In honor of the Deepwater Horizon disaster, I’d like to share with you some tips for saving the environment that I found in a magazine.

Yay! Everything is going to be okay now!

But of course it’s not. No matter how many of your electronic devices you unplug, mountains in West Virginia are still going to be strip-mined for coal to put the electricity on the wires. No matter how often you turn off your car instead of idling it, there have already been thousands of spills in the Niger Delta (just to name one place). All of these tips might be meaningful ways to conserve a resource that was being obtained in an environmentally sound way, but when environmental damage is built into the system, focusing on conservation is cold comfort.

Environmental damage is not occurring because you and every other American left your car idling; it’s occurring because we’ve built a society in which nearly everyone must have a car in order to survive above the poverty line.

Environmental damage is not occurring because you left your cell phone charger plugged in; it’s occurring because we build houses with no thought towards natural heating or cooling, and then the only option is to run 3000 watt air conditioning units every day of the year to keep the temperature at 68-72 degrees.

Environmental damage is not occurring because you eat too much cow and not enough fish; it’s occurring because we expect to have strawberries in December and mango and pineapple in Detroit, and so airliners deliver them from Hawaii and Chile every fucking morning.

These are the things that would have to change in order to “save” the environment. You cannot “save” the environment by doing the things on that list, because those things are not what is harming the environment.

When I see lists like this, I wonder whether their real effect is to distract me. If I think that I’m doing something meaningful by turning off my engine when I get out of the car, I will be derailed from thinking about actually meaningful actions that I might perform.

Just to be clear, I still think there are good reasons to conserve, I just don’t think that “saving the environment” is one of them. For one thing, conservation may make you less personally dependent on the energy that is being derived in a harmful way. This makes you more open to actions that reduce the availability of that energy, which many non-harmful options do.

For your enjoyment, here is a funny video from Derrick Jensen, talking about meaningful environmental actions.

In a previous post, I gave a particular definition of “culture,” described the expansionist drive that is one of our cultural myths, and concluded that:

The correct place to direct your outrage, therefore, is not just at the individual actors who created this particular situation, but at your culture, itself, for lying to you and everyone else about the value and necessity of expansion. Without a cultural shift away from this message, we will continue to manufacture these disasters until we have done so much damage to our landbase and extracted so many resources that continued expansion is simply impossible. And, as horrific as these disasters are, you should save your outrage for truly aberrant situations. In this culture, horrific environmental damage is an accepted and inevitable outcome of extracting resources from the earth so as to sustain “progress,” growth, and expansion.

If culture is, “The things we tell ourselves about ourselves,” then when I talk about a cultural shift, what I mean is that we change the things we tell ourselves about ourselves. For example, we could replace the cultural myth of, “growth is progress; stasis or contraction is death,” with, “living in balance with one’s environment is life; over- or under-consuming and over- or under-populating is death.”

This is not an easy task. Our culture is incredibly resistant to fundamental changes. Your first thought may be to disagree with that claim. After all, the world has been through some drastic changes in just the last few hundred years. Surely some of them count as a fundamental cultural shift? No. I’m talking about really fundamental cultural myths: the ones that are buried so deep that you usually can’t even see them.

By way of example, the expansionist drive seems like one of these fundamental myths to me. For as long as our culture has existed, we have striven for: growth of our population; increased land-base under our control; increased consumption of resources; and increased technological complexity. No matter what other cultural changes you can point to over the 10,000 years or so that the dominant culture of the world has been developing, this one has remained steadfast. At different times and in different locations, the expression of the expansionist drive has waxed and waned, but it has never wavered.

I think of the ways that culture resists the changing of its myths as cultural defense mechanisms. One of those is the myth of ideological consistency. It goes like this: “Total ideological consistency is morally superior to ideological inconsistency. People whose ideals are in any way inconsistent are at best hypocrites, and at worst liars. Either way, their ideas are dismissable.”

Let’s say that I believe that the petroleum economy is fundamentally immoral and that the world would be better off if petroleum use was dramatically curtailed or even eliminated. But I also drive a car. “A ha!” the myth of ideological consistency shouts at me. “You don’t really believe that crap! If you really believed that crap, you wouldn’t drive your car! You’re a hypocrite! You’re a fake!” Now I’m faced with three choices:

1. Stop driving my car.
2. Maintain my belief and keep driving my car. Live in a state of constant cognitive dissonance.
3. Ignore or abandon my belief about petroleum being immoral.

