Oil Free Flotilla – A Seething Pit of Hypocrisy

Yay, we did it! But wait, my toothbrush was plastic and I ate food from a can... bloody hypocrite.

It was so strange to come home on the 1st of December from the oil free seas flotilla (the backstory is here http://oilfreeseasflotilla.org.nz). I went from being completely embedded in a floating community, a close-knit group depending on each other in a myriad of ways, to one lone individual once again navigating the corridors of steel and glass in Wellington's city streets. I swayed like a drunken tree in the wind, regaining land-legs after nearly three weeks where everything in the whole universe moved a little or a lot, all the time.

Bewildered and thrown back into normality, it was too hard to resist going back through some of the media stories from while we were out there, both to get a sense of how the issue was living in the public imaginiation, and to feel vicariously re-connected with my shipmates.

What most stood out for me, reading some of the comments and discussions, was how lame the key critique of our endeavour was! The point that many people seemed to feel undermined the voyage was the hypocrisy of protesting against deep sea oil exploration while dependent in some shape or form on oil. I felt like writing about this hypocrisy problem, not because I am especially hurt and feel a need to defend the flotilla, but because it seems like an increasingly typical and banal debate in this movement to break up with fossil fuels.

Basically the argument goes like this: "These people are bloody hypocrites protesting against extraction/excessive use of [insert fossil fuel] because they themselves are using [insert oil related item]." Sometimes the speaker is right (yes, the flotilla used some diesel -although our engine died on day 3, so not much!), and sometimes they're wrong, like here:

Hon GERRY BROWNLEE: ... I would simply like to note, then, that that flotilla is out there powered by dirty diesel-guzzling engines. [Interruption]

Mr SPEAKER: Order! A supplementary question has been called. Gareth Hughes.

Gareth Hughes: I think the Minister will find that they are yachts.*

heh.

But actually, it doesn't matter at all whether they're right or wrong, it's the petty neh-neh-ness of hypocrisy noting that bothers me. It's a gross, competitive, "I recycle so I'm better than you," trivial, spiteful way to critique. "We all depend on oil products therefore it's hypocritical to oppose them." I challenge that logic.

Yes, I try and limit how much fossil fuels I create cause to be burnt. But I don't do so in order to manipulate how other people perceive me and be somehow more credible as an activist. I do so because I feel like they are hurting the world and I find that hard to forget. My personal consumption of the oil-related products most of us rely on is totally unrelated to my right to oppose deep sea oil, or Bathurst coal, or tar sands. It's a typical symptom of a culture of competitive individualism that we feel this need to critique the personal choices of those who are trying to open up a conversation about where we get our energy from and what we do with it.

No-one has a nice handy perch outside of history from which to birth change - all we can do is work with the conditions, creatively, imaginatively, but not magically out of nowhere, in an untouchable perfect vacuum. If I tried to do that I would a) spend all my time trying to be perfect and have no time for achieving anything and b) be stressed all the time about what people were thinking of me. Life is not meant to be about being a martyr or obsessed with self-denial! It's a fast track to resenting everyone and everything. We need to give ourselves permission to work with what we've got. As an immaculately mustached young guy whose name I've forgotten said in a room I was in recently – "our generation didn't choose these systems. If we did we'd have chosen better ones." We are part of this car-dependent culture, this legacy of domination and greed and emotional repression, we're just doing the best we can with what we inherited, what we were carefully trained into, just like the generation before us. We need to use what we've got to create something different. I'm not making an argument that my fossil fuel use should be judged in relation to what change I create. I'm saying it's unrelated, and no-one else's business but mine. Who cares about me? Engage with the ideas as they appear in your own life! See if something is true for you. Enough with the hypocrisy police.

It seems like behind all vitriolic hypocrisy-accusations is a fear that people are going to be judged by their habits, that my actions are somehow condemning them and their lifestyle, that once again they are going to be found to be not good enough. I can understand that, because a heap of environmentalists are incredibly judgy and use caring about the planet as a disguise for hating humans and playing a subtle game of oneupmanship. And I know very very few humans who don't have some kind of feeling of being not good enough, at some time, in some way. Maybe all the time.

