Regional, day five: talking to deer, crossing the river

This entry was originally written in my journal during a regional geology trip to West Texas from March 12-19, 2011. For the complete list of regional geo blog posts, click here.

day 5: Big Bend National Park

The Rio Grande smells like salt. Matthew says it might be from sulfates, maybe from agricultural runoff. The most polluted river in the country to separate us from Mexico. The macro is scenic—desert mountains, hills stretching for miles. It’s in the details that I start to see a story.

Across the river feels immediately different—it’s hotter, more humid and smells like horse poop. There’s trash strewn everywhere and dozens of trails leading everywhere, leading nowhere in particular. This is not the federally protected wild land that exists across the river. This is somewhere people live and work, out of necessity.

I cross back, stopping the middle to let the polluted waters rush past my legs. It’s not a ritual, not an absolution. It’s just water, mixed with past mistakes, with ambition and regret.

* * *

We hiked Emory Peak today—5.1 miles more or less straight towards heaven, then back down to Earth again. I saw three deer, stopped, watched, tried my best to talk to them. I stared one down, tried to tell it I meant no harm. It looked back at me, seemed a bit puzzled, on edge, on guard. Sometimes I wonder if it’s ok to tell them not to fear me. What if they make that mistake with another human? What if they trust me, keep trusting once I’ve learned to take care of myself, to hunt? Where will my allegiances lie then?

Deer have so much to teach me. I could barely make out the tracks. If I’d stayed for longer, I might have seen the bite marks on the shrub it was chewing on, the shrub I still don’t know the name of. If I’d been raised to see properly, I would have been able to see its tracks, to follow it, to talk to it.

How can I defend my landbase without knowing it intimately? I don’t want to be the biologist, the chemist, the naturalist, the geologist. I want to know the plants because I depend on them for food. I want the knowledge that is my birthright, the knowledge to take care of myself and give back to the land as it feeds me.

Regional, day four: crossing the border

This entry was originally written in my journal during a regional geology trip to West Texas from March 12-19, 2011. For the complete list of regional geo blog posts, click here.

day 4: Big Bend National Park, the Rio Grande and some unnamed hills just barely in Mexico
There is a camp across the river. It belongs to vagrants, Mexican cowboys, the desperately poor, the uncivilized who are aware of precisely what they’re missing. Empty cans strewn everywhere reflect either time or distance from the act of eating, show that if wind and weather did not spread detritus across the makeshift home, the weariness born of spending too much time trying to find a meal has. Maybe he—I feel certain that this belong to a he, or a they, not a she—is just a messy person by nature. Maybe there is no hidden meaning in the empty wine bottle, the canola oil (same label as mine, but in Spanish) sitting upright and half-gone, the empty bean can filled in with sand.

I cross the river, walk, invade, intrude, follow tracks, climb a hill, run back, run anywhere. I dream of kidnap, rape, abduction, becoming one of the desaparecidos. I picture men with guns surrounding me, motioning silently for me to come with them. I picture them as drug traffickers and American military, and I cannot for the life of me decide which one would scare me more.

Regional, day four: Boquillas del Carmen

This entry was originally written in my journal during a regional geology trip to West Texas from March 12-19, 2011. For the complete list of regional geo blog posts, click here.

day 4: in Big Bend National Park

Backstory: Big Bend National Park is right on the US-Mexico border—the Rio Grande, which runs through the park, is the official dividing line between the US and Mexico. Across the river, there’s a town in Mexico called Boquillas del Carmen. The people there used to make their living off of tourists from the park—they would take people across the river on horses and sell crafts and food to visitors. However, in 2002, the border was closed due to security concerns after 9/11, making all commerce between the town’s inhabitants and Americans across the river illegal.

Since the closure, most of the families have left, and the inhabitants are forced to leave crafts out on the trails around the Rio Grande and ask for donations, all while surrounded by signs instructing park visitors that buying anything from a Mexican national is a crime. The federal government has announced plans to re-open the border sometime soon.

While hiking in the park, I had a brief conversation with a man from the town named Felipe. This entry is based on that conversation.

* * *

I have no words to even adequately begin to apologize to the people of Boquillas del Carmen for the US’s idiotic, criminally insane culture and the security, immigration and anti-drug policies that come along with it.

