We spent the last couple of days holed up in some of the oldest mountains on the planet, a region that has been more bio-diverse than the amazon rainforest. While at the Peace Retreat, we saw for the first time media coverage of the gulf oil spill, which was something akin to being hit by a truck. Coming to terms mentally, emotionally, spiritually with a disaster of this proportion is made all that much harder when you’ve spent the last month of your life without grounding and immersed in discussion about the systemic insanity of nuclear weapons, power, and mountain top removal coal mining.
We have met people all over the eastern part of this continent who are working to change the world, who have been fighting for peace all of their lives. We have certain tools already at our disposal to live peacefully with nature, we have always had these tools. To live in a symbiotic relationship with your surroundings, the technologies involved, the ways of thinking, the morality, this is nothing new. (The commodification of the environmentalist movement, the greenwashing of corporate maleficence, selling us back the shell of our former counter culture with the insides rotted out; now that’s new.)
To take this relationship, however, and transpose it onto social relationships, to apply permaculture technologies to the systems that govern our personal interactions and exchanges, this may be something new. Especially working from our current social context, which is so burdened by histories of genocide, ethnocide, cultural sterility, the immense losses in identity and personhood that can never be quantified, that can never be given a financial worth. A debt beyond debt. To address these issues and to move forward toward reconciliation and social rejuvenation, that is some heavy work. But these conversations and revelations can be facilitated through the practice of bioremediation, through the collectivization of infrastructures that sustain us: food, water, knowledge, song, spirit, shelter. And more importantly, these movements for sustainability off of the grid and outside of the jurisdiction of the megastate need to be mediated by a strong dedication to social justice.
Access to land means access to life. Fighting for freedom from nuclear & fossil fuel domination means fighting not for oneself, but for the earth and all of us on it. Dedication to social and environmental justice necessitates an acknowledgement of ones place and privilege, and a commitment to tearing down the systems of oppression while building up systems of sustenance. A permaculture movement without a strong dedication to social and environmental justice will mean farming a dead earth.
The oil spill in the gulf will destroy the economy of the south east united states. Those most effected by this tragedy will be the poor people and people of color in the south. While decreasing or eliminating our use of petroleum will help to collapse the oil giants who have helped destroy democracy and perpetuated decades of state perpetuated terror and war, there is also a social war being waged in this country against people of color, through economics, prisons, immigration policy, to name a few. It is no coincidence that black folks were the original back bone of the coal industry in amerika, it is no coincidence that dine folks were the back bone of the uranium mining industry when their mineral rights were appropriated by amerika, it is no coincidence that impoverished communities all over this country are having new energy projects proposed to them with that same promise: we will give you jobs. What good are jobs that kill us? What good are jobs that serve to perpetuate poverty in our communities? What good are jobs that make us complicit in the destruction of our homelands, or shelter, our sustenance?
We have a black president, and we need a social rights movement more than ever.
We are tired of fighting, we are traumatized, we are healing, and we are mad as hell.
