Twelve Years

Twelve years ago, I went to Biloxi, because I was at loose ends, because my parents bought my plane ticket, because them sending me was something they could do to help in Katrina’s aftermath. I worked with Hands On Disaster Relief (now All Hands Volunteers), the sort of outfit in its early years that asked only “do you have your shots, and do you want someone to meet you at the airport or bus station?”

My friend Serena had found this group, she went down a week before I did and met me at the airport. Other friends—Nina, Josh, Lydia, Kate, Carrie, Beth, Laura, Will, Vee—came too, or we met and made friends with each other as the raggedy bunch of recent college grads we were. I don’t remember it all, perfectly.

What I do remember is the knot of horror and rage that left me feeling like I was going to cry or vomit most of the time. I’m a white girl from New Hampshire with an expensive education. I spent most of my time in the mountains. I was not prepared for all of the destruction, for shaking hands with the people who had been left behind or stayed behind or just got back to Biloxi after the storm. I was not prepared for reality.

I came out of all of that, after a few months, with a puppy. Carrie had fallen in love with him at the animal shelter, but whatever home she’d thought to give him to had fallen through. And then when it was time for me to go, the puppy was on the edge of just being a spoiled feral pet of Hurricane Camp, so I adopted him. It wasn’t anything official—I just happened to be the one to take him to the vet, and I happened to write my name down as “owner.” I named him Noah, for the flood. They told me naming him Noaa would have been too much, even for me.

I kept that little guy, and I loved him. And for almost twelve years, he was my constant companion. He went with me across the country six times, saw me through two shattering heartbreaks and some minor heartaches, came with me to grad school, hiked where I hiked, swam where I swam, was where I was, for all that time. When my father died, I regularly cried into Noah’s fur like the world had ended. It has been a roller coaster of a decade, and Noah was there for all of it. We were the most secure daily fixtures in each other’s lives through all the changes I dragged us through, the adventures I sought, the troubles that hit. Until my poor sweet Pet came down with dementia, became uncomfortable, inconsolable, in his own skin and I had to let him go—two months ago now—snuggled in my and my sister’s arms, loved until the last moment he knew and beyond.

As the rain falls and the water rises in Texas, I feel as if no time has passed. Because the news is the same, the pictures are the same, the devastation is the same, the goodwill of neighbors, the kindness of strangers, the imbecility of the leaders, the ovine shock of the rest of the country…all of this is the same. My dog has lived a full life and died, and we—the people—have still not addressed the root causes of why these storms are so devastating.

The climate is changing, and we are changing it. The people we elect to leadership positions are not leading. These storms are not the wrath of God, are not natural—unless you might, as I could be convinced, think that these storms are the divine wrath of the forces of nature rising up against the species that has wrecked and ravaged our way through the world since we first discovered fire.

Storms are more frequent and with heavier loads of water because the planet is warming. The planet is warming because the emissions from making cars go, planes fly, smartphones charge and plastics ubiquitous and life too convenient are thickening the atmosphere and trapping air closer to the planet. We are thickening the air, insulating our planet from the necessary cool of the rest of the universe. And so, in our little chemical hothouse, the warmth begets moisture, the moisture begets storms with greater wallop than ever.

What is stopping us from stopping these things? In part, we are simply a lazy, selfish and unimaginative people. We think such things as Katrina, as Sandy, as Harvey will never happen to us, personally. It’s easier to think that. It’s easier to turn off the imagination, the voice that says “what if…” Horror of our own is incomprehensible, surreal. But, as my friend Mary, reporting from Charlottesville last week said “the thing to say is ‘it’s so surreal’ but that is an utter disservice to the reality that this all is.”

I don’t care if mass flooding and destruction is never going to happen to me. I’d rather it doesn’t, but it’s going to happen and keep happening to others, and there is nothing special about me that is going to make a storm pass me by. Anyone’s reality could easily be my own, if the tides turn, if the weather shifts. When.

If you did know that a storm was about to destroy your life, but could be soothed by taking a bus or putting up solar panels or air-drying your clothes, would you make those changes? Can you go without, can you live smaller, simpler? Could you use electronics less, more wisely? Are you willing to donate not your blood or money to relief efforts, but to make structural changes in your life that will cut the emissions that are increasing the severity of storms?

And then there are our politicians and industrialists. The policy makers seem hamstrung by industries that make money while Rome burns and floods, because they are. Our president cares more for his t.v. ratings than for staffing the agencies that oversee disaster response, never mind his abysmal decisions on loosening regulations on industries that will further increase the cloud envelope around the planet. But, much as I despise Trump, he is not solely responsible for this storm, personally. The fault is with all people who have power and refuse to act responsibly with it. All people. Anyone who makes a choice has power, that is the sort of power that needs to shift, that is the power we all have.

