Thanksgiving

This is a letter of reflection on living with the land that I wrote in November 2019 which was read at First Mennonite Church of San Francisco.

Dear friends,

I’m writing to you from the south slope of our mountain up in the redwood forest where I’ve lived since last April.  My feet are propped up on a dying madrone, and my head is leaned back against a fir.  There are a lot of birds making noise today.  I laid here all morning for my mind to slow down enough for words to come.  I was asked to write something about land and food.  It is hard for me to know what to say.

This land lived with the Cahto people for I don’t know how many thousands of years.  And while this forest is thoroughly beautiful, I imagine its mangled body would be barely recognizable to many of them.   Almost every tree has been cut, the land itself cut in all directions with roads, slopes stripped of their soil, no longer able to hold the rains on their way to the sea, eroding the streams into deep canyons.  And the trees are dying on their own now, whether from drought or toxicity or loneliness, I don’t know.

What does it mean to live with the land?  I feel no authority to speak to this.  I lay in the forest and weep for what has been done to them and is still done to them.  I am sorry.  I don’t have an answer, and I cannot turn away.  I will be here and ache.  They tower above me, they shield each other and my own body from the wind like a thick crowd, solemn, silent.  They want me to be here, they want me to see them.  I feel this.  I hear them whisper to each other in the rustle of leaves.  I think they know why I’m here, but I do wonder sometimes what they really think of me.  What I feel most from them is love and sadness, and a confidence that they belong.

Do I have any right to ask them to provide for me?  I don’t know.  They do provide.  Even after all the people have taken from them they still sprinkle the ground with acorns, and drop wood for our fire.  I am crying right now.  I cringe to speak of them and of my own way of life on the same page.

Am I really living off the land?  No.  Sure, we have plenty of fruit and greens and mushrooms from the land.  Our meat and eggs mostly come from friends nearby.  The only foods we need to buy from elsewhere are grains, beans, and spices, but that’s still a significant part of what we eat.  I can make excuses for myself.  There were once abundant salmon here, and now they are so few I have still not seen one.  I am not surrounded by a community that knows how to live with this land, while most of our ancestors always were.  I have more pressing work to do; if I didn’t, I could gather enough acorns for the year.  But I would still cook them in a metal pot that came from who knows where, while wearing clothes from who knows where else, on a fire of wood cut by a chainsaw.  Most of what we depend on was produced elsewhere by the industrial system.  There is no purity.  It’s all tangled up.

And I am still a human animal in the world, this world so beautiful I am speechless in gratitude just to be here.  I will delight in the warmth of the fire and the taste of strawberries.  I will still try to feed us from the land as much as I can because it feels right.  This means looking at what we have and eating that.  We eat our own kale, garlic, mushrooms, herbs, and apples almost every day all year.  And usually tomatoes or potatoes or squash or carrots or peas.  So we can taste the land in our food.

As our industrial and political systems collapse and we can no longer buy the things we used to buy, our relationship with food will change.  Here, we will probably end up eating more acorns, and being cold more often, and it’s quite likely that eventually we will go hungry.

I often wonder if it’s also too late for the forests as they are now, if the ecological balance is so upset that they will die soon even if the humans stop actively killing them.  I don’t know.  Meanwhile I want to love them as much as I’m able.  Looking around the forest here I am always reminded that everything dies, and often sooner than we’d wish it to.  I find something here to trust.  I trust, not that I will live as long as I’d like, or that I will be fed and comfortable for as long as I live.  Rather I trust that under all the sorrow and grief and confusion there is still something vast and beautiful that begs my attention and delight, and so I belong here.

I am grateful for the presence of tanoak, with its fuzzy, fatty acorns.  I’m grateful for fir and it’s bracing sap scent.  For redwood even though its leaves get all tangled in our hair.  For madrone, dancing its smooth curves beside the straight solemn conifers.  For bay with its rich bitter nuts.  Chinquapin with its gnarled branches.  Bold yellow maple and soft pink dogwood leaves, those funny alder cones, and the elusive yew.  The sweet crunch of manzanita, the shiny huckleberry, spiky whitethorn, and the sticky fragrance of mountain jasmine.

