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Utne Reader Visionaries share their latest projects, ideas, and visions for the future.
What do the U.S. government and Silicon
Valley have in common? Above all, they want to remain opaque while
making the rest of us entirely transparent through the capture of our data.
As in 2004 and 2008, Rebecca Solnit and her blue-state henchwomen and men will probably invade northern Nevada on election week to swing with one of the most swinging states in the union. She is, however, much more excited about 350.org's anti-oil-company campaign and the ten thousand faces of Occupy now changing the world. Rebecca Solnit is the author of 15 books, including two due out next year, and a regular contributor to TomDispatch.com. She lives in San Francisco, is from kindergarten to graduate school a product of the once-robust California public educational system, and her book A Paradise Built in Hell is the One City/One Book choice of the San Francisco Public Library this fall. Solnit's latest book, The Faraway Nearby, will be published in June. She was named an Utne Visionary in 2010.
This article originally appeared at Tom Dispatch.
Finally, journalists have started criticizing in earnest
the leviathans of Silicon Valley, notably
Google, now the world's third-largest company in market value. The new round of
discussion began even before the revelations that the tech giants were
routinely sharing our data with the National Security Agency, or maybe merging with it. Simultaneously another set of journalists,
apparently unaware that the weather has changed, is still sneering at San Francisco, my hometown, for not lying down and loving Silicon Valley's looming presence.
The criticism of Silicon Valley
is long overdue and some of the critiques are both thoughtful and scathing. The
New Yorker, for example, has
explored how start-ups are undermining the purpose of education at
Stanford University, addressed the Valley's messianic delusions and political
meddling, and considered Apple's massive tax avoidance.
The New York Times
recently published an opinion piece that startled me, especially when I checked
the byline. WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, the fugitive in the Ecuadorean
Embassy in London,
focused on The New
Digital Age, a book by top Google executives Eric Schmidt and Jared
Cohen that to him exemplifies the melding of the technology corporation and the
state. It is, he claimed, a startlingly clear and provocative blueprint for
technocratic imperialism, from two of our leading "witch doctors who construct
a new idiom for United
States global power in the twenty-first
century." He added, "This idiom reflects the ever closer union between the
State Department and Silicon Valley."
What do the U.S.
government and Silicon Valley already have in common? Above all, they want to remain
opaque while making the rest of us entirely transparent through the capture of
our data. What is arising is simply a new form of government, involving vast
entities with the reach and power of government and little accountability to
Google, the company with the motto "Don't
be evil," is rapidly becoming an empire. Not an empire of territory, as was Rome or the Soviet Union,
but an empire controlling our access to data and our data itself. Antitrust lawsuits
proliferating around the company demonstrate its quest for monopoly control
over information in the information age. Its search engine has become
indispensable for most of us, and as Google critic and media professor Siva
Vaidhyanathan puts it in his 2012 book The Googlization of Everything, "[W]e now allow
Google to determine what is important, relevant, and true on the Web and in the
world. We trust and believe that Google acts in our best interest. But we have
surrendered control over the values, methods, and processes that make sense of
our information ecosystem." And that's just the search engine.
About three-quarters of a billion
people use Gmail, which conveniently gives Google access to the content of
their communications (scanned in such a way that they can target ads at you).
Google tried and failed to claim proprietary control of digital versions of
every book ever published; librarians and publishers fought back on that one.
As the New York Times reported last fall, Paul Aiken, executive director of the
Authors Guild, summed the situation up this way: "Google continues to profit
from its use of millions of copyright-protected books without regard to
authors' rights, and our class-action lawsuit on behalf of U.S. authors
The nonprofit Consumer Watchdog wrote to the attorney general on June 12th urging him "to
block Google's just announced $1 billion acquisition of Waze, developers of a
mobile mapping application, on antitrust grounds... Google already dominates
the online mapping business with Google Maps. The Internet giant was able to
muscle its way to dominance by unfairly favoring its own service ahead of such
competitors as Mapquest in its online search results. Now with the proposed
Waze acquisition, the Internet giant would remove the most viable competitor to
Google Maps in the mobile space. Moreover it will allow Google access to even
more data about online activity in a way that will increase its dominant
position on the Internet."
The company seems to be cornering the online mapping
business, seems in fact to be cornering so many things that eventually they may
have us cornered.
In Europe, there's an
antitrust lawsuit over Google's Android phone apps. In many ways, you can map
Google's rise by the litter of antitrust lawsuits it crushed en route. By the
way, Google bought Motorola. You know it owns YouTube, right? That makes Google
possessor of the second and third most visited Websites on earth. (Facebook is
first, and two more of the top six are also in Silicon
Imagine that it's 1913 and the post office, the phone
company, the public library, printing houses, the U.S. Geological Survey mapping
operations, movie houses, and all atlases are largely controlled by a secretive
corporation unaccountable to the public. Jump a century and see that in the
online world that's more or less where we are. A New York venture capitalist wrote
that Google is trying to take over "the entire fucking Internet" and asked the
question of the day: "Who will stop Google?"
The Tipping Point
We ask that question all the time in San Francisco, because here Google isn't just
on our computers, it's on our streets. I wrote earlier this year about "the
Google bus" --
the armadas of private Wi-Fi-equipped luxury buses that run through our streets
and use our public bus stops, often blocking city buses and public
transit passengers while they load or unload the employees taking the long ride
down the peninsula to their corporation of choice. Google, Apple, Facebook, and
Genentech run some of the bigger fleets, and those mostly unmarked white buses
have become a symbol of the transformation of the city.
Carl Nolte, the old native son who writes a column for
the (dying) San Francisco Chronicle,
said this month of the future inhabitants of 22,000 high-priced
apartments under construction, "These new apartment dwellers will all be new
San Franciscans, with different values. In a couple of years we'll think of the
progressive politicians, circa 2012, as quaint antiques, like the old
waterfront Commies your grandfather used to worry about. This is already a
high-tech city, an expensive city, a city where middle-class families can't
afford to live. It is a city where the African American population has dropped
precipitously, where the Latino Mission District is gentrifying more every day.
You think it's expensive here now? Just you wait. These are the good old days,
but it won't last. We are at a tipping point."
Mr. Nolte, you can tell, doesn't particularly like this.
A guy named Ilan Greenberg at the New
Republic popped up to tell us that we must like it -- or face his
ridicule. He writes, "Ironically, the anti-gentrifiers themselves
undermine San Francisco's
liberal ethos. Opposed to newcomers? Wary of people whose values you don't
understand? Critical of young people for not living up to an older generation's
ideals? It all sounds very reactionary and close-minded." The problem is that
we understand Silicon Valley's values all too well, and a lot
of us don't like them.
Adding newcomers might not be so bad if it didn't mean
subtracting a lot of those of us who are already here. By us I mean everyone
who doesn't work for a gigantic technology corporation or one of the smaller
companies hoping to become a global monolith. Greenberg (who is, incidentally,
writing for a publication quietly bought up by a Facebook billionaire) sneers
at us for defending middle-class people, but "middle class" is just a word for
those of us who get paid decently for our work. People at various income levels
in a diversity of fields here in San
Francisco are being replaced by those who work in one
field and get paid extremely well. Small, alternative, and nonprofit
institutions are also struggling and going down. It's like watching a meadow
being plowed under for, say, Monsanto genetically modified soybeans.
Speaking of meadows, one of Silicon Valley's
billionaires, Napster founder and Spotify billionaire Sean Parker, just threw
himself a $10 million wedding on environmentally sensitive land in Big Sur. In the
course of building a massive fantasy set for the event, "including
grading, change in use from campground to private event, construction of
multiple structures including a gateway and arch, an artificial pond, a stone
bridge, multiple event platforms with elevated floors, rock walls, artificially
created ruins of cottages and castle walls," he reportedly did significant environmental damage and violated regulations.
Apparently paying $2.5 million in fines after the fact
didn't bother him. Napster and Spotify are, incidentally, online technologies
that have reduced musicians' profits from their recordings to almost nothing.
There are tremendously wealthy musicians, of course, but a lot of them are at
best, yes, middle class. Thanks to Parker, maybe a little less so.
Teachers, civil servants, bus drivers, librarians,
firefighters -- consider them representatives of the middle class under siege,
as well as the people who keep a city viable and diverse. Friends of mine -- a
painter, a poet, a filmmaker, a photographer, all of whom have contributed to San Francisco's culture
-- have been evicted so that more affluent people may replace them. There's a
widespread tendency to think that defending culture means defending privileged
white people, but that assumes that people of color and poor people aren't
artists. Here, they are.
Everyone here understands that if a musician -- hip-hop
or symphony -- can't afford a home, neither can a janitor and her family. And
competition for those apartments is fierce, so fierce that these days no one I
know can find a rental on the open market. I couldn't when I moved in 2011;
neither could a physician friend earlier this year. The tech kids come in and
offer a year in cash up front or raise the asking price or both, and the
housing supply continues to wither, while rents skyrocket. So while Greenberg
might like you to think that we're selfishly not offering a seat at the table,
it's more like old people and working families and people whose careers were shaped
by idealism are objecting to being thrown under the, well, bus.
Like Gandhi, Only With
Enough minions of Silicon Valley's
mighty corporations could arrive to create a monoculture. In some parts of
town, it already is the dominant culture. A guy who made a fortune in the
dot-com boom and moved to the Mission District (the partly Latino, formerly
blue-collar eye of the housing hurricane) got locals' attention recently with a
blog post titled "Douchebags Like You are Ruining San Francisco." In it, he
described the churlish and sometimes predatory behavior of the very young and
very wealthy toward the elderly, the poor, and the nonwhite.
