A Letter to Tangaroa

This post was written during my time sailing on the Rainbow Warrior III and originally published by Greenpeace NZ. My thanks to them for making it possible to care, publicly.

Tangaroa. Atua of the oceans.

This is not a structured argument. It's not an informative 101 on fisheries management. It's an apology, and an expression of my own grief, and a love letter. Some humans have forgotten some things.

For the last few weeks our ship and her crew have been here out at sea, in your rolling domain, visiting longline fishing vessels and documenting the conditions and fishing practices on board. Rusting hulls filled with the frozen bodies of your children. Tuna are hauled aboard, their fins sliced off with deft, expert hands, their hot blood drained, a line threaded through their mouth and gills, their rounded bulk slung into the depths of a freezer. Fishermen work for inhuman stretches of time, reeling in more... and more... and more from your waters. Tuna, sharks, sunfish, marlin, turtles... whatever likes the look of a baited hook.  The freezers fill up, the boat becoming lower in the water from the weight. Hundreds upon hundreds of tonnes of stiff bodies. And then these go to shore, directly or via another ship, and the boat begins again. It is one of thousands.

Tangaroa, a tuna in your world is a living thing, a vital, hot-blooded, muscular, round-bodied, swift, silver flash of life. You are the guardian of the waters, but as a creature is dragged from them and into a boat, something happens. It stops being a living being and becomes a commodity, a resource, money in fishy form. It stops being your creature, your gift, our privilege, something to respect and honour. It becomes a quota. A stock. A fishery. An 'it'. Something to fill a can, a sandwich, a wallet, a report, a conference. What has happened to human eyes, that silver creatures are seen only as silver dollars? When did we forget that the same mauri animates us both?

This approach is not just to your sea-creatures, but other humans also. The fishermen on these boats are not treated as human beings, but as a resource – a disposable method to convert fish into cash. Too many of them are underpaid, overworked, deprived of sleep, some are abused, perhaps kept at sea for years at a time with no means of escape. We have heard stories of lost fingers, of beatings, of being locked in freezers, income stolen by corrupt agents after years of work, stories of distant families, of hardship and sacrifice. What hardening of the heart has happened to make some people treat other ones like this? And what damage does it do to a person to be effectively forced into commodity-killing for their work?

Who is doing this? Where does this culture come from? There are obviously some companies that are callously determined to strip-mine every wriggle of life from the sea – Mitsubishi, for example has for years been stockpilingendangered bluefin tuna for the day when extinction drives up the price. But this kind of madness happens within a cultural web that we all help construct: one that sees creatures as commodities, one that puts personal gratification above any other goal, one that takes but does not give back. A chronic, ravenous dissatisfaction. The way we eat teaches us how to see, and the way we see shapes how we eat. And it is forgetful. You are continuously teaching us the laws of nature but many of us have forgotten how to listen, how to live by them. 

Why should we remember you? What help would it be to acknowledge you as atua and guardian of everything in the oceans? Perhaps the act of honouring you could serve as a reminder that to take something from the ocean is a privilege, not a right. A reminder that the world is not ours. Even in well-meaning moments, we talk about looking after the ocean – for us. We talk about 'our oceans,' 'our fish,' looking after the sea for 'our children'. 

It's not our ocean. It's your ocean. 

This is what I understand about you. You keep on giving. You are generosity, you are wildness, you are creation and destruction, humourous, spontaneous and always changing. It is not in your nature to hold back, you give freely the food that becomes our blood in turn. You do not turn against people even in our heights of greed. But we seem not to notice, we keep on taking. At some point we stopped taking just what we needed and started to exploit you. Will we keep going until the oceans are empty, until the last and smallest creature has been sieved and boiled and canned and consumed? Maybe we will.

Tangaroa, mō taku hē, mō taku hē.

I am sorry.

(written during the Warrior's 2015 Pacific Tuna Campaign)

The Perversion of 'Be the Change'

“Be the change that you wish to see in the world,” Gandhi famously advised. The words once evoked some kind of a response in me, a wonder and excitement of possibilities. Now I feel they conjure up nothing more than a hackneyed truism, an overused and abused and essentially meaningless call to irrelevant individualism. What happened? What does the way we understand this phrase tell us about the Western cultural psyche and its approach to social change?

