Deep Green, part 1: two visions for the future

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Local isn't about the carbon footprint

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

An open letter to my future less-radical self

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

all my love,

Rachel

Derrick Jensen vs. Ayn Rand

I have an account on Library Thing, a site that lets you catalog, tag and manage your books. I was browsing through my library and decided to take a look at my author cloud, which is basically a weighted list of all the authors you own books by (more books means the author's name looks bigger). A lot of the huge names were favorite childhood authors--Orson Scott Card, JK Rowling, Amelia Atwater-Rhodes. But outside of that field, two of the biggest names were Derrick Jensen and Ayn Rand.

I cannot think of two people whose written works are more diametrically opposed. Derrick Jensen is an anti-civilization deep green activist who believes that we need to return to a level of technology and population closely resembling the Stone Age if we ever want to live sustainably on this planet. His books are incredibly lyrical, and link the pervasiveness of rape and child abuse in our society to deforestation, mining, climate change, imperialism and almost every other global problem you can think of. Reading Derrick brings you to your knees in tears because he shows you simultaneously how awful and abusive our culture is, and how beautiful the world is and can be if we have the courage to fight back.

And then there's Ayn Rand. Somewhat better known, Ayn's books are thick and pay homage to human genius in its many forms. Atlas Shrugged is her thousand-page ode to capitalism, an economic system which allows the brilliance of one man (say, someone who invents the lightbulb) to benefit the masses of humanity. The Fountainhead is her tribute to the individual going against the conventions of society and having the courage to be brilliant. And Anthem is a dystopian novel in an entirely collective world where one man and one woman rediscover human curiosity and the concept of self and run away together.

A lot of people have a lot of bad things to say about Ayn Rand, as they should. Her no-altruism, no-government world leaves a lot of people out, and she's completely incapable of understanding and addressing concepts like privilege, racism, sexism, learning disabilities and the like. All of the sex scenes in her books are either outright rape or distinctly rape-esque. She is the right of American intellectual discourse, taken to its logical conclusions and stripped bare of any pretense.

And what Ayn is for the right, Derrick is for the left. Environmentalists get accused of being anti-capitalist, anti-growth, anti-business and anti-technology all the time. Most of them awkwardly backpedal and retract or soften statements they've made, trying to find some compromise between two fundamentally irroconcileable systems. Derrick doesn't lie and he doesn't compromise. He draws his lines clearly and picks a side. The living health of the planet is more important than economic growth and production. Production is just another name for turning living things into dead things, and civilization is sustained only by widespread violence. Come over to the side of the living planet, and fight like your life depends on it, because it does.

I'm drawn to both of these stories, both of these worldviews. Obviously, I'm more in the Derrick camp than the Ayn one. I'm an environmentalist. I'm not that into capitalism, our culture, or really civilization itself. I'd rather we spent most of out time growing our own food and making clothes ourselves. I'd like to keep the Internet and Western medicine, and I'm not sure where all that fits in. But I like where Derrick is going. I want to be there.

Even given this, Ayn isn't wrong about everything. At its core, much of her writing is about the beauty of human curiosity and innovation. This is the oldest cultural myth of Western civilization, and I'm aware that it's problematic. The lone man bravely staking out new ground gets to conveniently ignore the workers who make his lightbulbs and build his railroad and all that. And more to the point, because of inherent inequalities in the world, some of those railroad workers and lightbulb factory employees could probably find the cure for cancer or something equally important if they weren't trapped in an economic system where they have no other options for work and can't have agency in their own lives. But even with those problems, I find something incredibly inspiring about the heights that the human imagination has reached to. We've built a transcontinental railroad, gone to the moon, mapped the human genome and invented the Internet. I think a lot of that is built on collaboration, but there have definitely been people throughout history who had a vision, an incredible mind, and the resources to go with it.

