Recently I was listening to a folk song an activist friend had sent me, Brother Warrior, performed by Kate Wolf, not typically my style of music, but I found myself moved in particular by the choruses, refrained “I tell you now, there is no reason to be afraid”.
The song is activist music, one I learned of from the tree sitters in Northern California, where I was originally born. Activist music often has a mournful, empowering tone with a strange mix of the energies of peace and war within it.
Perhaps, most likely, it’s current events in particular that had tears streaming down my face at this affirmation of fearlessness and hope. I come from a line of traumatized people, one line in particular likely fled pogroms in Eastern Europe at the turn of the last century, so when I tell you it feels strange in my blood and my bones, the news we’ve seen in these last few months, I hope you know I mean this literally.
On that note, it’s particularly sad to see “anti-semitism” harkened as the reason behind support for Zionist or other genocidal or colonial actions – I’m not the only person of this ancestry to ask the world to never commit or excuse war crimes in our or our ancestors’ names.
Increasingly, saying things like this, pro-peace things, pro-humanity things, or pro-environmental things, is becoming “criminal” under a political situation I’m not quite sure would have ever been on my bingo card as a younger person. Times seem strange.
While my work with Rewild Ecopsychology and other current public projects seeks to be somewhat neutral, palatable, or corporate for the generalist world, I think we are at a crossroads when it comes to being politically correct, when political correctness has seemingly turned into what may be a Black Mirror episode. What is correct anyway? The jury is out.
I struggle with my work in green psychology when it comes to “how political” or “how radical” we want to be.
I have a vivid memory of myself arguing with a professor in grad school about this very point – it is vivid because the human mind remembers painful and scary events more than mundane or contenting ones (what a cruel trick of nature). At my buddhist alma mater, Naropa University, we were taught to see the world with a sense of unity- to share the burdon of what we understood to be a chronic and widespread “divorce from nature” in global industrial societies, and to understand “no one was 100% at fault and no one was the ultimate enemy”.
I disagreed.
What can I say? I’m not a very good Buddhist.
Everyone in the room knew there were some material teeth to my argument, but eventually, as a student and someone becoming “out of balance” emotionally, I needed to nevertheless, just shut up. Go sit zazen.
Years later, a communist friend well-versed in computer science and socialist economics reminded me of this important dialectic again. What they said will stick with me forever. As I lamented over a can I didn’t recycle or wasting gas in my car to see friends on a weekend, he said to me:
“You know the ultra wealthy, their impact on the earth mathematically is multiplied. But for us, it’s like we only have the power of addition. To hold yourself at that same level of responsibility is unfair, illogical even.”
This was the dialectic argument against what my graduate school ecopsychologist mentors taught: that while spiritually we all may be one and each of us has a role to play in what we call “The Great Turning”, materially some organizations and individuals are indeed more impactful, and therefore more responsible, more implicated, in the large scale environmental and social impact of industrialization on our world. They should be held accountable at this multiplication level, and we can cut ourselves a break from the “green washing” hyper-individualist idea that we should shoulder a burden equally or more heavily.
This idea is risky and challenging to speak allowed because it hints at a radicalism few are comfortable with – holding people in positions of power and influence accountable.
And increasingly, this task has become more violent for some, and more dangerous for us all.
This current political timeline does not seem to be for the faint of heart. And my empathy goes out to others who are recognizing the signs of high control in our current cultural climate, and the threats to nature and human rights that come with such cults of personality. To speak out about this seems bad for business, but at a certain point, we must also acknowledge that while capitalist profits were always adjacent to hierarchy and oppression, all-out fascism was not what even the most egregious of organizations likely had in mind. Even late capitalism, which is not my favorite system, cannot survive kleptocracy. (Nor can or could it survive climate collapse, so perhaps, there is some room here to appeal and persuade.)
So for people like myself, attempting to find a place in the world as both dissonants and peace advocates, it can feel complicated to even speak on such things, even and especially when what we are seeing feels like the headlights of a train coming straight at us. One that many activists heard coming from a mile away decades ago, yet is still nonetheless just as terrifying no matter how long you’ve suspected its impending arrival. There is a lot of recovery work to be done, a lot of damage control to be done, and I’m sure I’m not alone in assuming that many of us do not know where to start.
