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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Letter to a human 10,000 years from now

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

camp: Back of Beyond, the Known Universe, Utah

Dear person ten thousand years from now,

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

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

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

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

love,

Rachel

Pretending to be old

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

camp: Back of Beyond, the Known Universe, Utah

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tracking in the desert

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

camp: Back of Beyond, the Known Universe, Utah

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

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

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

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

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

Walking through canyonlands

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

camp: Back of Beyond, the Known Universe, Utah

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

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

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

We can't solve climate change

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

camp: Back of Beyond, the Known Universe, Utah

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

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

My food podcast

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

camp: Paonia, Colorado


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