The problem with these two worldviews is that they can't coexist. I think Derrick is right about what needs to happen. We need to un-grow, depopulate, re-learn to take care of ourselves and our landbases and live much more simply than we do now. But the curiosity that had fueled Ayn Rand's work is something fundamental to human nature. People want to understand how the world around them works. They want to make an impression or a discovery that will change the course of history. That desire might be rooted in Western cultural conditioning. But human curiosity is universal. And curiosity is going to push future humans, even if they're living in sustainable earth-dwellings, to wonder about us. It's going to push them to rediscover the technologies we came up with. It's going to push them to lightbulbs, cars and computers. It's going to push them towards machine-based technology.

Reading these two authors, I've had to come to terms with many false beliefs that I've held. Derrick has gotten me mostly past the idea that we can somehow technologically engineer ourselves out of the violence and environmental destruction that fuels our economic growth. But Ayn has also gotten me over the idea that we will ever go back to a place where we don't have that drive to discover and develop. No matter how bad peak oil is or what happens to the planet, people will still have that curiosity.

I don't know what to do with this realization. It doesn't speak well for the future of the planet, or ultimately the human race. And it makes it so hard for me to pick a side. I know, feel and understand that my health is ultimately dependent on the land the sustains me--clean water, breathable air, healthy soil, functional ecosystems. I've slept under the stars for months at a time. I know what it is to feel completely at peace, and the only times I've ever felt that way was when there was nothing separating me from the stars. But I'm still seduced by the terrifying beauty of industry. Walking through the sixth-largest coal plant in the country, I was awestruck by the scale of human imagination. I find factories haunting and poetic. When I see smokestacks, I think of the end of civilization, but they look so beautiful that I want to sit there, transfixed, and watch the apocalypse unfold.

I exist, day in and day out, praying that there will never be a moment when my life is on the line, when I truly have to choose between the two.

A list of questions

Yesterday, I found myself sitting in Methods of Environmental Analysis (aka baby statistics and GIS). We were learning about chi-square tests, but I was in the middle of reading Endgame by Derrick Jensen, so I wasn't really feeling the abstract math thing. The basic premise of Endgame is that civilization is fundamentally anti-life and unsustainable, and that it would be impossible to maintain without pervasive, widespread violence. I've waited for a while to read this book, because it's the sort of thing you can't go into unless you've read a few of his other books and spent a lot of time thinking about our culture, the world and what sustainability really means.

But here I was, in class, and I find myself agreeing with his argument. Civilization is unsustainable and based on turning living things into dead things (this is called production, for all you econ majors out there). So, as someone who values life in most of its many forms, not just humans or rich humans, it seems like I have a moral obligation to end civilization.

That's a scary thought. I was thinking about what that would look like, what it would entail, how I could go about doing it and what we could replace civilization with if we ever get there. And I started making a list of questions, things I want to know and understand as I continue to figure out my role in the world and the fight for the living planet.

1. Do humans ever have the right to take the life of another living being for the sake of profit? Beyond killing to provide for immediate needs (ie. food), is it ever ok to build a dam or clearcut a forest?
2. What does a non-capitalist, non-exploitative economy look like? How do we incentivize good ideas in a non-capitalist system?
3. Is there any way to make human living sustainable and not based on killing living things without returning to the Stone Age?
4. How do we re-wild people? How do we convince them that this system isn't in their best interests without being condescending or paternalistic?
5. Could we develop closed-loop technology based on continual recycling of things that are already trash, so we could continue to have material goods without new resource extraction? Does the second law of thermodynamics make this physically impossible in the long run?
6. Should I support solar panels, wind power and electric cars now, knowing that ultimately, they're as unsustainable as coal and are just buying us more time?
7. How can I stop systematic violence effectively?
8. What do we eat? How do we grow it? How do we make up for the toxification of the total environment, the habitat degradation and soil erosion of the past centuries when we shift to completely local food production?
9. How can I know that I'm by far my happiest on Semester in the West, when I'm living outside and away from civilization, yet be reluctant to contemplate a future without television, electricity, central heating, iPods and the internet?
10. Is it enough for my life to be about food? Where is the line between seeing the problems I'm confronting as part of a much larger, destructive system and focusing on a small piece of the puzzle that I think I can actually change?

