. We discussed medical versus surgical abortions for a few minutes. She answered all my questions thoroughly.

While talking to her, at no point did any of the politics surrounding abortion enter our discussion. She didn’t judge me. She didn’t ask me if I had considered other options. She behaved like a medical professional answering questions about a medical procedure.

I’ve been pro-choice my whole life. I vehemently support a woman’s right to choose whatever she thinks is best for her if she gets pregnant, and I believe access to abortion is a right and an issue of social justice. There are few things that make me as angry as politicians and zealots who argue against access to reproductive healthcare, including abortion. This issue has always felt more personal to me than almost anything else. I’m a sexually active young woman. Pretty much any policy aimed at limiting access to reproductive care is going to affect me or someone very close to me in a negative way.

When I was sitting in my bathroom, counting down the two minutes before I could look at the result of my pregnancy test, I was a little bit nervous. I was hoping and keeping my fingers crossed. But I also knew I had an out. I knew that if I didn’t want to carry a pregnancy to term, I wouldn’t have to.

For millions of women around the world and in the US, this isn’t the case. Most counties have no abortion clinics in them. Looking online, the cheapest abortion I could find in Seattle cost $420—a small fortune for many people. Women often have to drive hours and spend the night far away from home to get an abortion. Access is already a huge issue, especially if you’re poor. And thanks to the Republican Party’s crusading anti-women platform, it’s getting worse.

When you’re sitting in your bathroom, underwear around your ankles, praying to God that that second line doesn’t show up on the stick you just peed on, you want every option you can get. You want to know that whatever happens to you from that point on will be your choice, and that you will be supported no matter what. Most of all, you don’t want anyone who has never been in that position, anyone who isn’t capable of being in that position, making laws deciding if, when and how you get to make choices about your own body.

Why I want to be an activist

I want to put my body on the line for something that actually matters.

I want to scream back at the people who insist that they have a right to destroy my world in the name of property and for the sake of profit.

I want to wade through the fog of grey areas and complications and find one thing I can commit to doing with every part of my being because it’s absolutely, unquestionably right.

I want to be surrounded by people who never tell me that I should turn down the fire burning inside me.

I want to prove to myself that solidarity and uncompromising love for the earth cannot be stopped by tear gas, pepper spray, rubber bullets or beatings.

I want to do more than understand the problems and be more than an intellectual who writes well and speaks passionately.

I want to feel the thrill of not compromising, even if it’s only for a night.

I want to spend my evenings in cafes and anarchist collective bookstores drinking microbrews and plotting revolution until sunrise.

I want to fall in love with someone who’s crazy enough to fight for something bigger than himself.

I want to believe that change is possible.

I want to be on the right side of history, even if it means going to jail.

I want to be young and stupid and free.

Veganism and the myth of individual choice

I just came across this video via GOOD magazine. It’s a Mercy for Animals tape of pigs inside a factory farm, and though it’s incredibly hard to watch, it’s also really important.



I’m cynical and jaded. It’s hard for me to get truly angry or upset about the abuses of industry and the destruction of the natural world, because it’s so ubiquitous. But this video had me in tears. Climate change is distant and species extinction is abstract, but pigs screaming in terror and pain is awfully, disturbingly real.

I went to the Mercy for Animals website and clicked on their “Get Active” page, which made me even angrier. Here are their suggestions for getting involved in this issue, in the order they’re listed on the site.

1) Go vegetarian, or better yet, vegan.
2) Educate others about the horrors of factory farming and the benefits of vegetarianism and veganism.
3/4/5)Join Mercy for Animals by sending them money, volunteer for them and attend their events.
6) Spread the word about vegetarianism via Facebook, Twitter and your email signature.
7) Hand out leaflets about vegetarianism.
8) Organize a video screening.
9) Veganize local restaurants and cafeterias.
10) Write people in power about these issues.

