The logic of sacrifice zones and our need for collective connection through heightened sensitivity to the living world
the heartbreak of mining in Colorado and poisoned rivers, 'the pathology of sensory overload under oppression, dancing and laughter, goats in a trailer park
I’m sitting in a coffee shop getting prepared for teaching an online class later, or rather facilitating a discussion with a really cool crew of students and I arrived early this morning around 8 am squinty eyed to beat the crowds at this quirky spot and take advantage of some quiet.
I woke this morning sleeping from in the back of my truck, nestled into a bunch of wool blankets and a down sleeping bag, parked in a trailer park in Silver City, New Mexico, three inches from a fence line on one side made of dried cut off Juniper trunks, wired together, with ceramic pots from Mexico on the ground next to it. On the other side, a car with tinted windows is parked, the sunrise gleaming off of the silver scratched paint and a 70’s double wide trailer, someone’s home who I don’t know at all. On the other side are a slew of other trailers, some made into little punk shacks, some lived in by Hispanic folks and their kids who we’re playing basketball earlier in the front yard, some old hippies— and there are goat everywhere. Yes, goats in a trailer park. My friend who brought me here to crash and who is staying in one of the trailers made neat punk shack with a woodstove got up before me this morning to walk the goats to forage in the Juniper forest next to the park and actually killed one the day before to put up, of which I ate in a taco the night before when I arrived. I didn’t get up in time to walk with her before sunrise, as the cold air kept me in bed longer and the physically strenuous day I had the day before had my sore legs wanting a little more rest. Yep, a day in the adventure of where life takes you. Goats in a trailer park.
I landed here yesterday evening after a week over in the wilderness area down the road watching the first spring flowers come up (Valerian!, Golden Smoke!, Rue Anenome, Solomon’s Seal, various Brassicas, Mugwort, Horehound, and more), scouting and finding new hot springs, visiting old Mogollon era (Puebloan folks) cliff dwellings where one of the rangers hanging out there noted to me that the Prickly Pear below the dwellings were ‘anthropogenic’ and well I had some ripe conversations there with him.
Yesterday, I was exhausted from a long walk across the hot mesa and down a canyon to the main middle fork of the Gila river, and along the way I gathered a beautiful green-purple speckled willow for weaving coppiced straight and long from a heavy monsoon season last year that sent roaring water slithering through secret slot canyons I haven’t visited in over 5 years (with Ribes leafing out and hanging over the cliff edges, I smiled glancing up, saying hi to old friends yet again and again). Giant Douglas Fir in the crevices that never see the light. Wet sand in my sandals from the creek formed instantly by the spring that juts out of the earth where dead Spikenard stalks lay retted and new sprouts yet to unfurl. Damp cool moss hidden in the nooks and caves as the trees got bigger the closer to the river we got, the spires reaching taller and taller and more grandiose, my friends were in awe.
“I told you that it was deeply canyoned out here!” I said to them.
We got down to the main river and I didn’t want to leave, of course. Last April I did a walk out here, and the plants were more leafed out, and wild hops, nettles, Sochan were fully up along the river and this year Spring is taking its time so not many of these people were emerging yet, or barely so. 5 years before I had walked through this same intersection with a group from an art and activism residency I was doing through an organization called Signal Fire. This intersection spoke to me in the layers of dreams and hopes I had at various times crossing through. Fat Cottonwoods, Gambel Oaks the size of cars, Douglas Firs bigger than most I see in the Pacific Northwest. Box Elder, Wild Grapes. We were suddenly miles and miles from any road. Instead of fording the river the whole way to this spot, we took a route over the mesa and down and it felt like we went through a secret corridor. It ended up being 8 miles long round trip, not too far given some walks I’ve done, but we didn’t expect to be doing that— and yet by the end of the walk the calm of the heat of the mesa, and the cool of the slot canyon and the loud roar of the big river sent a steady stream of electric calm through my body. I was invigorated by the hot sun, moving my body, even my hurting knee. The sensations of self-willed landscapes, of being a humbed being moving out here, moving in the terrain of my mind. Taking in the stimulus a mile a minute and it filling me rather than taking from me. I handle it just fine, even with burst of wind from the Spring wild wind season, even the glaring sun, I felt alive in my body, getting tanned from living outside the last few months.
