New update to the book list! Notable additions are Malinda Lo's Last Night at the Telegraph Club, which is very good and I think I might be a bit late to the party on; Julia Armfield's Private Rites, which exceeded my expectations in every way (and I had fairly high expectations), easily rocketing itself to one of my favorite books of all time; and Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed, which includes some of the best revolutionary praxis I've read in a long time.
THE ENVIRONMENTAL TERRORISM OF THE ZIONIST ENTITY’S OCCUPATION OF PALESTINE
Since the beginning of its occupation of Palestine in 1967, the Zionist Entity has repeatedly committed acts of environmental terrorism and human rights abuses. It has systematically denied access to water and destroyed water resources and infrastructure, destroyed farmland and agricultural facilities, and co-opted the language of environmentalism to justify land grabs and the destruction of historic Palestine. These atrocities have been documented by numerous human rights organisations, including B’Tselem, an Israeli human rights group; Amnesty International; the Human Rights Watch; and the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner of Human Rights.
This essay aims to compile the acts which make up the campaign of environmental terror by the Entity. As it is written, a genocide is being carried out—this is not intended to be, nor could it possibly be, a complete documentation of the crimes of the Entity. It is not even a documentation of the most severe of those genocidal acts. Rather, the aim of this essay is to reinforce one particular fact: the occupation of Palestine is, among a multitude of other horrors, an act of immense environmental injustice—an injustice which, even alone, constitutes a genocide. Should we work to prevent genocide by any means, should we aim to establish a land-ethic through which humanity and the environment can coexist, should we hope to address the climate crisis and the historic and continuing disparity of its impacts, we must begin by ending the Zionist Entity’s ethno-supremacist apartheid rule.
WATER ACCESS AND CONTAMINATION
In June 1967, just months after the start of the occupation, the Zionist Entity consolidated control over all water resources and infrastructure in Palestine. In the November of that year, Entity authorities issued Military Order 158, which stated that “No person is allowed to establish or own or administer a water institution … without a new official permit” from the Israeli Occupying Force (IOF). The order further states that a permit can be denied “without giving any explanation” and obtaining one has proved to be effectively impossible for Palestinians. The Entity also denies Palestinians access to the Jordan River and freshwater springs across Palestine, and even restricts the collection of rainwater.
In the West Bank, the IOF regularly and systematically destroys Palestinian rainwater cisterns, and Palestinians are forbidden from drilling new water wells, installing pumps, or deepening existing wells. The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) reports that over 180 Palestinian villages in rural areas of the occupied West Bank have no access to running water. Meanwhile, illegal Israeli settlements are supplied with freshwater from wells and pumps drilled and installed by the Zionist Entity, and Palestinians are forced to purchase water from Israeli corporations at exorbitant prices and rates limited by the Entity.
In Gaza, the situation is even more dire. The Zionist Entity forbids the transfer of water from the West Bank to Gaza, and 90–95% of water in Gaza is contaminated and considered unfit for human consumption. The Coastal Aquifer, Gaza’s only freshwater resource, is insufficient to supply the population and is being increasingly contaminated by sewage and seawater infiltration. In some cases, this contamination is intentional: analysis of satellite footage by the Human Rights Watch in 2024 shows the “deliberate, systematic razing of the solar panels powering four of Gaza’s six wastewater treatment plants” by the IOF, and IOF soldiers have filmed themselves demolishing key water infrastructure.
The result is that while the World Health Organization and the UN recommend an availability of a minimum of 50–100 liters of water per person per day (LPPD), the average in Palestine was only 73 LPPD as of 2017. UN OCHA reported that in some herding communities in the West Bank water consumption can be as low as only 20 LPPD, and since the start of the Zionist Entity’s accelerated genocidal campaign in October 2023, the average water consumption in Gaza has dropped to between two and nine LPPD, an amount less than even the absolute minimum of 15 LPPD established by the Sphere Handbook on humanitarian response. By contrast, Israelis consume an average of almost three hundred liters of water per person per day.
DESTRUCTION OF FARMLAND AND AGRICULTURAL FACILITIES
In addition to their restriction of Palestinian access to water, the Zionist Entity is determined to eliminate the capacity for Palestinians to produce their own food. An investigation by Forensic Architecture released in March of 2024 reported that the IOF’s invasion had uprooted almost half of the orchards in Gaza and systematically targeted farmland and agricultural infrastructure. Nearly 40% of the land used for food production in Gaza was destroyed by the IOF, and the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index—a satellite measure of the robustness of plant life—declined sharply in the areas through which the IOF invaded. Satellite imagery further revealed that almost one third of Gaza’s greenhouses had been obliterated, and in Northern Gaza, nearly 90% of greenhouses were destroyed in the ground invasion by the IOF.