He wrote, "You're on MUNI [the city bus system] and watch a
20-something guy reluctantly give up his seat to an elderly woman and then say
loudly to his friends, 'I don't know why old people ride MUNI. If I were old
I'd just take Uber.'" Yeah, I had to look it up, too: Uber.com, a limousine
taxi service you access via a smartphone app. A friend of mine overheard a
young techie in line to buy coffee say to someone on his phone that he was
working on an app that would be "like Food Not Bombs, to distribute food, only
for profit." Saying you're going to be like a group dedicated to free food,
only for profit, is about as deranged as saying you're going to be like Gandhi,
only with guns.
"An influx of techies will mean more patrons for the
arts," trilled an article at the Silicon Valley
news site Pando, but as of yet those notable patrons have not made an
appearance. As a local alternative weekly reported, "The tech world in general is notoriously
uncharitable: According to the Chronicle
of Philanthropy, only four of 2011's 50 most generous U.S. donors
worked in tech, despite the fact that 13 of Forbes
50 Richest Americans in 2012 had made some or all of their fortunes in tech."
Medici in their machinations, they are not Medici-style patrons. There is no
noticeable trickle-down in the Bay Area, no significant benevolence toward the
needy or good causes or culture from the new tech fortunes.
Instead, we get San Francisco newcomer, Facebook CEO, and billionaire Mark
Zuckerberg pursuing his own interest with ruthless disregard for life on Earth.
This year, Zuckerberg formed a politically active nonprofit, FWD.us, that
sought to influence the immigration debate to make it easier for Silicon Valley corporations to import tech workers. There
has been no ideology involved, only expediency, in how FWD.us pursued its ends.
It decided to put its massive financial clout to work giving politicians
whatever they wanted in hopes that this would lead to an advantageous quid pro quo arrangement. Toward that
end, the group began running ads in favor of the Keystone XL pipeline (that will bring particularly
carbon-dirty tar sands from Canada to the U.S. Gulf Coast) to support a
Republican senator and other ads in favor of drilling in Alaska's pristine
Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to support an Alaskan Democrat.
The takeaway message seemed to be that nothing is off
limits in pursuing self-interest, and that the actual meaning and consequences
of these climate-impacting projects was not of concern at least to that
29-year-old who's also the 25th richest person in the United States.
(To give credit where it's due: Silicon Valley
billionaire Elon Musk, Paypal cofounder and electric car mogul, quit FWD.us.) Zuckerberg and his Valley associates were
pushing things they didn't care about and demonstrating that they didn't care
about much except what makes their corporations run and their profits rise.
Here, where the Sierra Club was founded in 1892 and many are environmentally
minded, this didn't go over well. Protests ensued at Facebook headquarters and
on Facebook itself.
Rising hostility to the tech surge in San
Francisco is met with fury and bewilderment by many Silicon Valley employees. They tend to sound like
Bush-era strategists dumbfounded that the Iraqis didn't welcome their invasion
with flowers.
Here's something else you should know about Silicon Valley: according to Mother
Jones, 89% of the founding teams of these companies are all male;
82% are all white (the other 18% Asian/Pacific Islander); and women there make
49 cents to the male dollar. Silicon Valley
female powerhouses like Facebook CEO Sheryl Sandberg get a lot of attention
because they're unusual, black swans in a lake full of white swans. As
Catherine Bracy, on whose research Mother
Jones based its charts, put it, "The current research I've seen shows that wealth
creation from the tech industry is extremely unequally distributed, and current
venture capital is going overwhelmingly to a small, homogeneous elite." That's
what's encroaching on San Francisco.
That Pando article chastises us this way: "San Francisco can become a world capital.
First it needs to get over itself." But maybe we don't want to be a world
capital or more like New York and Tokyo. The logic of
more-is-better seems unassailable to San
Francisco's detractors, but inside their more is a lot
of less: less diversity, less affordability, less culture, less continuity,
less community, less equitable distribution of wealth. What's called wealth in
these calculations is for the few; for the many, it's impoverishment.
The Armada of the
If Google represents the global menace of Silicon Valley, and Zuckerberg represents its amorality,
then Oracle CEO Larry Ellison might best represent its crassness. The fifth
richest man in the world, he spent hundreds of millions of dollars to win the America's
Cup yacht race a few years back. The winner gets to choose the next venue for
the race and the type of boat to be used. So for this summer's races, Ellison
chose San Francisco
Bay and a giant catamaran
that appears to be exceptionally unstable. Last month, an Olympic-medal-winning
sailor drowned when a boat he was training on capsized in San Francisco Bay, pinning him under its sail.
Part of Ellison's strategy for winning again evidently
involves making the boats so expensive that almost no one can compete. A race
that once had seven to 15 competitors now has four, and one may drop out.
Business Insider headlined a piece, "Larry Ellison Has Completely Screwed Up
The America's Cup." It went on to say, "Each team, with the exception of New Zealand's,
is backed by an individual billionaire, and each has spent between $65 million
and $100 million so far." In typical Silicon Valley-fashion, Ellison also
figured out how to stick San Francisco for a significant part of the tab and
in the process even caused the eviction of a few dozen small businesses, though in the end
the city did not give him a valuable stretch of waterfront he wanted.
Here's what San
Francisco is now: a front row seat on the most
powerful corporations on Earth and the people who run them. So we know what you
may not yet: they are not your friends and their vision is not your vision, but
your data is their data, and your communications are in their hands, and they
seem to be rising to become an arm of or a part-owner of the government or a
law unto themselves, and no one has yet figured out what we can do about it.
Rebecca Solnit is just winding up
several months as a research fellow at Stanford Libraries and Stanford's Bill Lane
Center for the American
West. Her work there will lead to a book about California history, but her new book, out
this month, is The Faraway Nearby.
Copyright 2013 Rebecca Solnit
Image by Robert
Scoble, licensed under Creative Commons.
This post originally appeared at Tom Dispatch.
One summer some years ago, on a peninsula jutting off another peninsula off the west coast of Iceland, I lived among strangers and birds. The birds were mostly new species I got to know a little, the golden plovers plaintively dissembling in the grass to lead intruders away from their nests, the oystercatchers who flew overhead uttering unearthly oscillating cries, the coastal fulmars, skuas, and guillemots, and most particularly the arctic terns. The impeccable whiteness of their feathers, the sharpness of their scimitar wings, the fierceness of their cries, and the steepness of their dives were all enchanting.
Terns were once called sea swallows for their deeply forked tails and grace in the air, and in Latin, arctic terns were named sterna paradisaea by a pietist Danish cleric named Erik Pontoppidan, at the end of a turbulent career. It's not clear why in 1763 he called the black-capped, white-feathered arctic terns sterna paradisaea: birds -- or terns -- of paradise. He could not have known about their extraordinary migration, back in the day when naturalists -- and Pontoppidan himself in his book on Norway -- thought swallows buried themselves in the mud in winter and hibernated, rather than imagining they and other birds flew far south to other climes.
Of all living things, arctic terns migrate farthest and live in the most light and least darkness. They fly tens of thousands of miles a year as they relocate from farthest north to farthest south. When they are not nesting, they rarely touch ground and live almost constantly in flight, like albatrosses, like their cousins the sooty terns who roam above the equatorial seas for years at a time without touching down. Theirs is a paradise of endless light and endless effort. The lives of angels must be like this.
The far north is an unearthly earth, where much of what those of us in temperate zones were told is universal is not true. Everyone walks on water, which is a solid. In winter, you can build palaces out of it, or houses out of snow. Ice is blue. Snow insulates. Water crystallizes into floating mountains that destroy whatever collides with them. Many other things turn hard as rock in the cold. Nothing decays, and so time stops for the dead, if not the living. Cold is stability and warmth can be treacherous.
Trees dwindle; shrubs cling to the ground; and further north nothing remains of the plant kingdom but low grasses, diminutive flowers, mosses, and lichens hidden beneath the snow part of the year; and nearly every species but the reindeer and some of the summer birds is carnivorous. In winter, light can seem to shine upward from the white ground more than from the dark sky where the sun doesn't rise or rises for an hour or two a day. And at the poles themselves, there are not 365 days per year but one long night and one long stretch of light, and the sun rises once in the spring and sets once in the fall.
Their opposite is the equator, where every day and every night of the year is exactly twelve hours long. The further north or south you go, the longer summer days and winter nights get. In Iceland, each day of spring was several minutes longer than the one before, so that in May the days went from nearly 17 to 20 hours long, and by June there is no true darkness, no night. The sun dipped low around midnight or after and there were spectacular sunsets that melted into sunrises, because the sun never went entirely away.
That summer among the terns, I lived at latitude 65, about as far north as Fairbanks, Alaska, and one degree south of the Arctic Circle. If you go farther north, to, say, the town of Longyearbyen in the Norwegian Arctic at latitude 78, which I later visited, the sun rises in late April and stays above the horizon until nearly the end of August, when sunset finally comes -- a few minutes before sunrise. There, winter is a night as long as that summer day, running from the end of October until the middle of February. The twenty-four-hour cycle of day and night we think of as normal and daily comes as a rush of rapidly changing days and nights, flickering like a strobe, between the great day and the great night that each lasts 1,000 hours or more.
Long ago, I had read about the white nights of St. Petersburg in Russia, at only 59 degrees north, and I had once spent a couple of weeks in the Canadian wilderness at that latitude near midsummer, when night was just a blush of darkness that generally began and ended while I was asleep in my tent. I had always wanted to see the white nights farther north, but actually living through them was a little disorienting.
In Praise of Darkness
Sometimes during that summer when the sky was often gray but never black, I would think that a task had to be done before darkness and then realize that there would be no more darkness while I was there, and it didn't matter so much when I rose, when I slept, when I traveled. For me day and night were time itself, and I missed the rhythm and structure they provide. I missed stars. Darkness no longer shut me in: I shut light out to sleep. It was as though I had entered a landscape that itself never slept, never dreamed, that never let up the rational alertness of daytime, the light of interrogation and analysis.