The song “Brother Warrior” and energies like it come from a place of what we in Hawaii might call “Kapu Aloha” (or as a part-Hawaiian, I can at least say it is very close to this). When one conducts themselves in a state of peaceful protest, it can truly be a thorn in the side of those who mean ill to the world. There is power in peace. And, there are also alternative perspectives, which, while I won’t delve into here, I think it’s naive to say are completely without their reasons. Many scholars have pointed out that revolutions and progress are rarely forged by peaceful protests alone; it is just the peaceful ones we record in our history books, but they often survive alongside others who have also brought social change through the application of pressure or even force. There are ethical issues to this, of course, but it is still a more complete picture to acknowledge this fact than to attempt to erase it entirely.
Recently, I was listening to my aunt and mentor Kealoha speak on the topic of Kapu Aloha during the TMT protests and Ki’ai water protector movement in Hawai’i. I’ve heard wisdom on Kapu Aloha many times, but for some reason, today it clicked differently as she spoke that “Kapu Aloha is Aloha in Action” and it is protection. Kapu Aloha is deeply entwined with resistance when we are resisting harm to our bodies, our lands, and our people. It is not just the feeling of love, but love as a verb when we protect what is valuable, when we protect sacred life.
I began writing this blog post to offer platitudes to others who feel the gravity of the political moment we are in now and do not know where to go or what to do with this energy. Some are being asked to “self-deport,” while others are being disappeared, and I think in times of crisis, assuming your actions hurt no one else, what you do to keep you and yours safe is the correct choice when the stakes are so high.
As countries like Germany and others warn us of the signs we should be looking for, and many we are already missing, I hope that my stepping into the arena to say something, anythin,g to acknowledge the gravity of this will have a ripple effect in helping others to become more brave and outspoken too. Yes, I am scared. Yes, it is risky to say you do not agree with the dismantling of the United States Constitution and human rights protections – just like it was risky to fight against slavery when it was legal here, and just like it was risky and illegal to criticize Nazis during the holocaust.
But we must be willing to be there for one another. To be seen and to make it known where our values lie, and for whom and what we are willing to fight for.
For myself, as a generally peace-oriented person, my fight has always been for the protection of biodiversity and diversity and dignity for all living things. As one deeply connected to ecological study, we know biodiversity is king as an indicator of systems-based health, and as a social scientist, I believe this applies to the well-being of our species and selves as individuals.
The term “none of us are free until all of us are free” also applies to how we treat “The More Than Human World” or species other than ourselves. And in an indigenous perspective, harkening to my Hawaiian ancestors again, we know that in stories like that of Haloa, the older brother to humanity and representation of food resources, it is that we humans need the biosphere, nature, and biodiversity, not the other way around.
Western and some biblical perspectives put man at the top of a hierarchy of things, with women, children, pets, and the stewardship -or rape- of nature beneath him. As silly as this hierarchy may sound to an ecologist, other social scientists are aware of how much this epistimological residue still shapes our society today.
Challenging these hierarchies is important now more than ever, especially with climate collapse looming. As a deep thinker, I’ve always found it kind of silly that we still have wars and a “waste-based” non-circular economy, because we actually have other existential threats, like nuclear cleanups, volcanic winters, or cosmic impacts we could worry ourselves with instead. It would be a much more efficient use of our primal collective fears of death.
One of my favorite concepts along the lines of this thinking is that of the “post-scarcity society,” usually touted by future-thinking socialists. Fully Automated Luxury Communism is a book written on this theme, and I hope that increasingly people (especially those with the aforementioned “multiplied” influence) will begin to consider how our supply chains, manufactured scarcity, and archaic systems of energy can be rapidly shifted to save our earth– and thusly our social fabrics and individual well-being.
As for the platitudes I mentioned earlier, if you are like me, it may be difficult to sleep when many of our collective social and environmental safety nets are gutted, along with many other eyebrow-raising events now in a speed run. In these moments, I turn now to my peaceful activist refrain, “I tell you now, there is no reason to be afraid”.
At least on a spiritual level, there is some peace and satisfaction in knowing you are on the side of truth, justice, and peace in this historical moment. If there is wisdom from green psychology, I might add in these times, it is this: Nature often overcomes astonishing obstacles with instinctive resiliency and tenacity, and she usually doesn’t rush.
You can resist, grow, educate, and protect that which matters to you most in ways that don’t burn you out, that energize and give hope. You can be brave in the smallest of ways, and you don’t know what a potentially scaled and massive ripple effect that might have.
And remember, if you are worried, you are not alone in this struggle or awareness, and a small seed can help to grow a forest with luck and time.