Forensic Architecture identified in total more than 2,000 agricultural facilities that had been destroyed since October of 2023, and noted that as the IOF advanced southward, the destruction of farmland and agricultural infrastructure moved with it. Between January of 2024 and late March, when the investigation was released, 40% of greenhouses in the area around the southern city of Khan Younis had been destroyed. Additionally, Forensic Architecture noted that the IOF routinely built earthworks to reinforce military outposts, leaving behind unlivable areas in their wake.
Even just within the last year, the situation has worsened drastically. In May of 2024, UN analysis of satellite imagery by the United Nations Satellite Centre (UNOSAT) revealed that 57% of permanent crop fields had “exhibited a significant decline in health and density”. That number had increased to a horrifying 81% of permanent crop fields as of their March 2025 analysis.
In another 2025 analysis, focused on the destruction of greenhouses, UNOSAT identified some 4,578 completely destroyed greenhouses, with a further 1,082 either moderately or severely damaged. This comprises almost 65% of greenhouses in Gaza. The analysis further reports that “in terms of surface area, 56% of the greenhouse extent is now damaged”—a 37% increase from previous UNOSAT images, and a near doubling of the figure found in the Forensic Architecture report. Similar satellite imagery from other sources shows entire neighborhoods with no remaining green and vast swaths of farmland covered over with the tracks of IOF military vehicles.
GREENWASHING THE DESTRUCTION OF HISTORIC PALESTINE
It is a foundational myth of the Zionist Entity, perpetuated from before even the Nakba and international recognition of its existence, that Israeli settlers “make the desert bloom.” The Entity has, from its inception, attempted to portray itself as ecologically conscious, environmentally friendly. This appearance has been used as a thin veil for the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people and the flora native to the land.
Since its establishment as an international NGO in 1901, the Jewish National Fund-Keren Kayemet LeYisrael (JNF-KKL, or JNF) takes credit for the planting of 250 million trees in historic Palestine—a statistic which is proudly displayed on their website. Not mentioned alongside it is the volume of their destruction of native olive, carob, and pistachio trees, nor the fact that nearly every tree they plant is either a European conifer or a Eucalyptus tree, both non-native to the region.
An explicit and successful attempt to evoke the forests of Europe to make the Zionist Entity a more desirable destination for European Jewish settlers, the non-native conifers in particular are ill-suited to the environment. They struggle to adapt to the soil of historic Palestine, require replanting, demand higher volumes of water than native flora, and become prone to, among other problems, wildfires. Fires like the 2010 Camel wildfire—then the worst in the Entity’s history—and the recent fires in 2025, which now claim that title, are fueled by the concentration of these dry pines.
Beyond aesthetic colonization, the forests planted by the JNF serve more practical purposes. Forests and parks were planted overtop of destroyed Palestinian villages throughout historic Palestine, erasing the history of the Palestinians in the same stroke as their physical removal from their land. The fast-growing pines ensure refugees will never be able to return to their now-buried homes, and mosques lie abandoned in the depths of these unnatural forests. Further, since the occupation of Palestine in 1967, these same pine forests are planted around illegal settlements in the West Bank, serving both to protect and expand them and to “seize and divide Palestinian territory within east Jerusalem and the occupied West Bank”.
The final purpose of the JNF’s efforts is a propagandistic one. For Israeli settlers to be the ones who “make the desert bloom”, there is an inbuilt assumption that the native occupants of the land were unable or unwilling to do so. If, as the JNF claims, this “greening” combats desertification and is an environmentally friendly or even necessary act, the implication, then, is that the Palestinians were and are poor stewards of the land, a lie which lends further strength to Zionist justifications for settlement and colonization. Further, the Entity’s ability to position itself as a green leader—a frontrunner in environmentalism and coexistence with nature—grants it international legitimacy and political cover.
To be clear, the Zionist Entity is not environmentally friendly. It is not even remotely green. A century of rapid industrialization, population growth, de- and reforestation, and the forced displacement of millions of people have left it with, in the words of Jewish eco-socialist Joel Kovel, “a proliferating set of ecological degradations”. Worse, the toxic byproducts of their highly industrial and militarized society are often forced upon the occupied Palestinian population: waste from within the Entity is brought to dumps and quarries in the West Bank, illegal settlers deliberately poison Palestinian land, solid waste is dumped without restriction on the sides of roads in Palestinian villages, and pollutant industry frequently moves into the occupied West Bank, where environmental regulations are more permissive and toxic chemicals and industrial byproducts can run off into Palestinian land.