Option one amounts to martyrdom. Remember that culture defines how we meet our basic human needs. If “driving a car” is a fundamental aspect of my culture, and “not driving a car” represents a meaningful challenge to that culture, then “not driving a car” means threatening my access to food, shelter, sex, social interaction, and so forth. Even if I take the step of not driving a car, my ideas are still open to challenge under the myth of ideological consistency. Do I have electricity at my house? Does it come from petroleum in some way? Do I eat food that was harvested and transported using tractors and trucks? If I have a belief that is inconsistent with my culture’s myths, I have to totally excise myself from my own culture in order for my actions to be totally consistent with that belief.

Option two is very difficult for most people. Not only is cognitive dissonance psychologically painful, but others may quickly dismiss your ideas due to your “hypocrisy.” Additionally, because you have been programmed with the myth of ideological consistency, you view yourself as morally inferior to those whose actions appear to be consistent with their beliefs (cultural myths).

Option three, of course, is the easiest out. Forget the challenging belief and go with the flow. Who can blame a person for doing the only thing they know how to do in order to get access to food, shelter, sex, social interaction, and so forth? And this is how the myth of ideological consistency helps to preserve the existing cultural myths.

As long as you buy into the myth of ideological consistency, you cannot fully participate in changing cultural myths that you disagree with. The cultural myths that you wish to promote do not yet exist within your society, so you cannot practice them within your society. If you choose to act in a way that is totally consistent with your beliefs, you must excise yourself from your own culture. I think that there is a very valid question as to whether this is even possible. First, to do so would very likely deprive you of all of the mechanisms that allow you to meet your basic survival needs. Second, the pervasiveness of our culture means that there may, literally, not be anywhere on earth you could go to escape it.

There is a fourth option: abandon the myth of ideological consistency. This doesn’t mean that you stop evaluating whether a person’s (or your own) actions are consistent with their stated values, just that you understand that people (and yourself) can be in a position where they (you) hold values that are in conflict with each other and where they (you) care about all of the values too much to abandon any of them.

Derrick Jensen laments the salmon populations that have been destroyed by dams that block access to their spawning grounds. He knows where the dams are, and he hasn’t blown any of them up. Does that make him a hypocrite? Or does it just mean that he values not-being-in-prison and not-being-dead as much or more than he values removing the dams? Who can blame him? Prison has been constructed to be as awful as possible specifically for that reason!

Would I like to live in a world where I could eat food that was raised totally without chemical pesticides and fertilizers? Absolutely. Am I willing to stop eating anything except that food, today? No. Does that make me a hypocrite? Or does it just mean that I value access to food as highly or more highly than I value pesticide- and fertilizer-free food. Read that sentence again: “I value access to food.” Well, shit. Who doesn’t, when you put it that way?

The myth of ideological consistency is a sham, and you should work to excise it from your reasoning as thoroughly as possible.

I had some good conversations with friends this weekend, in which we discussed the outrage and horror that people are feeling over the Deepwater Horizon disaster. I’m horrified too, at the scope of the environmental disaster, but I find it hard to muster up too much outrage.

It’d be one thing if I believed that this was an aberration—that something had gone wrong in the system to allow this to happen—but as near as I can tell, the system was working exactly as intended. The oil rig was cutting every corner they reasonably could to boost the profits on the oil. The Minerals Management Service was pretending to regulate the oil companies, while actually letting them do whatever the hell they wanted. The politicians were maintaining plausible deniability on the lack of oversight, while accepting massive donations from oil companies so as to grease the wheels that make the whole thing possible. And Joe Public was shouting, “Drill Here! Drill Now!” and complaining to said politicians when gas got near $3 a gallon. We were all doing our part to ensure that, eventually, a disaster like this would happen. And “eventually” isn’t even the right word, because this is far from the first time a disaster like this has happened. It’s just the first time it happened close to Americans’ home. When thousands of leaks from decrepit pipelines pollute land and water in the Niger Delta, it doesn’t merit a mention, but when it threatens our economy, suddenly, people get mad.