I am filled by the last week cooking on the fire with a few friends and a feral baby (But I’ve been doing this with groups of friends since late February in different locations across the Southwest). I came to town to teach my class since internet or cell service is not reliable out there or consistent, and I prepared myself for the onslaught of more stimulus even in a little town like this. After reading AYESHA KHAN, PH.D.’s substack publication this morning with my first cup of coffee— on the relationship between neurodivergence- sensory processing ‘issues’, capitalism and disconnect from land and community, I am reaffirmed in my own experience. The more open I am to my senses, which allows me to even take in the worlds I weave together, I am more open to the fast wirings of the capitalist world as well. I share the link to the piece a little further below. I really hope you take the time to read their work, alot of which is free or partially free.
Sensory processing disorder is defined as “difficulties in detecting, modulating, and interpreting sensory stimuli to the extent of causing impairment in daily functioning and participation”. Anything that impedes our ability to conform, obey & comply with capitalism or the oppressive rules of the state can be classified as an abnormality. Our health is measured by our productivity & success at school or work. Disordered/ disabled individuals are funneled into institutions that aim to discipline, “rehabilitate” & cure us back into conformity under the guise of healthcare or humanitarian accommodations. AYESHA KHAN, PH.D.
This has me thinking about A LOT, I mean, I’ve already been thinking a lot about trauma, PTSD, the malleability of our bodies and nervous systems from our experiences of the world and our ancestors’ experiences of the world—and sensory experience, and sensitivity to certain things. Sensitivities are superpowers. How to feel sturdy in myself and my own resilience, and be compassionate when I am negatively impacted by certain stimulus is a bit I’m working with after internalizing my whole life that my way of perceiving the world meant something was ‘wrong with me,’ as reinforced often by people in my life I was close with who didn’t fully accept this about me as a part of simply being human and being me and also how our culture pathologized not being able to always handle the sensory onslaught of capitalism. (See, for example, the vision of a vast strip malls, gas stations, shopping centers, parking lots and fast food joints where there is nowhere to walk without a highway roaring past or nowhere to meet with kin that isn’t inside a space you must pay to be in, and even then the space is curated to disconnect not connect, there is no more peaceful commons in a lot of the worlds we find ourselves in.)
After all, it takes a certain amount of numbing in order to swim through, and numbed is seen as normal. What allows me to love deep, to see connections constantly, to take in so much, is also part of the medicine our world needs — to be more connected.
Ayesha reiterates this in their latest piece, that we need one another, we need love, we need connection and group connection to the land to swim through the jungle of sensory experience. Here’s the piece, let me know what you think:
Going from the remote valley, where the choices to ‘consume’ was limited, and time in the ecology of wild space was dominant, literally ‘close to the land’ my nervous system adapts to the safety of being able to be heightened in awareness. I start to hear messages, have different kinds of dreams, be able to sit for hours in silence. I come back to the hubbub and it’s always an adjustment. Time is different. Social expectations are different. And yet, if the hubub was full of rich color and cultural life with our spaces to gather including the outside landscape, as Ayesha explains in their piece, the stimulating materialism is ‘connective’ not disconnective. This reminds me of traveling in parts of Mexico where cooking is done partly outside, or where gardens run right into the house.
I came back to town to be able to get up early this morning and roll over to the coffee shop, and last night once I got to town from the ‘wilderness,’ I joined two of my friends at a traditional dance night where I laughed and smiled for a solid hour doing Mexican hat dances and Contra dancing, dosee-do, swing your partner, lean back, kick your feet this way or the that. It was a good entrypoint from coming out of ‘the wild’ and to simply dance with ‘mostly’ strangers. I am reminded of how much I freaking love Contradancing, and how I haven’t done it in many many years.
I feel a sadness that the pandemic was still weird enough when I was in North Carolina last for most of the things I used to enjoy there, including all forms of group dance— and this was one of them. I don’t know what it is about contra dancing, the way that the music combined with a simply formula of moves that includes engaging everyone on the dance floor inviting so much laughter, joy and lightness. As they said in the cliff dwellings when we were hanging out in the big open room with charred ceilings, ‘we think this area was for ceremonial dancing because of how packed down the floor is, as dancing is social bonding.’
I’ve missed dancing. All kinds of dancing. In contra, one spins the other, walk around each other in circles lead by shoulders, form tunnels for others to spin through, trade partners so everyone gets a turn smiling at and spinning everyone, and so on. I remember how much I used to love waltzing, especially with a dance partner who knows how to lead well and for me to be seamlessly swept across the floor weaving in and out of others in their flow. I used to contra dance twice a week, and then do estatic dance one a week at least, with contact improv. In college, I trance danced at weekly drum circles with my friends, dressed in our colors while the rest in all black, goth and pagan and pentagram wearing folks to shake out the university headiness, get barefoot on the dirt and transform ‘together’. I’ve missed all forms of this in my life for awhile now. Where is my group to dissolve together regularly and yet bond?
