Semester in the West journal archive

Earlier this summer, when I was reading and thinking about environmental philosophy and deep green more, I also went back and re-read my journal from Semester in the West * and realized that I wrote a lot of good things over the course of the semester that I’d like to be out there with my name on them. To that end, I’ve typed up my journal and created an archive, which is now up on the blog, with entries backdated to reflect when I actually wrote them. In some cases, the entries aren’t word-for-word as they appear in my journal; rather, I used my journal text to expand on something brought up by my experiences. Where necessary, I’ve also prefaced each entry with information about where I was and what I was doing at the time to add context.

I’ve tagged all entries with SITW, which was the tag I used for all SITW blog entries published during the semester as well. If you only want to see the newly added journal entries, I’ve also used the tag SITW journal. If you’re interested in specific topics, some common themes are activism, grazing, climate change, environmental philosophy and nature writing.

If you don’t want to pore through three months of my rambling thoughts, here are the entries I think are the best, in chronological order:
• Wolves and ranchers (best summary of the wolf issue from a personal standpoint)
• Ecology scares me
• Camp life (best reflection on what's it's like to live outside)
• Managing nature
• Putting plastic squares on fences (best musing on conservation/environmental philosophy)
• Walking through canyonlands (best nature writing)
• Tracking 
• Climate nihilism (best thing about climate change, inspired by visiting a coal plant)
• Industrial solar in the desert
• End of the semester: this I believe (best summary of what I learned over the course of the semester)

I’m still working on revising and organizing my more polished Semester in the West writing, but when I finish that to my satisfaction, I’ll get it up here too. And at some point in the future, I’ll try to create a better record of all of the writing I’ve done for the Pio (Whitman’s newspaper) as well.

*For readers who don’t know me in real life or are unfamiliar, Semester in the West is a field program run by Whitman College, where I’m currently a junior. It takes twenty-one students on a semester-long road trip around the American West to study environmental issues, environmental politics, ecology and environmental writing. I participated in the program in the fall of 2010. It was possibly the coolest thing I’ve ever done.

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.

End of the semester: this I believe

camp: Johnston Wilderness Campus

Well, it’s the end of the semester and I feel compelled to wrap this up. There’s a lot I didn’t cover, I guess, in terms of day-to-day experiences, but I feel like I got most of the big idea s down. I have a long list of things to research and learn more about, and I doubt I’ll ever get through the reading list that’s been growing in my head all semester. Anyway, it seems appropriate to finish off the semester with a few lists. So, here they are.

things I believe:

Local solutions to problems are time-consuming and sometimes messy, but they’re probably the best way to solve a lot of environmental problems. For example, the utility-scale solar clusterfuck.

Each individual wolf has an intrinsic right to exist, but somehow, I have to be ok with killing them anyway.

Similarly, I don’t like forest management, but I’ve come to accept it as a necessary evil. Or, in the case of Kendall and the aspen, a necessary good.

I like ranchers, or at least Todd Nash, the Boises and Katie’s dad. I don’t mind subsidizing them, but I don’t believe any corporation should be able to graze on public lands.

I think I’m ok with utility-scale solar, and that scares me, because fundamentally, I don’t see how it’s different from a dam. And I thought I was opposed to dams. Though NGS seems like a compelling case for giving them a second look, and what kind of world do we live in that we have to make these choices in the first place?

Questions raised by big solar:

What do I value? What am I willing to sacrifice?

What do we destroy for PV?

How much water, and where?

Will we close coal plants, or just raise demand to meet capacity?

Do we care about the desert tortoise?

How urgent does climate change need to be before we sacrifice idealism?

Is my solution going to be my child’s environmental problem?

Someone needs to blow up Glen Canyon Dam. But really, I’m not sure I care about that anymore either.

Knowing a place—the way Craig does or the way Mary does—is a valuable skill.

Our government will never solve climate change, but people like John Wick and Nils Christofferson might.

I want the last chapter of Dead Pool to come true.

