Friendship in a post-civilization world

For the next three weeks, I’m living in the Intag cloud forest region of Ecuador. The area is dotted with tiny pueblos which are tucked into valleys and nestled on top of ridges. The roads here are dirt and cobblestone, and they wind up and down hills through a green mosaic of forest and small agricultural plantations. I’m living with a family in Peñaherrera (population about 150 families) and commuting 20 minutes each day by overcrowded bus or motorcycle to Apuela, another small town where the regional newspaper I’m working for is based.

This year, I’ve spent a lot of time in places where life runs a lot slower than my usual mile-a-minute pace. When left to my own devices, I will triple-book myself from 8am-10pm, schedule conversations with friends to make sure I have time to see them, have sixteen windows open on my browser and spend the bulk of my day trying to get as much out of every second as I possibly can (that or watching stuff on Netflix). In Ghana, I got used to waiting for hours for people to show up for interviews in their villages because they were out farming or couldn’t catch a ride or just didn’t feel like showing up on time. Every night, I went home to a house with no TV, no internet and nothing much to do except talk to my dad, attempt to cook, or read. My first two weeks in Ecuador I was on a farm in the middle of nowhere—no Internet, no TV, no radio, no cell reception and nothing to do after work except read and talk to the other volunteers. Now, I’m in a similar situation. It looks like I’ll be getting home around 4pm everyday, and while there are ample TVs here and internet cafés close by, there’s still not really anything to do in the Western sense of the term (no movie theaters, bowling alleys, bars, cultural attractions, etc.) Mostly, it seems like people play volleyball, watch TV and sit around and talk to each other.

Spending time in places like this has made me think about the nature of my friendships. With casual friends, I do many of the same things people seem to do in rural Ecuador. We watch movies together, sit around chatting about what we did today, maybe go shopping or grab a meal. With my closest friends, though, I mostly share ideas with them. Sure, we hang out and waste time together, but my closest friendships are the ones where we stay up until all hours of the night discussing Occupy Wall Street, the border and the socioeconomic factors which create food deserts. Mostly, we talk about the world—what’s going on, what’s wrong with everything and how we might go about fixing it.

In my ideal world, communities would be a lot more local than they are now. People would spend a lot more time interacting with their neighbors, a lot more time doing things like taking care of community gardens and a lot less time online. In some versions of the future, there is no internet—post-gridcrash, we all go back to being people living in the rural Third World, with no power, little connection to the outside world and a radically local lifestyle. This is how humans have lived for thousands of years, for the majority of human history. And it’s occurred to me that in this world, I have no idea what a friendship looks like. If the world were such that there weren’t absurd problems to try and solve, or if I was living so locally and off-grid that I had no idea what was going on on other continents, I have no idea what I would do with my friends.

In many ways, the Ghanaian villages I visited this summer and the Ecuadorian cloud forest where I’m living now seem like a window into this world. Here, people seem to form relationships based more on proximity than anything else. You know the people you grow up near, because they’re close to you. Obviously, there are people you get along with better than others, and you gravitate towards them. People aren’t disconnected from the outside world by any means—Intag is a hotbed of environmental activism on issues ranging from deforestation to water pollution caused by mining. But most people here don’t seem to spend their free time discussing the philisophical implications of Occupy Wall Street imbracing an explicitly nonviolent strategy, for example. They mostly spend it being normal people.

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about what the end of civilization (or at least a transition to a radically localized economy) would look like in economic, political and environmental terms. I’ve thought a lot about big picture things, how we would get food and energy, how democracies would function. But it’s interesting to think about the more personal—not just that my friends might be very different people, but that the entire nature of friendship might change too. I always think of things like types of food or manners of greeting people when asked to describe cultural differences. It’s kind of an exciting notion that something as basic as friendship isn’t a constant either. 

Justified murder and the ethics of "the greater good"

Is it ever ok to kill another human being?

This is one of the oldest and trickiest moral questions in the universe. Most people will say that yes, under certain circumstances, the taking of human life is justified. The most common cases where people are willing to accept killing seem to be self-defense, war and the death penalty (this one seems to mostly apply to Americans). Some people will go further, and some people are opposed to any type of killing. But the vast majority of humans seem to recognize that under certain circumstances, the taking of human life might be the lesser of two evils.

Even in situations where we might personally feel uncomfortable justifying murder, most of us can sympathize with the motivations of murderers. In both high school and college, I had classes where we read Beloved. In the book, Sethe (an escaped slave) kills her infant daughter to keep her from being sent back into slavery when slavecatchers come looking for the family. Most of the students discussing the book felt that in the same situation, we probably wouldn’t have had the guts to kill our children. A few people said that Sethe’s actions were morally wrong. But almost everyone sympathized with her motivations. The popular author Jodi Picoult (author of My Sister’s Keeper, among other things) has written several books whose plot basically revolves around unusual murder cases—the husband who smothers his wife with a pillow because she’s dying of cancer and they both agree that it would be easier to have her die quickly at home than suffer first; the teenage couple so entwined that when Emily gets depressed and wants to end her life but doesn’t have the courage to do it, her boyfriend pulls the trigger for her because he can’t bear to see her suffer anymore. Dexter is a popular TV show which revolves around a man who can’t control his impulse to kill, so he channels it by killing other serial killers. The idea of “moral” murder runs deep in our popular culture.