Twelve years. That is the difference between a first grader and a high school senior. That is a lifetime. I simply cannot accept that so little has happened on a large scale when so much happened in the small space between myself and the little dog who came out of the flood with me.

Lastly, a nice man I met in Biloxi, standing outside what had been his house, said that in disasters, people should donate socks and underwear. He could cope with a lot of the troubles, but being able to wear clean underpants just makes a person feel more human. This is the scale that horror happens at. Send underwear. Thank you.

A Numb Fury

Lately, when I hear about coral reefs being bleached, or particles of carbon in the atmosphere, or rabidly migrating invasive species, or any and all of the other news about our changing climate, I find myself a bit numb.

Which is odd. I’ve been so long on the side of the passionately hopeful, believing that if we care enough and act humbly and wisely enough, we can yet pull of this grand trick of saving the world.

And I can still say and write the right the words, but they have an ashy hollow feeling now. I don’t seem to be able to work up a lather for presumed demise and resurrection of the abstract as well as I once could.

What has changed?

Just that I am learning to live with loss and I no longer believe all wrongs can be righted with enough love and elbow grease. My father died in April, my uncle died in December. The shape of my world is vastly altered without these wonderful men in my life.

I hate it. I miss them every day and may never believe that I’ll never speak with either again, never hear my dad’s laugh or make terrible puns with my uncle. I’ll never hug them again.

It is unmooring, to have beloved constants there one minute and then going, going, gone forever.

This, somehow, makes the presumptive loss of life on Planet Earth at once easier to comprehend the scope of and less acceptable to allow to happen unchallenged.

We cannot repeat the past. We cannot turn on a dime to restore old-growth forests, pump crude oil back in the ground, unbleach the Great Barrier Reef, or grow back eroded coastlines. We cannot bring back the dead or live in the past.

Speaking historically and climatically, the past wasn’t perfect. The past was where we learned to haul oil and coal out of the ground and burn it, before we knew what damage it could cause. We learned to put it in our cars and airplanes and factories before we knew it could get in our lungs, before we knew that more isn’t always better. We hunted species to extinction and poisoned our waters. When we talk about protecting and preserving, about re-growing former environments, it starts to sound like an idealized past we are trying to recreate. We’d like, please, a second chance, to hit reset with all of the rainforest, but none of the pollution.

My personal past wasn’t perfect. My father had alcoholism. Living with and loving him was a lot like being in a hurricane zone—the erratic storms of his moods were unpredictable, regular, and unnavigable. I don’t know why he drank—other than addiction is a sort of emotional and chemical parasite that, inside people we love, creates a need greater than any other for whatever substance feeds the monster of the disease. I don’t know if there was anything more we could have done to help him to stop before it killed him. The part of me that may never heal over Dad’s death is that it was preventable, but between his disease and our furious loving ignorance at how to help him, the disease won, rather than all the brilliant and kind and creative and big-hearted parts of my dad. The monster won, not our love. That will always sting.

I don’t want that past back, fully. I want the good parts, with our lessons learned all around, so that we can go forward whole again. I have thought, so many times, that “I get it, I’ve learned how much I love my dad, how fragile and brief life is and how much people matter. I’d like him back now and I know that the man he was in the week before he died learned his own lessons and would like to come back too, please!”

But we don’t get that. No one, no place or species or ecosystem or weather pattern gets to hit restart.

The last thing I heard my father say—almost exactly a year ago—was “it’s going to be okay, it’s all going to be okay.”

As last words go, they aren’t bad. Sometimes I find them comforting, other times so infuriating that I’ll scream. Because it hasn’t been okay, it isn’t okay, and it will never become okay that this was how my father left the people and the world he loved so much.

It has also, with a terribly normality, become okay that he isn’t here anymore. Not always, but the unimaginable has become the daily and the real, and we are all adapting but surviving to this new world.

If my father could have been treated for his disease before it was too late, he would still be here. If there were a treatment for my uncle’s rare and aggressive cancer, he would still be here.

When I think about climate change, I can’t help thinking that we do have all of the information and the science and many of the solutions staring us in the face. And yet we are choosing, with our inactions, not fix the problems before us. I have seen people die for lack of treatment and intervention, and I can't fathom that we're as people letting the world waste away when we have enough of the answers to be smarter.

I think that my numbness at re-hearing the same but worse climate news may just be sleeping fury that what can be salvaged in this world with its biological prerogative for life and survival, adaptation and resilience is not being treasured. Treatments to the causes of climate change are well-known (use less, think more), the science is in that we are doing this to ourselves as a people, life is short and the world beautiful…what else do we need to know in order to act?

