Well. I wrote three potential blog posts over a month ago in December. I decided I wanted my blog to be high-quality: carefully proofread for concision and quality as well as spelling and grammar. It’s now the end of the third week in January. Since I would rather have a lower-quality blog than none at all (an admittedly questionable choice, of course) from now on I’m just going to post, no waiting period, no editing beyond spellcheck.
To paraphrase from Days of War, Nights of Love: This blog will not save your life.
Well, obviously. So why did I say it?
This blog will not save the world.
That’s obvious to. As much as I love the stories about the Good Guy riding into town or sweeping in with a primary-color cape and mask and Saving The Day, actually transforming the world on a scope vast enough to be considered “saving” it is not entirely realistic. Not for one person, one blog.
The problems we’re dealing with — I’m thinking mostly the threat of environmental collapse, but that’s hardly the only problem of significance facing humankind today — were not and are not created by one person. And they will not be solved by one person, or one website.
I don’t like hype.
I don’t like fatalism, either.
There is a middle ground, the ground of one person’s worth of difference, or one organization’s worth of difference. There is also the difference of many people coming together for change — as in the Civil Rights Movement of the 60’s, for instance.
If this blog reminds one person that they care about the planet, and gets that one person to, I don’t know, start a compost bin in their back yard or switch to a low-flow shower head or go vegetarian or whatever, then this blog will have been worth it. (To the extent that this blog reminds me to be environmentally conscious in my daily life, it’s already worth it.) If this blog causes one person to see the world in a somewhat different way than before, it will have been worth it. If this blog is found by one activist on the verge of burnout and inspires that one person to keep fighting anyway, if this blog turns even one person’s despair to hope, then this blog is worth it. I can always hope that far more than one person will be affected, but one person is still a difference. One person counts.
After all — every molecule of excess human-caused carbon dioxide in the air ultimately got there through the driving or electricity use or whatever of one person. Every tree that gets cut down in the Amazon rainforest to raise cows and every tree that gets cut down in Indonesia for palm oil could, if we had absolute knowledge, be traced back to the hamburgers and supermarket cookies that were, every one of them, each eaten by an individual person. What I’m saying, is the harm that has been caused to the planet is the cumulative impact of individual actions by individual people. (Not individual people working alone, of course; individual people working together.) If individual, mortal, flawed humans caused this impending catastrophe one fast-food meal at a time, we can slow the momentum of the catastrophe in exactly the same way.
It starts with an idea, a story. There are ideas behind the destruction of the planet: the idea that humans are separate from nature, the idea that we should “conquer” it, the ideas that progress is both good and inevitable. The idea that we can and should grow without limits. We got here with ideas; we can get out with different ideas. The idea that the Earth is valuable, not just as a collection of resources, but as it is. The idea that we need to keep the wellbeing of future generations in mind. The idea that growth is limited.
People who believe the idea join together — there is learning to organize effectively, there is finding funding, there is learning to live with and work with people we may not like personally. There is putting organizational goals over personal conflicts. This creates effective organizations, and a movement.
It is a hard process. It won’t happen overnight. It certainly won’t happen from this blog alone — but it doesn’t have to. Because this blog isn’t the only site these ideas are being shared. Because as alone as you might feel right now, there are others who feel the same way, and more of us all the time. I can’t save the world. You can’t save the world. But I can save a piece, and you can save a piece, and when we work together we can save a larger piece. When enough of us are working together for the same goal, each of us doing what we can, we can stop the train that’s driving us all off the cliff edge. It must be possible. After all, we’re the ones who started it.
Five minutes ago I looked out the window and saw the new moon. Going by the width of the crescent, this isn’t the first day of the new moon, but it is the first day I saw it, so for me it’s a new moon.
It’s a good omen. Not that I believe in anything as thoroughly irrational as omens, naturally. But if I were to believe in omens, this would be a good one. The new moon that’s closest to the start of the new solar year. A time for reflection, for stories, and for new beginnings.
