Making yourself irrelevant

In the ideal world, there would be no "environmentalists" or "activists" or whathaveyou.

Activists and social workers frame problems. More often than not, they are the ones on the ground witnessing ecological tragedies such as an oil spill unfolding, witnessing poor decision-making that leads to a group of people being disenfranchised, witnessing human rights violations caused by fracking corporations tainting aquifers forever. It is the activist that is aware. It is the activist that fundamentally questions the nature of our choices and actions. But being aware is only the first step in creating change. Possibly the most important step for the activist comes next: How does the activist frame the problem? Is the problem the oil spill itself? Or the political complex that leads to oil being pulled out of the ground in the first place? Is the problem that people don't have food to eat today? Or is the problem really how oppressive economic structures leave people struggling to make ends meet? In framing what the activist observes, in framing the problem, the activist creates, frames, and dictates the response. The framing of the problem connects the activist with people that have goodwill, filling them with empathy and compassion. But what happens with that empathy and compassion? In the end, are people made to feel that their monetary donation is enough? Or are they made to get off of their seats and actually do something about the problem?

The goal of the activist is to take down systems of oppression, not navigate them with integrity, would say Derrick Jensen. The very need for police states, for environmental monitoring, for refuges from oppressive places must be diminished. In my mind, the goal of the activist is to create resiliency. It is to instill ways of thinking and being that allow for critical self-reflection, and action based on that reflection. Sure everyone sees the world different, and there are an infinite number of means to an end. But are those means socioecologically degrading and unjust? Are those means creating disparities between people? Or are they guided by a sense of constantly putting oneself in another person's shoes? Are they guided by fundamentally creating peace rather than ending war? 


When the privileged go to a place like Africa (because it is more exotic than going to rural Kentucky or a decaying urban core in the US...or even the street corner where the homeless person spends time) it is easy to see that people are starving. Okay...That lets USAID dump buckets of food on them covered in American flags, making the Americans look good but in no way empowering Africans to make them resilient. That is not to say that food should not be given to those that are hungry. But does the donation of food come along with an understanding of why they are hungry? Does the donation in any way empower the people other than giving them energy to survive another day? 


These questions go deeper than mere policy tinkering that still maintains power dynamics, that still keeps dragging the carrot just beyond arm's reach. In framing the problem, the activist must not create more work for herself. The fundamental goal of the activist is to make herself irrelevant. The activist should not, as Wendell Berry would say, be a specialist--one that beats the same drum again and again. In the ideal world, the activist won't need "a seat at the table". Rather, the work of the activist is accomplished when a changed paradigm of decision-making, of politics, of being, comes around. The activist, or environmentalist, or whathaveyou, must go to bed every night thinking, Have I done work today that will diminish my need tomorrow? If the answer is yes, the activist is on the right track. 

How appreciation is activist

It is not hard to see that there is much that is not working around us--everything from government's continuing failures to a lack of community resiliency and a reliance on others to make decisions for our personal lives. Much of these failures arise from our continual cultural want for more. We want better infrastructure, cheaper access to things made around the world, continued materialism. And the providers of our wants can't keep up with our demands. Furthermore, there is a differential access to provisions, further exacerbating inequalities that currently exist. I will be the first to admit that this power dynamic must change, but maybe the way we are going about creating the change is futile. Are there ways in which we don't have to directly feed the system and cause these changes? Might appreciation be activist?

Activism as we currently think about it is about taking a stand for something, generally with political motives and outcomes. That something could be promoting firearms legislation allowing everyone easy access to guns. Activism can also be about taking a stand against something, like trying to block firearms legislation that allows such easy access to guns, again, with political motives and outcomes. But I also think that activism can also be about doing something we are not culturally programmed to do, and to appreciate is one of those things. And that's what turns appreciation from an acceptance of the way things are to something that is political.
 
This is a system, a culture, that is driven by a decided unappreciation of everything--of our bodies, of the land beneath our feet, the air we breath, and the water we drink. We cherish and respect the things we appreciate. We seem to violently demolish everything that we don't. And because this is a kind of activism, a way of being that this culture does not know, it does not know how to deal with it. If we are to change "the system" fundamentally, I think that we must act in activist ways that don't lend legitimacy to the system, but rather in ways that destabilise it. Appreciate what you have. This appreciation then opens up our lives to more positivity, and more control over ourselves, rather than continually giving proxies to others.

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.

Changing the system, or navigating it with integrity

"The task of the activist is not to navigate current systems with integrity. The task of the activist is to take down systems of oppression." ~Derrick Jensen

I keep coming back to Jensen's talk the other day, because it was just full of fascinating ideas, thoughts and encouragement, but also replete with cynicism and a sense that we are just running out of time. I must agree that we are running out of time, in the biggest sense, first and foremost. With something like climate change for example, it doesn't seem like the world is gung-ho on making sure Mauritius doesn't drown. There are other deeper issues that do need to be dealt with, though, such as a redefinition of norms and ethics, which I think Jensen is trying to get at, too.

(When I say "technology," I mean the technology that has been brought into the world in the past few decades, the rate of whose introduction has followed something like Moore's law.) As I have alluded to with several posts on technology and progress (here, here, here, here, here), while I am not against technology altogether, the trend of techno-optimism are rather worrying, particularly because it has redefined what "sustainability" means. It has now come to mean "sustainable development," which fundamentally assumes that a Western-derived ethic of technological development will free us from our current society's ecologically-degrading behaviour. Instead of actually questioning our behaviour and what drives it, we come up with geo-engineering solutions that are just bound to make things worse. Now, it seems that much of our education system is set up such that it produces people to further entrench this technologically-driven, ecologically-degrading economy as the norm. And while it may be possible to engineer our way out of environmental disaster (I do not believe so), what Jensen is saying that it would be a major breakthrough if we were to take a step back and realise that our quest for ever-increasing technology has led us to where we are.

There are two ways then that Jensen says we could use our power - either we could all be techno-optimists, and make technologies that are "efficient" and "less harmful" to the environment, rather than come up with technologies that will have a degrading influence on nature and people, or we can say that the problem is our dependence on technology itself. We can get a job with BP, and try to "green" it from the inside, or we can make BP obsolete. We can try to convince people in the Department of Defense that we should have weapons that target only the intended target and minimise collateral damage, or we can stand in solidarity against everything that drives us to use violent force, and make the need for something like the Department of Defense a thing of the past. These are difficult things to do, but things that each and every one of us can influence. By saying no, we do not patronise, and we do not in any way insure the future of the system.