CLIMATE JUSTICE
In its desire for colonial conquest, the Zionist Entity poisons earth and sea, denies access to water, destroys or forbids the construction of vital infrastructure, razes farmland and greenhouses across Gaza, buries history under non-native forests, manipulates the language and politics of environmentalism into a cover for its crimes, and commits again and again acts of environmental terror designed to contribute to its genocidal, ethno-supremacist project. The struggle against its genocidal and ecocidal crimes is intimately connected to the fight against climate change and for environmental equity.
There can be no climate justice without a free Palestine.
Cicada brood XIV, a collection of 17-year cicadas composed of individuals from three different species in the genus Magicicada, emerged this year. Alongside their annual brethren from a variety of genera including Cicadettana, Diceroprocta, and Neocicada, the male cicadas climb trees and use muscles in their abdomen to buckle special organs called tymbals, which then snap back into their original shape when the cicada's muscles are relaxed. This motion, repeated hundreds of times per second, resonated, sometimes, through special cavities in their bodies, produces the cicadas' song.
I learn the names of these things, Magicicada, Cicadettana, tymbal, brood XIV, with a sort of wonder, scrolling through website after website, all of them plain, unformatted, name of cicada, hyperlink, picture. I wonder that I did not bother to learn their names sooner, to learn the mechanism of their song, to know them. I think of Ada Limón, the way she writes in a poem how she taught herself the names first of birds and then of trees—"I like to call things as they are." It feels almost a slight against the cicadae, like never bothering to ask a neighbor's name.
I think too, though, of a tweet I read once, a concept attributed (though I don't know the accuracy of the attribution) to G. K. Chesterton—"if we could forget the names of things ... we would see them again in all their dazzling strangeness". What does it change, to know the name of the organ on that lies on each side of the anterior abdomen of Magicicada and Diceroprocta, to know that only the male cicadas produce sound, to know that that sound is just the vibration of a resilin structure? The Wikipedia article Cicada puts the word 'singing' in quotes when describing the process, just like that, "The 'singing' of male cicadas", as though, to the knowledgeable, it is not really song.
"They don't really sing, you know", I imagine someone telling me, their tone condescending. "It's actually just the vibration of a specialized organ buckling and unbuckling very quickly."
I am torn between these ideas. On the one hand, is it not song? Was I not able to love the cicadas before I learned the word 'tymbal'? I have always been enchanted by them, fascinated by the molted shells they leave behind, by the striking redness of their eyes, by the way their song fills the air. They have always been, for me, the symbol of summer, their song its principal sound. On the other, it feels almost an act of love to learn the many names of the many kinds of cicada, to whisper them to myself, Cicadettana, Magicicada, Diceroprocta.
I turn it over and over in my mind, name them, un-name them, name them, un-name them. Maybe I do not have to choose between the wonder and beauty of Cicadettana and Magicicada and the "dazzling strangeness" of cicada song filling the air, rising and falling. There must be some way to learn and to know and to name and then to forget and to wonder. I consider the opposite—it is easy to imagine that someone might never learn the names of things and still never wonder at their strangeness. It is easy to imagine their indifference the cause of both, and should that be the case, would not care be the driving force behind both knowing and un-knowing? To care deeply enough to learn the names of things, and then to care enough again to not let the knowledge of their names drag them out of the strange and into the familiar.
UNDERSTANDING HUMAN-ENVIRONMENT RELATIONS AS A PRODUCT OF COLONIALISM
I. INTRODUCTION
The thesis of this essay will address only one of two separate but related issues. The issue addressed here is how present human-environment relations should be understood—I argue here that these relations are and must be understood as a product and outgrowth of colonialism and colonial thought. Left unaddressed is the second, equally important question of what cultural imagination of the environment or deeper guiding worldview should be adopted to produce healthy and just human-environment relations in the future. We cannot move forward to a healthier and more just worldview without fully understanding what the shaping worldview of the present is, but equally, understanding the present alone is not enough to guide us forward in the future.
To that end, there are some scholars who argue that cultural imagination (or further, worldview or religion) is immaterial with respect to the ways in which we perceive and interact with nature. One notable such “scholar” who rejects the idea that our environmental relations are shaped by cultural imaginations and worldview is Paul R. Ehrlich, who put forward the I = PAT equation for understanding human-environment relations. Broadly, his position is that environmental impact is directly proportional to population (among other factors), and the solution he proposes is a reduction of population.