Progress is a Humble Rebellion

(My dad's stonewall, Dimond Hill Farm, Concord, NH)

When the climate talks were in Copenhagen, my graduate department was incredibly generous in funding several students to attend. My application for a slot was an enthusiastic medley of Humanities-based, qualitative musings about why I—an Environmental Studies writing student—would be as appropriate a candidate for a ticket to Denmark as students of environmental policy, international law and energy science.

As tends to happen when quick academic decisions are necessary, more scientific and quantitatively focused students were selected. I don’t doubt that they were excellent and good choices, that their presence in Copenhagen has honed their outlook and driven many actions since that time. However, I remain impatient with the pervasive idea that numbers are some how more valuable than words. Yes, it is hard to determine if a heart has been spoken to, awakened, and what that newly beating tempo may set the body and brain off to do, but precisely because of that immeasurable potential power, the Humanities earn their name.

What I wanted to do for Copenhagen, what I have always wanted to do and sometimes I’ve gotten closer than others is to help people to fold humbly inwards to act boldly outwards. This is harder to explain than a policy paper or an emissions report.

What I mean like this—with my apologies to any Danish historians and I may have lost some facts in the poetry: Geographically small Denmark was disproportionably a world leader for several hundreds of years. Then, their navy was beaten soundly in 1801. This shifted not only the world order, but also Denmark’s ethos and national identity. There was some internal reckoning and identity crisis on a national level, and the result was the country uniting behind the idea that, if not the most powerful country in the world, they would certainly be the greatest Denmark in the world.

And now they are a leader in environmentalism and have a largely peaceful and functioning society. While there have been undeniable violent racist issues within Denmark in the last few years—relating to cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad—we are in no position in the United States, with our guns and racism, to discount the larger lessons of Denmark’s ethos.

When my father began to struggle with the idea of retirement, with who he would be if not the “large and in charge” charismatic and effective bully of a community re-organizer, I talked with him about the history of Denmark, that they too had to humble, revision, and came out slightly reinvented, but changed only for the better.

In semi-retirement, my father built a stonewall at a nearby farm. He—envious of the craftsmen at a wooden boat show—had determined that in this next phase, he wanted to work with his hands. The farmers, wonderful women, encouraged him that it was good for his soul to get in touch with the earth. And he was fantastically happy, and even a little healthier drinking water and walking to work.

It was all too brief a retirement, but I’ll be forever proud of how my dad tried to be something new, yet was still building something for a community, albeit on in different dimension and different scale.

I’m sure that there are other nations who have, when faced with collapse, folded inward and re-birthed a more feasible ethos, but I have yet to find any country that has done it on the scale and with the ethics that makes Denmark an environmentally progressive leader. I hoped, when the climate talks were in Copenhagen, that something of this progressive humbling would rub off on the delegates, on the press and the scientists, that people would come streaming home with the seed in their hearts that things need not be as they always have been, that there are other ways of being than bygone identities.

To me, it was as significant and promising that the 2009 talks were in Denmark as it was that there were talks at all. In the disappointing aftermath of Copenhagen, where nations who must poured out their hearts and the policies of the powerful did not change, I clung to the comfort that, at least the world was talking about the climate. At least what I know to be as true as my bones, at least there is a sense that this is a global struggle, that we are not just a few crazy people watching tides rise and songbirds disappear and crops dry up and forests burn.

To know how many people do care is at once comforting and galvanizing. Who, we might ask, are so selfishly scared of change that they do not listen to this beautiful assembled symphony?

Who is it that ignores such vociferous passion?

Answer that, and it becomes clear that this struggle for a better world does have real adversary, villains with corporate stationary and billion dollar investments in the status quo.

Of course, with our phones and computers and cars and televisions and microwaves and jet-fuel heavy passports and plastic disposable everything that runs off dirty power plants and pipelines, we are each also part of what ignores the passion, part of what must pause to examine our own lives and choices, part of what must be humbled towards greatness.

And now, again, what parts of the world who can out of luxuriant responsibility and/or who must direst need are converging in Paris to again discuss the scourge of climate change. And, of course, each time there is a summit or major decision or action about climate change, the dramatic hype makes it seem as if the world hangs fully in the balance, that we will all drown, burn, starve, freeze or live on what happens with that single event.

This is absurd. The drama is chronic, the moment is every single one we have on this sweet earth with each other. The world is always in the balance, always teetering, and the fires, floods and famines are already here. We are living in the time of greatest crisis—climate change does not watch the news and get better or worse because some people sit down together and try to cap emissions or create public transportation. One climate conference, two, three…these will not alone turn the tide. We must do that, in between the headlines, in all our acts and actions.