The sensuality of night had never been so clear to me, darkness descending like velvet to wrap around you and enclose you in its black cocoon, to take you to your other self and others. In darkness dreams awaken and dreamers merge, which might be how passion becomes love and how making love begets progeny of all natures and forms. Merging is dangerous, at least to the boundaries and definition of the self. Darkness is generative, and generation, biological and artistic both, requires this amorous engagement with the unknown, this entry into the realm where you do not quite know what you are doing and what will happen next.
Creation is always in the dark because you can only do the work of making by not quite knowing what you're doing, by walking into darkness, not staying in the light. Ideas emerge from edges and shadows to arrive in the light, and though that's where they may be seen by others, that's not where they're born. But darkness is a pejorative in English, and the term has often carried emotional, moral, and religious overtones as has its opposite: the children of light, snowy angels, fair maidens, and white knights. "Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that," said the dark-skinned Martin Luther King Jr., but sometimes love is darkness; sometimes the glare is what needs to be extinguished. Turn off the lights and come to bed.
When you spend time in the desert, you come to love shadow, shade, and darkness, the respite they give to the menacing blaze of day that burns you out and dries you up. Heat is the desert as predator, just as cold is the Arctic's biggest animal. Desert light is fierce, and at midday it flattens everything into a harsh solid, but early and late in the day, light is golden and every crevice and fold and protrusion of the landscape is thrown into the high relief of light and shadow. At those times day and night intertwine like dancers, like lovers, and shadows are as powerful a presence as the things that cast them, or more so, growing and growing until the sun disappears below the horizon and darkness spreads like water on the land.
Journey to the Center
There was only one dark place left in Iceland that summer, or so it seemed to me, and I went there again and again. Elín Hansdóttir, a young artist who had been instrumental in the chain of coincidences that brought me to Iceland, had made a labyrinth titled Path. In a big room in Iceland's National Gallery, with the help of two meticulous carpenters, she built a zigzag route of Sheetrock that gave off that material's dusty clean aroma. One person at a time entered Path, and a pair of watchers in the outer gallery monitored entries and exits and occasionally went in for a rescue, like lifeguards.
When you stepped in from the daylight and the door closed behind you, the space seemed to be absolutely dark and then your eyes adjusted to the faint, faint light. You could move forward when you were blind or wait until you could see, but placing a hand on one side of the walls helped you travel too. The path turned at sharp angles, so that you knew that you were being turned around and around, and you lost track of the distance that you were going.
The light that leaked through the intentional, careful cracks in the walls and ceiling was faintly lavender blue -- it came from fluorescent tubes -- and it streamed across the space in strange ways. It was easy to believe that what was dark was solid, what was light was spaciousness into which you could move, but reality as you bumped into it was often the other way around, with open blackness and hard pale surfaces.
Your expectations reversed, you moved deeper into the labyrinth, knowing now that you did not know what was solid, what was space you could occupy, but would have to test it, over and over. Path was a space in which you perfected the art of not knowing where you were, of finding out one literal step at a time. Did the path fork? Or was there only one route? How far did it go? Was the way out the same as the way in? All this would have to be found with the hands, eyes, and feet as you traveled.
At the end, the walls began to press together and it was as dark as it had been at that first moment you stepped in and closed the door behind yourself. And then you could go no farther. It seemed as though it ought to feel claustrophobic, but I found in it an embrace of darkness, a destination, a handmade night. There and back again took me 10 or 15 minutes by the clock, but the time inside had no such quantifiable measure. It was time apart, symbolic time, a slow journey to the heart of the unknown and the unknowable. I kept coming back all summer, seven times in all, once for so long the attendants grew concerned. I felt at home there, more myself than anywhere else in Iceland, somehow. Jules Verne's novel about Iceland was called Journey to the Center of the Earth, and this felt like such a journey, or such a center.
A labyrinth is an ancient device that compresses a journey into a small space, winds up a path like thread on a spool. It contains beginning, confusion, perseverance, arrival, and return. There at last the metaphysical journey of your life and your actual movements are one and the same. You may wander, may learn that in order to get to your destination you must turn away from it, become lost, spin about, and then only after the way has become overwhelming and absorbing, arrive, having gone the great journey without having gone far on the ground.
In this it is the opposite of a maze, which has not one convoluted way but many ways and often no center, so that wandering has no cease or at least no definitive conclusion. A maze is a conversation; a labyrinth is an incantation or perhaps a prayer. In a labyrinth you're lost in that you don't know the twists and turns, but if you follow them you get there; and then you reverse your course.
The end of the journey through the labyrinth is not at the center, as is commonly supposed, but back at the threshold again: the beginning is also the real end. That is the home to which you return from the pilgrimage, the adventure. The unpraised edges and margins matter too, because it's not ultimately a journey of immersion but emergence.
Paths, Empaths, Journeys Into and Toward, By Touch and By Ear
If Path was a book, it was about not knowing, about being lost, and about darkness, the darkness of the deep interior, a book you read with your feet. Anatomists long ago named the windings of the inner ear, whose channels provide both hearing and balance, the labyrinth. The name suggests that if the labyrinth is the passage through which sound enters the mind, then we ourselves bodily enter labyrinths as though we were sounds on the way to being heard by some great unknown presence. To walk this path is to be heard, and to be heard is a great desire of the majority of us, but to be heard by whom, by what? To be a sound traveling toward the mind -- is that another way to imagine this path, this journey, the unwinding of this thread?
Who hears you? We live inside each other's thoughts and works. You build yourself out of the materials at hand and those you seek out and choose, you build your beliefs, your alliances, your affections, your home, though some of us have far more latitude than others in all those things. You digest an idea or an ethic as though it was bread, and like bread it becomes part of you. Out of all this comes your contribution to the making of the world, your sentences in the ongoing interchange. The tragedy of the imprisoned, the unemployed, the disenfranchised, and the marginalized is to be silenced in this great ongoing conversation, this symphony that is another way to describe the world.
To hear is to let the sound wander all the way through the labyrinth of your ear; to listen is to travel the other way to meet it. It's not passive but active, this listening. It's as though you retell each story, translate it into the language particular to you, fit it into your cosmology so you can understand and respond, and thereby it becomes part of you. The word empathy originally meant feeling into, and to empathize is to reach out to meet the data that comes through the labyrinths of the senses. To enter into, we say, as though another person's life was also a place you could travel to.
Kindness, compassion, generosity, are often talked about as though they're purely emotional virtues, but they are also and maybe first of all imaginative ones. You see someone get hurt -- maybe they get insulted or they're just very tired -- and you feel for them. You take the information your senses deliver and interpret it, often in terms of your own experience, until it becomes vivid to you. Or you work harder and study them to imagine the events you don't witness, the suffering that is not on the surface.
It's easier to imagine the experience of people most like you and nearest you -- your best friend, the person who just slipped on the ice. Through imagination and representations -- films, printed stories, second-hand accounts -- you travel into the lives of people far away. This imaginative entering into is best at the particular, since you can imagine being the starving child but not the region of a million starving people. Sometimes, though, one person's story becomes the point of entry to larger territories.
This identification is almost instinctual in many circumstances. Even some animals do it; babies cry in sympathy with each other, or in distress at the sound of distress. But to cry because someone cries or desire because someone desires is not quite to care about someone else. There are people whose response to the suffering of others is to become upset and demand consolation themselves.
Empathy means that you travel out of yourself a little or expand. Recognizing the reality of another's existence is the imaginative leap that is the birth of empathy, a word invented by a psychologist interested in visual art. The word is only slightly more than a century old, though the words sympathy, kindness, pity, compassion, fellow-feeling, and others covered the same general ground before Edward Titchener coined it in 1909. It was a translation of the German word Einfuhlung, or feeling into, as though the feeling itself reached out.
The root word is path, from the Greek word for passion or suffering, from which we also derive pathos and pathology and sympathy. It's a coincidence that empathy is built from a homonym for the Old English path, as in a trail. Or a dark labyrinth named Path. Empathy is a journey you travel, if you pay attention, if you care, if you desire to do so. Up close you witness suffering directly, though even then you may need words to know that this person has terrible pains in her joints or that one recently lost his home. Suffering far away reaches you through art, through images, recordings, and narratives; the information travels toward you and you meet it halfway, if you meet it.
Few if any of us will travel like arctic terns in endless light, but in the dark we find ourselves and each other, if we reach out, if we keep going, if we listen, if we go deeper.
Rebecca Solnit had been writing for TomDispatch for a decade, mostly on non-electoral politics, uprisings, and insurrections, and she is the author of 14 books, including The Faraway Nearby (Viking), published today and from which this essay is adapted.
Reprinted by arrangement with Viking, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. from The Faraway Nearby by Rebecca Solnit.
Copyright Rebecca Solnit 2013
Image by Josef Stuefer, licensed under Creative Commons.
Rebecca Solnit on
injustice, struggle, and the hope that pushes us to action. "Everything is in
motion," she writes, "and sometimes we are ourselves that movement."
As in 2004
and 2008, Rebecca Solnit and her blue-state henchwomen and men will probably
invade northern Nevada
on election week to swing with one of the most swinging states in the union.
She is, however, much more excited about 350.org's anti-oil-company
campaign and the ten thousand faces of Occupy now changing the world. Rebecca Solnit is the author of 15 books, including two due out next year, and a regular contributor to TomDispatch.com.
She lives in San Francisco, is from kindergarten to graduate school a
product of the once-robust California public educational system, and her
book A Paradise Built in Hell is the One City/One Book choice of the San Francisco Public Library this fall. Solnit's latest book, The Faraway Nearby,
will be published in June. She was named an Utne Visionary in 2010.
This post originally appeared at Tom
Ten years ago,
my part of the world was full of valiant opposition to the new wars being launched
far away and at home -- and of despair. And like despairing people everywhere,
whether in a personal depression or a political tailspin, these activists
believed the future would look more or less like the present. If there was
nothing else they were confident about, at least they were confident about
that. Ten years ago, as a contrarian and a person who prefers not to see others
suffer, I tried to undermine despair with the case for hope.
