Some thoughts on fear and forgiveness

What is needed is a sort of catharsis. We must wash ourselves of all the ecologically and humanistically debasing things that pervade our culture. What we must seek instead is, as Tim DeChristopher has said,

...a humane world...[a] world that values humanity...a world where we meet our emotional needs not through the consumption of material goods, but through human relationships...[a] world where we measure our progress not through how much stuff we produce, but through our quality of life—whether or not we’re actually promoting a higher quality of life for human beings.

And such a world can only come from a deeply changed ethic that values (not monetarily) Earth and everything that resides in and on it. But how do we overcome the fear that can be paralysing when taking new, bold steps? I don't claim to know about this in any great depth or detail, but it is apparent to me that any meaningful, positive steps that will lead to a more holistic future must be hopeful, be courageous, and come with an acceptance of newness and the unchartered.

Fear is a powerful controlling force. (But hope and courage are liberating.) Fear is primal, and is the fear that is tapped into to convince us that the "enemies" are "planning to attack our way of life," allowing those with power to use our "consent" to act violently. At the same time, fear prevents us from presenting ourselves as whole before the world because it prevents us from admitting defeat or apologising for our mistakes; we are fearful of vengeance and retaliation. I wonder, do those that engage in ecologically degrading activities, and know that they are, not come clean because they are scared of the consequences of doing so? Possibly, for many companies and people try to hide their mistakes and disasters by not confessing or owning up to them. How has the way we've structured adjudication and law made people scared? If we are able to forgive, will we live in a less fearful world? I think so. How might fear look in an ecologically holistic world? For now, I'll leave you with these words from Conversations on Forgiveness)

Forgiveness is an opportunity for transformation, both individually and collectively. It not only helps relieve mental and emotional anguish, but it offers the possibility for change, for redemption, for restoration—for hope and even love to blossom from pain and suffering. It can stop a cycle of hurt and create opportunity where there seemed to be none. Most of all, it has the potential to heal and open our hearts to love again and more fully, strengthening and building our capacity for compassion and understanding.

Tim DeChristopher on "freedom"

For the next couple of posts, I want to elaborate on the word "freedom". For today's short post, I want to share with you some powerful words from Tim DeChristopher during a conversation with Terry Tempest Williams.

Tim DeChristopher is an inspiring climate activist and leader. Better known as Bidder #70, on 19 December 2008, after having taken a final exam in an economics course at the University of Utah, Tim took the train to observe and protest a Bureau of Land Management auction that was leasing land to oil and gas companies. He ended up bidding on vast tracts of land, for which he owed  two million dollars, just to keep the land out of the hands of the oil and gas companies. Of course, he didn't have the money to pay for the land. On 2 March 2011, Tim was found guilty of violating the Federal Onshore Oil and Gas Leasing Reform Act on two felony charges, and later sentenced to two years in federal prison and ordered to pay a ten thousand dollar fine. Writes Terry Tempest Williams, "Minutes before receiving his sentence, Tim DeChristopher delivered an impassioned speech from the courtroom floor. At the end of the speech, he turned toward Judge Dee Benson, who presided over his trial, looked him in the eye, and said, 'This is what love looks like.'"

We might think that Tim gave up his freedom to protect land from oil and gas corporations, our atmosphere from greenhouse gas emissions, and our future from climate change. But what Tim now thinks about freedom is a challenge and call to all of us wanting to envision and create a fundamentally different culture.

TIM: If you look at the worst-case consequences of climate change, those pretty much mean the collapse of our industrial civilization. But that doesn’t mean the end of everything. It means that we’re going to be living through the most rapid and intense period of change that humanity has ever faced. And that’s certainly not hopeless. It means we’re going to have to build another world in the ashes of this one. And it could very easily be a better world. I have a lot of hope in my generation’s ability to build a better world in the ashes of this one. And I have very little doubt that we’ll have to. The nice thing about that is that this culture hasn’t led to happiness anyway, it hasn’t satisfied our human needs. So there’s a lot of room for improvement.

TERRY: How has this experience—these past two years—changed you?

TIM: [Sighing.] It’s made me worry less.

TERRY: Why?

