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TechnoratiThe biggest wilderness I've ever been in-a roadless area roughly the size of Portugal with about fifty contiguous watersheds and the whole panoply of charismatic macrofauna doing their thing undisturbed-is another story. This one is about what happened afterward, when I and the Canadian environmentalists I'd been traveling with arrived at the nearest settlement, a logging town in the far northeast corner of British Columbia consisting of a raw row of buildings on either side of the highway to Alaska.
We were celebrating two weeks of rafting down the central river in that ungulate- and predator-rich paradise at the outpost's big honky-tonkish nightclub, where the DJ kept playing country songs, to which all the locals would loop around gracefully, clasped together. But my compadres kept making faces of disgust at the music and asking the DJ to put on something else. He'd oblige with reggae, mostly, and we'd wave our limbs vaguely, dancing solo and free-form as white people have danced to rock-and-roll since the mid-1960s. Everyone else would sit down to wait this other music out. It was not a great movement-building exercise. How far were you going to get with a community when you couldn't stand their music or even be diplomatic about it? I've been through dozens of versions of that scene over the years and got reminded of it last year by my letter from Dick.
He really was named Dick. From a return address in the exorbitantly expensive near-San Francisco countryside, he sent me a typewritten note about a section in a recent book of mine. He declared, "The country music parts of the US you love so much are also home of the most racist, reactionary, religiously authoritarian (i.e., Dominionist) people in the country. You don't have to go far: just look @ voting patterns among rednecks descendants of the white yeomanry, if you wish to be polite) in the Central Valley. They love Bush and are very backward people by the standards of the Enlightenment. The Q might be, what is the correlation between country music and political backwardness, if any?"
My first question for Dick might be: which country music? You could cite Johnny Cash's long-term commitment to Native American rights and stance against the Vietnam War (he called himself "a dove with claws") or the song about interracial love that Merle Haggard wrote (but his record company refused to release, though the minor country star Tony Booth had a hit with "Irma Jackson" in 1970) or "I Believe the South Is Gonna Rise Again," boldly sung by Tanya Tucker in 1974:
Our neighbors in the big house called us redneck
'Cause we lived in a poor share-croppers shack
The Jacksons down the road were poor like we were
But our skin was white and theirs was black
But I believe the south is gonna rise again
But not the way we thought it would back then
I mean everybody hand in hand . . .
Or you could just mention medium-sized country star Charley Pride (thirty-six Billboard No. 1 country hits), who also doesn't fit Dick's redneck designation because he is African American.
In terms of political orientation, you could cite the Texas-based Dixie Chicks, who refused to back down from criticizing Bush on the brink of the current war. They were, as their recent hit had it, "Not Ready to Make Nice." Though corporate country stars like Toby Keith stampeded to support the so-called war on terror, alt. country musicians like Steve Earle charged just as hard in the opposite direction. Country music is a complex beast, sometimes in resistance to or mockery of the mainstream and the rural South, sometimes a mirror of or hymn to it, the product of many voices over many eras, arisen from a culture that was never pure anything, including white. (And its current listening territory includes much of the English-speaking world.)
Another set of questions might be why Dick despises the people and places that spawned the music, and what larger rifts his attitude reveals. Answering them requires digging into the deep history of American music and American race and class wars, and into the broad crises of environmentalism in recent years.
Those wars about race and class are peculiarly evident in the stories we tell about Elvis. I was raised on the tale that Elvis stole his music from black people. The story told one way makes Elvis Presley a thief rather than someone who bridged great divides by hybridizing musical traditions and brought the lush energetic force of African-American music into white ears and hearts and loins. It ignores his many white influences, from bluesy Hank Williams to schmaltzy Perry Como, his genius in synthesizing multiple American traditions into something unprecedented, and the raw power of his own voice and vocal style. It ignores, too, the lack of an apartheid regime in American roots music. White country blues and white gospel were part of the rich river of sound that came out of the South long before Presley. Despite segregation, black and white musicians learned from each other and influenced each other. (Another view of Elvis, from Billboard magazine in 1958, stated, "In one aspect of America's cultural life, integration has already taken place.")
The particular song Elvis was supposed to have stolen from R & B singer Big Mama Thornton, "Hound Dog," wasn't a vernacular expression of African-American culture, and it wasn't her creation anyway; it was written by two New York Jews, Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller. Elvis's first single featured a cover of the song "That's All Right Mama" by Delta blues singer Arthur Crudup, but the B-side was a cover of bluegrass star Bill Monroe's "Blue Moon of Kentucky," as perfect a mix of southern musical traditions as you can find. Elvis was repeatedly charged with being a racist-most famously in rapper Chuck D's 1990 song-on the basis of a comment he never actually made. James Brown and Muhammad Ali thought otherwise, and some Native Americans claim the part-Cherokee Elvis as their own.
The story that Elvis stole his music from African Americans as told by, for example, my now-deceased, uber-leftie, America-hating, and otherwise wonderful aunt, turned rock-and-roll into a mostly white child miraculously born to a purely black family. It was a way of saying that cool and correct white people could love rock-and-roll-white music with roots in the South-but dodge the sense that they had any affinities with white southerners; they could imagine them as wholly other and hate them with ease, with a fervor and disdain that spilled over pretty easily to all blue-collar rural people, to the white American peasantry, basically. That hate had and has wide currency. Ask Dick.
The story that racism belongs to poor people in the South is a little too easy, though. Just as not everybody up here, geographically and economically, is on the right side of the line, so not everyone down there is on the wrong side. But the story allows middle-class people to hate poor people in general while claiming to be on the side of truth, justice, and everything else good.
