Reconsidering Sacred Spaces, Fire and Brimstone

Delivered in early fall of 2017, I was invited to give the keynote speech at the annual event for the Environmental Educators’ Association of Oregon. The speech was delivered in a small garden area, which surprised me as I’d planned much of the speech based on a metaphor about “this room we are in.” Nevertheless, following historic flooding in Houston, devastating summer wildfires and other global ecological disasters, the speech was well-received.

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I want to acknowledge this event is taking place on unceded indigenous land.

I’m often rightly accused of having a pretty abrasive rhetorical style. So I want to apologize in advance if anything I say to you today comes across as without tact. The point of this speech is to get lots of us thinking about humanity and the environment as interconnected in order to save life on earth, specifically our life. Human life is threatened. It is not as though an unknown killer stalks the planet. The earth isn’t dying a natural death, it is being killed, and the people killing creation have names and addresses. Given the urgency of this moment I hope you can forgive me for being blunt.

We often think of the environment as a sacred natural area. We see environment as a thing outside of cities. I and my fellow environmental justice activists push back pretty hard at this idea. YES, we revere the greatness of our mountains plains forests and coasts. But we see the lived environment as vital – not just where deer and salmon live and spawn, though those are our sacred siblings and they have the right to live. The places we live work learn pray and play all constitute an environment as well. The human environment. The places where we go about our humble human lives.

… That was a joke. Because our lives as humans are not humble in the slightest. I’m going to be funny, just wait.

If anything human beings have shown ourselves to be exceptionally arrogant in how we manage resources in our societies. Arrogant in the assumptions we make about what is acceptable to do as the predominant species on the globe. Arrogant in how some of us derive so many benefits from our urban planning and our conservation efforts, while other people suffer immensely from our exploitative labor practices in the developing world, our environmentally devastating extraction of resources in working class communities at home and around the globe, and our imperial aggression on foreign governments. Arrogant in how we maintain a lifestyle that would require four planets to sustain. Arrogant in maintaining that our urban areas, exurban areas, and our rural areas are divided when in fact they are connected. Arrogant in our insistence that a technological fix will come along to keep us living the same way we live now but somehow without all the devastation we see today. Arrogant to assume that we will save human life through individual consumer and lifestyle decisions instead of a dramatic overhaul of the way our economy is governed.

I want to start a discussion that I want you to take with you elsewhere. Let’s now for the sake of discussion say this room, this area, is our whole world. I also wrote this speech under the assumption it would be indoors. So let’s pretend we’re in an enclosed room. And in it, every continent, ocean, and square foot of atmosphere. Here in this enclosed space.

If I were to start a single fire in this room, you would probably kick me out. You’d call me an idiot for endangering our lives. The smoke would choke you. It would offend you. But most importantly: You would put out the fire. Or if it got bad enough you would call in experts and have them put out the fire. Except, again, this is all we have, this room. There is no outside expert to call, just us. If you wanted to survive it would be up to you to put it out. And then. Moving ahead. You would declare this is not a space for such burning. You’d figure out a way to make sure it never happens again. 

A key feature of our definition of our humanity begins at the moment we harnessed fire. And yet, did we truly harness fire?

In our cities and towns, in every internal combustion engine and incinerator and furnace and piece of digging equipment and coal and oil power plant we have fires raging. In this our one global home. Everywhere around us you can see the hubris of mankind lighting fires and making the assumption that we have them under control. 

How much fire propelled you into this room? Created your clothing, helped you arrive expeditiously, lighted your way, created the materials for your event, gave you the information that is printed on those handouts?

We do not control the natural processes of the globe. Those are governed by science and creation. Burning creates airborne carbon. Our economy is based on burning untold tons of nonrenewable and toxic substances made from the decayed and compressed bones of ancient animals and plants. As it turns out if you put enough carbon into the atmosphere you cause a mass extinction. Excessive atmospheric carbon is how every mass extinction in history was caused. It is a great irony we must recognize that the victims of those many mass extinctions are now, tens of thousands of years later, the fuels which are the driving force behind the mass extinction we are now living though. Too much carbon in the atmosphere and the era ends. And we are there right now. We all feel it and we don’t know what to do about it. 

But what happened? How did we get here? I don’t want to belabor this point but it must be said until it is understood: white supremacy settled this continent and made an absolute mess of this land. Settlers did this mess-making by ignoring any of the traditional ecological practices of the traditional native inhabitants, the people who lived here since time immemorial. 

