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The Ecopsychological Imperative to Dismantle Civilization

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The fading roar of an ATV engine leaves silence in its wake. Birds, offended by the intrusion, refuse to sing. Grasshoppers stop their dance to consider their safety. Even the reliable mountain breeze hides. And, with the tidings of violence borne by the sounds of explosion in the engine’s combustion, I know I cannot blame them.

Only the September Utah sun is unbothered. The heat, originating so far away, is oblivious. The last rain fell weeks ago and the dust antagonizes the lump forming in my throat. My co-workers at the Snyderville Basin Special Recreation District Trails Maintenance Department have dropped me off with a water bottle, work gloves, and an ancient, wood-handled rake that leaves half-inch splinters in my hand when I’m not careful.

I’ll be paid $12 an hour today to rake gravel and leaves from a freshly cut trail in the Wasatch Mountains high above Park City, Utah. My co-workers won’t be back for 6 hours. This is the same job I did yesterday and the day before, and I know now, from experience, that each stroke only pulls more gravel into the space my rake passes over. I watch a boulder watching me and wonder if he recalls Sisyphus, too. I wonder if I could move that boulder and push him up the hill. I wonder if the effort might provide some distraction.   [Read more…]

On Being Suicidal

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“I am suicidal.”

Three words only — but, the three most difficult words I’ve ever had to say. I did not want to say them. I fought so hard to leave them in the chill darkness of my depressed mind and now their expression feels like a declaration of defeat.

I fear that giving voice to my suicidal thoughts will make them more dangerous. And, when I admit being suicidal, the demonic voices whispering on the edges of my consciousness will escape through my words to materialize as physical shadows hounding me wherever I go.

Because of these fears, I tried desperately to ignore what the words meant. Having already attempted suicide twice in my life, I know what can happen if I deny the words for too long. I know where that seductive path leads.

And so, after several weeks in one of the worst depressive episodes I’ve experienced in years, I sit in the white light of my psychiatrist’s office, head in hands, spitting the words — and their awful taste — out.   [Read more…]

This Is What Depression Feels Like

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My notebook pages are blank again tonight, as they have been for the past 30 nights. I know what I am supposed to write, but I cannot bring myself to do it. The pen takes on an immense weight as I force it towards the college-ruled lines I prefer. When I pass from external reality to those internal landscapes where my inspiration dwells, my inner vision blurs. I cannot – or, will not – say what needs to be said.

The voices in my mind argue. One voice says, “What’s the point? It’s never going to help.” Another adds, “They’ll just think you’re whining.” A third screeches, “Hide it! You mustn’t tell anyone.” A fourth reminds me, “You’re not supposed to ruminate, you know.”

A lone voice holds out, and asks, “Yeah, but what about them?”

She’s asking about the ever-growing list of people I personally know whose lives have been affected by major depressive disorder (depression) and suicide. She’s asking about the 40,000 Americans who take their lives every year. She’s asking about losing one person to suicide every 40 seconds around the world.   [Read more…]

Power and Direct Action: A Primer

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This year’s Fourth of July week grew in horror as it passed. Each day brought new nightmares that struck me at a dizzying pace. By the end of the week, after I decided I was sick of weeping, I turned off the television, shut my Facebook tab, and remembered that the best antidote for despair is action.

My week started hopefully enough in Eugene, Oregon where I participated in a training hosted by members of Deep Green Resistance called Extraction Resistance: A Three Day Training in Direct Action. One of the goals of the event was to normalize direct action tactics, and I was asked to write a primer on the topic. This is that primer.

When I got home from Eugene, I found a video news story from Karachi, Pakistan showing men digging mass graves in anticipation of the number of heat-related deaths caused by soaring summer temperatures. The ghosts of people not yet dead climbed from trenches dug in the dry Pakistani dust. I could almost see the bodies piling in the grave-diggers’ shadows.   [Read more…]

The Swamp Cedars and the Nevada Water Grab

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The Swamp Cedars in Spring Valley, Nevada have grown long memories. They stand on the valley floor under the bright Great Basin stars where the skies are still unspoiled by the encroaching glow of electricity. Beneath the trees’ branches, the blue petals of wild irises flutter in the breeze. All of them – the trees, the flowers, the stars – sway to the soft melodies played by the valley’s bubbling springs.

The Swamp Cedars are under attack. Close to 300 miles south of Spring Valley, the City of Las Vegas sprang up in the desert. Las Vegas’ population continues to grow in an arid landscape and the city is running out of water. Instead of restricting development, Sin City encourages residents and businesses to move to the city promising them access to the water they’ll need.   [Read more…]

Direct Action Journal: The Wound of Perpetual Guilt

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If fear is the mind killer, guilt is the heart killer. Experiencing guilt creates a wound. The wound is healed when the behavior producing the guilt is rectified. The scar that forms over the wound serves as a reminder to guide future behavior.

