Watered Down
I was born by the river,
Not in a tent like the song says but in a sterile reinforced steel concrete building known as Riverside Methodist Hospital in Columbus, Ohio.
The river in ‘Riverside’ was the Olentangy River.
Olentangy is a word of the Delaware Tribe.
BUT…the name Delaware was “assigned” to this Native Tribe by white colonists who didn’t feel like calling them by their real name: Lenape.
Delaware was the name of the river that the Lenape lived by in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York, and Delaware. Both Delaware the state and the Delaware River were named after Thomas West, 3rd Baron De La Warr (1577–1618), an English “nobleman” and Virginia’s first governor. I haven’t taken the time to research anything more about him but it’s fairly safe to say that he was no doubt a royal fuckface who spent his precious time on Earth fucking shit up for Natives and Black people and women and Nature…no wait, I’m mistaken, he was an appointed fuckface, not a royal one, my bad.
And the only reason the Lenape came to be in Ohio was once again because a bunch of fuckfaces were fucking everything up by driving Native people westward out of their homelands to make way so for their stupid fuckface settlements.
The name that European fuckface settlers gave to the Olentangy River was ‘Whetstone River’ because there is so much shale on her shores, which they used to sharpen their tools.
But in 1833, after the Ohio General Assembly passed legislature that required the names of several waterways to be changed back to their Native names, she got renamed Olentangy……
…..except Olentangy wasn’t a revert at all because she was never called that by the Natives in the first place!
Olentangy, or ‘River of the Red Face Paint’, was what the Natives called ANOTHER nearby river (‘Big Darby Creek’…Don’t get me started on who in the fuckface ‘Big Darby’ was), named this because there was so much red clay on the banks, which the Natives used to paint their faces.
Just imagine if we all still directly used the raw Earth to adorn ourselves, that alone could help us feel closer to Her.
But this ignorant arrogant country is total shit at admitting and correcting its mistakes, we just double down and lean into them. I mean, Natives here are still referred to as ‘Indians’ all because of that time when fuckface supreme Christopher Columbus arrived on this continent he thought he had found a new route to India. And yet, the city I live in is STILL called Columbus in honor of this colossal twat.
So the REAL name of the River I was born by is not the Olentangy, but the ‘Keenhongsheconsepung’, a Lenape word for “sharp tool river”, because her shale was good at sharpening tools.
But that 1833 river renaming law dropped the ball on that one. But it’s not like changing the names of things has ever actually worked at bringing about positive radical change.
If only the real reason why racism is still plaguing our society is merely because we haven’t named quite enough boulevards after Martin Luther King Jr.
MLK was super into non-violence and railed against capitalism. I can’t think of anything more violent than roads, which are the very veins of this destructive beast called industrial capitalistic civilization. Naming a road after MLK is like naming some new terrible agricultural chemical ‘Rachel Carson 451’.
If symbolic acts like renaming things don’t come with the substance and culture to back it up then its pointless, and also dangerous because it fools people into thinking some sort of progress has been made when it hasn’t. Did we not learn anything from ‘Poltergeist’???
“You left the bodies and only moved the headstones, didn’t ya?!!!”
~ ~ ~
I was born by the river.
But not in the way humans used to be born by rivers.
I was geographically born NEXT to It.
Not born BY Her
FROM Her,
WITH Her,
BECAUSE of Her,
Not born in a way that I will then RETURN to Her someday.
No, like you I was born into a life that has had no positive interaction with, dependence on, or reverence for Her.
I, like you, was born of a culture that has broken almost all of the agreements that hold the fabric of life together.
Long gone are the days of using the shale along Her shores.
Long gone are the days of fishing from Her waters for the bulk of our sustenance.
Long gone are the days of traveling by Her currents, floating along in the hollowed out bodies of our Tree kin.
Long gone are the days of painting our faces with the clay from Her banks.
Long gone are the days marked by ceremonies and rituals honoring Her.
Long gone are the days of cleansing ourselves in Her clear clean waters, where we gave Her our woes and she washed them away and we gave thanks.
Those were the days.
~Now our mounting woes are mindlessly dumped into Her at ever increasing volume. She can’t keep up. Not now.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
~Now some of Her clay-rich banks have been replaced with concrete. Now when we think of banks we think of those institutions that hold nothing of inherent value, nothing we can paint our faces with.
