CLIMATE MARCHES or THE PRAXIS OF NOT GIVING A FUCK

How do we confuse ourselves less, avoiding getting things catastrophically wrong and making things worse for everyone? Could it require anything more than people actually caring about what they profess to care about? Seems like a good start. But I don’t see that out in the world.

For example, I just attended our big climate march. I’ve been to many similar and adjacent events over the decades but this was one of the most depressing things I’ve been a part of. There I encountered legions of folks, serious people who have serious motivations and who are acting seriously, marching in t-shirts, holding banners, and chanting lines about their proposal for fundamental transformation of the food system. (#FoodForests #DecolonizeFood #EatLocal #TheForagedDiet)

Food is these people’s passion and what they’ve deemed, of all things, essential to making an impact on climate or perhaps the one little bit they feel most able to influence or execute in their own life. So, in my mind, we can only expect these people to have attempted to acquire food, or even just Googled related themes, if only one time. No? And is that so much? Should we not expect this? Seems reasonable. They should only have themselves tried to live off a small amount of their own forest or intertidal foragings for a week or a year and then just extrapolated their findings out to any slightly larger population than one. They only need to have spoken to a contemporary or more traditional farmer, fisher, or forager for fifteen minutes about inputs of time and resources and then considered what it takes to feed a small number of folks. Right? I mean, what else would or could anyone possibly do if they were making such grand public proposals to reconfigure virtually all of civilization, end our 10,000 year history of animal husbandry, transform the human diet, and further manipulate the entire ecosystem?

If not this, I guess my point is to wonder if they could possibly care at all about any of what they will tell you is of greatest importance to them? If so, how? Is this a radical expectation? From where I sit, this idea (learning about your passion) feels so combative and revolutionary that saying such out loud seems to require a hushed voice and a carefully preselected audience. Why? Because if you seek these folks out (students, professors, career activists) and can stop them long enough to ask a question about their passion, things start getting interesting and often aggressive. If nothing else, it’s then the plot is revealed and what previously seemed like obvious contradictions begin to cohere.

Seemingly unanimous, the idea appears to start from a perfectly naive set of assumptions about the past and, in particular, the fishers and foragers of the Pacific Northwest. Whether at a climate rally or in an enviro course, at a biodiversity conference or in a guest lecture with a farmer, without an immediate prompt, someone will bark something about decolonization and ending the “destructive Eurocentric food system.” Others will pipe up and add their obvious rejoinders, typically their insistence that prior to European arrival, or perhaps modernity, the ecosystem and its local human component were in perfect symphony and peak harmonic productivity. And I‘ve seen and heard the same exact sentiments shouted and embannered back east and down south at Occupy Wall Street protests, Antifa riots, and everything in between across a generation (so, this is definitely a thing and the clearest of evidence for the exquisite failure of half a century of high school Social Studies curricula and effectively the entire global pantheon of university Humanities departments. Alas.)

When you ask the obvious food-specific follow-ons (and just the simplest bits, like expected fish or shellfish extraction volumes or, really, any damn thing at all) not even a guess is offered. You’re shouted down as forwarding a genocidal colonialist agenda for wondering what you’re missing and what others are thinking. And they’ll never spell any of it out. But the reason friendly pedestrian conversation causes such antagonism, or mere consternation, is that it never occurred to anyone to actually consider any of it. They spent more time inputting their credit card expiration date into their t-shirt purchase than they did evaluating the slogan on it. Worse, there’s no social pressure or personal ethical catalyst that could prompt any such inquiry should the idea arise. This, despite having many forms of evidence and all readily available and in a wild diversity of forms. There are historical accounts, oral histories, and modern assessments of all kinds from the widest variety of fields and sources. And, for the most classic example, if you just speak with locals along the coast here in BC, they will tell you that their most recent kin took on the order of thousands of salmon per family in just a single season. And you can find such in everything from popular newspapers and magazines to academic journals. I’ve written about this before.

What’s publicly expressed (the total ignorance of history and culture) is not the concerning bit though. It’s not that in order to believe, carry signs, and yell about the quaint mutualistic symbiotic perfection of local communities, all while claiming supreme awareness and non-erasure, one must reject effectively everything these cultures tell us about themselves. It’s not the obvious, that entire cultures didn’t subsist by benign foraging alone or that often the tremendous productivity and extractions rates, even of the distant past, were artificially produced by large-scale ecosystem manipulations on land and sea, with large-scale burning, farming, aquaculture and on, and far more intensive than are carried out in many places in modern times. And it’s not that people demand societies which subsisted in this way didn’t manipulate and exploit natural systems and that to maintain this idealized order and the prosperity of a minority of elites they didn’t create the most inequitable, oppressive, and murderous regimes ever known. No. What’s really sick is all the more nihilistic brutality that follows from the above assertions. Unspoken is, of course, not a desire to return to these maximally exploitative systems that dominated in prior millennia – culturally-embedded systems of raiding, war, and chattel slavery that this Edenic perfection required – but, naturally, the happy eradication of billions of people. This is the (non)sense grounding this ascendant philosophy.

But, to be clear, this kind of proposal and set of assumptions is exactly what you get throughout (and what will successfully get you through) all Enviro-related discourses. Justifications and mantras can be found in op-eds, books, and whole course outlines, too. And they arrive as nearly entirely whimsical insistences based on nothing more than immature and untested political passions and (un)ethical intuitions. Whole schools are built on this. I have been enrolled in three of them. And, no, I don’t see it as a sophisticated or extreme form of caring, as advertised; instead, I’m convinced it’s an elaborate system of training for becoming unable to care. It’s the praxis of no longer giving a fuck… about anything.