A decade later,
the present is still contaminated by the crimes of that era, but so much has
changed. Not necessarily for the better -- a decade ago, most spoke of climate
change as a distant problem, and then it caught up with us in 10,000 ways. But
not entirely for the worse either -- the vigorous climate movement we needed
arose in that decade and is growing now. If there is one thing we can draw from
where we are now and where we were then, it's that the unimaginable is
ordinary, and the way forward is almost never a straight path you can glance
down, but a labyrinth of surprises, gifts, and afflictions you prepare for by
accepting your blind spots as well as your intuitions.
The despairing of May 2003 were convinced of one true thing, that we had
not stopped
the invasion of Iraq, but they extrapolated from that a series of false
assumptions about our failures and our powerlessness across time and space.
They assumed -- like the neoconservatives themselves -- that those neocons
would be atop the world for a long time to come. Instead, the neocon and neoliberal ideologies have been widely reviled and
renounced around the world; the Republicans' demographic hemorrhage has weakened them in this country;
the failures of their wars are evident to everyone; and though they still grasp
fearsome power, everything has indeed changed. Everything changes: there lies
most of our hope and some of our fear.
I've seen
extraordinary change in my lifetime, some of it in the last decade. I was born
in a country that had been galvanized and unsettled by the civil rights
movement, but still lacked a meaningful environmental movement, women's movement, or queer rights
movement (beyond a couple of small organizations founded in California in the 1950s).
Half a century ago, to be gay or lesbian was to live in hiding or be treated as
mentally ill or criminal. That 12 states and several countries would legalize same-sex marriage was beyond imaginable then. It wasn't
even on the table in 2003. San Francisco's spring run of same-sex weddings in
2004 flung open the doors through which so many have passed since.
If you take the
long view, you'll see how startlingly, how unexpectedly but regularly things
change. Not by magic, but by the incremental effect of countless acts of
courage, love, and commitment, the small drops that wear away stones and carve
new landscapes, and sometimes by torrents of popular will that change the world
suddenly. To say that is not to say that it will all come out fine in the end
regardless. I'm just telling you that everything is in motion, and sometimes we
are ourselves that movement.
Hope and
history are sisters: one looks forward and one looks back, and they make the
world spacious enough to move through freely. Obliviousness to the past and to
the mutability of all things imprisons you in a shrunken present. Hopelessness
often comes out of that amnesia, out of forgetting that everything is in
motion, everything changes. We have a great deal of history of defeat,
suffering, cruelty, and loss, and everyone should know it. But that's not all
we have.
There's the people's history, the counterhistory
that you didn't necessarily get in school and don't usually get on the news:
the history of the battles we've won, of the rights we've gained, of the
differences between then and now that those who live in forgetfulness lack.
This is often the history of how individuals came together to produce that
behemoth civil society, which stands astride nations and topples regimes -- and
mostly does it without weapons or armies. It's a history that undermines most
of what you've been told about authority and violence and your own
Civil society
is our power, our joy, and our possibility, and it has written a lot of the
history in the last few years, as well as the last half century. If you doubt
our power, see how it terrifies those at the top, and remember that they fight
it best by convincing us it doesn't exist. It does exist, though, like lava
beneath the earth, and when it erupts, the surface of the earth is remade.
Things change.
And people sometimes have the power to make that happen, if and when they come
together and act (and occasionally act alone, as did writers Rachel Carson and
Harriet Beecher Stowe -- or Mohammed Bouazizi, the young man whose suicide triggered
the Arab Spring).
If you fix your
eye on where we started out, you'll see that we've come a long way by those
means. If you look forward, you'll see that we have a long way to go -- and
that sometimes we go backward when we forget that we fought for the eight-hour workday or workplace safety or women's rights or voting rights or
affordable education, forget that we won them, that they're precious, and that
we can lose them again. There's much to be proud of, there's much to mourn,
there's much yet to do, and the job of doing it is ours, a heavy gift to carry.
And it's made to be carried, by people who are unstoppable, who are movements,
who are change itself.
Too Soon to Tell
Ten years ago I
began writing about hope and speaking about it. My online essay "Acts of Hope,"
posted on May 19, 2003, was my first encounter with Tomdispatch.com, which
would change my work and my life. It gave me room for another kind of voice and
another kind of writing. It showed me how the Internet could give wings to
words. What I wrote then and subsequently for the site spread around the world
in remarkable ways, putting me in touch with people and movements, and deeper
into conversations about the possible and the impossible (and into a cherished
friendship with the site's founder and editor, Tom Engelhardt).
For a few
years, I spoke about hope around this country and in Europe.
I repeatedly ran into comfortably situated people who were hostile to the idea
of hope: they thought that hope somehow betrayed the desperate and downtrodden,
as if the desperate wanted the solidarity of misery from the privileged, rather
than action. Hopelessness for people in extreme situations means resignation to
one's own deprivation or destruction. Hope can be a survival strategy. For
comfortably situated people, hopelessness means cynicism and letting oneself
off the hook. If everything is doomed, then nothing is required (and vice
Despair is often premature: it's a form of impatience as
well as certainty. My favorite comment about political change comes from Zhou
En-Lai, the premier of the People's Republic of China under Chairman Mao. Asked in
the early 1970s about his opinion of the French Revolution, he reportedly
answered, "Too soon to tell." Some say that he was talking about the revolutions of 1968, not 1789, but even then it provides a
generous and expansive perspective. To hold onto uncertainty and possibility
and a sense that even four years later, no less nearly two centuries after the
fact, the verdict still isn't in is more than most people I know are prepared
to offer. A lot of them will hardly give an event a month to complete its
effects, and many movements and endeavors are ruled failures well before
they're over.
Not long ago, I
ran into a guy who'd been involved in the Occupy Wall Street movement, that great
upwelling in southern Manhattan
in the fall of 2011 that catalyzed a global conversation and a series of
actions and occupations nationwide and globally. He offered a tailspin of a
description of how Occupy was over and had failed.
But I wonder:
How could he possibly know? It really is too soon to tell. First of all, maybe
the kid who will lead the movement that will save the world was catalyzed by
what she lived through or stumbled upon in Occupy Fresno or Occupy Memphis, and
we won't reap what she sows until 2023 or 2043. Maybe the seeds of something
more were sown, as they were in Czechoslovakia during the Prague Spring of 1968
and Charter 77, for the great and unforeseen harvest that was the Velvet Revolution of 1989, the nonviolent overthrow of the
Soviet totalitarian state in that country.
Second, Occupy
began to say what needed to be said about greed and capitalism, exposing a
brutality that had long been hushed up, revealing both the victims of debt and
the rigged economy that created it. This country changed because those things
were said out loud. I can't say exactly how, but I know it mattered. So much
that matters is immeasurable, unquantifiable, and beyond price. Laws around
banking, foreclosure, and student loans are changing -- not enough, not
everywhere, but some people will benefit, and they matter. Occupy didn't cause
those changes directly, but it did much to make the voice of the people audible
and the sheer wrongness of our debt system visible -- and gave momentum to the
ongoing endeavors to overturn Citizens
United and abolish corporate personhood.
Third, I only
know a little of what the thousands of local gatherings and networks we mean by
"Occupy" are now doing, but I know that Occupy Sandy is still doing vital work
in the destruction zone of that hurricane and was about the best grassroots
disaster relief endeavor this nation has ever seen. I know that Strike Debt, a direct offshoot of Occupy
Wall Street, has relieved millions
of dollars in medical debt, not with the sense that we can fix all debt
this way, but that we can demonstrate the malleability, the artifice, and the
immorality of the student, medical, and housing debt that is destroying so many
lives. I know that the Occupy Homes foreclosure defenders have been doing
amazing things, often one home at a time, from Atlanta
to Minneapolis.
(Last Friday, Occupy Our Homes organized a "showdown at the Department of
Justice" in Washington, D.C.; that Saturday, Strike Debt Bay Area held their
second Debtors' Assembly: undead from coast to coast.)
Fourth, I know
people personally whose lives were changed, and who are doing work they never
imagined they would be involved in, and I'm friends with remarkable people who,
but for Occupy, I would not know existed. People connected across class,
racial, and cultural lines in the flowering of that movement. Like Freedom
Summer, whose consequences were to be felt so far beyond Mississippi in 1964, this will have reach
beyond the moment in which I write and you read.
Finally, there
was great joy at the time ,
the joy of liberation and of solidarity, and joy is worth something in itself.
In a sense, it's worth everything, even if it's always fleeting, though not
always as scarce as we imagine.
Climates of Hope and Fear
I had lunch
with Middle East and nonviolence scholar Stephen Zunes the other day
and asked him what he would say about the Arab Spring now. He had, he told me,
been in Egypt
several months ago watching television with an activist. Formerly, the news was
always about what the leaders did, decided, ordained, inflicted. But the news
they were watching was surprisingly focused on civil society, on what ordinary
people initiated or resisted, on how they responded, what they thought. He
spoke of how so many in the Middle East had
lost their fatalism and sense of powerlessness and awoken to their own
collective power.
This civil
society remains awake in Egypt
and the other countries. What will it achieve? Maybe it's too soon to tell. Syria is a
turbulent version of hell now, but it could be leaving the dynasty of the
Assads in the past; its future remains to be written. Perhaps its people will
indeed write the next chapter in its story, and not only with explosives.
You can tell
the arc of the past few years as, first, the Arab Spring, then extraordinary
civil society actions in Chile,
Quebec, Spain, and elsewhere, followed by
Occupy. But don't stop there.
