Confusion as a State of Grace[1]:
Climate and Kinship in 2021 Installment 4 ~ Terrestrials in Exile
Cara Judea Alhadeff
August 2021
Photo provided by the author ~ Click image to enlarge
The terrestrial has been exiled from the earth.—Sajay Samuel[2]
We woke in the Safeway parking lot, ash falling from the sky. The gated communities of Fairfield, California had been evacuated. An ominous orange-grey cloud was rolling toward us. Our LoveBus wouldn't start. We were all drenched in sweat; the 106 degrees tightened around us as the ash coating thickened. I worried we would have to abandon our home.
I gathered our evacuation bags as Zazu constructed a wooden catapult on the bus floor while our golden-doodle, Mac, splayed flat—his eyes darting back and forth—nervously watching my every move. Wild (Rob) had been baking in the dense heat, flipping electric relay switches in between cranking the bus ignition. No luck. The gaseous tsunami was getting closer; the parking-lot highway-flight frenzy mounting as consumers hoarded petro-plastic water bottles, toilet paper, Pepperidge Farm goldfish snacks.
“There is something peculiar about this book: the fact is the cover gives it away right from the start[3]. In the foreground, a young man, Zazu, holds his malamute husky, Cocomiso, both atop their friend, a humpback whale. In the background, a tableau of the contemporary grotesque: three sewers vomiting effluent into the sea on the left balanced by five industrial chimneys spewing noxious fumes into the air on the right. Between these man-made geysers, a sun hangs: low, heavy, ominously red.”[4]
Photo provided by the author ~ Click image to enlarge
Finally, Wild asked if I still had the scraps of aluminum foil I had saved months ago. I was delighted he had yet again found a use for “trash” that I had been carting back-and-forth across the country. In my daily life, I attempt to heed Ana Baptista's warning that embraces the wisdom of embodied energy:
Out of sight, out of mind. This is the reality for environmental communities. You flush your toilet, you throw out the trash, you turn on the lights, you purchase those new sneakers you wanted. All of these simple, daily acts reverberate in the communities that are at the points of extraction, production, transport, and waste dumping. These acts are made possible by the existence of places and people that are mostly out of sight of our everyday lives. They do not exist in our popular imaginations. We have no idea where the garbage goes or where the sneakers come from and so the illusion of cheap, efficient, fast consumption is a reality we take for granted.[5]
Wild twisted a torn foil fragment across two relay switches. He succeeded in completing the connection—the bus engine ignited.
Zazu thus incarnates the fate destined for us all; of those without a homeland. It is language or, perhaps more correctly, speech, that is the ground on which one ‘I’ emerges from a conversing ‘we’; a ‘we’ that itself is stutteringly convoked beneath and beyond the afflictions imposed by family, tribe, society, nation, and even species. The tapestry of speech may well be infinite— the scream of monkeys tortured in cages for shampoo, the songs of humpback whales, the murmur of a cooing mother, the mutterings of a philosopher, the laughter of a child at play — yet, one founds the quiet of home on the sound of words[6].
We couldn't return to the Bay[7] —the sky barely visible through the haze of forest-fire smoke—so we headed north. Unbeknownst to us, so did the fires. We were inadvertently behaving like a fire beetle (Melanophila). Using the hypersensitive heat-sensors on its body that detect infrared radiation, the fire beetle can locate a fire from more than 20 miles away. Engineers are applying the beetle’s evolutionary strategies in designs for military infrared radiation detectors.[8] We must scrutinize the abundant ironies of the US military's historically profound creativity. Finding allies in unexpected places is central to democratic co-evolutionary biomimicry (patterns and relationships in nature). Like military engineers, it behooves activists to apply nature's survival strategies that are rooted in radical reciprocity.[9] The physicist and cosmologist, Stephen Hawking reminds us: everything we need to know is already within us just waiting to be realized.[10]
In contrast, a “living emergency” represents “a new normal that permeates daily life—characterized by despair, anxiety, and post-traumatic stress...typical of refugee camps and conflict zones.”[11] When we focus only on climate refugees and forced climate migration (and not the root of their peril), we further reify the illusion of separation that divides humans from the natural world. Estrangement becomes the lens through which we perceive “nature.” Rather than being led by fear and corporate-bred hysteria, what if we could embrace the potential of our emergency? In her A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster, Rebecca Solnit reminds us that “emergency” comes from the word to emerge, to rise out of, to extend; it is the opposite of merge, rather a separation from the familiar, from habit, from the expected Like “apocalypse”—a revelation—an emergency shakes up what we think we know, inviting new perspectives. Similarly, “catastrophe” is a turning over, a disruption of what is expected, originally used to refer to a plot twist.[12]
Catagenesis (pragmatic-creative renewal, creativity after catastrophe) is one coalitional path to radical systemic change. It includes transformative initiatives that integrate biomimicry as well as human multicultural models of symbiosis that counteract the paralysis of climate-anxiety/ climate-grief. Only when we recognize the intricate relationships between environmental degradation and marginalized ethnic, racial, and economic communities in conjunction with creative collaboration can we mobilize multilateral paradigm shifts. This requires an urgent embodiment of interdependency. From this visceral commitment, we can cultivate regenerative economic tools for biocultural transformation; integrating, rather than competing with our natural environment or isolating ourselves from it.
