Science shouldn't be apolitical

We’re two days into orientation for study abroad, and so far, I have really mixed feelings. I was a bit nervous signing up for an ecology program, because as much as I enjoy science, I’m a politics girl at heart. Not to mention an aspiring writer/journalist. I like learning macro—how ecosystems function, what causes climatic patterns. I like toxins and soil health and agronomy. But I’m not really into identifying birds or sketching different types of leaves. And I firmly believe that ecology and conservation can’t really be separated from politics, especially if you’re trying to preserve ecosystems intact.

 Our first official lecture confirmed some of my fears. We were talking about deforestation, specifically, what causes it and what we can do to stop it. Some of the things that were listed as causes of deforestation: growing population and poverty. Which is fine, except that we didn’t discuss why people in Ecuador are poor and how that may or may not relate to US foreign policy, multilateral trade agreements and the like. Because for me, talking about “poverty” without addressing what laws, policies, agreements and attitudes are causing it is pretty useless. Naturally, the “solutions” suggested were mostly in the realm of conscious consumerism. Don’t buy tropical wood. Eat less beef and soy and cocoa products. We didn’t even get as far as “contact companies buying sketchy wood and ask them to change their purchasing practices”. Xavier, one of our academic directors, asked us for more ideas. I threw out debt forgiveness and debt-for-nature swaps. I said individual choices were good for raising awareness, but that they probably wouldn’t make a significant dent in the problem. I restrained myself and didn’t mention capitalism and neoliberal trade policies.

After the lecture, I asked Xavier if SIT (my study abroad organization) has an official policy about capitalism or any other political/economic policy. He said that because SIT is an educational institution, they are apolitical. On one level, I understand this. But on another level, it’s thoroughly maddening. How can you advocate conservation of tropical forests while remaining apolitical? Not choosing a side isn’t the same thing as being neutral. I get that issues are complicated and solutions aren’t always clear, but it seems so misguided to me to refuse to articulate a position about issues which so clearly affect the outcome of something the program purports to care about.

Right now, I’m restless. I want to be on the border. I want to be doing work with an organization which has spent years thinking about what activism is and how to affect meaningful change outside the state from the bottom up. I want to make connections with radicals who speak Spanish and live in places where activism has teeth. I understand that this isn’t what this program is about, and that I have a really unique opportunity to learn ecology in the most diverse country on earth (per unit area, at least, though Colombia wins outright).

Today, we got to hike though a cloud forest reserve while learning the Spanish words for ecological and botanical things. The views were gorgeous, and I actually managed to remember a few useful facts about plants. When we got back, we had salsa dancing lessons and then went out to dinner. I went to a Tex-Mex place with five other girls, where we shared a pitcher of margaritas after I spent ten minutes convincing everyone that they were unlikely to get sick from the ice used to make them. We shared stories and played ten fingers and talked about our favorite TV shows. And it was a lot of fun.

I’m hoping I can find a happy middle ground while I’m here. I want to pay attention to South American news and work on my Spanish and talk politics with my host family. I want to keep reading and writing too much and I want to think about ways I can be useful in making meaningful changes to the world instead of just buying fair trade chocolate. But I also want to be here, in place, connecting with people and engaging with the program. I want to learn those plants, because as painful as the process can be, it’s awesome when you can walk through a forest and narrate the scenery, make sense out of the tangle of green. I want to learn a ton and accept for now that science can be apolitical, even if it shouldn’t be. I want to understand place better so I can fight for it when I get home.

The human construction of nature (aka deep green, part two)

This post is part two of what may eventually be three posts about the ideas of the deep green movement. Part one can be found here.

In my last post, I talked about what deep green is and how I feel about its analysis of our environmental situation. Now, I want to talk about some issues I’m having trouble reconciling with deep green philosophy. I should add that I’m relatively new to deep green, and by no means have I done an exhaustive search of available writings on the topic. So it’s definitely possible that the issues I bring up have been addressed by someone else.

Many people have a tendency to construct a human/nature divide. Environmentalists say that nature is good, in balance, self-sustaining. Humans are destructive, wasteful. Nature should be fenced off, designated, set aside so that we can visit it without ruining it forever. This idea underlies the language of the 1964 Wilderness Act, which says that “a wilderness, in contrast with those areas where man and his own works dominate the landscape, is hereby recognized as an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain”. Ed Abbey wanted to preserve wilderness as a spiritual refuge for man to escape the evils of civilization (and as a place from which to wage guerilla warfare against a fascist government). Even non-environmentalists like to separate humans and nature. Descartes argued that animals didn’t have souls and thus couldn’t feel pain—in spite of the similarity of their physical structures, they were entirely unlike humans. The Bible gives man dominion over the earth, placing him at once as separate from and above nature.

