“Are You Making Distinctions?”

Like all of us, I’ve been struggling these past few weeks, trying to balance panic and some kind of clear-eyed attempt at threat assessment. I grew up around a lot of White Russians and Holocaust survivors, and the question of “how do you know when it’s time?” was in the air. Grandmothers and aunties told stories of who knew early, who bought the tickets even though her husband thought it was unnecessary, told him she was taking the kids, and he could come too. Who waited until too late and couldn’t get out. Doing geneology in high school, one classmate found out her people were Russian Jews. She had no idea. They’d gotten out through Shanghai.

I keep looking at cheap houses in France, dreaming of selling my house here, stashing the money, spending a fraction of it on a house in a country where there is still a government, where I speak the language (badly), where the food is good and there is still a real commitment both to society and to scaring the rich on the regular with massive strikes when they get over their skis. But I live with a man who is deeply rooted here, in the house he built with his own hands, on the side of a mountain he has walked countless times, a mountain that is his home. Not everyone is portable. And I was single until well into my 40s. We like eachother. We don’t like to be apart. And so, I’m not going anywhere. Not yet anyhow.

I’ve been returning to Rebecca Solnit’s work. Like the last time we went through this, I’ve been cracking open my copy of Hope in the Dark again, looking up her Guardian essays. And now she’s started a newsletter project called Meditations in an Emergency. I know we’re all drowning in newsletters, but you should sign up for hers. In one of her first posts, Solnit points to the ways that they’re trying to convince us we’re not connected to one another:

… their theory of change seems to be that they are going to do stuff and then it will be done. Like they’re moving furniture around, like you and I and the trans and immigrant communities and federal workers and Canada and Mexico are just so many sofas and chairs that are going to sit where they place us. Like we’re inanimate objects. Maybe everything is dead in the sad lonely worldview inside their head. Which would also explain their recalcitrance about climate and nature: if you see it as a collection of inert objects rather than an intricate living system in which what you do to any one part may affect the whole, you grant yourself more license to meddle. 

The title of this newsletter comes from an event Alta Magazine did last spring, with Gary Snyder, in celebration of his 90th birthday and the 20th anniversary re-issue of Practice of the Wild. Even among those gathered for that event, even among those who care deeply about nature and the wild, a persistent division crept in, a division of class, a division between those who do the physical work and those who think and talk about physical work. The first question John Freeman asked Gary was: “I wondered if I could ask you what you learned about your place in the world by working among miners and people that were logging? It seems counterintuitive for someone who cared so much about the wild”

“Are you making distinctions?” Gary snapped.

Freeman was momentarily taken aback. Gary was speaking both from his position as a lifelong practitioner of Zen, and as someone who grew up working class, on a smallholding in Oregon, and who has spent most of his adult life on a smallholding in the Sierra Nevada. We once lost Gary at the Art of the Wild conference I helped run as a grad student at UC Davis. The conference was held at Olympic Valley, and we found Gary at the building next door, where Husquavarna was having a chain saw demo. He was trying out new saws. Just as Gary used to tell us in the course he taught on Zen and classical Chinese and Japanese poetry that “if you can find the Zen in the poem, you know you’re wrong,” so too, as a person who actually lives in a rural area and who has collaborated with Forest Service, loggers, and recreationalists to develop a forest management plan, he is not someone who is going to contribute to the idea that there’s some kind of binary opposition between “miners and loggers” and “people who love the wild.”

“It’s all wild,” Snyder replied to Freeman. “I learned to love the wild. That’s what you have to do in a way. You have to be part of it. You have to know what the tools are. You have to talk to the people who have worked in it.”

I’ve known a lot of loggers and miners out here. I once had a boyfriend come over with his well-worn tape of Sometimes a Great Notion, which he wanted me to watch — for the logging. He’d read the book, he knew the literary significance of it. This was a guy who spent hundreds of hours in a fishing boat guiding Jim Harrison. Dan wanted me to see the movie for the logging, because at 19, he and his best friend had gone out to the Pacific Northwest. They’d been those guys with spikes on their boots, hundreds of feet in the air. It had been one of the great adventures of his youth. (He’d also nearly starved that winter, trying to get gigs, because like our current administration, big logging and mining companies see workers as furniture.)