Paul R. Ehrlich is also notable for, as pointed out by Hannah Ritchie in her 2024 book Not the End of the World, making repeated and egregiously inaccurate predictions. “In 1970,” she writes, “he said that ‘sometime in the next 15 years, the end will come.’ … Of course, that was woefully wrong. He had another go: he said that ‘England will not exist in the year 2000’. Wrong again.” Beyond Malthusian thinkers like Ehrlich, whose theory seems to lack the ability to make accurate predictions, the consensus across a variety of fields of study is clear—our environmental relations are inextricably linked to our shared cultural imaginations.
Setting aside the dubious-at-best predictive capacity of his theory, Ehrlich’s equation completely ignores the obvious fact that environmental impact is not evenly distributed across nations. There is, additionally, significant correlation between the historical colonization of a nation and the modern depletion of its environmental resources and ecosystem services (Talyor et al., 2016; Wood, 2015), but colonization is a parameter absent from Ehrlich’s proposed relationship.
II. CULTURAL IMAGINATION AS AN ACTION-SHAPING FORCE
Muir, in his 1912 book The Yosemite, assumes an imagination of nature which is at its core religious, and it guides his prescriptions for environmental policy. “Dam Hetch Hetchy!”, he writes, “As well dam for water-tanks the people's cathedrals and churches, for no holier temple has ever been consecrated by the heart of man.” His presupposition here is that a religious imagining of nature will result in specific action—that imagining Hetch Hetchy as a holy place eliminates the possibility of damming it for a water resource.
Cronon (1995) and Glave (2010) both write on the ways in which the desire to “preserve” wilderness by cleansing it of peoples is an action derived from the American imagination of wilderness as by definition apart from humanity. Glave writes that “contrary to the dominant purist sort of preservation that emphasizes places and not people—the practice and ideology of whites—African Americans acknowledged and emphasized the communities populating those wild places.”
This idea—that misanthropic preservationism, the preservation of a human-less wilderness, is a product of a particular cultural imagination of wilderness (and that that particular imagination is itself an outgrowth of colonial thought)—is echoed in Cronon’s earlier writing on wilderness. “The removal of Indians,” he writes, “to create an ‘uninhabited wilderness’—uninhabited as never before in the human history of the place—reminds us just how invented, just how constructed, the American wilderness really is.” In his work, he argues that the American imagination of wilderness is a cultural ideal that arose from stories written to inspire a certain view of certain lands among certain people, and that this cultural ideal is directly responsible for the actions of cleansing nature of people in order to create an imagined “wilderness”—in part because it was created to justify such actions.
In Willis Jenkins’ 2025 lecture Wilderness, Whiteness, & Settler Colonialism, he points out that the initial designation of the Americas as “wilderness” was done with the express purpose of justifying settler colonialism. The Christian Doctrine of Discovery held that Christians were not just permitted but obligated to “civilize” wilderness, and that “terra nullius”, an aspect of Roman common law, designated lands belonging to no one as free for the taking. By choosing to view the Americas as “wilderness”—wild, unused, empty—colonizers made themselves entitled to it.
III. CULTURAL IMAGINATION AS A PRODUCT OF WORLDVIEW
Cronon and Glave’s works, like Muir’s, are in part centered on the ways that a cultural imagination can effect action, but they go a step further in aiding our analysis of modern environmental relations—they identify the source of present cultural imaginations about nature as an explicitly colonial worldview.
Other scholars who attempt to identify the source of our cultural imaginations about nature include Lynn White, Jr., Seyyed Hossein Nasr, and David R. Loy. Each of these scholars argue, as do Muir, Cronon, Glave, and Jenkins, that our cultural imaginations directly shape our relations with nature. In trying to determine the sources of our cultural imaginations about nature, though, they identify different responsible worldviews.
White, in his 1967 paper The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis, claims that the origin of these imaginations is medieval Christian axioms which framed nature as a thing to be dominated by humanity. “The present increasing disruption of the global environment,” he argues, “is the product of a dynamic technology and science … originating in the Western medieval world …. Their growth cannot be understood historically apart from distinctive attitudes toward nature which are deeply grounded in Christian dogma.” He further argues that whether any given person identifies as Christian or whether a culture is rooted in Christianity is irrelevant—the axioms of Christianity were exported within the technology and science of the industrial revolution and spread throughout the world, and “no new set of basic values has been accepted in our society to displace [them].”