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~Now Her once free flowing veins are inhibited by over 90,000 dams. Late last year an agreement that’s been in the works for years was finally signed that will remove four massive dams along the Klamath River in Oregon and California by 2023. It will be the largest dam demolition in U.S. history and will open up critical fish habitat. Only time will tell if it actually happens, of course there’s already been some signs of bureaucratic stalling. During WW2 huge bridges were erected in a matter of days. These dams could come down at the same speed, not in 2 years time. When it comes to doing the right thing we’re always told “it takes time”.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
~Now Her rivers can barely feed us. Coho Salmon populations in the Klamath River have fallen by as much as 95%. Salmon are at the heart of the culture and diet of many tribes local to the Klamath River, including the Yurok and Karuk. Spring Chinook Salmon, once the Klamath Basin’s largest run, has dwindled by 98%. Fall chinook salmon, the last to persist in any significant numbers, have been so meager in the past few years that the Yurok canceled fishing for the first time in the tribe’s memory. Overall, populations of migratory freshwater fish have plummeted by 76% since 1970, and large freshwater megafish (those weighing more than 30kg) are down by 94%. (Read this comprehensive report, entitled ‘The World’s Forgotten Fishes’ here).
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~Now, daily praises to Her have been reduced to lame ass, once-a-year, largely symbolic gestures such as March 14 being declared ‘International Day of Action for Rivers’. These empty, meaningless, barely even performative official “days” are pathetic, abysmal substitutions for any kind of real fleshy substantial ritual and ceremony powerful enough to move us to stop this Earth Eating machine, to stop ourselves from being cogs no longer, and become the “counter friction” so desperately needed now.
Hey there now, having an International Day for Rivers is better than nothing!
Better than nothing isn’t going to cut it. We have to be better than better than nothing.
Reverence thru ritual has been so watered down that a phrase like “watered down” has come to mean a bad thing. We all need a good watering down.
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“One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds. Much of the damage inflicted on land is quite invisible to laymen. An ecologist must either harden his shell and make believe that the consequences of science are none of his business, or he must be the doctor who sees the marks of death in a community that believes itself well and does not want to be told otherwise.” ~Aldo Leopold, white dude feeling what Indigenous peoples have lived with for centuries.
I took this video on the Kokosing River near Gambier, OH. I quarantined there in a friend’s cabin for over two months back in the spring of 2020 when I first became sick with Covid. I often go back to visit, as I did on this snowy day in December of last year.
Honestly, the more time I spend with Her the LESS close I feel to Her……because I grow more and more aware of just how detached my life is from Her’s and how dependent my life is on the forces that are diminishing Her’s. Can my life even be called a life if it only takes, if it exists mostly outside the natural paradigm? (uh oh, I just became one of those people who throws the word paradigm around)
In the Netflix documentary ‘My Octupus Teacher’ (which btw, I think a stronger title would have been ‘My Teacher, the Octupus’, just saying) the filmmaker talks about his time spent 20 years ago with the hunter gatherer bushmen of the Kalahari Desert…..
“They were inside of the natural world and I could feel I was outside. And I had this deep longing to be inside that world.”
I am becoming more and more familiar with this longing, and I hope others come to this too.
A little while after I took this video, I saw a muskrat swimming upstream. And even though this animal is living in right relationship with the river and the Earth, whereas I am not, I still wondered if they felt anything of what I felt: a sense that the world is LESS THAN from that which their ancestors experienced (or even a few generations ago experienced).
Kokosing means “River of Little Owls”, but in all the time I’ve spent with her I have yet to see or hear a single owl. But I have no doubt that when she was given this name the owls here were numerous, hence the name.
If we had to name rivers today based on what is happening with them now then they’d have names like ‘The Ol’ Water Sports River’ or the ‘The Lil’ Industrial Dumping’ or ‘Sewage Drain Creek’ or ‘The Mighty Farm Runoff’. (‘Farm Runoff’ is actually an American word that translates roughly as “Endocrine Disruptor” or “Mass Amphibian Grave”).