I grew up surrounded by liberals and leftists who liked to play the idiot in fake southern accents, make jokes about white trash and trailer trash, and, like the Canadian enviros, made gagging noises whenever they heard Dolly Parton or anything like her. If Okies from Muskogee thought they were being mocked, they were right, in part. This mockery was particularly common during the 1970s and 1980s, but it has yet to evaporate altogether-after all, Dick, who judging by his typewriter was around then, wrote me only last summer. My aged mother continues to make liberal use of the term "redneck" to describe the people I grew up among (though they were just suburban conservatives), and last summer I met a twentysomething from New York at a Nevada campout who told me he too was raised to hate country music. He was happily learning to love it, but late, like me.
My own conversion to country music came all of a sudden in 1990, around another campfire, also in Nevada. The great Western Shoshone anti-nuclear and land-rights activist Bill Rosse, a decorated World War II vet and former farm manager, unpacked his guitar and sang Hank Williams and traditional songs for hours. I was enchanted as much by the irreverent rancor of some of the songs as by the pure blue yearning of others. I'd had no idea such coolness, wit, and poetry was lurking in this stuff I was taught to scorn before I'd met it.
HATING WHITE SOUTHERNERS, particularly poor white southerners, and often by extension any poor rustic whites, seems to be a legacy of the civil rights movement. So far as I can tell (I came later), well-meaning people outside the South were horrified by the culture of Jim Crow, with its segregation, discrimination, and violence-and rightly so. Over the past couple of years, I've spent time in New Orleans and on the Gulf Coast, and I myself was horrified by the racial violence that transpired during the chaos of Katrina and some of the everyday apartheid and racist vileness that persists in the region. But I also recently ran into raging white racists on the periphery of Detroit, Michigan, right across the river from Canada. And the last ostentatious racists I met were the middle-aged heir of a fabulously wealthy family whose hallowed name is smeared all over the Northeast and his yachting buddy, right here in left-coast ultra-urban San Francisco. Racism is pervasive. The pretense that it belongs solely to poor people who talk slow lets the rest of us off the hook.
So on the one hand we have white people who hate black people. On the other hand we have white people who hate other white people on the grounds that they hate black people. But that latter hatred accuses many wrongfully, and it serves as a convenient coverup for the racism that is all around us. The reason why it matters is because middle-class people despising poor people becomes your basic class war, and the ongoing insults seem to have been at least part of what has weakened the environmental movement in particular and progressive politics in general.
Right-wing politicians may serve the super-rich with tax cuts and deregulation and privatization galore, but they also dress up expertly in a heartland all-Americanism that has, at least until Bush's plummeting popularity, allowed a lot of rural Americans to see them as allies rather than opponents. The right has also done a superb job of portraying the left as elite and hostile to working-class interests, and the class war going on inside and outside leftist and environmentalist circles did this propaganda battle a great service. The result of all this has been a marginalized environmental movement-more specifically, an environmental movement that has alienated the people who often live closest to "the environment."
Of course dreadlocks and ragged clothes weren't exactly diplomatic outreach tools either. I spent some of the 1990s with and around activists in the public forests of the West, and a lot of the supposedly most radical had a remarkable knack for going into rural communities and insulting practically everyone with whom they came into contact. It became clear to me that in their eyes the worst crimes of the locals did not involve chainsaws and voting choices but culture and what gets called lifestyle. It was a culture war that got pretty far from who was actually doing what to the Earth and how anyone might stop it.
Grubby, furry, childless pseudo-nomads who could screw up all they wanted and live hand to mouth until something went wrong and the long arm of middle-class parents reached out to rescue them scorned the tough economic choices of people with kids, mortgages, and no bail-out plan or white-collar options. Some of them did great things for trees, but their approach wasn't always, to say the least, coalition-building. It also wasn't ubiquitous. There were some broad-minded people in the movement, and some who even hailed from these rural and poor cultures, and Earth First! always had a self-proclaimed redneck contingent-but the scorn was widespread enough to be a major problem. And it seemed to be part of the reason why a lot of rural people despise environmentalists.
I remember talking to a young rancher in an anti-environmental bar in Eureka, Nevada, who humbly presumed that environmentalists, including myself and the group I was with, loathed him. His hat was large and his heart was good. Whatever you think of arid-lands ranching, he seemed to be doing it pretty well. He boasted of grass up to his cows' bellies, talked about moving the cows around to prevent erosion, and deplored the gold mines that are doing far worse things to the region. We were clearly on the wrong track-the environmental movement as a whole, if not the Nevada activists I worked with, who did a decent job of bridging the divide, but why was there a divide? The bar in Eureka, as of last July, still sold t-shirts emblazoned with the acronym WRANGLERS (Western Ranchers Against No-Good Leftist Environmentalist Radical Shitheads), a slogan about as diplomatic as my letter from Dick.
THE SOCIALISM AND PROGRESSIVISM that thrived through the 1930s saw farmers, loggers, fisheries workers, and miners as its central constituency along with longshoremen and factory workers. Where did it go? You can see missed opportunities again and again. Some of the potential for a broad, blue-collar left was trampled by the virulent anti-communism and anti-labor-union mood of the postwar era. More of it was undermined by the culture clash that came out of the civil rights movement. By the 1980s, when I was old enough to start paying attention, the divide was pretty wide. And environmentalists were typically found on one side.
The environmental justice movement set out in part to rectify that. The founding notion was to address the way that environmental hazards-refineries, incinerators, toxic dumps-are often sited in poor communities and communities of color. But class and thereby poor white people very quickly vanished from the formula. Toxic dumping in a rural North Carolina African-American community is said to have launched the environmental justice movement in 1982, but the prototypical environmental injustice had been exposed a few years earlier, in the mostly white community at Love Canal in western New York. It wasn't an anomaly either. The 1972 Buffalo Creek flood occurred when a coal-slurry impoundment dam on a mountaintop in West Virginia burst and killed 125, left 4,000 homeless, destroyed many small communities, and devastated the survivors-almost all of whom were white. And modern-day coal mining continues to ravage poor, mostly white regions of the South in what environmental journalist Antrim Caskey calls "the government-sanctioned bombing of Appalachia." Caskey describes how "coal companies turn communities against each other by telling their employees that the environmentalists want to take away their jobs."