And then if I really think about it, the list of people I need to apologize to stretched so far I can’t see the end anywhere in sight. I owe an apology to the indigenous communities here before me, to the descendants of black slaves who worked backbreaking days to amass wealth for my ancestors, to the people of the Niger Delta, to the women raped in the Congo because of civil unrest caused by the curse of having resources my country needs, to every salmon dead so I can charge my phone with cheap hydropower, to the natural communities that lived on the land my house is on, to people who starve to death or die of malaria because they can’t afford health care or food that costs 1/100th of what I’m willing to spend on a smoothie or another piece of clothing I don’t really need…

And I know guilt does no good. I know I didn’t create these systems. I know that focusing on the big picture is far more important, and that the most self-serving, awful thing those in power have done to keep us from fighting back is to convince us that our individual choices can somehow, magically, save the world.

But then someone looks you in the face, and says nothing about this. He doesn’t talk about capitalism, immigration policy or NAFTA. He looks at me, hand on his horse, and says simply, “No hay mucho trabajo.” Is it hard to survive? “Si, es dificil.” And that’s all. He seems uncomfortable when my questions get more general, when they touch on illegal people, on migrant farmworkers. Maybe it’s my poor Spanish, or maybe he’s just tired at the end of the day. Maybe it’s just that I have the luxury to sit around and daydream about bringing capitalism down, but he’s too busy dealing with its daily realities to help a white girl feel less guilty.

Regional, day two: tracking vs. science

This entry was originally written in my journal during a regional geology trip to West Texas from March 12-19, 2011. For the complete list of regional geo blog posts, click here.

day two: driving from El Paso

I found a coyote today. I saw tracks, a set of footprints telling a story, spelling out yesterday’s intention. Two sets of scat—one canine, dark, segmented with pointed ends and full of fur. One red, orange, with nut shells, seeds. A bit of fur in one. Looked like a coyote too. Why both there, why together? How old were they? Just how much of that story can I train myself to decipher if I work at it?

Science and tracking seem like convergent evolution at first. Tracking is knowledge applied out of necessity, deeply rooted in place. Science promises us the same precision, the same attention to detail, all for our insatiable curiosity, our desire to understand the world we live in. I want to be both, and sometimes they seem so similar. They’re about process and discovery, about getting intimate with dirt and plants and rock. But they’re also so fundamentally different.

Tracking demands humility because your very survival depends on the information you can wrest from the ground. It’s collaborative, about give and take. It’s a delicate dance between the animal, trying to remain hidden, and your very real need to find answers, to find food, to grasp whatever tiny details of information lie hidden in the dusty prints by the side of the road.

Science requires patience and coming to the natural world on its own terms, at least sometimes. But it’s born from curiosity, not necessity. It’s us above, trying to make sense of our world below. It’s the triumph of the human mind. It’s us knowing how to manage a forest but not remembering how to talk to the trees. There’s beauty in all that too, in the insatiable curiosity of the human mind, in our ability to decode natural laws and ascribe meaning to the rhythms and patterns of nature. But sometimes, I just want to be a tracker.

Regional, day one: civilization and peak oil

This entry was originally written in my journal during a regional geology trip to West Texas from March 12-19, 2011. For the complete list of regional geo blog posts, click here.

day one: flying into El Paso, Texas

Flying in looks like civilization, like creeping destruction, like our abusive conquest to impose order on a world too beaten down to resist. Square plots, prescribed Edens, green with life stolen from deep underground, from river choking with petrochemicals. Houses and houses and houses and they all look the same. At least they’re honest. I want to believe we can turn this around, but we’re all so invested in keeping the machine moving forward that three-quarters of us will never see the problem or understand how deep it goes, how rotten our civilization is. I want to believe that peak oil will be our unwelcome savior, an intervention when we most need it, forcing us to get clean, to break the habit, to once again live our lives as fully and humanly as we’re capable of, the way no Westerner has in recent memory. I pray for this, knowing that when we’re on the other side of the Hubbert curve, we’ll murder and rape and bomb each other into oblivion for every last sweet black drop. What the drug trade has done to Ciudad Juarez, to inner-city Los Angeles, oil will do to Western Civilization. I want to open my eyes and look my future full in the face, but I’m afraid that the clarity of reality will be too blinding for me to coexist with it. So I fly over, falling in and out of sleep, dreaming of place crashes, and I don’t look down anymore. I close my eyes and sleep.