We haven’t got all that much time

Dear friends,

There is beauty.

What does it mean that so much of what I’ve done or eaten or used or been involved with is entangled with this machine called civilization, that has spiraled out from the first plowed field and imprisoned animal out and out to the point that people have cut down most of the world’s forests, poisoned almost everything in the ocean, killed off almost all of the animals, and imprisoned each other in boxes of metal and plastic and concrete, away from all of the other living ones?  What does it mean?

There is still beauty.  And we haven’t got all that much time.

I know what I find beautiful, what I find worth living and working and fighting for.  What I adore and marvel at.  My feet are on the ground, my hands in the soil, cold water on my skin, wind on my face, redwood needles in my hair, flowers in my nose, birdsong in my ears, berries on my tongue, sunshine dancing in my eyes, beloved people in my heart.

And what I find beautiful is being destroyed and desecrated and killed.  Has been for a long time, and it’s speeding up.  It is heartbreaking.

No, solar panels and batteries and all that aren’t going to undo this.  There are a lot of other cultures who have lived in a healthy way on the earth for tens of thousands of years, what we might call sustainable, and what I would probably call beautiful, and they weren’t as isolated from the real world as modern civilized folk.  They had to feel the world.  If we could go back there, I would.  If any future culture is to one day live in some kind of sustainable and thoroughly beautiful way with the living earth, it will probably look a lot more like that.  No plastic.  No computers.  People will die of things that people around us aren’t dying of now.  And people probably won't be nearly as sick and depressed as so many are now.  And people will know each other more and know the land they live with more and know the plants and animals they eat, more than we do.  And maybe some hundreds of thousands of years will pass and some of the surviving forests will mature again.  My spirit takes some delight in this possibility and then I go back to admiring the tanoaks I’m sitting under and their beautiful lichens and mosses, stiff and biding their time for the rain to come, and the sunshine reflected off the creek dancing on their leaves.  I’m writing so that if you wonder “well what’s Phil think about all this craziness these days” you might end up looking out at a tree or taking a deep breath or smiling.  Soon I’ll go back to picking strawberries.  Really, I’ve mostly been speechless before beauty and mystery for the past year.  There’s much I’ve wanted to say but words are difficult to come by, and the soil and air and water always call.  If you want to know some of the struggles in the world that I care about and how to help, my dear friend makes this excellent podcast called For The Wild that goes in depth on it, and my heart and opinion is mostly aligned with hers.  She’s so good at talking about these things that I don’t have to.  :)

So with all this about how we are destroying everything I love, I don’t mean to lay more guilt on you.  We all have some share of guilt in what’s been done and some part in what is being done, and we were definitely coerced into much of it, probably from very young.  Yes we have some guilt.  And more pressing, we have some freedom.  Some of us more than others, but we all have some freedom.  Name what you love, name who you love, keep this in your mind.  Name the beautiful.  Name it and keep it in your mind, and in front of your eyes when you can.  Name it and live and work and fight for it, and adore and marvel at it.  Everything dies.  Feel it.  Feel it.  Slow down.  Feel it.  We haven’t got all that much time.

I am too alone in the world, yet not alone enough 

To make each hour holy

I am too small in the world, yet not small enough 

To be simply in your presence like a thing, just as it is

I want to know my own will, and to move with it

And I want in the hushed moments, when the nameless draws near

To be among the wise ones or else alone

I want to mirror your immensity

I want never to be too weak or too old

To bear the heavy lurching image of you

I want to unfold

Let no place in me hold itself closed

For where I am closed, I am false

I want to stay clear in your sight

I believe in all that has never yet been spoken

I want to free what waits within me

So that what no one has dared to wish for

May for once spring clear without my contriving

If this is arrogant, God, forgive me

But this is what I need to say

May what I do flow from me like a river

No forcing and no holding back

The way it is with children

Then in these swelling and ebbing currents

These deepening tides moving out and returning

I will sing you as no one ever has

Streaming through widening channels 

Into the open sea.

