Bradley Jones
Pod 14
10.01.04
profundity of disconnect
"It all starts with something that doesn't quite fit. A contradictory fact that just won't go away. It doesn't have to be a big thing, it can be a little annoying fact in the back of someone's mind. Take the fact that summer is hot and winter is cold. Geocentric astronomy failed to explain why the seasons were so different, a problem that kept bothering 16th century Nicolas Copernicus. The world hasn't been the same since."
-Michael David Schacker, The Organic Shift
In attempting to look back on my environmental heritage, I thought at first that I found nothing. I thought that I had looked into an empty set of relations - that the environment had absolutely no bearing on my upbringing. I wasn't exactly raised a pagan. However, on further reflection I found rather interesting and distinct symptoms and signs of a negative relation with what I now understand as deep ecology. The relation I’ve examined is more accurately not a relation at all, but only significant because of the profundity of the disconnect. It would appear that my heritage is the culmination of a centuries long attempt to distance human life from the messiness of the biosphere, and create instead an imagined shining jewel of perfectly insulated mechanical human order. A world, unfortunately, without room for the complexity of environmental effects, which, discounted by the gem's creators for too long, have made their importance increasingly more tangible.
At first I wasn't sure it would be possible to write a paper on a lack of connection, or how I could describe the significance of the space between two antithetical paradigms. But as I thought about it, I realized that it was exactly this disconnect that has likely been the single largest influence in my life - for whenever I asked the bigger questions of my family, and of society at large, I only found an echo of "there is no answer here," which kept me looking for a very long time.
I never accepted that there weren't answers to the problems that I found with the world, and I couldn't be content until I found some. This lack of answer and understanding had manifold ramifications on me, in my psychological and intellectual development. In retrospect, it is clear that I reacted with increasing hostility to every new lie and inadequate truth that I was confronted with. Society suggests to children that there is always an answer, yet instead of sensible or intuitive explanations, you are always directed to higher and higher authorities. Fortunately, I never, ever listened to them. Unfortunately, rebellion does not equal or even necessarily cause positive change.
Of course, I was obviously imprinted and educated by the teachers' examples in many ways. However, I find myself lucky in that my first instinct has always and forever been disbelief, especially of authority figures. On the other hand, I find myself unlucky in that in all that doubting and questioning in my early life I was never directed to anything which wasn't fundamentally bullshit. In effect, by rebelling against my human mentors, I was simply subjected to proportionately more education by the mass culture, i.e. The TV and radio that I absorbed almost constantly.
In looking into my family's history, I’ve seen only a drive toward modernism, with it's anthropomagnification and endlessly self-referenced solutions. My grandparents and parents all worked very hard to make sure that I had a chance to be bourgeois, and that is exactly what I was raised to be - an member of an elite, tasteful and intelligent upper-middle class. Ultimately it was only a fortuitous combination of three things prevented this; my rebellious instinct which slowly helped me to think for myself, a discovery of fascinating conceptual and utilitarian complexity, and a concussion. All that, and the fundamental unsustainability of the American lifestyle.
heritage is a multi-foliate thing.
When you're talking about heritage in Jackson, Mississippi, or in most any part of the deep south, you're talking about race. Race is the issue in the south, almost all political movement is still oriented around it. Black history month in the jackson public schools was a big deal. Everyone was perpetually concerned about healing the race divide, to the exclusion of most anything else. By sixth grade, I was really sick of it. Several times through public school I was in the minority with respect to black people; in fact, I was the only white male in my eighth grade class.
I was taught in detail, several times, the complexities of the race history of our state, and knew the present day complexities from personal experience. I knew that most of my friends were black, but there were lots of parts of town that I was scared to visit, and that those parts were mostly populated by blacks. In my hometown of Fulton, in northeast Mississippi, I can remember my grandmother talking about the new church they were opening and the discussion they'd had about whether or not to allow blacks in the congregation. I was aware of many white racists in my neighborhood, I ran into them, of all ages, wherever I went. The tension was everywhere, but it never interested me in the slightest. My take on it was simple; it's just plain dumb. I wanted nothing to to with it, with either side of the issue. Arguing something so obvious seemed pointless. I had interest neither in either preaching to the choir, nor arguing with the bizarre views of sincere racists. I wished lazily that everyone would just get over it, and meanwhile tried to find a discussion that was worth having.
My personal heritage was another issue in which I had a total lack of interest, despite incessant indoctrination as to it's importance. My family was as american as MTV. There was some rumor of scotch-irish heritage on my mothers side, a feature ubiquitous in the south. Someone somewhen had certainly come from peasant farmers, but no one could remember any actual immigrants in our family line, so it always seemed pretty irrelevant. My father was an army brat and so lost any roots he might have had to constant transplanting. Which left me, in the eighties and nineties, with all the buzz about finding your roots, your origins, your ethnicity, as nothing but a product of our mass media culture, trying to believe in the importance of what I was taught, but never finding any.
My childhood in suburban Mississippi was typical of the eighties. My parents worked all the time, so I was raised on microwave pizza and TV. Very few of my early memories take place outside. I remember gardening was one of my mother's many hobbies, and it got a proportionate share of her attention, which is to say, rather little. I remember once when I was young, I tried growing radishes in the middle of our back yard. One of the few benefits of a southern upbringing was a fine appreciation of vegetables, cooked as deliciously as any meat or processed food. I can still remember so clearly the woman across the street who would take my sister and I for an afternoon and cook sweet creamed corn, green beans with ham hock, mashed potatoes and butter, all in the classic southern style. As near as I can remember, my favorite childhood snacks were cucumbers and radishes, but I was enthusiastic about everything from green beans and corn to cauliflower and brussel sprouts. My radish experiment, however, led nowhere.