To understand situations like this, I think it’s helpful to examine the role that our culture plays in our relationship to the earth and the resources we extract from it. When I say culture, I don’t mean art, music, or snooty restaurants. I mean the stories that we tell ourselves about ourselves. For example, here are some of the things are said by many (all?) modern cultures:

Progress and success is defined as growth and expansion. Growth and expansion are associated with life and vitality. Lack of growth and expansion is a failure, and is associated with death. Things that support growth and expansion are good and things that hinder growth and expansion are bad.

The culture in which you exist (civilization) is the only way that you can have food, shelter, safety, comfort, and entertainment. People who lived outside of your culture lived an a brutish, dangerous, scary, barbaric world that you wouldn’t want anything to do with.

When I think about the the framework of choices and values that made the Deepwater Horizon disaster inevitable, it seems obvious that there’s a link back to the expansionist drive that is one of our cultural myths. If lack of growth and expansion equates to cultural, national, and ultimately individual death, then it makes sense that corners would be cut in order to acquire the ever-scarcer petroleum that fuels, literally, our growth and expansion. No matter what the damage done by a leak, it’s better than dying!

It’s really hard to challenge these cultural myths, because we have had them whispered into our minds every day of our life, and also because the very existence of the culture that provides us with the necessities of life depends on belief in the myths. But the veracity of the myths is easy to challenge. For example, it should be obvious from examination of nature that few, if any, species expand and grow for any length of time without a corresponding contraction. Species that expand and grow excessively, such as the rabbits that were introduced to Australia, create enormous problems, both for themselves and for the other species that have to share an ecosystem with them. So, the idea that contraction equates to death and expansion equates to success is easily falsified. And yet you show me one public company who wants to announce that its profits have dropped. You show me one government official who will cheerfully report that the GDP is down, not up. You show me one financial analyst who’s happy that the stock market is down. Nope. Up, up, up. All the time. Forever. Or it’s bad news. That’s the power of the cultural myth of the expansionist drive. Even though it’s demonstrably false, or at least incomplete.

Where should we direct our horror and outrage at the disaster that’s occurring in the Gulf right now? BP? Minerals Management Service? Politicians? All of these and more share some part of the blame. But focusing solely on those actors is just playing whack-a-mole. Deepwater Horizon is the most prominent (to people in the USA anyway) example of the inevitable outcome of the collection of stories that our culture tells us about our relationship to the environment and the resources it contains. The really scary thing is that every other system that’s operating within that culture is operating under the same premises. While some rigs are certainly safer than Deepwater was, at the end of the day, all rigs and pipelines and other facilities operate within the cultural myth that supporting the continued expansion of civilization is, literally, life-or-death. They have historically also cut corners and taken risks, with resulting environmental damage (thankfully, only to brown-skinned people who don’t really matter because they are far away and also poor). They will continue to do so as long as our shared culture contains the myth of the expansionist drive.

The correct place to direct your outrage, therefore, is not just at the individual actors who created this particular situation, but at your culture, itself, for lying to you and everyone else about the value and necessity of expansion. Without a cultural shift away from this message, we will continue to manufacture these disasters until we have done so much damage to our landbase and extracted so many resources that continued expansion is simply impossible. And, as horrific as these disasters are, you should save your outrage for truly aberrant situations. In this culture, horrific environmental damage is an accepted and inevitable outcome of extracting resources from the earth so as to sustain “progress,” growth, and expansion.

By Joshua Bardwell, originally posted in May 2010 at Jack-Booted Liberal.

Last fall, in anticipation of raising pigs, we plowed up a section of the field and put down a seed mixture consisting of yummy, nutritious, and easy-growing plants that pigs like: rye grass, sudan grass, field peas, and rape-seed. Although wild pigs live exclusively on forage, we don’t have enough space for us to raise them that way. We are using feed, but we also wanted to supplement with forage as much as possible. For one thing, the other plants would add variety to the pigs’ diet. For another, rooting around in the field would make the pigs happier, since rooting is a basic part of “what pigs do.” And of course, there could be some financial savings if the calories gleaned from the field translated into lower feed consumption.