To go from the quiet of a less capitalism dominated space in the canyoned lands of cliff dwellings to this one- was a good choice. The band has accordions, and 10 different fiddle players of all ages, even a 6 year old girl. It’s so neat to see how dance in this way is translated across place as I have contra-danced in New Hampshire, North Carolina, Oregon, and now New Mexico. Every place has a different feel and interpretation. Being close to Mexico, the influence from the Spanish culture here and then the Mexican culture nearby was palpable, and very different than anything I’ve experienced elsewhere.
After hiking the slot canyon, and then hitting the dances, my legs were very tired. I ate another goat taco before bed, talked with my friend about our collaborations we’re doing this summer on my ecology immersions (she is cooking and I’m so glad for it) I passed out in my truck bed nook, surrounded by trailers and goats and the clustered village of this outlier place.
To awake like I said, at sunrise, eventually peeling up, secretly peeing outside next to the Mexican pottery shards while everyone sleeps in on a Sunday morning, getting out to the coffee shop to work this morning. Waking up now, as the shop fills up. I’ve had so much I’ve thought about writing on substack this last month but being on the road or off grid, prepping for something else that needed my attention, I haven’t taken the time to write. There’s a lot I’ve been thinking about with where I’ve been focusing my attention and also hosting this current study group that will be done after this afternoon’s meet up has been really inspiring. (I’m doing another one next month, starting soon, with the same material, one more time for folks who want to meet during evenings not afternoons)
Prepping for this last session has been fun and enlightening and really for me pulls together everything we’ve been talking about together. I’ve been interested in all of these layers for quite awhile, but every time I revisit them, I learn a new way to see, to feel about it, and how these issues around plants and land are not isolated and unrelated to so many other pieces, and really that’s been the whole point of this experimental study group. And so much of my work with Ground Shots over the years in general.
The last session of Terratalks (what i’ve been calling this study group iteration) is on Biotic Nativism, Invasion Biology… yes those topics. It’s a big one. In the process of this, I got my students to read Matt Chew’s research and article on Biotic Nativism of which I had perused before, but this time I read it again slow and at awe at the history of how we got to understanding plants as belonging and not, and how it is informed by social institutions like British Common Law, and I’m reminded at how ‘wild’ it is that these things morph and mold into common accepted understandings of things we see today. This study group has been about looking at cultural lens of how we see certain ecological elements like fire and water, and also how we see one another as belonging or not in it all. The Invasion biology bit is very political, and hits people in a deep place, and often ends with people mad at one another or feeling insulted and unheard by the other because it is a divided and intense realm that challenges folks’ moral compass’ in the world. It IS cultural, because so much of the conversation is about culture not actual science. I’m excited about it, rather than dreading the conversations with this group because we’re all curious and willing to talk about complex and hard topics (like the role of eugenics in conservation, or our fear of wildness as it translates to mining, or killing wolves and coyotes or suppressing fire or expirating native folks from their traditional lands… for example)
We read about Oak Flat. About the use of water in mining in the southwest. About the benefits of Beavers on the land everywhere. About Grizzly Bears as root tenders. About the salinization of the eastern coastal forests and the rapid death of remaining Atlantic White Cedar groves and Long leaf Pine in places like coastal Carolina. We looked at fire ecology and attitudes in the midwest, the South, California about fire. We read what anarchists say about wildcrafting. We read ways to deconstruct the word wild. We read about the destruction of the wild gardens of the Columbia river valley to nuclear and solar. And so on. And we also talk about plants. Who like disturbance and how we notice that where we live. Ways to re-see wildness in order to better inform our sense of how to be engaged in ecology as players a part of it all.
It has been wretchedly heartbreaking to learn so much more about mining this Spring, traveling in the Southwest where giant open pit mines are everywhere and reading about it to prepare for my summer ecology classes. Also, the giant solar farms, deemed as ‘green energy’ along side lithium mining sites, are a big part of scraping the southern California and southern Nevada deserts of any life at all. At a rapid rate as we continue to consume and create obsolete technology or come up with solutions that would only cost a tiny bit more to make way more efficient, like making batteries last longer, or putting solar panels on homes that already have south facing roofs instead of on rare habit in the desert. Sacrifice zones for our habits. For our entrapment in a world of hungry ghosts.
