PS. Say hello to green eyes if you can. Much love – and a kiss.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/04/fashion/04love.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&sq=modern%20love&st=cse&scp=6

Or maybe I’m just confused?

I’d really like to work on a non-male oriented greatest forest defeders web site with you and others… Of course at this point I don’t even know who you are? I did a search on Polywog and found Micah on myspace, maybe that’s the guy I talked to? I’m confused… Let me know what’s up?

Be well, Deane
http://www.myspace.com/olyecology

We last spoke at the the women & environmentalism panel at ELAW last March.

I just gave your paper the old grad-school skim and was very pleased to see how much you made of the early 21st century oriented years when you were most involved in forest defense.

Reading this triggers so much passion in me, so much I want to say! Your welcome to call 360-789-7843 or email me to talk more.

In grad school we talk of the “So What?” of our papers. And to me the “so what” that’s most significant in this subject matter is the plight of non-male identified forest defenders.

Did you know that the first person to ever appeal an old growth timber sale in the Pacific Northwest in 1976 was a women? The first old growth redwood forest ever saved was saved by a women? I could go on and on about the two dozen most significant women forest defenders of the PNW. I’d actually like to work with you and others to create a website dedicated to the history of non-male identified forest defenders. And this desire is a good lead in to my critique of your framing.

But first realize that their is a certain narcissistic quality to the gender bender era of PNW forest defense (1998-2005?) In this era it could be argued that the previous emphasis of personal liberation thru the protection and restoration of ancient ecosystems was upstaged by personal liberation through questioning society oppression and isms with the actual forest defending part merely being the stage or setting where it takes place. And in my view this approach leans more towards the masculine-oriented utilization of forest resources rather then the defense and protection of forest resources as the reason and purpose for uniting as defenders in the first place. And that’s why I think we need a broader more intentional frame of the who, where and how of the greatest non-male identified forest defenders. And from this frame far greater insight will be provided as to what’s going wrong and write in the war of the sexes.

And as the saying goes: the first major sacrifice in any war is the truth. And because of this the analysis as currently framed obfuscates a huge amount of insight. For example To say that the Warner Creek campaign was a single-issue focused campaign that didn’t pay any attention to sexual abuse that occurred in basecamp is not at all true. (alot to say about that one.)

In addition the green scare was mentioned as primary in your introduction, yet not at all represented in the main body of your work? This is discomforting in that most readers question the legitimacy of arson and the fact that the issue has been sidestepped weakens the integrity of your overall work. More important to me though, is the loss of the primary emphasis on the protection of rare and ancient forest ecosystem, a concept that very few humans have taken the time to even understand! And to not explain it to the readers hardly at all… it’s not only a form of normative oppression but it also takes away from the clarity of narrative / frame.

So what if the cliche’ frame of “the battle of the sexes” was replaced with a women’s liberation framed analysis of what is sustainable & correct direct action when it comes to the successful defense of forest ecosystems? From this frame I suggest an analysis of risky life endangering behavior, as well as green scare oriented long-term jail oriented behaviors could be contrasted with what great women forest defenders accomplished as well as endured?

What I’m trying to say is that from a women’s liberatory frame the forest defense scene can be seen as way that 1) inspires the feminine value of thinking through the impacts of our civil-disobedience and community building behaviors, 2) inspire the feminine value of having a holistic all inclusive approach to eco-defense and groups dynamics, and 3) most of all we need to inspire the feminine value of persistent, sustained robustly developing beneficial change of societal mores and laws no matter how insurmountable they may at first seem. —> And of course the given here is that society is horribly wrong to mama nature because it only values ecosystems in utilitarian / consumptive ways.

That’s enough for now. I’d like to dialogue / collaborate with you further on this! I think something really significant and culturally evolving power can come out of your endeavors so keep up the good work!

Be well, Deane
http://forestpolicyresearch.org

PS: If there’s a way we could put something together to present at this years eco-feminism panel at ELAW in MArch I’d put much effort into helping get it together?