Look, I get that individual actions are important. Feeling personally invested in an issue is an important thing, and many people get into broader forms of activism because they started out being vegetarians and then choose to look into food production more (oh hey there). So by all means, go veggie or vegan if you want to and spread the word to interested parties. But we all know that individual vegans are never going to end factory farming, and as a movement, we do a disservice to ourselves by pretending otherwise.

Most people will never be vegan. Selling people on reducing meat consumption is feasible—it’s probably healthier for them anyway. Selling people on vegetarianism is challenging, but doable. Selling people on veganism is really hard. Veganism, as far as I’ve seen, has a popular perception as a movement of ascetics who are interested in self-deprivation and having moral high ground. This isn’t completely accurate, obviously (I have vegans friends, I swear), but like most stereotypes, it contains grains of truth. Being vegan isn’t easy, and it isn’t practical or realistic for many people, especially people who are low-income.

I don’t believe we can sell the world on veganism, but I think we can sell them on not torturing animals. Pretty much any decent human would be saddened, angered or shocked by watching that video, or one of the many others documenting similar practices in the industry. I believe we do a disservice to those who will never be vegan when we list that as the first action step a concerned person can take. Individual choices can be powerful and empowering, but they won’t change the status quo. Framing the solution to factory farming as veganism disempowers people who aren’t willing or in a position to make that choice. It frames people unwilling to give up animal products as part of the problem. It emphasizes personal choice over political action, even though the latter can produce results on a much larger scale.

Existing power structures will not change or give up power without a fight. No one has ever stopped clear cutting because a bunch of people from the Sierra Club asked nicely. They stopped because radical Earth First and ELF people were busy chaining themselves to trees and monkeywrenching machinery, and suddenly a compromise with the Sierra Club seemed like a perfectly reasonable middle ground. And existing power structures have made factory farming a necessity for feeding the world, especially poor Americans.

Ending factory farming requires radicals and compromisers. It requires activists willing to break into slaughterhouses and film conditions inside of them. It requires people to build and support alternative meat suppliers, and policies which allow equality of access to those alternatives. It requires people who want to lobby Congress to pass more stringent regulations on factory farms, and it requires vegan anarchists who want to liberate pigs from their prisons. There’s no reason you should have to be a vegan to care about animal suffering or to be an anti-factory farm activist. We need as many committed people as we can get to fight back, and pretending that our individual choices are the most important tool we have won’t get us very far.

Local isn't about the carbon footprint

I just posted my problems with the local movement, namely that a focus on choosing local foods can ignore the fact that the same crops have very different environmental impacts when grown in different places. That said, I’m a huge believer in eating locally. I’ve heard some criticisms of the local food movement recently that have bugged me because they seem incomplete, so I want to address them.

The most common criticism of local eating that pops up on various blogs has to do with carbon emissions. Some people claim, as the Freakonomics blog crew did a while ago, that the efficiencies of large-scale agriculture can mean that stuff shipped in from really far away actually has a smaller carbon footprint than local food. They tell you to picture one large steamship or cargo plane compared with dozens of inefficient diesel pickups driven by individual farmers.

The other carbon footprint argument is made by people comparing the transportation footprint of food to the production footprint of meat. Because of the huge amount of greenhouse gases released by animals, particularly cattle, eating meat and dairy gives you a much bigger carbon footprint than eating food shipped halfway across the world to your plate. Sometimes, this argument ends with the claim that if we really care about saving the world and reducing our impact, we should go vegetarian or vegan instead of worrying about local food.

I have two big problems with the carbon footprint argument. One: it’s not uniformly accurate. The generalizations that are relied on to make claims like, “x produces more carbon emissions than y” mean that those statements have to be taken with a grain of salt. The carbon footprint of a piece of food depends on literally thousands of factors—what it is, where it was grown or raised, where the water to irrigate it came from, how power is generated in the area it’s grown, how it was shipped and how it was packaged, just to name a few. Cows can be managed in such a way that they increase the organic content of soil, meaning the soil sequesters carbon and the beef being produced has a greatly reduced or negative footprint. I’m willing to concede that most of the time this isn’t the case, but to generalize about “the carbon footprint of beef” ignores the reality of farmers who are working hard to do it right. There’s simply no accurate way to know the exact footprint of anything, especially if you don’t know the person who produced it.

