An invitation to a Providence event, and a fable about change.
SUMMARY
I write summaries for people who have to marshal their time and attention.
Join me and Eleanor Finley on Saturday, June 28, 4pm, at Symposium Books, to talk about her book Practicing Social Ecology
Imagine a ferry at the mouth of a river
Grapple with the relationship between general principles & specific conditions
Learn a little more about Eleanor’s book, including how she writes about uncertainty
Imagine the ferry again
Do me a favor and picture a wide estuary, about wide enough to where you could just see someone waving on the far side where the river swells out into the bay, or maybe a lake. Just upriver from where you’re sitting, let’s say on a bench, there’s a ferry landing. If you’ve been looking out to sea, you may need to turn a bit on your bench to see the ferry, plying its way between the banks.
People are riding the ferry on this imagined day for the same reasons they used to cross the bridge: to work; for a hair appointment; to buy something they can’t buy on the other side. But there are fewer of them, because more people work close to where they live in these imagined days. Some of them moved to the same side of the river as their jobs. They’re able to earn enough to live on by working fewer hours, and have more choices about where to live (even though stormwater flooding means there’s less buildable land area by the river than there once was) because housing is free, and food systems have shifted a bit, making some things cheaper and more available, taking others out of circulation almost entirely.
The work you imagine the ferry riders doing, the houses you envision them living in, even what they’re having done to their hair, depends on where you are, what kinds of banks you pictured: high red bluffs with a winding wheelchair path, or a channel cut through a bright green saltmarsh buffer, or reedbeds the color of bread. The principles are more or less the same, but the specifics depend on the conditions, and I can’t tell you exactly what those are or will be.
That uncertainty, that inability to predict or ensure the results of a directly democratic experiment, is itself a principle, one that Eleanor Finley emphasizes repeatedly in her book Practicing Social Ecology. While it lays out some theory (and has a solid Recommended Reading list if you want to dig in deeper), the bulk of it—and the part that intrigued me most—was the practicing part. How do you live, with others, like you’re truly part of the world? How do you, like, do it?
Eleanor writes about some people who have done it: in Barcelona, in Tulsa, in Rojava, in Chiapas, in New York City. They have made popular assemblies and People’s Houses, gardens, fabrics, and friendships. She is intentional about making it sound (sometimes) fun but not easy. Not only is it tough to let go of how you assumed things had to be (hierarchical, profitable, predictable), it takes work to make them different, from the work of self-awareness and hashing out intentions together to the work of digging in the earth, blocking a police force bound on eviction, or enforcing the sanctions of a community tribunal.
And plying back and forth between those two kinds of work is the ferry of learning, testing, failing, trying. There’s an old AA gag that stigmatizes doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. But if you’re not following a rigid playbook—if you’re betting your shirt on what emerges when you apply general principles to specific conditions—you have to pay good, close attention to how this season is different from last season, and choose what to adjust, and maybe be wrong again. You have to read a lot, listen a lot. You have to check who the division of labor that seems like it works is working for, and maybe make a change that won’t work for everyone either. And failures can be costly, materially and to morale. (This is without getting into the cost of attack, predictably violent, from people and institutions bent on domination, and the cost of meeting that attack, including with violence—something I want to ask Eleanor to talk about in more detail when we meet.)
But what is happening now is also costly, materially and to morale. The first, worst fear for many of us about making a big change in how we engage with each other in the world is that we think we know what to expect from this one. I’m including myself in this! There is a leap required, as well as attentive, inventive work: a leap, or many leaps, into the unknown-to-us, the unknown-so-far, the unknown-again. Telling the truth about this, and suggesting that the leap is still worth taking, is one of the things I appreciated about Practicing Social Ecology: the reminder that practice happens before, during, after, and during.
The ferry I imagine in my river would set up its landings in the shadow of the pillars of a broken bridge that people’s assemblies, in a long-drawn-out consensus process, ultimately decided against repairing. It would pass beds of phragmites and flocks of swans, oyster reefs cleaning the water and people tending the oyster beds in waders and kayaks, defunct chemical tanks being slowly and safely dismantled further down the bay. The sand for the cement that would have fixed the bridge would sleep peacefully in its quarries, or go to repair something more essential, half a world away.
Please join me and Eleanor this Saturday to talk, think and dream in more depth together. In the meantime, try this exercise—for this one, the practice is first and the questions come after.
PRACTICE: Close or unfocus your eyes and imagine the mouth of a river—ideally one you’ve visited, or one that’s not too far from you, even if you don’t live near a place like that.
QUESTIONS:
What did you picture that’s particular to that place?
How much of what you pictured is what you’ve seen there, and how much is what could be there?
What scares you about what you pictured? What grieves you? What exhilarates you?
SHORT READING: Anita Hofschneider, “In California’s largest landback deal, the Yurok tribe reclaims sacred land around the Klamath River”
LONG READING: Eleanor Finley, Practicing Social Ecology
I wrote a book, LESSONS FROM THE CLIMATE ANXIETY COUNSELING BOOTH: HOW TO LIVE WITH CARE AND PURPOSE IN AN ENDANGERED WORLD (Hachette Go, 2024). This newsletter holds the ways that what's in it has branched out: new reflections, events and workshops, unresolved questions, further reading, ways to connect and act. I'm glad to be here on earth with you.