I believe everything I’ve written about NGS and the scale of our problem, but I still hope we might learn jujitsu fast enough to make it count.

I’m torn between two approaches to activism:

1) The responsibility of an activist is not to navigate oppressive systems with as much personal integrity as possible, it is to confront and dismantle those systems.

2) What matters most is how well you walk through the fire.

I know 1 is right, but 2 is so seductively beautiful.

I want to fight. Even if it’s too late. Especially if it’s too late.

Industrial solar 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: San Bernardino County, California

So yesterday afternoon we went to the Sierra Club’s Desert Committee meeting which was largely focused on renewable energy development on public lands. It’s a very interesting political situation—the national Sierra Club supports utility-scale solar in the Mojave, because climate change is a big enough problem that they’re willing to sacrifice. The California Sierra Club is opposed, and from what I saw at the meeting, a lot of their motivation is NIMBY related, but not necessarily wrong. So much infighting amongst the environmentalists there and so much anger in tone when addressing people on the same side. Maggie’s sociology-related theory is that that generation grew up wanting to stick it to the man and had to fight for recognition of environmental issues. Our generation grew up knowing the system was fucked—we didn’t have to realize it in college. We’re about dialogue and compromise, so we listen. I think it has a lot to do with politics too. Republicans are a right-wing party whose rhetoric is even further right (like Tea Party). Dems are centrist and talk center-left sometimes, but they mostly backpedal and capitulate. So no one’s even paying lip service to the far left, much less enacting policies that they support. And that leads to frustration.

So I don’t like their rhetoric, but I’m glad someone is fighting for the desert. I’m glad someone will be watchdogging any large-scale solar and wind projects that do get approved on public lands, because those corporations need to be held accountable with the same level of scrutiny we would apply to any other project. I worry about the precedent we set by allowing large utility companies to develop projects on public lands. I think I’m willing to sacrifice the desert tortoise for the greater good, but after talking to Jim Harvey this morning, I’m not convinced it’s necessary. Feed-in tariffs seem to make sense, though I really want a better knowledge of PV materials and manufacture before I start getting excited about rooftop solar. The Solar Done Right guy I talked to at the meeting said the Department of Energy was doing a cradle-to-grave analysis of PV vs. concentrated solar. God, I want to see that, and apparently they might not release it. Freedom of Information Act…

We also talked to Jim Harvey this morning. He made a pretty compelling case for doing feed-in tariffs and distributed generation rather than utility-scale solar on public lands. I still want to look into PV and also his claim that deserts sequester a ton of carbon and that benefit goes away with power installation. I find it disheartening that none of these new power facilities/installations—not the rooftop proliferation in Germany and not the large projects proposed in the Mojave—have actually closed any coal plants. And overall, I think environmentalists need to be more proactive about these sorts of issues. I love Alex (Wilderness Society dude)’s acronyms—Nowhere on Planet Earth (NOPE) and Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anything (BANANA). These are the new NIMBY, and we have to be more than that if we want to make progress.

I guess one of the things I’m wondering is if we accept that large utility-scale projects hurt the desert and that solar rooftop is a better solution, what is our best course, as activists and environmentalists? Do we acknowledge political reality and recognize that climate change is urgent even while feed-in tariffs are infeasible in a market dominated by big utilities? Or do we stall large projects and right the system, fight for the desert? I’m tempted to side with political reality, yet I know that if the project in question were Glen Canyon Dam or a nuclear plant, I’d right to the bitter, bloody end to keep it out of the desert. Maybe. Or would I? Maybe climate change is so serious that radioactive waste, flooded canyons and decimated salmon runs are worth it. Except we’re not closing any coal plants when we add all this solar and wind. And while that’s discouraging in terms of ever stabilizing our climate or having a future with pikas and Bangladesh, it does mean that we should do solar right the first time, even if it takes longer.