I share a strong interest (and some knowledge) regarding Black history and women’s history in the region, as well as a long-standing interest in the life and written works of C.E.S. Wood. I think that radical protests in the forests of Oregon and the western US has had terribly negative long-term consequences for the economy, ecology, biology, and aesthetics of the region, however.

Tim Ingalsbee, et al., are not heroes and protectors of the forests, as presented, in my view they are enemies and destroyers. However heroic they may paint their own involvement and ideals, or however much they strive to capitalize on their 15 minutes of infamy.

My PhD is in catastrophic wildfire history of western Oregon. Warner Creek currently is an ugly, dangerous mess of dead and dying forest fuels waiting to explode into an even greater inferno of death and destruction next time it goes up. Thank you, forest protectors! You really screwed up the area, thanks in large degree to the efforts and “fire ecology” expertise of Dr. Ingalsbee and his cohorts.

Oh, well, they were “well intentioned,” some of them, I guess. Our forests and rural economies are largely destroyed by their actions, but the participants likely felt like the Crusaders of the Middle Ages when they were acting out to the local public’s detriment. On one side of the continent we have white nights and damsels in distress; on the other we have rape, pillage, and destruction. Depends on your point of view and whose God is on your side, I guess.

I suspect this is a paper you wrote for one of your classes. Printing the footnoted citations would be a good addition for your blog readers, too.

Keep up the good (written) work, and keep an open mind. Learn about the “Six-Year Jinx” of Oregon’s Tillamook Fires to better understand the sealed fate of Warner Creek. No one is happy with the result. It is not good. You have created an ugly dangerous palce where once beauty existed.

Sorry I’ve been slacking so badly reading and editing Apex. It is on the agenda for the night to read some more.

Win and I went to Laughing Planet and Sweetlife today, and I told her stories about riding the tandem around in the dark and the rain early in the morning with you long, but not so long ago. Miss you. Come home soon, I’ll be waiting.

cheers–
little light
SPEAK! Radical Women of Color Media Collective

I know you have been out having lots of fun adventures, and those of us who don’t experience them with you want to see life in NY, and read the musings of polywog.

What’s your Revelation?

How are you? I was thinking about you just now, having just got back from travelling! (and recalling the travelling i did with you)

How is it out there? I think Im gonna pass through in early winter, just for a couple weeks (or less! for REAL this time!)

And… I think I know that person in those pictures. I think I met him at witchcamp, in oregon, and he seemed awesome. weird! SMALL world!

Much love!

Thank you.

that’s a lot to consider i think, but interesting to think about

the second paragraph, i have questions/comments about:

-i honestly don’t like the word ‘discursive.’ i do not find its meaning self-evident; i feel it comes across as overly jargony, i read it as overly jargony, designed to be shared among a specific class of academics in the know.

-the film that you were referring to is called ‘the truman show’

-who is ‘they?’ this ‘they’ seems elusive. i’m very curious. who is accountable for ‘naturalizing’ this social reality. who is responsible?

one book suggestion i have is pierre bourdieu’s language and symbolic power. bourdieu’s writing is very dense, but the book contains a general introduction to his ‘theory of practice,’ or what is also called ‘reflexive sociology.’ from memory, i no longer have the book: bourdieu writes a lot about how the academy’s theories of language and cognition are informed by a linguists’ practical need to secure ‘capital’ (which is both symbolic and material) in the social world. and yet, they provide ostensibly ‘universal’ theories of how language works for human begins. bourdieu notes we do what we do out of a practical basis: survival and thrival in the social world. his book explores how humans in the social world (divided along race, class, gender, ways of speaking, et al) use language or speech acts in a practical sense. i think this book could be informative to your thoughts about assumptions…

why do you end your very thoughtful, deep, questioning, probing post, with “of course i have no idea what i am talking about”? don’t you…

respectfully…
a cricket

glad you’re out there, traveling, being alive, being wild and free.

remember when I said I wanted to help you with your blog, and then as if from a big cyber dumpster of God, WordPress just gifted you some extra space? well, i still appreciate your blog and want to help it to keep going, but now I have a new idea about how to do that. i’ll fill you in next time we talk.

e

Thanks for sharing your poetry with the world. Your poetry is great, and inspiring, and although I’m sure I interpret it differently than you meant when you wrote it, I think it is brilliant.