After Occupy
came Idle No More, the
Canada-based explosion of indigenous power and resistance (to a Canadian
government that has gone over to the far right and to environmental destruction
on a grand scale). It was founded by four women in November of 2012 and it's spread across North
America, sparking new environmental actions and new coalitions around
environmental and climate issues, with flash-mob-style powwows in shopping
malls and other places, with a thousand-mile walk (and snowshoe) by seven Cree
youth this winter. (There were 400 people with them by the time they arrived at Canada's
Parliament in Ottawa.)
Idle No More
activists have vowed to block the construction of any pipeline that tries to
transport the particularly dirty crude oil from the Alberta
tar sands, whether it heads north, east, or west from northern Alberta.
Each of those directions takes it over native land. This is part of the reason
why tar sands supporters are pushing so hard to build the Keystone XL pipeline from Alberta to the U.S. Gulf Coast.
Thankfully, the
push back is also strong. Our fate may depend on it. As climate scientist James
Hansen wrote a year ago, "Canada's tar sands, deposits of
sand saturated with bitumen, contain twice the amount of carbon dioxide emitted
by global oil use in our entire history. If we were to fully exploit this new
oil source, and continue to burn our conventional oil, gas, and coal supplies, concentrations of carbon dioxide in the
atmosphere eventually would reach levels higher than in the Pliocene era, more
than 2.5 million years ago, when sea level was at least 50 feet higher than it
is now."
The news just
came in that we reached 400
parts per million of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere, the highest level in more than five million years. This is
terrible news on a scale that eclipses everything else, because it encompasses
everything else. We are wrecking our world, for everyone for all time, or at
least the next several thousand years. But "we" is a tricky word here. Some of
the people I most love and admire are doing extraordinary things to save the
world, for you, for us, for generations unborn, for species yet to be named,
for the oceans and sub-Saharan Africans and Arctic dwellers and everyone
in-between, for the whole unbearably beautiful symphony of life on Earth that
is imperiled.
Part of what
sustains me in the face of this potential cataclysm is remembering that, in
2003, there hardly was a climate movement. It was small, polite, mostly
believed the troubles were decades away, and was populated with people who
thought that lifestyle changes could save the planet -- rather than that you
have to get out there and fight the power. And they were the good ones. Too
many of us didn't think about it at all.
Only a few
years later, things have changed. There's a vibrant climate movement in North America. If you haven't quite taken that in, it
might be because it's working on so many disparate fronts that are often
treated separately: mountaintop coal removal, coal-fired power
plants (closing 145 existing ones to date and preventing more than 150
planned ones from opening), fracking, oil exploration in the Arctic, the Tar
Sands pipeline, and 350.org's juggernaut of a campus campaign to promote disinvestment from oil, gas, and
coal companies. Only started in November 2012, there are already divestment
movements underway on more than 380 college and university campuses, and now
cities are getting on board. It has significant victories; it will have more.
Some countries
-- notably Germany, with Denmark not far
behind -- have done remarkable things when it comes to promoting
non-fossil-fuel renewable energy. Copenhagen,
for example, in the cold gray north, is on track to become a carbon-neutral city by 2025 (and in the meantime reduced
its carbon emissions 25% between 2005 and 2011). The United States has a host of
promising smaller projects. To offer just two examples, Los Angeles has committed to being coal-free by 2025, while
San Francisco will offer its citizens electricity from 100% renewable and
carbon-neutral sources and its supervisors just voted to divest the city's fossil-fuel stocks.
There are so
many pieces of the potential solution to this puzzle, and some of them are for
you to put together. Whether they will multiply or ever add up to enough we
don't yet know. We need more: more people, more transformations, more ways to
conquer and dismantle the oil companies, more of a vision of what is at stake,
more of the great force that is civil society. Will we get it? I don't know.
Neither do you. Anything could happen.
But here's what
I'm saying: you should wake up amazed every day of your life, because if I had
told you in 1988 that, within three years, the Soviet satellite states would
liberate themselves nonviolently and the Soviet Union
would cease to exist, you would have thought I was crazy. If I had told you in
1990 that South America was on its way to liberating itself and becoming a continent of
progressive and democratic experiments, you would have considered me
delusional. If, in November 2010, I had told you that, within months, the
autocrat Hosni Mubarak, who had dominated Egypt
since 1981, would be overthrown by 18 days of popular uprisings, or that the
dictators of Tunisia
and Libya
would be ousted, all in the same year, you would have institutionalized me. If
I told you on September 16, 2011, that a bunch of kids sitting in a park in lower Manhattan would rock the country, you'd say I
was beyond delusional. You would have, if you believed as the despairing do,
that the future is invariably going to look like the present, only more so. It
I still value
hope, but I see it as only part of what's required, a starting point. Think of
it as the match but not the tinder or the blaze. To matter, to change the
world, you also need devotion and will and you need to act. Hope is only where
it begins, though I've also seen people toil on without regard to hope, to what
they believe is possible. They live on principle and they gamble, and sometimes
they even win, or sometimes the goal they were aiming for is reached long after
their deaths. Still, it's action that gets you there. When what was once hoped
for is realized, it falls into the background, becomes the new normal; and we
hope for or carp about something else.
The future is
bigger than our imaginations. It's unimaginable, and then it comes anyway. To
meet it we need to keep going, to walk past what we can imagine. We need to be
unstoppable. And here's what it takes: you don't stop walking to congratulate
yourself; you don't stop walking to wallow in despair; you don't stop because
your own life got too comfortable or too rough; you don't stop because you won;
you don't stop because you lost. There's more to win, more to lose, others who
need you.
You don't stop
walking because there is no way forward. Of course there is no way. You walk
the path into being, you make the way, and if you do it well, others can follow
the route. You look backward to grasp the long history you're moving forward
from, the paths others have made, the road you came in on. You look forward to
possibility. That's what we mean by hope, and you look past it into the
impossible and that doesn't stop you either. But mostly you just walk, right
foot, left foot, right foot, left foot. That's what makes you unstoppable.
Rebecca Solnit's first essay for Tomdispatch.com turned into the book Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities, since translated into eight languages. Portions
of this essay began life as the keynote speech at the National Lawyers' Guild
gala in honor of attorney and human rights activist Walter Riley, whose own
life is a beautiful example of unstoppability.
Copyright 2013
Rebecca Solnit
Image by David Shankbone,
licensed under Creative
How could the State of the Union message reflect deeper values
of equality and compassion for those in need? In a call to action, Starhawk demonstrates
how to make that message a reality.
During Obama's State of the Union
message, I was scheduled to give a talk at Northern Arizona
University on "Women
Taking Action: Using the Insights of the Feminist Movement." As part of it, I
decided to write the State of the Union as if
Obama were suddenly possessed by the spirit of the nurturing, caring,
life-sustaining values that women have often carried. Here it is—you can
compare his speech and see how well he measures up! I am indebted to astrologer
Caroline Casey, the brilliant host of the Pacifica
radio show Visionary Activist, with whom I spent much of the weekend at the
Conscious Life Expo in L.A.,
for the phrase "until now!" She uses it as a mantra when people get all caught
up in how bad it is and how wrong we all are and how doomed we are—she just
adds "until now!" Try it when you get caught in a downward vortex!
My sisters, brothers, frères and
The State of the Union
is not well. We have defined aggression as strength and poured our resources
into killing, starving everything that serves and supports life. We have served
the greedy at the expense of the needy, allowed children to go hungry, the poor
to lack shelter, the sick to lack care, the wounded from our wars to go
unhealed, the aged to be abandoned. And we have utterly failed to address the
greatest challenge of our age, the destruction of the earth's climate and the
meltdown of our global life support systems.
Until now!
For now we will work together to heal
this mess!
We will siphon away money and
resources from war and death to life, to health care and education that
inspires and empowers, to arts and imagination and invention and research, to
the protection and regeneration of our wildlands and farmlands, to things that
enrich our lives and help us to thrive. No longer will we meet the dangers of
the world with brute force and firepower—but instead we will look at the causes
of violence and change the conditions that breed hate.
Now we will feed the hungry and house
the homeless, care for the sick and the wounded, assure the comfort and the
security of the elders, because that's what decent people do. And if our
society can't do this, it's not worth protecting.
We will cease rewarding greed. Those
who benefit from the system will now pay their fair share to support it. We
will change the laws that in the past have allowed them to control it, and
return power to the people. And—here I'm speaking to the 1 percent—you know
what? Your lives will actually be better. You might have somewhat less stuff
but richer relationships, less control but more time, more sense of wonder,
more peace of mind. And if you really need it, we'll name some bridges after
you and let you cut some ribbons and open some health care clinics and child
care centers, just like the Queen of England.
Most importantly, we're going to
address the destruction of the living systems of the planet. No longer will we
allow practices that imperil our climate or our aquifers, or threaten to
release radioactive poison over the land. We know that we must make big
changes: in our energy systems, our technology, our economy, our food growing
systems, our ways of living. But we also know that together, we can do this! We
can work together and make the shift to a new world in balance with nature.
We already have the technologies we
need—solar, wind, renewables. We can make the transition wisely and swiftly.
And we will invest in the research that will bring a thousand new ideas into
production, using the resources we still have to create what we need for the
new world.
We will protect our forests and wild
lands, our arctic wastes and our desert refuges. This year we will plant
millions of trees, to suck up carbon and to provide shade and habitat, fruit
and nuts, wood and mulch, quiet and beauty.
We will nurture our soil, for
building healthy organic soil is the best and fastest way to broadly and safely
sequester carbon. That soil will grow healthy food close to where we live,
creating true abundance. We will support our farmers to make the transition to
humane, organic agriculture, and support our young people to connect to land,
to start urban farms and schoolyard gardens, to plant groves of fruit trees and
food forests, to grow true abundance for us all.
