DESPAIR

Life begins on the other side of despair.

—JEAN-PAUL SARTRE

 

 

 

ALMOST EVERY INDIGENOUS PERSON I’ve ever worked with has said that our first and most important act of resistance must be to decolonize our hearts and minds. A significant part of decolonizing our hearts and minds is separating ourselves from this culture, breaking our identification with it and identifying instead with life. I didn’t build dams. They’re not mine. I need to dismantle them. Likewise, I didn’t invade Iraq. They’re not my troops. And also likewise, I didn’t create car culture. I drive a car, but car driver is not my identity. There’s all the difference in the world—and I mean all the difference in the world—between those who drive cars, and those who identify with car culture. It’s the difference between those who drive cars simply because it’s expedient (and who eagerly anticipate and are actively working toward the end of car culture), and those who would (and will) find the end of car culture not only inexpedient (and undesirable) but a threat to their very selves, or more accurately, to their perceived selves. It’s the difference between those who propose solutions to global warming that take the world as primary, and those who propose solutions to global warming that take industrial capitalism as primary. I am committed to ending car culture, and there are longer levers I can find than simply not driving a car.

Perhaps the identification I’m talking about is somewhat akin to what some Buddhists call attachment. I drive a car, but I’m not attached to driving this car, or to car culture. If car culture ends (or rather, when it ends, because it will end) I will look around, befuddled (and happy), and then I will shake my head to clear my thoughts, and after that I will get on with my life.

And that’s where, if I understand all of this correctly, I may part ways with at least some Buddhists. I see a fundamental difference between being attached to (or in my words, identifying with) car culture and being attached to (or identifying with) life on this planet.

If those in power, or more broadly the culture in general, can get us to identify with them, “I am the disease as well as the cure,” we will not be able to fully fight them, because we will perceive ourselves as fighting ourselves. Contrast the effectiveness of actions that emerge from saying, as we’ve all heard so many people say, “I am the problem as well as the solution,” to those that emerge from, “I am the solution, so you evil motherfuckers better watch out, because I’m going to stop you using any means necessary, and I’m going to stop you now.” Or better, saying nothing and simply getting the job done.

When people realize that magical thinking ain’t gonna cut it, they sometimes return to one of the previous phases, distracting themselves increasingly frantically, destroying with ever more vehemence those who would even incidentally remind them there are other ways to be, or becoming more and more smug (and more and more brittle, and more and more volcanic) in their insistence that we needn’t worry about the damage. Sometimes they do all of these at the same time.

But some people move beyond these phases, and for them sometimes the next step is a bone-crushing despair. This despair, as I’ve described in several books, can be a necessary part of the process of decolonization. This despair is, at least in my own case, intimately tied to death. It began with death, it led me to and through death, and when I emerged from this death, death was still my constant companion, only now everything was different.

For me, the despair began as anguish over the murder of so many whom I loved. When I was a child, a “developer” converted dry fields flanked by cottonwood trees near where I lived into an upscale neighborhood. Anthills, prickly pears, and tall native grasses were bulldozed and replaced with pavement, sidewalks, and Kentucky bluegrass. Meadowlark songs were replaced by lawnmowers. Pop and rock blared from backyard stereo systems. My friends the bull snakes, tiger salamanders, and western toads disappeared. I couldn’t blame them. Eventually, so did I.

Fast forward twenty years, to my late twenties. I was living now in Idaho, having fled Colorado because there were too many people. But here, too, people were building (a.k.a. destroying). I saw beautiful forests murdered by clearcutting. I saw vibrant streams lose fish, birds, in some cases even algae.

This drove me deeper into the sorrow and despair that had shadowed me all those years, sometimes more noticeably, sometimes in the background; a sorrow and despair about this culture’s destruction of so much life, its conversion of the living to the dead. I had no outlet for this sorrow, this despair, this inchoate rage at these clear injustices and at the sheer stupidity of it all, so I turned this sorrow, despair, and rage inward.

I hated myself for participating in this unjust system into which I had been born (obviously without my consent), and for my failure to effectively oppose it (actually at that point, for my failure to oppose it at all). I was paralyzed not only by this self-hatred, but also by my growing perception of the magnitude, ubiquity, nonsensicality, and horrifying momentum of this culture’s tidal wave of destructiveness.

And then I found action, and resistance. At first my steps were tiny, and timid: letters to the editor under a pseudonym because I was too scared to have a voice; protests where I stood silently because, once again, to have a voice was too frightening. But even these small steps encouraged me, made me happy. And they were really fun! Not only the actions themselves; and not only the camaraderie of standing shoulder to shoulder with others who were at least doing something to try to stop the horrors; and not only the solid and profound joy and ecstasy—and I mean ecstasy—of doing the right thing; but also the equally profound and ecstatic joy of, however timid and terrified one may feel on the inside, rising from one’s knees, standing full upright, and saying, “No!”

