There Are No Externalities in an Ecological Civilization
Cara Judea Alhadeff
December 2023
Portrait triptych of Sojourner Truth, Frederick Douglass, Emma Lazarus by Micaela Amateau Amato for
Zazu Dreams: Between the Scarab and the Dung Beetle, A Cautionary Fable for the Anthropocene Era.
In 1883, the Statue of Liberty arrived at New York Harbor. According to the press, it was reminiscent of the Colossus of Rhodes—both massive and powerful—except the Colossus of Rhodes was built to intimidate enemy intruders, while the Statue of Liberty was an invitation to those who had struggled to find refuge. Emma Lazarus, a Sephardic young poet of Portuguese descent and a student of environmentalist-poet Ralph Waldo Emerson (who was deeply influenced by suffragist-abolitionist, Sojourner Truth and abolitionist-orator, Frederick Douglass), was asked to write about the statue. Highly acclaimed for her writing denouncing the pogroms in Russia and her persistent activism for Ashkenazi immigrants, Lazarus named the Statue of Liberty the Mother of Exiles, and wrote “The New Colossus:” “… Give me your tired, your poor, / Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, / The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. / Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, / I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
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Years ago, I was lucky enough to see Ariel Dorfman’s “Death and the Maiden” Broadway production with Sigourney Weaver and Ben Kingsley about an unexpected encounter between a former political prisoner and her torturer. I was both thrilled and horrified—thrilled by Dorfman’s story and the actors’ storytelling and horrified that the audience simply got up and left the auditorium after the final curtain fell. Why wasn’t Amnesty International set up in the lobby to capture the audience’s attention while the story was still fresh in their consciousness?
The crisis of intricately bound systemic oppressions of hidden costs (such as disparate impacts, externalities, road-effect zones[1] and sacrifice zones) parallels that of children-as-collateral damage. In our contemporary techno-euphoric, chemical-addled “civilized” culture, children become collateral damage within the minefield of electronic digital hegemonies and Big Pharma’s rampage on children’s bodies and psyches. However, this article isn’t about that.[2] It is about how we ignite a sense of citizen responsibility and corporate accountability coupled with action when we understand how these infrastructures interlock. We have the key.
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I am continually tormented by the lack of personal-lives relevancy follow up that I think would be integral to so many films, book talks, performances. In his endorsement, Arun Gandhi (Mahatma Gandhi’s grandson) wrote of my cross-cultural, climate justice book as launching a new genre called edutainment. I’m not yet sure how I feel about this term, but I do feel that too often books, films, performances are received purely as entertainment: “Oh how horrible…,” and then we get back into our cars, go home, and continue with business-as-usual—missing again and again extraordinary opportunities to collectively challenge the roots of the crisis explored on the pages or the stage.
For example, in my town known for both its gun-toting big ranchers, coal miners (the neighboring West Elk Coal Mine is the third largest in Colorado), glyphosate/Roundup addicts, anti-immigration zealots, dangerously homophobic, fundamentalist body-phobic Christian Nationalists/ Biblical Literalists, and equally present NPR-addicted media consumers, Pagan off-grid 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,[3] (notice the total absence of this land’s original inhabitants: the confederation of Ute tribes) during Ben Goldfarb’s community reading of his new book: Crossings: How Road Ecology is Shaping the Future of Our Planet, I felt once again 1) the dangers of celebrating “innovation”—in this case “wildlife crossings”—that in the end reifies interlocking systemic oppressions; 2) accepting our taken-for-granted norms as inevitable. Goldfarb writes, “Today it’s impossible to imagine life without the asphalt arteries that connect goods with markets, employees with jobs, families with each other. …Like most people, I at once cherish animals and think nothing of piloting a three-thousand-pound death machine” (10). He continues with a phrase that I feel becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy, one that we can’t afford to take for granted: “the inevitable cost of modernity.” Accepting “inevitability” relinquishes our sense of possibility for profound paradigm shifts rooted in compassion and our infinite interconnectedness.
We (yes, of course, we is problematic—who is that we?)[4] justify and perpetuate our hubris with insidious concepts like “interspecies imagination”[5] that are rooted in a Jevon’s-Paradox mentality of Progress and Development. In contrast, if we were to truly embrace interspecies intimacies, we would create infrastructures rooted in ancestral wisdoms, ancient technologies, and biomimicry practices[6] that would uproot the recklessly arrogant idea that building new roads “creates a better future for all living beings.” We must resist greenwashing: challenging the intersecting aspects of habituated obedience that generate consumer-convenience culture—such as electric vehicles and driverless cars that sustain the tyrannies of car culture. In order to co-create bio synergistic infrastructures, we must deeply embody Wendell Berry’s declaration: “...you cannot regulate an abomination. You have got to stop it.” However, resignation reigns, inertia ensues, Benjamin Franklin's “happy mediocrity” is the norm.
Following a local showing of the award-winning documentary film, “A Will for the Woods,” I expressed concern that the main character who was going through maximum doses of radiation and chemotherapy to battle his lymphoma proclaimed to be committed to environmental causes through his choice for a green burial.[7] Burying his medically-poisoned body feels like an extreme contradiction: is another chemical-ridden corpse really “a gift to our planet”? The organizers responded: “he was doing his best” and “I’m not going to be judgmental.”