The renewable energy lie

The lie is that we can live in a somehow more sustainable or friendly-to-earth or “green” way by using solar or wind generated electricity and lots of batteries.  It’s bullshit.  Solar panels are produced from mined materials and toxic industrial processes that pollute where the mining and production is done, and they leach poison into the ground even where they are used, and we don’t know how to recycle them so they will break down over time and be piled up or left somewhere to degrade and pollute and we’ll replace them with more that required more mining and more toxic industrial chemical processes.  Wind turbines are not too different — they’re expensive to maintain, require lots of toxic stuff, and eventually break down and can’t be recycled in any earth-friendly way.  Hydro is no better, river ecosystems have to be destroyed to have hydroelectric dams.  Nuclear shouldn’t be considered green anyway, it’s not renewable since it depends on this limited mined material, and it creates really nasty waste, and of course all the infrastructure required for it is ridiculous, and they risk meltdowns that ruin everything.  And then batteries, don't get me started.  Look up lithium and cobalt, and then consider that batteries degrade over time and can't really be recycled and are very toxic to produce and dispose of.

So with all that, in our modern media and social media world, there’s this false dichotomy.  There’s the fossil fuels which are evil and polluting and causing climate change and killing everything, and then there’s the “green energy” that causes no harm and will allow our modern civilization and economy and internet and cars and all to go on forever if we just spend lots of money changing over to the “green energy”.  The truth is we can’t have this civilization and economy and internet and cars and all for much longer regardless, there is no way to power or maintain it that doesn’t involve ongoing and accelerating destruction of what's left of the living earth.  So many well meaning people who love the living earth have been co-opted and tricked into basically being a lobbying force for industry and economy under the guise of "green energy".  Don’t fall for this.  Your time is worthy of better causes and more beauty than this.

I use solar panels for electricity, because they’re convenient when living off grid.  I have no delusion that they’re friendly to the earth.  I am torn and often would rather just quit the internet and not use electricity anymore.  Somehow I’ve convinced myself that it’s worth engaging with this stuff in order to be able to fight for what’s left of the living earth a little bit longer, and I’ll be honest, to stay connected somehow to the people I love.  Maybe that’ll change one day.  This is all very complex.  I’m not trying to guilt you, I'm just saying no, renewables aren’t more earth friendly, they’re not a green future, they’re not worth giving your energy to fighting for.  If you have energy to fight and you love the living earth, fight more directly for it — like fight to protect forests and rivers and mountains that are directly threatened by logging, mining, pipelines, etc.  Stop the resource extraction at the source, and all the rest of our destructive economy will slow down a little.

You are freak

I read this story at the Easter vigil at First Mennonite Church of San Francisco in 2019.  

Sitting at my desk.  Ergonomic chair, 30” screen.  Sunlight and cheerful coworkers all around.  We are the winners.  The tech-elite.  Making the world a better place, raising the standard of living.  Eventually we are going to meet everyone’s needs with solar-powered artificially-intelligent everything factories.

 

But somehow I hear another story.  Out there, our empire of civilization reaches its fingers into the last wild places.  Its eye falls on an unspoiled steamy jungle, thriving with humans and majestic animal kin.  It sees timber, metals, tourism potential, untapped markets, labor pools.  Smiling people, sitting on their dirt floors in their dirt huts, eating the bounty of the land.  And we call it poverty.

 

In march the well intentioned, the missionaries, humanitarians, entrepreneurs, peacekeepers.  Out go the animals.  The human bonds are replaced with money.  Plugged in to the empire.  A “developing” country.  Another billion users.  Growth.