Watching Jeopardy a couple months ago there was a question — or I’m sorry, an ANSWER — that was wanting to know at what degree in temperature rise do scientists say the Earth cannot exceed in order to avoid the worst of climate change catastrophe. Most scientists have abandoned the 2 degree limit warning because there is just too much evidence now showing that 2 degrees will be beyond bad and so many scientists say we cannot go past 1.5 degrees of warming. But much of the mainstream climate science reporting often still says 2 degrees because it often takes forever for the public to accept scientific findings (as the pandemic has shown us), especially if doing so hurts capitalism. In pre-ultrasound days, the female scientist who discovered that women probably should not be getting their bare pregnant bellies x-rayed was not listened to for like 8 years, meanwhile tons of babies were born with birth defects from radiation exposure.
So the first guy rang in and guessed 3 degrees. Wrong-o.
The second guy rang in and said 5 degrees. Dead wrong…like literally everything will be dead if there is that much warming.
The third woman didn’t even bother guessing.
I found this to be goose bump terrifying, and not just because Alec Trebeck is pretty much hosting the show from beyond the grave, but because these contestants were “well educated professionals” who knew so very much about Prussian wars and 18th century French literature yet did not know a very simple and important fact about the state and fate of the planet of which they live and depend on, something that should be common knowledge at this point.
It was just one of those Ed Grimley “We’re Doomed as Doomed can be” moments.
Then I read this article in the Atlantic.
How in the fucking shit can there be an article with the title ‘The Next Decade Could Be Even Worse’ and not even mention how a big part of that “worse” is that life on Earth is being extinguished at a rate faster than when the dinosaurs went extinct. No, the article was mostly about how the elite class is bloated and there are too few elite jobs to go around which will lead to a breakdown of society. No mention about how the collapsing biosphere will factor in to all this (or is the cause), which was crazy because the guy being interviewed was a former ecologist! Now he is a mathematician who is considered an “expert” in civilizational collapse. But there cannot be experts for the collapse that is coming because it will be like no other in human history, perhaps even in Earth’s history! I don’t think models of past civilization collapses will be of much use for this one because past ones did not involve this many people or nuclear warheads, nor had to contend with such an extreme and fast change in the environment and climate.
This math guy is also like the world’s leading “expert” on beetles. But he said he quit that field because he had learned everything there was to know about beetles. This is a type of intellectual pornography. “Knowing everything there is to know” about something is not a replacement for a real relationship with it. This isn’t Pokemon where we “gotta get ’em all!”
We don’t need experts. We need better relationships. We need intensive and extensive relationship counseling. We need to look to those humans who still have some semblance of healthy relationships with the Earth, with LIFE, and maybe most importantly…..with DEATH.
At the center of every conversation we have now needs to be the Murder of the Planet by this culture. But this isn’t even on the EDGES of most conversations! It’s grotesquely ignored. It’s a metaphorical elephant that is so big that it has not only filled the entire room, but the entire house and beyond, its dung piled so high that it’s almost completely engulfed us. And even as the dung is about to cover our faces we are using our last moments to say “But the economy, but JOBS.”
We need to be done with talking about things as isolated issues.
We need to be done with compartmentalizing the shit out of everything.
We are just not making the connections we need to be making.
For example, watching CBS Sunday Morning with my parents right before Christmas, there was a segment about Franklin, Indiana, home to an ongoing childhood cancer boom caused by the Amphenol Corporation (a plant that manufactured electronic parts). From 1961–1981 Amphenol sent their wastewater into the municipal sewage system. So for decades now, underground plumes of industrial toxins have been entering people’s homes through a process called “vapor intrusion”, which would be a good name for a Metal Band but not something you want happening to you and your loved ones.
Two of the chemicals in the waste water were trichloroethylene (TCE), and tetrachloroethylene (PCE), which are “known carcinogens”.
The language we use to talk about this fucking shit is all fucking wrong. TCE and PCE aren’t the culprits. Making them out to be keeps us in a very limited reductionist mindset and doesn’t allow us to pull back for a broader critique and so there is never any talk about what caused the things that cause cancer.
We made these chemicals! We live lives that require them! These chemicals aren’t causing cancer, we are, our entire lifestyle is. The very production of the “device” you are using to listen to me talk about toxins RESULTED in toxins being released somewhere(s)! If the toxins don’t kill us the irony surely will.