To me, the ethics of murder get most interesting when you’re talking about preventing a greater wrong. Most people would agree that if we had a time machine, it would be a good idea to go back in time and shoot Hitler in the face. But beyond that, the ethics get more complicated. I want to be an activist, and I’m not inherently nonviolent in my ideology. I believe that violence is justified in defense of human rights when other nonviolent measures have been exhausted. This might sound like a radical statement in this day and age, but I think it’s really just a question of degrees. Ask almost any American today if they believe that slaves fighting back against their masters were justified in killing them, and you’ll get a yes. Ask the same question about indigenous people in the Amazon killing oil company representatives who refuse to leave and refuse to stop polluting their land and destroying their way of life, and you’ll get a much wider spectrum of answers. (I’m still undecided on this one, by the way.) I once read a book which addressed the age-old question of what you would do if you knew you only had a week to live. The woman writing said she had a friend who had a simple answer. She wouldn’t go base jumping or spend time with loved ones. She would hunt down the men who had raped the people she cared about, and she would kill them one by one. I can’t say I’d do the same, but at the same time, I can’t really argue with her motivation. I’ve never been raped, and to my knowledge, neither have any of my close friends. If I were in her position, though, I imagine I would feel similarly.

Like many people, I think moral rightness should trump legality. What I mean by that is that if there are laws which are clearly wrong or immoral, it’s an obligation for responsible citizens to oppose them. Most social change in the US has come about through this premise—slave revolts, lunch counter sit-ins, draft card burning, workers going on strike before it was legal. If the Keystone XL pipeline does get approved, I’m counting on other activists to join me in stopping its construction, by any means necessary. I believe that the importance of having a livable planet trumps any laws which guarantee property rights to people building the pipeline. Likewise, if Ecuador decides to open Yasuní National Park for oil extraction, I’m hoping that the communities that live there will fight back, both legally and literally, if necessary.

The morality-over-legality idea is what inspires many vigilante groups, as well as activists willing to use illegal tactics. It’s the reason the Minutemen are patrolling the US’s southern border to keep out illegal immigrants and, in some cases, poisoning water left out in the desert to keep people from dying of dehydration. It’s the reason the Animal Liberation Front is willing to bomb animal research labs and rescue animals from slaughterhouses. Usually, I’m inspired by actions like this. I respect the convictions of people who believe enough in what they’re doing that they’re willing to go to jail for their ideals, even if I don’t personally agree with their tactics. I’m inspired by the idea of being on the right side of history later even if you’re on the wrong side of the law now.

But there’s one increasingly common action being taken by activists in the US that makes it very hard for me to agree with the morality-over-legality idea. For people who engage in this action, it’s the only way they have to stop a much greater evil. They’re at the fringes of a large movement, and while many within that movement claim to renounce the violence of their tactics, many are also secretly grateful that some people are willing to stand behind their convictions.

I’m referring, of course, to the pro-life/anti-abortion activists who have murdered abortion providers. The most recent inductee into this crowd was Scott Roeder, who shot Dr. George Tiller in church in 2009. Dr. Tiller was one of three doctors in the United States who performed late-term, third trimester abortions, almost entirely to save women’s lives or because the fetuses had debilitating disorders which would cause them to die shortly after birth. Roeder was a long-time anti-abortion advocate, and he accomplished in one day what Operation Rescue and all the rest of the non-radical activists on his side hadn’t been able to do in thirty years of protest and lawsuits—he shut down Tiller’s clinic.

I can’t really argue with Roeder’s tactics. I don’t believe in any kind of eye-for-an-eye justice—I’m talking about murder as a tactic to prevent further loss of life in a literal, immediate sense. If you believe that abortion is wrongfully killing a human life, if you believe that it’s murder, and you know that the law isn’t on your side, you don’t have a lot of options. Decades of lobbying hasn’t made abortion illegal (though it hasn’t made it dramatically less accessible, especially to low-income women). And when you’re talking about murder, you don’t really want to stand around and wait for the state to do the right thing. You want to stop it by any means necessary. I partially understand this conviction, because I know that if abortion were illegal, I’d drop everything I was doing to go to medical school so I could set up a safe and illegal abortion clinic. That’s how strongly I feel about the importance of access to reproductive healthcare.

The pro-choice crowd wants people like Roeder to be classified as domestic terrorists, something the US government has been unwilling to do. Beyond their support for access to abortion, pro-choicers argue that part of living in a civil society is obeying its laws, whether you agree with them personally or not. Mostly, I think this premise is true. You don’t run red lights even if you want to, because you respect that other people need to get places in an orderly fashion too. You pay your taxes which go to fund all kinds of shit you don’t agree with (wars, abstinence-only education, executions, food stamps, the US Department of Education), regardless of your political affiliation. But when morality gets introduced into the equation, it gets harder to make this argument. Civil society, sure, but you don’t stand by while sentient beings are being murdered. You refuse to be drafted even if it means getting arrested, you break into labs to free monkeys being tortured, or you murder abortion providers to keep them from killing.

At the end of the day, my convictions that doing right should be our highest calling trump my belief in the importance of civil society. This puts me in an uncomfortable position with people like Roeder, because holding this position means saying that I don’t disagree with his tactics, only the beliefs that motivated them. One of the points of laws is that they represent societal norms. They protect all of us by not allowing one person to impose their view of morality on the rest of us, at least most of the time. But still, I can’t make the argument that following laws we know to be morally wrong is the right thing to do. Morality has always been and will always be subjective. There are often no easy answers. One person’s guerilla is another person’s freedom fighter, and one person’s domestic terrorist is another person’s moral crusader. And while I can hope that those who choose to take the law into their own hands share my conceptions of what is moral, I can’t really fault those who disagree with me for doing the same.

Rachel's official Occupy Wall Street roundup

I've been following the Occupy Wall Street protests as much as I can from Ecuador, and I'm completely in love. So I thought I'd take a minute to share my favorite articles, photos, etc. from the various occupations going on around the country:

Steve Fake sums up the origins of Occupy Wall Street and the issues that have led to many people to protest.

The official declaration of the occupation of New York City.

The Nation takes on OWS's refusal to align itself with the Democrats and the White House, and why that's crucially important for the movement. And another article speaks about female protesters and how OWS culture has evolved to encourage diverse voices to speak up.

Slovakian philosopher and leftist intellectual Slavoj Zizek makes an awesome speech at Zucotti Park.

Literally the best protest sign I've ever seen, anywhere.