The troubling thing is that I feel like a fear of this hypocrisy police backlash stops a lot of people from becoming really lovingly critical of this mess we're embroiled in, stops them voicing their concerns and ideas and fears. One man interviewed by Campbell Live in Kaikoura said something along the lines of "I'm not sure about deep sea oil, it seems pretty dodgy, but I drive my car every day, so I guess I support it." To me that sounds like he's formed a position based on a concern about being attacked for hypocrisy – and judging from the fb and media comments I've read, that's a valid enough concern. What's the solution? Maybe... don't be a dick?

*copied from the ludicrous petty squabbling that is the parliamentary transcripts, Volume 695, page 14755, Week 60 - Tuesday, 19 November 2013, at http://www.parliament.nz/en-nz/pb/debates/debates/daily/50HansD_20131119/volume-695-week-60-tuesday-19-november-2013

apathy and acceptance

 (how much energy does it take to be asleep?)

I don't really write on this blog much, even though as those who know me can attest, I'm not short of things to say. I think it's because I'm a (grudgingly recovering, oft-relapsing) perfectionist and if I can't write something structured and world changing and great that can quite happily be published in my collected essays edition in 2050 without major editing, then I can't do anything at all! Things like that always sound ridiculous when you articulate them, but brains are ridiculous, that's exactly the sort of thought process they get off on (mine, anyway).

Anyway, new policy: short, semi-unintelligible snippet posts with hardly any structure and a total failure to cohere or tell a nicely shapely narrative. Instead of a blog, it will be a beautifully shapeless blob! Or that's my strategy anyway.

So, this blob: something I always want to write about but never feel well enough researched/informed/able to articulate: the difference between acceptance and apathy. This distinction is pretty important to my own life but what makes me want to try and explore it is how often poor old 'acceptance' seems misunderstood.

I remember walking along one day with a friend who was experiminting with illicit buddhism, and I was trying to force him to admit that it was stupid and passive because all the adherents would just meditate away while meanwhile the world would pave paradise and put up a shopping mall. "Everything will be concrete and you won't even CARE!" was the gist of my complaint. He had no good answers and resorted to the wise yet condescending nod technique. This is what I would say to myself if I could timetravel back there and be him:

Me: the problem with 'accepting' is that you won't even care about (for eg) climate change. It sounds like you just want us to sit back and watch the fallout, fuck all the suffering and the victims etc.
Me-time-travelling-inhabiting-my-friend's-body-and-talking-to-myself: nah acceptance is not apathy. To me, acceptance doesn't mean all the things that haven't happened yet - how can you accept them when you don't even know what they'll be? It just means what has already happened and what is happening right now. I wonder if our future obsessed culture creates this determination to think 'accepting' means 'accepting what might happen'.

Me: but change and action come from dissatisfaction with the status quo and it being unfair and stuff
TimetravelMe: I don't reckon 'acceptance' means no motivation. It's not the same as resignation. I can be critical of something but still accept it - it just means I'm not trying to block reality because I can't handle it. If I am angry and hurt about lots of elephants dying or people hurting one another, acceptance doesn't mean I go 'oh well, too hard'. It just means I acknowledge my own reactions. It's the opposite of putting my fingers in my ears and going lalala because it's too much and too scary. So to me that would pave the way for quality action, because I wouldn't be tied to blind reaction.
I guess it does sound weird to say "I accept deep sea oil" - maybe the language is too polluted - but what I mean is that I accept that it is happening right now, I feel concern and grief and anger that people care about money more than this world our home, but I currently feel moved to do everything in my power to stop it. Acceptance to me just means owning my responses and acknowledging that I have no idea how it will all turn out, and feeling my own fear about what might happen. I want to act, effectively, full of life and curiosity, not full of tense determination to make things be 'my way'. I refuse to act from a place of domination - I don't think I can dominate my way into a better world.