When I started paying attention to the cycles of the moon — I didn’t always — I noticed something odd happening. I got so used to seeing a crescent or a gibbous moon shining strikingly in the night or daytime sky, or the full moon in all its glory, that whenever I went for a few days at a time without seeing the moon, I would feel sad and off-center, like I was missing something. Or like a loved one was far away. Usually this was during the last few days of the waning moon. And then the new moon would come back, curving right rather than left, shining in the evening rather than the morning (which because I’m a night owl meant I was far more likely to see it) and it felt like an old friend returning, and everything was right again.
Does paying attention to the natural world matter? In a sense, it doesn’t — by itself, observing the new moon doesn’t reduce CO2 emissions, or prevent habitat loss and species extinction, or neutralize water pollution. (As I write, the moon appears to be turning on its side as it’s about to set. The “horns” of the crescent always point away from the sun. When the moon is a crescent, it is actually in the sky mostly during the day rather than during the night. So right now, it is the start of the night, but the moon is setting.) People who want to act to protect the environment can take action with very little knowledge of the environment in general, let alone the bioregion they live in.
But that is precisely where the two problems are: firstly, that people who are disconnected from the natural world (from rivers and springs and sparrows and spiders and the moon and the sun and the stars, from sunshine and drizzly rain and sharp lightning storms) are less likely to want to protect the environment, let alone be willing to make major sacrifices for it. And secondly, someone’s got to know what they’re doing. We live in a world of abstractions, and also a world where people often spin and manipulate and lie through their teeth, even lie to themselves, to ourselves. Chevron runs ads claiming to be “green”, so does PG&E. You can make anything sound good for the planet if you’ve got a big enough advertising budget. Those of us who want to make decisions that are going to be better for the environment, we need ways of fact-checking, of grounding what we do in reality. Part of that is using our own senses to observe the world immediately around us.
One of the books I read in college, “Developing Ecological Consciousness” by Christopher Uhl, talks about the importance to the environmental movement as a whole of simply being aware of the place you live in. The one thing I remember most about the book is how the author discusses his own life and his own personal development (and his own mistakes!) right alongside theoretical concepts. It is generally considered unprofessional in academic circles to acknowledge one’s own existence — I strongly believe this to be a profound mistake, for any subject of direct relevance to human beings. That is, if you’re writing about math or physics or engineering, there is little need to bring your personal life experience into it; but for subjects relating to people a certain amount of subjectivity is unavoidable and so it is preferable to not pretend to objectivity. I admire Uhl for going against that tradition of professional invisibility. It certainly made the book more approachable, and I suspect far more relevant as well.
Out of respect for the effectiveness of the personal approach, and in the interest of valuing integrity over looking professional, I will attempt as much as I can to speak in terms of my personal experience when that seems the best approach. When making statements that can be empirically verified, I will do my best to verify and reference sources. And when making theoretical statements I will attempt to ferret out where I got the ideas from and acknowledge those inspirations — although, because playing with ideas is fun and worth doing for its own sake, I will not refrain from sharing an idea just because I am unsure of its origin or its veracity.
In the interest of keeping this blog relevant, concise, and well thought out, I’m considering a “sleep on it” policy, where I don’t post anything until I’ve had a chance to proofread the next day, when I can see mistakes and confusing phrasing with fresh eyes. I’m sure this won’t clear up everything, but I hope it will help.
1. It’s absurd. It’s important to stay absurd. Otherwise you start taking things seriously, and inquisitions start happening.
2. It is a reference to a scene/philosophical arguement in Ishmael: a novel, by Daniel Quinn. The main character is talking to a gorilla (it makes sense in context, sort of) and the gorilla asks what creation story he believes in. The (human) main character insists he has no creation story — he believes in scientific truth. The gorilla then asks the human to explain that scientific truth as best he understands it, and the human does. He describes the Big Bang and the expansion of the universe and the development of our solar system and planet Earth and microbes and plants and animals and finally human beings. To show how the human’s account is, in fact, a story, the gorilla repeats back the same concepts, only from the perspective of jellyfish, who of course place their evolution at the climax. When human beings talk about the world, we tend to put ourselves at the center.