TIM: It’s somewhat comforting knowing that things are going to fall apart, because it does give us that opportunity to drastically change things.

TERRY: I’ve watched you, you know, from afar. And when we were at the Glen Canyon Institute’s David Brower celebration in 2010, I looked at you, and I was so happy because it was like there was a lightness about you. Before, I felt like you were carrying the weight of the world on your shoulders—and you have broad shoulders—but there was something in your eyes, there was a light in your eyes I had not seen before. And I remember saying, “Something’s different.” And you were saying that rather than being the one who was inspiring, you were being inspired. And rather than being the one who was carrying this cause, it was carrying you. Can you talk about that? Because I think that’s instructive for all of us.

TIM: I think letting go of that burden had a lot to do with embracing how good this whole thing has felt. It’s been so liberating and empowering.

TERRY: To you, personally?

TIM: Yeah. I went into this thinking, It’s worth sacrificing my freedom for this.

TERRY: And you did it alone. It’s not like you had a movement behind you, or the support group that you have now.

TIM: Right. But I feel like I did the opposite. I thought I was sacrificing my freedom, but instead I was grabbing onto my freedom and refusing to let go of it for the first time, you know? Finally accepting that I wasn’t this helpless victim of society, and couldn’t do anything to shape my own future, you know, that I didn’t have that freedom to steer the course of my life. Finally I said, “I have the freedom to change this situation. I’m that powerful.” And that’s been a wonderful feeling that I’ve held onto since then.

Step outside your life and thoughts

One of the reasons why it is difficult for us to make changes in our lives is because we are too immersed in them, and people of different socio-economic statuses (SES) are immersed in them in different ways.

Many people of low SES live day to day, paycheck to paycheck, and always live in the uncertainty that the government will make some stupid decision to further trample on their lives "for the greater good". As an outsider to this group, it seems to me that it can be difficult for many people of low SES to think differently of their lives because they struggle to make ends meet. Although it may seem difficult to blame them for this, Wangari Maathai did, with incredible outcomes.

Many of the people of middle SES, like me, are caught up in their lives differently. Although we do not struggle to make ends meet, we are immersed in our lives because we are now constantly distracted; there is no time for us to think about anything other than our material gratification. With constant streams of stimuli and minutiae from things like Facebook and Twitter and e-mail, it is easy to get caught up in cycles of unawareness of what is around us. Tim DeChristopher, more famously known as Bidder #70 believes that this stream of stimuli has been concocted precisely so we remain unaware of what is truly going on around us, so that we do not question how we ought to be living or changing our lives. (Read this revealing conversation about his life and thoughts with Terry Tempest Williams.)

But also just my views on how to live, and what actually makes me happy; how to form a little community out there with a few people; how human actions really work when there isn’t a TV telling us what to do—that all formed out there. And I think that’s part of why some people fight against wilderness, fight to extinguish all of it. I mean, I think there’s definitely a lot of folks who don’t understand it, and have never experienced it. But I think some of the opponents of wilderness really do understand it. They understand...

Those of high SES, like the one percent, are caught up in glamour, glitz, and fashion, and, well, "work". Many of them have purposefully been involved in the creation and coercion of policies that have taken away the wilderness, that have produced the streams of stimuli and minutiae, just so that we remain unaware, uneducated, illiterate, a few steps behind the curve. There isn't really much that I can say about these people, for many have known nothing other than lives full of material and monetary wealth.

What got me thinking about all of this was my time home with my parents, and a claymation video that Acacia showed me a while ago based on Mark Twain's Mysterious Stranger. My dad and I have very different views about the world, which makes conversation very interesting and challenging for me. Below you can find the video to Mysterious Stranger. While it is a little freaky and portrays humans in a rather negative light, (at least) I found the manner in which the little village was outside of the children's lives to be a very compelling way of communicating how immersed we are in our lives.



I, too, get caught up in my thoughts, it seems. Over the past years, as I have become more and more immersed in writing and thinking that you see on this blog, I have been guilty of not viewing events from different angles. And I think that this can do a disservice to my advocacy, to the advocacy of the justice movement. It is only if we understand the forces at play from all directions that we can come up with meaningful steps and actions and find chinks in the armor of this culture.