The right wooed rural white people (and then screwed them), the left neglected them at best, and the electoral maps everyone made so much noise about in the 2004 election weren't about red states and blue states, they were about urban islands of blue surrounded by oceans of red. The anti-environmental and often corporate-backed Sagebrush Rebellion of the 1970s and the Wise Use Movement of the 1980s did their part to deepen the divide by convincing rural whites that their livelihoods were threatened by environmentalists and persuading them to embrace pro-corporate, pro-extractive-industry positions. And small-scale farmers losing their land were receptive to right-wing rhetoric that claimed to feel their pain and pinned the blame on liberals or immigrants or environmentalists, rather than corporate consolidation, globalization, or other macroeconomic forces. During the Clinton era when rural right-wingers feared the United Nations and "world government" (remember the black helicopters?) and the militia movement was strong, I wished that the anti-corporate-globalization movement could have done a better job of reaching out to these descendants of the old Progressives, Wobblies, and agrarian insurgents to tell them that there were indeed schemes for scary world domination, but they involved the World Trade Organization, not the UN. An environmental movement, or a broader progressive movement, that could speak to these
communities would be truly powerful. And truly just.
Pieces of it are here. The Quivira Coalition and many other groups across the West have found common ground with ranchers; land trust organizations and others have forged alliances with farmers; the whole premise that the people who actually produce the resources that the rest of us use are necessarily the enemy is fading away. I think of the fantastic work being done by good-old-boy-like activists I've met in the South-a land preservationist getting lots of conservation easements from the local Charleston-area gentry and a big red-faced drawling guy doing extraordinarily great environmental justice work with the African-American community in New Orleans's Lower Ninth Ward. And of people like Oakland's Van Jones, who are thinking about how jobs and the environment can come together as a goal. Even presidential candidate John Edwards, himself the child of North Carolina textile millworkers, talks about class and poverty in a way no one in the mainstream has in many years, or decades. The argument that a healthy environment can bring more revenue into rural communities through recreation and other benefits has more credence nowadays, and hardly radical constituencies like the lobstermen of Maine have recognized the relationship between their livelihoods and the health of the oceans. But much remains to be done.
The environmental movement's founding father, John Muir, was himself a Wisconsin farm boy, and he did not so much flee the farm for the wilderness as invent wilderness as a counter-image to the farm on which his brutal father nearly worked him to death. Muir worked later as a shepherd and lumber-miller in the Sierra Nevada and much later married into an orchard-owning family, but he didn't have much to say about work, and what little he did say wasn't positive. The wilderness he sought was solitary, pure, and set apart from human society, corporeal sustenance, and human toil-which is why he had to forget about the Indians who were still subsisting on the land there. This apartness and forgetting so beautifully codified in Ansel Adams's wilderness photographs has shaped the vision of much of the environmental movement since them.
The Sierra Club, which Muir cofounded with a group of University of California professors in 1892, saw nature as not where one lived or worked but where one vacationed. And traditional American environmentalism still largely imagines nature as vacationland and as wilderness, ignoring the working landscapes and agricultural lands, whose beauties and meanings are widely celebrated in European art. More recently, as environmentalists have found themselves dealing with more systemic problems-pesticides, acid rain-they've begun to shed the sense that the rural and urban, human and wild, are separate in ecological terms, but that awareness has done little to actually connect rural and urban people and issues.
Today, rural citizens see themselves in an unappreciated, fast-shrinking middle zone between wilderness and development (even though agriculture is often the best bulwark against sprawl). In many ways, rural culture is dying, and that seems to push many rural people into near-paranoia. During the water-scarcity crises in the Klamath River region on the California-Oregon border, farmers spoke of "rural cleansing" and seemed to believe that environmentalists wanted to empty out the countryside. Some of them do. Rural life, other than sentimental fantasies of an idyllic past, cowboy fetishism, or the pseudo-ruralism of people who live in rustic-looking settings but commute to work in the white-collar economy, is largely invisible to most of us most of the time. It's true that agriculture and wilderness are often in competition-the farmers of the Klamath Basin are competing with salmon for water. But if rural culture and rural life were positive values also being defended, the negotiations might go better.
Wallace Stegner wrote forty-seven years ago that "Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed," and something else will go out of us if the resourcefulness, rootedness, and richness of rural culture disappears. It's why the environmentalist-rancher coalitions are so noteworthy, and the new alliances forged to resist the Bush-era oil and gas leases across the arid West. But they are only a small part of a culture and a movement that need to do a lot more.
One step would be to stop letting the right wing frame the debate. More significantly, we need to seek ways to sustain both rural life and wildlife. The small solutions-fencing riparian habitat, allowing wildlife corridors, reorienting farms toward sustainable agriculture and local markets and away from chemical-heavy industrial production-can be cooperative rather than competitive. The large solution is a culture that values all of its fulfilling landscapes-the ones that sustain us bodily as well as imaginatively, the tilled lands as well as the wild. Of course one complication is that rural life itself has been increasingly industrialized in ways that produce, rather than a picturesque farm scene, a sort of food factory operated largely by exploited and transient workers and run by offsite profiteers. Reforming this will be good for both human rights and the environment-as well as our health and our tables.