Average Americans share their stories over at We Are the 99%, and n+1 explains what we should make of this self-identification.

Over at Feministing, an awesome piece on how OWS has taught average white Americans something people of color have known for a long time: the police aren't there to keep you safe.

One of the best arrest photos I've seen. Great photography, great storytelling, and absolutely heartwrenching.

Feminist and activist Naomi Wolf describes getting arrested in New York.

Mother Jones calls for Occupy Earth, in solidarity with the planet the 1% are destroying.

Barbara Ehrenreich, author of Nickel and Dimed, on why homelessness is becoming an OWS issue.

The New York Times on what Wall Street thinks of the protesters in private.

Some reflections on the role violence has played in protests in the US, and how this might apply to OWS.

And the deep green crowd calls for escalation to literally, not metaphorically, stop the 1%.


Happy reading, everyone!

I am (almost) the 1%

Note: As sometimes happens when privileged white people try to write about class issues, it’s entirely possible I’m offending people here. If so, I apologize sincerely. If you take issue with anything I’ve written here, I’d appreciate knowing what and why so I can correct it in future discussions and thoughts that I have.

On a political level, I’m 100% behind Occupy Wall Street. I flip back and forth between being an anarchist depending on the day, but even old liberal me knows that the level of class inequality and lack of opportunity in this country have gotten absurd. I’m angry at Wall Street, especially the few on it who consciously steered us in this direction knowing they’d be bailed out if their gambles didn’t pay off (looking at you, Goldman Sachs). I’m angry at our government for not doing anything to stop them (not that I expected better). I’m angry at the absurdity of the debate over repealing the Bush tax cuts. I’m angry because of the number of good, intelligent, hardworking people I know who are stuck working dead-end jobs for next to nothing just to pay the bills.

On a personal level, it’s harder for me to pin down my feelings about Occupy Wall Street. As the movement has encouraged people to come forward and share stories under the theme “We Are the 99%”, I’ve taken a look at my own circumstances in life. Technically, I am part of the 99%. My family doesn’t rake in millions of dollars a year, I don’t have a trust fund, and I will have to work a real job in the real world to support myself once I get out of college. But that’s where my similarities with most of the 99% end. I will graduate from a good, private university next year with no debt and no student loans. That simple fact sets me apart from so many of the protest signs I’ve seen, from people who graduated with thousands in debt and nothing to show for it. It sets me even further apart from those who never had the means or the opportunity to go to college. And I’m just talking in the US. If you want to go global, in a world where a billion people survive on a dollar a day or less, I am the 1%.

The fact that my life has been extraordinarily privileged doesn’t stop me from worrying about the economy. After my dad told me and my brother that it would be a good idea to invest our life savings in the stock market in April of 2007, part of me was terrified to watch my money evaporate into thin air as bank after bank failed or got restructured. Another part of me knew that if seventeen-year-old me had $3000 to invest in the stock market, with reasonable certainty that I wouldn’t need to touch that money for ten or so years, I had nothing to worry about.

This pattern intensified once I got to college. Freshman year, I worked 15-20 hour weeks at Safeway for much of spring semester, while I had two smaller jobs back on campus. I’m still not exactly sure why I felt compelled to do this, but I think it was equal parts terror and guilt. Watching capitalism nearly collapse when I was coming of age made a powerful impression on me, and I’m guessing the effects of the financial crash will be with me my whole life. I saw gas prices rising, friends’ parents being laid off and my wages staying flat. More than anything, I saw that doing everything right—having a college degree, acquiring useful skills, building a career—didn’t guarantee you stability, much less prosperity. I saw how thin the line between success and destitution can be. And I saw that in spite of my family’s fortunate circumstances, I couldn’t count on their success to carry me through life. I’d always wanted to make my own way in the world, but for the first time, I felt that the safety net provided by my family might be more illusory than I’d ever thought possible. So I resolved to work as much as I could to save money in case I needed it.

The guilt part fed off of this. I would talk to friends at college, and so many of them would mention their financial aid packages, the loans they had to take out, the work-study jobs they had to have. I didn’t. I not only had parents who could afford to foot the bill, but almost half of my tuition covered by merit scholarships (which I’ve become increasingly convinced are not too far from a form of upward wealth redistribution). And while making money was certainly my main motivation for working so much, part of me wanted to know what it’s like to try to go to college full time while having an actual job, not one of the cushy campus ones where you water the plants in the science building.

Here’s (shockingly) what I found out: it’s hard. You consider not taking certain classes because they’d interfere with your ability to be available in the evenings for work. You tell your manager that you absolutely cannot work more than 15 hours a week, and you get scheduled for 24 one week and told that there’s nothing else they can do because someone just quit. You try not to let your profs know that you’re working, try not to use it as an excuse. You have to be incredibly on top of all of your homework, because you need to request days off two weeks in advance and if you forget, you end up getting off work at 11pm when you have a test at 8am the next morning that you still need to study for. You skip meals because you work 4-9 shifts, campus dining halls only serve from 5-9, and you don’t want to spend the extra money to buy dinner when you’ve already paid $2600 for a meal plan. You work 9am-6pm shifts and come home so exhausted from standing on your feet all day and so stressed thinking about all the work you didn’t do that you just want to sit on your bed and cry. You choose between working weeknights and worrying about homework you barely have time to finish or working weekends and having to turn down invitations to parties because you work the 6am shift on Saturday morning. And for all of this, you get paid $8.67 an hour, which works out to $8 after taxes. And then you pay union dues ($50 a month). Last semester, I calculated what happens if you’re trying to pay for college. To pay one semester of Whitman tuition with a minimum-wage job (assuming you pay no taxes or union dues), you would have to work 55 40-hour workweeks. In other words, you could work at Safeway full time for a year and still be about a thousand dollars short of one semester of college tuition.

