Exploring how the concept of race intersects ecological succession and war

It's an intense one, and I hope you can read with your own ability to embrace openness as I explore these ideas with curiousity, flexibility and fluidity; perhaps an embodiment of ecological process

I’m drawing a bath in a clawfoot tub, hand painted walls of corn poppy shadows and an arched entrance of clay and wood. I’ve been in transition and trying to get my bearings on a routine lately after moving from a space I spent the last 6 months on and off, and temporarily find myself at an artist residency called Elsewhere Studios.

I’ve made it a routine for months now to read and research every morning after stretching and coffee, with writing¹ and a walk before I turn on my phone or answer or engage any other humans in the world. I used to operate this way, (well I wasn’t as good with phone boundaries in the past except for when I had no service) before the years of grief took away my brain, and it’s nice to be back and in my work again, mostly. Not that grief isn’t always there. I love learning, and research, and I finally can focus again on my work, my process of 'web weaving’ and have opportunities to educate others nowadays in person about the realms of ecology, place and politic I explore on the daily and have since I was 20 years old². I’ve been practicing being in my body after some revelations this year, taking time to remember to feel the pleasure of sensations being in the wide world, rather than reacting to the sensations that feel painful. Barefoot and moving about on textured rocks, clay soils, soft grasses and mud filled ponds. Finding companionship in the sensations of being alive, alongside exercising my mind, my creativity and heart. My heart still gets all mixed up especially when it comes to other people, but it works well when it comes to the birds, foxes, the muddy feet.

After coffee and a walk, it was Monarda flower tea brewed in a pit-fired coiled clay tea pot. It is still ashen and charred from my month in the Gila Wilderness³ this spring. The Monarda from Grey Owl Gardens, reminds me of the fields of light pink flowering Monarda that grow in the Ponderosa Pine forests along the first section of the Colorado Trail if you start on the Front Range end. it reminds me of the forest openings with just enough sun in the Big Ivy national forest where I used to spend most of my time in Appalachia. It reminds me of the gardens I worked in in Ohio where a teacher asked us to leave every single Monarda plant when weeding because it saved her life once during an allergic reaction to a bee sting. It reminds me of the Monarda plants I used to sit by in my herb garden where I grew up, and all the bees and butterflies that came, to have it all bulldozed years later for no reason other than it was too much to take care of by hand, now just sod, my beloved beebalm is gone⁴.

Today feels milder, but during this move the daytime temps have been in the 90’s and my body has struggled to go on as normal in such a sudden and persistent heat spike, and alongside seasonal allergies to grass and tree pollen. The spring dragged on with rains and mild weather to the point that farmer’s around here didn’t get their spring vegetables in until the heat spike finally arrived, where then suddenly the frost-free gardens of corn, beans, peppers, basils needed to go in too. I’ve been trying to find time to put my Oaxacan blue corn in the ground and it’s getting to be too late soon, if I don’t get myself to amending soil in the slightly alkaline bed at the bottom of the terraces at my friends’ place, where I am told I can put some seed in the ground. It’s been a few years since I grew this corn out, and stayed put to see it mature, only to never eat ⁵ it. It’s seed I tended to for a few years on a piece of land in North Carolina in 2013-2016 and after 5 years away and a grief-filled season back a few years ago, I have the seed in my possession yet again.

Between suddenly having a ton of space for a month at Elsewhere- a studio with the perfect light and a window that opens to broad-leafed trees, a big shift from where I based the last half year in the tree-less windswept adobes with a 360 view — and having space also in a wood shop nearby for my airstream renovation and apothecary, I find myself not knowing where to place myself first. I’ve been really good for awhile about not spreading myself out too much, and focusing on one thing as a time as a stress-reducing and creative practice, and it’s worked. Lately I’ve fallen off, because its that time of year where the energy in the air is that everyone is overwhelmed and thin and I’m determined to not let it happen to me again. I’m recalibrating, and being ‘ok’ with letting some things go. Focus, and letting go of lofty goals, to re-orient into realistic ones day by day, moment by moment, has been really helpful. Nonetheless, it is a transition time bringing up old traumas of past transitions or past periods where homespace wasn’t peaceful or safe, and I’m looking at what that is for me. I’ve allowed my body and mind to be safe and at peace, grounded and taken care of for a bit now, and to re-experience transition especially around home, is reminding me how much it affects me to have things to shuffle, my systems out of order, my home space not under my control and how much in the past it vastly affected my mental and physical health. I even looked different.