For a while that joy of resistance helped stave off some of the sorrow. Or perhaps it’s more accurate to say it counterbalanced the sorrow, since the sorrow was still there in full, only now I felt like I was doing something about the cause of that sorrow.

This only worked for a few years: in time, resistance alone was no longer sufficient. I needed effective resistance, and this was (and still is) in short supply. I needed to do far more than just “put up a good fight,” win symbolic victories, win only defensive victories, or raise public awareness while the real world continued to be destroyed at ever-accelerating rates. No matter what victories we claimed, real forests continued to be murdered; real rivers were killed or enslaved; real plants, animals, and fungi were driven extinct.

And just as powerful was the hard-earned realization that the processes through which we were allowed to resist were rigged in favor of the destruction. Over the course of many books, and earlier in this book (especially the story of Smith and his accomplices, including the involved agencies), I’ve described how and why these processes are rigged, as well as some of the effects these rigged processes have on the real physical world, on human communities, and on our psyches.

One of the effects of defeat after defeat after symbolic victory (which meant a defeat that we called a victory because we were so tired of being defeated) was that the sorrow and despair once again grew.

The rage, grew, too, yet that, I’d long before realized, had grown all along. As a child that rage had been impotent. When I’d begun to resist, the rage had become joyous, ecstatic. And when I came to understand the ineffectuality of nearly all of our resistance and pseudoresistance, and more even than that when I grew to see the ubiquity of the lies we’re told by those in power, the lies we tell each other, the lies we tell ourselves, and the lies we too readily believe, that rage turned more bitter. I could feel this rage growing, in my throat and dry mouth, in my heart and tight stomach, in my clenching and unclenching fists.

The sorrow, despair, and rage continued to grow year after year. So did my confusion: I could not for the life of me (or the planet) understand how so many more people could care about professional sports or the sex lives of celebrities or making money or accumulating power than the continued existence of life on this planet. Or how about this: governments subsidize commercial fishing fleets for more money than the fiscal value of their catch. Taxpayers pay to murder oceans. We’d all be better off if these commercial fishermen were paid to sit at home in their underpants watching The Price is Right. How does any of this make sense? My paralysis grew as well: if I and all the activists I knew were working as hard as we were and things were still getting worse; and if the processes we were allowed to participate in were rigged against us; and if every time we figured out how to use rules designed by and for those in power (commonly called “laws”) to stop the destruction of the natural world, those in power simply changed the rules and did whatever the hell they wanted anyway, why bother doing anything? Why not just quit? Of course, discouraging dissent (and even moreso resistance) is one major reason those in power have set up public participation/oversight processes the way they have: if the processes were fair, and based on justice and a love of life, we would win every time; if the processes were entirely unavailable to us we would more easily see the system for the autocracy that it is; but if they can keep us participating in these rigged, sham processes, where, for example, we can point out lie after lie after lie to CDF (you can of course substitute the USFS, BLM, USFWS, or any other AoD [Acronym of Death] and you’ll see analogous results), and CDF still approves timber harvest after timber harvest after timber harvest,²³⁷ we may well continue to feel worse and worse until we give up, turn on the tube, and cheer for our favorite football team to win the big game or our favorite horse to win the big race or our favorite actress to win the big Oscar or our favorite politician to win the big election. As I realized this, my pain and anguish grew.

But these feelings couldn’t grow forever. Something had to give. I broke. And that was a good thing. Of course I didn’t know that at the time. I just knew it hurt. No matter how real, fundamental, and necessary this breaking was for my growth—and for the decolonization of my heart and mind, and for the survival of my soul; and for my future resistance—and no matter how harmful and deceitful (to self and other) the avoidance (conscious or unconscious) of these feelings may be, it is sometimes—often—hard to find anything redemptive about these feelings while still in the midst of them. At the time they just hurt like hell, and I wanted (and want, when they happen now) them to stop.

It can be pretty easy not to get past this phase of pain, sorrow, rage, and self-hatred, partly because it hurts so much to go through these feelings to the other side (and we have so very few models telling us how to get to the other side, or even that there are any other sides to get to). It can be so much easier to back away from this pain just a little. Of course the pain never does go away completely, no matter how much we may try to drown our understanding of the massive destructiveness of this culture (and our role in it) through chemical and non-chemical distractions. But the pain can ease off some, moving from an excruciating, acute crisis to a deep chronic ache.