 

Everything is business.  War is business.  Revolution is business.  Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Haiti, Venezuela, the list goes on and on and on.  The machine has many faces, the military-industrial-complex, the technological-educational-pharmaceutical-agricultural- industrial complexes.  Even the nonprofit-industrial-complex.  Most of us keeping the machine running can explain why our part of it is beneficial, and we probably even believe it.  Yet despite all our good intentions, the machine grinds away converting life and diversity and beauty into profits.

 

No one speaks of it like this.  Over lunch, I slip in a sad remark about Syria.  Awkward pause.  The conversation shifts to when will we settle Mars.  We are frantic.  We don’t have time to see the consequences of what we do.  Everything’s too complex, so we must pretend it is simple.  We plug in the numbers and poverty goes down.  If you don’t like it you’re a luddite.

 

 “You can’t say this all at once,” a well-intentioned colleague tries to talk sense into me.  “People will think you are freak and then you won’t be able to change anything.”

 

Must I really go on pretending like it’s all fine, so I can hold on to the golden handcuffs, the empire’s power, and somehow use it for good?  I stare out the window at trees quivering in the spring breeze.  I sit in a comfortable chair, I have warm food and health care and barely have to work.  I should be grateful.  But I do not belong here.  It hurts.

 

(pause)

 

Laying on the floor of my tent in the homeless camp.  Puddle of water in one corner.  Headlights in my eyes at night.  Screeching bart train in my ears.  I’m free!  Sure, I’m still in the empire, but now I’m with the oppressed and not the oppressors.

 

Marching on the street.  “What do we want?  Housing.  When do we want it?  Now.”

 

We demand the evil empire give us our fair share of this chopped-down paved-over concrete graveyard of a forest.  Our fair share of the plastic and minerals dug by slaves from the living earth five thousand miles away.  What if it was fair?  The seven billionth of us gets a comfortable room, a job, food, maybe an electric car.  Clean water, piped from some rare place whose destruction has not yet become an economic necessity.  Would the elephants say this is fair?  I love the people around me, and it is so complicated.  Must it be Team Human against all the rest of life?

 

(pause)

 

Laying under a clump of redwoods in the forest I’ve been with the past year. 

 

My friend on the mountain says thirty years ago she’d get five to ten feet of snow each winter.  This winter, six inches.  Up the road from me they made new clear-cuts last fall.  They cut some special ancient trees in one particular spot leaving a sign saying it was for “fire prevention.”  Bullshit.  Money.  I hear the logging trucks rumbling on the road a mile away.  Will we ever stop?  We know that the trees bring in and hold the water in the earth.  As the trees go, the drought comes.  We’re killing them anyway.  Money.

 

Can our human empire just end already?  Must all of the salmon and orcas and caribou and wolves die first?  The ocean is dying.  The forest is dying.  Even the insects are dying.  God, are you going to turn this around?  What should I do?  What are you trying to tell me?  Why?

Leaving

Hi friends,

I'm leaving Google at the end of next week.

There's too much I want to say.  :)

I spent the summer away from work, outdoors in Oregon, awash in beauty.  I learned a lot.  I wept at how we're treating the earth, as I rode past mile after mile of logged forests, polluted streams, and lifeless monocrop fields.

I got to be part of what I'll call "alternative culture", to explore ways of meeting all of our human needs through local community alternatives to basically everything we currently use money for.  I wrote some about this time here on this blog.  I barely scratched the surface though.  More and more people, perhaps millions now even in the West, are devoting their lives to new (and sometimes ancient) ways of living in healthy relationship with each other and with the earth.  While they are usually partly within the current system, when all of these new ways of living come together, the current system becomes obsolete.  I see joyous glimpses of this everywhere.

Meanwhile our dominant civilization is killing its own foundation: the healthy web of life on earth.  Through deforestation and pollution we are destroying the ability of the planet to support all forms of life.  We can see this in the oceans where the fish populations are collapsing, the silent fields that were once thriving forests, and the deserts where millions of people go hungry in drought.  This ecological crisis can't be solved simply by swapping oil for solar panels.  I'm no longer optimistic that we will soon fix these problems with some new technology.  It looks like climate change is exacerbating the storms and droughts and fires, and seems likely these will continue to become more and more severe in the next years.