I’m adjusting to being in town, with all the sounds, energy swirling around and people coming into the space where I live uninvited because it is a space that feels public, because it used to be in the past. If you know me, you know I am sensitive to noise, and sometimes other sensations like cold water. All the years I spent traveling, I remember all the times of also moderating my noise input. Sometimes noise doesn’t both me, especially if it is bird sound, or drone-like noises at a certain frequency, or even the quiet shuffling of other humans. Water moving, wind against the yurt I was living in, didn’t bother me. Construction sounds, horns right next to me, dogs barking randomly through the night, or people yelling, do bother me. Sometimes I can move through it all and it doesn’t cause me harm, other times, I feel physical pain and I have to put earplugs in, sunglasses on and baggy clothes on to feel better. The month I spent in Gila this winter reminded me of how glorious it is to be a sensitive human and be able to open the senses wide open without danger of overwhelm from the poisons found in the modern world. I wasn’t too sensitive, or too chaotic⁶ but able to tune into myself and my body as it melts in to the land seamlessly without so much distraction or modulation. My dreams deep, my thoughts complete. I felt this on the Colorado Trail too, especially during the periods we didn’t see a lot of people or had no cell service. I spoke about it in the whole nature ritually washing thing⁷.

Letting Nature Ritually Wash Us

What I have loved about being in town is experiencing being able to walk places right out my door, especially the back alleys where interesting plants grow. I’ve already taken opportunities to walk these alleys during other periods because of hosting in-town donation based plant walks a few times now, but being able to walk out any moment, in a town/nature mixed landscape where nature isn’t devoid of here at all, has been fascinating. I’m still uncertain if I could live in town long term, especially at a busy intersection. But, its fun for a moment, to observe how the birds and Tree of Heaven (tree I mention a bit in my last post on Moab), feral fruit trees, Siberian Elms, Ash and Maples make home along the man-dug ditches and sidewalks.

I’ve shifted some research focus to the connection between eugenics, conservation, land and war. Even though it was something Gabe and I spoke a little bit about on the podcast back a few years ago, the episode I hosted with Calyx Liddick really drove it home for me.

Episode #77: Calyx Liddick of Northern Appalachia School on the historical connection between ecological conservation and eugenics

The wormhole I’ve been down connects to the Israel-Palestine war, weaving in my mind my past experiences trimming Cannibas at illegal pot farms with Israelis in northern California and asking them to explain the conflict years ago while we sat for hours doing slave labor together⁸, the perception of race or otherness depending on the context and how it connects to my experience growing up in the rural south where my family has been at least 5 generations on both sides⁹, and how it relates to our experience of land. I’m gonna share a little bit of what I’m thinking about right now, but know that it isn’t complete for me, nor fully formed, might be stumbling along¹⁰, and of course I’m exploring this with genuine curiosity and vulnerability while trying to not be influenced by the performance I am being told I need to enact right now to show solidarity with the oppressed, because it’s obvious performance is not working to stop the death and suffering happening right now. And to me it’s obvious that oppression is relative to time place and power and this current situation and our bandwagons is proving it and perpetuating it.

I want to have a deeper understanding of the somatic landscape behind why this war is happening and how it is connected to my work around fear and othering in ecology, and it’s sent me down some curious roads.