I miss you lots, and am reminded of how amazing you are every time I spend an evening with someone new (like tonight), and I am left thinking about how wonderful your energy is and how rare it is to find a person who is so full of life and desire to be their best.

Keep posting!

Eug

I cannot remember any of Graeber’s other critiques right now, so you are probably right in calling them shallow, and I have had the criticism you mentioned of anarcho-primitivism for a long time. OF course I am not really a GA’er in any sense and I am pretty critical of their perspective…especially on art, language, race, gender, and class.

Pablo

I also liked fragments but its missing a lot. Most of it is rather shallow and just passing statements. I agree that he dismisses anti-civ stuff very quickly but from what I remember he had some good criticisms of it as well. I think he is especially correct in pointing out that JZ cherry picks his anthro data and is about 30 years behind on his research as well.

I am calm, yet at this moment the cafe is fast.

Keep writing.

This is the best writing I have ever seen you do. Not only does it bring to light some of the most cutting edge ideas necessary to break down the boundaries of culture and nature, it is easy to read and flows together in a way that someone who is new to the ideas you present could follow.

I am in a crazy room right now with kids listening to Spanish cartoons, and adults making dinner, so I am going to cut my comment short for now. However I want to emphasize the importance of this paper to my life, and the amount that your study, your drive, your persistance has changed one person´s life. Mine.

Thanks. Keep it up. Your trip is backed by awesome work.

I do like where you are going and you could turn any one of those subtopics into a great masters thesis, in my opinion.

I am not the book review editor for Green Theory and Praxis (www.greentheoryandpraxis.org). If you ever want to turn anything you are doing on, that relates to forest defense or environmental issues, you should look at sending it to them. Also, let me know if you ever want to do a book review. Its a great way to get some stuff on your vita while not doing a painful amount of work (3 pages or so of writing). Plus you get some free books!

I have to admit that for me I need to write about things that I am personally invested in which is why I write about FNB, Forest Defense, Anarchism, etc. That being said, all those topics sound interesting and you have already written an undergrad thesis on FD. You might want to move away from that and try something new? There is nothing at all wrong with expanding your knowledge base. That being said, I feel that it would be more work and for your thesis you might want to get done quicker and writing about what you know could help that. Just remember that you have to pick a topic that interests you enough to spend a year, or two, on it. You have to make sure that its not some thing you think is neat today but something that you can spend all the time working on. Just some idea. I have no real advice that I can give you. I am in the same boat. Every months something else makes me excited…I feel its the biggest problem. I want to write and learn about EVERYTHING.

Also, would you mind me reading your FD thesis? I would love to read it. I will probably discuss StrawDevil and Fall Creek in my dissertation and I know you have some great insight on them!

I really like your blog. Way to go!
I’m a student at Acadia university in Wolfville, Nova Scotia studying Sociology and Gender & Feminism. I’m looking for some good reads on anti-assimilationist politics/theory/ ideas. Any suggestions? Looking forward, Tracy

Thanks for posting about the project and web site. I’m really excited about New York, you’ve got to let me know if there are any vegan treats in that city that can’t be missed! I hope I’ll get a chance to see you then.

The other day you said “I’m afraid of the ‘c’ word.” But I don’t think you are. I think you are afraid of being trapped, afraid to static relationships, afraid of time commitments. Afraid of the “t” word, trapped, or time, might be more accurate. You are in fact one of the most committed people I have ever met, but in ways of radical ever evolving personal integrity, not in a static drift.