Secondly, these arguments are assuming that the only point of eating local is reducing your carbon footprint. A lot of foodies care about that, but most of us have other reasons we want to eat locally too. I personally don’t care much about my individual carbon footprint—I’m much more worried about the Keystone XL pipeline and stopping coal plants from being built than agonizing over how many cow farts it takes to destroy the planet. For me, local foods are about community. Buying directly from farmers keeps money in my area, where it has a greater multiplier effect. It supports hardworking average people, rather than shareholders and executives at big supermarkets. It allows me to have the awesome experience of strolling through the farmers’ market with no shopping list and buying weird-looking vegetables on impulse because the farmer who grew it was right there and told me how she cooks it at home.

Local foods are a function of privilege and wealth, and they’re yet another indicator of the sad fact that low-income people are much less likely to have access (geographically and financially) to healthy, fresh food, much less the time and knowledge required to cook it. As far as I’m concerned, this is the biggest problem with the local food movement. Choosing local can’t be called a choice if most people aren’t in a position to make it.

Ultimately, though, we need local. If we’re going to live on this planet well into the future, we’re going to have to do a better job of building resilient communities where members support each other. We’re going to have to grow more food closer to where we eat it and pay better attention to taking care of our soil and water. Local isn’t about carbon footprints. It’s much, much bigger than that. It’s about nothing less than reshaping our entire relationship to food.

Sometimes, this sounds like a daunting task to me. But then I remember that the current food infrastructure hasn’t been in place for very long. My great grandma knew how to can food. My grandma remembers what real tomatoes taste like and doesn’t want to buy the ones in the supermarket because she says they’re just not the same. Another world is possible, and its close relatives have existed in living memory. Industrial food on this scale is a post-World War II invention, and the seeds of resistance began sprouting a few decades ago, when organic food became a thing. I spent much of my time hopelessly depressed, lamenting the state of the world and politics and social injustice. But food is one thing that leaves me smiling. We’re up against the biggest, most entrenched special interests in the history of civilization. But time, dedication and ecology are on our side. It’s going to be hard, but we’ll get there. And when we do, there won’t be bloggers asking questions about whether local food makes sense, because local will be the new normal.

Beyond local

Note: This is a column I wrote for the Pioneer last fall while I was on Whitman's Semester in the West program. The column can also be found on the Pioneer website. I'm planning to post in the next few days about some common reasons people argue against local food and why they're missing the point, but I thought it would be relevant to post my own critique of the local idea, as well some thoughts on the shortcomings of food package labels.

The importance of eating local foods has been a prominent theme in the environmental movement for the past few years. Eating local makes sense for many reasons—buying close to home is a way to connect people to the farmers who grow their food, and a shorter transportation distance generally means fewer carbon emissions. As we develop local food systems, however, it is critical to remember that not all crops are created equal.

Consider California. About half of our nation’s fruits and vegetables are grown here, mostly in irrigated valleys which rely on the importation of water. In Southern California, much of this water comes from the Colorado River, which has been dammed dozens of times to provide cheap water for the desert farms and metropolises of the American West. California has the largest share of the Colorado’s water, and it uses about 80% of what it takes to irrigate crops. Unfortunately, the Colorado is overallocated—shared between seven states and Mexico, depended on to feed the growth of Las Vegas and Phoenix and subject to increased water loss as climate change warms the West. With water shortages looming on the horizon, California’s farmers may move to mining groundwater, pumping it from underground aquifers at rates that will take centuries to replenish.

A concerned environmentalist living in Los Angeles could easily find local produce to eat. Go to the supermarket, and you’ll find California-grown avocadoes, tomatoes, oranges, carrots and artichokes. But how sustainable is it to eat vegetables grown in a semi-desert with water pumped to them from hundreds of miles away? If local eating requires taking so much water from the Colorado that its waters have failed to reach the ocean for the last three decades, what are we accomplishing?