A feed-in tariff makes sense whether the utility scale stuff happens or not. So I want to look into that, into getting an initiative started to get that going in Washington. That seems like the perfect thing to bypass the state legislature with and go straight to the people, yet Jim seemed confused and taken aback when I suggested it. We’re not good at being proactive, which makes sense to an extent, because a lot of people get into activism by opposing something close to home, something where they never believed the corporation would take it that far. We fight and oppose, but we have trouble being proactive and finding good alternatives. We don’t recommend alternative sites, because everything is sacred. We don’t try to pass initiatives that would pave the way to a brighter future we imagine. We don’t go after coal plants. If Bill Gates shifted his entire foundation and fortune towards repowering the US, it would be done. We could close the coal plants and still guarantee all the employees their salaries for the next five years. We don’t have that kind of money and we’re used to seeing ourselves as underdogs with no real cards to play besides emotional appeal. But we’re past that. This problem goes beyond a hippie concern for trees and Gaia. So we need to use that lever and push for what we want, not just against what we don’t. And I’m serious about that initiative. You have to start somewhere.

Trash

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: San Bernardino County, California

First, the stuff from today while it’s fresh in my mind. This morning, we went to the community center in San Bernardino County, California, where they were collecting hazardous waste and having a market where people bring random stuff and sell it. I love the community interaction this fosters. I feel like so much of the excitement of going shopping is just finding something new, something you didn’t have before. And so much global resource consumption would be cut if American did this kind of stuff more instead of just buying new crap. I want to get involved in efforts like this—freecycling, dumpster diving, barter economies, local currencies and grassroots flea market type things. I think building these systems and methods of interaction is incredibly important and has the potential to be so much fun. There’s so much adventure in going to an open air market or digging through someone else’s trash, so much satisfaction when you find something worth having. Kids love discovery. Just have to get them when they’re young and they’ll be sold for life.

Hazardous waste fascinates me. And makes me want to be a chem major. It’s so strange that all medical waste is labeled a biohazard and disposed of by incinerating it. Even HIV-infected blood is harmless after a few hours in the open air. Burning plastics releases dioxin into the air, something much more pervasive and scary. And yet, we can’t stick used dressings in the normal trash. God, I want to design better plastics. Non-petroleum based substances that don’t contain BPA or any other endocrine disruptors, that don’t release dioxin or any other carcinogens, even when burned. I wonder how old the idea of hazardous waste is. Even waste isn’t that old—maybe a century, one and a half at the most. I’m impressed that they can recycle so much of it—I think he said 60-70%, including the electronics. I need to learn more about semiconductor manufacturing.

And it’s late and I’m exhausted, so more catch-up tomorrow.

Life lessons from the field

Semester in the West is coming to an end. We have less than two weeks left in the field before we start driving back to Whitman, then another two weeks at Whitman’s Johnston Wilderness Campus working on our podcasts and final epiphanies. After spending this much time in the field, I’ve learned some important life lessons. So, here’s a brief list of the most important things I’ve learned this semester.

1. Do not, under any circumstances, step on a cactus while wearing fleece booties. And if you do, make sure your first action after spending fifteen minutes painstakingly picking cactus spines out of your feet isn’t to put your bootie back on and then step on another cactus right next to your chair.

2. If you try to make chocolate chip cookie dough without butter or eggs and instead substitute applesauce and vegetable oil, your dough will form a pancake-like substance when cooked on a griddle and will taste mostly like apples with a hint of vanilla.

3. If it’s pouring rain and so windy you can’t set a tent up, your best recourse is to put your stuff under a tarp and have a dance party in a trailer while waiting out the storm. If you choose to do this, having beer and chips for dinner will be far easier than cooking. Traffic flare lights also work really well to illuminate the dance floor.

4. Swimming holes are great for feeling clean, but after the mineral residue in the water dries in your hair, you will still want a real shower.

5. The dedication a group of twenty-one people for doing daily ab workouts is surprisingly high, but will decline in the face of twelve-mile hikes or rainstorms.

6. Putting the internet in “green” mode (as opposed to work-only mode) will result in everyone trying to go on Facebook at the same time and will crash everything for the next half-hour. If you instead leave the internet in work-only mode all semester, everyone will check Facebook surreptitiously at random times, thus preserving the internet for everyone else to use.