From one perspective, open pasture is nature’s solar panel. Grass and other field plants capture the sunlight that falls on them and turn it into calories through the wonder of photosynthesis. Pastures are not, typically, composed of calories that humans can use, since we lack the physical adaptations that would allow us to digest grass very efficiently, but certainly other animals are more than happy to consume those calories, and convert into yummy meat (if you’re into that sort of thing). Anybody who’s ever had a garden knows how much work it can take to squeeze a meaningful amount of food out of a vegetable plot. Anybody who’s ever had to mow a lawn knows how little work it takes to grow grass, as well as plantain, dandelion, clover, violets, and other such “weeds”. So, the idea of something that eats grass and “weeds” and turns it into meat is awfully darn appealing (again, if you’re into that sort of thing).

Twice now, this year, the grass in the field has gotten tall enough that I have mowed it, and seeing the cut grass composting in clumps on the ground has ticked me off every time. The solar energy stored in that grass is incredibly valuable. It is one of the only truly sustainable forms of energy that exists. If I am going to call that field “mine” and bend its form to my will, then I feel like I have an obligation to do something more with that energy than leave it to rot. I have interrupted the life-cycle of the grass. I have deprived the animals that would live in the high brush of their habitat. I have denied the trees that would grow there the opportunity to take advantage of this sunny, clear spot. And for what? So I can have a pretty view out my window every morning?

For all the ways that we are just apes, I do think that humans have something that other animals lack. Our big brains give us a unique ability to imagine the world as we would like it to be. Likewise, they give us the technological wherewithal to realize our imaginings, for good or for ill, on a Herculean scale. Other animals may sometimes cause destruction in the same way that we do, but I doubt that they have the same intellectual capability to realize what they are doing. They are what they are, and they live or die, thrive or decline, on the merits of their selves. And, really, so do we, it’s just that we (might) have the unique ability to make conscious choices that change “what we are,” and so to shift the outcome.

When I look at all the environmental damage that the human urge to modify has caused, I sometimes revolt, and wish that we could “just be animals” again. But of course, that genie is out of the bottle and won’t go back. I took some comfort in the words of Joel Salatin, who says:

Plants and animals should be provided a habitat that allows them to express their physiological distinctiveness.  Respecting and honoring the pigness of the pig is a foundation for societal health.

The comfort comes from the realization that looking at how things are and imagining how they could be is just as much a part of a human’s psychological distinctiveness as rooting in the ground is a pig’s. There’s no sense hating it or denying it. Just like a pig wouldn’t truly be fulfilled as a pig if it couldn’t root in the earth, I wouldn’t be truly fulfilled as a human if I didn’t see things and imagine how they might be better. So, I accept that doing so is just a part of my unique contribution to nature. Pigs root. Chickens peck. And humans cannot leave well enough alone.

But idle hands are the devil’s plaything, and a clever clever human is apt to make changes to his or her environment, for good or for ill. If I poison the plants in my yard and then put down sod and treat the land with weed killer so nothing else can grow there, I will have made the land one kind of “better.” But it is a very expensive form of “better.” Monocultures are fundamentally unstable. They require massive inputs of energy in order to sustain themselves. I will have to apply fertilizer to make up for the nitrogen that the lack of legumes like clover is causing. I will have to use weed killer or manual labor to keep out unapproved plants. I will probably burn gasoline to run a mower and a string-trimmer and a leaf blower. What I will have done is taken nature’s solar panel and turned it from a net energy producer to a net energy consumer.

Another option is to look at that land and ask myself, “What is that land capable of doing, in a way that will sustain me without fundamentally depleting it?” The field by my house is too small to raise a cow on, never mind a whole herd, but my few acres could possibly support a sheep. Better yet, they already support a colony of rabbits! If I want the grass to be short, is it better to expend my own energy to cut it, and to then leave it to rot in the field, or to bring in animals that will cut the grass for me, and will use that energy to sustain themselves? Even if you set aside the potential for those animals to become meat in the future, the answer to me seems clear. Fossil fuel being shipped from around the world so that I can run a mower to cut some grass and leave it to rot? Or happy sheep or bunnies living their lives off that grass, providing entertainment, companionship, and possibly even wool, milk, or meat to me? There’s no question to me which one is more Right.

