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| (Image from JustSeeds.org) |
I’m not in Standing Rock, North Dakota. I’m not planting my
feet on the ground that contains my ancestors, placing my flesh and blood
between the land and our culture’s insatiable lust for oil and the
incomprehensible power of profit. I haven’t been arrested, held in a jail cell
or a dog kennel. I haven’t screamed at the law enforcement of collected states
and departments and representatives of governments and corporations.
And I have been wondering why I’m not there. I know these
things matter. I do not want oil to spill into any landscape, upon the bones of
any ancestors, into the waterways of the living, into the endocrine systems of
the unborn generations. I do not want the dangerous patterns of our consumptive
lives to continue unchecked, unchanged. I want the sovereignty and dignity of
Native peoples—in North Dakota and across the globe—to be upheld and broadened,
not beaten down further and ignored yet again. Colonialism, white supremacy and
capitalism—all of these forces have pushed peoples out of homelands and towards
the marginal land and seascapes that are now most at risk from the climate
change brought about by lifestyles less grounded and intentional that many that
were displaced. I don’t treasure an image of indigenous peoples as noble
savages—that lack of nuance and excess of Romanticisms covers up far more
interesting realities and prevents humans from seeing each other with empathy,
and as the hot messes of contradictions we all are. However, I do believe that
there are societies that have much more sustainable values than the majority white, post-Industrial Western Capitalist one that destroys landscapes to find the oil
that, when burnt in power plants and refineries and gas tanks, destroys the
air, the water, the seasons, the planet.
I’m still here in New England, though, not in the Dakotas. I
daydream about these actions, these times of solidarity when bodies come
together to block pipelines and trucks, but I never go. I stay here because I
need to pay my rent, feed my dog, repay my student loans, tend to my family,
because my life is here and I feel enough binding me here that I can’t imagine
going without creating more, or maybe just different, burdens. Am I just making
lazy and selfish excuses to stay comfortable? Do I not believe enough? I wonder these things in the middle of the night
sometimes. If I really cared so passionately about climate change, about being
in solidarity with a cause I believe in, wouldn’t I be there, linking arms and
marching and standing and holding firm despite the consequences, rather than
going to the grocery store or making mundane appointments for my car inspection
or looking at the container ships come into port and knowing that their oily
effluent is mingling in the sea with my father’s remains, and I am standing on
the beach, throwing a tennis ball for my dog.
If I really wanted the present and the future to be
brighter, better, cleaner and kinder than the patterns of the past, shouldn’t
I, shouldn’t we all, be out on parade and picket lines?
I don’t know. It simply isn’t practical—if everyone is
arrested, who bails us all out, makes soup for everyone, takes care of the
young and the elderly, installs solar panels, plants gardens, negotiates
climate and human rights agreements. I admire those who are putting their lives
on hold and on the line to stop pollution from crossing national boundaries and
poisoning the land and water and sanctity of the place. Similarly, I admire the
people who labor through zoning board meetings, who figure out how to live off
the grid, who temper their egos enough to carpool or take an inconvenient bus,
who raise kind children who love vegetables, who run for office with integrity
and practical idealism, everyone who does the thousand quieter jobs that
transitioning away from fossil fuels truly require.
And it is not the same to do this small work. I was sitting
in my apartment, prepping for a job interview by researching grant writing and
best practices for sustainability in higher education, while watching friends
on Facebook check in at Standing Rock. And I wanted us all to be there, for
real. To be all together, fists high and smiles wide, walking into the fray and
saying, firmly, that this dirty way with pipelines and trampling lives and
beliefs for profit and out of a lack of imagination of how to implement a
cleaner world will no longer be. I wanted the drama and the Romance and the
certain solidarity of such direct action.
Because doing the quiet necessary work is hard. Not in the
way that having red raw marks on your wrists from zip-tie handcuffs or being violently intimidated or beaten by law enforcement or being a
civil disobedience felon or living in a protest camp is hard—and I do believe
those are hard things that people chose to do—but because you have to get up
every day and find a balance of practical action while navigating life. It is hard, it is not glamorous—movie
stars and Bill McKibben and Terry Tempest Williams and Wendell Berry are not
going to join you in signing up for a CSA or doing an energy audit of your home
or going to a meeting of the water board—but it is perhaps as vitally important.
Which is what I’ll keep telling myself, as I do what work of
the world as I can in Maine, while it remains Facebook official that I’m in
North Dakota.
