The author at Pleasure Park where the Gunnison and North Fork Rivers converge. Click on the image to enlarge.
Over two years have passed since I began writing articles for Mother Pelican . I embarked on this personal-political narrative of globalization and bioregionalism at EcoVillage Ithaca, New York, continued through Sage Co-Housing in Boulder, Colorado (both communities, predominately white and upper-middle class) to Pontiac, Michigan (a former General Motors factory town, now impoverished) where we converted a school bus to our eco-art installation tiny home. From there we traveled to Earthaven Ecovillage in North Carolina—where we made our home for two years. Following challenges with racial justice and eco-conscious living in our community, our travels in the LoveBus continued across the United States, through raging fires in Oregon[1] (visible from outer space) and California; and, raging economic disparity on Colorado’s Front Range. Finally, we landed on April 1st, 2021: the Garden of Eden, the orchard and animal husbandry breadbasket of the Western Slope Rocky Mountains.
The ancestral land of the Ute Nation,[2] Paonia, Colorado (originally peony , but intentionally misspelled by the settler colonialists in 1891) our home for the past t wo years, is the quintessential embodiment of synergistic opposites. Residing at the juncture of mountain and high desert, extreme political differences thrive side-by-side. Our North Fork Valley is known for its gun-toting big ranchers, coal miners (the neighboring West Elk Coal Mine is the third largest in Colorado), glyphosate/Roundup addicts,[3] anti-immigration zealots, and dangerously homophobic, fundamentalist body-phobic Christians. Yet, equally present are the Pagan off-grid[4]
artist-activist, hippie-homesteading, garlic-braiding, beekeeping, cheesemaking, yak rearing, herbal medicine conjuring, gleaning, seed-swapping, wild-weed cultivating, beer-brewing, methamphetamine-making, decolonized/decentralized alternative banking, creative self-sustaining entrepreneurs, permaculturist, natural-building, tiny-home dwelling, body-worker fermentation fiends, farmers, and midwives—including a smattering of Jews, Buddhists, and Baha'i followers.
Legend has it that at one point, Paonia housed 23 Christian churches within our 20-block town (ranging from avant-garde Seventh-Day Adventists to Quakers).
FUCK JOE BIDEN next to American flag declaring
the 2nd Amendment right to keep and bear arms.
Click on the image to enlarge.
Our pluriverse offers not only a comingling of the liberals to the libertarians, but spans beyond both ends of the spectrum. Paonia’s Town Park houses both the annual hunter’s campout as well as the Terence McKenna psychotropic festival (McKenna was born in Paonia: History — Elsewhere Studios). Signs on people's homes who live adjacent to one another range from the 10’x10’ sign: “FUN FIGHTING FACISTS: IMPEACH TRUMP,” “Dissent is Patriotic,” the ubiquitous CO-EXIST bumper sticker with the symbols of dominant religions, anti-fracking, and Black Lives Matter messages. And then to balance the Prius-driving liberal, there’s the 16” foot-long banner: “BEEF & JESUS,” “BABIES MATTER”[5] (incongruently—in my mind, this person is also a professional reflexologist), “FUCK JOE BIDEN” in conjunction with a wall-sized banner of an American flag inscribed with the Second Amendment, “SOCIALISTS SUCK,” “TRY TO TAKE 'EM” (referring to the image of guns), “TRUMP 2024,” “Hunt with your kids, not for them” (image of person with gun), “IF YOU LIKE FREEDOM, THANK A VETERAN,” “This land is FREE because of the BRAVE.”
In reference to these last two messages valorizing the military, I cannot help but consider an additional confluence of contradictions. I remember MLK Jr.’s critique of United States’ soldiers as “paid killers.” Dr. King wrote about the institutionalized violence of the US military in his 1964 Why We Can't Wait—another extraordinarily poetic oration on the nonviolent movement against racial segregation. As I learn more about the actual agenda of the US Constitution that was intended to consolidate power in the centralized federal government, I wonder if Alexander Hamilton, Samuel Adams, and other American aristocratic elites involved with writing the Constitution would have crossed time and space with Dr. King, would they have tried to suppress him and other nonviolent civil rights activists? Why are US students not taught that these politicians who were supposedly defending freedom, actually instituted a federal army to be dispatched in order to enforce tax levies—through potential violence and state-sanctioned murder—without any accountability. For example, in the context of the peaceful, although armed,[6] subsistence farmer’s rebellion of 1787, Daniel Shays’s Honorable Rebellion: An American Story:
…the right of rebellion and the natural rights Thomas Jefferson had offered the country in the Declaration of Independence were now replaced with a government that authorized itself to write and enforce its laws and subdue insurrections with soldiers who felt no kinship to the people they forced the law on.[7]
These conversations are welcome in my bizarre community. Although drastically impoverished in racial, ethnic, and queer diversity, our town is rich in economic, spiritual, and political diversity. Paonia breeds extraordinary heterogeneity, multiple and coexisting contradictory perspectives. Like the edge in permaculture, where differences interface,[8] my community represents the fertility of friction in which differences coexist. Sometimes (I will explore this in next month’s Mother Pelican installment), it feels like democracy in action.