Shameless self-promotion: read my latest article!

Ok, I promise I'm going to update soon with real and insightful musings about the food justice conference I went to last weekend, but until then, go here and check out my latest piece of journalism about undocumented students at Whitman.

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.

PETA, sex and vegetarianism

PETA has a long history of objectifying women in their ads. In addition to the charming billboard at left, they've been known to dress women up as chickens, pigs and other animals (always in bikinis) and leave them outside in cages. In one case, they made giant styrofoam trays like the grocery store meat ones and saran-wrapped bikini clad chicken women to them, supposedly to illustrate the evils of factory farming.

So I really shouldn't have been surprised when they came up with this. It's the casting video for their rejected Super Bowl commercial, featuring a bunch of conventionally attractive, skinny women in bikinis "playing" with vegetables.

I think the video speaks for itself, so I'm not going to spend a bunch of time ranting about objectifying women. Obviously the claim at the end, that "studies show vegetarians have better sex" is deeply flawed. Vegetarian are far more likely to be well-educated, liberal, feminists, health-conscious and a host of other things which are correlated with better sex lives, so implying that vegetarianism is somehow responsible for this is shaky as best.

Mostly, I'm angry about the way PETA chooses to promote their message. By focusing entirely on external reasons for being vegetarian, PETA does nothing to make people think critically about what they eat. Marketing vegetarianism as another way for women to lose weight plays on existing female insecurities about attractiveness and conventional beauty standards, and it does nothing to make people think about the problems with meat production. By blindly promoting vegetarianism without engaging in critical dialogue about our food system, PETA is making two unfounded assumptions: that being vegetarian is always better for the environment and animal welfare than eating meat, and that opting out of the system will somehow improve it.

These are both dangerously simplistic assumptions to make. There are many cases in which eating meat is sustainable and a good idea--when it's local and responsibly raised, when you're in an environment where herding has evolved over thousands of years and is better for the land than agriculture would be (eg. the Masai in Eastern Africa), when vegetarian food is grown with pesticides on land which was formerly rainforest  (eg. tofu in many cases). Even if being vegetarian is better in most cases, there's nothing sustainable about gardenburgers or any of the other processed, packaged fake meat products that so many vegetarians rely on for protein.

Even worse than this, though, is the idea that going vegetarian will change factory farming or the industrial food system. I'm not saying that acting conscientiously doesn't matter--there's personal value and discovery to be had in efforts to be aware about your own consumption. There's a reason I eat the way I do and try to buy used books, used clothes and not consume at levels that many American do. But with global meat consumption growing every year and the industry spending so much time marketing itself and convincing people to buy its products, people going vegetarian is not going to make a huge dent in the system. If you personally want to be vegetarian, go for it, and more power to you. But far more important than that personal choice is a choice to actively work towards ending factory farming. And that's really what PETA should be talking about.

Freedom to choose food

After almost two months of trying everything I could think of, I am finally off my school's required meal plan. Whitman requires students to be on a meal plan for two years, so this semester was going to be my last. Our plans cost $2620 per semester for the cheapest option, and for that amount, you get either 21 meals a week, or 14 meals a week plus $150 "Flex dollars" which can be spent on individually priced items in our cafe. Most people can't eat 21 meals a week, so they pick the second plan, and if you do the math on it, it works out to $11.27 per meal.

My reasons for wanting to be off the plan were numerous. Obviously, it's absurdly expensive. Beyond that, though, it's incredibly difficult to be a vegetarian who doesn't eat soy-based products and tries to avoid processed carbs (eg. pasta). You're going to end up eating a lot of plain black beans and salad bar stuff. And, I love milk and meat, and I wanted to be able to eat them without spending half of my wages from Safeway on raw milk (which costs $5.50 for a half gallon over here). And my schedule is such that trying to structure my life around dining hall hours is really stressful. I work on weekends during brunch most of the time. I have classes that overlap with most of the dinner hour. I'm busy from 11am-4pm solid on Mondays, so I can't really grab lunch. Feeding myself last year was a complex task involving three days advance notice and lots of Tupperware to get me through my weekend shifts at work.