We must all recognize that the conservation movement was racist in its origins – that white male decision makers believed the Indian to be inferior, and thought our tribes could not possibly be entrusted to maintain the land as the white man saw fit. And so a system of conservation made Native territory into federally managed land. Yet another great irony, that racism made the people with the most knowledge of this place out to be those who the state needed to exclude from management of the land. 

And now white supremacy lives here. This is the worldwide seat of white power. And Now, as the land is resisting its ongoing subjugation through superstorms and massive climate shifts, Native people are finally being recognized by the mainstream environmental movement as water protectors, and the defenders of the sacred, just as you’re beginning to recognize the ongoing leadership of communities of color in liberation struggles. Yet some white people don’t know if it’s their proper role to stand with us at Standing Rock, to march with a fist up for Black Lives Matter, to get arrested defending trans sisters of color against Nazis, to shut down airports for Muslims, to blockade ICE trucks for Dreamers. White people made this mess and now seem to want everyone else to clean it up. You need to be active in these struggles because they are environmental struggles. They all relate to how the world is being killed. To who is doing the killing and who is trying to do the saving. 

The belief has persisted for too long that nonwhite people have no contribution to make to this society. White supremacy and other systems of oppression justify placing black and brown bodies at the front lines of climate change and imperialism – the US military being the largest consumer of fossil fuels. Patriarchy justifies the rape of Mother Earth and her bounty for the short term gain of a few white men. The mass incarceration of black and native people for minor crimes, and their continued enslavement for profit, while many white war criminals and gross abusers of state and corporate power and privilege roam free. These are the ongoing disasters which are not resolved so simply as by voting. They must be resolved by cultural shift. They are the interrelated crises that are destroying our environments- our forests and coasts, our rivers and plains, as well as our gentrified neighborhoods with no access to healthful foods, no transit, no sidewalks, no tree canopy, no green spaces, no affordable housing, no living wage jobs, no clean air, no clean water, no good schools, no hospitals, and no reverence for the diverse cultures of the globe=.

We have severed our relationship to land and each other in allowing ourselves to compartmentalize these issues as though they don’t speak directly to our values.

Everywhere we can see the wanton destruction resulting from this system. The arrogance of white power is to assume it knows best how to govern a thousand global indigenous ecosystems under a one-size-fits-all regime of central control and central wealth and power concentration. There is nothing Democratic about this system. It is militaristic and terrifying to those of us who value life, who value the sacred, to any of us whose families have ever suffered at the barrel of US tanks and guns. This global governance model is not suited for good people. It is only suited for those white men in suits who are profiting off of destruction while exploring how to colonize space and other celestial bodies. They themselves know they’re nearly done destroying this planet. And for them, it is time to move on to the next. 

Stephen Hawking actually said this. “We need to be off the planet in 100 years.” A recent article had the headline, “Even the Most Far-Out Visions of the Future Imagine Capitalism Is still Alive.” It is literally so difficult to imagine changing the way our economy works to actually sustain life on Earth that one of the smartest people on the planet sees no way for us to stay here and fix it.

But imagine the sheer amount of resources these rich people would pile into getting a livable domicile off the earth. In a final hurrah, they would launch the last good parts of this universally-unique oasis into space, almost certainly propelled by combustible fuel that destroys this place further, leaving us with nothing whatsoever. To fund this venture they will insist we keep the economy of this earth intact, lest we risk their escape from the destruction they’re wreaking. And they will seek to commodify more and more of this earth – privatizing our water, our transportation systems, making money off of carbon trading. If they could bottle the air we breathe and sell it to us, they absolutely would. And truthfully when we buy our health care from these vultures, we are paying rent on our human form. We are leasing our own lives. When we let polluters trade credits for pollution, we commodify Mother Earth just as readily as bottling air. 

These are distressing times.

It is in this context that as an Indigenous man I’m visiting you today to talk to you, mostly white and privileged, mostly middle class, environmental educators about our sacred environment. I was asked to celebrate your good work, and I do, absolutely, celebrate your many contributions to the coming generations’ deepening understanding of this sacred home of ours. Your education opens the eyes of many to the mysteries of the natural world. And with that congratulations I must also demand that you do more. 

Thank you sincerely for the chance to speak here. I’m honored to be before you at this vital moment, in the hopes I can compel you to take action, the right action, to save ourselves. I want to leave you with a few thoughts regarding how we think of sacred spaces, and our relationship to our land. 