I don’t mean to suggest that my experience was miserable. I was bolstered considerably by having $100-150 in extra spending money per week, and for me, work was more of a sociological experiment than anyone else. I loved talking to people, hearing their life stories, seeing who bought what and why. Mostly, work was a daily reminder of just how privileged I am. I had coworkers dealing with far more absurd schooling situations than me—people going to full time night school at the local community college while regularly putting in 25 and 30 hour weeks. Walla Walla isn’t exactly a wealthy area, and I would estimate about a quarter of my customers were on food stamps. I learned most of what I know about food politics and realistic food choices for people living in poverty during my year and a half standing behind a checkstand, and for that, I am eternally grateful to everyone who came through my line. And during this time, I was constantly hyper-aware of class—my own privilege, my guilt, and the relative and absolute poverty that so many people I interacted with lived in.

Perhaps most interesting were my interactions with other Whitman students. Some would come in chatting with friends about certain classes or profs, and I would often chime in. More often than not, the students would do a double-take, during which I imagine they had to re-program their brain to conceive of the possibility of a Whitman student working a minimum-wage job off campus. I imagine many of them assumed that this was something I had to do to afford college, and perhaps some of them felt uncomfortable being reminded of the fact that not everyone is as fortunate as they are. I had similar experiences when Whitties would come in and pay for their food with food stamps—I had to remind myself that it’s possible to go to a good liberal arts school and not be able to afford to eat. It sounds stupidly obvious now, but there’s a big difference between knowing something intellectually and seeing it right in front of you.

So now people are occupying all over the country, and most of them have personal stories of economic hardship. And when I read their handmade signs explaining why they’re out in the street, it feels like seeing Whitman students pay for their groceries with food stamps. These people are my community, and I agree with them completely. But we live in different worlds. They have student loans. I have $6000 invested in the stock market and no debt. Their houses are in foreclosure. My family owns our house outright, and it’s not exactly a small house.

I would still like to think I have more in common with “average Americans” (whatever that means) than the true 1%, the executives of giant corporations and high-profile Wall Street traders who rake in millions of dollars a year. In spite of all of my privilege, I don’t feel that I have a secure future. I have so little faith that the economy is going to start working for average people, and my post-grad job prospects seem like they’re going to rely on luck and chance as much as my own skills and ambitions. I feel like if anyone should feel secure, it’s me, and I can’t decide if that means that I’m just paranoid and unaware of just how privileged I am, or if it’s a sign of the depth of our economic problems. Neither option is really a good one.

Occupy Wall Street is also giving me a good reminder. Yes, I care about labor issues and economic inequality, but from my position of power, I’m not the best-qualified person to address these issues. Reading about the rules that have evolved around OWS General Assemblies, I was incredibly inspired. I love the idea that people moderate lines and underrepresented groups (women and people of color) get to go to the front because their voices need to be heard. I love the step up/step back idea, which encourages people who generally dominate conversations to give other people a chance to share. I want, more than anything right now, to come home from Ecuador for a few days just to get a chance to see what OWS actually looks like. But being this far away has also made me realize that I’m one of the voices that needs to step back. Rich white liberals have been going on about income inequality for years now, writing articles, citing statistics and doing interviews. It’s time to cut out the middleman and let the people speak for themselves.

Turtles, time and something like silence

It’s almost one in the morning when I see my first turtle. She’s a leatherback, black and almost six feet long. She moves up the beach in the dark, slowly, as if carrying a great burden. Turning her massive body, back feet now facing us, she begins to dig. There’s sand flying everywhere, and we move to avoid it, trying to be quiet. There are six of us staring at her, but she seems almost oblivious to our presence. She’s focused on the task at hand. With the hole dug, she stands over it and lets her eggs drop in. They come in bursts, slimy and about the size of golf balls, falling into the sand, plopping into the nest she’s made. As she lets them go, tears stream down her face. Locals say that she’s crying at the thought of being separated from her babies. Science says she’s shedding salt from her body. There’s so much gravity in the air, so much at stake that I want to believe she feels what’s going on. In a world where fewer and fewer turtles are able to survive long enough to complete the cycle she’s beginning tonight, her presence here is beautiful, awe-inspiring, a tale of triumph. And yet the odds are stacked against her. I’m thirteen, only in eighth grade, but something in her eyes speaks to a much older part of me. I feel the emergency of the situation, the sad truth that the actions of my species are driving her kind to extinction. I see the same recognition in her tears, not directed at me, but a general sense of weariness, of someone who’s lived too long and watched the world grow less familiar, less safe. I’m afraid to move, afraid to disturb something much older and more profound than I will ever be. We all watch in silence as she covers her progeny in sand and heads back towards the ocean. And then the stillness of the moment is gone. Walkie-talkies crackle, informing others that we’ve got a turtle nest. And our work begins.

This night, I’m at a turtle station in Costa Rica. The station exists because leatherbacks and other sea turtles are under assault on multiple fronts. Habitat loss and pollution are disrupting their lives in the ocean. Human development and construction threaten the beaches where they lay their eggs. Hatchlings are confronted with a loud, confusing world upon their emergence from the safety of an eggshell, and too many of them head towards the glowing lights of civilization instead of into the water they should learn to call home. And as if all this weren’t enough, poaching of nests has become more common, turtle eggs having become a valuable black market delicacy. Our task, on this one stretch of beach, is simple. We find the nests, dig them up, and move the eggs to a fenced-off hatchery where they can be monitored and guarded against poachers. We take away their wildness in exchange for a higher survival rate because right now, the stakes are too high to sit by and let nature take its course. I’m on the late patrol, 12:30-4:30am. Since I’m thirteen, I’ve only stayed up this late once or twice in my life. The feeling that I’m awake well past my bedtime only adds to the gravity of the situation and makes the entire night feel surreal.