7. All-you-can-eat pizza buffets are always a bad idea, no matter how nice the restaurant pretends to be. However, they are indispensible on ten hour driving days.

8. Rattlesnakes command a respect unrivaled by most animals you are likely to encounter in the desert. And even if you think you’ve gotten over your childhood fear of snakes, you’ll still want to keep a good distance.

9. Tolerance for spicy foods can be increased, but only to a point. Don’t order food with red chiles in New Mexico unless you mean business.

10. Beds are a really beautiful and underappreciated thing. And showers, while probably overrated in day-to-day life, are incomparably wonderful after two weeks of strenuous hiking in the desert.

Building habitat for birds

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: Roswell, New Mexico

Today, we saw birds in a wildlife refuge, where ponds are filled and drained each year to provide “natural” habitat for the migrating birds. I read the newsletter, which talked about how so many people were viewing the birds from an unsafe location on railroad tracks that the entire pond had to be closed for people’s safety. This all reminds me of a zoo, except that the birds are free to come and go. But it’s so controlled. So managed. So like Owens Lake. I wonder what the history is, if this is one of the restoration “wetlands” mandated by Congress as penance for bulldozing habitat to create another parking lot. Did this used to be a real wetland, without the drainages and surrounding fields of government-commissioned crops? And do we pay farmers to grow those crops because they’re what the birds want to eat or because the crops are in surplus and we’re trying to find as many uses as possible for them? I suppose I could’ve asked Paul or someone at the visitor’s center instead of just assuming that everything’s a conspiracy against nature and for farmers and agribusiness. But that wouldn’t be any fun.

I don’t mean to devalue the refuge for what it is—habitat for birds that need it. I’m glad we have protected areas and places for those birds to eat and hang out. Mike Prather understood the necessity of compromise better than anyone else we’ve met, and if he can see the “construction site” that is Owens Lake as a victory, then I can be grateful for man-made refuges. But it just seems to god-like. Here is nature. Here is our highway, our railroad, our thriving metropolis in the middle of the desert. So even as I accept that we grow cancerously, that we’ve spread out enough to make setting these places aside a necessity, I still wish it were otherwise.

Election night

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

Election night! And what a shitshow it is. Dems were down 42 house seats and 7 governorships when I went to bed. Murray will pull through, Joe Manchin got West Virginia (!), Rand Paul in Kentucky (crazy shit), Blanche Lincoln is getting her ass kicked and Tim Fucking Eyeman’s stupid anti-tax bullshit is winning as we vote to repeal taxes on soda and candy, not give schools money for energy efficiency and nor impose an income tax on people making more than $200,000 a year. We’ll keep the Senate, the House is fucked, redistricting will be a Republican wet dream and our government will continue to be center-right and full of crazy people. I’m comforted by the knowledge that even if Democrats controlled 535 seats in Congress and Obama was still in office, we wouldn’t be doing shit about climate change anyway.

I should mention Kendall* and aspen and climate change. How water is stored best by aspen, how they’re in decline for a number of reasons, many of which go back to climate change. How she said a lot of people in her forest don’t care about or even accept climate change, but if you start talking water shortages, they pay attention. I wish we could get people motivated about mitigation as easily as adaptation. The climate is changing and people see it. Show them problems and they’ll support solutions Ascribe causality to those problems and you’re a communist trying to destroy the American economy. So even for mitigation, we learn to be bilingual—green jobs, energy security, savings via conservation. This is our Esperanto. Mention habitat, polar bears, ocean acidification or taxing carbon and you become the enemy, hostile enough that the best response is to shoot first. And so it goes—locally, people see things and can talk about solving them, but nationally, James Infhoe will chair the House Committee on Energy and Whateverthefuck once Dems lose. And so the long defeat marches steadily on. Half the army has yet to see the cliff.

*Kendall Clark, Supervisor for Carson National Forest, who we met with.

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.

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