I ended up looking at work speaking to the contradiction that Palestinian activist and general badass Ahed Tamimi forces us to reckon with about our projections of otherness as being savage, barbaric and brown. She is blond haired and light eyed, and the Israeli soldiers she assaulted as a child defending the town spring were dark skinned and dark haired. What does being blonde, or having blonde hair have to do with land connection or assumption of innocence, intelligence or belonging? (and btw, I’m blonde and green-eyed, and have existed in that experience my whole life) Blonde hair has meant at least in the last 100 years, that you are a part of a more evolved and civilized race and therefore worthy of home, land, safety and resources, power, though those who touted eugenics ideology could not clearing define the origins of Aryan-ness as being in sync with Nordic features. Eugenics influences how see who belongs or who is worthy. Just as biotic nativeness is a social construct, so is race as a scientifically measurable idea. Seeing folks where I grew up on Facebook defending the current genocide, as fighting pure evil, and being Christian means supporting the people who seem whiter, more western and yet more barbaric, well to do Christians who claim under baptism¹¹ to uphold the 10 commandments.

This article📝 by Yosefa Loshitzky I have already linked above breaks this all down super well. 📖

These God-loving folks find this situation an exception because the supposed ‘brown’ people are barbaric animals/terrorists who are defending their land connection for no reason other than to be evil. Don’t forget that during WW2 and before, Jewish folk were looked at in this same way. And, the Holocaust was the culmination of this desire by a group of people (the Nazis, but also the broader culture on the whole allowed this to happen) to completely eliminate an ‘other.’ Jewish folks have been marginalized as other, and as the non-white other when it was strategic to do so, when there was need to blame a group for societal problems and issues. Many Jewish folk have ethnic features similar to those considered Arab in Palestine (though Arab is a modern word created and imposed on a diverse groups of people), and yet many Jews and many Palestinians also have blonde hair and blue eyes, so this narrative of the brown-skinned other does not hold up. Both ‘groups’ have been on either side, and yet, the idea that there are separate groups here, neatly drawn, with neat linear histories, is an easy but harmful overgeneralization to make. Just like in the invasive plant narrative, where ‘native’ Junipers are called invasive plants because of their behaviors and how they annoy us or make us uncomfortable or cause a profit loss, not because they fit the agreed upon othering criteria neatly.

Check out the podcast episode I published back in the winter with Jason Hone on Biblical Ethnobotany, where he explains how the Romans caused the Jewish diaspora out of the holy lands, along with most anyone else who didn’t fit the ethnic and cultural features they deemed superior.

Episode #82: Jason Hone on biblical ethnobotany and ecology of the holy lands

Trying to understand deeper the complexity of human movement, cultural connection to land, and diaspora as it relates to the southwest has me realizing there are also parallels the current middle east conflict in certain ways. I’m finally reading some deep history of the Ancestral Puebloan peoples and its finally helping me sort out of some layers I didn’t understand as fully before, and learning these stories helps me teach about plants and landscapes. These woven webbed patterns trickle all the way down to the right here, in how we understand what we think is happening, how we see one another.

(more of that thread in another post).🪡

In one scenario, Jewish folk were see as the edge of the so-called Oriental other, (especially the Mizrahi and Sephardi) but today, they are seen as on the edge of the civilized West and the west must defend it’s kind, or it’s cultural ideas of superiority. What of this is created and imposed? How do these lines get drawn and redrawn according to beliefs held en masse about a group of people, place or landscape? And again, our deep held cultural beliefs of a superior race don’t hold up neatly in this case, because just as ecologies are always changing and morphing and responding to conditions, so are people and their genetic, cultural and religious expressions. We have so much diversity within Judaism for example, because of deep long time diaspora and trauma, but also long periods of integration, peace and syncretism. And the same for the holy lands on the whole, which has been home or a travel route for so many people even to pre-biblical times due to its geography that it also isn’t clear that we can define Palestine as one distinct culture and one distinct type of people who all look the same, or believe the same thing or even are the same religion. There are Christian, Jewish and Muslim Palestinians, who could be dark haired or blonde. Iranians, who are supposedly the ‘other’ enemy, are Persian and speak Farsi, and can also be Christian, Jewish or Muslim. So much of what is happening now is showing up how much our broad generalizations or deep lack of understanding of history can create conflict. And yet, we have people in power, right here, in the supposedly most civilized country in the world, doing some of the worst things to people and land. Who is exactly enemy, and who is exactly bad?