The bottom line is that it feels fundamentally disrespectful for me to mow the field and nothing more. It’s disrespectful to the plants that would have grown if I hadn’t mowed, and to the animals that could have lived off of those plants. If I was to leave the field alone, then I don’t think that I would have any responsibility towards it, but when I divert the field from the path that it would take in my absence, I feel like I also take on a responsibility towards it, and leaving that grass to lay in the field doesn’t feel to me like I’m fulfilling that responsibility.

Issa and I got up this morning and drove about an hour and a half south to an Amish community where we had been told we could buy chickens. Sure enough, they had damn near everything for sale: chickens, ducks, turkeys, sheep, pigs, even calves. I hadn’t settled on a particular breed, mostly because the breed I buy would be determined in large part by what breeds they had on sale at the time. I didn’t think it paid to be too picky the first time out the gate. They had several breeds available, but the one they had the most of, and most importantly, the only one that they had already laying, was the Red Sex-Link. The others weren’t expected to start laying until July or August, which is a lot of feed to put into a bird only to save $5 on the price.

Sex-Link might sound like a funny name for a breed, but it refers to the bird’s color being linked to its sex. This makes it easy to tell the males from the females early in life. Lots of people who raise hens don’t want anything to do with roosters. They’re noisy, they can injure the hens when they try to mate with them, and they can even be aggressive toward the owner. The one thing they provide is fertilization, which, if you’re not breeding, is irrelevant. But even an expert sex-er has only about an 80% hit ratio, which means that if you’re buying chicks, you’re likely to get some roosters, and some people just don’t want that. Hence, the sex-link breeds. You can read more about them here.

Before we left, we had to find something appropriate to transport the chickens in. This is a constant issue with us. We bought electric fencing and decked out the stall for the pigs. Fine. Now how do you get them home without them flying out the back of the damn truck? I built a chicken coop for the hens. Fine. Now how do I get them to it? It turns out the answer is pretty simple in the case of the hens: cardboard boxes work fine. Thank you Internet! The whole time, though I was thinking, “I’m going to walk up here with my cardboard boxes, and the chicken-seller is going to say, ‘ You’ve clearly got no business owning chickens! Away with you!’”

Well, that’s not how it went. I walked up, picked out my hens, the guy stuffed them into the boxes, I paid my $40, and away I went. Couldn’t be easier!

Here’s the first box of chickens being set out into the coop.

The chickens immediately set to pecking and scratching. They especially seemed to like the clover.

They found the water before too long.

And the food.

Juli-cat was, of course, enraptured.

On a side note, we also stopped by a butcher shop to ask about slaughtering our pigs. The butcher didn’t do the slaughter on-site, but he recommended a processing house just across the street. It was a small building that appeared as if the owner might live in the house next-door. The family that runs it was sitting out front at a picnic table and said it’d be fine for us to stop by and see how things were done. That’s really encouraging!

I recently had a conversation wherein I told a friend that I wasn’t interested in putting solar panels on my house. I think he was surprised, given that we had been having a discussion about ways that I reduce my home power usage. Sure, installing solar cells would further reduce my monthly electricity bill, but that’s not the goal of the game for me. Reducing energy consumption, ultimately, is about extending the period of time on which we depend on non-sustainable energy sources. I’m not particularly interested in that strategy, since it ultimately is destined to fail. Non-sustainable, by definition, means that eventually it runs out.

I don’t mean to suggest that I expect non-sustainable energy to fail within my lifetime, or, really, at any time in particular. It’s a given that it’ll run out, but the people who think they know when, and what will happen between now and then, are just guessing. What this means is that my actions align with my desires for the far-future in a necessarily vague sort of way. My individual actions will probably not significantly affect the course of humanity’s relationship with energy, nor am I likely to be precognitive enough to anticipate how I will relate to energy in the future, so all I can do is imagine how things might go and do what feels good today.