Nasr (1968) takes a superficially contradictory but intricately linked position: it is the deviation from traditional religion, he argues, and not traditional religion in and of itself, that creates our cultural imaginations. Specifically, Nasr identifies secularism as functioning as a kind of global pseudo-religion insofar as it takes the place of a religious worldview in shaping shared imaginations. Nasr posits that the rise of secularization allows individuals to feel as though having respectful or spiritual relationships with nature is optional, which makes room for science-based technologies of extraction and exploitation.
Loy agrees with Nasr that a pseudo-religion is responsible for our specific actions of environmental destruction and for the cultural imaginations which support them, but he identifies not secularism but market capitalism as the underlying worldview. In his 1997 paper The Religion of the Market, Loy argues “that our present economic system should also be understood as our religion, because it has come to fulfill a religious function for us. The discipline of economics,” he writes, “is less a science than the theology of that religion, and its god, the Market, has become a vicious circle of ever-increasing production and consumption by pretending to offer a secular salvation.” Loy makes the point that market capital functions specifically as a salvation religion—it promises satisfaction and transcendence from everyday life through the prayer of consumption. It is this inherently consumptive ideology which Loy identifies as the shaping worldview behind ecological destruction.
Justin McBrien, in his contribution to the 2016 publication Anthropocene or Capitalocene, reaffirms Loy’s observation, though he identifies the operative mode of Capital as accumulation rather than consumption. This accumulation, he writes, is “necrotic. … The accumulation of capital is the accumulation [of] potential extinction.” Beyond just identifying capital as the extinctive force behind environmental destruction, though, McBrien highlights the intimate and inseverable bond between capitalism and colonialism. On the novel ecology of the slave plantation, an invention of capitalism, he writes that the intentional “climatic [and] geographic differentiation allowed for the ecological other of colonial subjects, justifying capitalist expansion ….”
This holds a dark echo of Cronon and Glave’s preservationism—the creation of a delineation between the environments of the New and Old Worlds provided a justification for the very colonial processes responsible for that creation in the first place. It is, in McBrien’s words, a “self-fulfilling prophecy” (2016).
Humorously, in a comparison between the 1930s colonial administrator’s fear of under-population and the post-cold-war fear of overpopulation, McBrien, too, critiques Paul R. Ehrlich—“The discourse of overpopulation,” he writes on the matter, “resurrected a misanthropic neo-Malthusianism that perceived the greatest threat to the biosecurity of the globe as the growing ‘hordes’ of the Global South.” Here again we see the complete dismissal of Ehrlich’s “scholarship” by yet another academic field, as well as the (accurate) observation that the very premise of Ehrlich’s fear is a racist and colonial view of humanity.
IV. UNIFICATION UNDER THE COLONIAL WORLDVIEW
I posit here that Cronon, Glave, White, Nasr, Loy, and McBrien have all made accurate analyses of the worldviews which underlie human-environment relations, none quite captures the full picture (though Cronon, Glave, Loy, and McBrien come the closest).
Cronon and Glave identify colonialism as the ideological underpinning of the Western cultural imagination of wilderness and of nature. Loy identifies market capitalism, as does McBrien—McBrien brings this into agreement with Cronon and Glave by pointing out the shared and collaborative origin of capitalism and colonialism, and while Loy does not explicitly attribute market capital to colonial thinking, he does acknowledge the connection: “Our commodifications have enabled us to achieve something usually believed impossible,” he writes; “we now have ways to colonize and exploit even the future.”
Further, modern scholarship clearly identifies the instrumental role of colonialism in the Global South in globalizing market capitalism (Ashiagbor, 2021; Austin, 2014; Bhambra, 2020) and the deep ties between Western secularism and colonialism (Carr, 2022; Miró, 2019; Yountae, 2022). Finally, Jenkin’s lecture on the work of Cronon and Glave underscores the role which the dominative axioms of Christianity identified by White played in the justification of colonialism and in the shaping of colonial thought with respect to the New World.