I found the book to have many interesting and compelling ideas in it, most importantly the idea that the massive devastation we are dealing out to the enviroment and to indiginous people is morally equivalent to, or at least comparable to, the genocide perpetuated against the Jewish people in the Holocaust — arguable our contemporary culture’s strongest example of atrocity. In other words, that the genocides of indigenous people around the world that are currently going on, and the ecocide of the ecosystems of planet earth, are as bad as or worse than anything else that has happened in all of human existance, with corresponding ethical implications for all of us.
3. It references two of my major interests, religion and biology.
4. Jellyfish, or more currectly jellies, in phylum Cnideria (the c is silent) are awesome. They do not have bones, blood, or brains. Their stomachs and their genitals are the same structure. Despite their size, they are officially classified as plankton because they can’t swim, only drift. They have a multi-phase life cycle, like amphibians. Their life cycle includes a phase where they are tiny and sedentary and live far longer than they do as an adults. (Anemonies are essentially the opposite: their larval phase is free-floating, like jellies.) The adult form is called a medusa — like the snake-headed woman out of Greek mythology. Some jellies are poisinous enough to kill humans. They come in many different shapes, sizes, and colors. They are a major food source of certain types of sea turtles. The Portuguese Man ‘O War, which is not actually a jelly but is similar, is actually four organisms in one. That’s awesome.
On the other end of the multi-appendaged boneless underwater animal spectrum, octopuses are the most intelligent of invertibrates. (It’s not octopi, I’m afraid, due to the language of origin. If you want to be pedantic you’ll have to go with octopode.) They have blue blood containing hemocyanin rather than the hemoglobin that makes our blood red (better for the low temperature and high pressure conditions of the ocean) and three hearts. They can taste with their tentacles. They only mate once, dying soon after mating for the male and soon after the eggs hatch for the female. There may be hundreds of thousands of offspring from one set of eggs, most of which die before reaching adulthood. They rarely live more than five years. The primary way to tell males from females is that on the males one of the tentacles is modified into a spoon-like shape without suckers at the very end. This special tentacle is called a hectocotylus and is used for mating. Octopuses are nocturnal and very shy. Their color changes depending on their mood.
Did I mention I like biology? Ask me about starfish some time.
What I expect this blog to be about: Whatever interests me at the moment. Specifically, I expect I’ll be writing a lot on gender issues, on sexuality (both in the sense of GLBT issues and in the sense of sex), on the environment, on oppression and priviledge generally, on compassion, on the good life and how to find it, on “Is Truth Beauty” old-school philosophical questions, on commercialism, on globalization, on antiracism and indiginous peoples’ rights, on mental health, on the natural world, on fat acceptance, on relationship styles (polyamorous, monogamous, monogamish, etc), on classism and labor issues and homelessness, on really cool animal facts, on mathmatics, on particularly inspirational people and movements, on critical thinking and challenging assumptions, on democracy, on direct action, on creating sustainable systems, on earth-centered spirituality, on atheism, on popular psychology, on vegetarian food, on fantasy and science fiction, and on anything else that I want to write about.
Welcome.
As someone who aspires to have people read my work and consider it worth reading, I swear to do my best to keep my writing interesting, engaging, and varied.
As someone who aspires to have my writing contribute to making the world a better place, I swear to do my best to speak truth as best I understand it, to be aware of possible consequences of what I write, to be accountable to criticism, and to recognize the input of other writers and thinkers, especially ones who have less privilege than I do.
I acknowledge that it is easier and more enjoyable to follow blogs that update regularly; as such, I will attempt to update frequently provided I have concepts worth sharing and if I am on hiatus for a time I will post a notice to that effect. I do, however, intend to prioritize quality in my writing. If I don’t have anything meaningful to say I won’t say anything, and if what I want to say is rough and unresolved I may wait until my thinking is more clear to share any of it.
jellyfishcreationstory 