Another reason that so many of us step away from this pain, this transition, is that we don’t know what to do. I shared the above with a friend who is a longtime Greenpeace UK (mainstream environmental) activist. She responded, “I think I’m trapped in the ‘pain, sorrow, and self hatred’ phase. I always knew I wanted to devote my life to the planet but now that the direction I was heading in seems futile, I don’t know what to do. I feel like I’m standing alone on a road with no idea which way to go. . . .”

She continued, “If I’m honest, there are two reasons I’m not yet fighting back: one is that I’m not yet sure of what to do: what would be effective? And two, and probably the main reason, is that I’m scared. And that fear is probably what keeps most people oppressed and stops them from doing anything. I care desperately about what’s happening to the world, and feel rage and sorrow and despair every day, but at the same time it’s not a recognizable direct instant threat to me. If someone suddenly came at me, or someone I loved, with an axe, I would just react, without thinking. And I think this is the difference: it’s not that I care less; it’s just that I have way too much time to think about the consequences of fighting back, and then that scares me. I also think most people among the general population don’t want to take responsibility for anything: they’ve been taught from birth that those in power will make the right decisions for us, and I think many people truly still believe that. And even when you try and show these people, their denial is so deep that they don’t believe it, or they want to keep their lifestyle in any case, and so they force themselves not to care.”

So many activists have said similar things to me. Faced with the enormity and seeming intractability of this culture’s destructiveness, what do we do?

The pain and confusion can certainly feel like good enough reasons not to persevere, but there’s an even more deeply frightening and fundamental reason that holds many people back. It has to do with the forcefulness and completeness with which this culture has inculcated us to more highly value this culture than our own life, the lives of others, and life in general; to consider this culture more real than life; to identify more with this culture than with life; to be more attached to this culture than to life. Because we’ve been so completely inculcated into identifying more with this culture than with life; and because we’re inculcated into thinking this culture is life; and because we’re taught to believe this culture is our life; and because the destructiveness of this culture is so overwhelming and has so much momentum; and because we’re told again and again that the harm this culture causes is our fault because we drive, wear clothes, eat, shit, consume (“You can save the earth by consuming less”); and because the processes by which we’re allowed—allowed by those in power, and more importantly by ourselves—to even slightly rein in the destructive acts of those in power are rigged in favor of, no big surprise, those in power; and because these processes are sham processes, Potemkin processes, set up to deceive and discourage us; and because we’ve been so thoroughly trained to be submissive to authority, to be good little boys and girls, to never talk back to our parents/teachers/bosses/leaders, to never get smart, to answer the questions posed by our betters and to never reframe or reject those questions (and certainly to never pose questions of our own), to only be creative in ways we’re trained to be creative and to not be creative in ways we’re trained (often without being explicitly told) to not be creative; and because we’ve been so completely turned into imbeciles with high IQs, like our parents/teachers/bosses/leaders, that it never occurs to most of us that even though the processes in which we’re allowed to participate are rigged, we can create our own processes, stop the destruction our own way, on our own terms, not theirs (picture a Gordian knot, picture a sword, picture a sword cutting the knot: now go find yourself a sword and start hacking). Because we don’t know what to do (won’t someone please tell us?); and because our defeats can be so very painful and discouraging that it can so very easily become so very attractive to not feel those defeats by not attempting to win in the first place; and because to stop this culture from destroying the planet would be to stop that with which we have been trained to most closely identify; and because to act against this culture can feel like we are acting against ourselves, can feel like we are splitting into a thousand pieces, can feel like we are disintegrating (in part because we are; or rather, because our socially created selves are); and because we’ve been taught to despise ourselves, other victims, and all those beneath us on the hierarchy set up by this culture, and never to hate those above us on this hierarchy; and because we don’t want to go to prison, or be tortured or killed; and because we know that those in power often imprison, torture, or kill those who oppose their (oftentimes psychotic) desires; and because we do not want the full power of the state coming down on us and those we love; and because we do not want people to disapprove of us (never mind that it would only be others of the living dead of this culture; while the real living, including nonhumans, including wild humans, including others of the resistance, would love us all the more, would stand up in respect for us); and because the whole bloody mess is so out of control, it can be so very attractive, once again, to simply try to control what we can, and hope that God (or Buddha, or, far more to the point, our culturally-formed consciences based on the value systems of this culture) grant us the serenity to accept that which we (have been taught to believe we) cannot change. And that which we “cannot change”—so we are told again and again, in ways large and small, including, for example, every mainstream proposal to “solve” global warming which takes this destructive culture as a given—is this culture. What we can change—“the only thing we can change,” we’re told again and again—is ourselves. As with the “solutions” to global warming that take this culture as primary and that attempt to force the natural world to conform to it, we are once again made to believe that this culture is immutable, and this time it is we personally who must conform.