i have been trying to find the right way to put this, but it's not easy.

yesterday i wrote for hours about slavery and petroleum, the Transition movement and Lydia Maria Child.

there's a point to be made there, but i couldn't quite make it, because i feel a powerful need to cover my bases, explaining carefully, so i am not misunderstood, what is and is not the same about the chattel slavery economy and the petroleum economy. and what i hope and fear is, or is not, the same about Transition Northampton and the Northampton Society of Education and Industry.

i've also been reading stories about what the world might look like, once petroleum goes away, if slavery doesn't. they're quite good, and have gotten inside my head, in that way that unsettling parables do.

and i've been planning for grad school, in history. and reading derrick jensen for the first time, and spending a lot of time outside, down by a river that seems to get lower by the day, and the woods that are none of them much past 100 years old.

just now, a series of funny things. i read this sentence: "what are ten species of edible plants within one hundred yards of your home?" and i could answer that question. more or less.

and then i read this: "I was recently in new england, and someone there commented that local trees had grown back over the last hundred years. he took this as a good sign: the people of the region had finally learned to not deforest their own backyards." followed by a counterpoint: "technological and social innovation have enabled these yankees to deforest the globe."

and my first thought was that when i walk, or run, out to those century-old woods by the river, where i can identify burdock and lambs quarters and dandelion and acorns and nettle and daylily and a half dozen other edible plants, i find them in fields that get annually bush-hogged, and in the thin slips of young woods between.

and then the last funny thing that happened was that, in this same book, i read the name of a friend i fell out of touch with years ago, which spurred me to try to find the right way to say this again... and when i went upstairs, i found i'd left my coal burning computer open and idling on the website of the man who gave me that phrase.

the friend was someone who went to yale when this country was first invading iraq. she thought that the invasion was a really bad idea, and hung the flag upside-down out her window, and for her trouble, she had her living space invaded by a belligerent group of white undergrad men wielding 2x4s and racist epithets.

I remember the sense, at the time, that this kind of violence was waiting, out in the open, for anyone willing to say anything marginally honest about iraq, and this nation's military goals there. doubly so if these honest people failed to be straight white men.

and i remember being confused that someone who so gloriously failed to be such things would still be, as our mutual acquaintances told me she was, a primitivist. my exposure to primitivists at that point was mostly to the variety that seemed excited about The Collapse, and the fantasy of eking out a hard-bitten survivalist existence that was nasty, brutish, and short, in the deer hide pants that they had already made for the occaision. i had, and have, little patience, and something verging on utter contempt, for dudes whose rejection of "civilization" stems from civilization's emasculating nanny culture that fails to separate the men from the boys... or whatever. so i wrote off primitivism and deep ecology and "anti-civ" as so much masturbatory ablist heteropatriarchal macho fantasy, with a fetish for the noble savage. There's a slight aftertaste, bitter and lingering, of some of that in Jensen's writings.

at the beginning of my senior year in college, i watched Post-Katrina New Orleans happen. and i worked on my thesis during spring break, when most of my friends went to new orleans for the same reasons i later did - a powerful need to do something.

and when i got down there, i found that Post-Katrina New Orleans had taken place just like The Gulf War. and what is most upsetting, and hardest to shake, is that new orleans absolutely refuses to be anywhere but the real world. which means that what happens there happens because of what happens here. the same world, the same rules, the same patterns of inputs and outputs. 

at the beginning of the summer, two lovely friends from new orleans visited my home town, and we talked about the Deepwater Horizon. gallows humor, mostly. a few weeks ago, a wonderfully thoughtful mentor and i sat down to lunch, and she said "It's gotten to the point where things are so fucked that I can't take it all in." we were talking about the collapsing lobster population in the atlantic, and about the Deepwater Horizon, which had still not been capped.

i've reluctantly revisited my dismissal of primitivism. or rather, i've come to the conclusion that all my discomfort with The Dudebros Of The Apocolypse is merited. and that calling it "civilization" is complicated, but that the industrial petroleum economy is going to burn itself out, that there are other economies waiting to take its place, and they are also going to burn themselves out, and that in so doing, those economic systems are going to continue destroying vast areas of the world, and vast numbers of its inhabitants. Look at the gulf, or that other gulf that oil comes from. or the niger delta, or the appalachians. or the Sundarbans. one of the helpful things about Jensen is that he insists we already know plenty of examples. and i find that i do.

basically, i have, in the last several years, stopped seeing apocalypse as an adventure fantasy, and have started to see it as a fairly honest way of describing actual events. a partial description, because apocalypse, as a concept, has two parts. the first part is the end of the world in question. then the veil-lifting part. and we've got the worlds ending part. it's been with us since 1492 (in Al-Andalus and Guanahani both) and before, and since. the difference now is that many different sorts of worlds seem to be ending at once. 


there's some level of consensus on oil discovery and production being well over the hill. ditto the effects of climate change. and as joni seager doesn't quite put it in her wonderful talk at barnard, fuck a bunch of 2 degrees feel-good bullshit.
it's the revelation part that we're still waiting on. not The Case Of Chosen v. Fallen kind of revelation. the other one, where knowledge gets assimilated, incorporated, and acted on.

So i'm marking the end of this summer by taking the GRE, and then looking after some dogs, and then going to work with some Queer Family in tennessee. and from there, i'm hoping to go visit a lot of people i care about, in a lot of places i've never been, and try to figure out the right thing to do, somewhere in the process. 

because i know that i can wake up in the morning and write my thesis instead of going to new orleans. i've made that decision before.

but there are deeper and more simple questions, about far less familiar and far more apparent options.

And i'd appreciate some input.