V. CONCLUSION
In the synthesis of the perspectives of modern scholarship and the work of Cronon, Glave, White, Nasr, and Loy, we find that the single underlying ideology which shapes human-environmental relations is colonialism. As Loy writes of capitalism, this ideology is able to lie beneath other worldviews, masking its central role in shaping Western cultural imaginations of nature and Western human-environment relations. If, as Loy posits, the Market … bind[s] all corners of the globe more and more tightly into a worldview and set of values whose religious role we overlook only because we insist on seeing them as ‘secular,’” colonialism sits a layer deeper. Its fulfillment of a pseudo-religious role in shaping our actions lies not just beneath the mask of secularism and of the identification with traditional religions, but further beneath market capitalism itself—the extractive, accumulative, and dominative axioms which have been reinforced in Christianity, and which are central to market capitalism all arise from the colonial worldview.
It stands to reason, then, that in order to change our worldview (though, again, this essay makes no prescriptions as to what specifically our new worldview should be), we may seek the therapeutic resistance of modern religion, as Loy suggests, but we must seek it not just to overthrow Western secularism, not just to overthrow market capital, but to destroy the colonial and neo-colonial worldviews which, through Western secularism and through market capitalism, shape our exploitative environmental-relations. That is to say:
There can be no just reform of environmental relations which do not center anticolonial action.
VI. EXTERNAL SOURCES
Ashiagbor, D. (2021). Race and colonialism in the construction of labour markets and precarity. Industrial Law Journal, 50(4), 506–531. https://doi.org/10.1093/indlaw/dwab020
Austin, G. (2014). Capitalism and the colonies. In L. Neal & J. G. Williamson (Eds.), The Cambridge History of Capitalism (pp. 301–347). Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CHO9781139095105.010
Bhambra, G. K. (2020). Colonial global economy: towards a theoretical reorientation of political economy. Review of International Political Economy, 28(2), 307–322. https://doi.org/10.1080/09692290.2020.1830831
Carr, R. (2022). Indigenous secularism and the secular-colonial. Critical Research on Religion, 10(1), 24-40. https://doi.org/10.1177/20503032221075384
Carrasco Miró, G. (2019). Encountering the colonial: religion in feminism and the coloniality of secularism. Feminist Theory, 21(1), 91–109. https://doi.org/10.1177/1464700119859763
Cruz, N. (2018). Co-colonizing: The ecological impacts of settler colonialism in the American supercontinent.
McBrien, J. (2016). Accumulating extinction. Anthropocene or capitalocene, 116-137.
Ritchie, H. (2024). Not the end of the world: How we can be the first generation to build a sustainable planet. Little Brown Spark.
Taylor, A., Pacini-Ketchabaw, V., de Finney, S., & Blaise, M. (2016). Inheriting the ecological legacies of settler colonialism. Environmental Humanities, 7(1), 129–132. https://doi.org/10.1215/22011919-3616362
Wood, L. (2015). The Environmental Impacts of Colonialism. In BSU Honors Program Theses and Projects. Item 119. Available at: https://vc.bridgew.edu/honors_proj/119
Yountae, A. (2022). The myth of the secular revolutionary: On Fanon’s religion. Contending Modernities. https://contendingmodernities.nd.edu/decoloniality/the-myth-of-the-secular-revolutionary-on-fanons-religion/
wow, pretty-toastie! you sure have been gone for a lil while! i'm sure in that time you haven't experienced significant growth with respect to your politic ideology!
haha
anyway who wants to read the essay i wrote on human-environment relations, cultural imaginations, religion, worldview, and colonialism? (after it's been graded for the class, that is. y'all have to wait like. a week or two.)
Update book list just dropped! Added a couple books to Novels and to Poetry, created the Cozy Novels section, and created the Political Theory section :)
wow, pretty-toastie! you sure have been gone for a lil while! i'm sure in that time you haven't experienced significant growth with respect to your politic ideology!
haha
anyway who wants to read the essay i wrote on human-environment relations, cultural imaginations, religion, worldview, and colonialism? (after it's been graded for the class, that is. y'all have to wait like. a week or two.)
writing poetry like bleeding onto paper
and saying
look. this is what flows through my veins.
this is what keeps me alive.
arent you glad i showed you in all its crimson glory? this is the color of my insides. isnt it beautiful?
sitting in your apartment's kitchen,
seat pulled up to the small island
watching you cut an apple into slices—
you tell me envys are the best variety,
but you don't have any right now;
i think i would love any apple you gave me—
watching you pour a cup of tea,
earl grey,
milk and honey,
ceramic mug,
(for me)—
this is the most loved i have ever felt.
i want to write that i can't help but think of Sappho,
(fr. 56, tr. Anne Carson),
not one girl I think
who looks on the light of the sun
will ever
have wisdom
like this
but that wouldn't be the truth.
the truth is that i do not think of Sappho or poetry or Anne Carson's translations—
sitting here, in this halcyon moment? i do not think of anything but you.
or, "Open Letter to the Executives of ExxonMobil Corporation, Shell plc, TotalEnergies SE, BP plc, Chevron Corporation, etc."
