I’ve been grappling with Margaret Wheatley’s quote asking if we can be overwhelmed, exhausted, etc. and still be the ones reweaving the web. I’m thinking about how we support each other through this time. It’s very uncomfortable to still be dependent on the old system for physical support while wanting psychologically and spiritually to be breaking away and starting something new. Like being a teenager again!

My favorite vegetable farmer is rethinking his business model and told me he thinks food should be free. I’m trying to wrap my head around that, but the sense of panic I felt and a little anger when he said it surprised me. I’m trapped in this dysfunctional sickening system and the food he grows, pesticide-free, small farm, local, inexpensive and delicious (he’s really good at farming) is one of my ways out. I don’t have a new structure to join (create?), and I need his food to stay healthy until then. Hopefully he needs the clean water I help to protect and we are mutually supportive until there are new, more sustainable systems. 

I work daily with people coming to terms with the false myth that we can “control” nature (they think permanently and to good end). Rivers are complex, self-organizing systems and our attempts to control them have to be massive, with large, frequent inputs of energy, or they fail in fairly short periods of time (the river responds, it is a relationship). (Thank you Craig for giving me validation of this thing I felt and constantly visioned but dismissed, which is animism).  I work for a program installing million-dollar stream restoration projects with really big rocks (affectionally, BFR). We’re attempting to use natural channel design principles, with project designs that directly mimic the forms of self-organizing dynamically stable sections of river in the same system. But most projects are a compromise that use the old engineering principles as well to protect nearby infrastructure, because people are still accepting the reality that we can’t live safely in floodplains and their property investments are unsustainable. 

For some, this means abandoning property held for generations and perhaps the family’s only real asset. Big floods and associated costs (including loss of life) are changing some minds, while others are entrenching. The latter want to get bulldozers in these streams and clear out all the sediment, turning complex rivers into wide u-shaped channels. We explain the river will directly and immediately begin to reshape itself as a result - erode and deposit sediment where people don’t want it. The people who fish and drink the water (versus the ones who only want to never be flooded again) are most open to the message we can’t dredge our way out of this (living within nature). 

After Tropical Storm Irene and Lee in upstate New York, I heard people say things like “mother nature had PMS” or something equally repulsive. I’m interested in the identification of nature with female and out-of-control and the patriarchal impulse to control women’s fertility.  I’m not sure what new myth about renewal of abundance and wild fertility will be psychologically comfortable, except that I’ve noticed a lot of “sensitive” young men who are at the same time confident in their male ways, both straight and gay. Their security seems to come from being more comfortable with the wild inside themselves and not feeling threatened by it?

I’m mostly exposed to young people in the environmental field and both my husband, who teaches stream process to interns, and myself have noticed they are preparing. Like I was somehow born compatible with the zeitgeist of the 70s and 80s (what’d be wrong with marrying a black man if I love him I asked my conservative father), these kids seems to just get what’s happening ecologically and the implications and are preparing. They tell us things like which plants can be used to make fiber ropes when we’re in the field. They ask my husband to explain his economic map that is critical of capitalism.