And apathy - to me it's a contradictory word because it conjures up both intense stasis, and extreme tense movement. Sort of like when you're lying in bed and you don't want to get up but you really need to and it is anything but relaxing. I totally disagree that apathy is laziness. Apathy is being afraid, losing faith that anyone will listen to you, feeling disempowered, shame, hating yourself, blocking the world or your emotions because they're too much... all of which are bloody exhausting! Apathy is incredibly tiring! It's like being a golf ball all full of stretched rubber bands all the time, working hard to keep a chaotic world under control. Apathy doesn't need abuse, apathy needs agency. To me a core part of apathy is being unable to feel or own your own response to things -perhaps shutting down as a response to overwhelmingness. So you hear the sea level is going to rise? That polar bears are going extinct? A million pieces of tragedy every day? If I can't acknowledge my own reaction to hearing this stuff, feel it in my body, – if that feels like too much, overwhelming– then I have to block it out. Like I do with my library fines ($68.30 last time someone managed to prise my fingers out of ears and shout the amount in).

So we throw more depressing statistics at the apathetic, hoping they'll 'wake up'. Maybe one or two people do, overflowing with grief and anger. My theory is that it doesn't work - because any action is blocked by it being too scary to accept what is going on and our own response to that. Apparently conservative people are more fearful, which in my biased world sounds like a similar response (no I refuse to do referencing – you'll just have to take my word for it). So for me the question becomes - how can I help make it feel more safe to accept the world/ourselves/reality? How can I do that more and more myself? Not apathetically, not resignedly, not passive or with withdrawal – but being ok with what I am and what's going on in me, all the time. And then acting in a fresh way, full of all the energy I'm not wasting filtering myself and the world.

Me: zzzzz

ps I lied I didn't actually conquer perfectionism I just got sick and stuck in bed. All incomprehensibles may be blamed on the fever.

Wild? I was absolutely livid...

Wildness... lately I've been thinking about (and trying to write about) the many meanings of this word. Here's a sampler from the OED:
WILD:

4a. Of a place or region: Uncultivated or uninhabited; hence, waste, desert, desolate.

6. Not under, or not submitting to, control or restraint; taking, or disposed to take, one's own way; uncontrolled.

7b. Giving way to sexual passion; also, more widely, licentious, dissolute, loose.

There's a huge amount of interesting cultural baggage just in these few definitions. I'm not going to try and write a well shaped, progressive argument here, or a cohesive theory of everything, just a few observations: Why, if a landscape has no human presence, is it then terra nullius, a terrible blank, "waste, desert, desolate"? I think this is evidence of a world view that only defines wild spaces in terms of what human value they might hold. I was at a workshop a few weekends ago and one woman told a story about a fellow mother waiting after school for their kids. The woman telling the story was speaking about the proposed mine on the Denniston plateau and the destruction it would wreak. The other mother's response was "but there's nothing there!". Woah! I'm not saying this other mother is a horrible human, just that she's deeply inside some cultural norms and values that can only perceive the world in terms of human use. This is what worries me about rhetoric saying "look after the world for future generations" (the implication being, so there's something left for them to use too). What about looking after the world for its own sake, recognising that the non-human sphere has an intentionality and purpose in its own right? Saying "it's there for us" (thanks Genesis) seems like egotism on a species level, and it's not fair to say its a natural human tendency: there are plenty of cultures that didn't/don't indulge in this specific brand of egotistic utilitarianism ("things are only good in terms of usefulness to ME"). This is a western contruct, from a legacy of self-involved, dualistic thinking. It's the macro version of only being interested in other people in terms of how useful they can be to you – networking at its worst.