First, a favor: I never want to hear any of you talk again about reducing your footprint. Certainly, leave no trace when you camp, but that’s not what I mean. Stop pretending we aren’t making an outsize dent in the world. That’s long past responsible. Our collective carbon footprint is huge. It is time rather to have a positive footprint. A large one. You can’t destroy a planet as a species and then retreat into a belief that your shopping habits, personal fuel usage, and recycling and composting will solve it all. The US military is the largest consumer of fossil fuels. Your Prius does nothing to change that. We have lost the right to minimize our own impact. It is time to maximize our response to our impact. It is time we embrace how much we can do instead of shrinking in the face of what we have done. 

It’s time to reconsider sacred space.

Many of you would agree with me that Multnomah Falls, previous to its recent incineration, was considered a sacred place. Will it still be once the fire is entirely out, and the dust settles? What about this hypothetically enclosed room we’re in? You recognize that a fire in this room violates its ability to sustain your life. Is this room sacred to you before the fire? What about the city of Houston? Before hearing about its recent flooding, did you consider it a sacred place? Is it sacred to you now that you see how its destruction has devastated so many lives? What about Bangladesh? Puerto Rico ? Nepal? The island nation of Tuvalu, which is currently entirely underwater. Are these places sacred to you? Did you see them as such before they were destroyed by the ravages of Western decadence?

Our conception of sacredness needs to change. We can’t compartmentalize it. Maya Angelou once said that Justice is like air, we either all have it or none of us have it. I would offer that sacredness is the same. Either we see this room, the city of Houston, East Portland and downtown Portland, Multnomah Falls, Cuba, Antigua and Puerto Rico as well as Miami and New Orleans, Vietnam, North Korea, Bangladesh, Nepal, either we see each of them as sacred, or nothing is sacred. Either we treat our Urban environment with the same respect we treat our forests, or our cities will burn next. As the radicals say, an injury to one is an injury to all. We injure many for a few to live easily. But we can’t live forever off of injury. 

And so you, environmental educators, have work to do. You are at the front lines of empowering the coming generation to live differently. To maximize a positive impact. To understand that the forests are absolutely sacred, just like our own homes are sacred. To understand that “nature” is everything around you. That human beings were once just animals and these homes and buildings and factories are our dens and nests and hives. Our animal nature would have us living very different lives. But we have reasoned our way into modern society where everything is on fire and we are a cartoon dog saying “this is fine.” We can’t have all these fires. It will kill us all. 

Indigenous people, people with traditional cultures, found a way to celebrate the plants, animals, foods, and places that made up our homes. Nature is not viewed as a place outside of where you live. Nature is only where you live. To live in harmony with nature, we have to restore traditional ecological knowledge but this will not happen unless we restore ecological reverence, a deep sense of how interconnected this globe our home and all its people plants animals microflora and charismatic megafauna are. 

Your role as educators is to make this so. To not only teach others to revere the natural world but to revere human connection to it, and stewardship of it. To not only teach the names and phenotypes of various species but to teach the proper care of and respect for and harmony with these species. To impart wisdom from the tribes and the refugees and the traditional inhabitants of the land you find yourself settled upon. And ultimately your work is the same as everyone else’s – to unsettle this land, to communicate that you do not own land but land owns you, feeds homes and clothes you. To teach the people to live in harmony with this land – from hood to coast, high desert to high school, gorge to community garden. You must show the youth, and all people, the sacredness of their own backyards in the same breath as you revere Multnomah Falls, or the Oregon Coast, or our high deserts, or our mountaintops. Show them the dangers of the air toxins in their neighborhood, while showing reverence for the fresh air in our forests. Don’t just emphasize the natural beauty that remains, but emphasize the built environment, the good, bad and ugly of our human footprint. Learn for yourselves, if you do not know, and show a better way. If you fail at this task, we will lose all these places. 

We love to place blame on an individual for the fire in the gorge. But given our human arrogance, globally, we are all a 15 year old boy with a firecracker. Every year we destroy forests the size of Rhode Island, ruin tens of thousands of acres in our one sacred place and, when we are confronted by our actions, we act faultless. We take no accountability for how our disrespect of the land makes us responsible for the disruption of natural cycles and the resulting disasters. The real individuals who are at fault here are in this room – this room representing everyone and everything. We all need to own it and we all need to change. We need to force systems of oppression to cease to exist. That includes systems of ecological extraction, economic exploitation, and militarism. It’s all connected to keeping itself going.  

We will lose the beauty of our environments to our arrogance. Our forests and our cities will run black with smoke. And when we lose our lives to these disasters, all the education we’ve learned and taught will disappear.

It is said that our species became human when we learned to build fires. I contend we will not be animals again, will not live in harmony with our planet again, until we learn to put them out.