I recently re-subscribed to a very established and well known environmental magazine that I read voraciously back when I was a budding activist, back when reading like-minded discontent and ideation about the state of our world was like finding an oasis in the desert to slake a lifelong thirst. My re-subscription happened as I jumbled through internet articles and social media streams about this and that disaster ‘of our times,’ and so it is obvious to me now that my re-subscribing to the magazine happened in a pure fit of nostalgia. I’m so over the characterization that current events are the ever strange soup of some recently discovered recipe- the sense that what events or ideas we happen to be floating around with in our physical realm have materialized like a shocking squeeze of lemon or an extra dash of salt. I think we are rather dealing with a carefully calculated and long recorded reality. Current events are more like the meat permanently sloughing all the way off of the bone, or the connective tissue finally dissolving into a sizzling puddle. These conditions “of our times” are simply the ever exacerbating symptoms of a disease humans have always had, and we’ve known about it all along. Also- if you haven’t noticed, other species don’t seem to be having a vastly different time of it circa 2020-21. It’s the humans. And time, as Albert Einstein reminded us, is the most persistent illusion.
My emails have charted my acceptance of this. When COVID first hit I would write something like “Dear so and so, I hope you are doing well today,” the punctuation of the word today felt sufficiently radical. Maybe it is. Nevertheless, after that I fell into the trap. It morphed into: “I hope you are finding some joy in these turbulent times.” This abyss of “our times” is rich territory, because the word “joy” can be replaced with any number of things you wish upon people, as long as these things are temporarily achievable within acceptable realms of sanity. “Reflection” and “solace” are suitable substitutes for “joy”, and then there’s also the balm du jour, “space.” When insurgents attempted a coup on the US capitol, it necessitated an even more dramatic stance, so I changed to “Dear so and so, I hope you are holding up amidst the most recent stage of empire collapse,” and even that doesn’t feel perfunctory enough. To hell with the empire. Maybe I should change to “deterioration of the species.” Let me know if you have something better. If you’re working on this and you haven’t been fired yet, or wait…even if you have been fired: I want to hear from you.
Anyway, back to the magazine. As soon as my subscription was confirmed I was let in on a commemoration of different people and old essays, which I scrolled through distractedly, recognizing lots of names of course, and finally settled on a very poetically written piece about the lack of will in the presence of knowledge regarding our planet’s plight. Names were dropped, quotes were quoted, and I ended the article feeling comforted and righteous. A receipt of my mind’s purchase would have yielded items such as I agree! and We are willfully terrorizing ourselves and our earth! and There is a better way! All of the items then would be stowed into their respective cupboards; I would retreat to the softness of my sofa.
There, with my puppy curled on my lap and the world still in shambles, it took seven seconds for my comfort to fade, and so I began to question my motives for re-subscribing to such beautiful hullabaloo. It is a beautiful magazine, and maybe my first issue after more than a decade will prove me wrong, but I think what happened is that I succumbed to a guilty pleasure that I share with quite a lot of my fellow (aging) activists. I’m calling it a certain kind of sentimental environmentalism, or sentimental activism in general, that is comfortable and deadly and usually not doing a damn thing.
Sentimental activism is usually very eloquent and diplomatic, very moving, and very intellectual. It pines for a better world, and tends to euphemize nature as a wholly merciful enterprise, and above all it lionizes people— the older and deader (and whiter) the better— as proof of whatever folly is being pointed to and whatever healing is obviously available, if we could only change our “way of thinking” or even better our way of “being.” If we could only “see the light.” As mentioned, it does all this without a direct request or call to action. You will also recognize sentimental activism by how many names are dropped, and especially if they are the same names that are always dropped when talking about earth and nature, and most especially when they are the names of people who have written the most sentimental of all the words to convince people of a certain ilk about the dangers of humanity’s trajectory. If those names have been being dropped for at least the last two decades, you’re really in it deep.
I have written things like this. I blame myself. I have been guilty of falling muddily into the footsteps of those who have inspired me- poets and thinkers and mystics and others who publish creative and intellectual material that comments on culture and moment. Because yes, this is courageous, but only to a certain degree. Ideas can be courageous and appropriately incendiary and inspirational and necessary and bold. But I think the particular thing that reduces certain activism into something merely sentimental isn’t just how it doesn’t come with a challenge to self and to others, but also by how redundant it has become. And then it’s like a form of grief that isn’t constructive anymore. The thing, the beloved thing, is dead! Oh me, it’s dead and I am sad! Or it was never born or embodied and I must turn over all the rocks. I must feel my feelings, regardless of the reality I am living. If you’re going to do the intellectualizing and feeling, I must ask- what are you going to do about it?