IF, AT THE START OF THIS STORY, the great divide was manifest in musical taste and distaste, that too has begun to close, as musical genres bleed into each other and no longer provide the airtight identities they once did. The young don't seem to care who owns what music, and a lot of them have distinctly downwardly mobile tastes-garnished with irony, but not with scorn. (After all, a lot of them are downwardly mobile in this ruthless economy.) Race has gotten a lot more complicated in their lifetimes (and ours), both in abstract ideologies and in actual liaisons and general hybridizations, and so has music, above and beyond all those suburban white boys who wanted to be rappers in the 1990s.
The late-twenties writer and music aficionado Steven Leckart wrote me last year about the splendidly hybrid music and tastes of his generation. "I get the sense that the phrase 'everything but country'-which was rather popular when I was a teenager-is starting to go out of fashion," he said. "When Jack White of the White Stripes produced Loretta Lynn's last record and was nominated for a Grammy, that may not have been on teenagers' radars, but it's certainly reflected online. So you have a thirteen-year-old who happens to like Beck navigating with a click to the White Stripes and then to Loretta Lynn, and if he likes what he hears with Loretta even just a little, he will continue to explore those roots." The Farm Aid lineups over the last decade suggest another kind of crossover: everyone from Billy Joel and B. B. King to Dave Matthews has played alongside Willie Nelson and a regular array of country musicians. Maybe the music that once divided us could unite us as we wander this unfenced aural landscape.
Fortunately, I think Dick might be a relic. There are particular organizations as well as general tendencies that make me hopeful. Among them are the resurgent interest in where food actually comes from, the growing tendency to condemn less and build coalitions more, and a stronger capacity for thinking systemically. And then climate change is an issue that could unite us in new ways as it makes clear how interdependent everything on this planet is, and the extent to which privilege and consumption are part of the problem. The solutions will involve modesty as well as innovation.
The anti-environmentalist right has shot itself in both feet in the past few years, losing credibility and constituency, and a smart and fast-moving left could make hay out of this, to mix a few fairly rural metaphors. It would mean giving up vindication for victory-that is, giving up on triumphing over the wickedness of one's enemies and looking at them as unrecruited allies instead. It might mean giving up on the environmental movement as a separate sector and thinking more holistically about what we want to protect and why, including people, places, traditions, and processes outside the wilderness. It might even mean getting over the notion that left and right are useful or even adequate ways to describe who we are and what we long for (or even over the notion of rural and urban, as food gardens proliferate in the latter and sprawl becomes an issue in the former). We must also talk about class again, loudly and clearly, without backing down or forgetting about race. This is the back road down which lie stronger coalitions, genuine justice, a healthier environment, and maybe even a music that everyone can dance to.
Rebecca Solnit, a recipient of the Lannan Literary Award, is an Orion columnist and a contributing editor to Harper's. She is the author of twelve books, most recently Storming the Gates of Paradise, and lives in San Francisco.
© 2008 Orion Magazine
43 Comments so far
Show AllForests have managed themselves for thousands of years, it is people that need to learn thier place in the world.
lizard -- "If we clear forests, do not let the collected wood decay, and grow either new forest or plants that grow very quickly we will reduce carbon dioxide in the atmosphere."
I wish I was an expert on Forest Managemnt but in my experience, managing forests is not a good idea ... forests were never 'managed' in the past and followed their own burn cycles. You have a point in that we live in this fu~!@ed up 'climate change/carbon conscious' world but we need to address CO2 levels by reducing emissions and not managing forests. Decaying wood is the best source of nourishment for forests. There are many schools of thought on forest management but I really think we should completely leave the 'bio-sphere' forests (rain forests) untouched and maybe manage the new growth afforested forests.
When you cut trees and preserve the wood in building a house, CO2 is reduced, provided that you plant a replacement. If you burn the wood, that's a different story.
Riddimboy: Consider the following heretic thought: If we clear forests, do not let the collected wood decay, and grow either new forest or plants that grow very quickly we will reduce carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Stable forests do not take up as much CO2 as a growing one. If we collect the dead wood in the forests, less CO2 will go up in the next fire. Further, a forest left untouched accumulates dead wood and burns hotter and is more destructive when there is a fire. Managing the forests is perhaps smarter than just leaving them alone. A 1000 year old redwood is beautiful, but how much CO2 does it clear and what area of forest does it deprive of sun that fast growing plants could use? Like I said, heretic thoughts.
The real enemies are uncut trees and undeveloped land, undrilled oil,and free swimming fish. Lumber, vacation homes and suburbs, Mcfish sandwiches, are prosperity and "wi$e use" of resources, resulting in jobs for rural folk and subsistence for city folk.
Remember, it takes a millenium to replace a 1000 year old redwood.
Don't believe the Lie!
The Hippies and the Rednecks should be friends,
but they've got this thing about TREES.
Drop your fearful prejudices!
Co-operation is the way forward.
The Forest and the Farm are our CONNECTION POINTS not our battlegrounds.
You have a Redneck-Hippie friend who hunts and fishes, loves the land and the water, listens to world music, has a seasonal vegetable garden and brews his own beer.
You have a Hippie-Redneck friend who farms and cooks, loves the forest and the river, plays bluegrass fiddle, drives a hybrid car and has maxed out her credit cards.
Your Task is to find these people, get to know one another, and then begin the project of reconnecting your community into a sustainable whole.
Begin now.
-matti
kelmer .. excellent post ... we gotta stop killing any/all animals and fish and completely preserve whats left of our flora and fauna. I also believe we need to not meddle with nature and leave forests completely untouched so as to let them regenerate and regulate themselves. The WWF and a whole slew of these gigantic non-profits sometimes end up getting enmeshed in local politics and compromise their positions.
kokuaguy thanks for the post ... i had to google Mahalo !! Sorry for my ignorance but im from a far away land myself and it didnt occur to me its a greeting ... mahalo to you to my brudda/sistah !
