While reading the recently published Rambunctious Garden: Saving Nature in a Post-Wild World, by Emma Marris, I found myself simultaneously cheering and exclaiming with a steely squint: Hey! Real conservationists can’t think this! You’re just giving ammunition for them to lob back at us. Slippery slope turns to avalanche turns into apocalypse! Who the heck to do you think you are?

Now that I’ve finished the book, I’ve decided to go back to applauding Marris for her cheerful heterodoxy and passionately common-sensical approach to conservation issues in the brave new world of the twenty-first century. I began reading with no problems. In the first chapter she says,

Nature is almost everywhere. But wherever it is, there is one thing it is not: pristine. In 2011 there is no pristine wilderness on planet Earth…. [Humans are] running the whole Earth, whether we admit it or not. To run it consciously and effectively, we must admit our role and even embrace it. We must temper our romantic notions of untrammeled wilderness and find room next to it for the more nuanced notion of a global, half-wild rambunctious garden, tended to by us.

So far so good. Recent climate change and the cascade of new realities resulting from it are clear to virtually every scientist and conservation-minded person on the planet. (Insert punchline about Texans and their three-term governor here.) She explains that environmental sciences, especially in the United States, use a baseline, a reference point which, in formulating conservation goals tends to assume an ideal time of pristine, stable wilderness to which nature itself yearns to return, hearkening to a time before the destabilizing pressures of human occupancy. We fouled nature up, so it’s our ethical duty to restore it to its original, Edenic state.

But then she makes things really messy. From what point do we date human occupancy for the sake of conservation goals? And where? Many scientists assume that the time before the arrival of Europeans to the Americas is the time to which we must reset the clock. This is the baseline that many conservation-minded Americans (like me) also assume, most likely unquestioningly (like me). (One of the reasons I call myself a utopian—i.e., not a realist—is my hope, expressed in an earlier post, that human stewardship, particularly by ranchers, might at some point not be the worst thing that ever happened to the Earth.) First of all, religious fundamentalists aren’t the only ones to believe that the Garden of Eden existed as a historical reality. The idea that there has ever been a stable, self-perpetuating ecosystem is problematic:

We are a short-lived species with a notoriously bad grasp of timescales longer than a few of our own generations. But from the point of view of a geologist or a paleontologist, ecosystems are in a constant dance, as their components compete, react, evolve, migrate, and form new communities. Geologic upheaval, evolution, climactic cycles, fire, storms, and population dynamics see to it that nature is always changing.

Nor do scientists always know what any particular ecosystem actually looked like at any pre-baseline time. Nor does the Edenic model take into account the fact that many native peoples had purposeful management systems before the arrival of Europeans. Finally, this baseline is also increasingly impossible to achieve, either through restoration or management practices, because the pressures of climate change and population growth have made turning back the clock about as feasible as stuffing a sixteen-year-old boy into the shoes he wore when he was eight. It isn’t going to happen, especially if he didn’t actually have any shoes when he was eight.

The pristine wilderness toward which so many conservationists aspire is, in fact, an American construction that came into being along with Yellowstone National Park and the science of the nineteenth century, which saw nature as essentially balanced, static, unchanging in its equilibrium. Contemporary environmental sciences clearly demonstrate that the natural world—before human “interference”—never stood still for long. Some of the most revered natural phenomena—old growth forests, for example—can be the result of climactic anomalies, like long wet spells that interrupted wildfires cycles. And what do we do about issues like the mountain goats at Yellowstone, which are now beloved by tourists, but were introduced from several hundred miles away in the 1940s for hunting purposes?