I am at least as spotty on France’s history as I am on Denmark’s. But, even in what I have gleaned from Joan of Arc, Dumas and Dickens, Casablanca, Les Mis and Stéphane Hessel there is an invigorating lot of revolutionary resistance to and takedown of over-gilded and corrupt systems.

Also—and this may be the strongest piece—what has come out about French culture since the terrorist attacks of November 13^th is that, simply, French love life. That rooted, determined joie de vive, this is something that the climate movement too often overlooks. We are full of facts, of statistics, predictions, carbon counts, horror stories, and fear. All of those have some place, but what we forget—at our own peril—is why we go about this business in the first place.

Why? Because the world is beautiful, because we love each other, because it would be simply rude to not protect all that is wonderful for all who have yet to come to fall in love with as well.

If I hoped that Copenhagen’s turn at the climate talks could bring humility, then it is my even deeper hope that Paris will teach us to bring joy to this work, to be brave and fierce.

These brighter tools, I believe, are sharper and stronger than any other for all that lies ahead.

Blood and Oil, Beauty and Use

(Goose print, with my compliments to Mary Oliver and her wild geese)

With the UN Climate Talks opening in Paris on Monday, and with Paris freshly symbolic of joyous resistance against terror, I have been trying to articulate the link between the two. Others, of course, have already found it and written and done magnificent work in highlighting the connection. But, never mind preaching to the choir—we are all part of the choir and singing out in our own times and ways and voices has certain merit in this necessary revolution on personal and global scales.

This morning, the morning after Thanksgiving, I found the most recent New Yorker hunkered down under the circulars and ads for Black Friday sales that came in the newspaper and mail. In it, Steve Coll writes: “The Islamic State is an oil-funded descendant of Al Qaeda in Iraq, a branch of the original Al Qaeda, which was formed in 1988.”

For years, Black Friday has made me spitting mad. That our nation goes to sleep full of gratitude and turkey and pie and love on the small and human scale that transcends politics, full from a day of focusing on the bone-deep values of our lives and national ideology and wakes up to shop until we drop…this makes no sense. And when what I believe to be at stake with this pressurized American overconsumption—merely the life of our singular and beautiful planet, the authentic vibrancy of our human relationships—is further threatened by the discounted, disposable merchandise produced in decidedly unclean conditions, built with the energy of heartbreakingly filthy power plants, well…I turn into a snarly Charlie Brown about the commercialization of the holidays.

But this year, knowing that more pointedly anthropocentric threats than climate change are also tied to the blind overconsumption of resources, I have a slim hope that the madness of Black Friday and absurd Christmas consumption can be reduced. If we are, as a culture, hugely reliant on oil, and much of that oil is purchased from governments and states that fund terrorists, then, aren’t we, through our energy misuse and selfish purchases, funding conservative zealots with dreams of suicidal jihad and fueling the storms and droughts that ravage everyone?

In 2001, President George W. Bush encouraged Americans to fight back against terrorists by continuing to live our ordinary lives. Taken out of context, this message was watered down to “fight terrorism by shopping.” Which is absurd. When we shop, when we consume without thought for the back story of what we are buying, without an understanding of where our hard-earned dollars will go—my suspicion is that not only do we contribute to the changing climate, but we may very well be funding those who would hold a hotel hostage, gun down a concert and any other number of acts against humanity.

Rather than that, let’s rebel against terror and slow our destruction of this lovely world by living more ordinary lives. We can live smaller and smarter, and in this, we will be more connected to the rest of the world. In being wise and humble and aware that our voices and choices and actions do matter in this world, we grow magnificent, we become limitless. Rather than scrabbling to reach some nebulous and hollow ideal of enough and what a good life looks like, we learn to live how it feels right. The Socialist and artist William Morris wrote “have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful.”

I love this. They seem like good words for living by, for revolting from normal destructive pressures and connections, for embracing the holiday season with, and saving the world through.

Love and Fire: A Prayer for Keystone

(I carved this listening to Obama's 2009 Inauguration.)

The Keystone XL Pipeline is still hanging too close to reality. President Obama has said he will veto it if the bill lands on his desk—and it appears all to likely that it will—and while I do love the idea of a man who ran on hope and change providing a decisive, dramatic, and heroic act in the eleventh hour, I both do and don’t understand politics enough to hold my breath.

Besides, either way, we—the fighters for and livers of a life away from unquestioned fossil fuel dependence—have already won.