This obsession with a pure race, the idea that there is a pure origin to a people who now are being leveraged by western countries for power and money over nuclear arms and oil, that looks blonde and blue eyed not Arabic, is a strategic fantasy. I can’t claim to be an expert at all of this. But my interest in beauty norms across the world, garden aesthetics, ethnotourism12, perceptions of wildness and the culture of invasion biology has me weaving them together. What does skin bleaching have to do with salt cedar, or colorism have to do with land back and cultural acceptance, safety and belonging? Lots. Its an uncomfortable topic to talk about as the ‘left’ and ‘right’ tend to default to strict comfortable polarisms on these topics. It seems that the goal ends up making sure to perform the right motions to belong rather than critically look at how concepts of biotic nativism or the construct of race negatively affect the land in this case. But then this disrupts narratives on both sides in small ways. Because both sides often see it simply, and without looking deeper at why one group would other another into oblivion when just a few decades ago those that are othering were also othered en masse.

Must we keep the people we other in control, even if we realize at some point we are wrong, out of fear of their retaliation, somewhere, somehow? Violence will always create more violence later, and I also fear that our violence on land, whether it is us being convinced of native plants ‘purity’ over the bad ‘invasive’ ones or that whiteness is superior over darker skins or even how these things get flipped on their heads the other directions in odd and fantastical ways, will only inevitably put us back in cycles of more violence.

It’s also been brought up to me by someone who I’ve been friends with a long time who I have found I disagree with often and yet we stay friends — what amount of our fantasy of utopia influences our future baseline? What do we exactly hope liberation looks like? I do not know how to answer or respond to this, but I wanted to put that perspective here.

I’m working on these tendrils to better understand, be able to speak to folks of different backgrounds, histories and lineages. To better understand how things aren’t so black and white. Or, try to not recite the same talking points others recite without looking deeper¹². My recent ecology class focused on intersections of geology, biology, mining and somatically curious ecological critique as it connects to Unaweep Canyon as nexus 🕸️ and spirals out ꩜ into the world in directions up ⬆️, down ⬇️, and everywhere in-between🔄. And fitting since Unaweep has some of the oldest Pre-Cambrian rock around deep in it’s canyon walls. It is the deep mother where all else rests. All this human stuff came after. All of it. I digress.

Just as my body is safe to melt into Cottonwood and mud when camped down by the Gila river for weeks on end, here I see how as time isn’t linear, ecologies are not in boxes and race is a construct strategically imposed on the ecosystemic spirit of peoples who cannot fit in neat and clean containers for the purpose of wielding ‘power-over’. Sure there are connections to the materialization of nature, the nature-human split, and forced disembodiments in order to mechanize and commodify our every moment and movement in all of this but those tendrils warrant further depths.

More to come on all of this, also a heads up I’m working on a podcast 🎙️ interview soon with local philosopher Cara Judea Alhadeff Phd., American Spanish/Turkish Jew13 whose research centers vulnerability as the center of new thoughts on cultural change, whose work is connected to all of these tendrils mentioned, and more.

The bath has been had during writing breaks today, the steam, Rosemary and epsom salts lifting days of spinning, movement and energy coming in from the outside world. Monarda bits float in the bottom of my cup. Clouds hang in the sky today, and the green canopy outside my window has shaded me from the what the big sky out there is doing, something I could always see so clearly up on the adobe hill where I was just living before, a place I dreamed about last night and miss. Somehow, in the big sky, I seemed so small, and my being, with the big landscape around me, was felt in a different perspective. Somehow, all of the energies could move through in and out.

Here in the forest, where I am just for a short time, I am reminded how much environment affects thinking and feeling. The canopy of closed in, magnifies what we don’t want to look at in ourselves. Or, causes us to see ourselves and our feelings as bigger than the greater world that molds us.