Which really relates to the second definition, about control. If a wilderness is a self-willed land, one that we allow to do its own thing, then ecological destruction is about control. Geo-engineering and sci-fi dreams of technological determinism saving us from ourselves are still obsessed with controlling and shaping the world – the "thinking that caused the problem". Most utopian dreams are inherently controlling, because they suffer from an absence of doubt. Kindness doesn't know the outcome. It acts in the moment, without trying to make everything come out exactly how it wants it to. "Letting go' might seem like the last thing we need to do in relation to biospheric destruction, but it just means releasing our personal notion of how things 'should' be, in the future, in our minds, and instead working with how things are, and listening to their own intentionality.

Rebranding nature as 'ecosystem services' make everything subservient to how it serves human interest. And even that's not fair, to universalise. Because environmental destruction is characterised by how it doesn't serve everyone's interest, and in the long run, doesn't serve human interest at all! Certain, specific groups benefit from environmental damage, and they benefit in the extreme short term. Saying "humans are a plague on the planet" universalises what is very culturally specific. Saying population growth is our biggest problem tries to make the most innocent responsible for the selfishness of one culturally specific group. Not fair!

There's a long history of connecting women with nature, in order to relegate both to a sub-rational, lower sphere of life. Traditionally (in a western cultural idiom), women were contradictorily seen as both sexually ravenous and insatiable (needing constant control), and passive and incomplete (crying out for dominance). The non-human sphere was similarly defined by its 'need' for dominance and control – think about the language of 'virgin' soil, becoming a 'cultivated' young lady, not 'running wild'.

Here's a poem from a super popular conduct book in the 18th Century:

Ours be the task alone

to check her rude excresences; to prune

Her wanton undergrowth; and where she sports

In shapes too wild, to lead her gently back,

With prudent hand, to better form and use

John Armstrong The Economy of Love (1736/8^th ed. 1791)

(How might this relate to current pressures on women to "prune their wanton undergrowth"? How is our obsession with hygiene an obsession with control, a fear of the wild?)

It's easy to fall into dodgy essentialism here: to start claiming that women are biologically closer to nature, that women's ways of doing things will save the world, etc etc. This is recycled Victorian moralism gone wrong: 'the angel in the house' becomes 'the angel in the ecosystem', and it's just a relative of the same old biological essentialism that has been used to subjugate women for centuries. It's pretty much the antithesis of feminism. Being female doesn't automatically give you some sort of ecological consciousness. I only need to think of my own experience of people's actual lives to see that. That doesn't mean that the nature/culture dualism hasn't been gendered by Western cultural tradition. It just reinforces the realisation that gender is constructed, and that the way we understand and construct what is 'masculine' is kind of gross and harmful, and operates in a similar way in relation to everything it perceives as "other". Which brings things nicely back to the beginning: it's the sense of seperateness that makes us see everything only as reflections of ourselves, as expressions of usefulness, mediated through our hunger. We have called this specific kind of 'confidence' and 'assertiveness' (read: egotism, domination and self-involvement) 'masculine', but increasingly we live in a culture that encourages everyone to be like that, and it is to their credit that I know plenty of women and men who choose not to be. The end (for now).

(Inspiration for the title comes from Rowan Atkinson in a gorilla suit: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=beCYGm1vMJ0) AND the artwork is by Yellena James :)

On Permeability

 A short story...