That week I spent in Costa Rica awakened something inside of me. I’d always known conservation was important, but that trip put that knowledge right in front of me. It’s so easy to rationalize away extinctions, to shrug and sigh and ask what we could have done differently. But spending a night watching turtles lay their eggs, and you start to see the stakes. You know in your head that their tears are just a process that’s evolved to allow them to live in salt water, but you still feel like you’re being initiated into the process of life and death, like the universe is giving you a glimpse behind the curtain.

Now, I’m in the Galapagos Islands. The air here is pregnant with environmental conflict and scientific importance.  This is where Charles Darwin himself discovered natural selection, for God’s sake. And after centuries of human interference and millions of tourists coming in and out, Galapagos is threatened too. There are introduced species threatening native birds. There’s trash building up from residents and from ever-increasing levels of tourists. I don’t need to see turtles laying eggs in the wee hours of the morning to feel that same imperative, the same sense that very real things are at stake. Today, we hiked around Santiago Island on lava flows, and we saw a species of plant that’s endemic to that island only. This tiny little succulent vine has managed to survive growing between the black cracks in the lava, and it’s found nowhere else on earth. Everywhere we’ve been in Ecuador is ecologically important, and everywhere has endemic species. But something about the Galapagos Island manages to capture that imperative better even than remote corners of the Amazon that are threatened by oil extraction. The blue waters and sun and geologically spectacular islands make me feel like I’ve come to the end of the world, or a close enough approximation to serve as a set for either Planet Earth or Pirates of the Caribbean. There are sea lions and marine iguanas everywhere, plus Darwin’s famous finches. And it’s beautiful. Spectacularly so.

Here too, there are turtles in the water. They’re green sea turtles, smaller than the leatherbacks I saw in Costa Rica, but they look similar enough that I get the same feeling. These are old animals, both individually and evolutionarily. They’re reptiles who would not look out of place alongside the dinosaurs, and each individual lives longer than most humans ever will. The nature writer Craig Childs told me last fall that you should never listen to anyone who tells you not to anthropomorphize animals, because assigning human emotions and motivations to animals is the only way we have to relate, empathize and care for them. So I watch these turtles, the way they move through the water with such slow grace and I think that they must feel the changes in their world. Maybe they’re largely insulated from the effects of civilization since they live in one of the most protected marine reserves on earth. But turtles have been known to migrate extraordinary distances, and I can’t help but think that they must notice the plastic building up in the oceans, the rising temperatures and sea levels, the way more and more two-legged creatures come in boats every year, pointing cameras at them and exclaiming in delight every time one of them sticks its head above the water to breathe. More than noticing, I look at these old sea creatures, and I think they must understand. They have to see how it’s connected, how the increased presence of humans is tied to the trash in their home, to the slow erosion of their slow way of life.

I want someone from the animal kingdom to hold us accountable, and these ancient reptiles seem like appropriate stewards of the place where life began in a primordial stew. Every single species of marine turtle is endangered on a global level, and I worry that this is the only reprimand they’ll give us. Turtles don’t cry out asking to be saved, and they don’t hold the same imperative that seems to come with polar bears and wolves. I worry that their last message will be almost silent, that they won’t warn us. I worry that they will slip away, and their absence will speak louder than the rasping way they take in air, heads just barely above the surface of the water, entering our above-ground world for a second before vanishing back into the blue-green depths of the ocean.

Danger in the forest

Temperate forests train us to be passive. Occasionally, hikers get eaten by bears or cougars, or gored to death by mountain goats. But by and large, the biggest threats you face in a temperate forest are the elements. You’re much more likely to hurt yourself by getting lost, falling off of a cliff, drowning in a raging river or freezing to death. You’re constantly battling the elements when you’re outside--taking off a fleece, putting on a rain jacket. You’re afraid of getting wet, of cold, of the setting sun.

In the tropics, the elements are more or less constant. It might rain, but it’s so warm that it doesn’t really matter. It’s always hot and humid, and so you’re constantly drenched in your own sweat. And yet, walking through a tropical forest, you have to be constantly on guard. Here, all the threats to your existence are living. There are the standard subjects of nature documentaries—anacondas lurking in rivers, poisonous snakes tangled in the vines of a tree, ants whose sting will have you in bed for two days with a fever. But really, the danger is everywhere. Wasp stings become routine, like getting bitten by a mosquito while hiking in the Cascades. You have to re-learn how to walk in an environment where you can’t grab a tree to stop a fall because the trunk is covered in spines, home to a toxic caterpillar, or protected by a group of army ants. You’re constantly vigilant, because everything around you is full of poison—the spines of plants, the insects living on them, the snakes you’ve been afraid of your whole life, the frogs hiding between the leaves. There’s no place for idle daydreaming, for putting your hands on a blind ledge or grabbing a vine without really looking at it.

And yet, here I take risks. I strip naked, wearing nothing but my rain boots, and let wasps sting me in unmentionable places as I bathe in a puddle of water on the forest floor. I run through the forest on a moonless night without a headlamp, where the dark is so total that I can’t see my hand in front of my face. I swim in a river where I’ve seen an anaconda the night before, where there are piranhas and caimans and parasitic fish that will swim up your vagina and have to be surgically removed. I do this for a week, get stung by something large and black that I can’t quite see, and my hand is radiating burning pain past my wrist for an hour. But I’m fine. I survive, largely without incident.

Now, I want to go home and get to know my place better. I’ve never thought to run naked through a temperate forest, partially because I’d probably be close to well-frequented trails, but really because I just haven’t been trying hard enough to actually be outside. I don’t go into Discovery Park at night and run around without a headlamp. I don’t sit nestled between the roots of a hemlock tree and sketch the plants near me or close my eyes and see if I can hear the wind over the sound of my own thoughts. I haven’t even snuck back into Cleveland Memorial Forest, the Seattle School District-owned piece of old-growth where my high school ran outdoor program trips, to run around on the trails that used to be my home almost every weekend during the school year. I’ve been spending too much time reading, as usual, and not enough time getting to know the plants I live near.