How my universe of self takes a different shape, acts as a different vessel.

I imagine our worlds of conflict, pain and pleasure, self and other are influenced by variables we don’t always realize. Despite all of it, and not knowing answers, I hope for less othering and more clear-stream. Empathy and trust in one another and place. How can we possibly do that with deep grooved lineages of pain and violence? Only the mother knows, the pre-cambrian rock, the deep well of wisdom that all of these stirrings sit upon. In all of our differences in religion, physical features, ancestral traumas, daily motions, our spirits connect to that same base somewhere, the same old- as fuck rock. God, the Great Spirit, Allah, whoever and however named. Somehow in my ecology classes I hope to not ostracize anyone for their beliefs or where they are at with their journey in things. I hope to at least plant seeds of ‘as above, so below’ and how in our curiosity about knowing the living world around us we call nature, we can also look at what connects our cultures and histories and bodies beyond it all.

Lots of resources 🔗 are linked in this one. Click through highlighted texts or featured podcast episodes for further research and your own reading and feeling. I’d love to hear your thoughts. And comment here on the post if you want to comment, instead of emailing me, to encourage dialogue with others.

Also, consider supporting this publication if you appreciate this work and the tendrils it connects.

If you have resource suggestions on any of these topics, please do comment below and provide them for others.

Reminders: 📝

• the next 7-day in person ecology course I am teaching is in early August out on public land, on the Grand Mesa here in western Colorado. We’ll be at 10,000 feet, you’ll get a rad reader full of resources to take home, a loupe that you get to look at flowers an lichen up close, your meals cooked for you, and lots of new knowledge and awareness when you walk away. If you’re interested, your signing up now helps us plan well for the class. Email me (kelly@ofsedgeandsalt.com) or the non-profit I teach this particular class through if you have any questions at all.

• I’m finally putting out the next podcasts soon via Ground Shots Podcast, sorry it’s been so long. Life, moving, teaching, needing to make money have made it hard to stay consistent. For the next one think goats. yep goats.

🐐🐐🐐

1. though i’d like to get writing back to daily, it hasn’t been

2. I’m 37 if you didn’t know

3. Gila turns 100 this year, at least the designation of it being ‘untouched’ wilderness by Aldo Leopold and others, and barely fucked with by modern humans it is, but it indeed was inhabited by ancestral Puebloan peoples of past who planted gardens in the wild often next to their dwellings, not exactly untouched

4. I’d really like to be able to pour my love one day into place, land and persons and have it not wrecked and bulldozed. And yet, how many others in the world right now are having their entire home and land connection bulldozed? I bet we’re all watching it on instagram.

5. long story, but I vowed not to without ceremony with those I planted with, and since that never happened, its time to tend the corn again to take another round

6. things we HSP (Highly Sensitive People) are often told

7. After the fact, I felt this title was kinda cheesy, clique maybe

8. except we were there because we got paid a living wage, at least at first

9. even my own somatic reckoning with being ‘trained’ to fear blackness, brown skin or otherness and even when I intellectually disagreed, i observed with horror as my somatic body still upheld the racism trained in me from an early age in how my nervous system responded in certain scenarios. and yet, as a child I remember being innocent to it at first and not understanding that anyone was different at all, I remember that somatic innocence. I feared white men more than people of color because as a very young child I had been given actual reason to.

10. trying to embrace that this work can be and maybe must be non-linear, multi-faceted and multi-mediumed much as my art is, and how necessary these marriages are to unimaginable futurisms of the peace we hope for

11. ok i grew up baptist, but one can be ‘saved’ a few different ways according to who you ask. and as a baptist growing up, all other christians were going to hell, btw because they weren’t getting saved correctly.

12. like when people say: ‘this isn’t a true cedar’ when not knowing the origin of the word cedar or the way it was originally used. or when people say ‘invasive plants are the 2nd greatest threat to biodiversity’ without realizing the statistic was created by also including rat populations in the mix.