This is not to say that local foods aren’t a worthwhile goal. On the contrary, some degree of local food production is essential for solving climate change. But locovores need to do more than look at the distance their food has traveled to get to their plate. The same food produced in two different climates can have dramatically different environmental effects. Cattle grazed on Virginia pastures, where it rains, are good for the land and can easily be rotated between pastures to allow grasses to regrow. Cattle grazed in the desert canyonlands of Utah trample biotic soil crusts, increase soil erosion and allow non-native plants to take over the ecosystem. If you live in Utah and want to eat beef, getting it from Virginia might be the more sustainable choice.

Environmentalists are used to screening food by labels. If something is organic, local, grass-fed or all-natural, it’s automatically assumed to be better for our health and the Earth. If we want to succeed in building a more sustainable food system, we need to move beyond these labels and look at the actual impacts our food has on the land it’s grown on. If a crop can be grown in the area where you live without pumping a river dry, building a dam to divert subsidized irrigation water or permanently depleting the soil of its nutrients, it’s a good candidate for sustainability. If not, get it from somewhere that can grow it sustainably or go without it.

Obviously, this approach is not universally applicable—many crops are unsustainable no matter where they are grown, and there isn’t enough choice or transparency in our food system to answer all of these questions. Being in a place to consider your food choices this carefully is a function of education, environmental awareness and affluence, all of which are privileges many people don’t share. But to the extent it’s possible, everyone who cares about the health of the planet needs to ask difficult questions when they to go the store or sit down for dinner. Looking at the package will never tell you everything you need to know about your food. Talk to the farmer, learn what grows well where you live and pay attention to what you’re supporting when you buy food. Our existence on this planet depends on its ability to produce food for us. We need to start taking better care of it.

An open letter to my future less-radical self

I’m sitting in bed writing this—my old room, with the lime green walls, purple bedspreads and shelves overflowing with books. I’m wearing those orange almost-basketball shorts I paid two dollars for at Goodwill, and I’m thinking about revolution.

I think I know you. You’re thirty-five or forty, with a good job that pays enough. Maybe you even have a husband or kids. You travel, and you still read anything and everything you can get your hands on. I’m not sure if you have the biggest garden anyone’s ever seen inside the city limits, or if you buy organic at the grocery store and promise yourself that next week, you’ll learn how to can vegetables, but either way, I know you still pay attention and you still care.

I’m writing you because recently, something happened. You read about it in the news, or saw a video, or heard from a friend. Someone did something illegal, the kind of thing you used to think about doing. Someone smashed a bank’s windows during a protest or rescued animals from a lab or blew up an oil pipeline. And I can see you sitting there, shaking your head at the wild-eyed revolutionaries who chose to be violent, who alienated people because they were too young and stupid and idealistic to realize that illegal actions won’t solve anything.

I want to remind you what you used to be like, before you settled down. The nights you fell asleep thinking that sometimes, you wanted nothing more than to watch Issaquah burn to the ground and see a forest grow back in its place. The evenings you spent plotting guerilla schemes to plant carrots in the middle of golf courses when you had papers you were supposed to be writing. The day you walked through one of the largest coal plants in the country, when you thought about leaving the group to attempt a one-woman sabotage of the computer system, but opted to take two hundred photos of generators and clouds of smoke instead. The weeks and months you searched for a revolutionary who lived up to his legend, who wasn’t just another dictator-to-be waiting to abolish term limits and seize land. Your burning desire to be a journalist, to uncover the worst of humanity, to travel the globe in search of suffering and resilience and speak truth, no matter its costs.

You probably remember all of this and more. You might shrug it off, or laugh at how young you were. You’re probably proud of some of the things you’ve accomplished, and you probably should be. And I want to make sure you know that you wouldn’t be the woman you are if you hadn’t spent your twenties plotting writing, reading, praying and searching for revolution. If you hadn’t cared enough to be willing to go to jail for what you believe in, you wouldn’t have gotten where you are today.