The human/nature divide is an artificial one. For most of human history, people have lived in “wild” areas, and nature was historically a place where people got food and building materials and tons of other stuff. The idea of setting aside land as “wilderness” would have seemed foreign to most cultures that have existed before ours, and American wilderness was often made by kicking native peoples off of their lands so John Muir and Theodore Roosevelt could enjoy their scenic views of mountains unmolested.

The deep green stuff I’ve read seems to be mostly on board with this, but they draw another divide—industrial civilization versus indigenous cultures. Indigenous cultures are integrated into their landbases and able to live in a sustainable way without depleting natural resources. In contrast, industrial civilization is systematically destroying the planet.

I’m not denying the awful, horrendous destructiveness of industrial civilization, nor am I denying the existence of indigenous cultures that were able to live sustainably. But I don’t think there’s anything special and magical about non-civilized and indigenous societies. There are plenty of instances throughout human history of people who destroyed their environments via deforestation, from settlers on Easter Island thousands of years ago to indigenous people in the Andean highlands in the past few centuries. Industrial technologies have managed to dramatically accelerate the speed with which we’re able to destroy things, and I absolutely believe that the mentality of Western Civilization has a particularly unsettling zeal for conquest, pillage and plunder.

However, that doesn’t mean that indigenous cultures are automatically harmonious with nature or with each other. My pre-departure readings for Ecuador have included descriptions of the indigenous people who have traditionally lived (and often still do live) in the Amazon. Warfare between groups has been common, both to defend exclusive rights to forage in a particular area, and also to capture women to increase genetic diversity for the group. Portraying traditional indigenous cultures as uniformly harmonious, peaceful, happy, feminist or any other positive attribute strike me as a reconstruction of Rosseau’s “noble savage” concept. Throughout history, there have been cultures—indigenous and non—that have systematically depleted natural resources, and there have been cultures that have managed to live sustainably in a place over a period of time. If we want to get there as a culture, we’re going to have to deal with a lot of tough issues, get over our oil addiction, figure out how to live more locally and more integrated with our landbase. For me, that’s not the same thing as bringing down civilization.

If we accept that humans are part of nature, then we run into another problem. Deep green works that I’ve read have seemed to construct nature as a relatively static entity. Plants will return to damaged areas if given time to do so, systems will bring themselves back into balance if humans stop destroying them, but overall, nature stays relatively the same. I understand the sentiment behind this idea. I’ve written before about the detached environmental view, the scientist who points out that 99% of species that have ever existed on earth are now extinct so if more species are dying off now, it’s just the natural order. The other common argument that gets thrown out is that anything humans do is natural, because we’re part of nature. If we’re stupid and kill ourselves off, it just proves that we weren’t well adapted to the earth, and anyway, the sun’s going to burn out in a few billion years, so what does it all matter anyway?

I’ve said it before, but these ideas are stupid, suicidal and self-destructive. Anyone who cares about the future of life should have a vested interest in preserving the planet in a liveable condition. Even anthropocentrists who see no intrinsic value in the existence of other species should have a vested interest in preserving clean water, productive land, un-polluted ecosystems and a climate that isn’t too hot so that future people can live and eat. So I understand why, faced with arguments like these, radical environmentalists are quick to construct nature as a permanent, fixed entity. But it’s not.

I’ve been reading a lot about evolution recently, since my study abroad program is ecology-focused and includes a trip to the Galapagos Islands. One of the books I read talked about the Galapagos finches and scientists who were studying them during a period of drought. Drought conditions dramatically altered the types of food available to the finches, such that over a single season, the average beak length of the finches changed by about a millimeter. That might not sound like much, but from an evolutionary perspective, it’s pretty significant. Evolution is a constant, ongoing process. There’s the classic example of moths in during the industrial revolution—the ones that happened to be grey started to blend in better with soot-covered buildings, so in a few generations, almost the entire population had become grey to avoid predators. When farmers in the US started spraying DDT all over everything, they quickly found that after a few seasons, bugs were becoming resistant not only to DDT, but to several similar chemical compounds. Pesticides constantly have to be changed because insects are so good at adapting quickly to new chemicals.