Here's a link that will get you to the PBS program on Pete Seeger:
http://blogs.takepart.com/2008/02/27/pete-seeger-on-pbs-and-how-you-can-...
Howzit, Lizard --
We have a number of activist, hard working UCC congregations in Hawaii. I'm a member Church of the Crossroads near University of Hawaii's Manoa campus. We tend to neglect outreach efforts that will be necessary to sustain our membership in the long term, and I see our musical programs as the key to making connections with evangelicals, where the real growth of Christian "religiousity" is to be found today. We do what we can to find common ground with all religions, including fundamentalists whose dogma we have little in common with, but more and more of whom are going back to the Hebrew texts such as Genesis for their teachings on stewardship of creation and protection of generations yet to be born.
yours for aloha (peace/love) and pono (justice/truth)
mike in honolulu
Superb comments. Great article. All are insightful, provocative and inspired. Thanks everyone :)
I happen to enjoy all types of music. I do have my preferences for different times, as well as my all-time favourites. But still, there isn't a genre you can mention from which I don't enjoy at least a piece or two.
Respect is the answer, imo. Respect. For each and every one. For ALL. Respect is the only thing that's gonna' get help us move forward, towards real, lasting, widespread progress.
Right on, write on....
Nice article. Unfortunately, as a leftist and a southerner who started college at a major state university with a rich student-left history, I experienced the kind of attitude ascribed to "Dick" in this article first hand. Don't assume based on a person's accent, dress, or yes, choice of music, that they are not an ally or companero.
This is, and I hope, will continue to be a diverse society. If those on the left cannot find common threads that connect disparate groups - working-poor rural whites, Hispanic immigrants, African-Americans, we are up the proverbial sh*t creek - without so much as a boat. Those with the real financial and political power in this country have found it only to easy to divide us. Will they succeed again this November?
I agree with Hootowl and Ezflyer. Some hunters/fisherman may not be very receptive to environmentalism, but dogmatically declaring that all sportsmen are enemies of nature is a mistake. Well-meaning but misguided people who impinge on natural areas to build their dream homes are a far greater threat to the environment. People who insist that their world view is the one correct one and that all who disagree with them are wrong can be found on both sides of the political equation, and unfortunately they are the ones who facilitate much of the destructive division that tends to derail the efforts of the more pragmatic people who would rather have solutions than conflict.
Personally, I can see nothing wrong with raising an animal to slaughter it for food, any more than I see anything morally wrong with a lion hunting a gazelle. Both are solutions to the problem of providing nutrition to the body. Sooner or later, we will all end up being eaten, most likely by microbes who will return our fundamental elements to the earth so they can be used again. It's not immoral, it's just the way things work.
Good post ezflyer. That is the sort of thing I am talking about. I grew up fishing for trout in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan and I have to say that people who fish and enjoy the outdoors are not our enemies. If there is any "enemy" in rural areas it would be developers who develop 500,000 dollar houses for yuppies that have a "great view" because they clear cut the woods down to the lake. If we were smart we'd talk to the local( poor) hunters and ask them what they think of the destruction of deer hunting areas with those clear cuts? Traditionally fishing clubs like the Izsac Walton league have been very outspoken about preserving habitat they called it "conservation." And here is something to think about although I consider myself to be a proud Earth First!er with arrests for locking down to try to stop clear cuts, I am also quite certain that fishing clubs like the Izaac Walton have preserved more land than EF! probably by a factor of a thousand.
http://www.iwla.org/
Really the overall point though is as you said ezflyer is how are we going to reach the 50% of the country who is rural and poor and being brainwashed to hold social views that are against their own interests? Hint being a self righteous vegan with jello dreads ain't going to help. It might make YOU feel good but it won't solve the problem but rather just give more ammo to asshats like Rush Limbaugh about dirty hippies. Are we really so stuck in our psedo hip high priced urban enclaves that we ourselves aren't willing to change and be more tolerant to bring about real change?
I think BTW you are right that listening to Willie Nelson and being positive about the woods and the goods things in it might help.
Comparing joining hunting and fishing clubs to joining the Klan, it may be that some of their members really are in it. But as the right has proven, this is a contest for minds. We don't reach many on the radio, so we need to counter Rush with one on one relationships. There is no reason we have to be enemies because they've been brainwashed, on the contrary. An understanding friend can be a better, more trusted influence than right wing radio talk show hosts.
I've found that my fishing friends are receptive to catch and release methods. I sometimes remind them that if they're not going to eat the fish, to take a picture and put it back in the water to grow and multiply so we can have good fishing again tomorrow. They see this done all the time on tv fishing shows, so it's not a big hurdle.
My hunter friends are also receptive to my suggestion that they harvest young, tender and tastier big game and leave the old, parasite ridden, toxics loaded males with big racks but tough gamier meat to multiply their species. Their better genes helped them get to the top and it is those we should preserve if we want our game to be the best. Also, spending more money to mount more dust catching heads on the wall doesn't please most wives anyway and its nice to see these beautiful males around and alive instead.
A twist on catch and release fishing is catch and release hunting. It could be done in any season with many species. A trophy hunter will shoot a buck with a tranquilizer dart, take a picture, cure any ailments and release the animal. It's a win-win for game and sportsmen.
I commend vegans on their earth friendly habits, but the self-righteous insistence of left wing authoritarians on making us all vegans against our will is one of the counterproductive things this article talks about.
The quality of postings here is impressive.
"Another way for enviros to connect with rednecks is to join their hunting and fishing clubs, 4H Clubs, farmers associations and even (gulp) their churches. They too want to preserve wilderness if only for the fish and game."
