When I said burn it down, I didn’t mean this
Thoughts on the LA fires 💔
In my teens, I chanted “burn down Babylon” with the best of them. For the Rastafarians, Babylon means oppression and corruption, often the government and police.
While living in Jamaica, I saw how the police mistreated my friends. They left me alone, likely because I’m white and American, but I had my own Babylon to beef with.
There are great things about white American culture, like doggie birthday parties. But for a long time, I didn’t love being a white American because of what my culture represented.
Back home, Babylon was football players who called me a “freak.” A culture that encouraged competition, elitism, and callousness. I had left my culture and immersed in nonwhite cultures and, in doing so, saw that, historically, Anglo culture (colonization) had become the biggest bully.
For me, burning down Babylon meant dismantling the culture of exploitation, greed, and profit over relationship. A system that began in Europe in the 1300s, when the lords exploited the serfs.
Now, inflation has been squeezing everyone, especially those who work in the public sector (like my husband and me) whose wages haven’t kept up.
So, burn it all down. Let the phoenix emerge from the ashes and grow a new paradigm.
For many, Trump held the matches.
And yet, I paused. Maybe there were some things I wanted to save, like democracy. And educational equity. And DEI. And the environment.
By burn it down, this is not what I meant:
This is what I meant:
The Babylon I rallied against — profit over all else — is why L.A. is now on fire in the middle of January.
We’ve been living in a tinder box. Smoke from wildfires is one of the reasons I left California for a cold, wet rainforest – to protect my sensitive lungs. But climate change followed me to Alaska, where a massive flood this summer and last damaged and washed one of my friend's homes into the river. (I wrote about this for Slate and The Independent.) Now, as I write this (Thursday night,) 10 have died in fires in the City of Angels.
Last November, Alaska got unseasonal snowstorms. Now it's 48°, and raining in the middle of January, so our ski hill remains closed. 😢
When Trump was elected, my first thoughts were, "And what of the earth?" His track record isn’t great. Billionaires can build communities on Mars and underground bunkers in Kauai. Lately, Trump has been hosting plenty of them at Bro-a-Lago.
We lost the plot a long time ago, but we all live on planet Earth, and she is anarchist. I know this because I’m married to a conservative for whom “greenie” was a slur growing up, and yet he is more greenie than many liberals I know, preferring woodstoves over fuel to heat his home and opting for staycations over travel. He likes electric cars but is concerned about how mining for the battery parts harms the planet. Even Trump signed the Great American Outdoors Act during his last presidency.
You may have heard about the No-Spend movement circulating TikTok recently. I have been practicing this for several years, doing my part to opt out of capitalism by working less and spending less. Spending less also leaves a smaller carbon footprint by reducing waste, energy use, and carbon emissions. (Incidentally, my word for last year was less).
We can eat more veggies and less meat, which would help climate change considerably. We could travel less.
“One search on chatGPT uses 10x the amount of energy as a Google search. Training one AI mode produces the same amount of carbon dioxide as 300 round trip flights between New York and San Francisco and five times the lifetime emissions of a car.” — Matt Bernstein
If we train AI, it needs to be for altruistic endeavors, for everyone, not just shareholders.
I welcome your thoughts and ideas, although comments are reserved for paid subscribers. Please keep the dialogue civil and kind so this remains a welcoming and pleasant space for everyone.
Love to everyone in L.A. right now. So much love.
Summer
Summer, yes the City of Angels has met the Demons from Hell! Reaping the unintended consequences...or is that the not even considered consequences...of an over industrialized world crying MORE, MORE, MORE not less, less, less! It is self immolation that has found the home of rampant consumerism (not just California but the whole USA) and is here to stay.
So, I certainly applaud your family's small e small c environmental conservation practices! It is so easy to rationalize that my little bit of waste is not worth the change in habits, the few extra steps, when the industrial complex, the billionaires still flaunt the use of resources thousands of times more than you or I do. Selling LESS as accomplishing more for our world could certainly use a good PR campaign!!!
You know Summer... I think that regarding the environment/the planet we live on and with, the real "greenies" are most often the people who spend more time in wild and wildish places. It may seem. like it's a liberal/conservative or blue/red issue but I think that's an illusion. Protecting the natural world doesn't translate from concept to action without that emodied sense that we are not separate from our environment. My sister's father in law recently passed at age 98. He was a 3 term Repuplican governor and US senator from Washington State. He was also one of our greatest earliest conservationists. He left DC politics in part because he wanted to be in Washington State where he could spend time in his beloved forests and mountains. A large portion of Olympic National Park bears his name. My daughter works in shoreline climate change mitigation for the state department of ecology and my son has an ecology degree and currently works as an arborist (because he can't stand sitting behind a desk). My kids were raised spending large chunks of time off grid in the woods of the Olympic Peninsula. I really think that this is the disconnect. If you live in a big city, even one surrounded by natural beauty (like LA, Seattle, San Francisco etc), I think it's much harder to make those daily choices to live smaller, to leave less of a trace, to be always mindful of how one's choices affect the ecosystems we live within. When you must cut and chop your wood to heat your home, shut down the water system during the winter so the pipes don't freeze, or carry in your water; when you watch king tides thrash the bluffs and hillsides adjacent to larger bodies of water, or carry a chainsaw in your car to cut downed trees every winter/spring to get to the cabin in the woods, it changes you. A person can't think of themselves in the grandiose fashion we're seeing everywhere these days. The LA fires are a testament to the power that is so much greater than human, but so are the floods, hurricanes, tsunamis etc that have been growing larger and more devastating every year. It takes great hubris to continue to ignore the fact that we're inviting disaster to continually "rebuild". Rebuilding is necessary obviously, but rebuilding taking into consideration the awesome power of the elements and the fact that we do have a choice about what, where and how big and that these things are relevant to the whole of planet earth... I'm not sure we've learned that lesson yet. But I sure hope this week moves the needle.
(I thought I'd write a few words in response to your post but clearly I had more than a few words🙄)