On Permeability

The woman had never liked sounds. As a child, she would put wads of blu-tack in each ear, pull a beanie down over her face, and crawl hampster-like onto the top shelf of the airing cupboard, where she could enjoy the blissful absence of the everyday noise that made life so exhausting. As she grew older, she found herself more and more repelled by the constant physical menace of sound, its encroachment, its impatience. The rustle of shopping bags seemed to scrunch the skin of her inner ear. The chink of teaspoon against china cup struck against her temples and brow. A neighbour practicing saxophone seemed to smear notes across her face with a disgusting mustard stickiness. It was unbearable.
She began to look for solutions.
The eastern suburbs were problematic, plagued as they were with the constantly descending blades of aeroplane noise. The western hills were cursed with rusty kaka cries and the intolerable death gurgles of tui. The inner city was completely out of the question. The south coast was promising for a few blissful days, until a southerly storm sent long rollers explosively up onto the rocks in terrible liquid exhalations, receding with a deep sucking undertow that she felt was trying to pull her insides out through her pores.
She found refuge in a brand new soulless hill suburb, far from the shops and schools, a dark-glassed McMansion large enough to facilitate her retreat into the innermost rooms of the house. She paid cautious men to come with thick armfuls of purple-grey wool and fill the walls and windows and ceiling and front rooms while she sat in the basement wearing BOSE noise cancelling headphones turned up to max negation.
You could order your shopping online, she found, and have it delivered in reassuringly silent cardboard boxes. She ate from floppy silicone bakewear with gentle plastic spoons and disconnected the sound output of the TV so it became a soothing bath of colour and shape.
When the sound of the kettle accelerating into violent white noise became intolerable she turned to slow trickling mouthfuls of tap water, and when the infernal glopping of her stews and curries began to slime across her skin like a rash she undertook a diet of soft silent fruits, avocados, and rice pudding from Meals on Wheels, who tactfully left it on the back step.
She eased herself into silent lukewarm baths that had dribbled from the tap over many hours, and wiped her teeth with a carefully non abrasive sponge.
On Guy Fawkes night she put her headphones on and wrapped expensive shawls around her head in the manner of a Kenyan woman; and when hardy Trick or Treaters ignored her articulate and discouraging signage she crept down to the basement through long tendrils of mint green carpet and waited for them to leave.
The silence spread around her like a blissful picnic blanket.

Many years passed.

One day the woman was sitting in her headphones constructing a pastoral scene from Fuzzy Felt, when suddenly the silence became too much.
It was ravenous, it had no bottom, it yawned and gaped and tried to swallow her face. And there she was in the middle of it, a rock in a swirl of dark ocean, the hole at the bottom of the whirlpool, a guttering candle about to be swallowed! It was a vacuum, it would suck her brain out through her ears, it would turn her inside out!
She ran for the door, shedding headphones, mohair rugs, blankets of finest lambswool and small knitted items, and opened it wide on hinges of silent oil. The unfamiliar daylight stopped her short upon the front step. A wild tangle of convulvulus and dock, snail infested fennel and raggedy agapanthus had obscured her narrow front path. She took a deep breath, a lungful of late morning air, the gasp of a surfaced swimmer.
The sounds came at her. Roadworks gnawed at the distant air, cars shifted gear up hills, invisible building site men shouted at one another to fuck off, snails slimed their ways up the fennel stalks, cicadas and blackbirds and the cluCLUNK of a loose manhole as the tires went over it all swarmed in the air. They washed over her, they went straight through her and around her and up her nostrils and inside her molars. Her jaw unclenched. Her bones breathed a sigh of relief and shuffled imperceptibly away from one another. It was ok.

"I hate humans, I love trees", and other problematic statements...

What I'm feeling an urge to write about at the moment is the tendency for environmental agendas to slide into misanthropy. Misanthropy: a hatred for humanity! Woah! There's a danger when we're talking about respecting the natural world to fall into a construct of humans as harmful and insane at an essential level, and to start either insinuating or saying straight out that the world would be better off without us. I want to unpack this idea...

Firstly, I've been there. I've been that person. Environmental concerns first engaged my interest in a pretty sudden way, reading David Suzuki's 'The Sacred Balance'. It's scientific, it's passionate, it's heartfelt. I lay on my bed and read this book with tears rolling nonstop down my face as I realised the extent and depth of human abuse of the natural world. This, and other books and websites, profoundly changed my orientation to life. I wanted to be involved in this cause. But what I didn't realise at the time is that I was taking my grief and using it to blame other humans. I was using it to feel a profound dislike for my own race! This can only arise from being not only everyone else's enemy, but also your own. Disliking humans means disliking yourself. It's a desire to take the habits of others and say 'look, look what these people have done. They have done evil things. I would not do those things, oh no, for I am one of The Good Guys, and I know not to do those things'. It's using caring for the environment as a way of feeling superior to others, to bolster up our own constantly-terrified ego. The book that moved me had a subtle message that told me that 'the masses' were harming the earth while 'the enlightened ones' fought against them. What bullshit. We are all complicit in the harm we are causing. Our culture is constructed and maintained with the assistance of every single one of us, just as a future is something that we can all construct together, rather than something inevitably descending like the blade of the guillotine.