The humpback explains, “YES! I heard rumors that the United States was soon going to be buried in poop—poop of all kinds: human, animal, insect. Some old whale friends told me they saw swarms of dung beetles fleeing the North American continent because they could no longer bare to eat the poop from the United States. The dung beetles cried that the poop was contaminated with GMOs, pesticides, glyphosate, vaccine-adjuvants, hospital hazardous waste, flame retardants, endless chemicals and pollutants—the dung beetles, who have survived for 30 million years, knew better than to eat what had become an industrial toxic soup. “Not only is North Americans’ poop chemically toxic, but when people living in the US die, their bodies are now toxic—so they can’t decompose, because nobody wants to eat them—no dung beetles, no vultures, no horn flies, not even the bacteria—they are fleeing too.” Then our mammal cetaceous friend began to cry: “Now I understand—many of our beached whale and dolphin friends’ dead bodies are also filled with chemicals. If nothing eats our bodies, we will no longer be a part of the cycle of life; we will all be separate, forever isolated from one another. The shores and lands are getting covered in unwanted dead bodies and poop” (77, six footnotes removed from this excerpt).
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In 1994 in his Earth in Mind: On Education, Environment, and the Human Prospect, David Orr warned: “At death, human bodies often contain enough toxins and heavy metals to be classified as hazardous waste”(1). Now, twenty-nine years later, given vaccines and their adjuvants administered through the CDC required schedule, the measurable toxins and heavy metals in human cadavers have exponentially increased.
Rather than instituting megalithic band-aids: greenwashing masquerading as “renewables,” “coexistence,” “sustainability,” “civilization,” what if we were to commit huge sums of money, time, energy, and creativity/ innovation to exploring how to uproot the physical and psychological infrastructures that maintain, in this case the “road-effect zone”? We must scrutinize the persuasion psychology and behavioral engineering embedded in the normalization of sacrifice zones, disparate impacts, externalities, collateral damage, “waste people,” and “road-effect zones”—all hidden costs.
In her White Trash. The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America. Nancy Isenberg recounts the trashification/ vilification and simultaneous commodification of poor people—specifically white people: “white trash,” “scum of the land,” “wastrels,” “rubbish,” “forgotten men,” “the dregs of society.” “’Offscourings’ (human fecal waste) was one of the most common terms of derision for indentured servants and England’s wandering vagrants” (37). Isenberg writes: “As the ‘waste [land]’ of America’ was settled, it would become a place where the surplus poor, the [vile] waste people of England, could be converted into economic assets. The land and the poor could be harvested together, to add to…the nation’s wealth…” (21). These histories are concealed within the American myth of equality: “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.”[8]
I realize that Goldfarb (and many authors, activists, researchers) are concerned with alienating their audience—of course, not getting published—again confronted with the costs of speaking out! However, as a bookstore and a small community like Paonia, can we take the next step—draw much of this material into our personal/ collective lives as a collaborative imperative?
A radical paradigm shift that embodies ecological civilization can only take root if we embrace our profound interdependency through igniting our individual agency while supporting one another collectively. The individual must function as a collective—only then, will no one be an externality.
Notes
[1] The “Road-Effects Zone” demonstrates that more than cars kill. Our entire car culture is founded on ecocidal infrastructures: Pavement covers one percent of the US while the “road-effect zone” blankets twenty percent of the US: “Nearly a fifth of America’s greenhouse gas emissions are coughed out by cars and trucks, and the transportation sector is the fastest-growing contributor to climate change; meanwhile, the rise of electric vehicles, whose batteries depend on lithium and other metals, has catalyzed a mining boom that threatens to disfigure as Chile, Zimbabwe, and Nevada. Even habitat loss, the most thorough eraser of wildlife, is a road problem. Before you can log Alaska’s rainforests or convert Bornean jungles into oil-palm monocultures, you need roads to transport the machinery in and the product out. Roads are, you might say, the routes of all evil” (Ben Goldfarb’s Crossings: How Road Ecology is Shaping the Future of Our Planet, 2023: 5).
And then there is roadkill: In the twentieth century roadkill was the “leading direct human cause of vertebrate mortality on land. Name your environmental ill—dams, poaching, megafires—and consider that roads kill more creatures with less fanfare than any of them. (More birds die on American roads every week than were slain by the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, with the road deaths accompanied by a fraction of the handwringing” (Goldfarb 4).
[4] See my discussion of dominator-culture that is founded on hidden costs (economic, corporeal, psychological, and spiritual). “We”/“our” refers to those who (perhaps unwittingly) participate in dominator civilizations characterized by a consumption-based middle-class standard of living that depends on toxic systems and the exploited labor of others.
[5] Attempting to inhabit other beings’ Unwelt, their subjective-lived experience: “Road ecology was an act of interspecies imagination, a field whose radical premise asserted that it was possible to perceive our built world through nonhuman eyes…think wild animals…empathy manifested as science” (Goldfarb 9).
[8] 400 years later, inhabited by low-wage auto-industry workers, some suburbs of Detroit are identified through both waste land and waste people—for example, Westland aka Wasteland, Garden City aka Garbage City.
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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