———
When the skies burn and the oceans boil,
When the rivers turn to steam and every bit of solid ground
has been crushed to sand beneath the weight of
oil wells and gas drills and coal fires and pipelines,
May your eyes sting with smog and acrid smoke,
And may your lungs and throat be filled with ichor and black gold—
May you choke on the blood and oil you have spilled,
(your hands are slick with it; none of it your own),
And may you try, desperate, to cry for help,
slow bubbles through thick, dark fluid—
May you know how it feels to stare down a slow death;
May you feel powerless and desperate;
May you feel how we have felt.
———
Get involved / donate:
SCNCC (Donate)
Extinction Rebellion (Donate)
Things that are tangled: The loop of red string I keep in my pocket, rub absently between my fingers, twist into tiny shapes. The boughs and vines and briars of Central Park. The screams of crows perched high in hemlocks, in birches, in oaks and aspens and yews, raspy and joyful and defiant. The thatched roof of a home on the rocky shore of Ireland and the carpeted floor of an arcade strewn with neon geometry, both rough on my hands in the same way. The prophecies that hang in the air, the knowledge that suffuses the atmosphere and drips blackened knots over the heads of humanity. Time.
A pair of young girls—was I ever that young?—stumbled across me once, in the woods of northern France. Their gaze fell on me, wrapped in a battered bomber jacket, the patches torn away long ago or long after, and I exhaled a cloud of cigarette smoke and stared back at them. They stood frozen, side by side, their eyes wide. I watched one girl shift closer to the other, heard the crunch of twigs and dead leaves under her foot. She whispered something in French, grabbed the other’s hand, her fingers trembling slightly.
Something about these girls, scared, standing in front of an entity they could not comprehend, reminded me of myself; I wanted desperately to put them at ease. Your children are beautiful, I told them. You raised them so well. And they were, and they did—I could see them, all bright smiles and bubbling laugher and round cheeks, all dirty hands and strong arms and herbs tucked into leather pouches, all grey hair and wrinkled skin and wisdom.
The girls couldn’t see. Of course they couldn’t.
It’s so easy to forget what you should and shouldn’t know yet when you already know everything. The years blend together, and I forget where I am, when I am. It makes me feel insane.
A young man—a boy—found me once in an alley in Seludong. He was out of breath, nervous. He spoke in rapid Tagalog. They say you’re a witch, he said. Can you change me? Can you fix my body? It’s not right. It doesn’t fit me. It broke my heart to have to tell him no, tell him that all I can do is see, that the only way I can change anything is to warn people. I could not bring myself to tell him that no one will ever heed my warnings.
Phoebus Apollo’s voice echoes in my skull, as hot and violent as the sun. It tastes like ozone, like blood on my tongue. Just the memory hurts. He knew that I just wanted to help. All I ever wanted was to help. I saw the people around me suffering and I just wanted to help them and he offered me the means—gave me the means. But then he asked for something in return, a price I wasn’t willing to pay, and I said no—but what does ‘no’ mean, to a god? I turned him down, and he, in turn, unable to revoke his gift, made sure that I would never be able to help anyone.
Things that are tangled: The pieces of soft, soft cloth I keep in my pocket, rub absently between my fingers, worried and worn and frayed. The wrought iron fence gates of a manor in northern Vermont. The calls of screech owls and foxes, hunting at night, earsplitting, beautiful. The smell of woodsmoke, the taste of basil and rosemary and lemongrass and mint. My feelings. How can I love someone when I know that she would do anything for me, that for me to love her would destroy her? How can I love someone when I can see her wife’s face in my mind, always, always, and it isn’t mine?
But then, how can I not? She puts basil and rosemary and lemongrass and mint in the glasses of water she makes me. She takes me to an arcade, laughs when I need to stop to run my fingers over the carpet of neon geometry but waits all the same. She listens when I tell stories about places I’ve been and things I’ve seen and people I’ve met. She is patient when I forget. She walks with me through Central Park, smiles excitedly at me when the foxes and the crows and the screech owls scream because she knows I love the sounds.
Her face in the moonlight is the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen, and I have seen everything. She never asks me about her future.