Well, I can cope with the reality that the Wizard of Oz is actually working levers behind a curtain, even as I’d like to be able to ignore him. But one of the unexpected revelations of that unveiling really hooked me under the ribs: the chapter entitled “Learning to Love Exotic Species.” I have often moaned and groaned about the non-native fauna—the fallow, axis, and sika deer, the feral hogs, and the various other oddities—that wander through Madroño Ranch and compete for food with the natives, especially in this drought time. I’m also a member of an advisory board to the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center, the mission of which is “to increase the sustainable use and conservation of native wildflowers, plants and landscapes.” I recently sat in on an excellent and nuanced presentation on invasive species by Damon Waitt, the director of the center’s Native Plant Information Network. I know as surely as I know that north is up and south is down that natives are good and that invasives are bad. But Marris upends the poles and says, think again. Non-natives can be not only not malevolent but actively useful. While some exotic species (a term she prefers to “invasives”) are “rowdy nuisances” that need active and emphatic controlling, there are far more “shy foreigners” who work for the good of their new ecosystems. In fact, there are human-managed—that is, artificial—landscapes filled with exotic species that outperform their “natural” cousins, if performance is measured by biodiversity and provisions of services to all inhabitants and not just humans.

This is when I began to ask the “just who does she think she is” question with my arms akimbo, which is when I realized it wasn’t my scientific, based-on-facts knowledge that was being challenged (it doesn’t take much); rather, it was my own self-identity as a conservation-minded layperson. I was adhering to an orthodoxy I hadn’t realized I subscribed to. I learned at my mother’s knee that any orthodoxy’s tires need a good kicking before you buy. I had climbed into this orthodoxy (a Prius, naturally) without doing so and found that I might be stuck on the side of the road with a flat.

In Marris’s rambunctious garden, however, the side of the road might not be a bad place to be stuck. If it were managed for biodiversity, for beauty, and as a part of a much larger ecosystem—as a stop for migratory butterflies, for example—a stranded motorist might enjoy the wait for help. We’re so used to thinking of “nature” as something outsized and grand and hard to get to that we frequently forget that it’s quite literally underfoot or falling on our sleeves as we walk along a city sidewalk. While it’s not entirely within our control, there are more ways for human being to engage in a fruitful relationship with nature than we currently allow ourselves to imagine.

Marris’s call for biodiversity everywhere—in industrial sites, apparent wastelands, back yards, hybrid ecosystems developed for economic gain—made me realize that unexamined orthodoxy often leads to monoculture, be it agricultural, social, political, intellectual, or spiritual. In industrial agriculture, monocultures rely heavily on pesticides, ridding crops of insects that in a healthy polyculture can be absorbed into the system (sometimes requiring intensive human labor). In the national discussion about immigration, there seems to be a sector demanding social monoculture, using terms that sound very much like the prejudice in environmental circles against “invasive” species. The extremes in both political parties are demanding that their candidates spray any bipartisan thoughts with herbicide. When she first messed with my assumptions, I mentally doused Marris’s proprosals, hoping the threat to my preconceptions would go away. Despite the huge short-term returns of monoculture (in my case, the sure knowledge that I was right), the reality of radically diminished liveliness looms just past the identical crop rows. Re-wilding monocultures of the mind, the heart, and the land—acknowledging that there is no single solution to any complex problem—sounds like a critical strategy in the face of what sometimes feels like a threatening future. According to Marris, it’s our duty to manage nature, but it’s a duty leading to pleasure, beauty, and liveliness. As she urges, “Let the rambunctious gardening begin.”

What we’re reading
Heather: Emma Marris, Rambunctious Garden: Saving Nature in a Post-Wild World
Martin: H. W. Brands, Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt

I apologize in advance if this post seems unusually grumpy; I’ve been in a lousy mood all week. The arrival of spring in Central Texas always has this effect on me. As the weather turns warm and moist and the redbuds and pear trees burst forth in clouds of colored blossoms, as the mountain laurels fill the air with the scent of grape Kool-Aid, as Heather and the rest of humanity get all goo-goo-eyed over the season of hope and rebirth, of pastel colors and eggs and baby chicks and bunnies, I grow ever gloomier, because I know what the sights and smells of spring really augur: the onset of another brutally hot summer. And in Texas, summer can last well into what would be considered fall, or even winter, in other places. To me, spring is the annual reminder that I’m about to spend six or seven months covered in a thin film of sweat. And did I mention the mosquitoes?