When I come home to the US, I’m going to feel very homeless. Since I left for Ecuador, my cousin has moved into my room. My stuff is mostly in boxes in the basement. I have stuff in storage at Whitman, but I’m not moved into my house there either. I need focus and purpose for the month I’m home, or I’m going to drive myself crazy sitting at home and feeling like I don’t quite belong. And so, I want to try to re-learn the forests of my childhood, to connect with them better, to teach myself botany like a scientist and teach myself to see place like a tracker. I want to spend a good portion of a day or two every week in the forests by my house, not hiking, but just sitting and observing things and drawing leaves. So many indigenous people raised in the Amazon are able to walk through their tropical forests with completely confidence, knowing which plants are safe to eat and how to get where they need to go. I’ve been blessed to grow up near a forest that’s safe, a forest where I’m not going to get bitten by a poisonous snake or attacked by a bullet ant. And it’s time for me to start taking advantage of that.

The gay conversation

My host brother, Nico, had one of his friends over last week (they play in a band together), and I was chatting with them about music. My brother’s friend studied in the US for a while and has a gringa girlfriend, so his English is even better than Nico’s (he’s more or less fluent, but you can tell English isn’t his first language). He always wants to speak English with me, so we usually talk in a mixture of the two languages. The boys were discussing songs for their band, and Nico mentioned loving some song by John Mayer. His friend agreed, and I shook my head.

“What?” the friend asked me.

“Nothing, he’s just an asshole and a womanizer,” I responded. We discussed this for a little while—they wanted to know how I knew this (“Have reasons, Rachel,” said Nico). I said I saw stuff about him on supermarket tabloid covers. Eventually, we agreed that his music was one thing, but as a person, he was probably an asshole.

And then Nico’s friend says, “Well, at least he’s not gay.”

Quito as a city looks pretty developed. The more rural areas of Ecuador seem more classically “third world”, but Quito might as well be a major city in the US, at least in many regards. So sometimes I forget how different cultures can be here. But this is one of the most striking differences between the US and the Third World that I’ve noticed. Say what you will about the US’s policies towards gay people, but at least among our urban, well-educated population, being gay has become almost completely normal. Not to say that there isn’t discrimination, but being gay is not the awful, secret thing it was fifty years ago. A friend coming out to me wouldn’t elicit anything more than, “Oh, ok, cool.” I’ve almost gotten to the point where I stop assuming gender when someone mentions having a significant other.

So here I am, radical feminist/ally Rachel, sitting across the table from two nice, well-educated guys who happen to believe that about half of my friends are disgusting. Cultural sensitivity is one thing, but I wasn’t letting that one slide.

“What does that mean?” I asked. Nico’s friend said something I don’t remember about gay people being gross. I said, “You know, like half of my friends at school are gay.”

He countered with, “That’s ok because you’re a girl, though. It’s not weird if they’re lesbian.”

This sentiment, that somehow lesbians are ok, or aren’t really gay, is something I also noticed in Ghana. While I was there, homosexuality was causing quite the controversy in the local papers (this all started when the main government-owned daily paper ran as a front page headline: 8000 HOMOS FOUND IN TWO REGIONS. The deck was, “majority infected with HIV/AIDS”. The actual story was that the UN AIDS program was trying to get people to come forward and get tested for HIV as a public health measure, and some of them happened to be gay.) So the whole time I was there, there were opinion columns and articles debating the ethics of tolerating homosexuals, one of which defined bisexuality as “when someone is married but maintains sexual relations with the same sex.” And yet invariably, every single article would spend paragraphs bashing gay people and then say something to the effect of, “Lesbians are totally cool, though.” I think it’s a pretty common attitude in general. For people threatened by gay-ness, lesbians are much safer. First of all, girls don’t have sex (because we’re all proper and don’t have any libido and are just waiting to be seduced by nice guys). So if someone says they’re lesbian, no one pictures two girls going at it. Also, lesbians come with the possibility of girls making out with each other! Which many straight guys seem to think is the most exciting thing in the world.

Anyway, back in Ecuador, I was shaking my head and trying to figure out what I could say to these guys. I said, “No, they’re not all lesbian, I have guy friends who are gay too.”

And then, Nico’s friend says, “Oh, that’s scary though…” He motions cutting himself and blood dripping, and says, “…and then you’ll get HIV.”

At that point, I just got mad. I said, no, that’s absurd, most gay people do not have HIV. He said, yes they do, because they all have anal sex. I said that not all gay people have anal sex, and anyway, that’s why condoms were invented. He said, no, condoms were invented for guys and girls to use, not for gay people. Clearly, I was not getting anywhere here.

And so he kept talking with Nico, and I thought about straight privilege. It hurts me to hear people talk this way about people I know and love. Two of my best friends from high school are gay. Another one is trans. My roommate freshman year was queer. About half of my friends at Whitman are not straight in some capacity. And yet, as a straight person, I can travel to countries where the prevailing attitude towards gayness is one of disgust and judgment, and I can feel safe. My relationships will never be questioned. I am normal. I fit the mold.

As I’m sitting here, thinking, he asks me what I’m thinking about. I shook my head, not sure how to explain. He says, “You’re thinking about them having sex, aren’t you?” I said no, I was thinking about all the people I know and care about who happen to be gay, but also happen to be people with characteristics other than their sexuality. He laughed and said, “But now you’re thinking about sex.” I said yes, since he brought it up. He said it would just be weird to have gay friends, because they might start liking you. I said, so what, I’ve had guy friends who liked me when I didn’t feel the same way, and it’s weird, but it wouldn’t  be any weirder if it was a girl. He shook his head and employed the standard Latino guy defense. “It’s just because we have a machista culture”, he said. That’s why we’re not ok with the gays.