We live in a swirling maelstrom of forces pushing us to be atomised, selfish individuals, to feel a sense of lack, to try and assuage that lack through mindless hedonism and consumerism, to be disempowered, fragmented, lonely little egos, scrabbling for a sense of well-being and connection. Many people can see that the castles we have built are not serving us or the more-than-human world. Many people know that changes must and will occur. But the ravenous capitalist machine, the physical expression of our self-obsessed individualism, likes nothing better than to co-opt challenges and pervert them into an extension of itself. Look at punk, now a selection of union jack/safety pin consumer identity markers, look at those branches of feminism that collapsed into advocating for women to have equal right to fuck over the world. Radical challenges get swallowed whole by a capitalist machine more concerned with looking inevitable than it is with actually working.

"Be the change" was never supposed to refer to changing minute and irrelevant details about your physical life. Changing to a mung-bean only diet and sleeping on a mattress of wool from only the most enlightened alpacas may give a smug sense of superiority over your fellow humans, but it is just another fragmented, individualistic and pointless gesture that really achieves sweet fuck all. I mean, go for it by all means if you just simply like doing those things, but don't then hold those gestures up to yourself or others as evidence of moral superiority or greater effectiveness as an agent of change. For a start, not everyone can afford such gestures, and so gushing about toilet cleaner made from the joyful tears of dolphins, sustainably harvested during dolphin therapy sessions, basically becomes a way of crowing about having more money than other people. Any conditional criteria for worthiness as a human will fall into this, because materially our society is so hugely unequal and unjust. And for myself at least, such moves always had a profound instability to them: the uneasy sense that if my validation was coming from not flying/being vegan/wearing hemp underwear/etc then if these things ceased or ceased to be recognised, I would once again be an unvalidated, needy and separate self.
Physical gestures are not something to build a sense of self from, and trying to do is just another iteration of capitalist consumerism, appropriating anything and everything into the gaping void of my own gnawing inadequacy. That is the mentality of infinite growth, and it is the mentality of the ego. It is not the mentality of life, which is always already sufficient and enough.

The irony is that by perpetuating these same thought patterns and ways of being, even if our actions seem different from the norm, we don't bring any change at all, only the same dull round of earth destroying hypocrisy. People always seem so sad and surprised to learn that a giant new windfarm has destroyed 400 hectares forest causing a vast mudslide that wipes out a village, or that westerners eating quinoa has screwed over the grain as a Bolivian staple to the point where the locals who grow it cannot afford it any more and are forced to less nutritious alternatives. We really thought physical changes were going to change the world. But it's the same thinking, and so it's the same results in different garments.

Be the change has come to mean "do the change, and judge others who don't". The western culture is obsessed with doing, and not very interested at all in being. I can see this in the way we denigrate those without a job, the way I have had to learn how to relax and do nothing without feeling guilty, the way we chase busy busy busy, anything to avoid feeling and just being. We love cats even through they really don't do much at all, why can't we do the same with human beings?

This isn't actually surprising - it is just what the neo-liberal capitalist mindset and machine does: it takes radical challenges and perverts them. 'Be the change' is a genuinely radical challenge: it calls on all of us to abandon the competitive, self-serving, narcissistic, neurotic and miserable patterns of culture and thought we have been socially conditioned into and made our own. It recognises that our problems are not merely physical: they are emotional, cultural and spiritual, and the physical woes are only the most bloody obvious symptoms of a way of being that is profoundly disconnected from the world and life that we are all inescapably and joyfully part of. It calls for an end to power and control as the go-to methods of living.

Only by recognising the capitalist impulse to corrupt and absorb, an impulse within all of us, can we stay true to the potential of the original phrase. To be the change we must reorient our relationship with everything around us, we must step back into feeling like part of the world, and fall in love with life. Only then will our actions be able to express the kind of profound change we do truly need. We don't have to do this, but why wouldn't you?

Subantarctic Marine Reserves - Great, But Don't Get Schmoozed.

 New marine reserves - we must really care about NZ's subantarctic islands. But do we really?

So Nick Smith, our conservation Minister, has just announced 435,000 hectares of marine reserves around the subantarctic islands. Hooray, great news, you may think, but don't be fooled. Straight away I've seen/heard people talking about how this is so great. Yes, it is, but beware: by passing on the "good news" you are also playing your part in the government's spin machine.