** that's like asking anti-racism activists to join the KKK.
Hunters and fishing people are a blight-we have an annual pier fishing event for kids, they catch 200 tiny fish each year and throw them in the garbage. There's a local river here where people have been seen throwing fish they catch onto the road for cars to run over. This is what hunters and fishermen do--they exploit Nature for no good reason(veganism proves that we dont need to hunt or fish for food).
-4H clubs are similarly disgusting. You raise an animal only to slaughter it. That's a perversion of nurturing. No other species engages in such a depravity.
We dont need any more of this supremacist BS. Greenpeace is already full of it. Same with the World Wildlife Fund which not only supports the Canadian seal hunt but came out in favor of elephant slaughter in South Africa.
The answer isnt to bend over for the dominionist/human supremacist fools.
Wonderful article pointing to the real problem of our society, that we are profoundly divided by race and class, a legacy of the slavery that the 'founding fathers' were unable to face.
A quibble about Hank Williams, he really did steal his thunder from black music. In particular, Emmit Miller, a popular vaudeville star. If you Google his name you can find his archive online where you will find 'Love Sick Blues' and other HW songs, right down to the yodles.
kokuaguy: The United Church is exceptional. I greatly respect this institution. It is hardly an example of religiosity though, quite the contrary. The United Church does not carry the mentality I am worried about, quite the contrary. If I were to join religion, the United Church is where I would go.
kokuaguy: i see your point and I think i agree with you. Perhaps religion is the way out, I certainly don't see this culture as receptive to atheism so I hardly think that is the answer in the short term.
OOPS--
that was lizard who needs to Google the United Church of Christ and its efforts to support protect the environment and address the Climate Crisis.
m
Mahalo, riddimboy -- I had to google Judi bari, but you are right to remind us of her sacrifice and her example to us all. I suggest you google the United Church of Christ, for starters. Old55 likewise does a service by adding Willie Nelson's contributions to the list of uniters, and by noting ironic legacy of our "divider in chief." Mucho mahalo to you to hootowl for the link the great Bagenet website. My contribution would be to highly recommend the most recent PBS production on folk singer/artist Pete Seeger's legacy.
As for the lizard, you're on to something with Sweden, but there's religiousity that you are apparently ignorant of, and it is the only real hope of uniting our divided culture on issues of sustainablility and stewardship.
with sincere aloha,
mike in honolulu
Protestants and jews accept the concept of conquest justified by superiority and closeness to the "real" God. The other people who may well fit in with them are the Muslims, who also are quite affected by religiosity from the same book, since the Koran is 100% pro-Torah. These are the problematic people of today: Americans, Jews, and Muslim arabs. Jews, while being often secular, none-the-less are deeply affected by the us vs. them mentality. The problem, thus, rests with the mind set generated by the Torah, a book noone should take seriously, but which, unfortunately, many do, and in earnest.
i do not believe the people have been brainwashed by the rich or the corporations. The mentality of rural America is shaped by religion. The old testament is a book about chosen people who, led by God, expropiate land for their own use and are justified in this by God. It is about morality, and enforcing it by death if necessary. It is about punishment and fear of God. It is about us vs. them. It is this mentality thjat has led to the actions of the US. The opposing mentality is that of the enlightment from France. It's proponents were atheists like Jefferson and Madison. The values of the bible are centered in the rural areas, while those of the enlightment are centered in the city. The struggle,therefore, is between the rural areas and the city. Regressive vs. progressive. The mindset to be changed is of a religious nature. Not accidentally, development of a nation is coupled with a diminution of the importance of religion. The most advanced state, Sweden, is now 50% atheist. All highly developed countries, with the exception of the US, have greatly diminished religiosity. This is the esssence of the problem.
Its amazing ... a nice, long, well thought out and analyzed article ...and and not a single mention of Judi Bari ! This sucks ...
Good old pot smoking Willie Nelson is a great cross-cultural ambassador. As Solnit points out he's been bringing all kinds of folks together with his annual Farm Aid concerts. Not to long ago I saw him play a free show for wounded veterans, their family and care-givers at Brook Army Medical Center in San Antonio. After the show he mingled with his fans in that crowd for almost an hour and was warm, respectful and attentive to everyone of those folks. Willie grew up amongst the rural poor in Texas and he continues to bridge all those gaps. We can all learn some valuable lessons observing how he does it. He's like a beloved uncle to everyone he meets.
I've spent time myself amongst some of the most "redneck" loggers in Northern Idaho, and more recently around very conservative folks in Texas. One area where most folks in this country these days can find common ground is in discussing the complete disaster the G.W.Bush presidency has been to our country. We've all got to work on finding those common interests and expanding the dialog.
hootowl,
You missed my point. The condescension I encounter is coming from the rural conservatives, not me.
And lets remember that the red state/blue state (why are conservatives denoted with the color red?? - isn't that backwards) stuff is really not a state-boundary phenomenon, it is a urban vs. suburban/rural phenomenon. "Blue" states are just states with enough of their populations in cities to tip the balance.
First of all, lets be clear, my experience in the Appalachian region is that genuinely poor rural rural people, if you would talk to them, are already on our side.
But, I have found that most of these self-described humble country boy-conservatives are none of the sort - they own big spreads of acreage and collect big oil and gas royalties on the wells and coal on their property. On top of that, they invariably have a high paying job managing a mine or oil/gas operation - the same mining operations that are ruining the lives of poor people in their small homes and trailers - who, very suspiciously, never seem to be able to get a job at the mine themselves.
In other words, these "country boys" are largely members of the capitalist class themselves.
A government of, for and by.... ? We are often told this government is the problem... but by whom? Oddly the corporate interests say government is the problem and then do everything they can to control it themselves.
This removes the of, for and by ...us and replaces it with them. I think if WE had OUR government and not them and theirs... we'd soon have the changes everyone needs.