My childhood was more about books and computers than about ever seeing sunlight. The nearest thing to a natural refuge I ever had was a large concrete drainage where I’d occasionally try to build dams, or explore the sewers as far as my courage would take me. It wasn't until my twenties that I found people who could teach me about the beauty of wilderness. Until then it's only appeal was escape, since you could be fairly sure of your privacy in any forested area.
In every case, the nonhuman was trivialized or marginalized. There were pets and lawns, and there were bugs and weeds. Nature was made into a non-issue, perpetually irrelevant. I never even gave it a second thought, until in college I read Paul and Anne Erhlich's "The Population Bomb" and "The Permaculture Design Manual." At the same time as I was reading these books I had a fairly serious bicycle accident in which I flew over my handlebars, landed on my face, and broke it. After recuperating for a week or so, I returned to school, and almost immediately started attending activist meetings. My roommate also reported that I seemed different, though subjectively, I still felt like me. I’ve still never been able to determine whether it was the exposure to new ideas or blunt force trauma that finally made me see things a different way. Perhaps a little of both.
My early adventures into environmentalism seemed like I was exploring an entirely new world. It was something that I had never been exposed to, that I had no way of integrating into what I had seen of life except for slow and painful self-force-fed osmosis. It was quite difficult. Many times it looked like apathy and anesthetic would win out over the sensitivity and understanding I needed to attain a deep ecological outlook. Without even knowing it, I had been the victim of a pervasive and generations-long indoctrination of powerlessness, insensitivity and hopelessness, and it was this heritage I was fighting back against.
My father's father was born to a family of arkansan cotton farmers during an age when family-farmed cotton was slowly becoming insupportable. My grandfathers family believed that it would all turn around eventually, that "cotton was king," despite a clear trend towards mechanization and new crops. My grandfather Doyle apparently tried for quite a while to make his father see this and begin to try new things. His family, however, stuck to it to the last. After Doyle had abandoned that particular sinking ship, he went off trying to build enough capital to become a cattle rancher. Though he held a succession of rather adventurous jobs, he never made enough to start his dream. He was eventually was forced to join the army, for "three hots and a cot."
He was smart and capable, and repeatedly rose to warrant officer (the highest military position open to anyone without a GED) and was repeatedly demoted for conflicts with authority. He was a carver and a whittler and minor inventor, deadly with a throwing knife, and apparently capable of clipping a cigarette into quarters with a bull-whip. He was stationed at home during W.W.II, and met my grandmother after the war. They lived in california while my family lived in Mississippi, so I saw them very rarely. He died of Parkinson's when I was twelve.
My father's mother, Barbara, was born to a middle class family in berkeley, and did typical stuff that you'd imagine a grandmother would do living through the forties, fifties and sixties, until my parents generation came of age. She played piano, worked in the school system, learned how to operate punch card machines, and got a degree in art later in life. She has always seemed to me to be smart and capable, but broken, and had a lot of difficulty relating to people. She met my grandfather while she was in school, and he was a senior sergeant at the rotc. They got married and settled down in the contemporary style. She lives near mill valley, and still golfs and dates.
My mother's father was the oldest of six children, in Itawamba county Mississippi, one of the poorest counties in the poorest state in the nation. His mother died in childbirth when he was 14, and his father died two years later. My grandfather delmus was left with raising them all, and promised not to get married until all of them were out of high school. While raising them he held a number of jobs in printing and publishing. He eventually bought his home town's news paper, the fulton news beacon, changed it's name to the Itawamba county times, and developed it into a successful and award-winning publication. He was industrious, and an industrialist, and always kept up with the state of the art. He was a chronic workaholic, and died of a heart attack before I was born.
My mother's mother was born poor as dirt on a failing subsistence homestead in rural Mississippi. Her father died when she was very young, and her mother and sisters all moved to live with family in Amory, Mississippi. She somehow managed to get through college and become a teacher. After marrying my grandfather, she got a masters in library science, and became the librarian for Itawamba county. She was and is a very proper southern lady, educated and polite and bored.
There is one more aspect of my environmental "heritage" that is particularly uncomfortable. It is biome of the deep south itself. It is particularly hated all it's inhabitants, in my opinion, this dislike is fairly rational. To start, the climate of the region is naturally hot and humid. This effect is magnified by the glare and thermal mass of ubiquitous concrete and metal. The terrain of Mississippi is naturally swampy, but it's natural aspect is conquered by gullies and drainage, leaving still, moist air, full of small, darting mosquitoes, parasites, and airborne mold.
To go outside on a hot summer day in any town or suburban area in Mississippi is truly a dreadful thing for the weak American constitution. It's a bright broiling sauna, full of things that want to feed off of you. Thats one reason I left, and the main reason I can never live there again; I’m allergic to the air.
the salvageable
It seems clear to me now that my family's history has been defined by the drive towards exactly the sort of dysfunctional society we have today. There is no evidence of any questioning of anthropoimperialist ideology at any point in recent history. Instead, my family has been a textbook example of humanity at it's industrial apex, self-made and successful. Unfortunately, my generation has been forced to call all my ancestors achievements into question, and assess them from a radically different standpoint. From their point of view, I was given everything, uncounted opportunities. From an environmental heritage point of view, I was given nothing except the chance to invent one.
It's easier than it feels it should be to forgive my family for their oversight, their error in analysis. From some angles it feels necessary, even powerful and portentous, that society was forced to come full circle, to attempt the impossible and finally eliminate and replace itself in order to create the next big idea. So, in every way, I feel honored and blessed that I have been placed at the crest of the breaking wave, where I am afforded the most incredible view in every direction, and unlimited excitement and anticipation for what the world will look like when our wave meets the sand and falls back.
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