The effects are not evenly distributed.  The unhoused breathe wildfire smoke while many of the housed have filtered air.  Some of us see our homes flooded or burnt while for others business continues as usual.  Most communities in the country and increasingly in the world have lost the ability to sustain themselves from their land, and now must import almost everything they need from elsewhere, which becomes precarious when those importing the goods see no profit in it (food deserts), or when disaster breaks down the supply line like in Puerto Rico.  Many communities no longer have access to clean water, or are losing it as I write.  On Monday I listened to a man from Guatemala talk about a new silver mine near his home that is polluting and drying up the water supply for many villages there.  Almost all silver is used to produce electronics, and demand is rising.  In Oregon this summer, ancient trees thousands of years old were cleared for fire breaks.  The entire planet is being saturated with chemicals that we ought never to have created.  These kinds of damage cannot be undone or fixed by technology.  The story for other species is even worse, as most wild animal populations have died off and we pack billions of animals in cages in horrific factory farms.  The coral reefs, the rhinos, the ancient forests, the whales, and even the insects... who speaks for them?  Some people do, and they end up in jail if their actions threaten profits.  Profits are made at the expense of Life.

And within our civilization, we have more prisoners and refugees, more drugs and anxiety and depression and stress and addiction than ever.  Even in wealthy regions, most people don't like the work they do all day.  It's also not physically healthy to be indoors or using a computer or riding in vehicles for as many hours as many of us who are "successful" do.  What is happening to us?

It seems the leaders of our world are apathetic or powerless, as they fight over the most gaudy deck chairs on this titanic.  While it pains me, I don't hate them for this; their actions are the product of a traumatic history that touches all of us.  They don't know what they're doing.

I envision a more beautiful world where humans have a healthy part to play, to love and respect the earth, not to dominate and exploit it.  I see many people living that vision already, and want to live my life in service to it.  I see the extremes of both ugliness and beauty grow more stark.  Ugliness as we close down and protect ourselves from the 'other', beauty as we come together in community, in love with mother earth.  Will "society" as a whole make some kind of transition, or continue the march into dystopia and eventual chaos?  I don't know.  It will be both at the same time.  Some people are already in an obvious dystopia, some are in a beautiful place yet in the shadow of a collapsing ecosystem.  To hope for a peaceful transition would be to ignore the incredible violence on which the current system lives.  It will be violent because it already is.  May we learn to be kind to each other as these changes unfold.

It's been said that we need the darkness to see the stars.  We can open ourselves to what is happening, feel and honor our pain, grieve what is lost, and revel in our deep gratitude for the beauty of life.  I don't mean to be a downer pointing at all this ugliness.  I feel that we have a deep need to see it and acknowledge it.  It makes the beauty that much more precious and worth living for.

“Tell me, what else should I have done?

Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?

Tell me, what is it you plan to do

With your one wild and precious life?”

-Mary Oliver

What should we do then?

I don't know exactly what we should do.  I don't have a rational "here's what everyone needs to do" that will resolve all of these crises.  I want to let go of my need to control what happens, because I'm really not in control.  At the same time, even if I let go and accept whatever comes, I am a human being and it is natural for me to care and want to help, to serve what I love.  I will not deny that part of me either.  So I find myself thinking about how to help, even if it seems "hopeless" overall.  I need not stress about the outcomes, but I will still act.  What else would I do with my few short years here?

So what might I do to be practical?

I don't believe our technology is serving us well.  We, the wealthy humans near the top of the power hierarchy may see it as indispensable, but if we consider the animals or the fish or the trees or the laborers in the sweatshops and mines and plantations, it's not working out so well.  Yes, our technology relieves some suffering in some places, but at what cost?  We simply do not, and probably cannot, count the costs of development.  I am not enthusiastic that further technological progress will heal us.