I know you probably know this. But there’s one other thing I need to let you know. Revolution doesn’t have to be a phase. You’ve always been more of a reformer who likes to keep radicals close. You’re too pragmatic to light the fuse or pull the trigger and too invested in shades of grey to see evil as clearly as some of your cohorts. You’re not a risk-taker, especially when it comes to putting human life on the line.

But we need the radicals. You need them, though you may not remember it. Factory farming will never end if people aren’t willing to break the law and videotape the atrocities being committed in slaughterhouses. Serious changes to existing power structures won’t come without serious threats. Sometimes, threats are external—the end of cheap oil, maybe. Sometimes, they’re legal. But sometimes, they’re not. Cochabamba didn’t get their water back because they asked nicely and filed petitions. They got it back because they took to the streets, occupied the center of town for several days and were willing to endure tear-gassing and being shot to stand up for their right to control their own water supply.

This isn’t to say that activists for causes you believe in haven’t done things that are wrong or that you disagree with. Legality and morality are separate issues. Actions may be illegal and moral (the civil rights movement), illegal and immoral (rape), legal and moral (growing your own food) or legal and immoral (covering up reports saying that your product kills people so you can keep selling it). Just because something is a supposed act of resistance doesn’t make it ok. But I’m asking you to remember that you stand on the shoulders of fighters, radicals, anarchists, feminists, ecoterrorists, communists, union organizers and people from all walks of life who were willing to speak truth to power and put their bodies on the line for causes they believed in.

I’m sure you’re happy with your life, and I’m glad you’re not in prison. I’m happy that you’re doing something you believe is meaningful, and that you’re making a small but important contribution to making the world a more just, equitable place. But I want to make sure you never forget your roots. I want to make sure you understand, when you hear that story about those people who did something crazy and illegal, that they’re fighting for the same things you are in the only way they think will work. I want to make sure you know you’re only here because of people who are far braver, stupider, radical and idealistic than you were ever going to be.

all my love,

Rachel

Why I want to be a journalist

I want to travel beyond the reaches of everyday experience and write a map which lays a clear, twisting path through the wilderness of distant places.

I want to nestle myself deep into the recesses of something awful and captivating, immerse myself in conflict and wake up shaking, half-remembering nightmares where the horror around me was able to penetrate through the skin of my objectivity.

I want to stare truth unflinchingly in the face.

            

I want to go to places abandoned and forgotten and hold the eyes of the world open until they’re blurred with tears.

I want to write about the dark, terrible depths of the human condition and the strength and courage that exist precisely because of the evil lurking inside.

I want to pull people through dark tunnels and lead them towards a small glimmer of redemption barely visible at the very end.

I want to write stories that ignite deep-burning fires inside of people instead of giving them hope.

I want to show suffering and despair with such clarity and conviction that the world never feels compelled to relive the events that lead to them.

I want to bear witness to the destruction of the natural world and write eulogies for places we’ve sacrificed while hoping, without expectation that we’ll learn from our mistakes.

I want to be as objective as humanly possible when reporting on anything, and as much of an activist as possible when selecting what that anything is.

I want to share stories that have been forgotten, give voice to the silent and remind myself that truth, like evil, is never as simple as you’d like it to be.

Fat acceptance

I'm five feet, five and a half inches tall, and I weigh 150.7 pounds. This gives me a body mass index (BMI) of 24.7, just a hair below the cutoff for overweight (25).

I used to be skinny. I had no breasts to speak of until well into seventh grade. I had bony knees tiny legs and ribs you could count, if only just. By freshman year of high school, I had developed a bit. I ran cross country that fall, stopped running once the season was over, kept eating four meals a day and gained ten pounds that winter. In my first two years of college, I've put on another fifteen pounds.

