The Revolution is Love

I’d like to share an excerpt of the book I’m working on. It is from the beginning… (It is a first draft so be gentle!)

What made you into an environmentalist? Think back over your life to an event that inspired you with care for some special part of our planet. For me it came at about the age of seven or eight, when I was outside with my father watching a large flock of starlings fly past. “That’s a big flock of birds,” I said.

My father told me then about the passenger pigeon, whose flocks once filled the skies, so vast that they stretched from horizon to horizon for days on end. “They are extinct now,” he told me. “People would just point their guns to the sky and shoot randomly, and the pigeons would fall. Now there aren’t any left.” Of course, I’d known about the dinosaurs before then, but that was the first time I really understood what the word “extinct” means.

I cried in my bed that night, and many nights thereafter. That was when I still knew how to cry – a capacity that, once extinguished through the brutality of teenage boyhood in the 1980s, was nearly as hard to resuscitate as it would be to bring the passenger pigeon back to Earth.

Species extinction did not end with the 19th century. The fate of the passenger pigeon foreshadowed the calamity that is now overtaking all life on this planet, a calamity that has left none of us untouched. I recently made the acquaintance of a farmer here in North Carolina, I’ll call him Mike, a man of the earth whose family has been here for three hundred years. His thick accent, increasingly rare in this age of mass media-induced linguistic homogenization, suggested conservative “Southern values.” Indeed, he was full of bitterness, though not against the usual racial or liberal suspects; instead he launched into a tirade about the guvmint, chemtrails, the banks, the “sheeple,” the 9-11 conspiracy, and so on. “We the people have got to rise up and smash them,” he said, but it was leaden despair, not revolutionary fervor, that colored his voice.

Tentatively, I broached the idea that the perpetrators of these crimes are themselves imprisoned in a world-story in which everything they do is necessary, right, and justified; and that we join them there when we adopt the paradigm of conquering evil through superior force. That is precisely what motivates the technologies of control, whether social, medical, material, or political, wielded by those we would overthrow. Besides, I said, if it comes down to a war to overthrow the tyrants, if it comes down to a contest of force, then we are doomed. They are the masters of war. They have the weapons: the guns, the bombs, the money, the surveillance state, the media, and the political machinery. If there is hope, there must be another way.

Perhaps this is why so many seasoned activists succumb to despair after decades of struggle. Dear reader, do you think we can beat the military-industrial-financial-agricultural-pharmaceutical-NGO-educational-political complex1 at its own game? In this book I will describe how the modern environmental movement, and most especially the climate change movement, has attempted just that, not only risking defeat but also quite often worsening the situation even in its victories. Climate change is calling us to a deeper kind of revolution, a different kind of revolution, a revolution that will be unstoppable.

Mike wasn’t understanding me. He is an intelligent man (as most farmers are), but it was as if something had possessed him; no matter what I said, he would pick up on one or two cue words to pour forth more bitterness. Obviously, I wasn’t going to “defeat the enemy” by force of intellect, enacting the very same paradigm I was critiquing. When I saw what was happening, I stopped talking and listened. I listened, not so much on a conceptual level, but to the voice beneath the words and to all that voice carried. Finally I asked him the same question I am asking you: “What made you into an environmentalist?”

That is when the anger and bitterness gave way to grief. Mike told me about the ponds and streams and wild lands that he hunted and fished and swam and roamed in his childhood, and how every single one of them had been destroyed by development: cordoned off, no-trespassed, filled in, cut down, paved over, and built up.

In other words, he became an environmentalist in the same way that I did, and, I am willing to guess, the same way you did. He became an environmentalist through experiences of beauty and grief.

“Would the guys ordering the chemtrails do it, if they could feel what you are feeling now?” I asked.

“No. They wouldn’t be able to do it.”

* * *

It has been quite a process, my foray into writing a new book. I solicited support on Patreon (to crowdfund my writing sabbatical) and was moved by how many people responded. But then I felt constrained to produce something tangible, right away, otherwise I’d be letting them down. I felt like a schoolboy with an assignment due. Predictably, what I wrote in those circumstances was garbage. Then the fatigue hit me — the fatigue built up from years of intense travel and speaking. I descended into a surrendered space and basically let go of the book. It was only then that the material I’ve excerpted above came to me. The book, whose working title is “The Revolution is Love,” aims to bridge the spiritual and political dimensions of environmentalism, environmental justice, and particularly climate change.

Even when I gave up on the book, it didn’t give up on me, and neither did my supporters near and far.

At this point, I’m taking it slow, conserving and rebuilding, and trusting the writing process. That’s easy when the material is flowing; harder when that process means to write nothing for days or weeks, but rather to read, meditate, be with children, nourish my health… I’m getting over the habit of always needing to be producing something measurable. (That’s the basis of the current economic paradigm, after all, which drives the wrecking of the planet.) More and more of the quantifiable, less and less of the sacred. This time I’m taking another approach. I hope it is working. I think the book will have a lot of stories, weaving back and forth between personal and political, spiritual and systems levels.

I want to thank everyone who follows my blog and my podcasts.  That support is really important. You have been giving all along, spreading the work I do and the ideas which all of us serve.

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