I don’t say any of this to defend the use of DDT. I don’t mean to suggest that animals that can’t evolve to live in the world being created by humans should die off because they’re not “fit”. But knowing the incredible dynamism that exists in nature, it’s hard for me to talk about returning nature to a former state of glory. I believe absolutely in preserving biodiversity, keeping species and ecosystems around for their own sake. I know the oil economy is a nightmare and needs to go away for so many reasons. I want people to live more harmoniously with nature, more in touch with each other, more outside, more fully. But knowing the way that humans have interacted with nature for millennia—we push, species evolve and push back—makes me reluctant to say that anything humans do to alter nature for their own benefit is bad or unnatural. I’m not talking about things like tar sands or uranium mining. I’m talking agriculture or selective land clearing to build homes. I want a world where we can live harmoniously with nature. But I don’t believe we can make that world unless we recognize that we’re neither wholly good nor inherently destructive, not separate from or above nature. Even in our hubris and arrogance, we’re still a part of the ever-evolving face of life on earth, and an honest conversation about bringing us into better balance with the rest of nature needs to start by acknowledging that fact.

Regional geology journal archive

I was reading my old journals from the regional geology trip I went on over spring break, and I realized that there’s some good stuff in there that I’d like to be out with my name on it. To that end, I’ve published my journal entries from the trip on the blog, backdated to reflect when I actually wrote them. I had just finished reading Derrick Jensen’s Endgame when I went on this trip, so this is among my more anti-civ and apocalyptic writing. There’s also a fair bit of musing about the US-Mexico border. To see the full list of entries, you can go here.

I’m planning to do a similar journal archive for my Semester in the West entries, but that one’s going to take a bit longer, since I have 80 pages of journal entries to type up first.

What I'm thinking for next summer

As this summer wraps up, I find myself thinking about all the amazing people I’ve been lucky enough to know and all the awesome things they’ve been doing. I’m feeling free knowing that I don’t have a job at Safeway, which means I’m under no pressure to stay in Seattle or Walla Walla next summer just for work. And I’ve been having such an amazing time traveling in Ghana and Ecuador, meeting people from all over the world who are on such varied adventures. All of this is making me think about what I want to do next summer. So of course, I made a list (is it just me, or do I really like lists?) And the best part is that I could probably do two or three of these ideas in the same summer! Basically, my goal is to make this summer look super boring by comparison, though four continents in three months might be hard to beat.

Here’s what I’m thinking, in approximate order of what sounds coolest to me right now (this may change in like five minutes):

1) Finally satisfy my burning desire to understand Mexico and the border by volunteering for No More Deaths, a humanitarian aid group which works in the desert Southwest.

2) Relatedly, I could do a summer program with the Mexico Solidarity Network, which is an awesome study abroad program focusing on social justice movements in Mexico. This might cost more than I could reasonably afford, but it’s definitely still high on the list.

3) Go to India with the family. With Dad living in Ghana, he and Mom have been meeting for vacations in Europe together. But after Greece this summer, we had a serious family discussion about taking a trip somewhere a bit more adventurous, and India was pretty high on the list. With a bit of cajoling, I could probably make this happen.

4) Stay in Walla Walla. I’m really motivated to do this because it would allow me to be in the same place for a whole continuous year and a half (January 2012 until May 2013 when I graduate), which hasn’t happened since I left high school. As much as I’ve been really happy traveling the West and the world, it’s nice to settle down in one place for a while and get involved in organizations and projects there. If I did stay (and I almost certainly will for whatever part of the summer I’m not traveling during), I would want to get started on my thesis, put a lot of energy into being on the board of the Walla Walla co-op, read a ton of books and have an easy part-time job. Mostly, though, I would want to focus on my writing, which could take a number of forms. I’ve been seriously thinking about writing a book about my experiences working at a grocery store, because there is not yet a definitive food politics book about the grocery industry, the way there is for fast food (Fast Food Nation, Eric Schlosser), industrial agriculture (The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Michael Pollan), vegetarianism (Eating Animals, Jonathan Safer Foer), global food justice issues (Stuffed and Starved, Raj Patel) or the politics behind nutrition and food regulation (Food Politics, Marion Nestle). Writing could also potentially involve working on stories to freelance, getting an internship with the Walla Walla Union Bulliten or just blogging a lot about my experiences volunteering with cool organizations. Plus, I’ve never gotten to see the farmer’s market in its full glory during the middle of summer, and I think it would be really fun to try to eat 100% locally for the whole summer.