I didn't want to petition to be off the plan, because I've heard horror stories from other people who have tried. Bon Appetit, the company Whitman contracts with for food, is absurdly invested in their image as a good-doing, sustainable, accommodating company, and they want to make money. It's far better for them if they can work with you to provide for your needs while keeping you on the meal plan. I've heard of them allowing students to take raw ingredients and cook for themselves, or specially preparing meals for students with very specific medical conditions, rather than letting them off. Based on talking to friends, the only cases where students seemed to have been successful in petitioning were based on completely false grounds. One made up a psychological condition where he couldn't let anyone else touch his food; someone else made up a gastrointestinal problem and got a doctor's note for it.

I didn't want to resort to lying, so as my options narrowed, I decided to petition on honest grounds. I told them that meat and dairy are important parts of my diet, and that the only ranch I feel comfortable eating meat from is Thundering Hooves. I told them I only drink local, grass-fed milk, and that my milk is unpasteurized whenever possible. I was told by the Bon Appetit staff person whose job it is to deal with special requests that they made efforts to get Country Fed Natural Beef from Eastern Oregon, and I explained to her my objections to public lands ranching. I was told that most people who've petitioned successfully had religious grounds. I told her that the reasons I eat what I do are rooted in a ethical framework that I believe as deeply and take as seriously as most people take their religion, and that the fact that I didn't have 3000 years of tradition or millions of other followers behind me shouldn't make my beliefs any less valid. I was told that the college works to accommodate special requests, but that they can't do a perfect job with everyone. I said that I understood, and I didn't expect them to provide these foods specially for me, but that the college is obviously willing to accommodate some special requests (vegetarians and vegans), and that my requests were no less valid, just less common.

And I got her to admit that Bon Appetit was unable to provide for my dietary requirements. The next day, I got an email from the Residence Life office informing me that my petition to be off the meal plan had been approved.

I was so happy that this actually worked, especially after so many people said no to me for different reasons or told me that trying to petition on ethical food grounds would never work. I firmly believe that everyone should have the right and ability to control what they eat, and I think that interacting with Walla Walla's incredibly diverse food system is a crucial component of my education. I work at Safeway, volunteer at the co-op, write articles about food banks and stay up until 2am on the weekend talking about food justice.

Of course, this whole experience has also served to underscore how privileged I am to be able to make these choices for myself. I feel better about what I eat now than I have for most of my life, but the only reason I'm able to do this is because I'm a) absurdly conscientious of the impacts food systems have and b) bankrolled by my parents. And that's the crucial problem with food. You shouldn't need a ton of money or a degree in environmental studies to know what to eat. You shouldn't have to be a white, upper-middle class college student to have access to good, healthy food. You shouldn't be able to buy factory-farmed milk for $2.19 a gallon in the grocery store while cows, soil, agricultural workers, American taxpayers and streams pay the true cost. Meanwhile, real milk that doesn't externalize these costs is $6.50 a gallon at the co-op, putting it out of almost everyone's price range. If you want it unpasteurized, the cost goes up to $11.

So it's great that I can cook for myself and keep learning about food. It's great that I can support the co-op and tell everyone who comes through my line at Safeway that they should stop buying our organic milk and go to the co-op instead. It's great that I'm surrounded by people who understand that the industrial food system is killing people, land, living beings and the planet as a whole. But it's not enough. It never will be.

I don't know what a truly sustainable food system would look like. It would involve a lot more gardens. Monsanto and Safeway wouldn't exist. Most people would produce some or all of their own food. Washingtonians wouldn't eat oranges or bananas, and people living in Utah and Nevada probably wouldn't eat much beef. People would spend more time feeding themselves and their families. Food would taste better, be better for you and involve a lot more work. People wouldn't go hungry. Agricultural subsidies wouldn't exist. Organic permaculture would be standard, and Union Carbide wouldn't make pesticides anymore. We wouldn't have a giant dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico because of chemical runoff from fields. Pregnant women would be able to drink the water in Wallula, Washington. People wouldn't live in Phoenix, at least not in the numbers they do now. We wouldn't overpump our goundwater to grow wheat and alfalfa. Everyone would eat meat, and everyone would eat less.

I have no idea how to get there. But that's where I'm headed, with as many crazy life-loving, tree-hugging, anti-industrial capitalist people as I can drag along with me.

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.