Machista culture is obviously something I have a hard time with. It’s employed during orientation to tell women that we shouldn’t drink much and need to be extra careful (not that this isn’t true, but I would rather live in a world where we educate men not to rape women, rather than educating women about how not to get raped). It’s the excuse given for the men who whistle at you on the bus and creep on you when you’re walking home. It’s the go-to explanation for behavior that I would label as obsessive, bordering on stalking, when dealing with men my age in Latin America. I’m just worried about you. That’s why I’ve texted you every ten minutes for the past two hours to ask you why you weren’t responding to my first message. It’s probably the reason that when I left the club I was at on Friday night at 2am, a random strange man asked me where I was going, and when I said home, he asked if he could come with me and got offended when I said absolutely not. I can get on board with cultural sensitivity when it’s about the fact that Ecuadorians will tell you a time for something and mean an hour later. Or when it’s about the fact that food=love, so you have to finish everything on your plate lest you gravely offend your host mom. But the machista thing, I don’t buy. Cultural differences are great, but some things need to evolve. Sexism is one of them. Homophobia is another.

And yet, during this conversation with Nico and his friend, I asked them if homosexuality was illegal here. Both of them said no, absolutely not. How could that even be illegal, they asked? I said that gay sex had been illegal in many states in the US until 2003, that it was absolutely illegal in many other countries, especially in Africa, and that in Uganda, it was punishable by death. They looked at me incredulously and said no, we don’t do that here. And both of them seemed to think that the notion of making anyone’s sexual orientation illegal was absurd. I suppose that’s progress of a kind. And given how far the US has come on LGBT issues in the past fifty years, I’m optimistic that the rest of the world will soon follow.

Fútbol in Ecuador

Mostly, I write about ideas and politics on here, but I thought I’d take a break and describe some of the things I’ve actually been doing in Ecuador. Last Friday afternoon, the Ecuadorian national soccer team played the Venezuelan team in the first round of eliminator games for the 2014 World Cup in Brazil. Naturally, our whole group decided to go. Fútbol is almost more of a religion here than Catholicism is. The stadium was surrounded by people selling team jerseys (which we all bought), people doing face painting, and perhaps most comically, people filling giant bottles (we’re talking gallons) of beer to take into the stadium. Apparently Ecuador hasn’t caught up with the US in terms of concessions monopolies, so you’re absolutely allowed to bring beverages into the stadium. My group elected to buy a bunch of rum, three liters of Coke and some limes before we went in, so we had a great time mixing Cuba Libres on the sidewalk outside of the stadium while trying to look nonchalant when the police walked by. In the end, we were able to walk into the stadium with three liters of rum and Coke without incident.

Seats are not assigned at the stadium, and by the time we got there (an hour before the game started), every single seat was full. I use the term “seat” loosely, since they’re really concrete benches, and everyone’s goal is to squeeze as many people as possible onto them. Somehow, I talked a nice guy into giving me and a friend seats that he’d been saving, so we were able to actually sit down for most of the game.

One of the things about going to a national sporting event (as opposed to say, a baseball game in the US), is that supporting the team boils down to a thinly-disguised fanatic sort of nationalism. It’s like how everyone in the US gets during the Olympics, except when you’re actually watching the game, it’s right next to you and much, much louder. Ecuadorians have a fútbol song, which I’m convinced every single person in the country knows the words to, and people just started singing it all the time before and during the game. The words are, “Vamos, Ecuatorianos, esta noche, tenemos que ganar,”

 which translates to, “Let’s go, Ecuadorians, tonight, we have to win.” (It sounds a lot better when it’s being sung in Spanish). My favorite part of the game was when they announced the Venezuelan team. I didn’t even realize they were announcing anything—the sound system wasn’t much of a match for the noise made by a full stadium of fútbol fans—but as soon as they called the first player’s name, the entire stadium raised their fists in the air and chanted, “¡Hijo de puta!” (son of a whore). All of this, perfectly coordinated, for every single player on the team. I was impressed.

Ecuador won the game (thank god), 2-0. The whole experience made me wish soccer was more of a thing in the US. I’ve always been a baseball girl, though I stopped watching pros when the Mariners started sucking so much. But soccer is so energetic and fast-paced, and it’s so easy to appreciate the athleticism of someone who can head a ball into the goal. Plus, I love the rowdiness of soccer fans, though I think a lot of that has to do with the extremely lax rules about alcohol consumption in the stadium. (The section next to ours had a guy who was repeatedly chugging beers, which prompted the entire crowd to form a circle around him and cheer him on, breaking into applause when he finished.) There were a few minor fights, but nothing serious, probably because almost everyone in attendance was supporting the same team.

I’m always amazed by the unity of sports fans, and sometimes I find myself wondering what would happen if we could get so many people to come together so clearly for something that actually mattered, or if even a fraction of the money and time and energy spent on professional sports franchises were spent on health care or improving education or something socially beneficial. And yet, sports seem to be the great unifier in the world—regardless of country, race, class and increasingly gender, most people can appreciate watching a team, feeling part of something bigger, having common ground with strangers. Marx may have thought religion is the opiate of the masses, but I’m starting to think that it’s soccer. And maybe that’s not a bad thing.

Back to veggie

After a year and a half of thinking about meat, I’ve made my decision. Starting when I get home from Ecuador, I’m going back to being a vegetarian.

When I first went vegetarian, I was in third grade. I was motivated by moral absolutism and fervent idealism. I believed that animals should not be killed to feed humans when we were clearly capable of living without taking life. Over the years, my reasons shifted to a general protest of factory farming. I read Fast Food Nation sometime in middle school and was so grateful that I was largely absolved of responsibility for the horrors described by Eric Schlosser as he toured slaughterhouses and food chemistry labs. I didn’t want to be complicit in the torture of animals, the exploitation of a largely undocumented Latino workforce, the carbon emissions that come from beef, the overflowing waste lagoons that border CAFOs.