I also don't believe that our problems are mostly due to money being in the wrong hands.  Measuring everything by monetary value seems to me one of the roots of the crises.  The mentality that values money over life drives much of the pollution and resource extraction and oppression around the world, since humans first accumulated "property" and enslaved each other.  I don't feel that getting as much money as I can and giving it to the non-profit side of the system is the best way for me to serve what I love.  I feel that the money abstraction and the distance it puts between us and the effects of our actions makes us feel disconnected and alone.

I also don't like our culture's valuing of measurable impact over everything else.  Much of what is precious to me cannot be measured.  What's the measurable value of a 5000 year old yew tree?  What's the measurable value of caring for a disabled child?

“May what I do flow from me like a river

no forcing
and no holding back

the way it is with children.”

-Rilke

So I don't know what we all should do exactly, and I don't know what I will do beyond the short term.  I'm skeptical of money and the dominant culture's value system.  I want to trust what makes me feel alive over our culture's normal stories that usually are rooted in fear.  I recognize that I'm one of the most privileged people in the world.  I know most people do not have the options that I have.  I don't mean to judge, only to encourage.

Right now what's happening is I've been living in a homeless protest encampment in Berkeley the last couple months, which has given me still another perspective on our society.  It got interesting this weekend and we're fighting eviction, hoping to benefit and inspire homeless communities around the country.  With all of the disaster and war refugees today, and housing crises in many places, there are more and more people who can't have regular housing, and we could learn to live together with more kindness and understanding.  I'm also involved with the community here in other ways like Food Not Bombs.  I expect soon I'll be moving on to other places, to learn and to live in service to what I love.  To restore soil and help plants grow and be community.

I've learned I don't need much money to live well myself, so I don't need to earn it for myself.  Perhaps my perspective on money and impact will change and I'll eventually decide that earning money and supporting my many friends who don't have much money in their various causes is the best way to contribute, and then I might return to a job, but we'll see.  "It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society."

Wherever I am, I'll be with some kind of community learning how to live in healthier relationship with each other and with the earth.  There'll be dark moments and joyous moments, and this is life.  Life is good.  Whatever comes, I will give attention to the beauty around me, the beauty of community and of nature and of every form.  Beauty everywhere begs our attention.

“An eye is meant to see things.

The soul is here for its own joy.

A head has one use: For loving a true love.

Feet: To chase after.

Love is for vanishing into the sky. The mind,

for learning what men have done and tried to do.

Mysteries are not to be solved: The eye goes blind

when it only wants to see why.”

-Rumi

On Simple Living

When I talk about simple living, I'm referring to living in ways that are less harmful -- that require less destruction and pollution and oppression.  People might also use "simple living" to mean having a less cluttered house, or a large house where their few possessions leave lots of empty space.  That's a different thing -- one could have that kind of simplicity and still spend a lot of money in support of harmful industries, and pay for a lot of violence and destruction.  We can even spend our weekends protesting against the government and corporations who are carrying out this violence and destruction, while the rest of the week we produce and consume in support of them.  One hand is holding a sign saying "Stop!" while the other hand is giving our money to the object of our protest, implicitly saying "keep it up!".

So simple living is a way to put our money where our mouth is -- in other words, take a holistic view, to integrate all parts of our life into a whole, we might say to live with "integrity".  The reason we practice this kind of simple living is that we desire to be kind to those we love, and recognize that we love all beings -- ourselves, other people, animals, and I say even the trees and mountains.  The same way we try to be kind to those closest to us, and we try to avoid harming them, we can practice being kind and avoiding harm to all.  When this happens, we are more able to appreciate and enjoy the beauty of all beings, similar to how we are able to appreciate and enjoy the beauty of those we love most.

So what could simple living look like in 2017 America?

