Writings I Return To
There are many pieces of writing over the years that have had a profound and lasting affect on me. Some of them hit hard immediately, others were a slow burn whose impact only revealed itself over time. All of them, in their ways, have shaped how I see myself, my community, and the world as a whole.
The writings I’ve collected below represent just a few of my favorites that have stuck with me over the years. Over the next week, I’ll share more such pieces. For now, here are three that feel especially relevant to the times we’re in and to the weeks ahead.
Deviant and Proud by George Monbiot
When I first read Deviant and Proud I was trying to make sense of my growing unease and disorientation with the world as I knew it. I had just read Naomi Klein’s iconic No Logo, I had read hundreds, if not thousands, of pages of scientific reports and studies on climate change, I knew things were broken and unsustainable but with each new bit of knowledge came with it a loss of belonging.
How did I find into the world anymore?
I hadn’t really felt like I fit in before, but I felt like that was just a matter of growing up and learning how to be an adult. Yet as I read more about the systems that governed our world, I felt increasingly like my sense of displacement was structural - that I just didn’t have a place in the world as it was. And for a while, I took that to be a reflection of my own deficiency.
“Sure, Capitalism is unjust and destructive,” I thought, “But like it or not, it’s the way of the world and if I can’t adapt to it, if I can’t succeed in it, what does that say about me?”
But reading George Monbiot’s piece helped me see myself, and the way I was feeling, differently. In it, Monbiot describes the impact of the market on our lives:
“The market was meant to emancipate us, offering autonomy and freedom. Instead it has delivered atomisation and loneliness. The workplace has been overwhelmed by a mad, Kafka-esque infrastructure of assessments, monitoring, measuring, surveillance and audits, centrally directed and rigidly planned, whose purpose is to reward the winners and punish the losers. It destroys autonomy, enterprise, innovation and loyalty and breeds frustration, envy and fear.”
And in response to this horrid state of affairs he says:
“Depression and loneliness plague us. The infantilising diktats of the workplace destroy our self-respect. Those who end up at the bottom of the pile are assailed by guilt and shame. The self-attribution fallacy cuts both ways: just as we congratulate ourselves for our successes, we blame ourselves for our failures, even if we had little to do with it.
So if you don’t fit in; if you feel at odds with the world; if your identity is troubled and frayed; if you feel lost and ashamed, it could be because you have retained the human values you were supposed to have discarded. You are a deviant. Be proud.”
Like all revelatory works, Monbiot’s take is complex in its underpinnings and implications, yet simple in its delivery and message: The confusion and shame and disorientation we feel isn’t a reflection of our failures, but our strengths. We feel this way because we’ve retained our humanity and true sense of self and the world we inhabit is hostile to that. For us to feel at peace in these circumstances would be to surrender to the brokenness and injustice of the world as it is, to allow ourselves to be warped and contorted to fit the demands of a machine that cares not for our well being but only for our utility as part of its uncaring grind.
To be deviant, then, is something to aspire to, to hold onto, to recognize for what a beautiful thing it is in rebellion of systems so rewarding of dehumanizing conformity.
Listening to grasshoppers: field notes on democracy by arundhati roy
Listening To Grasshoppers (follow the link for a full PDF of the entire book) is one of, if not the, most radicalizing books I’ve ever read. It’s not the most philosophically radical - Pedagogy of the Oppressed - or the most existentially radical - any number of studies on climate change - but it might be the most politically radical. I say this because, when I started reading it I believed and assumed we all agreed that democracy was a good thing. By the end, I no longer believed that was true.
Roy’s book is not a polemic against democracy, nor did it lead me to believe that democracy can’t be good. What it did do is show me what democracy looks like in practice in a part of the world which I previously had very little knowledge about. And in doing so, it helped me understand my own country better, as well as the broader nature of political power and how government’s really operate when not small enough to be held accountable by the people.
Like all the best journalists, Roy is not merely a stenographer or reporter - she has lived the things she writes about and she writes with a clarity of purpose and understanding that makes it impossible not to feel invested in conflicts that two pages ago you’d never even heard of.
Reading about the atrocities in Gujarat overseen by then Chief Minister, but now Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, learning of the ongoing civil war in Kashmir, coming to understand the two-sides-of-the-same-coin nature of India’s dominant political parties - Congress and BJP - and seeing how they manipulate and buy votes by taking advantae of the extreme poverty inflicted by their respective policies - all of it, piece by piece, took apart any high minded moral certainty I had about democracy as an ideal and grounded me in the fact that politics is not about ideas, it’s about people’s material lives. And in India, democracy reproduced the same tyranny and injustice and horror that other systems had done in the past, only this time with the veneer of legitimacy that democracy supplies.
There’s a Stephen Moss’s interview with Arundhati Roy that contains a quote I find myself returning to again and again:
“Guerrillas use violence, generally directed against the police and army, but sometimes causing injury and death to civilians caught in the crossfire. Does she condemn that violence? "I don't condemn it any more," she says. "If you're an adivasi [tribal Indian] living in a forest village and 800 CRP [Central Reserve Police] come and surround your village and start burning it, what are you supposed to do? Are you supposed to go on hunger strike? Can the hungry go on a hunger strike? Non-violence is a piece of theatre. You need an audience. What can you do when you have no audience? People have the right to resist annihilation."