Fire is “natural,” endemic to planet earth, as are hurricanes, floods, earthquakes. The extreme negative consequences on ecosystems and biodiversity due to fire suppression are vast.[13] It is our Anthropocentric relationship to the natural world that renders the natural dangerous, untamed, requiring unbelievably extensive resources to control. Accumulationist, ill-informed urban and suburban sub-division planning rooted in our inability to be mobile, flexible, adaptive, and integrative resists and perverts the natural course of nature. Every Western hyperindustrial social sector has become rigid, static. For example, a 25,000 square foot mansion requires obscene resources to “protect” it from fire—helicopters, grotesquely toxic chemicals, massive fire-fighting units. Even the language of fire-fighters invokes nature as our enemy, rather invoking a co-evolution embedded in permaculture practices and biomimicry wisdom. Such radical reciprocity includes fire mitigation through prescribed burns, not fire suppression.[14] Fire is at the core of humanity's survival.[15]
Our dear Native[16] friends who had also fled the
mold-mentality epidemic at Earthaven Ecovillage had recently moved to Ashland, Oregon, and had given birth to their newborn girl, Sequoya. We were on our way to meet them—trying desperately to avoid the fires along the highways. Unlike "Fitzcarraldo,"[17] the 1890's wanna-be rubber baron and Trans-Andean railways failed-business man who believed beyond any reasonable doubt that he was traversing the mountainous Amazon basin in the "right" direction, we did have our doubts—wondering if we were heading directly into one of the thousands of wildfires consuming the Pacific Coast states.[18] Awkwardly
maneuvering our bus-car-canoes/kayak, bikes caravan, we found ourselves inching up an abandoned one-lane logging road that snaked through the scorched landscape. It was the middle of the day, yet owls were flying erratically through the orange haze—in which time lost all reference. We crawled up and up the twisting narrow road—charred tree cadavers dotted the extreme slopes, dropping hundreds of feet below. Nothing, no one was in sight or sound. According to Zazu's watch, hours had passed.
The terrestrial has been exiled from the earth. The prime mover of this deterritorialization is the Corporation.[19] Despite its name which suggests bodies and earthiness, the corporation is an ET par excellence. Once a legal fiction created by man, it now rules over man as an amortal Demon-God. ...Having exiled the terrestrial, corporations now squat over the earth. Are we condemned to the irreparable and the forsaken by the very monsters we ourselves called into being?[20]
We ended up in a WalMart parking lot. Panic-stricken shoppers rapidly rolling their carts from store to car—their Covid-19 masks covered with full-face protection—weak attempts to avoid the smoke and ash-laden air[21] that blanketed the tinder-box Western United States. My burning eyes and bitter taste of smoke heightened my fears that smoke inhalation would permenantly scar Zazu's developing lungs. The Mars-colored sky followed us. Not having seen blue sky for over a week became eerily familiar. Unable to determine night or day, we took refuge in a state park bordering the Pacific Ocean. Our ecovillage-refugee friends had to be escape Ashland's inferno with their newborn. They met us on the coast. Early, the next morning we were woken by a knock on our bus door. The local, humorless sheriff warned us that we had ten minutes to drive away. When I asked where he suggested we go, given that there were raging fires to the North, South, and East of us and we were 20 meters from the ocean, he simply removed his mask and repeated his threat.
Zazu dreams up a proper fairy tale — in which the comforting is enfolded within the scary and the beautiful is twisted into the ugly. Zazu dreams in images and in words, in philosophical musings and in historical forays — Zazu dreams to awaken us from our smug and slothful slumber.[22]
Photo provided by the author ~ Click image to enlarge
Notes
[1] With deep respect, I cite my Iyengar yoga teacher and lifelong mentor Judith Lasater.