And then her future arrives. It always had happened, always would happen. I can only bear to live through that time once. I’m not there. I am lost in the tangled weave of time and space and future and past, hunched over in the rain on the edge of a street in the middle of somewhere, terrified by the snarled knot of certainty that hangs in front of the faces of everyone who passes me. I am broken, I am lost. I know everything. I cannot remember my name. I watch the world end against the inside of my eyelids, again and again and again, and I cannot tell where I am, when I am. I do not know how to get back to her.
I left her, and I was gone for so long, and she fell in love. Really, truly, deeply. She and her wife were so happy, are so happy, will be so happy, and I am so happy for her. I am. I breathe in, breathe out. I have always known. I could see our ending from the moment I met her. I still didn’t expect it to hurt so much.
Things that are tangled: the lines of fate that bind people together, tear them apart. The pits of peaches, scarred over with twisting grooves. The ever-branching future and the ever-growing past. The sound of raindrops on asphalt. Flowers blooming before the last frost. The taste of loss, acid in my mouth. I feel insane. I know that I am not. I knew what would happen. No one ever heeds my warnings.
I blow a cloud of smoke and fog into the damp night air, watch as it mingles with the low grey clouds lit from above by the pale moon. I pull my worn jacket closer around me.
Time will keep moving forward. It always has. I will bear witness to it all.
Thinking about how Cassandra walked to her own death at Clytemnestra's hands. Thinking about how she knew. Thinking about how she was so tired that she went anyway. Thinking about how despite seeing the entirety of her future stretching out in front of her, she didn't fight back.
Thinking about how Clytemnestra murdered Cassandra over Agamemnon's body. Did she see her daughter, when she looked at Cassandra, raised her blade? Did she see Iphigenia, lying on the altar? Did she see blood on Agamemnon's hands? Did she look at Cassandra and think "My daughter should be here. My daughter should be standing here, and you're here instead, because Agamemnon chose you and slaughtered her."?
Thinking about how Clytemnestra refused to close Agamemnon's eyes or mouth after she killed him. Thinking about how she denied him funeral rites, denied him a proper burial. Thinking about how when Odysseus meets him at the gates of Hades, he is a restless spirit, how he is still thinking about those last moments, about Clytemnestra turning away. Thinking about how she condemned him never to rest. How when she gets to the afterlife, she will meet her daughter, and he won't be there to hurt them.
Thinking about how on this vase, Clytemnestra's face is hidden.
I can't help but think, too, what if it had been different? What if Clytemnestra had looked at Cassandra and instead of seeing Iphigenia's corpse, she saw her face? What if she looked at Cassandra, far from home, walking, docile, to her own murder, and saw Iphigenia looking up at her, and stilled her hand?
What I'm saying is what if Clytemnestra adopted Cassandra and they murdered Agamemnon's men together. What if they both got a second chance. What if Clytemnestra got to save a daughter. What if Cassandra got to live.
I know myth is defined by silhouettes, not people. It was always going to end like this. It was always going to be this way. If Orpheus hadn't turned around, it wouldn't have been Orpheus.
But I think of Hadestown: "As if it might turn out this time." We sing these songs, tell these stories, again and again, out of that hope that this time, it might be different.
i wish someone had taught me how to hold all this grief and anger and fear inside me at the same time.
what am i supposed to do with it? where am i supposed to put it all?? it doesn't fit within my chest—my heart is breaking,
and it feels like the world is ending, and yet nothing falters, and the world will not stop—the gears spin on, even in the face of relentless tragedy and injustice,
and the atrocities pile up, and i am so scared and angry and sad, but the world will not stop, nothing will even pause for this, it all just keeps going—
so i do the impossible (what else can i do?): i fold away all my sorrow and go to class.
———
i'm feeling so unbelievably helpless right now, and if you are too, there are some things you can do (this list is mostly taken from the end of Shaun's recent video on Palestine, though i've added a couple things related to trans rights).
if you're financially able to, you can donate to charities like:
The Human Rights Campaign
The Trevor Project
The PCRF
Heal Palestine
The BDS Movement
you can, of course, vote: refuse to vote for any politician who does not promise to protect queer youth. refuse to vote for any politician who does not call for a full and immediate ceasefire.
you can talk to people you know, go to protests and marches if there are any close by.
but you cannot solve all the world's problems on your own. there may not be any individual action you can take that will do enough.
so... join a union. in a capitalist society, your greatest power is your labor, and unions have been fighting for Palestine—and more generally, for human rights—for a long time. collective action by unions is one of the things which helped bring down apartheid South Africa.
...all of that may still not feel like enough, though, and i don't really have an answer for that.