By American standards, I'm an average weight, probably even below average. I've always loved my body--especially during the two or three years when I had a respectable chest and still held on to my flat stomach. I've never felt "fat", or had any particular desire to lose weight. But over the past two years, as I've gained more weight, I've found it harder to look in the mirror and feel proud. Initially, I thought this was because of the way I looked--the rolls of fat on my side that appeared when I bent over, or the way my cheekbones didn't stick out quite as much as they used to. I told myself I wouldn't always look like this, that it would get better when I didn't have school and three jobs to keep me busy and stressed.

After a year of feeling this way, during which I stayed about the same weight, I realized I wasn't mad at myself for the way I looked. I was mad because I wasn't taking care of my body. With an all-you-can-eat meal plan, I'd been eating more than I was used to, and I felt worse for it. I wasn't exercising regularly. I made some choices to change this. I signed up for aerobics classes, got off Whitman's meal plan so I could cook healthy food for myself and tried to limit my binging on chips and cookies a bit.

Guess what happened? I stayed exactly the same weight. I might have even gotten bigger. And I do not care anymore.

My parents, like many well-meaning people, have fallen into the skinny = healthy trap. When I told Mom I hated cross country and was quitting junior year of high school, she was concerned about my health without a regular source of exercise. The way she chose to phrase this concern was, "Aren't you worried you'll get fat if you don't exercise?" This summer, I proudly declared that I didn't care about my stomach fat anymore, because I had more important things to worry about and I wasn't "overweight" anyway. My dad's response: "Don't you think you are, a little bit?" I responded with a vehement, "No!" Later, I had another thought. What if I was? Would it even matter?

Since then, I've thought about fat a lot. Here's my non-radical reasoning about why fat is the wrong question:

Americans (and other people, to be fair) eat terrible food and don't exercise. Many people could stand to be more healthy. But healthier doesn't mean skinnier. People can be healthy at tons of different weights. Some obese people eat very little and exercise regularly. Some skinny people can eat whatever they want without gaining any weight. Most of us are somewhere in the middle. So sure, encourage people to be healthy, eat well, lay off the junk food and exercise regularly. Maybe they'll lose weight in the process. Maybe they won't. But either way, they'll certainly be healthier, and better off. There is absolutely no need to shame people for their weight or teach them that they are disgusting or unworthy of love or some other awful shit like that.

And here's my more radical reasoning (thanks to the amazing Lindy West at The Stranger for giving me some of these ideas in her awesome essay Hello, I Am Fat, which you should go read right now.)

Being healthy is an admirable trait, but it's not the be all and end all of human existence. What if someone wants to eat fried food all the time? That's their right as a person. What if someone has absolutely no desire to lose weight? That's absolutely their prerogative, because it's their body. Not yours. Not society's. Not everybody has to be healthy, just like not everyone has to be well-read or fluent in three languages or able to cook five course meals or pilot fighter jets. These are all traits that make for pleasant, well-rounded people, but they're not essential to live a happy, fulfilling life. If someone wants to be unhealthy, that's completely their choice. If someone happens to be fat, there's no guarantee that they are unhealthy at all, and either way, you don't have a right to tell them how to live their life.

People berate and ridicule fat people, tell them that they're imperfect, half-formed people who just need to lose a little weight before they can fin love and happiness. People who do this claim to be concerned about health and people's well being, which is bullshit. As Lindy points out, health includes mental health, and there are literally millions of fat people who're tried to lose weight to no avail.

For people who are concerned about public health, I would like to point something else out. I've previously quoted Raj Patel, author of Stuffed and Starved, who argues that obesity is a symptom not of "an impoverished faculty of choice" but "an impoverished range of choices". Obesity correlates with poverty, because poor people are more likely to live in food deserts and to not be able to afford fresh produce, gym memberships and a host of other things that keep the rich looking like covergirls. So if you're really, really concerned about health and people's well being, you'd be much better off pushing for food system reform (an end to corn subsidies, better social welfare programs, subsidized produce, etc.) than you would shaming fat people.