Solipsistic mania underlies ecocidal infrastructures that eradicate diversity. Carl Honoré reminds us that, in fact, ‘society is not frictionless.’ Fast-forward-cultural tyranny of Silicon Valley helped shape the normalcy of frictionlessness—constructing the desire for immediate gratification. Our techno-euphoric sped-up society feeds the dangerous illusion that friction should not exist. Friction inherently involves difference. Honoré urges us to remember that friction generates light; it generates heat. Friction causes us to pause, to reflect. Friction-based practices necessitate a public-private dialectic; they embody simultaneous analysis and action.
Diversity requires an embodied practice of edge consciousness
An edge is an interface between two mediums: it is the surface between the water and the air; the zone around a soil particle to which water bonds; the shoreline between land and water; the area between forest and grassland. It is the scrub, which we can differentiate from grassland. It is the area between the frost and non-frost level on a hillside. It is the border of the desert. Wherever species, climate, soils, slope, or any natural conditions or artificial boundaries meet, we have edges.[9]
In contrast with equality-as-assimilation (status-quo monoculture), friction offers equality-as-equilibrium (the edge, diversity, a variety of micro-climates and a pluriverse of ideological landscapes). It represents a kind of forest: diversity in community increases productivity and enhances the social fabric of the entire forest (Suzanne Simard). This diversity in the ecosystem of our small town breeds a spiritual intelligence in which differences are honored and allies are found in unexpected places.
Bioregional “small-scale systems allow greater pattern complexity.”[10] In contrast with monocultures which are both figuratively/metaphorically and literally combustible, our local communities become tremendously resilient when we generate bioregional infrastructures and economies rooted in multiplicity. I explore the vitality of small-scale complexity in my eco-action model called S.O.U.L.: (Shared, Opportunity, Used, Local). Implicit in this model is hospitality, conviviality, and intersectionality as a foundational strategy to create a bridge between community action, infrastructural design, corporate accountability, policy reform, individual response-ability leading to global sustain-ability. In human and non-human ecosystems, both the dangers of monoculture and the benefits of rhizomatic multiplicity echo one another[11] —a continual interplay between health of human bodies in junction with health of our environments.
And perhaps surprisingly, the importance of diversity within rural communities echoes urban environments. In his research on Complexity, Intractability and Social Change, Peter Coleman describes how urban violence is more likely to occur when homogeneity reigns. ln more complex, diverse societies, you see less violence, including less ethnic violence. Coleman urges us to resist oversimplified binaries (such as “us” vs. “them”) and to witness how patterns of violence are multicausal—rooted in multi-dimensional problems, challenges, and crises. For example, Eve Ensler writes in The Vagina Monologues: ”If we are going to end violence against women, the whole story has to change. We have to look at shame and humiliation and poverty and racism and what building an empire on the back of the world does to the people who are bent over. …It is the culture that has to change—the beliefs, the underlying story and behavior of the culture.”
One week after we moved to Paonia, I was asked to speak to the Delta County school board on behalf of potentially including Comprehensive Sexual Health Education (CSHE) curriculum. We coincided the board meeting with the local 2021 Gay Pride Parade. The yellow solid lines down the middle of the street essentially divided the religious Right from the queer sex activists—a literal edge. The friction was audible: citing scripture, the religious Right (literally standing on soap boxes) used crackling electronic microphones to shame and shun the dancing, hyperbolic colorful queer hippies; we used our voices—a human mic reminiscent of The Occupy Movement.[13] The friction was palpable: hefty flannel-attired, baseball-capped men almost spitting in my face: “You want my 3rd grade son to be exposed to anal sex?!” I responded: “Anal sex is not included in the CSHE curriculum). ”
Click on the image to enlarge.
Click on the image to enlarge.
Click on the image to enlarge.
In my rainbow-striped capris, I chose to dance on the yellow lines. I chose to play with edge configurations. And, what I found is that through collective vulnerability, some of those seemingly intractable conflicts actually can be breached. The more I straddled the “us” vs. “them,” the more we found common ground—we are all challenged as parents, as people who deeply care for our children.[14]
Zazu and his friends travel shore to shore, enlivening “the interplay of edges,
where new things are born,” D.W. Winnicott, Playing and Reality,
cited in Zazu Dreams. Click on the image to enlarge.