Perhaps it’s because I grew up in a cool, even chilly climate, but after almost three decades in Texas I have yet to acclimate fully to the summers here. Heather, on the other hand, loves hot weather; our personal comfort zones have only about a ten-degree overlap, as once the mercury climbs above 90° I begin to melt, and once it drops below 80° she begins to freeze. Under the circumstances, I think it’s pretty remarkable that we’ve been together for thirty years and married for twenty-five.

Of course hanging over everything else this week is the dreadful news of the earthquake and tsunami that devastated Japan, and the grim aftermath, with threats of nuclear disaster. We can’t yet know the final outcome of these events, but I worry that they may be a harbinger of even more catastrophes to come. A story on Grist.org suggested that climate change might cause more seismic and volcanic activity, as melting ice masses change pressures on the earth’s crust.

That’s scary all right. Equally scary are fears of massive radiation leaks from damaged nuclear reactors. We know that coal and oil and natural gas are all finite sources of energy, and that solar and wind power have limitations; nuclear power was supposed to be a sort of panacea, although we can wonder about the wisdom of building reactors in any place prone to major seismic activity. And then there’s that pesky problem of what to do with all that radioactive waste….

These gloomy reflections fit right in with the book I’ve been reading, Donovan Hohn’s Moby-Duck: The True Story of 28,800 Bath Toys Lost at Sea and the Beachcombers, Oceanographers, Environmentalists, and Fools, Including the Author, Who Went in Search of Them. The light-hearted title and subtitle are deceptive; the book is actually a thoughtful, and frequently depressing, contemplation of the problems of industrialization and pollution, and, most germane to the grim news from Japan, of the unintended consequences of technological advances. Reading it has not improved my mood.

It does, however, tell a fascinating tale. On January 10, 1992, south of the Aleutians and just west of the international date line, a freighter sailing across the northern Pacific from Hong Kong to Tacoma encountered rough weather. Somehow, as the ship rolled and plunged, two columns of containers stacked on the ship’s deck broke free and fell overboard, and at least one of them burst open as it fell, setting 7,200 packages of plastic bath toys—each containing a red beaver, green frog, and blue turtle, in addition to the yellow duck pictured on the book’s cover, but who’d buy a book titled, say, Moby-Turtle?—loose upon the waters. As the toys began washing up in unlikely places, they attracted attention from various news media—who could resist such a story?—and Hohn became obsessed with them.

The book ranges widely, both geographically and thematically: Hohn’s obsession takes him from his home in New York to (among other places) Alaska, Hawaii, South Korea, Greenland, and China’s Pearl River Delta, the industrial zone where the bath toys were manufactured, and he manages to work in reflections on the plastics industry (with a nice shout-out to my old UT Austin American studies honcho Jeff Meikle), the changing definition of childhood, the history of American environmentalism, and more. He writes well and often amusingly, but the overall message of his book is dire: we are almost literally drowning in waste, and we don’t really know what to do about it. Apparent solutions turn out merely to mask, or perhaps exacerbate, the problem; sincerely well-intentioned people disagree violently about what to do. And more and more garbage ends up in the oceans.

There was a time when all of this might have been ameliorated somewhat by the fact that spring signals the return of baseball. “Spring training”! I used to consider those the two most joyful words in the English language, other than “peach cobbler” and “tax rebate.” But that was before the steroid-fueled nightmare of the last fifteen years, in which unnaturally swollen sluggers rewrote the record book and permanently distorted the shape and balance of the National Pastime.

Now baseball is all but dead to me, and spring is when Tito and I fill out our NCAA tournament brackets, an annual exercise which makes manifest the depths of my almost complete ignorance of college basketball. (I usually pick the University of North Carolina Tar Heels to win it all, because I’ve always been a sucker for their baby-blue uniforms, but this year, in case you’re wondering, I boldly picked Duke to beat Kansas in the championship game.)

I don’t know what it will take to pull me out of my annual springtime slough of despond. Maybe the Blue Devils will actually go all the way (or, if not, maybe UNC will pull off an upset). Maybe the endorphins and tryptophan in a megadose of Easter chocolate will jolt me into a more agreeable frame of mind. Or maybe I just need to find more cheerful reading material.