[2] Sajay Samuel's review of Zazu Dreams: Between the Scarab and the Dung Beetle, A Cautionary Fable for the Anthropocene Era in Sephardic Horizons Journal.
[3] I [Sajay Samuel] reuse the first line of Walter Benjamin’s review of The Fairy tale and the Present by Alois Jalkotzy (1930). Benjamin excoriated that author for diluting the genre of the fairy tale — replete with evil stepmother, murderers and drunks — into a saleable commodity comprising bland pieties suitable for ‘children.’
[5] Baptista cited from her “Finding Hope at the Margins: A Journey of Environmental Justice,” in Jeanine M. Canty. ed. Ecological and Social Healing: Multicultural Women’s Voices. Routledge, New York, NY: 2017. The international recycling-industry scam is a prime example: “Alternatives” may unintentionally perpetuate the violence of the wasteful behavior; they may actually conserve the original problem. Greenwashing is a key example, along with numerous trash-based art projects, and much of the recycling industry—now, in 2021, clearly an international scam. And, even in 1991, when I initiated Sarah Lawrence College’s recycling program, the head of Student Affairs was delighted: “Now we can use more!” That comment has haunted me for twenty-five years, and is at the crux of much of my professional and personal lifeway.
[6] Samuel, Sephardic Horizons Journal. Samuel continues: “Resounding through Alhadeff’s ‘search for home through language’ is George Steiner’s Our Homeland, the Text (1985).”
[7] A lightning siege started on Saturday, August 15, 2020 during which there had 14,000 + lightning strikes. The worst of the blazes, including the second and third largest wildfires in recorded California history, were burning in and around the San Francisco Bay Area, where more than 200,000 people had been told to flee their homes.
[8] See Endnote 296 from Cara Judea Alhadeff's Zazu Dreams: Between the Scarab and the Dung Beetle, A Cautionary Fable for the Anthropocene Era. Berlin: Eifrig Publishing, 2017.
Following the direction of the signals (like a bloodhound), these beetles fly to a fire to mate while the trees are still burning and lay their eggs in the charred wood that no longer has predators. They have evolved to breed in dead trees because a live tree cell growth would crush their pupating larva bodies, or they would drown in the tree’s sticky resin that is a natural pesticide. (Botanical resin is an evolutionary adaptation of plants and trees to protect themselves against insects).
[9] “I’ve been thinking a lot about response-ability lately, and as the word denotes it is surely a result of deep listening. If I actively listen to another human or an object or an animal, I expand my ability to respond to the subtler calls I hear it emitting.” Cecilia Vicuña with Camila Marambio, The Miami Rail, Summer, 2015.
[10]Zazu Dreams models "the sociology of existing subcultures...[that] help us remember that other worlds already exist, while history reminds us that change is inevitable," and offers the speculative-fiction concept of "shadow time (a feeling of living simultaneously in two different temporal scales)." Zazu Dreams "maintains a link with tradition, recuperating what is valuable in the past in order to prepare for and cultivate a futre that will not allow us to merely wallow in the negative," and "manifest[s] this convergence of lessons from the past, struggles in the present, and visions of and for the future. It "coordinate[s] across complexly embodied and divergent experiences of temporality" and "redefine[s] what is inevitable" (Matthew Schneide-Mayerson, Brent Ryan Bellamy, and Kim Stanley Robinson, eds., An Ecotopian Lexicon. Introduction, "Resistance," "Perception," "Dispositions": 4, 7, 26, 39, 207, 247).
[11] See Eric Holthaus's A Radical Vision for What's possible in the Age of Warming: Future Earth. HarperCollins, New York, NY, 2020, 5.
[12] See Solnit's A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster. Viking Press: New York, NY, 2009, 10.
[13] See Andrew Beattie and Paul Ehrlich, Wild Solutions: How Biodiversity is Money in the Bank. Yale University Press: New Haven, CT, 2001.
[14] The “suppression of natural forest fires is leading to substantial changes in plant communities.” (Wild Solutions, 68).
[15] See Richard Wrangham's Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human. Perseus Books: New York, NY, 2009. Wrangham proposes that humanity began when Homo erectus “discovered” fire.