They had a hell of a trip down: the navy boat HMNZS Wellington, with the Minister, DOC staff, navy kids, Sam and Gareth Morgan, and Metservice people was forced to turn back from a storm described as 'hell on earth'... 16 metre waves and gusts up to 90 knots (166kph)...eek! Even allowing for the usual nautical exaggeration that would be really, really full on. There's a reason there's an old saying - Below 40 degrees south there is no law. Below 50 degrees there is no god. The captain said it was the worst sea he'd ever sailed in and admitted to having been afraid.

To give you an idea, this is about a 3 or 4 metre swell from the high aft deck of the 45m Spirit of NZ:

Multiply that by 4... Eek! So I was curious, why is the Minister braving these (not unusual for that patch of ocean) conditions? I'd heard rumours about setting up a climate monitoring station (great, let's spend money on better instruments to watch humans change the climate rather than on stopping changing the climate) and that may well still be a thing.

But this announcement about the marine reserves makes the trip make more sense. This government has come under increasing criticism for its 'drill it, mine it, frack it' ideology, inaction on climate change, and general mood of not giving a fuck about the natural world we depend upon. People's dissatisfaction is showing with, among other things, the growing momentum of the oil free movement. But now along comes election year, and the blokes in charge are a bit worried about their image, and someone has had the genius idea that we can announce vast tracts of distant ocean as marine reserve and look really, really, ridiculously environmentally caring.

I have no problem with making marine reserves in the subantarctics. But before you celebrate, consider how much impact these reserves are really going to have. Are any existing activities drastically going to change down there? And what else is going on that might endanger these places?

I sailed to Campbell Island last year and Nick Smith is right in saying that this place, along with the Auckland and Bounty Islands, is "one of the most pristine places on earth". It is one of the most amazing and precious places I have ever been lucky enough to visit. I sailed there on Tiama to pick up 6 scientists and bring them back to Bluff - our steel hulled sailboat is the prime mode of transport for scientists working on the subantartic islands. We happened to be anchored in harbour for one glorious day and I had a chance to explore part of the island, meeting sealions, albatross chicks like giant fluffy skittles, giant megaherb plants, and so many more wonders.

Approaching Cambell Island at dusk, the cliffs lined with albatrosses (white dots on the green bits)

 

So many sealions swimming around the boat like pasta on the boil, and lolloping around on land like big dog-slugs. A little bit scary when they run at you...

Tiama at anchor in Perseverence Harbour, Campbell Island

Albatross chick - these guys are HUGE! They just sit there waiting for food for so many months - I would get very bored.

Nick Smith goes on to say that "these marine reserves are about keeping them that way"(ie pristine). "The marine reserve status that takes effect today means there can be no fishing, no mining, no petroleum exploration and no marine farming in these waters." That sounds great. But check out Campbell Island. This is one of the approx 3 buildings on the island, in a place where everything is carry in, carry out, you need to vacuum your bags before going ashore to check for seeds, and the animals are completely unafraid of humans because they've hardly ever seen any.

A built-up area on campbell island. #densitydonewell.

The activities mentioned by Nick Smith - fishing, mining, marine farming etc aren't happening here, at all, and no-one has anything like that planned. So it seems to me making the reserves is a nice idea, but it's not a heroic act of change - in fact it will have approximately zero impact.

But what WILL have a huge and drastic effect on these islands is the very programme of fossil fuel exploration that this announcement seems designed to distract us from. At the same time as the gvmt is ostensibly protecting these precious islands, Energy Minister Simon Bridges is travelling around the world trying to schmooze foreign oil companies to come and drill right next to these same islands, in the super deep, super rough waters of the great south basin.

(islands in approximate locations. The cream patch shows areas designated for exploratory drilling)

Does someone need to sit these ministers down together and let them know that water moves around? Do you think being tossed by 16 metre waves might have given Nick Smith the sense that this patch of water in particular, moves around quite a lot? It is crazy to talk about protecting these islands while subsidising the fossil fuel industry in NZ by $46 million a year (WWF report 2013, link below) and actively encouraging them to stick drills into the seabed's belly within spill range of these islands.