What we’re reading
Heather: Karen Armstrong, Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life
Martin: Donovan Hohn, Moby-Duck: The True Story of 28,800 Bath Toys Lost at Sea and the Beachcombers, Oceanographers, Environmentalists, and Fools, Including the Author, Who Went in Search of Them

Martin’s post last week describing the first slaughter (and I use the word “slaughter” advisedly) in our new endeavor as purveyors of bison meat elicited a comment that urged us to consider the ethical fault line (presumably) running through every conscience, that unsteady place where we find ourselves rationalizing our actions to ourselves or to whatever audience our imaginations conjure up.

Martin tried to make his/our unease clear with the post’s title: Bloody Hands. So I’m wondering once again about the ethics of carnivorocity, as visible and treacherous a fault line as abortion, euthanasia, gun control, climate change, or cloning: when you stand on one side of the fault line, it’s easy to think that the earth itself will justify you when it opens up and swallows the dummies over there, proving that you were on the right side, at which point you can stop worrying all the time, for heaven’s sake, and go on your merry way without thinking about the issue ever again.

As usual, diving into the conversations available on the internet just sucked me deeper into the murk. A defense is available for every possible position and offered with wildly varying degrees of civility: meat-eaters supporting vegans and trashing vegetarians; meat-eaters sneering at any thought of self-restriction; vegetarians and vegans calling meat-eaters all sorts of names; vegetarians acknowledging that some meat-eating is environmentally acceptable; meat-eaters acknowledging that American meat production and consumption is for the most part grotesque. What’s a utopian-minded bison rancher to think?

Serendipity, as usual, is my guide: in chasing internet rabbits down their holes, I found a momentary resting place in a review of Maggie Kozel’s book The Color of Atmosphere: One Doctor’s Journey In and Out of Medicine. After describing a flummoxing patient she had as a second-year medical student, Kozel said, “[I] devoured the answers without asking the right questions.”

Of course, if you’re obsessive the way I am, then you’ll immediately begin worrying about what the right questions are, as in, if I’m “right” then others must be “wrong.” One of the hallmarks of the debate about meat-eating and its impact on the environment or the individual soul is the array of statistics and science that each side has amassed to prove the objective superiority of its argument. I’ve been persuaded by both sides and neither side, depending on the time of day, what I’ve just read, the weather, my most recent meal, and/or the health of my family, among other random criteria.

In other words, I don’t think science and statistics by themselves allow us to ask the right questions, since apparently convincing evidence can be found to shore up either side. Eating is one of those human activities rich with multiple levels of meaning; expecting questions directed at a specific level to adequately address the full range is a little like expecting a monoculture to support the diversity a polyculture allows. Although science poses some vitally important questions when it examines the issue of meat-eating, the nature of its inquiry must ignore other equally pressing but less quantifiable questions, such as, what conditions allow a multi-species community to flourish? Does eating meat (by humans) contribute or detract from our community’s flourishment (a word coined by our friend Hugh Fitzsimons of Thunder Heart Bison)?

I hear the howls of protest even before I finish typing this sentence: how do you measure flourishment? Who decides the standards? Invalid! Too subjective! Well, yes. That’s what makes this a fault-line issue: it addresses the limits of our humanity and so necessarily includes subjective experience. To be honest, I don’t know how to measure flourishment; I suspect you just know it when you see it. And when you see it, you’re moved to describe it, knowing that the urge will be frustrated to at least some degree because flourishment, like all fruit, is the result of such a complex interaction of elements in space and time that any description will be incomplete. And of course it’s not a steady state; it waxes and wanes as circumstances change and sometimes double back on themselves.

In this context, the question of whether meat-eating is ethical can be answered unequivocally: it depends. One of the preconditions for flourishment is a sense of justice, a perspective that includes but also rises above the immediate tit-for-tat concerns of fairness. The scope of justice includes not just humanity but the earth itself—and perhaps the cosmos. It unrolls over the course of history, recognizing that particular injustices sometimes take generations, centuries, or millennia to wither, even with the powerful witness and effort of prophets and their followers. As I said in an earlier post, it may be that vegetarians and vegans are living forward into a time where justice is more fully realized. At the same time, issues of fairness and justice press at us every moment in this world where the lion and the lamb cannot yet lie down together, where predators are a vital part of an ecosystem that has developed in sync with domesticated animals.