You meet people like the person I was then all the time. We say things like 'the best cure for humanity is a giant plague', or 'the earth will be better off once all the people have killed each other'. We need to stop and recognise that this is a horrifying, nihilistic vision! David Attenborough has described us as a "plague on the earth". David Suzuki, that early hero of mine, said in 2009 that "humanity is humanity...I just wish they'd stop being so human". What's wrong with these visions?

For a start, they assume that humans are inherently and unavoidably harmful in their presence on Earth. They share this view with fans of population control as the ideal method to minimise environmental damage. Advocating population control in the way Malthus did, and demographer Paul Ehrlich does, is inherently misanthropic. It's the force behind statements like the Japanese finance minister stating in January that the elderly should "hurry up and die"(1). It's saying that humans are intrinsically a negative force, that takes away from natural systems in a linear, non cyclical way. I'm not arguing that we don't currently act in such ways. But it's not inherent to our nature. It's not a built in feature, it's an app. Time for an upgrade! Malthusian enthusiasts love bandying around figures as to the 'ideal number' of humans that can live on spaceship earth. But surely this is wholly dependent on how those humans choose to live? There's a popular 'did you know' that says ants have a greater biomass than humans. As in, all the species of ant, weighed, would have greater mass than all the humans. (Looking into this, it seems unlikely that each ant has been weighed individually, but we'll roll with it.) There's a lot of ants, put it that way. And there's even more termites (little cuties), and potentially an even greater mass of krill — estimates range between 117-379 billion kilograms. Woah. That's a lot of krill. Why aren't we advocating mass culling of krill? Compulsory krill abortions! (Let's ignore for a moment the fact that we kind of are, by selling them en masse to omega-3 enthusiasts in gelatine capsules). Because their way of existing in the world isn't harmful. Every time a new krill comes along, it's not going to burn more fossil fuels and buy more clothes from Supré (although they do have some sizes suitable for krill). It's not the number of humans existing in the world, it's our habits. Population, like technology, just magnifies the impact of what we do. And since when are our habits our intrinsic character? Over the course of history we have changed and adapted our way of living countless times. Mass environmental destruction is just a loud and obvious message that it's time to do so again, in a really exciting way. This goes beyond better technologies – we require a different set of priorities wielding those technologies. Time to evolve!

We are aware of how badly adjusted our practices are to the rhythms and rules of the natural world. We are just that archetypal lonely kid in the corner of the classroom, burning with painful awareness that he or she doesn't fit in. We don't feel like we belong in the world. That's a tragedy. What that kid needs to know is how beautiful and awesome they are. We need some more faith in just how gorgeous human beings are, some belief in how special a part of the world we are, and can be. I do believe that climate change and environmentally shitty practices are, without major action, going to create conditions in which it will be very difficult for humans to flourish, if not survive.  But what's the point in survival for survival's sake? These days, the only environmental movement I'm interested in being involved in is one that whole-heartedly celebrates humans as a divine part of nature, and a beautiful expression of the same life that makes the natural world so ravishing, and worth respecting.

ref:
(1) http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jan/22/elderly-hurry-up-die-japanese

What is this...? An outlet? A cry for attention? A ranting-platform? An exhibitionist form of narcissistic journal dependence? I'm not really sure. I hope it's none of those. I just feel like there are lots of ideas floating in my brain that I would like to write about, and like to start conversations about, and my facebook page is a bit impossibly verbose. What are my interests through this blog? Issues surrounding radical change-making, imagination and creativity, social justice and inequality, human relationships with each other, ourselves, and the natural world, and the intersection between words and action. Woah, how exciting!