[16] A white, male long-term member of the Earthaven Ecovillage community shares with me that he is disturbed by my “Western-patriarchal capitalist” behavior. Because I speak quickly, am particularly proactive, ask lots of questions, provoke discussion, and don't simply accept things “as they are,” he tells me that I am not “Indigenous enough.” He emphasizes that his training with Martin Prechtel has helped alert him to my “oppressive” style of communication. I am saddened by this association for many reasons—I deeply admire Prechtel and feel he would not want his life philosophies to be used to silence those who express themselves with enthusiasm and directness. Prechtel's heart-centered living that draws much of its wisdom from our plant allies is about reestablishing our intimacy with nature while experiencing the world from multiple perspectives, not shutting down unfamiliar ways of being and projecting one's fears onto those who feel and act differently from the norm. Believing in and acting on “Indigenous” wisdom is repeatedly used as “proof” of members’ commitment to diversity in the ecovillage community. While this value is well-intended and sincere, it reflects discriminatory belief systems and habits that are deeply ingrained in dominator cultures—including cultural appropriation. The Mayan greeting in lak'ech—a la k'in, “I'm another you”—“you're another me” reflects this dialogue between differences. Ironically, the member's criticism that the way I communicate is divorced from our spiritual-natural world is itself rooted in a violent division between mind and body that characterizes both repressive white dominant culture and anthropocentric values that devastate our planet. My Native friends found these dynamics offensive and elitist, and left the community a few months before we left—ecovillage refugees...
[17] “Fitzcarraldo," is Werner Herzog's 1982 film about the 1890's exploitative rubber boom in Peru, and one colonialist's obsession with bringing opera to the Amazon. The story includes North African Sephardic Jewish immigrants (the main characters in Zazu Dreams).
[18] According to the National Interagency Fire Center, 2020 was the worst fire season in history: 58,950 wildfires compared with 50,477 in 2019.
[19] Rather than fighting “The Corporation,” we need to connect with the people in charge, the Board, the policy/path-makers/administrators. Monolithic language and institutionalized disinformation rely on a disavowal of specific histories of power. These concepts are not static, but rather lived relations—beyond dichotomous reductionism. Like science and the corporation, gender as a monolithic system of laws does not exist (Gilles Deleuze / Manuel DeLanda). There is no absolute monoculture of any race, ethnicity, or gender—no monolithic male or female, blackness or whiteness. Just as we need to define the nuances—the how—of whiteness, capitalism, science, gender, sexuality, and privilege, we must define the how of corporations, and the how of science. As Manuel DeLanda affirms: there is no reified generality—no “the corporation.” It behooves us to denaturalize the single master narrative and scrutinize its disjunctive rhizomatic contexts—rethinking the implicit structure of the corporation, science, and corporatized science. By attempting to dissolve conceptual illusory monoliths (as general as power or gender, or as specific as capital, whiteness, or masculinity), my research attempts to transform internalized fascism (Foucault) into a participatory, non-binary democracy in which theory necessitates practice.
[21] See Dr. Zac Bush's extensive scientific analysis that correlates swells of COVID-19 diagnoses with PM2.5 (particulate matter/ extreme air pollution).
Cara Judea Alhadeff, PhD, is a scholar/activist/artist/mother whose work engages feminist embodied theory, and has been the subject of several documentaries for international public television and film. In addition to critically-acclaimed Zazu Dreams: Between the Scarab and the Dung Beetle, A Cautionary Fable for the Anthropocene Era (Eifrig Publishing, 2017), her books include: Viscous Expectations: Justice, Vulnerability, The Ob-scene (Penn State University Press, 2014) and Climate Justice Now: Transforming the Anthropocene into The Ecozoic Era (Routledge, forthcoming). She has published dozens of interdisciplinary essays in eco-literacy, environmental justice, epigenetics, philosophy, performance-studies, art, gender, sexuality, and ethnic studies’ journals/anthologies. Her pedagogical practices, work as program director of Jews of the Earth, parenting, and commitment to solidarity economics and lived social-ecological ethics are intimately bound. Her photographs/performances have been defended by Freedom-of-Speech organizations (Electronic Freedom Foundation, Artsave/People for the AmericanWay, and the ACLU), and are in numerous collections including SanFrancisco MoMA, Berlin’s Jewish Museum, MoMA Salzburg, Austria, Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and reproduction, and include collaborations with international choreographers, composers, poets, sculptors, architects, scientists. Cara is a former professor of Performance & Pedagogy at UC Santa Cruz and Critical Philosophy at the Global Center for Advanced Studies. She teaches, performs, parents, and lives a creative-zero-waste life. She is always eager to collaborate with other activists, scholars, and artists from other disciplines. If you are interested please contact Cara via email at photo@carajudea.com or via her websites, Cara Judea and Zazu Dreams. See also this article: Social ecology pioneers return to Nederland.
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