Can meat be produced and consumed in a way that encourages justice and, hence, flourishment? I think it can. There are multiple instances of communities and societies that eat meat and live within that delicate balance that looks to the long-term well-being and dignity of the system as a whole, places like Joel Salatin’s Polyface Farm, although there are many, many others. (We’d love to hear some of your favorites.) There are multiple instances of communities and cultures flourishing without eating meat, most notably for the purposes of this post the Hindu cultures whose vegetarian cuisines I eat with great pleasure. (We’d love to hear some of your favorites.)

Likewise, there are communities and cultures that eat meat without flourishing, including most of the industrialized world, where concern for short-term profits and their consequent incitement of unrestrained appetite smother any hope of flourishment under mountains of animal excrement and anguish. Those places that encourage us (in the industrialized world) to measure the value of food in one way only—cheap is best—smother flourishment. Food is at the center of family, of community, of myth, of life. To reduce its essence to a single component is to denature its multivalent nutritional value.

Back to the ethical fault line, that place we stand uneasily, knowing that we may be swallowed: may those of us who recognize the fault line join hands—bloody or not—across the chasm and help each other seek the firmer footing of justice as our foundation. Flourishment will surely follow.

What we’re reading
Heather: Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall (still!)
Martin: Rodney Crowell, Chinaberry Sidewalks

Last week I found myself in a conversation with someone who doesn’t believe in AGW and has written a soon-to-be-published book explaining his position. AGW—which I had to look up—is short for anthropogenic global warming, or global warming caused by human activity. That idea is, he contends, “the biggest whopper sold to the public in the history of humankind.”

Now, I’ve read a lot about people like this: they listen to Rush Limbaugh, watch Glenn Beck, think the Earth is 6,000 years old, vote against the teaching of evolution in public schools, read the Bible literally, and vote Republican or Libertarian. I could probably pick them out in a crowd. They just have this look, right?

Except that this young man has a lot in common with, well, me. We’re both English majors from small New England colleges. Both former (at least on my part) doctoral students in literature. Both rowers. Both writers (although he’s been published in high-profile publications like The New Yorker, while I’ve been published in the Anglican Theological Review). Both voted for Obama. Both believers in “clean” energy, whatever that is. We most certainly don’t have that look.

He gave me the basics of his argument, the science of which I followed imperfectly, as I follow all scientific arguments. He caught and retained my attention when he said this: science relies on narrative. In other words, scientists tell stories about their research. They articulate their theories and findings in a particular way, a way that relies on their own experiences, influences, and personal quirks. Facts are facts, but facts aren’t self-interpreting. How the facts are articulated is essential to the final shape of the story.

So here’s the question: why do I take one set of scientific conclusions as gospel and reject another set? I’m not qualified to evaluate the merits of most scientific assertions, period. On what grounds do I choose one interpretation over another? I have to conclude that I rely on considerations other than scientific ones, just as many people do who don’t agree that climate change is caused by human activity, or that the earth is heating up at all. I tend to judge those people using criteria that I don’t generally apply to myself, a predictably unscientific state of affairs which may tarnish the burnished glow of my intellectual honesty.

According to a recent Gallup poll, Democrats are twice as likely as Republicans to believe that the effects of global warming are underway. All of the GOP candidates currently vying for Senate seats doubt the evidence supporting global warming and oppose government action to limit warming pollution. It would seem that most of us in the debate about climate change—and environmental concerns in general—are driven at least as much by political ideology as by science.

One of my daily reads is Grist, an e-zine that calls itself “A Beacon in the Smog.” Among the stories I read this week is one entitled “Stupid Goes Viral: The Climate Zombies of the New GOP.” Near the top of the story comes a staccato burst of single-sentence paragraphs that reads: “Meet the Climate Zombies. They’re mindless. Their stupid is contagious. And if they win, humanity loses.” While the tone is ironic, even flip, the message is clear: we need to be afraid of the politicians who refuse to acknowledge human participation in the destruction of the environment.