I can't imagine there's a single general answer, but all of us have steps in this direction that we could take.  Everyone who wants to be kind and stop harming others will find some steps easier to take than others.  There are steps that will be easy for one person to take, while being extremely difficult or impractical for someone else.  It's helpful to be in a place of genuine love, not trying to justify one's actions to feel less guilty, and not trying to impress others.  Perhaps when we're coming from a place of genuine loving kindness, we can celebrate any step that anyone is taking, and we can freely admit our own struggles and the things we do that we feel are harmful but that we are not ready to change for whatever reason.

Maybe a good practical starting place is, wherever we might spend money, to look deeply at what we are paying for and what the consequences are.  Question it with curiosity.  What pollution and destruction and oppression is required to give me this thing, and am I paying to support that pollution and destruction and oppression?  Do I really need it?  If I really need it, is there an alternative that is less harmful?  Am I paying for someone else to do work that I would consider beneath my dignity?

Questioning even one purchase this way could feel overwhelming due to the complexity of today's economy -- and I think that in itself is a valuable insight.  Some are simpler, for example if I buy a banana, I'm giving more profit to the fruit companies that conquered Central America and killed/enslaved/displaced the people there, and continue to occupy the land and destroy rainforest.  Some purchases might seem more benign at first, but on investigation we can see they are entangled with all kinds of destruction and suffering around the world.  The purpose of questioning is not to feel guilty about what we've done, or to figure out a way to justify our actions, but to help us practice kindness toward what we love.

In Portland, in the Food Not Bombs community I wrote of earlier, I found people questioning almost everything in this way, and avoiding harmful things as each had the ability or courage to do so.

Here are some examples of harmful things people were avoiding, which we can all try avoiding to varying extents:
- paying for cars to be driven
- paying for airplane flights
- buying animal products
- buying non-local, non-organic, or packaged food -- this is a big topic I'll say more on someday
- buying food from corporations
- buying anything produced with slave labor
- buying anything produced with any destructive means
- paying taxes
- investing money in harmful business or organizations

I am not completely avoiding all of these things, but I do feel the cognitive dissonance each time I give money toward one of them.

I still possess things that had a high cost in destruction, and will again if I someday replace them.  Most obviously my electronics: smartphone, laptop, and camera.  Even just possessing them, there is a cost, because I could sell or give them away to someone else who would have bought them new, which would reduce the demand by one.  Another one I have yet to address in my own life is investments.  I have a lot of money invested in index funds, because that's what you do when you save money, and I know I am helping to fund large scale destruction... perhaps it won't be long before I figure out what to do with that money instead.

But can one person's actions make a difference?

Yes.  We know this intuitively, that when we do harm or show kindness to another being, it matters.  If anything matters, this does.

Consider the destruction of beautiful forests and rivers and wildlife and cultures and villages that has been paid for by the demand of the "developed" world, and take one individual's share of that, one billionth or whatever it might be.  Just in terms of acres of habitat destroyed or polluted, one individual's share is quite significant.  This is not just statistics -- somewhere, actual trees and animals and indigenous people were killed, and the water poisoned.  I don't want to pay for that.

There are lots of other logical arguments for how one person's actions make a difference, but logical arguments eventually become wearisome.  It is beauty that I love, and whether I can accurately quantify the effects or not, I want to live in a way that feels true and honest in the face of the beauty that I love.

The purpose of every gathering

I'm contemplating, as I often do, what to do next with my life.  Right now that means deciding whether to continue working at my job.

Most of you are probably well aware of the "ecological crisis".  I find it good to be reminded of these things and just sit with them for a bit, because I don't always have to see them in person and it's possible to forget.

We've poisoned the air and groundwater and the ocean water of most of the earth through developing and using toxic chemicals and industrial processes.  Since we're rich in the US, most of this has been moved away from here and is now done in South America, Asia, and Africa, where most of the people are oppressed and in poverty, and have even less power to stop it.  This makes it a little harder to see from here.