Labeling these substances as “known carcinogens” makes it sound like they were discovered (not CREATED by us) and framing it that way takes the focus off of the INSANELY destructive lifestyle that requires carcinogens to run it.
There is this attitude that cancer is just this shit luck thing that happens, that it’s just part of life, not a consequence of how we live. There is also this war like attitude towards cancer, as if it was an enemy to defeat, as in “he beat cancer” or “she lost the battle to Cancer.” It’s not the cancer we should be battling, it’s the WACK-O dipshit culture that is causing the cancer. I always say there needs to be a counter movement to those ‘Race for the Cure’ cancer events called ‘Pause for the Cause’. Hating on Cancer (or the Coronavirus) is the ultimate shooting the messenger.
I’m a rare kind of anti-vaxxer, I suppose. I’m not against vaccines because I think they cause autism (LOADS of things are causing autism) or because herd immunity is better. Those things are probably true in part, depending on the vaccine and the disease. But there is no denying that vaccines overall work at getting rid of the diseases they are designed to get rid of. And that is why I am against them.
Vaccines let us off the hook, they stop the disease but don’t stop us from doing the things that CAUSED the disease in the first place!
A vaccine may be good news for humans (in the short term) but absolutely terrible fuck all news for the rest of life on Earth because a vaccine will allow us to go back to the kind of unfettered industrial activity and population growth that is killing the Earth.
This latest vaccine is just further immunization against facing reality head on. It’s just further kicking the can down the road. But at this point the can has been kicked so far off down the road that we can’t even see that this road dead ends at a cliff and that the can has gone over the edge. There is no longer a can to kick. Now we are just kicking ourselves basically. And furthermore, any analogy that involves industrial imagery like metal cans and roads will never allow us to breakthru to another way of thinking and feeling that lies outside the context of this murder machine of a culture.
I so wish the seething vitriol that people direct towards anti-vaxxers AND vaccines would be redirected towards the insane industrial culture that is causing us to be sick in the first place AND this same culture that is making us sick is fucking killing ALL life forms off at an alarming rate.
“When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe” is a well known quote by John Muir, and only a culture that has lost sight of this VERY basic principle would think it some novel idea that no one has thought of before. In this sense Muir is a colonialist of thought, thinking he “discovered” this insight, much like Columbus “discovered” the Americas. If Muir had said this to a culture actually living this truth they would have responded with the biggest DUH of all time, but in this culture he is immortalized.
We industrial modern humans are simply not good at seeing interdependence, because we have not been taught how, because our survival within these artificial systems depends on us NOT making these connections.
When you hear stories about cancer booms in communities like Franklin there is NEVER any focus on the non human life that is harmed too: the plant communities, the fish communities, the insect communities, even bacteria communities. We have become so extremely and insanely human-centric. This needs to be called out for what it is: Psychosis.
Even if we understand intellectually the importance of not destroying the natural environment that we depend on, because we have no real sustained direct lived experience of this fact we tend to regard Nature as separate from us because we have the perceived experience of getting along fine without Her.
In this great interview with Enrique Salmón he says “In my language and in most Indigenous languages, there’s no word for wild. And this is because Euro-americans, the language, again, coming back to language, how important it is, perpetuates this idea of the separation between us as humans, and everything else, and so we have this category of wild and wilderness, places that we’re not supposed to visit or if we do we leave only no footprints, this notion of wilderness, something that is totally separate from us as modern day human beings, that we are, the things that are wild or untamed, that they’re, they’re out of control, and so on. And so there’s this sort of negative connotation with these notions of wild and wilderness.”
In the same CBS Sunday Morning episode with the Franklin, Indiana piece showcasing children and mothers who’s lives were shaken by cancer caused by the electronics industry, they also ran a segment highlighting all these spiffy new electronic gadgets that would make great stocking stuffers, including sunglasses that have built in headphones. It was basically a commercial. Then during the real commercial break there was a trailer for yet another new crime/law TV drama about high tech evidence collecting and connecting the dots to solve the crime and get the “bad guy”.