We don't have the equipment to deal with a spill a few miles from the complacent waters of Tauranga - we certainly can't handle one here. If Nick Smith was genuine about protecting these pristine islands, he would take a strong stand against deep sea oil, which threatens both the islands directly through the danger of spills, and us all through the challenge of our climate crisis. Beware you're not inadvertantly helping with this sugar coated PR game.

some links:
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=11212495 (marine reserves article)
http://www.stuff.co.nz/environment/9760669/Hell-storm-sends-Kiwi-expedition-packing

http://www.wwf.org.nz/?10762/New-report-exposes-Government-hypocrisy-on-fossil-fuel-subsidies

learn more about the subantarctics -
http://www.ourfarsouth.org/

Mind Over Oily Matter

How Risk Really Works: A Play

[setting: a board room table. There may be cigars.]

Man 1: ok folks, the good news is we've struck more black gold and the select company here are all invited to invest.

Man 2: gosh dang that sounds great – but what's the risk here? We're a bit snowed under being bled dry for a teensy paint accident about half a million years ago – those environmental protection agency folks sure know how to hold a grudge. Worse than my wife, haw haw.

Man 1: well, it's pretty risky – in fact you know what, I think we'll cause everything to go horribly wrong and we'll have a giant spill that we'll be unable to cap that will spill 4.9 million barrels of oil into the ocean, wreaking havoc with ecosystems and human health for the foreseeable future. How does that sound folks?

Man 2: oh. Well that don't sound too good. But shucks, sure we'll invest – it would be rude not to!
Man 3: why not – count us in!

*****

In Joseph Conrad's Typhoon, the hubristic Captain MacWhirr steers his ship and all aboard towards disaster because he refuses to deviate from his course in the face of an encroaching storm. His name gives it away: he is mechanically determined to transcend the watery element and drive full steam ahead through the maelstrom. Conrad punishes this disconnected hubris with the typhoon of the title, as the ocean that the captain can only see as a vacant and passive background reveals its active agency.

Every good captain that I have ever trusted my soul to aboard a boat, large or small, knows that the sailors are not in control of the voyage. The ocean is in control of the voyage, and we will make our course and destination when our aims align with the whims of the water. The sea is not malevolent, just as it is not beneficent: it is sublimely impersonal. The beauty and the danger come from the fact that it really doesn't give a shit about our vessel. We can prepare; we can carry sea anchors and storm sails and liferafts and EPIRBS and radios and rosaries, but we are not the only parties controlling the outcome of every voyage, and the qualities I most admire in good sailors are flexibility and humility – not to be found in egotists like MacWhirr. Being response-able means having the ability to respond, both materially and in terms of humility and creativity.

In other words, the best sailors I know respect the sea, in all its moods. There is a hyper-masculine, clichéd character who is all too common, who goes to sea seeking to master the ocean, to dominate the vagaries of the wind and tide and control the uncontrollable. He doesn't usually have a sailboat. He has a two-storey white shiny monstrosity called "SeaRenity" or "Well Hung". This is the attitude that gets you into trouble when a squall stirs the water into unexpected revolt. There's no partnership with the wind or the water, just ego versus elements. There is no ability to respond, because there is very little respect.

This is the attitude I see in Key, Bridges et al's refusal to countenance the possibility of a spill from deep water drilling. I see a hubristic arrogance that expects to be able to rewrite the risk statistics simply by concealing them. They seem to imagine that the 1 in 30 deep sea wells which spill were prefixed by the conversation above, planning their disasters. Noone plans to have a spill, and to pretend that all that is required to prevent one is assurances with clenched teeth that nothing could possibly go wrong is the attitude that will fail to be prepared if one were to occur. It's MacWhirr again: bloody minded arrogance, unimaginative, inflexible, and inside, very frightened.

It is this obsession with control that scares me – that takes humans as the lead character, money as the key motive, and all else is background and resource, permitted to exist purely in terms of what it can give us in capital gain. I don't think it's possible to make the ocean play this game. It doesn't know the rules. I wouldn't sail with these captains – I think they're out of their depth.


ps – anyone looking for some long term investment opportunities? http://www.thestreet.com/story/12197676/1/time-to-buy-anadarko.html

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 :)