To be sure, Keystone has become a symbol as crucial to the climate movement as a keystone is in an archway. But the extraction of tar sands and their rickety conveyance through the hearts of three sovereign nations is not merely a symbol, which is precisely why this pipeline has proved to be such an effective rallying point.

And I fiercely want that oil to stay in the ground, in the tar sands and out of any pipes through anyone’s backyard and water supply. I want the carbon unreleased to the atmosphere and TransCanada to go bankrupt. I cry whenever there is news about Keystone’s lumbering progress through the State Department, the House, the Senate, now the House again. I cry equally when I hear more and more about popular resistance and public displays of most personal outrage at the threat of corporate profit and carbon pollution over all else.

But, again, regardless of how Keystone leaves Obama’s desk shortly, we’ve already won. A passionate and educated movement has been built. Keystone, lightning rod of debate and symbolic reality, has provided the time and space for legions of citizens to become aware of the climate change, and the role that fossil fuel industries and cooperative governing bodies play in this new devastation of the world.

Knowledge, friends, is power. However Keystone goes—and if I were a praying woman I would do so now; instead I write—we have learned and so are unquantifiably powerful. We have learned what is at stake, what the machinations are that try to stamp out the rebellious, undeniable truth that drives each of us in our separate ways. This kindling of love for our lives and landscapes, for a planet and the fire of outrage at all that threatens what we hold dearest, this is a force to be reckoned with.

We must hold that love and that fire. Keystone is one battle. The public and common sense opposition to the pipeline has been beautiful, but our future is larger than a single pipeline. This may well be a turning point in the fight towards the cleaner and kinder future we hunger for, but the day after the Keystone veto will still be one of the hottest for its date on record, glaciers will still melt, and corporations will still have more influence in politics than you or I, regardless of how loud we yell or deeply we love the earth. The day after, we must continue as we have, pushing and acting and growing towards the solutions we are finding as we go.

This outcome-neutral forward momentum is when we will need the love we have found in fighting Keystone. This is why and how we have already won, because through veto or passage, feast or famine, we have found the truth in our hearts and land and our strength to speak and live into what we believe.

And no outside force can ever change that.

(The love of this place is part of what drives me forward and keeps me going when fighting climate change.)

Snow Days!

(Taken February 9, 2013, but it looks a lot like this today too)

There is a lot of snow around my house. I will hold off, for now, in singing its praises, because I understand that for many people, these storms are nothing but a giant pain in the ass, lower back, frostbite, and morale departments.

Everyone, it seems, has some complaint about the snow. The most valid, I think, are related not to the sudden emergency of a snowstorm—everyone seems able to rise to the occasion of travel bans and parking regulations and necessary shoveling with remarkably sweet cranky-Yankee stoicism—but to the problems of living with the longer term effects of big snows.

It is hard to get around on snowy roads, hard for cars and buses and bicycles and pedestrians alike. Watching the subways and buses of the MBTA in Boston cave under so much snow is deeply worrying. Ditto seeing commuter car traffic slow to a crawl and school buses stymied in their routes. Everything slows down, and while I generally relax into and enjoy the extra time and largely readjust my life to accommodate the weather, I am both rare in the choice and lucky in the ability to do so.

The absurd quantity of snow and the lack of places to store it all is a simple tangible reality, and it dramatically changes the board we’re playing Life on. Why, then, are so many people clinging to the same route and routine they would in July or April, and expect nothing to have changed? Some of the most basic facts of our environment and habitat have altered—enormously, immediately, and drastically—in the last three weeks.

A common sensible reaction, I think, would be to alter our actions and habits in response. As a culture, we have enormously and irrevocably altered the climate, but we still, now or ever, cannot control weather. Continuing to commute and work and live as if the weather doesn’t—cannot—touch us is foolish. Nature always wins.

I have a deep respect for and fascination with large natural forces. I like to be out in storms, in mountains, beside the ocean, anywhere I can be reminded that I am small and powerless, and ought to do more and better to live humbly in the face of all that is greater than myself. I find it exhilarating, and comforting.

With that in mind, I relish the lack of control that comes with a big snowstorm. The snowdays, the travel-bans, the seeming constant shoveling of snowbanks taller than myself, all of this is a good reminder that I am not, and cannot reasonably be expected to be, in control. It’s like body surfing on the biggest waves—the same excitement, the same sense of not knowing when your feet will next touch. It is a little frightening, of course, but better to just relax and enjoy the ride than fight the tide. There is a freedom in being beyond of your own control.