In vast numbers around the world, people who once grew their own food have been driven off the land, or killed, or moved into cities and into debt to become consumers.  While I might not be the one with the gun driving them out, when I pay for ordinary things in America I pay the companies that pay the guys with the guns.

Most of these things have accelerated in the last 20 years as technology has allowed us to multiply our efforts.  Forest is being destroyed faster than ever right now.  Fertile land is turning to desert faster than ever.  The oceans are being killed off and polluted faster than ever.  We're dumping more trash than ever.  We're mining and extracting more finite resources than ever.  There are more factory farms packed with animals in pain.  There are more human refugees than ever.

But aren't we right around the corner from having new technology that will let us solve all of this?

Your guess may be as good as mine.  I think we already have the "technology" needed to live in a sustainable and much, much more beautiful way on the earth, even with seven billion people.  Trees and plants, for example, are incredible sustainable solar-powered air-cleaners and soil-restorers and carbon-sequesterers, plus providing food and habitat for us and all the other creatures.  But our current trajectory is toward more industrial technology that is used to make a profit.  And to make a profit, on some level, means taking nature (life) and converting it into resources and products that can be sold, accelerating this destruction.  Even "green" technology, like solar panels and wind turbines, require horrible pollution to create -- even if they are better than digging coal for the same amount of energy.  And of course, most or all of these green technologies are also focused on profit before anything else.

How does your job contribute to the problem?

To take the most obvious angle on it -- we make most of our profits through advertising, which is a crucial part of the industrial/consumerist system that provides the financial incentive for most of this destruction and horror.  So my job is to help this system run more efficiently.  Plus a good one third of the money I make goes to taxes, half of which go to war.

I could use the remaining money I get to try to do something good.  This was my noble intention until recently -- "earning to give".  But now I see that my earning the money is contributing to the destruction that I would then try to undo by using the money I earned.  It doesn't make sense.  

What would you do instead?

I don't know exactly.  But just as a strawman, if I stop working a regular job, buy almost nothing except [local, organic, unprocessed] food, and just go around helping with Food Not Bombs or whatever else?  I think I'll find other interesting things to do, in fact I have a lot of ideas and plans floating around.  But as a baseline, I could do this, and the amount of earth that is destroyed on my behalf each year will drop tremendously -- as I suspect it has this summer.

How could you give up work that you enjoy, a team of coworkers that are incredibly fun to work with and extremely talented, a career that is respected by most people, and a comfortable life where all your physical and financial needs are taken care of?  

:|  It's not the easiest thing.  But I do enjoy other things, there are awesome people outside Google, there are some people who would understand leaving, and a comfortable life isn't all it's cracked up to be.  Sunshine and birdsong and dirt and grass and the smell of rain and the taste of wild berries are also there outside the comfortable life.  

What are you really thinking about?

I don't spend most of my time thinking about technology and destruction and all that.  I love the trees themselves, and the birds, and the people, and the poetry, and the music and mountains and rivers and all the rest.  Most of this summer I've been spending my time up close with what I love.  I love this line from Rumi:

"The purpose of every gathering is discovered: to recognize beauty and to love what's beautiful."

This is what we really want to "do", isn't it?  This is why we go to the mountains.  This is why we spend time with those we love.  This is why we watch [videos of] cute animals.  This is why we gather to cook food and make music and watch eclipses.  I can give my attention more toward what is beautiful.  And I may help others around me to do the same.  And then we won't need as much of the stuff that is destructive.  The real juice is in what we gain, not what we avoid.  Life can be much richer than most of us are used to.  I've tasted this.

It'll still be complicated and difficult.  It's not like leaving work automatically flips life from dry to rich.  I had many rich moments while employed, mostly in my free time, mostly out in nature or with people.  And I've had my dry moments this summer, if fewer.  I'll still wrestle with my conditioning and culture which tells me that success, work-ethic, accomplishment, reputation, and so on, are most important.  I must be true to the deepest call I can feel.

There are a hundred ways to kneel and kiss the ground.  May this be one.