As depressing or bleak as all of this may sound, reading it and learning about the ways democracy has, and can, fail, helped me find and understand a new level of resilience. Because if democracy isn’t the answer, and in fact wasn’t the answer before, then it truly was and always has been about the people - about communities coming together and fighting back and building the world they deserve and need. Which means that, just because democracy fails, doesn’t mean humanity fails - the world doesn’t bend toward injustice simply because any one system of government produces unjust results, even democracy.
Before I felt that if democracy failed, if the will of the people produced injustice and oppression, then maybe we were fighting a losing battle. Yet reading Arundhati Roy recount all the ways that democracy’s can be compromised, distorted, used for unjust purposes even while the people demand better - it made it clear that democracy is just a tool like any other, not some perfect aspirational ideal to be treated as a moral North Star.
In Listening To Grasshoppers, I came to understand the world in a way I hadn’t before and in doing so, helped me understand who I truly want to be in solidarity with, and how little all the lofty speech and ideals of democracy matter in the face of reality. It’s not an easy book to read, nor is it particularly uplifting - at least not overtly. But it is a book that, upon completion, left me feeling a greater sense of political purpose and clarity and integrity than I ever had before.
Braiding Sweetgrass - Robin Wall Kimmerer
In Braiding Sweetgrass (the beginning of which you can read here), Robin Wall Kimmerer explores and expands on the intersections of indigenous wisdom, scientific knowledge, and the way nature can teach us how to live with and care for it.
This was my first real exposure to indigenous thinking and perspectives on nature. Sure, I’d read and heard and seen indigenous and native peoples speak about nature, but never with the depth or thoroughness to alter my own thinking. I had learned about how other people saw the world, I didn’t learn how to see the world.
By the time I read Braiding Sweetgrass, I had been studying climate change for a number of years. My view on humanity had only gotten dimmer as I saw in greater detail all the ways our species has wrecked havoc on the natural world. Not just presently but historically with all the megafauna we wiped out as our species migrated across the globe. My understanding of humanity’s relationship to the rest of nature could best be summarized as: "A nuisance at best, a blight at worst.”
Yet it only took Robin Wall Kimmerer a few pages to build up to two simple paragraphs that would forever alter my view of human beings and our place in the world. On page 6 of Braiding Sweetgrass she writes:
“On Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays at 9:35 a.m., I am usually in a lecture hall at the university, expounding about botany and ecology—trying, in short, to explain to my students how Skywoman’s gardens, known by some as “global ecosystems,” function. One otherwise unremarkable morning I gave the students in my General Ecology class a survey. Among other things, they were asked to rate their understanding of the negative interactions between humans and the environment. Nearly every one of the two hundred students said confidently that humans and nature are a bad mix. These were third-year students who had selected a career in environmental protection, so the response was, in a way, not very surprising. They were well schooled in the mechanics of climate change, toxins in the land and water, and the crisis of habitat loss. Later in the survey, they were asked to rate their knowledge of positive interactions between people and land. The median response was “none.”
I was stunned. How is it possible that in twenty years of education they cannot think of any beneficial relationships between people and the environment? Perhaps the negative examples they see every day— brownfields, factory farms, suburban sprawl—truncated their ability to see some good between humans and the earth. As the land becomes impoverished, so too does the scope of their vision. When we talked about this after class, I realized that they could not even imagine what beneficial relations between their species and others might look like. How can we begin to move toward ecological and cultural sustainability if we cannot even imagine what the path feels like? If we can’t imagine the generosity of geese? These students were not raised on the story of Skywoman.”
It was so clear and so stark and it had never once occurred to me: How can we begin to heal or fix things if we can only see ourselves as a destructive force?
And then immediately after: How have I become so skewed in my knowledge that I no longer understand or see all the beautiful, incredible, harmonious ways human beings can engage with and give to the rest of nature?
The book opens with the story of Skywoman and goes onto to weave together indigenous stories and wisdom and history with Kimmerer’s deep and expansive knowledge of biology and ecology as she illuminates another way of understanding the world and our place in it. It’s a book that’s profoundly hopeful without ever shying away from painful truths or messy realities. It feels trite to say because it’s a word so over- and mis-used, but it truly feels like a book of ‘Wisdom.’
It’s hard to find books that talk about humans and ecology that leave you with any hope for the future. The present horrors of climate breakdown are so enormous and catastrophic, it’s difficult to think about our role in redressing ecological injustices as anything other than lessening our harm, never mind actually benefitting the rest of the natural world in any meaningful way. Braiding Sweetgrass left me not only with hope, but with an un-abiding sense that caring for nature and living in ecologically generous ways are both things humans are consistently good at it as long as we slow down and listen to what the rest of life has to say.