The title of this post echoes the post from February about plant sentience for reasons that will become clear. I’ve always loved forests. I say that with the caveat that I’m quite sure nature is trying to kill me. In an ocean, I’m never relaxed, fully expecting a bite or sting from some unseen creature. On land I feel a lot better, and have even been known to bliss out in an old-growth forest. Bugs, bears, and snakes all lurk of course, but I can trust my eyes and ears and feel like I can evade danger if I need to (fond fantasy #23). (Admittedly, I feel safest in cities, where I do the lion’s share of my wandering and exploring, even facing the rare armed hold-up.)
The current surge of catastrophic wildfires, already far worse than any previous year (which we could have said in each of those years), is devastating areas across the northern hemisphere and choking cities thousands of miles away with smoke. In the U.S. this is all compounded by a severe drought over most of the West. But let’s not get too provincial here. In Siberia, wildfires are raging across the once frozen boreal forests, sending tons of carbon into the atmosphere, in a third consecutive year of unheard of drought and fire in the arctic north. And the ongoing destruction of the Amazon in Brazil, Paraguay, Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, and Colombia adds South America to the hot spots of deforestation-by-fire. Indonesia is another (check that Indonesia link to get to a great website Global Forest Watch, that has a dashboard where you can dive deep into any country in the world and see maps of forest cover, forest loss, fires, and more.)
The Amazon on fire in 2020. Photo courtesy Pixabay (Creative Commons)
Siberian forests ablaze (skynews)
Peat fires smolder in below-freezing Siberia last winter.
It’s hard not to feel completely apocalyptic, given the devastation underway, especially in light of the fact that it is part of a very bad feedback cycle, adding ever more carbon ever more rapidly to the atmosphere, which is quickly worsening droughts, floods, and other natural disasters. If we ever doubted that humans are an integral part of nature, it would be impossible now.
But in the midst of this dire situation, I still have confidence that we can turn it around. Some days it seems truly impossible, but when I read a book like Suzanne Simard’s new Finding the Mother Tree, I reconnect to the longer flow of history, as she describes so eloquently her own 45-year path from summer job for a logging company to a new (old) synthesis of modern science and ancient indigenous knowledge.
I have been given a glimpse of these ideals—almost as a stroke of luck—through the rigid lens of western science. I’d been taught in the university to take apart the ecosystem, to reduce it into its parts, to study the trees and plants and soils in isolation, so that I could look at the forest objectively. This dissection, this control and categorization and cauterization, were supposed to bring clarity, credibility, and validation to any findings. When I followed these steps of taking the system apart to look at the pieces, I was able to publish my results, and I soon learned that it was impossible for a study of the diversity and connectivity of a whole ecosystem to get into print. There’s no control!, the reviewers cried at my early papers. Somehow with my Latin scintillation counters, and my training to consider only sharp lines of statistically significant differences, I have come full circle to stumble onto some of the indigenous ideals: Diversity matters. And everything in the universe is connected—between the forests and prairies, the land and the water, the sky and soil, the spirits and the living, the people and all other creatures.
p. 283
Her book is great reading. She hones in, in a rather folksy and anecdotal way, on deep epistemology. How do we know what we know? What is knowing? She intersperses the episodes of her life with her evolving knowledge, from early romance and marriage, kids, moving, career path from lumber companies to British Columbia Forestry Agency to graduate school in Corvallis, Oregon, to eventual tenured professor at University of British Columbia, 9-hour commutes and the impossibility of balancing work and domestic life, divorce, eventually finding new love with a woman, cancer and survival. Amidst it all she makes the stunning discovery that various species of mycorrhizal fungi play key roles in a communicative web among trees in the forest, weaving together “mother” trees with their offspring, as well facilitating the sharing of carbon, water, and other elements with other trees species “in the neighborhood.” With a phalanx of graduate students following her research path, new breakthroughs soon follow, proving what the naked eye can already clearly see: clearcutting old growth forests is like chopping off our limbs. As a child of a horse-logging family of settlers in British Columbia, she is not opposed to a functional connection to trees and forests as resources that we must use. But her research shows that, contrary to lumber industry arguments, birch and douglas fir need each other and support each other over time, and both thrive in each other’s presence, as opposed to the narrow paradigmatic focus on a “competition for resources [water].”
A lot of activists across many issues and many generations have embraced the U.S. Constitution for its much-admired Bill of Rights, for the post-Civil War amendments that banned slavery and created “equal protection” for all while also ensuring birthright citizenship, and even the belated extension of voting rights to women a hundred years ago. I’m not writing to attack the worthy aspects of constitutional law that have expanded rights and allowed more breathing space in a society founded on slavery and genocide. But we can’t forget that basic reality: the U.S. Constitution was a document forged in a specific time and political culture that allowed for human slavery and was acutely focused on expansion into indigenous lands. Slavery and genocide were built in from the beginning, and no amount of blather about the magnificence of the Founding Fathers, the brilliance of the Constitution or the political structure of the U.S. government overcomes that.