Where the sweetness of a storm breaks down is the belief that has ossified into reality that, despite any and all environmental factors, the economy must continue unbroken. This winter, for the first time in my almost thirty-three years, I have a job that still pays me if work is canceled for “inclement weather.” If this were not the case, I would have stomach-churning anxiety about the number of snowdays—going unpaid for even a day rattles a thin budget in the worst, most bullying and powerless way possible. I know that fact in a way, like survivors of the 1930s, that I will never forget. I think about this sick feeling of worry and fear while seeing reports of MBTA commuters being stuck on trains, hearing about friends who spend an hour driving two miles through the city, talking to the other folks waiting for a bus in the snowstorms.

The only people who are out are those who feel that they have to be there. And no one, except for those who clear our roads and keep the rest of us safe, truly needs to be out. Will the world survive if Dunkin Donuts don’t operate for a few days? If corporations and businesses and firms send everyone home? For the most part, we would be absolutely fine if these hours were spent not at work or in transit, but home and among the people we love and labor for in the first place. Further, that so many people now are asked to work from home is a more subtle form of economic aggression. It is an invasion of privacy, a forced erasure of the thin but necessary barrier between personal and public. To me, if a person chooses to work from home, that’s fine. But, when an office demands that a person work from home, that is the Economy marching into one’s sanctuary, pulling the Eminent Domain card and planting its flag. It is abominably rude.

There has been talk about how these storms show how close our infrastructure is to collapsing due to weather events. With the climate ever changing and ever more erratic, I think this is a good warning to heed and act on the lessons of. We are, again, very good in emergencies—the statewide travel bans are like the snowstorms themselves in terms of the beautiful ability to be taken out of control. Where we flail is in dealing with chronic troubles. The storms themselves are not the problem. It is the clean up, recovery, and learning to be flexibly prepared. Climate change, for example, is a one time crisis, but a chronic challenge.

To me, what I see as truly both hastening climate change and breaking the infrastructure is the economy that demands these dangerous patterns of obsessive work and consumption. There are places for snow and time to move it and melt it, if we could alter our habits and expectations, if we could slow down without financial ruin and personal anxiety, if we could learn flexibility, humility, and patience.

Alongside repairing trains and buses, we must fix our economy so that people do not have to risk life and limb to keep a roof over their heads, food on their tables, and respect in their workplaces.  Our current system is cruel, bullying people into dangerous situations and invading their homes. And we are, too often, hamstrung and terrified by finances or so stuck in this rut of obeying the economy and job market at all costs that we forget how to respond with anything other than grumbling compliance.

When it storms and our geographies shrink, and we’re all required by nature to chuck out the to-do lists and day planners, I find it becomes clearer what we do and do not need to survive and be happy. That, I believe, is at the heart of the infrastructure that must be repaired. There are other ways if we will make them. The work of making a new way is, largely, like shoveling out your driveway. And, usually, a neighbor will help, or at least there is the camaraderie of shoveling together.

I want these changes now and sooner, but if it takes a few more beautiful snowstorms until we learn to humbly shift our priorities and work together on different ways of being in the world, I’ll also be delighted.

I’m heading out to shovel now—anyone need a hand digging out?

Emma Goldman and Dinosaurs

Emma Goldman, 1886?

In July of 1892, the Labor activist and Anarchist Alexander Berkman shot Henry Clay Frick three times. Frick, at the time, was the Chairman of the Carnegie Steel Company. The steel mill in Homestead was in the middle of a major and violent dispute between the fledgling labor unions and management. In Living My Life, Emma Goldman’s autobiography, she writes: “the philanthropic Andrew Carnegie conveniently retired to his castle in Scotland, and Frick took full charge of the situation.” (I am basing the following synopsis on Goldman's account in her autobiography, and am, undeniably biased in favor of the anarchists and labor activists over the industrialists.)

Frick refused to negotiate with the workers and the unions over labor contracts, fired the mill workers, evicted the workers and their families—including at least one very pregnant woman—and hired strike-breakers—who were probably in dire economic necessity themselves, even more newly arrived immigrants who were compelled to take the most immediate source of income that presented itself. These striker-breakers were protected on their route to the mills by the security forces Frick hired from the Pinkerton detective agency, a group which seems particularly prone to being well-paid by the powerful for unnecessary violence against unions and activists. In an altercation between the striking workers and the hired “security forces” several strikers—including a child—were killed.

Berkman, Goldman, and their circle of friends were outraged and, while they felt no real personal grievance against Frick as a man, they determined that he, as an active symbol for all of the inequity of power and dignity that the Labor and Anarchy movements sought to alleviate. They were young and passionate and utilitarian, and so their solution was that Berkman would kill Frick, and that Berkman’s own likely death as an outcome of this would be forfeit for their ideals.