We will root our industries and
enterprises back into local communities. No longer will we subsidize, with
cheap fossil fuels and tax breaks, their flight to far-off places with the
cheapest labor and the most lax environmental and safety standards. Instead we
will demand that they provide for real needs in ways that assure lives of
dignity and security to those who do the work. We're redesigning our cities so
that people can live and work, learn and enjoy their pleasures in true
We can do this—and more! Imagine how
it will be, next year and in years to come, when I can stand before you and
This is the State of our Union—we have fed the hungry, cared for the sick,
comforted the aged, restored the homeless to their homes, sent our young people
forth into life well-educated and debt-free, built thousands of acres of
healthy soil, planted a billion trees. We are still challenged by the results
of generations of degradation, but we have turned the corner. We're well on
track to an energy-rich world of 100 percent renewables. We're happier,
healthier, more creative, more inventive, safer and more secure. And most of
all, we have that wonderful feeling of unity and enthusiasm that comes when we
work together.
God—Goddess, Creator, Great
Spirit—whatever you want to call it, including our collective human power—bless
this great country, and blessed be you all!
Starhawk, committed global justice activist and organizer, is the author or
coauthor of twelve books, including The Spiral Dance, The Fifth Sacred
Thing, and The Earth Path. Her latest is The Empowerment Manual:
A Guide for Collaborative Groups. She is a veteran of progressive movements,
from anti-war to anti-nukes, is a highly influential voice in the revival of
earth-based spirituality and Goddess religion, and has brought many innovative
techniques of spirituality and magic to her political work. Her web site is www.starhawk.org. Starhawk was recognized as an Utne Reader Visionary in 1995.
Editor's note: This post originally appeared at Dirt Worship, Starhawk's blog on earth-based spirituality, permaculture, magic, politics, activism, and Paganism.
Above image of Capitol Dome by Bob Jagendorf,
licensed under Creative
Commons. Slideshow image of Occupy Wall Street prayer by David Shankbone, also licensed under Creative Commons.
Raj Patel is a writer, academic, and activist. He is the author of Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System, and the New York Times and international bestseller, The Value of Nothing.
He has also published widely in the academic press, with articles in
peer-reviewed philosophy, politics, sociology, science, and economics
journals. Patel is currently working on Generation Food, a multimedia project about reinventing our global food system. He was named an Utne Reader Visionary in 2009.
Editor's Note: Earlier
this month, longtime anti-GMO activist Mark Lynas changed his mind about
genetically modified foods. "As an environmentalist, and someone
who believes that everyone in this world has a right to a healthy and nutritious
diet of their choosing, I could not have chosen a more counter-productive path,"
Lynas at the Oxford Farming Conference. "I now regret it
completely." What caused the
change of heart? Lynas "discovered science." While outlets like Slate reported
this news with approval, Raj Patel questioned Lynas' assumption that science
and sustainability are mutually exclusive. Below is Patel's response, reposted
with permission from his blog.
It was such a non-issue that I really didn't want to write about it
at all. I didn't know who Mark Lynas was and didn't know that he had
changed his mind about genetically modified crops from being an opponent
to a fan. But, clearly, it was a slow news week. The killing and the
rape and the corporate crime and the climate change had been
successfully reported. So a range of news outlets decided to give Lynas
the air time he wanted, following this speech.
Frankly, there's not much to read. Mark Lynas opposed GM crops
because he thought they were bad but now he has 'discovered science',
and that makes him a better environmentalist and a supporter of the
pesticide industry's sale of genetically modified crops and it possibly
makes him regret studying politics and modern history.
In general, it's a good thing that people discover science. It
usually means they've left behind dogma in favour of peer review and
data. In this piece,
scientist John Vandermeer welcomes Lynas to science, and looks forward
to Lynas' reading more science in the future. After all, some of the
most reasoned arguments against GM crops come from those who have
embraced science for far longer than Lynas. GM Free Cymru and The Union of Concerned Scientists note, though, that Lynas hasn't really given up on the dogma,
seeming to have swapped his old prejudices for the kind of pro-business
platform that'll keep him flush with industry conference honoraria for
the next year or two.
There's really not much more to be said. It could be that Lynas will,
like Bjorn Lomborg, noisily muddle from one position to another,
trailing the scientific debates by a decade, but anticipating the winds
of conservative thinking by a month or two. Ultimately, though, it
matters little. While Lynas embarks on his journey from knee-jerkery to
scientific neophyte to, we hope, scientific sophisticate, science and
sustainable farming are demonstrating both that GM crops are irrelevant
in feeding the world, and that they're the worst among many far better
alternatives. Which is a far more interesting story to report than that
Mark Lynas has read a book.
Image: Organic corn, photo by Ivan Walsh, licensed under Creative Commons.
Bill McKibben is the author of a
dozen books about the environment, beginning with The End of Nature in 1989,
which is regarded as the first book for a general audience on climate change.
He is a founder of the grassroots climate campaign 350.org, which
has coordinated 15,000 rallies in 189 countries since 2009. Bill is a frequent
contributor to various magazines including The New York Times, The Atlantic Monthly, Harper's, Orion Magazine, Mother Jones, The New York Review of Books, Granta, Rolling Stone, and Outside. He is also a board
member and contributor to Grist Magazine. He is also a Schumann Distinguished Scholar at
Middlebury College, a TomDispatch regular, and the author, most recently, of Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet. He was named an Utne Visionary in 2010.
Change usually happens very slowly, even once all the
serious people have decided there's a problem. That's because, in a country as
big as the United States,
public opinion moves in slow currents. Since change by definition requires
going up against powerful established interests, it can take decades for those
currents to erode the foundations of our special-interest fortresses.
Take, for instance, "the problem of our schools." Don't
worry about whether there actually was a problem, or whether making every
student devote her school years to filling out standardized tests would solve
it. Just think about the timeline. In 1983, after some years of pundit throat
clearing, the Carnegie Commission published "A Nation at Risk," insisting that
a "rising tide of mediocrity" threatened our schools. The nation's biggest
foundations and richest people slowly roused themselves to action, and for
three decades we haltingly applied a series of fixes and reforms. We've had
Race to the Top, and Teach for America,
and charters, and vouchers, and… we're still in the midst of "fixing"
education, many generations of students later.
Even facing undeniably real problems -- say,
discrimination against gay people -- one can make the case that gradual change
has actually been the best option. Had some mythical liberal Supreme Court
declared, in 1990, that gay marriage was now the law of the land, the backlash
might have been swift and severe. There's certainly an argument to be made that
moving state by state (starting in nimbler, smaller states like Vermont) ultimately made
the happy outcome more solid as the culture changed and new generations came of
Which is not to say that there weren't
millions of people who suffered as a result. There were. But our societies are
built to move slowly. Human institutions tend to work better when they have
years or even decades to make gradual course corrections, when time smooths out
the conflicts between people.
And that's always been the difficulty with climate change
-- the greatest problem we've ever faced. It's not a fight, like education
reform or abortion or gay marriage, between conflicting groups with conflicting
opinions. It couldn't be more different at a fundamental level.
We're talking about a fight between human beings and
physics. And physics is entirely uninterested in human timetables. Physics
couldn't care less if precipitous action raises gas prices, or damages the coal
industry in swing states. It could care less whether putting a price on carbon
slowed the pace of development in China, or made agribusiness less
Physics doesn't understand that rapid action on climate
change threatens the most lucrative business on Earth, the fossil fuel industry.
It's implacable. It takes the carbon dioxide we produce and translates it into
heat, which means into melting ice and rising oceans and gathering storms. And
unlike other problems, the less you do, the worse it gets. Do nothing and you
soon have a nightmare on your hands.
We could postpone healthcare reform a decade, and the
cost would be terrible -- all the suffering not responded to over those 10 years.
But when we returned to it, the problem would be about the same size. With
climate change, unless we act fairly soon in response to the timetable set by
physics, there's not much reason to act at all.
Unless you understand these distinctions you don't
understand climate change -- and it's not at all clear that President Obama
understands them.
That's why his administration is sometimes peeved when they
don't get the credit they think they deserve for tackling the issue in his
first term in office. The measure they point to most often is the increase in average mileage for automobiles, which will
slowly go into effect over the next decade.
It's precisely the kind of gradual transformation that
people -- and politicians -- like. We should have adopted it long ago (and
would have, except that it challenged the power of Detroit and its unions, and so both
Republicans and Democrats kept it at bay). But here's the terrible thing: it's
no longer a measure that impresses physics. After all, physics isn't kidding
around or negotiating. While we were discussing whether climate change was even
a permissible subject to bring up in the last presidential campaign, it was melting the Arctic. If
we're to slow it down, we need to be cutting emissions globally at a sensational rate, by something like 5% a year to make a
real difference.
It's not Obama's fault that that's not happening. He
can't force it to happen. Consider the moment when the great president of the
last century, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, was confronted with an implacable
enemy, Adolf Hitler (the closest analog to physics we're going to get, in that
he was insanely solipsistic, though in his case also evil). Even as the German
armies started to roll through Europe, however, FDR couldn't muster America to get
off the couch and fight.
There were even the equivalent of climate deniers at that
time, happy to make the case that Hitler presented no threat to America.
Indeed, some of them were the same institutions. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, for instance, vociferously opposed Lend-Lease.
So Roosevelt did all he could on his own authority, and
then when Pearl Harbor offered him his moment,
he pushed as hard as he possibly could. Hard, in this case, meant, for
instance, telling the car companies that they were out of the car
business for a while and instead in the tank and fighter-plane business.
For Obama, faced with a Congress bought off by the fossil fuel industry, a realistic
approach would be to do absolutely everything he could on his own authority --
new Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) regulations, for example; and of
course, he should refuse to grant the permit for the building of the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline, something that requires no
permission from John Boehner or the rest of Congress.
So far, however, he's been half-hearted at best when it
comes to such measures. The White House, for instance, overruled the EPA on its proposed stronger ozone and smog
regulations in 2011, and last year opened up the Arctic for oil drilling, while selling off vast swaths of Wyoming's Powder River Basin at
bargain-basement prices to coal miners. His State Department flubbed the global
climate-change negotiations. (It's hard to remember a higher profile diplomatic
failure than the Copenhagen
summit.) And now Washington
rings with rumors that he'll approve the Keystone
pipeline, which would deliver 900,000 barrels a day of the dirtiest crude
oil on Earth. Almost to the drop, that's the amount his new auto mileage
regulations would save.