I am here to submit that many of us have become very comfortable inside of a certain kind of grief which manifests as a certain kind of denial. YES, the human species is stained (or whatever) with a passel of sins against fellow nature. YES, a different way of thinking would be nice. YES, it is very sad and it hurts oh so much and several very smart and eloquent people have really spoken the truth with feeling about this. But what are we going to do about it? Sitting around and feeling will only get us so far. Beautifully naming the feelings and their causes does not always get to the point of admitting that feelings are overtaking actual opposition.
And isn’t THAT disconnect the root of the most recent horror “of our times”? Isn’t it idealogical in nature, born of a long genealogy of sentiment about our way of thinking? Isn’t it that we all have gotten to a place of deeply held belief and emotion and here we are in our opposite trenches, thinking about it, turning over the proverbial rocks that have been thrown at us, and counting them into a carefully balanced pile that will serve as evidence of what is wrong with the world? And taking to our screen account to proclaim impotently about it? Aren’t ideas and statements of opinion without accountability behind them what got us here to begin with? How do we deal with this? Not with a bunch of beautiful opinion pieces about how somebody somewhere other than us should conjure a shocking and willful integrity of action that is greater than or equal to the action of those we find tyrannical, and carry on with it posthaste.
Well. Now I’ve really built a trebuchet. I’ve got to launch this somehow so it will really clobber all the pretty little aching rock cairns, without being a rock cairn in and of itself. I may fail, but not for lack of trying. If you’re struggling with my war imagery, I’ll go ahead and unapologize. I’m in a place where I have doubted that there is any way out of this other than war, and that this is why the extremists tried to take the capitol. This is why the idealogical levees breached into a horror of actual action. And this is why, when that happened, so many people on both sides of the aisle suddenly said “enough.” I won’t go into how much of the current desire to “purge” or “call out” is purely reactionary self-preservation or reactionary convenient trend. A reckoning has, of course, been long overdue. What I am suggesting is that the human species has, and always + forever will be reactive, self-preservative, and susceptible to convenient trend as a rule, no matter how sentimentally we urge a proactive and poetic “other” course.
I’m barreling toward the unthinkable. Have you guessed it yet? Yes, I’m suggesting, however terrified it makes me, that we do actual things, and I’m suggesting that these things be slightly out of bounds. I am not suggesting that the rioters were right, in any way shape or form, because I would never suggest that we do things so uselessly violent. I am advocating breaking the law, but not any old way. I am suggesting that you break the law in useful and nonviolent ways. I am done with ideas for different thinking. I am on ideas for different doing. This is not a new concept. This is the same concept behind the civil rights activism that has been carried out in social movements. But instead of peaceful, nonviolent protest I am advocating for peaceful, nonviolent subversive enterprise that connects resources to needs.
My activism is food, so I know how to provide examples in that realm only. I will stay in my lane. I have stayed out of proper food business for some time, because what I am talking about is all that is gently rogue. What I am talking about is creative mutual aid. What I am talking about is not checking out of politics or the systems born of the flawed thinking, but doing and undoing alongside of those systems that will serve us in spite of them. I am talking about building things and also about taking things apart. About recognizing that there are non-profits and businesses and ways of being in the world that we have participated in for a long time, and that some of us are now trying to save, that do not need to exist anymore. I am talking about Genuino Clandestino in Italy. I am talking about a church where people make cheese together. You can still sing while making cheese. I am talking about a group of people buying a herd of goats together and dispatching them cleverly and safely throughout the neighborhood until group harvest. I am talking about planting an anonymous garden in a city park. I am talking about community gardening that takes it all a step further, into the kitchen of a willing person or persons who will jar all that shit up and give it back to you as interest on your investment in the land being shared.
I could go on, but I think you get what I’m saying. I’m saying break the law. Break the law as gently and quietly and cleverly and coolly and deliciously as you can. The magazine might go out of business. The thing you have put your hard earned money into might fail. Because the rule of law and the habits of thinking were not developed in advance of action, they were developed in response to action. We will not create accountability that is sensible for humans or the earth by trying to convince each other with words, either beautiful or hurtful. Stop calling for different feelings and ideas. Instead, prove that what we need to nourish ourselves has not been given to us, and probably will not be until we create it, or revise or demolish the in-bounds acceptable thing that we thought would serve it up. And if we can do so while caring for each other and the earth, I believe we will be moving out from under the weight of sentimental grief.