A week of nightly experiments with bomb making in a cheap and crowded tenement—thankfully—yielded nothing but lost time and money when the dynamite turned out to be damp. The back-up solution was that Berkman would go to Pittsburgh, work with the local Labor-Anarchist groups, buy a gun, and assassinate Frick. The major trouble with this plan was that guns were expensive, especially for impoverished Anarchists who were working 18-hour days at menial paying work and trying to start a thousand revolutions with their spare hours. Emma Goldman, who was remarkably well-read, decided that the only course of action was to take a page from Crime and Punishment, and prostitute herself for as long as it took to earn the money for Berkman’s gun. As she wrote, “Sasha [Berkman] is giving his life, and you shrink from giving your body, miserable coward!”

So, Goldman spruces herself—cheaply—up, and trudges out to the street, and hates every minute of it. The man who approaches her buys her a beer, senses that this is not a job that Goldman will ever be any good at—although he doesn’t agree with Goldman that most women who become prostitutes are driven to the profession out of dire economic necessity, rather than “mere looseness or love of excitement,” as the man terms things—and pays her ten dollars to go home and wash her face. 

That money, plus the fifteen dollars Goldman borrows from her sister—after lying that she needed the money because of illness, which seems like the worst crime in this whole twist of mixed morals—buys the gun that Berkman shoots Frick with a few weeks later.

In the ensuing struggle, Berkman also stabs Frick in the leg, before Frick’s people knock Berkman out.

Berkman went to prison for fourteen years. Frick, with the 1890s version of top-notch medical care, survived. The Homestead Strike fizzled out amid public outcry at the violence—on both sides, now—with few gains for workers.

Eventually, Frick’s New York City mansion, home at one time to the three-member Frick family and their twenty-seven member staff, became the Frick Collection to showcase Frick’s personal art collection.

Lady Agnew of Lochnaw, 1892

Elsewhere in 1892, the painter John Singer Sargent made a portrait of Gertrude Vernon Agnew, the wife of a Scottish Baron. The painting helped to launch Sargent’s career of painting glamorous portraits of beautiful rich women, and also advanced Lady Agnew’s career as a society lady.

For the last month or so, Lady Agnew of Lochnaw has been hanging in the Frick Collection, on loan from the Scottish National Gallery.

Personally, I find Lady Agnew of Lochnaw as visually resonant as I find Emma Goldman’s writing politically resonant.

They make an odd pair of icons, and would have probably classistly hated each other. That their respective hey-days were the same era is stranger still. While industrialists built libraries, collected art, made fortunes off destroying the natural world with ignorance and greed, and hired security forces to beat up workers, crusaders for social reform were holding meetings, working long hours for little money, reading, writing, rabblerousing, opening ice cream parlors, plotting assassinations, getting beat up by police and paid security forces, going to jail, and always fighting for a fairer world.

Do Carnegie’s many libraries, does the art displayed at the Frick, does that absolve them of the inhumanity of how they made their money? Does the intent of a violent action—like an assassination attempt or the touch and go of building a bomb in a crowded apartment building—out weigh the violence itself?

And it is easy, very easy, to say of Frick and Carnegie and Rockefeller and Morgan and all the rest of the major industrialists of that early era that the times were different, that isn’t it—in the end—good for the public that they made all that money and had it to build public edifices? There is a sense that this sort of industrially financed public offering is a PR absolution for really dirty and inhumane treatment of workers and ecosystems alike. And that such acts were of the past.

After visiting the Frick to see Lady Agnew in person—in a place that wouldn’t have been if history had gone differently—I went to the American Museum of Natural History. This included a long and wonderful saunter through the David H. Koch Dinosaur Wing.

Koch, as in the Koch brothers.

As in the family that seems to use their—mostly fossil fuel derived—fortune on political causes that run completely opposite to my own beliefs. Never mind that their profits, as a fossil fuel company, come from our blind obedience to the climate-change causing status quo.

Just a few weeks ago, the long struggled over Cape Wind project in Massachusetts was felled by power companies pulling out, nearly eliminating the market for wind-generated electricity from a wind farm in Nantucket Sound. Bill Koch, David “Dinosaur Wing” Koch’s brother, has donated over a million dollars to fight against Cape Wind—possibly because the view from his summer home would now include clean power sources—threatening his lifestyle—as well as the oceanscape. When one side of a political fight is better funded—corporate and political leaders versus environmentalists and scientists, say—it becomes easy to see that people and common sense are worth less than dollars and influence.

