Standing Rock

(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. 

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?