You are indeed committed to the idea of anarchy, of free love, of joy, of honesty of accountability. You are committed to health, to the protection of beauty and bodily integrity.

As Ani says, “buildings and bridges are made to bend in the wind, to withstand the world that’s what it takes. All that steel and stone are no match for the air my friend, what doesn’t bend brakes.”

Yes, there is definitely a link between intrusive male dominance and intrusive state dominance. Not the least of which is that intrusive males generally control intrusive states, glorify the holding of power and the submission of those without power

Taking what you wrote and applying a slightly different tack; I think that one of the tactics used by abusers, especially on a large scale is the ability and desire to take what victim is saying, in this case women as a whole group, and twist it into something perverse and destructive. This can be seen on many levels from the private sphere, to the global sphere.

You have clearly illustrated the problem with what has happened to the term “free love” when you wrote, “the only thing we ever hear about free love– serves to discredit the actual movement and ignore the women who claimed their agency, empowerment, and sexuality through it. It is ironic that this one-dimensional cultural memory (that free love=liberal male sexual coercion) has taken the place of what is in many ways opposite and contradictory to the tenets of the actual movement.” This phenomenon of taking a term and turning it around into the opposite of it’s original meaning is very effective in stopping movements, to the extent of even reversing the effect of the original word of phrase.

In popular culture this phenomenon is especially becoming commonplace and prevalent with the advent of so many “trade names”, copywrites, and web addresses, not to mention names of cars etc. One of the most despicable cases of this phenomenon is the naming of places for what was there but has since been destroyed. Examples such as the naming of streets and towns for the native peoples who were displaced and slaughtered so that development could continue, subdivisions named “Elk Ridge” or “The Meadows”. On a slightly different angle naming cars things such as “Pathfinder”, serve to generally replace the image of a plant leaf with the image of a car, this I believe obscures the view of the original meaning and causes an amnesia of a societal scale.

I think that the commonality of this phenomenon, and the acceptance of it, lead people not to think about what they are losing, but to lose without even noticing it. This happens quickly, and is difficult to recover from, because once the meaning of a word of phrase has been changed, one first has to realize that it has been changed and then put effort forth to find out the original meaning if they are to understand what truly has happened in history. This amount of literary digging becomes impossible as the meaning of too many words are altered.

I think that the dependence/exploitation connection is an integral facet of our society that rarely is noticed and less frequently discussed. This phenomenon is equally pervasive in the private sphere, and the public sphere as far as I can tell. Which leads me to question what other symptoms of an unhealthy population may appear similarly in both spheres.

Further I question if another sphere may exist entirely, the “natural sphere”. If private is what happens in the home, and the public sphere is what happens between people in public spaces, is there not another human sphere-the one that encompasses the interaction between humans and nature?

If a “natural sphere” does exist, it shows symptoms of the same dependence/exploitation chronic cycle that exists in the private and public sphere. Here for instance people are dependent on rivers for fresh water and fresh fish among other things. Of course this relationship of dependence can lead to exploitation as we so often see in the world around us, or as in a radical love relationship the river and its inhabitants can be treated with love and respect with the focus on all of the same elements that make up radical love in the private sphere.

Indeed I believe the Natural Sphere naturally offers a radical love perspective, parallel to that of the private sphere. Here all of the “objects” in your basket of radical love still fit: bodily integrity, respect, choice, ability to leave. In the Natural Sphere both the river and co must retain bodily integrity, have respect for each other, be allowed to choose their own path, and have the ability to leave freely.

In every sphere radical love is the most natural way to act, or behave, it is only the imaginative coercion of humanity that creates the groundwork for manipulation necessary to build systems of unsustainable dependence, and a depletion of what should naturally be a limitless source. Privately we see patriarchy manifesting a superiority complex, which in turn often diminishes the value of the female, and views females as a “resource” to be utilized. Where as the most natural relationship is one of equality, and offers limitless love, compassion, and friendship.