Putting solar panels on my roof doesn’t feel good today. Solar panels and batteries are, undeniably, The Future, and I am skeptical of the premise that the future will be delivered to us on the platter of ever-advancing technology. Derrick Jensen sums up my thoughts on technological “progress” towards the future in his essay High on Progress:

[W]e seem unquestioningly to presume that tomorrow’s progress will bring more good things to life, and will simultaneously solve the problems created by yesterday’s and today’s progress (without then creating yet more problems, as “progress” always seems to do).

Suggesting solar cells and batteries in order to address the problems caused by fossil fuel usage seems like a perfect example of that idea, and resisting that idea on principle seems more important than any good that might be wrought by the use of solar cells.

The problems caused by fossil fuel usage are fundamental to any non-sustainable energy source. Substituting another un-sustainable energy source for fossil fuels is unlikely to do much except postpone the ultimate reversion to sustainable sources. To those who associate “sustainable” with the Toyota Prius, a wind farm off the coast, and cold fusion reactors, “reversion” may seem like a funny word to combine with “sustainable.” They see sustainability in the future. But truly sustainable energy systems are still all around us, and always have been. A pasture is a perfectly sustainable solar cell. It will go on for millennia, growing grass and other plants for animals (perfectly sustainable “batteries”) to eat. Meanwhile, technology keeps “advancing.”

It’s not that I don’t understand technology’s allure. I’m a modern human, just like you are. I like driving a car, mowing my lawn, playing Xbox, and blogging on the Internet. I used to fret a lot about my own hypocrisy until it was pointed out to me that it’s not that I’m failing to live up to my own values, but that I have multiple values in play. I want to live sustainably, yes, but I also want to have a relationship with a community of friends, family, co-workers, and neighbors. I don’t want to spend my life in prison, have my home taken by the IRS, or starve myself to malnourishment. These are important priorities too, and the issue of sustainable living doesn’t trump them.

So I have a car, but I’m glad that I work out of the home so I don’t have to drive it very often. I have a mower, but I’m thinking about getting a sheep instead. I shop at the grocery store, but I have a garden that helps remind me where all that food in the grocery store really comes from. I have electricity to my home, but I use fans and careful opening and closing of windows instead of central air to regulate the house’s temperature. The balance of these priorities is less about how much energy I do or don’t use, and more about how dependent I am on external inputs for sustenance. From that perspective, solar cells are just another, extraordinarily technologically complex, external input.

Of course, I haven’t missed that those power lines leading up to my house represent one huge external input. The difference is this: if, one day, those power lines go dead, and the world has changed such that we no longer have electricity, I am ready to pick up my hand tools and go to work without it. That’s not to say that I am 100% ready, because to live that way today would mean giving up some of those other priorities that I also value, but I’m practicing. And from that perspective, putting solar cells on my roof is a waste of resources. I’d be better off buying more hand tools. Or a sheep.

I have read that poke is a common, edible wild plant. As the plant grows, it becomes more poisonous to humans, but the young shoots are okay to eat—in a pinch anyway; it’s not like they’re delicious! The problem was that I only knew how to recognize full-grown poke. Its distinctive red berries and stalks are indicative of the presence of the very poison that makes it inedible. So, not very useful knowledge.

When we moved into the Wallow, it hadn’t been occupied for a while, and the plants were having a field day. I cut down some enormous poke plants! Poke forms a long and thick tap root that is damn near impossible to remove, so I simply left them where they were. As you might expect, this spring, those roots started sending up new shoots, and let me tell you, “young, tender poke shoots” are not tiny little lettuce-like things. In just a few weeks, that root put up two or three 12″ shoots, of about 1/2″ diameter, with leaves about 2-3″ long. (Of course, I knocked the shoots off. I suspect this poke root and I will be having this dance for a while.)

While doing some maintenance work on the pigs’ electric fence, I noticed a bunch of other shoots just like the ones from the poke root, growing in the woods near the property. It was clear as day that they were the same as the shoots put up from the poke root in my yard. And I realized that, without reading a book, without studying the Internet, without even so much as asking a friend, I had learned what young poke looked like. Just by paying attention.

This has not been an isolated incident. For example, last fall, Issa determined that a tree growing in our field was a walnut. Over the winter, all of the tree’s branches fell off until it was literally just a stick in the ground. This spring, the tree’s foliage has started to return, beginning with a tuft at the top and working its way gradually downward.