But here we are living through the biggest crime ever committed and hardly anyone is on the case of the missing Sanity, Empathy, and Compassion. Maybe that’s because we’re mostly accomplices. And once this colossal crime is fully carried out there won’t even be anyone left to seek justice. Who’s going to investigate this murder of all murders once we’re all dead? Elon Musk’s Mars colony that got away safely before it all turned to utter shit? Fuck off.
It’s almost like we don’t want to live.
Sometimes it feels as if we are collectively writing a big long suicide note. As someone who has made suicide plans in the past and even written suicide notes, I can say that something that happens in these acts is that a release comes and you do feel better, in my case better enough not to go thru with it, just the thought of doing it was enough. It sometimes feels as if we are in that stage of humanity. I hear people say all the time things like “the Earth will go on without us.” Or “The Earth is too powerful/complex/intelligent for humans to destroy it”.
For one, you don’t know that. And secondly, this discounts all the other life besides us. What industrial human civilization is doing is less of a suicide and more of a suicide bombing, taking out so much other innocent life with us.
But taking these stances that the Earth will be fine once we’re gone is like suicide note writing 101. I remember writing to my family and friends “You don’t need me” or “You’ll be better off without me”. For me, just seeing these things written out on paper helped me see how ridiculous and untrue they are (I know this doesn’t always work, but statistically most people that contemplate suicide and even those who make plans don’t go thru with it). Saying such things is just a coping mechanism to avoid guilt, avoid feeling the pain of knowing your death will cause others pain.
To say the Earth doesn’t need us or will be better off without us is coming from a place of worthlessness. We feel worthless.
And honestly, our industrial lives ARE for the most part worthless (to everything except capitalism). But we can remember that there was a time (for most of our existence as a species) when we weren’t worthless. When we (ALL OF US, not just “indigenous peoples”) were part of the Earth family, when we CONTRIBUTED to the fabric of life instead of tearing it up to make oil soaked rags for all the Molotov cocktails this culture has hurled into forests and rivers and wetlands and prairies and mountain tops.
And then sometimes it feels as if we are already dead.
That we were born into a dead culture. No need to wonder about the existence of ghosts. We are the ghosts, hungrily haunting the Earth, spooking the bejesus out of the living. We’re not fully alive, we’re removed from direct living. We watch screens like specters watch the living: Jealously.
All the movies I loved as a little kid — ‘My Side of the Mountain’, ‘Swiss Family Robinson’, ‘The Wilderness Family’ — were all about people returning to Nature. They gave me a real sense that something huge had been lost and now we just nostalgically watch stories about that something. But I didn’t understand why we couldn’t live that way now. I saw all these movies at school but there was never any discussion about them, they were just “entertainment”. It was like being shown part of yourself without acknowledging its been taken away or how it even happened.
There was so much debate over whether or not to send kids back to school during the pandemic — again this black and white reductionist mentality leaves no room for bigger questions like what even is the purpose of school now? And what curriculum is appropriate to teach children in this fast-changing, perishing world that is NEVER going to return to “normal”.
The more time I spend with the Kokosing River the more I can see I cannot be her lover as I so wish to be, not like the Muskrat and the Carp and the Heron and the Bald Eagle are.
I am an admirer at best, watching from a distance.
From the other side of an invisible wall.
The 4th wall.
For those not familiar with the fourth wall, it’s a term used in TV, theatre, etc for how a set only has 3 walls, the fourth wall being the screen/audience. The actors hardly ever acknowledge this 4th wall, as to maintain the suspension of disbelief for those watching.
Too many of us are trapped in the audience, unable to break the spell that keeps us passive bystanders. That’s why what is happening doesn’t quite seem real to many of us who have the luxury of sitting in the audience.
It’s high time to rush the stage.
~ ~ ~
A few months ago I had a dream while at the river.
I used to be an avid dreamer. I cherished my time in the dream world. It often felt more real and profound than waking life. But since I’ve become sick with Long Covid I haven’t really been dreaming nearly as much. It’s made me feel even less connected than usual to the wonders and mysteries of LIFE.
Science would have us believe that everything can be explained eventually. But why would we want this?
I used to be really into dream analysis. But then at some point I could feel I was diminishing their power by dismantling them.