5) Backpack around South America or India with a friend. This would be conditional on being able to convince someone to come with me, since I don’t think I would enjoy traveling alone for longer than a week or two. Bonus points if my family is going to India anyway (#3).

6) Roadtrip around the US, preferably with a friend. The goal would be either filling in my states list, which would mean the Midwest or (better) the South, or filling in my National Parks list, which might involve more of the West that I love so dearly. This could be a precursor to #1 if I end up driving to the border instead of flying there. Really, I would rather drive. Planes suck, and the West is gorgeous.

7) Work on a farm in the US. After my first experience with WOOFing here in Ecuador, I’d love to see something a little closer to home too.

Right now, I’m leaning towards a combo of #1,2 and 4. Or possibly 1,3 and 4. Or just 1 and 4. The border has been calling me for a while, though, and I think it’s just something I really need to do. And really, besides that, I just want to relax and write something good enough to prove to myself that I can make this whole crazy plan to not ever have a real job work out.

Hacienda Ilitio: week one

I’ve completed my first (of two) weeks working on an Ecuadorian permaculture farm. As it turns out, my fears in the last post about starving to death were completely unfounded—this week has involved some of the best overeating I’ve ever done in my life. I’m spending the weekend in Baños, which is a super-touristy town in the Central Sierra region of Ecuador. Plans for tomorrow include hiking and some Spanish lessons, plus writing and working on my archive of Semester in the West journal entries, which I’m going to be putting up on the blog sometime soon.

I’m too tired to post anything philosophical about agriculture, so, in no particular order, here’s a list of stuff I’ve done this week:

1) Spent twenty-five hours harvesting oats by hand. As a result, I now have four slivers and three callouses on my hands, plus a ridiculous farmer’s tan.

2) Milked a cow, then drank the milk from said cow less than ten minutes later.

3) Witnessed a burro escape from its fenced-in field three times in the same day. This is the same burro that apparently tried to eat its own child, and is consequently in solitary confinement with three horses that seem to think the burro is an inferior creature. Needless to say, this is the saddest looking burro I’ve ever seen, and that’s saying something, because I love Winnie the Pooh.

4) Lived in the shadow of Mt. Cotopaxi, which is one of the most active volcanoes in the region, if not the world.

5) Eaten enough fried yucca and fried plantain to give at least three people heart attacks.

6) Baked bread without a recipe in a wood-burning oven.

7) Drank raw alpaca milk. Which is less fatty than cow’s milk, and consequently less delicious. But still. RAW FUCKING ALPACA MILK! So many foodie points.

8) Watched Sebastian, the owner/manager of the farm, make cheese from fresh milk. Then we got to take some of the non-aged cheese. Which basically tastes like if you took raw milk and then made it even more awesome by adding salt and stuff.

9) Seen quinoa growing in its native habitat. Quinoa is actually an incredibly gorgeous plant—bright red-pink flowery on really tall stalks.

10) Fallen in love. His name is Santiago. He’s very tall and handsome. I’ve been told that he’s half llama and half alpaca, but I’m still not clear on the difference between the two. Anyway, he’s white and gorgeous and I want to take him home with me.

Day one on the farm

When I signed up for two weeks of volunteering on a farm in the Ecuadorian highlands, I wasn’t exactly sure what I’d gotten myself into. I told myself I’d be sleeping outside, I’d be freezing, I’d be doing hard work all day, there wouldn’t be much food and I wouldn’t particularly enjoy it. I hoped it might be character-building and educational, but I wasn’t promising myself anything else.

As it turns out, Hacienda Ilitio is possibly the most gorgeous place I’ve ever been. It’s right in the shadow of Mt. Cotopaxi. There are fields and fields of grass, a herd of alpacas and burros, and some nice, sparsely furnished cabins with running water. We’re literally in the middle of nowhere, and I can go for long walks with mountains in the background and feel so incredibly pastoral that I don’t even mind the lack of internet.