Now, I’m returning to the same label, but with a vastly different underlying ideology. I’m fully cognizant of the horrors of agriculture. I know soy is an environmental nightmare that’s clear-cutting Amazonian rainforest and supporting the Cargill-Monsanto empire. I know that the prairies of the American West have been destroyed to feed the world, that a field of wheat is ecologically no different from a barren, eroding hillside that was once home to an old-growth forest. I understand that animals are necessary for sustainable food production, because the only way we’re going to be able to keep feeding the world is with permaculture, designing systems based on natural processes. And I know that while Americans eat more meat than is healthy for them, humans were designed to eat flesh at least occasionally.

But I also know that the world isn’t black and white. I know that I can hold contradictory beliefs, that solutions aren’t as simple as they seem, that an action can be good, bad or somewhere in between depending on timing and context. And in the food system we have right now, I believe that eating meat does more harm than good for the world as a whole. Most animals, even happy local ones, are fed crops that are grown in the same problematic ways that cause so many environmental problems around the world. Unless they’re managed very specifically to avoid this, cows and other livestock have a dramatically larger carbon footprint than plant-based foods. And because I have the means, knowledge and physiology to be a healthy vegetarian, I’m going to do it.

I’m switching back fully aware of another uncomfortable truth—my individual choice to be a vegetarian will never end factory farming. I’ve said this before, and I’ll keep saying it until the left demonstrates an ability to think beyond personal choices as a venue for activism. But I don’t believe that the impotency of our individual actions as tools for change absolves us completely from personal responsibility. I own a cell phone which contains coltane, a mineral that’s found mostly in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The DRC has been ravaged by war and conflict for years, largely because of desires to control the country’s lucrative mineral resources. Would choosing to not buy a cell phone end the rape and murder that shapes the lives of so many people in the DRC? No. Does that mean that there is no blood on my hands? Absolutely not.

The modern world is rife with stories like this one, and the modern consumer is often painfully aware of the horrors they’re supporting. The socially conscious youth of my generation have been bombarded with guilt-inducing facts about sweatshops, toxic manufacturing processes, the horrors of resource extraction, climate change and social justice. We know that most things we buy are killing the planet, and we also know that trying to avoid buying anything problematic ever is nearly impossible without making a full time job of it. Most of us aren’t willing to invest the time and energy to be perfect—something I don’t believe is the mortal sin many would make it out to be—so we pick our battles, choose the few we really care about, and promise ourselves that we’ll work to build a better world to make up for it.

For me, factory farming is one of those battles. When I was eight, I didn’t want to be complicit in this system. Now, at twenty, I understand that even as a vegetarian, I’m still guilty. Even if I choose to go without meat, I’ve never done anything to challenge the industrial meat infrastructure, whether it’s liberating animals from a slaughterhouse or writing a letter to Congress asking them to make changes to the Farm Bill. Which isn’t to say that factory farming is our fault, collectively—the road to hell has been paved by a very specific set of people with very specific goals, and most of us weren’t among the lucky few. But as long as our society continues to say that these institutions and systems are acceptable, anyone who doesn’t exhaust every available effort and resource to stop them bears some of the burden for their existence. Plus, we (almost) all eat industrial agriculture. Even if you remove the burden of meat, I’m still complicit in pesticides and horrible labor conditions and absurd farm subsidies and the existence of Monsanto.

What this all boils down to is a vegetarianism based on premises of moral conflict rather than moral clarity. Last time I made this choice, I was saving the world. Now I know I’m not, but I’m still unable to close my eyes at the sight of a feedlot, unable to turn away and pretend I don’t know what I know when I eat. Part of me is humble, knowing my actions won’t make a dent in the problem. Part of me still craves the moral superiority of knowing that no animals are directly tortured to provide my food. Part of me wants to lecture and evangelize. Part of me is afraid to go back after tasting and loving my first steak (age 18), my first chicken breast (age 20) and my first bacon in over a decade. Part of me still can’t decide if fish are going to count, if I’m willing to give up my absolute favorite food (sushi) just to make a statement that almost no one will hear. I’ve spent hour after hour of my life thinking about these things. Those of you who’ve been reading my blog for a while have seen me write the equivalent of a full-length novel about the ethics and politics behind meat production and vegetarianism. At the end of the day, though, my choice is simple. I think about cows lined up for slaughter, waiting to have a bolt driven through their brains before they’re hoisted up by one leg to have their throat slit, and something deep inside me just screams no. It’s not the most well thought out argument in the world. But for me, it’s enough.

Quoted: Michael Maren on the completely ineffectiveness of foreign aid

From a fantastic interview which argues convincingly that all international NGOs and US aid projects are doing much more harm than good.


On the work aid organizations do:


[Aid organizations] know how to set up refugee camps, so they do it. And they also horribly underestimate the local people, the skills and abilities of the local people, and the ability of the people to save themselves and to take care of themselves. If I learned anything in the Peace Corps, it was that people basically know what they're doing. Ads that we see for these organizations tend to give the impression that all these Africans are a bunch of infants. That they're gonna starve to death if we don't send a bunch of 25-yearold volunteers over there to take care of them. The ads really rely on something I find somewhat racist. The whole aid industry is built on this conceit that Americans can go into a village of Africa and, by virtue of some innate quality of American-ness, have something to offer people, something that you can teach people there. As if these people couldn't survive without you. And that's sort of the hidden attitude when I get these questions: Aren't these people gonna suffer if we pull the aid organizations out? And I always have to say, "Do you really think people can't take care of themselves?" Where do people get the idea that Africans are gonna really suffer if a bunch of American volunteers go home? It's an absurd notion.




And on how this serves the US government's interests:


It lets us off the hook. "We're doing something. We're building schools over there. That's our obligation to this country"-when we're pursuing macroeconomic policies that are causing these problems to begin with, such as massive structural adjustments and debt burdens. That's really the problem, and that amount of money dwarfs the money coming in through these charities. You have to think about development in terms of larger economic issues. That's where the problems are.