If he were serious, Obama would be doing more than just
the obvious and easy. He'd also be looking for that Pearl
Harbor moment. God knows he had his chances in 2012: the hottest year in the history of the continental United
States, the deepest drought of his lifetime, and a melt of the Arctic so severe that the
federal government's premier climate scientist declared it a "planetary emergency."
In fact, he didn't even appear to notice those phenomena,
campaigning for a second term as if from an air-conditioned bubble, even as
people in the crowds greeting him were fainting en masse from the heat. Throughout campaign 2012,
he kept declaring his love for an "all-of-the-above" energy policy, where
apparently oil and natural gas were exactly as virtuous as sun and wind.
Only at the very end of the campaign, when Hurricane
Sandy seemed to present a political opening, did he even hint at seizing it --
his people letting reporters know on background that climate change would now
be one of his top three priorities (or maybe, post-Newtown, top four) for a second
term. That's a start, I suppose, but it's a long way from telling the car
companies they better retool to start churning out wind turbines.
And anyway, he took it back at the first opportunity. At his post-election
press conference, he announced that climate change was "real," thus marking his
agreement with, say, President George H.W. Bush in 1988. In deference to
"future generations," he also agreed that we should "do more." But addressing
climate change, he added, would involve "tough political choices." Indeed, too
tough, it seems, for here were his key lines:
"I think the American people right now have been so
focused, and will continue to be focused on our economy and jobs and growth,
that if the message is somehow we're going to ignore jobs and growth simply to
address climate change, I don't think anybody is going to go for that. I won't
go for that."
It's as if World War II British Prime Minister Winston
Churchill had declared, "I have nothing to offer except blood, toil, tears, and
sweat. And God knows that polls badly, so just forget about it."
The president must be pressed to do all he can -- and
more. That's why thousands of us will descend on Washington
D.C. on President's Day weekend,
in what will be the largest environmental demonstration in years. But there's
another possibility we need to consider: that perhaps he's simply not up to
this task, and that we're going to have to do it for him, as best we can.
If he won't take on the fossil fuel industry, we will.
That's why on 192 campuses nationwide active divestment movements are now doing their best to
highlight the fact that the fossil fuel industry threatens their futures.
If he won't use our position as a superpower to drive
international climate-change negotiations out of their rut, we'll try. That's
why young people from 190 nations are gathering
in Istanbul in
June in an effort to shame the U.N. into action. If he won't listen to
scientists -- like the 20 top climatologists who told him that the Keystone pipeline was a mistake -- then
top scientists are increasingly clear that they'll need to get arrested to make their point.
Those of us in the growing grassroots climate movement
are going as fast and hard as we know how (though not, I fear, as fast as
physics demands). Maybe if we go fast enough even this all-too-patient
president will get caught up in the draft. But we're not waiting for him. We
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter @TomDispatch and join us on
Check out the newest Dispatch book, Nick Turse's The Changing Face of Empire: Special Ops, Drones, Proxy
Fighters, Secret Bases, and Cyberwarfare.
Copyright 2013 Bill McKibben
Image of Arctic melting by
NASA Goddard Photo and
Video, licensed under Creative Commons.
Image of Bill McKibben by the University
of Michigan's School of Natural
Resources and Environment, also under a Creative Commons
As in 2004
and 2008, Rebecca Solnit and her blue-state henchwomen and men will probably
invade northern Nevada
on election week to swing with one of the most swinging states in the union.
She is, however, much more excited about 350.org's anti-oil-company
campaign and the ten thousand faces of Occupy now changing the world. Rebecca Solnit is the author of 15 books, including two due out next year, and a regular contributor to TomDispatch.com.
She lives in San Francisco, is from kindergarten to graduate school a
product of the once-robust California public educational system, and her
book A Paradise Built in Hell is the One City/One Book choice of the San Francisco Public Library this fall. She was named an Utne Visionary in 2010
As this wild year comes to an end, we return to the
season of gifts. Here's the gift you're not going to get soon: any conventional
version of Paradise. You know, the place where
nothing much happens and nothing is demanded of you. The gifts you've already
been given in 2012 include a struggle over the fate of the Earth. This is probably not exactly what you
asked for, and I wish it were otherwise -- but to do good work, to be
necessary, to have something to give: these are the true gifts. And at least
there's still a struggle ahead of us, not just doom and despair.
Think of 2013 as the Year Zero in the
battle over climate change, one in which we are going to have to win big, or
lose bigger. This is a terrible thing to say, but not as terrible as the
reality that you can see in footage of glaciers vanishing, images of the entire surface of the Greenland Ice Shield melting this summer, maps of Europe's future in which just being in southern
Europe when the heat hits will be catastrophic, let alone in more equatorial
For millions of years, this world has been a great gift
to nearly everything living on it, a planet whose atmosphere, temperature, air,
water, seasons, and weather were precisely calibrated to allow us -- the big
us, including forests and oceans, species large and small -- to flourish. (Or
rather, it was we who were calibrated to its generous, even bounteous, terms.)
And that gift is now being destroyed for the benefit
of a few members of a single species.
The Earth we evolved to inhabit is turning into something
more turbulent and unreliable at a pace too fast for most living things to
adapt to. This means we are losing crucial aspects of our most irreplaceable,
sublime gift, and some of us are suffering the loss now -- from sea snails
whose shells are dissolving in acidified oceans to Hurricane Sandy survivors
facing black mold and bad bureaucracy to horses starving nationwide because a devastating drought has
pushed the cost of hay so high to Bolivian farmers failing because the glaciers that watered their valleys
have largely melted.
This is not just an issue for environmentalists who love
rare species and remote places: if you care about children, health, poverty,
farmers, food,
hunger, or
the economy, you really have no choice but to care about
climate change.
The reasons for acting may be somber, but the fight is a
gift and an honor. What it will give you in return is meaning, purpose, hope,
your best self, some really good company, and the satisfaction of being part of
victories also to come. But what victory means needs to be imagined on a whole
new scale as the news worsens.
Unwrapping the Victories
"Unhappy is the land that needs a hero," Galileo famously
says in Bertold Brecht's play about that renegade scientist, but at least, the
hero has the possibility of doing something about that unhappiness, as, for
instance, the Sierra Club has. It's led the fight against big coal,
helping prevent 168 coal-powered plants from opening and retiring 125 dirty
coal plants. The aim of its Beyond Coal campaign is to retire all 522 such
plants in the United States,
which would be a colossal triumph.
Its victories also capture what a lot of our greenest
gifts look like: nothing. The regions that weren't fracked, the coal plants that didn't open, the mountaintops that weren't
blasted by mining corporations, the children who didn't get asthma
or mercury poisoning from coal emissions, the carbon that stayed
in the Earth and never made it into the atmosphere. The Keystone XL tar sands
pipeline bringing the dirtiest of dirty energy from Canada to the Gulf Coast might have
already opened without the activists who ringed the White House and committed themselves across the continent.
In eastern Texas,
for instance, extraordinary acts of civil disobedience have been going on
continuously since August, including three blockaders who this month crawled inside
a length of the three-foot-in-diameter pipeline and refused to leave. People
have been using their bodies, getting in the way of heavy equipment, and going
to jail in an effort to prevent the pipeline from being built. A lot of them
are the same kind of robust young people who kept the Occupy encampments going
earlier in 2012, but great-grandmothers, old men, and middle-aged
people like me have been crucial players, too.
Meanwhile in British
Columbia, where pipeline profiteers were looking into
alternate routes to transport their climate-destroying products abroad, members of the Wet'suwet'en nation evicted surveyors and politely declared war on them. In Ohio and New
York, the fight against fracking is going strong.
Across the Atlantic, France
has banned fracking, while Germany has made astounding progress toward using carbon-neutral energy
sources. If solar works there, we have no excuse. And as Ellen Cantarow wrote at TomDispatch of the anti-fracking movement in New
York State, "Caroline, a small hamlet in Tompkins County (population 3,282), is
the second town in the state to get 100% of its electricity through wind power
and one of the most recent to pass a fracking ban."
Everywhere people are at work to build a better world in
which we -- and some of the beauty of this world -- will be guaranteed to
survive. Everywhere they are at war with the forces threatening us and the
planet. I usually avoid war metaphors, but this time it's barely a metaphor.
Our side isn't violent, but it is engaged in a battle, and people are putting
their bodies on the line and their lives behind the cause. The other side is
intent on maximizing its profit at the cost of nearly everything.
My father, a high-school student during the Second World
War, followed the campaigns closely with pins on a wall map to represent troops
and battles. You could map North America that way now and see, when you added
up the struggles against drilling in the Arctic, fracking, mountaintop removal, and
the various other depredations of big coal and big oil, that remarkable things
are already being done. In this war, resistance has been going on for a long
time, so overlooked by the mainstream media it might as well be as underground
as the French Resistance back then.
A lot of it is on a small scale, but if you connect the
pieces you get a big picture of the possible, the hopeful, and the powerful.
Think of each of those small acts of defending the Earth as a gift to you. And
think of your own power, a gift always latent within you that demands you give
If you're reading this, you're already in the
conversation. No matter who you are, or where, there is something for you to
do: educate yourself and others, write letters, organize or join local groups,
participate in blockades and demonstrations, work on divestment from oil
corporations (if you're connected to a university), and make this issue central
to the conversations and politics of our time.
I've started working directly on various projects with 350.org, whose global impact and
reinvention of activist tactics I've long admired. Its creator Bill McKibben has evolved from a merely great writer to a
pivotal climate organizer and a gift to all of us.