Among the “pieces of furniture” the current administration are moving around are an as-yet-unknown number of our neighbors here. The north entrance to Yellowstone National Park is in our county, these are our neighbors, people who have worked in the park for decades, doing good work, keeping people and animals safe, restoring historic buildings. The Forest Service too. I pass their building every morning when I go to walk the dog. Nearly 5% of Montana’s working population works for the Federal Government. Federal jobs are some of the few in the state with salaries, and benefits. Some of the few jobs that will get you a mortgage. “Parasites,” the MuskRats have called workers like these. The same term they’ve used for our neighbors and family members who are on Social Security, or Medicaid, or probably soon, the ACA. Ripping out great swathes of the governmental ecosystem, as though everything isn’t connected, as though all of us aren’t connected.

In my horror and despair, I find myself turning to the Instagram accounts of the Sheldrick Trust and it’s offshoot, the Reteti Elephant Sanctuary. Both organizations are dedicated to the rescue and, when possible, restoration of elephants and other Kenyan animals to the wild, and their social media feeds are a balm in these times. They’re full of people whose job it is to love traumatized animals, to restore them to emotional and physical health, and to teach them, with the help of slightly older cohorts of rescued animals, how to be a rhino, or elephant, or ostrich, or giraffe — or in the case of one tiny rascal at Sheldrick right now — a warthog.

Mornings, while trying to be quiet as we drink coffee together and Chuck tries to wake up, I log in and see loving humans caring for animals, animals who are each individual, who have terrible stories. There’s one poor little elephant at Reteti who lost most of his trunk, it was eaten by hyenas while he was stuck in a well, but they’re nursing him back to health, seeing what he can do, watching him figure out how to eat. There’s a rhino baby at Sheldrick who is struggling to recover from having been attacked on her hind end, but there she is, her little blanket tied around her, with her keeper, heading out in the morning to see what the day brings. The little tiny elephants and rhinos, like most large mammals, need round the clock care, so keepers sleep in their box stalls with them. They each have names, and characteristics, and often the morning posts are about how the little ones are learning to be with one another. There’s several wild-born babies, born to former orphans who brought their little ones back to the center, who live just outside the gates. One bossy little girl was very upset when a new baby arrived, dethroning her. The posts have followed her as she’s learned to be a big sister, learned to help take care of the littler ones.

Is this just shameless anthropomorphism? Shilling for donations? These organizations run on donations, and of course we all love baby animals. So I went to the scholarly literature, and it seems, as I had hoped, that both these organizations are at the forefront of breaking down old thinking about human-animal relationships. Turns out that elephants in particular, with their long lives, their long memories, their deep social bonds, they too are not furniture. When wildlife managers translocated groups of young male elephants in South Africa, unmoored from their social bonds, they turned violent. One group killed over 100 rhinos, and it was not until managers began re-introducing matriarchs and family groups into those territories that the violence abated.

Reteti Elephant Sanctuary, a newer Kenyan organization was established in 2017. Reteti’s website declares that they are “An ever-growing movement of grass roots level, community focused conservation … and a new wave of wildlife protection.” Where Sheldrick hires male keepers, Reteti hires women to work with the animals, and one of their stated goals is to build safety not only for the animals, but for the people living in the area. For example, during the Covid pandemic, they had trouble getting formula for the elephants, so they turned to local women, who herd and milk goats. Turns out the goat milk formula worked really well for the elephants, and helped local women build economic security. They’re still using it, and by doing so, are building a circular economy, where the elephants and the people both benefit.

I think what’s so heartbreaking about this historical moment for so many of us, is watching the destruction of all these mechanisms of interconnection that have been built over, let’s say the decades since the Civil Rights Act of 1968. It has taken extraordinary effort to break down barriers of race, gender, class — and on the ecological side — of species. We have come more and more to understand how interrelated we all are, we have built institutions of care. They’re far from perfect, we all know that — but seeing these marauders tear out the wires, destroy everything that “modern” society has built — in order to reinstate hierarchies of domination and control, all in the service of making more money — well, I don’t know what we do next.

Everyone keeps saying it. Build community. Reach out to those within your orbit. Shelter those among us who are most in danger.

I suppose this is why I find the elephant rescue organizations so, heartening? encouraging? In the wake of the terrible damage that colonialism has done to those places, to the people, to the land, to the animals — the sight every morning of keepers feeding bottles to elephants, walking them out to the mud bath, shoveling dirt onto them so they won’t sunburn, managing their social interactions as though it’s a big elephant day care, then putting blankets on them, and tucking them into sturdy box stalls full of clean hay, making sure they’re not alone, that they sleep like the babies they are — all of this gives me some hope that we too can get through this.

I don’t know what the mechanism for surviving this is going to be, but I do know that we are not the monsters this administration wants to convince us we are.