The tone of the story sounds very much like Glenn Beck’s when he ridiculed Nancy Pelosi’s anxiety about the rhetorical strategies of Tea Partiers:

This is how they are attempting to silence the Tea Partiers—they are just so hateful, they are going to get violent. During the Tea Parties, liberals in the media were trembling with fear and shaking in their boots. And they were right—see how scary they look? Oh, the horror! Parents, cover your children’s eyes. Of course, no actual violence ever actually happened at any of the Tea Party rallies. But that didn’t stop Nancy Pelosi from crying about the possibility….

While Beck’s tone is ironic, even flip, the message is clear: we need to be afraid of the politicians who want to curtail our right to speak out.

Although I’m more willing to listen to one voice than the other, here’s the problem: neither set of comments is intended to be part of an actual conversation. Both are speaking from within a hall of mirrors in which each auditor is imagined to be a mere projection of the speaker, or at most, a member of the speaker’s monolithic tribe. I recently read a great blog about the “epistemic closure” in much current conservative thinking—the tendency to accept evidence only when it reinforces preexisting opinions—and this from someone who works for the libertarian Cato Institute! But I find evidence of epistemic closure on the left as well, frequently manifested by a tone that smirks, “If you don’t agree with me you’re a moron, and I refuse to converse with morons.”

Well, this moron wants some conversation. In reading Plurality and Ambiguity: Hermeneutics, Religion, Hope, by David Tracy (very interesting, wretched title, periodically intelligible), I found this meaty sentence: “Conversation is a game with some hard rules: say only what you mean; say it as accurately as you can; listen to and respect what the other says, however different or other; be willing to correct or defend your opinions if challenged by the conversation partner; be willing to argue if necessary, to confront if demanded, to endure necessary conflict, to change your mind if evidence suggests it.”

Of course, you can only have a conversation when all the participants agree to these rules, and the Glenn Becks of the world seem usually to want to talk only to themselves in their own halls of mirrors. But when those of us with passionate feelings about the fate of all Earth’s residents, human and non-human alike, sound just like the conversation-stompers on the other side, then we become part of the problem, not the solution. As frustrating as it is to follow the rules—especially when your conversation partner has his back turned, his arms crossed, fingers in his ears and singing “lalalalala”—it becomes even more imperative to walk out of our own hall of mirrors willing to engage (again and again and again) in the hard and morally vital work of conversation in the open air.

Living as I do in my own little hall of mirrors in Austin, my conversational muscles are a tad underdeveloped. I may have to start with the AGW denier I mentioned above, the one who otherwise looks pretty much like me. I’ll try not to call him a moron and try to be willing to change my mind, to leave my tribe and go outside, if evidence suggests that it’s necessary. Now that’s scary.

What we’re reading
Heather: Nick Reding, Methland: The Death and Life of an American Small Town
Martin: Jimmy McDonough, Shakey: Neil Young’s Biography

I’ve been surveying the multitude of leftovers in the refrigerator of my mind. When was the last time this thing was cleaned out? Jeez. Prodded into further examination of my last post by subsequent emails, conversations, and readings, I’ve concluded that my thinking is a little moldy and needs either to have the fuzz shaved off or be thrown out. Caveat lector: slightly smelly smorgasbord on the way.

Fuzzy thought number one: Chiding me for a Band-Aid approach to life-threatening environmental crises, a friend emailed this: “I actually think democratic control of the world through political action must be established. For me that means crushing the power of corporations.” On the one hand, I agree fully. The sheer, concentrated force of most multinational corporations is flabbergasting: the fact that British Petroleum still enjoys reasonable financial health despite the costs of the oil spill cleanup beggars the imagination. That much money is as good as a private militia, if not a private nuclear arsenal. Like anything powerful and willful, corporations need constant skeptical scrutiny.

Fuzzy thought number two: Bill McKibben, environmental prophet extraordinaire, was the first speaker a few weeks ago in a new annual lecture series endowed by my father in my mother’s memory at the Aspen Center for Environmental Studies. Martin and I were unable to attend, but my sister told me that the evening was beautiful, the talk was inspiring, and McKibben was a passionate and humble witness to the planet- (and therefore self-) destructive path we’re currently running down. (A few days later he gave a more formal version of his lecture at the Aspen Ideas Festival; either version is very much worth the time it takes to watch.)