I’ve been making my way through several books, one I have mentioned on here before — “River of Lost Souls” by Jonathan P. Thompson, who has a substack on here.
Here’s one of his recent posts:
Jonathan’s family has been in Colorado for many generations, and in this book, which centers on the Gold King mine spill in Colorado and the analogy of the Animas River as ‘sacrifice zone’ over and over historically — deemed a river of lost souls - a foreboding name given by the Spanish when they first entered the area spoke to the river’s future of disregard.
The books is oriented around this river but actually documents a few things. It tells the story of the history of mining in Colorado on the whole, and the fuckery and logic of this free for all pattern of greed that played out across these mountains and rivers of this place, with logic and practices that still persist today. It also speaks to the history of resource extraction in the four corners region of which Colorado is a part, as it manifests in Uranium, natural gas and so on- and how this has affected indigenous communities who were downstream or taken advantage of. The book lays out the common clashes that happened in the wild west towns of Colorado between the farmers, ranchers, Native Americans - and the miners, and the folks who came from the east with $ invested in mining and not caring about the land or the other people who lived there.
I knew it was bad, but I didn’t realize how bad, honestly, until reading this book. Almost every river and stream in Colorado has been polluted by mine tailing at one point in time, and this author goes into the science of what happens during mining and how it happened at different eras and how these processes created the pollution that still affects rivers like the Animas today.
I have found myself crying to no end some days reading this book, and loving so many of these places mentioned, that I didn’t fully understand were seen as sacrifice zones.
The Animas River has had environmental disasters affecting it almost 5 times over, from tailings, acid drainage, to uranium smelting that build the bombs that we used on Japan and so on.. and much of it affecting the native or blue collar communities downstream in Farmington, NM. To methane seeping out of the earth south of Durango from so many piles and channels and holes underground that in some places the sand is literally raised off the ground. The lung cancer rates from radium in drinking water and no one telling folks to beware. It’s overwhelming. Everything seems polluted, and having lived in the Durango area at one point, now pretty affluent compared to its past, and seeing some of the layers on the surface, it’s easy to see how people ignore it or downplay the immensity of what is all around while wondering why they have to haul water from somewhere else to drink.
Jonathan’s retelling too of what has happened in Navajo country, and the story of Farmington, is also particularly disturbing. The logic used to defend the pollution from mining, by showing old newspaper publications in Durango and Silverton and other towns across the region, show that even though the mining companies often knew of the pollution (but sometimes they denied it and even said it was good for crops, or even good to use to build some streets in Durango with which are literally still radioactive today) their logic was that the value of jobs was infinitely more important than the health of the land, or the people affected by the pollution of the land because if the miners had jobs than everyone will get what they need. The logic of sacrifice zones is a big one to suss out. Even in the conversation around invasive plants as often mining companies say that because there are invasive plants in a location, than it is a ‘degraded’ landscape and not valuable anymore and irredeemable and would be better as a mine or extraction zone.
My friend Kollibri has a substack and has been sharing bits from a book they are working on on the topic of invasive plants, and well its all connected in this web of cultural logic around seeing land as ‘good’ or ‘bad’ or useful or not:
I have more to say about all of this and this book too, of which I wish to talk about with people in order to really process it all— but I need to get to setting myself up for teaching in two hours. I haven’t contacted him or anything but I have thought about seeing if Jonathan would be on my podcast at some point speaking to so much of what he lays out in his book and the implications of this history, as a way to story the southwest, story Colorado, story the Colorado Trail, story ‘pristine’ mountain ranges people have no clue that there are tunnels for miles under filled with poisonous water.
What do we do with all the grief that comes out in this? In being ‘sensitive’ to the cries of the land, to the numbing we are forced to do in order to make a place a sacrifice zone? To make our every day lives sacrifice zones to truly feeling? Keep feeling, and keep trying. Do what brings us joy on the land in order to honor connection over disconnection. It’s hard but necessary. And ever as always, culture and ecology are forever connected. As above, so below. And it’s all a mess. We push away pain because it’s uncomfortable to feel. We disconnect because connection is scary in a world that tells you that your sensitivity is a ‘disorder,’ when it’s just normal.
May we love lands (and one another) and fight for them even as they are sacrificed for temporary needs, that could be met in other ways.