Ask yourselves if the idea of OF, For and By the people doesn't seem somewhat quaint,
Maybe it should be if only we had a heart, a brain and some courage?
But hey this is Kansas and what's the matter with it?
There is no WE in US (A) anymore... it is only THEM... and what's behind the curtain.
USAn that's true but not the point. The point is how do we reach rural people who have been brainwashed by Rush L. et al? Hint condescension and dismissal will not help when the corporations are acting all pseudo friendly to them, naturally they will listen to people who are nice to them first, kapeesh? I.e. we will keep losing until we understand where red staters are coming from and we talk to them as fellow human beings on the planet. I'd suggest reading Joe Bagenet to see what a red state friendly progressive life might look like:
http://www.joebageant.com/
rtdrury,
You post came in as I was preparing mine.
Let's make something clear, the rural rightist, with their big pickup trucks and 100 mile one-way, commute between their (often big ranch-style) home, to the mine or logging area, are using a hell lot more resources than me in my 1100 sq foot townhouse and 3 mile bus or trolley ride to work.
At the same time, we cannot deny the hostility of county people toward city people, and particularly western chauvinism toward eastern city people.
On my job, when I occasionally have to deal with a mine operators out west, all I have to say is I'm from the "Pittsburgh Safety and Health Technology Center" and all rapport is lost. Meanwhile, with the same MSHA people from the "Rocky Mountain District, Helena Field office" everything is hunky-dory.
I even see it here in CD. When I suggest the most environmentally responsible thing that anyone who isn't actively employed in ranching, farming or forestry or a remote mine can do is to move to the city (the city, not suburbs), get rid or their car and use public transportation, I get a distinctly cold response...
FVHorn, you mentioned that capitalists spew the propaganda that urban leftists threaten rural rightists' job security (resource extraction) with environmental campaigns when capitalists actually threaten rural rightists' job security with offshoring, etc. It would appear that urban leftist and rural rightists should ally against the capitalists and work together for progressive change. Standing in the way is rural rightists' ignorance and desperation. Also standing in the way is urban leftists' consumption of extracted resources and contempt for rural rightists' ignorance among other things. Given urban leftists' greater opportunities and economic power it would seem they are obligated to reach out first. Walking the progressive walk also requires urban leftists to integrate solidarity with the people of the world by offloading dependence on the capitalist's warez. So when is San Francisco going to really walk the progressive walk?
This was a great article. When I grew up in the rural West we had a liberal Senator, a democratic Governor, and a congressman. My father and a lot of the adults I knew were union members in copper. It wasn't that long ago, 40 years, but its like that world never existed. When I visit my relatives Utah the only thing they hate worse than the developers who took everything is the Sierra Club. They have reasons for this. People often see the land disappear as a preserve for the wealthy who are coming to the West in droves. When I visit relatives in Idaho they only people they hate worse than Tyson are environmentalists who do manage to alienate everyone in town.
There has always been a resentment against privilege in the West, as well as what seems to be a contradictory admiration for the rich and their conquests and often the most rapacious rich. I've never known quite what to think of it.
Some years ago, talking about the movies, Joe Bob Briggs pointed out that the only group left to villainize were rednecks. Just look at about every slasher film. It's often the redneck who dices up the college kids when they dare to venture into the woods or the desert.
I teach at a university in the Appalachians now. It is amazing how its the same problem here. Often when I visit some places I don't let people know what I do then so as not to alienate them. I don't know if I do it so well but liking Merle Haggard sometimes helps. The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band got together with the Carters, Roy Acuff and others back in the 70s. The record was great. Knowing the music gives you something to talk about.
Great post hootowl. You describe some real difficulties with the activist-heroism that doesn't often work, and the too easy cultural biases that keep us from seeing the chance for an activism of persuasion and solidarity.. Your answers are where the long-term battle will be. By the way I used to live in Arcata. Amazing country and a place where some of the lines have blurred and opened the door for new possibilities. best wishes.
I don't know the answer, either.
I think hootowl is on the right track.
I also keep thinking that somewhere we let the corporate masters drive a big wedge between two groups who are realy natural allies in the struggle against the corporate oligarchy that controls our lives.
Does the term 'Wage Slaves' ring a bell?
Having lived both sides of this both as a direct action activist opposing the logging of Redwoods in Humboldt county California and as a poor white person living in rural northern Michigan and rural Oregon I can say this article rings very true. Hint smelly vegans with jello dreads aren't going to change any minds, all we can do like that is sit in the logging road "locked down" which maybe will stop the logging for 48 hours (usually less). And no I am not saying that in a condescending fashion but rather as someone who has been there done that. I lived on a mountain as ground support for a year for tree sitters in Humboldt and at the end of the day they just bulldozed around our blockade, extracted the tree sitters and cut the Redwood grove we tried so hard to defend.
At this point I don't know what the answers are, certainly I have no confidence the system will change itself and activism more often alienates than creates solutions. In the long run I think it will come down to positive small moves like shopping at co-ops, driving less, supporting community gardens, installing wind mills, making our own clothes, working in soup kitchens, teaching young people to read, etc, and finally at least talking to sincere paleo-cons and Libertarians who want to dismantle the empire as much as we do while calling them out on their corporatism, etc. Perhaps this is a thin reed to go on but at this point I think it's our only hope. Certainly if we are honest with ourselves the status quo of marches, and lock downs has NOT won us any long lasting true victories against the oligarchy. And while I may hold my nose and vote for Obama I expect nothing more from him than a continuation of the status quo as opposed to things getting worse under McCain. That means in the long run it's up to us, so put down that doobie and pick up a pick axe and start working at a CSA or soup kitchen or habitat for humanity, whatever, I'm ready are you?
p.s. I'm interested in hearing from people e-mail me at raven200@gmail.com if you want to discuss this more.