I think what I’m getting at is this: radical love is natural, while it takes effort, and violence or the threat of violence, to enact any other type of relationship.

Hmmm, I think I’m getting somewhere, but my eyes are tired and I can’t focus. I’ll come back to this tomorrow. I’m so glad we help each other to learn Love, to think about how to make it everything wonderful and free. Wild and Free.

As an aside, I really enjoy your writing! You have a wonderful way of getting to the point and clearly articulating a perspective while remaining gentle and open.

This is my definition of Radical Love: engaging in intimate and possibly romantic relationships while simultaneously maintaining unrestrained independence and the ability to pursue one’s own dreams.

This encompasses sustainability, bodily integrity, and the need for a system that encourages such behavior.

I believe the period you are studying as well as the period we are living in now are both at the forefront of radical love, and unable to embrace radical love, as the civilization we live in is neither supportive of radical love, nor comfortable with the possibility of a paradigm shift towards radical love. This puts those who are radical lovers at the front of the curve, and in a dangerous position. It is possible that as the power structures in place 150 years ago have remained in place, the ability to grow the radical love movement has been greatly stunted.

I think this comes back to needing to first grasp what it is to be sustainable, on all fronts. I say this because just as patriarchy is a mechanism for the enforcement of exploitation and subordination, sustainability threatens the existing power structure and those who benefit from the power structure currently in place.

Similarly I find a parallel between the notion that feminism is somehow getting somewhere positive when a female takes a patriarchal position, and the idea that radical love is gaining popularity simply because more people are having multiple sexual partners or multiple relationships consisting of serial monogamy. These are tricks, guises designed to fool, to placate the “radicals” while keeping them neatly within the guidelines of the system.

One of this civilizations most terrible atrocities is the degradation of language. Industrialization and violence have wiped out many indigenous languages, and capitalism, capitalist propaganda media, along with government, have ruined and depleted the meaning of the words in our language.
Take “radical” for example. As I have been taught “radical” can be “to the root” a deep look, something or someone core. Yet the word has been manipulated, and turned perverse. It is now seen as synonymous with extremists, violent peoples, and religious zealots. Through this degradation of language the actions that were once synonymous with the original words have been demonized, and in a way controlled. The use of fear of the stigma that accompanies the current societal definition of many words inhibits the honest effort to act out the motions dictated by the original definition and thereby content of language.

So in essence we are losing not only the words themselves, but the culture and the ideas that go along with them. And as we lose these words, we lose the ability to teach others about the possibilities change can bring, and we lose the ability to effectively bring a radical change about.

But just as I’ve managed to get more than one person who looked at my unicycle and said “where’s your other wheel,” to actually try it themselves, maybe all hope is not lost.

One possible explanation for why the history you are studying avoids the subject of assimilation and system structure, instead focusing on equality, is the difficulty of grappling with the immense task of reinventing all of culture and civilization.
It is much easier to focus on one labor movement, or civil action, than it is to try to get a handle on how to bring about sustainability in a culture inculcated with the idea that growth is the goal, and sustainability equals failure.

Further, to teach students that assimilation is something to question, that never ending growth will lead to an eventual total collapse, that nature must be respected and celebrated before a true justice will be served, to teach them that the particular president we have isn’t the problem, rather it is the fact that we have a president, is dangerous. It would lead to a rebellion, a revolution, a true system wide change, and that would severely damage those who hold power; in the college industry, in the book industry, in every industry. After all even the school you are attending is not only the product of an industrial civilization, it is in itself an industrial machine, and its goal is to produce an ever growing number of parts which will assimilate into the industrial machine upon graduation.

Maybe you feel inarticulate, judged, and judgmental, because for you to state your opinion threatens every thing that the school is built upon, everything that you and your co students lives are built upon, and everything that you and your fellow students are paying a lot of money to learn how to be.