Enrique Salmón says “This is the reason why most Native peoples around the world tell trickster stories. It’s this recognition of that grey part of the universe, that part of the universe that we don’t quite understand, but we know is there. And that’s trickster. And here in North America trickster is often personified as a coyote, sometimes a rabbit or a skunk. But these trickster tales, and legends and myths, whatever we want to call them are reflections of that recognition of constant flux and dynamic change in the universe.”
So in my dream there was all this talk about “the roll out” and how important it is. This annoyed me because I thought they were talking about the vaccine but as the dream progressed it was made clear that this “shot” that was going to be distributed wasn’t a vaccine, it was a drug for painlessly killing ourselves. Some sort of consensus had been reached that the only way to save the Earth was to stop humanity permanently. I felt scared but also at peace. I also felt proud that we had all come to this conclusion. It felt like such a responsible thing to do.
~ ~ ~
Our entrance into this poor world so ravished by this insane unconscionable apathetic culture is a still birth.
Can we be reborn?
Is it too late?
We’ll see.
Either way, as the song says,
CHANGE GONNA COME.
But we need to change the way we talk about the change we think needs to come, like when we say “these systems we live by are outdated.” As if there was a time when these shithole systems were good and appropriate! The problem isn’t updating the systems we live by but eliminating them by any means necessary and creating ones firmly rooted in reality and fairness and compassion and inclusion and purpose and beauty. But first we must get over our severe and complex case of Stockholm Syndrome.
There is such pain in all of this, and it might be beyond our capacity to feel this massive amount of backlogged pain in healthy constructive ways, especially if we try to do it on our own as individuals. We don’t have the tools to deal with the death of EVERYTHING (we aren’t even given the tools by this culture to deal with our own death!) so we do everything we can to avoid feeling the pain out of fear that feeling it will destroy us (and it might!). This culture provides SO much pain aversion. But with pain aversion comes reality aversion.
As a teenager I sometimes would cut myself.
Cutting myself was a way I could feel real in the context of so much artificiality. Back then I was diagnosed with all sorts of mental “disorders” but now I don’t see myself as crazy or wrong for having cut myself, but see it as a way my soul was trying to escape this false reality.
Feeling the pain can be a way back into reality if we let it.
No matter what we do, there is AT LEAST 3 degrees of warming already locked in at this point, this will come to be by the end of the century. It’s unclear how much life, if any, can survive that amount of warming that happens that quickly.
How does this make you feel? Can you even begin to feel what needs to be felt that would lead to some kind of appropriate response?
We currently have no culture that embraces this ecological inevitability of collapse, that allows space to collectively come to terms with this, to feel this, to grieve this.
We refuse to go there, to suffer.
As troubadour Jonathan Richman reminds us….
When we refuse to suffer
when we refuse to feel
your life becomes a bore
and your suffering even more
when we refuse to suffer
when we refuse to feel
you’re sufferin more
and your life gets boring and crazy
when we refuse to suffer
when we refuse to feel
we suffer more
It’s like airconditionin’ when we should out in the summertime
when we refuse to suffer
when we refuse to feel
that’s when the prozac wins
and your body and feelings lose
well we’re gonna cheat feeling
and think that’s allright
but mother nature’s gonna school us
When we refuse to suffer
when we refuse to feel
we can’t win
when we refuse to suffer
when we refuse to feel
that’s when we can’t win
cause our whole body
will have the last laugh.
And to say that this warming of the planet is the problem is once again a reductionist viewpoint. There are so many interwoven shitstorms on the horizon from deforestation to insect disappearance to plastic pollution to disruptions in the Earth’s water cycles. The problem is beyond complex…..but the cause is quite simple……and any kind of a “solution” in the conventional sense needs to be disbanded to make room for presence.
We won’t be able to sanely and lovingly face the change that is coming nor bring about the change that is needed if we are all numb, or stuck in the ghostworld or have yet to be born, or have this unseen barrier between us and Her.
We have to stop running before the rivers all do or we’ll miss our own birth, our own life, our own death.
We’re missing everything.
And the Earth, she misses us.
Misses how we used to marvel at Her, how we used to praise Her, how we ran our fingers over Her curves and through Her vegetation and up her Peaks and down into Her valleys.
Misses the comfort of knowing She knew how we knew that Her waters were the same waters making up the bulk of our bodies. But now, water water everywhere but we refuse to drink.
Aren’t you thirsty?
I am.