We keep an eye out for trees growing near the fence, which they tend to do, since just below the fence doesn’t get mowed. Yesterday, from all the way across the yard, something by the fence caught my eye, and I said to Issa, “You see that walnut tree just to the right of the gate?” The tiny tree couldn’t have been more than 2′ in length, and it was too far away to make out many details, but the shape of it—the spindly stem with the tuft of new leaves on top—was just obviously the same as the walnut in the field. There was no mistaking it.

I hope it goes without saying that I don’t disparage book-learning in any way. We never would have identified that first walnut tree at all without looking it up in a guide, and neither would I have known that the red color in poke indicates that it’s become unsafe to eat. In fact, I think there are certain categories of knowledge for which book-learning is the only way to become proficient (try learning organic chemistry or to practice law, “just by paying attention,” I dare you).

Still, it’s amazing me the kinds of things I’m learning just by being interested and paying attention. There is an idea out there that the only way to learn is to sit down in a room with a book or a teacher and input words and pictures into your brain. It’s just not true! I’ve never been the person who can identify plants and trees by sight. I have, at various times, bought various field guides and studied them, but the information never stuck, and I think I know why: it wasn’t relevant, and it wasn’t interesting. When information is relevant and interesting, I think the animal mind is prone to retain it. This information is relevant to me because I am very interested in forming a real connection to the land on which I live, and part of that is getting to know all the other things that share the land with me.

On the other hand, when information is irrelevant and boring… well, if you’ve been to grade school, I think you can finish that sentence yourself.

I’ve been thinking a lot about oppression and privilege lately. Fat-hate. Rape culture. Sexism. Racism. Able-ism. I don’t claim to be particularly well-versed in the topics, but I have started to notice a trend or two in the ways that people respond to an idea that challenges their position of privilege. One behavior that I’m noticing at this moment is what I’ll call selective outrage. Honestly, it’s a topic that I, myself, am only really starting to grasp, so I may have a hard time describing it, but I”ll give it a try. Selective outrage works something like this.

In 2007, A law was proposed in Australia which stated that intoxication does not imply sexual consent. Note: the law did not say that intoxicated people cannot give sexual consent, just that intoxication plus the lack of a “no” does not mean “yes.” Apparently, “She was drunk,” was being used successfully as a defense to rape charges, and this law was intended to change that. Put another way, the law requires drunk people to actually agree to fuck you. Seems pretty non-controversial, no?

Here are some of the comments made on a certain web forum regarding this law:

So yeah, we had a few drinks, we went back to her place she threw me on the sofa, blew me for awhile and then rode we until she orgasmed and then the next day I get arrested for raping her

This commenter appears to be concerned with the potential for misapplication of the justice system. He doesn’t want to see innocent people accused of a crime, and he is OUTRAGED.

When you drink and drive, it’s is YOUR responsibility in the fact that you should of known to say no to driving. Why is it then, that when women drink, our justice system thinks they are nothing but children, unable to control themselves at all, and thus exonerate them of ANY responsibility?

This commenter appears to be concerned with issues of personal responsibility. He also seems upset at a system that treats women like children, rather than autonomous adults. He is OUTRAGED!

Now, I can support the Sober Guy/Drunk Girl = Rape argument to some degree, but I have two issues with this. Foremost; Shouldn’t this girl be, in some respects, responsible for her own level of intoxication? Hate to tell you, but you don’t HAVE to get drunk, and then the consent issue stays clear. How can the guys be the only ones faulted when both parties are drunk?

Likewise, this commenter raises questions of personal responsibility and agency. OUTRAGED!

Do you want to deny a woman with a slumbersex fetish pleasure?

This commenter tackles the conjoined issues of sex-negativity and sexism, standing up for the right of people to consent to treatment of their bodies, even in non-mainstream ways. He is OUTRAGED!

Except it’s all bullshit, isn’t it? Because these people are probably not outraged about misapplication of justice, treating women like children, taking away people’s personal responsibility, or, more to the point, rape, ANY OTHER TIME than when it might affect them. And that slumbersex person? The most egregious example. Is that person actually kink-positive in real life, or is this just some semantic trick, used solely for the purpose of opposing the new law? Which, I will re-iterate, says simply that intoxicated people have to consent to sex just like everybody else.