Fostering the advantages of working together across political, cultural, economic, sexual, and ethnic differences, we can offer how the concept of home (oikos—economy/ecology) can become a unifying goal.[12] Through dialogue and debate, we can bridge seemingly irreconcilable differences and intractable conflicts through active listening where people of diverse backgrounds can find allies in unexpected places. If we can encourage people to move beyond feeling threatened, our varied experiences and perspectives can nourish sustainable coalition building and build extraordinary resiliency and creativity necessary for community. More than ever in history, it is essential to recognize our interconnectedness—our unity in diversity. As Martin Luther King Jr. declared: “Unity has never meant uniformity.” Following models of Truth & Reconciliation conversations, co-evolving relationships can help overcome fear that divide-and-conquer politics breed. Rather than blaming and shaming and “us” vs. “them” divisions, we recognize our commonalities and how we are all interdependent. Like the metabolism of the human body and the earth’s tendency towards homeostasis, the metabolism of our global culture must be scrutinized as a relational organism.
And, how we got to Paonia is an entirely different story…
[2]Mother Pelican installment, I will explore how, in the name of Progress, the history of land grabs, illegal and indecipherable laws, and industrial capitalism is repeating itself through the current battle of the Land Use Code in Delta County, Colorado.
[4] Like clean, green (economies/technologies), and safe, smart (technologies), the term “off-grid” is yet again an extremely dangerous misnomer. The majority of off-grid systems are currently carbon-intensive and perpetuate hyperconsumerism. See my nine previous Mother Pelican articles.
[5] Before I realized this sign is an anti-abortion message, I naively reminisced about the 1978-82 kids' rights TV show, “Kids Are People, Too.”
[6] Ranging from subsistence farmers to the Black Panther Movement, armed, yet non-violent self-defense demonstrates a vital humanitarian-based history in the United States—as long as the weapons were not concealed. Ronald Reagan dissolved these non-violent, communal, self-defense tactics.
[7] Daniel Bullen, Daniel Shays’s Honorable Rebellion: An American Story. Yardley, Pennsylvania: Westholme Publishing, 2021.
[9] Bill Mollison with Rey Mia Stay, Introduction to Permaculture. Australia, Tagari Publications, 1991, 26. See also cross-cultural examples of agricultural edge patterns: ditch and bank chinampa systems (Mollison, 29), qanat aquifers (Zazu Dreams, 43, 113), and milpa polyculture (Earthaven Ecovillage). Other edge resources include: Sand Talks, Ecotopian Lexicon, Seed and Spark and architect Julia Watson.
[11] Rhizomatic multiplicity is one of nature’s great strategies for self-care. Humans can support natural fire mitigation by recreating/maintaining wetlands, supporting pioneer plants, cooling rocks, fire-resistant native grasses, and “noxious weeds” such the daikon radish that break-up soil. We can “create fire shadows to reduce the effects of radiant heat by (a) non-fuel structures (ponds, earthbanks, stone walls), and (b) plantings of fire-retardant species such as lilies, coprosmas, willows (which may be killed, but will slow down the fire). Plant a windbreak of fire-retardant species to reduce wind during a fire” (Mollison, 66). See Mollison for an extensive list of fire-resistant plants, trees, and ground covers.
[14] However, every Wednesday a group of Christian elders and children gather in front of Paonia’s LGBTQ rainbow flag-flying safe spots to “Pray Away the Gay.”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Dr. Cara Judea Alhadeff, Professor of Transdisciplinary Ecological
Leadership, has published dozens of interdisciplinary books and
articles on critical philosophy, climate justice, art, epigenetics,
gender, sexuality, and ethnic studies, including
the critically-acclaimed Zazu
Dreams: Between the Scarab and the Dung Beetle, A Cautionary Fable
for the Anthropocene Eraand
Viscous
Expectations: Justice, Vulnerability, The Ob-scene.
Alhadeff's
theoretical and visual work is the subject of documentaries for
international films and public television. She has been interviewed
by
The
New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Pacifica
Radio, NPR, and the
New Art Examiner.
Alongside
Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Vandana Shiva, Alhadeff received the
Random Kindness Community Resilience Leadership Award, 2020. Her
work has been endorsed by Noam Chomsky, Bill McKibben, James E.
Hansen, Paul Hawken, SHK-G, Eve Ensler, Alphonso Lingus, Avital
Ronell, and Lucy Lippard among other activists, scholars, and
artists.
Alhadeff's
photographs/performance-videos
have been defended by Freedom-of-Speech organizations (Electronic
Freedom Foundation, artsave/People for the AmericanWay, and the
ACLU), and are
in private and public collections including and San Francisco MoMA,
MoMA
Salzburg, Austria,
the
Kinsey
Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and reproduction, and include
collaborations with international choreographers, composers, poets,
sculptors, architects, scientists. Her art-based and pedagogical
practices, parenting, and commitment to solidarity economics and
lived social-ecological ethics are intimately bound. Former
professor of
Philosophy, Performance, and Pedagogy at
UC Santa Cruz and Program Director for Jews Of The Earth, Alhadeff
and
her family
live in their eco-art
installation repurposed schoolbus where
they perform and teach creative-zero-waste
living, social
permaculture, and cultural diversity.
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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