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A Glimpse of the Past and a Taste of the Future in Hell’s Canyon

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Hell's Canyon rimland, July 201

Hell’s Canyon rimland, July 2016

Since giving up farming a couple years ago, my interest in sustainable diets has only changed focus, not waned. Turning away from the domestic, I have been exploring wildcrafted food and medicine, including plants traditionally used by Native Americans. So this spring, when my former farming partner, Clara, invited me to visit northeast Oregon with her for the early summer harvest season of wild foods there, I was thrilled.

We spent six weeks in and around Hell’s Canyon on the Oregon/Idaho border, an area that’s abundant for foragers and has been for millennia. Fruit trees, berry bushes, wild roots and medicinal herbs can be found in profusion, mostly on public land. Most of this flora is native but some was introduced through European colonization. All of it is threatened to one degree or another by misuse of the land, both contemporary and historic, and by Climate Change. Indeed, every place we explored offered us a glimpse of the past and a taste of the future.

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Civilization as Symptom, Not Disease: Digging for the Roots of “Babylon”

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desert-postcardI first began to consciously question the value of Civilization in 1997. I was visiting Northhampton, Massachusetts, with a new lover. We were enjoying that early stage shortly after meeting when the intensity of sensation is so strong that your world is blown apart, making space for the new to enter and blossom, including the mystical. We went a book store I had never been in, and I found myself following my feet as they led me quickly down one of the aisles to a particular shelf. There, my hand reached up and picked out a book without my eyes reading the spine. The book was “My Name Is Chellis and I am Recovery from Civilization” by Chellis Glendenning.

I devoured the book in the days that followed, sating a hunger I hadn’t been aware of. Glendenning’s lucid text explained so much of the depression I had been experiencing in my life. Among many other salient points, she demonstrated how Civilization disconnects us from the natural world and how Capitalism appropriates our instincts in order to peddle us its wares. Glendenning turned on a light in my head that never went off again and has illuminated much for me in the time since as it has grown in brightness.

Four years later, inspired by the protests in Seattle against the WTO in late 1999, I moved to the West Coast and dove head-long into political activism. (The lover had become a partner and then an ex; as is typical, the magic was traded first for the mundane and then for the wretched.) In my new circles, I met forest defenders, anarcho-primitivists and rewilders, all of whom shared Glendenning’s disdain for Civilization, and some of whom took it much further, in both attitude and in action. This is when I first heard the name “Babylon” applied to Civilization in general and to Cities in particular. I’ve never been too fond of the term — Bible stories don’t inspire me much — but I’ve often shared the anti-Civ sentiments of those who use it.

Babylon, after all, has wrought annihilation seemingly everywhere: 
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The Mark of Malice in California’s “Emerald Triangle”

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Clearcut in Humboldt County

Clearcut in Humboldt County, making way for Cannabis cultivation

In November of 2015, I spent three weeks working at a medical Cannabis operation in Humboldt County. My time there was filled with realization and sadness. Though the land in that part of the country is sparsely inhabited and appears wild or even untouched, it has in fact been abused for well over a century and a half, and the mark of malice lies undeniably upon it. Waves of genocide and environmental destruction have swept through it and, unfortunately, the “Green Rush” of recent years is bringing more hurt.

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Life and Death on Route 395: Water Wars, Baby Birds and a Crashed Harley

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Storm over the White Mountains

Storm over the White Mountains, 6/6/15

I awoke the morning of my 46th birthday on top of the Los Angeles Aqueduct. Not immediately on top of it – it was buried at a depth of at least 25 feet in this spot – but just a few steps from our parked van it was exposed by a service shaft: an open concrete box lidded with a thick grate. Standing over it, I could hear the roar of water being sucked southwards by the thirsty urban monster 100 miles away. Down the hill from my vantage point, the giant metal drinking straw of the aqueduct’s pipe emerged from the soil, spanned the dry creek below, and thrust itself back into the ground of the opposite slope. Another service shaft stuck up out of the hilltop above it, just like the one in front of me.

The Romans made far more elegant structures for the same purpose, but I marveled at the feat of engineering laid before (and underneath and behind) me. I wondered about the degree of angle it employed in order to run slightly downhill over such a long distance. I looked in vain for any sign of the tremendous excavation that must of taken place. Or did they bore a tunnel? If so, that must have been a big powerful machine. The engineering feats of the 20th Century are a wonder to behold for their sheer scale and complexity. The long-term costs of these projects, though, have not been so wonderful.

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Your Money or Your Life: Can We Afford to Work for Peanuts?

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The author, with the giant peanut of Orick, California. Photo by Nikki Hill.

The author, with the giant peanut of Orick, California. Photo by Nikki Hill.

In Orick, California, there is a giant wooden peanut – over twelve feet long, six feet tall and weighing nine tons – carved from a single chunk of old-growth redwood. It was sculpted by local loggers in 1978, during the Carter administration, and brought to Washington, D.C., to protest the proposed expansion of Redwood National Park. Their message: “It may be peanuts to you, but it’s jobs to us.” To the loggers’ chagrin, the peanut was ignored and the Park expanded anyway, removing 48,000 acres from the reach of their axes. Now the rough-hewn sculpture sits unceremoniously at the south end of town, steadily wearing away under the effects of vandalism and the elements. No plaque tells its story; you have to know what you’re looking for, and even what you’re looking at.
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Postcard From Eastern Oregon: When planting food is illegal

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[Originally published on Energy Bulletin, September 2012]
This Spring my farming partners and I found ourselves landless. For the past eight years, we had been actively exploring a variety of forms and practices of small-scale agriculture and restoration, including bicycle-based urban farming, CSA (Community Supported Agriculture), plant-breeding and seed-saving, staple crops (grains, legumes and oilseeds) and the cultivation and processing of medicinal herbs (no, not pot). Last year I wrote an article, “Who Will Feed The People?”, discussing the challenges to small-scale agriculture in the United States, such as lack of equipment, knowledge, financial resources, and markets; the polluted wasteland left behind by conventional farming; increasingly volatile and unpredictable weather patterns brought by Climate Change; and, last but not least, the social barriers: people of the U.S. are by and large uninterested in significant changes to the socio-economic status quo, and resist cutting edge projects. It was the social factor — which can and did embody a profound hostility to Truth — that brought down our own farming efforts, at least for now.

With sadness and anger, we put our tools and seeds in storage, found foster homes for our perennial medicinals, and raised traveling cash by selling our home (a school bus) and an old but reliable Volvo. After tearfully parting with our beloved farm cat, two of us hit the road in an old pickup to see what we could see.

This journey took us to Eastern Oregon to seek out Finisia Medrano, a.k.a. “Tranny Granny”, a Shoshone elder who knows the ways of “The Hoop”, an ancient tradition of food gathering and cultivation that sustained the Native Americans and the land in good health for thousands of years until being violently disrupted by the European Invasion. The Hoop is not dead but, as we were to see, is severely threatened.
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