Living in a state of perpetual guilt, however, prevents the wound from ever healing. The wound festers. The guilt swells until it becomes an infection of empathy. The infected person devotes all her energy to coping with the constant pain of guilt. She spends all her time hunched over the wound, seeking to alleviate the pain. Focused on the wound like this, she cannot look beyond herself. A cycle develops. The guilt grows and becomes ever more painful. The pain strangles the infected’s capacity for empathy. Eventually, the infected loses her ability to act from a genuine concern for others and only acts to avoid the pain of more guilt.   [Read more…]

Direct Action Journal: Overcoming Fear

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Another episode with anxiety knocks me to my bedroom floor. Rational thought forsakes me. My body shakes with the strangled sobs of a man ashamed of his tears. Alicia bends over me. Her dark brown eyes – normally calm with the consistent rationality characterizing her personality – are wide with concern and weariness. We’re only several nights removed from the last episode. She must think, “Oh god, not again.”

Alicia seeks to hold me. I find a deep comfort in her touch – and a deep revulsion. It’s not her. The contradiction is born from the lies fear instills in me. Somewhere in the darkness, a voice reminds me that I am unlovable. I crave love but the voice whispers my lack of reasons to be loved. The closer Alicia gets to me, the closer she’ll get, I fear, to hearing those whispers, too. The closer she’ll get to realizing a man who cannot love himself should not be loved by anyone.   [Read more…]

The Language of Pinyon-Juniper Trees

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After two months of struggling to write anything coherent about pinyon-juniper forests, I was on the verge of giving up.

Members of the group I am campaigning with to stop pinyon-juniper deforestation began brainstorming about applying for grants to support the campaign. Many of the grants they discovered required us to demonstrate that pinyon-juniper deforestation harmed wildlife populations, poisoned water supplies, or had a tangible effect on human populations.

Thinking that I could support our grant application process with an essay, I sat down many times to write about the countless beings that call pinyon-juniper forests home. But, I never wrote anything worth reading.

It took me a long time to figure out why.   [Read more…]

Pinyon-Juniper Forests: BLM is a Ranching Industry Tool

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By Will Falk

Public lands ranching is destroying the Western United States. It has pushed native plant species to the brink of extinction. It causes soil to erode so quickly the land cannot keep up. Livestock are poisoning and depleting water supplies, killing perennial stream flows, and are making it increasingly difficult for surface water to accumulate. Stockmen and the animals they raise have devastated populations of iconic American animals like bison, elk, pronghorn, and sage-grouse. Ranchers, ever jealous of the trees their stock cannot eat, encourage the clear-cutting of forests.

I cannot decide whether writing this essay in the wake of Ammon Bundy’s arrest and Lavoy Finicum’s death at the hands of the FBI and Oregon State Police after their occupation of Northern Paiute land at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge is good or bad. It could be good because this story has finally forced public lands ranching, or “welfare ranching,” and the policies of federal agencies like the Bureau of Land Management and US Forest Service into the public’s consciousness.

On the other hand, there is the risk that while Bundy and his angry white men waved their rifles in the faces of law enforcement complaining about federal agencies like BLM and the Forest Service, the public developed too much sympathy for those Bundy threatened. These agencies might look like the good guys against Big Bad Bundy while the agencies’ own atrocities go over-looked.   [Read more…]

Pinyon-Juniper Forests: BLM’s False Claims to Virtue

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By Will Falk

Once I recovered from the shock I experienced witnessing the carnage produced by a Bureau of Land Management’s (BLM) so-called “pinyon-juniper treatment project” just south of Spruce Mountain in Nevada, all I wanted was the destruction to stop. In order to stop the destruction, we have to ask the question: “Why are they doing this?”   [Read more…]

Pinyon-Juniper Forests: The Oldest Refugee Crisis

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My thoughts race with yesterday. My friend Max Wilbert and I left Park City, Utah in the pre-dawn bitter cold crossing the Wasatch Mountains that form the eastern edge of the Great Basin. The drive west from Salt Lake City on I-80 is disorienting. We began the journey with the radio on. We both became too frustrated by news of another politician refusing to accept refugees, so we turned the radio off to watch the land as we traveled.

Interstate 80 took us past the sites of some of the West’s most destructive extraction industries including Kennecott Copper’s Bingham Canyon Mine. The Oquirrh Mountains stand tall on the Salt Lake Valley’s west side, each peak a majestic testament to the forces of beauty who formed the Great Basin.

Each peak, save one.   [Read more…]

Pinyon-Juniper Forests: An Ancient Vision Disturbed

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Standing in a pinyon-juniper forest on a high slope above Cave Valley not far from Ely, Nevada, I am lost in an ancient vision. It is a vision born under sublime skies stretching above wide, flat valleys bounded by the dramatic mountains of the Great Basin. The vision grows with the rising flames of morning in the east. The night was cold, but clear, and the sun brings a welcome warmth. When the sun crests the mountains, red and orange clouds stream across the sky while shadows pull back from the valley floor to reveal pronghorn antelope dancing through the sage brush. A few ridge lines away, the clatter of talus accompanies the movement of bighorn sheep. The slap and crack of bighorn rams clashing their heads together echoes through the valley.   [Read more…]

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