The sneaky thing about selective outrage is that the points raised are, on the face, valid. At least they would be if they occurred in a vacuum. But they don’t. They occur in a context in which, for example, WOMEN ARE ACTUALLY BEING RAPED and the people who raped them are not being convicted at stunningly high numbers. The commenters often have absolutely nothing to say about that. Being outspokenly angry about rape is reserved for Feminists Who Are Probably Also Lesbians. Oh, if you asked them, they’d probably say, “Rape is bad, yo,” but the only time they can be bothered to actually type a comment on the Internet is when a law might be passed to actually DO SOMETHING about the raping, and when they do, it’s to poke holes and point out potential problems with the law.

This is the essence of selective outrage. If the only time you express your outrage is to oppose ideas that seek to change conditions, then you support the conditions, no matter what you might intend. And in this case, that means you support the status quo as it pertains to rape, which is a little shocking given the state of rape in America today. If you are anti-rape, I don’t insist that you actually speak out about it. Hey, there are a lot of issues in the world for people to care about, and rape may just not make your list. That’s actually fine with me. But at the very least, maintain your position of silence on the issue when those who care enough to speak up do so.

This ad, seen in an airport, illustrates the complexity of attempting to support women in a culture that is steeped in female objectification.

On the one hand, the ad is explicitly pro-woman. On the other hand, it represents women as a “natural resource” to be “tapped.” If we are to support women, it should be for the same reasons that we support any person, and those reasons start with basic respect for human dignity. Saying that we should help them so as to “tap” them reduces them to the value that we can extract from them, which is, granted, totally consistent with our culture’s treatment of many people the world over, but is probably not reflective of the progressive values that this charity attempts to represent.

The sentiment ‘better seen than heard’ reflects a larger social attitude of the value of children’s voices, namely that they have none. Children should remain silent, and they are ‘good’ when they’re quiet, but ‘bad’ when they are not, because they are disturbing the adults and causing trouble. This attitude runs through the way people interact with children on every level, and yet, they seem surprised when it turns out that children have been struggling with serious medical problems, or they’ve been assaulted or abused.

The most common response is ‘well why didn’t the child say something?’ or ‘why didn’t the child talk to an adult?’ Adults constantly assure themselves that children know to go to a grownup when they are in trouble, and they even repeat that sentiment to children; you can always come to us, adults tell children, when you need help. Find a trusted adult, a teacher or a doctor or a police officer or a firefighter, and tell that adult what’s going on, and you’ll be helped, and everything will be all right.

The thing is that children do that, and the adults don’t listen. Every time a child tells an adult about something and nothing happens, that child learns that adults are liars, and that they don’t provide the promised help. Children hold up their end of the deal by reporting, sometimes at great personal risk, and they get no concrete action in return. Sometimes, the very adult people tell a child to ‘trust’ is the least reliable person; the teacher is friends with the priest who is molesting a student, the firefighter plays pool with the father who is beating a child, they don’t want to cause a scene.

and

Children are also told that they aren’t experiencing what they’re actually experiencing, or they’re being fussy about nothing. A child reports a pain in her leg after gym class, and she’s told to quit whining. Four months later, everyone is shocked when her metastatic bone cancer becomes unavoidably apparent. Had someone listened to her in the first place when she reported the original bone pain and said it felt different that usual, she would have been evaluated sooner. A child tells a teacher he has trouble seeing the blackboard, and the teacher dismisses it, so the child is never referred for glasses; the child struggles with math until high school, when someone finally acknowledges there’s a problem.

This attitude, that children shouldn’t be believed, puts the burden of proof on children, rather than assuming that there might be something to their statements. Some people seem to think that actually listening to children would result in a generation of hopelessly spoiled brats who know they can say anything for attention, but would that actually be the case? That assumption is rooted in the idea that children are not trustworthy, and cannot be respected. I’m having trouble understanding why adults should be viewed as inherently trustworthy and respectable, especially in light of the way we treat children.

Treating children well, treating them as people, and being part of the solution in creating a world where they have a place involves allowing children to speak, listening when they do, and believing what they say.