The world you live in is not a given; much of what is
best in it has been built through the struggles of passionate activists over
the last centuries. They won us many freedoms and protected many beauties.
Count those gifts among your growing heap.
Drawing the Line
Here's another gift you've already received: the lines in
the battle to come are being ever more clearly drawn. Clarity is a huge asset.
It helps when you know where you stand, who stands with you -- and who against
We have returned to class war in conflicts around the
world -- including the Chicago Teacher's Strike of 2012 and the Walmart protests in this country (which led to 1,197
actions nationwide in support of that company's underpaid workers on Black Friday), as well as the great student uprisings in Quebec and Mexico City.
There has, of course, been a war against working people
and the poor for decades, only we didn't call it "class war" when just the rich
were fighting hard. We called it corporate globalization, the race to the
bottom, tax cuts and social-service cuts, privatization, neoliberalism, and a
hundred other things. Now that the poor are fighting back, we can call it by
its old name. Perhaps what the conservatives have forgotten is that if you
return us to the grim divides and dire poverty of the nineteenth century, you
might also be returning us to the revolutionary spirit of that century.
This time, though, it's not only about work and money.
The twenty-first century class war is engulfing the natural world on which
everything rests. We can see how clearly the great environmental battle of our
time is about money, about who benefits from climate destruction (the very few)
and who loses (everyone else for all time to come and nearly every living
thing). This year, Hurricane Sandy and a crop-destroying, Mississippi-River-withering drought that had more than 60% of the nation in its grip made it clear that
climate change is here and it's now and it hurts.
In 2012, many have come to see that climate change is an
economic issue, and that economics is a moral and ecological issue. Why so
little has been done about the state of the climate in the past three decades
has everything to do with who profits. Not long ago, too many Americans were on
the fence, swayed by the oil company propaganda war about whether climate change even exists.
However, this month, according to the Associated Press, "Four out of every five
Americans said climate change will be a serious problem for the United States
if nothing is done about it." That widespread belief suggests that potentially
broad support now exists and may be growing for a movement that makes climate
change -- the broiling of the Earth -- central, urgent, and everybody's
Ten years ago too, many people thought the issue could be
addressed, if at all, through renunciatory personal virtue in private life:
buying Priuses, compact fluorescents, and the like. Now most people who care at
all know that the necessary changes won't happen through consumer choice alone.
What's required are pitched battles against the most powerful (and profitable)
entities on Earth, the oil and energy companies and the politicians who serve
them instead of us.
That clarity matters and those conflicts are already
underway but need to grow. That's our world right now, clear as a cold winter
day, sharp as broken glass.
Putting Aside Paradise
When I remember the world I grew up in, I see the parts
of it that were Paradise -- and I also see all
the little hells. I was a kid in California
when it had the best public education system in the world and universities
were nearly free and the economy was not so hard on people and the rich paid a
lot of taxes. The weather was predictable and we weren't thinking about it
changing any time before the next ice age.
That was, however, the same California where domestic
violence was not something the law took an interest in, where gays and lesbians
were openly discriminated against, where almost all elected officials were
white men, where people hadn't even learned to ask questions about exclusion
and racism.
Which is to say, paradises are always partial and, when
you look backward, it's worth trying to see the whole picture. The rights
gained over the past 35 years were fought for, hard, while so much of what was
neglected -- including public education, tuition, wages, banking regulation,
corporate power, and working hours -- slid into hell.
When you fight, you sometimes win; when you don't, you
always lose.
Here's another gift we have right now: the young. There
are quite a lot of heroes among them, including the Dreamers or Dream Act
activists standing up for immigrants; the occupiers who challenged Wall Street in its home and
elsewhere around the country, became the unofficial first responders who aided the
victims of Hurricane Sandy, and have camped out on the doorstep
of Goldman Sachs's CEO these last few months; the young who blockaded that
tar-sands pipeline, supplied the tremendous vitality of 350.org globally, and
have just begun to organize to pressure universities to divest from fossil fuel companies on 192 campuses across
the country.
In 2012, they rose up from Egypt
and Russia to Canada and Chile. They are fighting for
themselves and their future, but for us, too. They have remarkably few
delusions about how little our world is prepared to offer most of them. They
know that the only gifts they'll get are the ones they can wrestle free from
the powers that be.
Paradise is
overrated. We dream of the cessation of misery, but who really wants a world
without difficulty? We learn through mistakes and suffering. These are the
minerals that harden our bones and the milestones on the roads we travel. And
we are made to travel, not to sit still.
Take pleasure in the route. There is terrible suffering
of many kinds in many places, but solidarity consists of doing something about
it, not being miserable. In this heroic age, survival is also going to require
seeing what fragments of paradise are still around us, what still blooms,
what's still unimaginably beautiful about rivers, oceans, and evening skies,
what exhilaration there is in witnessing the stubbornness of small children and
their discovery of a world we think we know. All these are gifts as well.
Ice Breaking Up
As you gear up for 2013, don't forget that 2012 has been
an extraordinary year. Who ever thought we'd see Aung San Suu Kyi elected to
office in her native Burma
and free to travel after so many years of house arrest? Who expected that the
United Nations would suddenly vote to give Palestine observer state status? Who foresaw
that the silly misinterpretations of Mayan prophesy would be overtaken by the
Mayan Zapatistas, who rose once again last Friday? (Meanwhile, Canada's Native people started a dynamic movement
around indigenous rights and the environment that has led to everything from flash-mob dances in an Edmonton Mall to demonstrations in Ottawa.)
Who thought that Occupy Wall Street, roundly dismissed by
the mainstream on its one-year anniversary, would spawn two superhero projects,
Occupy Sandy and Strike Debt? (Who among the police officers clubbing and
tear-gassing the young Occupiers in 2011 thought that a year later these would
be the people with the power and the generosity to come to their aid when a
climate-fed storm wrecked their homes?) Keep it in mind: the future is not
predictable. Sometimes, the world changes suddenly and in profound ways.
Sometimes we make it do so.
Steven Spielberg's new film Lincoln is a reminder about what it
means to fight for what matters most. Permanently freeing five million slaves
and abolishing slavery forever meant renouncing a cheap power source in use for
more than 200 years. Doing so was initially inconceivable and then a matter of
indifference except to the slaves themselves and small groups of abolitionists.
Next, it was daringly radical, then partisan, with the whole nation taking
sides, the fuel for a terrible war. Finally, it was the law of the land. Today,
we need to give up on, or at least radically reduce our reliance on, another
set of power sources: oil, coal, and natural gas.
This is, among other things, a war of the imagination:
the carbon profiteers and their politicians are hoping you don't connect the
dots, or imagine the various futures we could make or they could destroy, or
grasp the remarkably beautiful and complex ways the natural world has worked to
our benefit and is now being sabotaged, or discover your conscience and voice,
or ever picture how different it could all be, how different it will need to
They are already at war against the wellbeing of our
Earth. Their greed has no limits, their imagination nothing but limits. Fight
back. You have the power. It's one of your gifts.
Copyright 2012 Rebecca Solnit
Image by Nattu,
licensed under Creative
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text:
Recipe: Bitter Greens & Citrus Breakfast Salad with Poached Eggs
There are several pieces to this unique and oh-so-yummy recipe.
The first has to do with the use of bitter greens. Bitter greens, such as radicchio, arugula, mizuna, escarole, endive and watercress, bring a pungent yet wonderfully unique flavor to the palate. Their bitter notes, similar to what you get from citrus zest and coffee, are also tinged with a fresh coolness, and do wonders for your digestive health. In many cultures, bitter greens are used to stimulate and tone the digestive system and in Ayurvedic medicine, bitter tastes aid in weight loss and help control food cravings — particularly the craving for sweet. When paired with natural sugars, such as what you get with ripe, luscious oranges, bitter greens will make your mouth sing!
Seasonality is another key to the dish. Winter signifies the orange harvest, especially in Northern California, where I currently reside. In this recipe I used small clementines, but feel free to experiment with Cara Cara oranges, blood oranges or any local orange that you can get your hands on. The more local and sustainable, the tastier the fruit!
But the real "pop" to this recipe is the dressing! The rich and deep sweetness of the balsamic paired with fresh-squeezed orange juice coats the greens and vegetables with just the right amount of bitter, sweet and salty. Then, combined with a hint of spicy Tabasco, myriad tastes come alive!
With the addition of pasture-raised, organic eggs, this dish packs in one of Mother Nature's most complete proteins. Just remember to accompany a poached egg with some whole-grain toast to soak up all that yolk. Enjoy!

subset: commoncrawl


text:
rogerfederer.com - Roger makes 26th Grand Slam quarter-final in a row
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Roger makes 26th Grand Slam quarter-final in a row
Today Roger powered his way into a 26th consecutive Grand Slam quarter-final in a row by defeating Austria's Jürgen Melzer (ATP 13) 6-3, 7-6 (4), 6-3 in a night match at Arthur Ashe Stadium.
Roger played with his accustomed style on the court, registering 41 winners to 23 for the Austrian as he continued his run at Flushing Meadows without the loss of a set.
Nevertheless, our champion had some luck in the second set tie-break with two net-cords and had to recover from a break down in the third set, but was always in control of the match. "Obviously, the tiebreakers are always crucial," Roger said. "It was a tough match today, breezy. He's a tough opponent and a close friend of mine so it was never going to be easy. I'm really relieved and happy to get through."
Roger's next match is scheduled for Wednesday against Robin Soderling.
roger, can u pls. do it 2 more times????
King of New York NEVER EVER went away, folks!!!! HE'S BAAAAACK BY HIS OWN SUBLIME DEMAND!!!!!!
I love you and you are number one always in our hearts.
Goooooo Roger
What a spectacular game you played against Robin Soderling. Your serve, the way you handled the third player "Mr.Wind" and the calculated way in which you played the match is worth every praise and more. Wish you all the best in the next