The current right-wing hysteria over Critical Race Theory is just the latest tempest stirred up to enforce an amnesiac approach to U.S. history that mostly prevailed for two centuries until unraveling rather substantially in the past quarter century. The intellectually vapid, but politically charged effort to discredit Nikole Hannah-Jones and the New York Times’ 1619 Project by creating the widely ridiculed 1776 manifesto failed on launch. But the rabid white supremacist rank-and-file, much larger than any of us want to believe, are fertile ground for truth-denying myths that prop up their fantasies of racial and cultural superiority. Discredited by a wide range of historians and public intellectuals over the past decades, the right-wing self-congratulating version of history won’t go away as long as it provides a unifying narrative to people who see their world slipping away and blame that perceived loss on betrayal by “others” (critical histories quickly become examples of such betrayals). This is the long history of fascism and right-wing demagoguery, played out over and over in the past century. And we are well into the current chapter of this, and perhaps the final chapter of the long-simmering U.S. Civil War, as it unfolds during the 2020s.
The view from Bernal Heights
But rather than further beating this exhausted (and exhausting) anti-fascist horse, I want to suggest that the nearly religious reverence for the U.S. Constitution is at the root of the strange passivity and political impotence that grips the country here in mid-2021. While the insane millions of right-wing zealots are arming themselves, organizing, demonstrating, publishing, and carrying on their efforts to overthrow the simulacra of democracy, where is the outpouring of grassroots energy defending the right to vote, or our supposedly precious democratic institutions? Where is the public clamor for universal health care, radical reduction and imminent elimination of carbon emissions, generalized rights to equally funded high-quality education, a general right to quality housing, etc.? Where are the strikes for new independent unions and a general doubling of wages? Or the elimination of the wage-system altogether?
I live far outside the boundaries of mainstream United States intellectual and political life. I’m a historian, writer, editor, and political analyst, and have participated in social movements all my life, from anti-nuclear and anti-war efforts in the 1970s and 1980s, to persistent labor agitating on and off the job (especially with Processed World magazine in the 1980s-90s), to the Critical Mass bicycling movement that propelled me into a role in new urban movements in Europe and Latin America during the 21st century. I write semi-regularly on this blog and I’ve published ten books with various publishers, all known to be on the “Left” (Verso Books, Pluto Press, AK Press, City Lights Books) or my own imprint, Full Enjoyment Books. I’ve had several titles translated and published in Italy and one in Brazil. My blog is read by a few hundred people, my books sell in the few thousands, and I have friends and fans from San Francisco to Santiago to Sao Paulo, Berkeley to Bergamo to Buenos Aires, Portland to Puerto Alegre, Mexico City to Milano, Toronto, Rome, and Guadalajara and points in between. I am proud of this, and it makes me happy and hopeful.
Coyotes, an ever more common sight on Bernal Heights, seen here at dusk on April 21.
I am far from silenced, and by many measurements I’m a modest success (even if I haven’t been able to economically support myself writing). But still, I’m a sublebrity (hat-tip to Brian Awehali for this great neologism) at best, and just another invisible “content producer” to most people. I’ve made no effort to get a “real job” since I was in my mid-20s, and have never tried to get my work in front of the big New York publishers, never connected with an agent, nor have I tried very hard to break into big circulation periodicals (a couple of tries led nowhere).
I’ve never officially made more than $25,000 in any of my 45 adult years, but I’m debt-free and even have a bit of savings, and with my very low Land Trust rent, my sweetheart and I live a materially comfortable life.
You could say I lack ambition. But actually I am profoundly ambitious with regard to my own goals, some of which I’ve had all my life (overthrow wage-labor and capitalism; live well now and work as little as possible), and others that have taken shape as I’ve gotten older:
• produce a dynamic archival space for recording and debating our shared history;
• participating in unfolding movements of techno-scientific workers to reclaim the purpose and design of their own work, and redirect the technosphere to a radically different way of life;
• adapt urban life to natural systems that undergird our existence, especially, perhaps, someday, redoing our relationship to fresh water, personal mobility, and public space;
• live to see the decommodification of housing and the reinvention of neighborhood life/politics.
• etc. etc. etc. …
Yes, I can keep adding to this list, but as a relatively isolated voice, not involved at the moment in any movement or political organizing effort, what’s the point? I like hearing and seeing my voice—if I didn’t I wouldn’t keep writing. But I am self-aware enough to know that narcissistic satisfaction is not an adequate reason to add more words to the empty, always urgent cacophony that is already burying countless intelligent ideas and vital critiques, including, presumably, my own!
We’ve all trekked up and down and all over Bernal countless times during this past year… but I still feel blessed that it is just a 25 minute walk from home.
With this predicament as my daily starting point, I ponder new books I want to write (and add to the tidal wave of new work always crashing over any of us trying to “keep up”), including a prequel novel to my previous After the Deluge, and two more histories of San Francisco covering 1957-67 and 1980-2020… or should I pursue a systemic reworking of our unique digital archive at foundsf.org to adapt it better to current stylistic preferences for online presentations, including adding a map interface?… or should I pursue building a solar energy commons, starting with our co-op building and reaching out to all the neighbors whose backyards connect in this large urban block in San Francisco’s Mission District, and pioneer a model of urban grassroots reinvention?
One or more of these projects will certainly reach fruition in the next years, maybe all of them! But I have to admit I kind of liked the Covid hiatus. It fit with my well-cloaked agoraphobia, removing any expectation that I would be going to events or seeing people out in the world. I have been quite content walking and biking on my own, seeing people very occasionally, hosting walks and tours outdoors during these months, and having hours every day to read, devouring dozens of books, following my curiosity and interests wherever they led me. I love being a completely independent public intellectual!