Now, I’m not advocating for assassinations of corporate leaders. Or anyone else. Everyone's parents and children and friends love them, I suppose. Our challenges in the climate change and human justice fields are, these globally-connected days, more systemic than the elimination of any one person could solve, anyway. Violence helps no one and only scares people away from joining a revolution.

Something, though, does need to change and be shaken up and rearranged. Starting, I think, with what we question and what we blindly accept. When push comes to shove, I’d rather have the dinosaurs stay in the ground than become either a museum exhibit or climate-change and fortune causing fuels. I’d rather all people have good useful work they feel confident in and be paid a living wage than have one man open a museum filled with artwork that his workers could never afford to have seen.

Push, though, will never come to shove. Powerful people will continue to buy off and silence opposition to their profits with pretty things. No one is going to ask me to decide if I like dinosaur bones in a museum donated by rich men who make a fortune but destroy ecosystems more than I like Tuvalu or alpine flowers or the clear lungs of Appalachian toddlers, and then re-arrange the world order according to my whims while I sit back and wish things were different. No one is going to start this revolution except us. We must, ourselves, use every day as an act for the world we want. 

Eggplants and Old Books

(Photo from First Root Farm!)

It is strange to work with teenagers. They need so much attention, but also so much independence to come into their own. In my work at the middle and high school libraries, I spend a lot of time walking the balance between being invisible and being present at a moments notice. It is, very much, like being a catcher in a field of rye—just in the right place and time when they need to be caught before some lousy cliff or something.

Students who last year came to me with their anxieties and fears about graduating, about the injustices of the world beyond high school, who I laughed with, gave tissues to when their dream school rejected them, I do not know where any of them have landed.

This, I believe, is largely how it ought to be. I think of my students as sweetly as I think of the eggplants and peppers I labored over on the farm last summer. We pulled out weeds, harvested fruits, sold the food, tilled over and replanted another crop. Each thing was what it was, needing what it needed from us, giving what it gave, until its time and season passed and another one began. I loved the product, but was not particularly attached to any single fruit, and always enjoyed the process over the outcome.

In all that I have read and learned and tried to absorb Koanic lessons of non-attachment and being present and mindfulness, nothing compares with the certain knowledge of relative insignificance learned by mentoring students and nurturing vegetables.

We—the students and I, the vegetables and I, anyone and anything on earth—are only together for a brief stage of each other’s journeys. It’s very freeing, and calls into question all sorts of other thoughts on permanence.

One of my main tasks in the libraries lately has been weeding obsolete books from the collection. As a writer, I try to not think too much that I am casually chucking out someone’s passionate life work, just because no one has read it in twenty or thirty years. I try to not think of the drafts, of the late nights writing, of the doubt and despair and revisions and rejections that go into making a book out of an idea. I get Robert Frost in my head, reminding me that “nothing gold can stay,” and that makes it much easier to let go.

We are not an archive—the idea is to be able to further students’ research in concert with the academic curriculum. And so, to make space for what is topical and relevant and useful, we discard and donate pounds and pounds of books. There is nothing quite like recycling “authoritative” texts to remind oneself that time and tide wait for no one, etc.

Besides, in the emptiness of the shelves, in the magic of biology that lets a new crop grow, in a curious student encountering the world, there is so much potential.

Everything that lives needs to grow and change and evolve—knowledge, libraries, humans, love, eggplants, all of it. My usual instinct is to hold on to everything—and I have tried this in so many ways and times and places—and this inability to let go clutters everything up, my heart, my bookshelves, my sweater drawer, and so on. Letting go, even a little, creates wonderful spaces for unknown possibilities.

Cultivating these ideas of being present in the moment, not becoming too attached to or defined by the transient, making space for new knowledge and passions, etc. all of this is only the tip of a very large iceberg in how to be happier, kinder, more ethical, sustainable and all the other good qualities I believe that we sorely need to go forward in a new year in an unceasingly challenged world.

Scrunched up under the root of the world’s various angers and sorrows—climate change, human rights, economic inequity, religious violence, and all the many places where these horrors bleed into one—is a sense of insufficiency. Someone, somewhere, at the heart of all of this feels that they do not have enough of something vital, and so the hoarding of resources and power begins and cracks the world into billions of haves and have-nots.

In the release of letting go of objects and expectations, fears and anticipations, I find that I am able to pare my life ever better down to what is necessary and sufficient, to be present and involved in the activities and relationships that are fruitful and valuable. It feels self-contained and openly mobile, rather than needy and stagnant and sad. I try to be like this, rather than chase what is not or focus on a dearth, rather than a well-loved glut. The act of letting go is an active choice for what you retain, what you possess. At the least, this focus on the positive of having, rather on the negative of lacking, is a good place start.

At the most, it may make a world of difference.