Hannah Montana's daddy said that the term "rednecks" came from union members wearing red bandanas in a confrontation with the coal mine owners and their hired thugs. No one taught me to dislike country music, I came by it naturally. Actually, some of the music around the peripheries of popular country is quite interesting: country blues, bluegrass ala Norman Blake, Vassar Clements, Doc Watson, and western swing.
I love this article.
Reminds me when I was prof at U of Oregon in the 60's, we stopped at a joint in a little failed logging town (never gamble on shuffleboard in such a place) with a dance floor and a jukebox. A local grabbed me by the shoulder, and told me "You can't dance like that in here", and I calmly asked if it was OK if we could leave now, avoided all disharmony, figured that without me and my freak flag, these people would just have to celebrate Saturday night by fighting each other.
Also reminds me that I heard Chuck Berry play "Blue Moon of
Kentucky" in SF at the old Carousel Ballroom in '68, Steve Miller was actually playing bass for him at the concert, and Chuck stopped the song twice, showed him how it went, got him to slow the tempo and play the correct progression - so Chuck Berry was teaching Steve Miller the old Bill Monroe song, popularized by Elvis.
The world is a two-way street. If the Rural Right would also be tolerant of differences, then it would be an easier task to reach out to them. But the Right-Wing Propaganda Machine and the rich owners of the mines, farms and sawmills (all actually from the 'city') declared war on the Left, and made environmentalists the enemy and an easy scapegoat for everything wrong in the lives of the rural folk.
Since the Left did not own the radio stations, newspapers, mines, sawmills, and farms it was easy for the Right-Wingers to demonize it, especially since the Left had more opportunities for education and everything else, and so there was resentment on the part of the poor rurals. These rural people were so cut-off from information that they thought jobs were being lost to the spotted owl, when they were actually being lost through mechanization, resource depletion, overseas competition and off-shoring. For example, the main mill for California redwood trees is in Mexico and has been for twenty years. So much for "local jobs creation" by the transnational corporations that own the cut-down trees, and everything else.
This is the crux of the issue in many cases- the Iraq War, the Economy, the Tax Code, the Environment, Welfare, etc. He who has the gold makes the rules and rules the propaganda. Poor rural folk must listen to those with the gold, and in good Stockholm Syndrome fashion, ally and identify with their oppressors. Kind of like Democrats in Congress.
People like Rush Limbaugh and the Right-Wing Shitmouth Klan cannot be 'friends'. The Right and the Republicans have proven time and again that they will simply take advantage of any sign of compromise, friendliness or empathy shown by the so-called 'liberals', like the capitalist pigs they are. These bastards are just evil and must be destroyed, much like the Nazi party was in Germany.
And the rural folk are given NO idea that they are really totally dependent upon the Socialism of the Federal and State governments. They would have no mail, no schools, no libraries, no roads, no health care, no tourism, no police, no fire protection, no military, and no jobs in government-subsidized forestry (see the US Forest Service) or agriculture (see the agriculture bill and the Agriculture Department and Corps of Engineers) or mining (see the public land giveaways and mine reclamation) or anything without Government intervention.
They have been spoon-fed the Big Lie by the Right-Wing Propaganda Machine and its multi-millionaire 'journalist/commentator/propagandists' that their well-being just depends upon the "massa bossman" and upon the sanctity of private property. You can see this is the same old lie of the Old South, that has now permeated the rural areas of the country, along with so-called 'country/white tribe' music, pushing out other competing philosophies (and music).
So yes, let us reach out to cowboy-booted and -hatted people, but re-educate them to forget the crap of the Corporatist Media, and ask them to remember that their forebears made this country great (until Reagan began to betray this course of history) by turning to Socialism to save themselves from the Capitalism-caused evils of the Great Depression. And they will now have to do it again.
And also make sure they know that, if nature is destroyed(maybe environmentalists should drop the 'Frenchy'-elite word 'environ-mentalists' and replace it with something like Naturalists instead), there will be no 'god's country' left.
Bravo Tour de Force.
Finally, something that gives me a reason to come out of the closet as a country-music listener.
Thanks, RS.
-Cynthia
Good article Rebecca.
Another way for enviros to connect with rednecks is to join their hunting and fishing clubs, 4H Clubs, farmers associations and even (gulp) their churches. They too want to preserve wilderness if only for the fish and game. They witness firsthand the damage that Big Agro, Big Lumber, Big Coal, Big Oil and other corporations are doing to the land and to their pocketbooks.
Enviros can better help them fight the right wing corporations hurting farmers and rural people by becoming friends instead of critics. We can help them make money by growing and selling organic produce and becoming a positive force in their communities.
I can identify with the points Solnit makes in her essay. I've noticed to my chagrin that many of the environmental activists I see on campus and elsewhere seem to have adopted similar attitudes to the anti-logging activists she describes here. Unfortunately, they seemed to have learned these attitudes from my generation, where self-appointed progressives tended to look on rural folks as rednecks and poor white trash, without really bothering to see if these stereotypes were accurate. I now work in an area where I frequently come into contact with farmers and ranchers, often under circumstances that could easily lead to conflict. Some of the best people I've met are those whose political views are very different from mine, but who's culture includes the notion of respectful hospitality toward guests, a lesson I hope I have learned to practice in my own life. One concept worth remembering is that statistics apply to populations, not to individuals. Viewed this way, the whole ideas of red and blue are replaced with a consideration of each person as an individual, rather than as a member of some group.
Rebecca, I grew up in Chicago, and if you'd told me back then that I'd be doing anything that sounded the least bit "country" I might've slapped the white right off your face.
But I never could deny the eloquence of Hank Williams and little by little....
Well, you've said it better than I can.
SJ
www.spartacusjones.com