Likening the scope of climate change to the devastation of nuclear warfare, he says that Americans “have so far failed to imagine that the explosion of a billion pistons and a billion cylinders each minute around the world could wreak the same kind of damage on the same scale.” Contributing to this failure of imagination are national inertia (we like the way we live); the divide between wealthy and poor nations (how do we tell others not to do what we have done when we are so comfortable?); and, unsurprisingly, the defensive position of the fossil fuel industry, which has hefted its mighty bulk directly on top of anything that might derail profits as usual. Imagine the public response to a campaign by the munitions industry downplaying the effects of nuclear warfare; one assumes that most of us would be thunderstruck. We should be as horrified by an industry that uses “the atmosphere as an open sewer for the effluent of their product” and makes more money than any industry in the history of money. But apparently we’re not. Yet.

Fuzzy thought number three: corporations aren’t going away, nor should they. They (can/should) provide the infrastructure that local and sustainable economies need to thrive. The problem comes when mighty corporate bulk squishes the little guys flat, which is what usually happens. Governmental regulations meant to restrain the mighty corporate bulk often squish the little guys even flatter. (That’s about the most sophisticated economic observation I’m capable of producing, so I hope you enjoyed it.)

Fuzzy thoughts numbers four through six, which come from the very back of the bottom shelf: when faced with complex, apparently insoluble problems, my tendency is to go for a walk. Or pull out Band-Aids. Or make a big messy meal requiring lots of cleaning up. (Martin, as chief dishwasher, gets tired of this one.) But having spent the week reading Reinhold Niebuhr, one of the great Christian theologians of the twentieth century, and listening to Bill McKibben, I must sadly conclude that mine are inadequate responses. Writing with the stench of World War II still in the air, Niebuhr rebuked those Christians who had concluded that the only response to evil in the world was pacifism, trusting in power of human goodness to convert evil. Nor did he allow those who act against evil to trust fully in their own righteousness. Rather, he said, we need to be acutely aware that “political controversies are always conflicts between sinners and not between righteous men and sinners. [The Christian faith] ought to mitigate the self-righteousness which is an inevitable concomitant of all human conflict. The spirit of contrition is an important ingredient in the sense of justice.” As tempting as it is to preen, when we choose to fight the bully power of corporations, we need to be clear about our own implication in the tangled web of environmental injustice.

Add Niebuhr’s words to these: McKibben, a mild-mannered science writer, published a column titled “We’re hot as hell and we’re not going to take it anymore” on the TomDispatch.com website this week that immediately went viral. Furthermore, our mild-mannered hero writes specifically about the refusal of our political leaders even to consider climate legislation last week: “So what I want to say is: This is fucked up. The time has come to get mad, and then to get busy.” This from a Methodist Sunday School teacher!

The organization he started in 2008 with seven recent Middlebury College graduates—350.org—was a ragtag effort to organize a worldwide response to climate change. The results of that effort were astonishing. It turns out that the term “environmentalist” does not apply just to a bunch of over-educated, effete white Americans; in fact, the rest of the world—most of it brown, young, poor, and powerless—knows something we Americans still aren’t willing to confront: climate change, driven by fossil fuels, has crippled the regularity of the natural order we rely on for everything. Everything. Everything.

Through 350.org, we have an opportunity on October 10, 2010—10/10/10—to tell the powers that be that we’re hot as hell and we’re not going to take it anymore. We should still walk through our neighborhoods and chat with our neighbors. We should still introduce people to the profound pleasures of eating locally and according to the seasons. Acts like these will give us sustenance for the battle ahead, especially those of us who don’t feel much like fighters, who don’t want to crush anyone or anything, and most especially those of us who don’t want out clean out our refrigerators.

What we’re reading
Heather: Dan O’Brien, Buffalo for the Broken Heart: Restoring Life to a Black Hills Ranch
Martin: Warren St. John, Outcasts United: An American Town, a Refugee Team, and One Woman’s Quest to Make a Difference