Obviously, that's what I want to do. But I'm making a promise to myself. Starting today, I promise to take good care of myself--regular exercise, not too much junk food. I promise to love myself no matter how much I weigh. I promise to never try to lose weight, because that's so not the point. I promise to remember all the amazing things my body can do, like hiking up ridiculous hills. I promise to never encourage anyone else to lose weight or shame them for their body size or appearance. I promise to be aware of thin privilege. I promise to fight with everything I have to build a better food system, and if I happen to have stomach fat rolls while I'm doing it, I promise to not give a fuck.

No-car, week 1&2

I've had a bit more than a week at home, so I figure it's time for an update on my No-Car Challenge. Thus far, I have mostly followed all the rules I originally set forth. I got a ride home from the airport and drove to get dinner with my cousin because I was going with my brother, who would have driven anyway. I went to Walla Walla earlier, which is obviously outside the Seattle city limits. I did cheat a bit yesterday and get a ride home from my aunt after walking 3.5 miles to her house because I had a cold and needed to start cooking dinner for friends who were coming over. And I got a ride home from the Harry Potter premier last night because buses don't run at 3am.

Strangely, it doesn't feel like that big of a deal to not drive anywhere. I've been taking the bus more than I thought I would, and while busing usually takes about twice as long as driving somewhere, I've been able to get a ton of reading done that I otherwise wouldn't have. I've done a few long walks to get places too, but mostly, I've just been chilling at home reading books.

So far, I don't feel like I've done anything especially profound or out of the ordinary by not driving. Maybe this will change if I get more ambitious--I'm thinking of trying to bus out to Issaquah to see my aunt and cousins, and also of doing an entirely public transit trip to Mason Lake to see my grandma. Even if I don't achieve a Zen-like trancendence of car culture, though, I'm accomplishing my main goal quite nicely. In the (almost) two weeks I've been home, I've spent a total of $18 on busses and $60 on gas to drive to Walla Walla. There's no way that I could have driven around this whole time without spending at least $30 on gas and another $15 on parking. And while I'm definitely not saving the world, saving money feels almost as good.

Quoted: "Phaedra Starling" on approaching strange women

Phaedra Starling (not her real name) explains how men should go about approaching women in public in this awesome piece (Schrödinger’s Rapist).

You want to say Hi to the cute girl on the subway. How will she react? Fortunately, I can tell you with some certainty, because she’s already sending messages to you. Looking out the window, reading a book, working on a computer, arms folded across chest, body away from you = do not disturb. So, y’know, don’t disturb her. Really. Even to say that you like her hair, shoes, or book. A compliment is not always a reason for women to smile and say thank you. 

If you speak to a woman who is otherwise occupied, you’re sending a subtle message. It is that your desire to interact trumps her right to be left alone. If you pursue a conversation when she’s tried to cut it off, you send a message. It is that your desire to speak trumps her right to be left alone. And each of those messages indicates that you believe your desires are a legitimate reason to override her rights.

Culture shock

The weirdest things about the US after a month in Ghana:

1) Driving home from the airport on a road that's completely paved with no potholes, no tro-tros, no signs proclaiming the benefits of a relationship with Jesus Christ and nobody trying to sell me phone cards, water sachets or plantain chips.

2) Saying "Good morning" to someone and getting a curt nod in reply as opposed to a smile and reply of "Good morning, how are you?"

3) White people. Everywhere. In very excessive numbers.

4) Going outside and having the air smell vaguely like spring or car exhaust, as opposed to the pungent combination of street food, sewage, warm rain, diesel fumes and humidity (which I love, by the way).

5) Being able to pay for things with a credit card.

6) The lack of color, on people's clothes, storefronts, signs and vehicles.

7) Brushing teeth with tap water. Also drinking tap water.

8) Paying 2-3 times as much for non-local produce that barely tastes like whatever it's supposed to.

9) The quantity (less) and type (non-tropical) of vegetation.

10) The realization that I didn't clean my room at all before I left, since I had less than 24 hours between getting home from school and leaving for 7 weeks of international travel.