Getting here was the most challenging thing I’ve ever done. Maybe challenging isn’t the best word, but I’ve never done anything else requiring as much blind faith in the goodwill and knowledge of other people, not to mention my Spanish skills. The directions I had for getting to the farm were essentially this: take a bus going towards Latacunga from Quito. You’ll go through a town called Lasso, and then there’s an intersection with a stoplight. Then after about a kilometer, there’s another intersection with no light that goes to another town. Get off the bus here, cross the highway and have a taxi take you up the road to the farm.

I figured as long as I didn’t screw up the getting off the bus part, I would be ok. I explained these directions to the bus assistant (not the driver, but the guy in charge of opening the door and collecting fares and such), who said he’d tell me when to get off. He did, in a place I suspected was too far down the road, but I listened to him. And thus, I found myself stranded on the side of a major highway in Ecuador with all my stuff and no idea where I was, nor how to get where I was going. After a five minute explanation to the police officer who (thank god) was stationed at the bus stop, he called me a cab, who arrived twenty minutes later and said he knew where the farm was. I got in the car with him and drove in what I thought was the completely opposite direction for almost a half hour, until magically, I arrived at the gates of Hacienda Ilitio. So now, although I have no idea where the hell I am, I am also here.

I’m cooking for myself for two weeks, and I suspect I’m going to lose a lot of weight, since all I packed was peanut butter, bread, jelly, lentils, quinoa, walnuts, Grape Nuts, oatmeal and dried beans. Plus, we’re over 10,000 feet above sea level and I’m going to be doing manual labor starting on Monday. However, the farm generously supplies volunteers with fresh milk and vegetables. So yeah, I had raw alpaca milk for dinner. Suck on that, foodies.

Off to Ecuador

I’m still figuring out the Deep Green thing, so I’ll post more about that when I get a chance to sort out my thoughts and write them down in a coherent fashion. I’ve been sort of preoccupied with the minor fact that I’M LEAVING FOR ECUADOR IN TWO DAYS. That’s like, really soon. So this is going to be my official goodbye entry. Of course, I’ll be updating in Ecuador a ton too.

I’ll be in Ecuador for four months on a study abroad program. The first two weeks, I’m working on a permaculture farm and wildlife refuge called the Hacienda Ilitio. I’ll spend two weeks taking care of animals, building fences, planting crops and doing a bunch of other manual labor that I’m not in shape to do at sea level, much less at 10,500 feet above sea level. This farm thing is not part of the program, so I get to travel there by myself, which involves finding a bus in Quito that goes to a fairly rural remote area and not getting lost somewhere in between. If I manage to survive two weeks without getting altitude sickness, starving to death (food is not provided) or acquiring an intestinal parasite, then I move on to the actual study abroad experience.

My study abroad program is focused on “comparative ecology and conservation”, which is a fancy way of saying that we get to go to a diverse group of gorgeous places, including the Galapagos Islands, and learn about how they’re being systematically destroyed and (maybe) how we can slow or stop that process. Naturally, I’ll be busy depressing everyone by pointing out that problems of degradation are systemic and necessary components of a larger industrial capitalist system, and that if we want to meaningfully address conservation, we should probably reconsider some of the systems that make it impossible.

Per usual, my biggest problem with packing has been deciding which books to bring. In general, I try to bring books that will enhance my experience in the country I’m going to. Part of this involves not bringing anything that’s likely to shake up the status quo in my brain too much. Illuminating or entertaining is fine, but anything that’s going to make me completely change my dietary habits or convince me overnight that the only way to fix the world is to start a violent revolution is generally out. Except that right now, I’m in the middle of reading a bunch of introductory anarchist books, which is sort of at odds with my usual rules. My final picks for the semester are:

2666—Roberto Bolano

Year 501: The Conquest Continues—Noam Chomsky

Of Love and Shadows—Isabel Allende

Post-Scarcity Anarchism—Murray Bookchin

Social Ecology and Communalism—Murray Bookchin

A  Neotropical Companion (required for the program)

Animal Factory—David Kirby

Anarchosyndicalism—Rudolf Rocker (I got a Spanish copy, so this is totally legit)

I have a bunch of Kindle books too, including some stuff by Emma Goldman and Peter Kropotkin. Plus a book about humor in Hitler’s Germany, which is going to be awesome. I think I’ll have a good amount to read, but not so much that I get overwhelmed and forget to experience Ecuador and learn from non-text sources.

I might post before I leave about some environmental/philosophical stuff, but if not, then I will see you all (my lovely loyal readers) in Ecuador!