I don't know what to do with all of these questions, except to keep talking to people and trying to work out what I can do with my life. I'm ready to listen to the world around me, and I'm ready to think of change on a systematic, fundamental level. I'm ready to fight. And I hope that's enough to take me somewhere.

Seeing and not seeing

We're all blind, at least a bit. Our lives are so complicated, full of so many tiny intricate pieces interacting in different ways, and we'd go crazy if we were forced to look it in the eye, to comprehend the full magnitude of the systems that sustain us.

I can rail against sweatshops, coal plants, industrial agriculture, Wal-Mart, oil production in the Niger Delta or any number of other things destroying the planet. It's easy for someone to counter whatever I might say by pointing out the awful truths that govern our world. Sweatshops are horrible, but many pay better wages than other available jobs, and children working in them would likely starve or end up as prostitutes if they closed. Coal plants provide jobs in poor communities. Industrial agriculture is the only way to feed seven billion. Wal-Mart allows working class families to save money on consumer goods and provides millions of jobs. Oil production is necessary to continue our lifestyle.

These truths are where so much conventional wisdom about saving the planet fall flat. Lobbying the Gap to source their clothes from more responsible factories won't end a system where children have to choose between working twelve hour days or selling themselves to sex tourists (if that can even be called a choice). Eating local won't stop industrial monocrop agriculture from spreading to Africa, India and Latin America. Installing solar panels on your house won't make a coal plant close its doors, or give the people who work in one a job. Boycotting Wal-Mart or refusing to let one into your town won't stop the real minimum wage from sliding down, and it won't improve the life of a single child in Asia.

In the systems we've created--economic, social and political--we've made these things a necessity. Some people point to this to argue that environmentalists and labor activists are wrong. We need sweatshops, coal plants, pesticides, dams, aluminum smelters, deep-sea oil rigs and big box stores for our society to keep functioning and growing. The leftists argue back with half-truths, saying that we can push for reform. We focus on small targets and we don't see the big picture. We demonize Wal-Mart while ignoring Target, K-Mart and Fred Meyer. We argue for solar, but not against coal. We believe people want to change. We believe we can tweak the system and it will become transparent, fair and sustainable.

That's not how it works. These institutions are fundamental to the way we operate as a society. Change won't come gradually, and it won't come easily. Making conscious choices as a consumer is a worthwhile activity for personal awareness, but it won't change the system.

Every day, I wake up in the morning and choose not to see. I don't think about the people in the Niger Delta, where the equivalent of a BP Deepwater Horizon spill occurs every year, even though that oil feeds the trucks that bring me food. I don't think about the toxic chemicals used to process and dye the cotton my clothes are made out of. I don't think about the fact that while I have four years of college paid for, other students at Whitman will graduate with thousands in debt, other students from my high school class are in prison or single parents, and other young adults around the world work ten or twelve hour days in factories to make the furniture in my room. I don't think about the habitat that has been lost to development, agriculture, and the ever-expanding demands of the human race.

I don't say these things because I feel guilty. I didn't create these systems, and god knows I don't know how to change them. I say this because I'm angry. I'm angry that this is how our world is structured. I'm angry that women in Thailand get cancer from making laptops like the one I'm typing this on. I'm angry that my being a vegetarian for twelve years did nothing to end factory farming. I'm angry that I can be the most conscientious consumer in the world and it won't to a damn thing to improve the lives of the people, animals and ecosystems that buckle under the collective weight of first world demand.

We can't see this. We can't feel it or think about it, because if each of us understood the full magnitude of the systems supporting us, we would go crazy. And if each one of us felt what was wrong on a personal level--if our child got cancer from a chemical factory's abandoned waste, if our beloved forest was clearcut to make room to grow soy--we would fight back. But we can't see the whole picture, and we can't articulate the deep, unsettling feeling we have that something is terribly, terribly wrong.

I don't have an answer. I don't have ten simple things you can do to make a difference. I'm tired of pushing towards the center, talking about compromise, gradual progress and effortless changes. I want to fight, but I don't know how or where. I want to see, but I don't really want to know or understand, because I'm scared that there won't be anything I can do to fix it.