Category: Next Economies

Economic models that inspire us amidst the collapse

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interstitial being(s): on biking

during the quiet quarantine months early in the pandemic, i accidentally found a personal trainer in my partner. he has slowly and patiently taught me how to become a cyclist in mexico city which has bloomed into a new relationship with my body and given me hundreds of hours of mental space to think as the wind moves past my skin. rather than picking up a pandy hobby like sourdough bread, airfrying, painting or whatever, i’ve traveled more than 10,000 miles by bike, mostly across the biggest megalopolis on the continent.

before i met my partner, i couldn’t imagine how to trace a path across some intersections on a bike. take for example an intersection near my apartment at the time: there are multiple parallel (lateral) streets with bike lanes, sidewalks, and medians in between, a monument in the middle of the road, dedicated public bus lanes either in the middle or edge of a multi-lane road — all crossing each other like a crumbly 10-by-10-grid of pie crust. as a pedestrian, you must be attentive to cross it slowly, so i couldn’t imagine it as a cyclist amidst the traffic, having had no desire to become a tiny fish sneaking between sharks that could pulverize me at any moment.

also: there are these things that look like traffic circles which do not behave as such. or, rather, they can look like traffic circles but are not. for a specific example, see what happens around the angel de independencia:

pay attention to the cars…

then, on top of the already complicated and always degrading physical infrastructure, add multiple layers of more chaos: people jaywalking everywhere; others pushing heavy, wheeled things in the bike lane or road because the sidewalk is too cracked; frenetic lane-splitting motorcycle delivery drivers; street vendors in moving in wide, 3-wheeled bikes; innumerable pot holes; random fallen wires which may or may not have electricity (but that i think/hope are mostly unused fiber optic cables); …and then add the giant chaos layer of drivers who have never passed a drivers test because it’s not a requirement of getting a license here (!!) – oh and the ugly but true feature of how normalized it is to drive drunk in this city – not to mention myriad forms of public transit belching black clouds of exhaust. it’s beyond easy to feel overwhelmed by a constant onslaught of heavy moving objects that could impede one’s (hypothetical) path on a bike. (not to mention that all of this is built on a slowly-sinking ex-lake-bed with pyramids and other sacred sites half-buried throughout.)

it is upon this unfathomable canvas that i’ve slowly sribbled GPS-guided lines across the map over these 3+ years.

recently, something suddenly shifted: i’ve come to see these heavy moving objects radically differently. i started to see their edges and spaces between them.

this might be because my partner was a fixed gear rider when we met. the nature of fixed gear bikes is that they don’t (usually) have breaks, so to stop, you need to slow the rotation of the rear wheel with your own weight, pushing in reverse against moving pedals. or hop up and force a skid to slow down. needless to say: it takes much longer to stop than a bike with breaks. and in a place where stopping on a dime seems like it should be a vital requirement, there are a surprising amount of fixie riders. (cue pensive head scratching and furrowed eyebrows: what the hell?)

a pattern that i’ve noticed over the years in trying to learn from and (sometimes) mimic my partner’s cycling behaviors is that, whereas i’d find myself stopping behind something – a parked car, a crossing pedestrian, a 3-wheeled bike vendor taking up 90% of a bike lane – he’d have kept going and i’d lose sight of him. it has taken me a long time to figure this out, but the way i’ve recently understood it is that he sees and focuses on the spaces in between things rather than the thing itself. whereas i still often feel a visceral onslaught of things coming at me, things i should avoid smashing into, or things i should swerve around, and the added handfuls of unknowns like a possible car door being opened or the depth of a puddle in the rain – i think he navigates by thinking about, seeing, and sensing the spaces that he could temporarily occupy.

instead of only sensing an obstacle, sense paths around it: a subtle shift, but one that’s fundamental to flow.

imagine, for example, lane-splitting between two lines of moving cars*. the embodied fraction of a second determination of whether or not the space between two rear-view mirrors is bigger or smaller than the width of your shoulders: can i fit? and knowing that this “yes” or “no” is a switch that flips on and off as the cars move in relation to each other…it’s kind of like tetris. but in 3-D. but instead of a shape of bricks, the shape is your body: with all it’s softness and exposed skin and breakable bones (and maybe your precious bike).

(*my partner calls this “ratoneando” – being a rat – by the way. something like “scurrying” might be a decent translation.)

if you want a preview, here’s an internationally known fixie rider and race-winner from CDMX, with an excerpt of her ride on calzada tlalpan:

so: the interstitial – the space between – is constantly shifting, not fixed, structured, or contained. this is because it is based on the relationship between two or more things which are also in movement.

this realization immediately felt metaphorical to me. though deeply physical in the case of biking, i know that it relates to systems transformation, next economies, network structures, repairing our relationships, maybe even internal family systems and shadow work

(most of) white/western/scientific thinking tends to focus on an object of study, or maybe a dichotomy of object and subject. however, what i’ve always found fascinating about network science is that it also includes the links between the two things, paying attention to relationships. same with ecology.

focusing on interstitiality is different than that though: it’s noticing what’s not there – the space, the emptiness – between or outside things. this is a necessary absense in the same way that the spaces (called “rests”) between notes are necessary for music. in the same way pauses after questions create invitations and invoke creation.

this space or emptiness is a point of origin: from nothing emerges new.

it is also a point of termination, like how the edges of a thing bleed into, degrade into, and return to the nothing.

the interstitial includes this liminality and edge-ness, and it includes what/where those things fade out into.

passing through the spaces between creative blocks

one application of the metaphor i’ve been running into lately is around what i’ve been taught to call creative blocks. it’s a deeply frustrating feeling to repeatedly run into the same block. the guiding principle says i need to “overcome” the block, or perhaps somehow “go through it” or maybe “disarm” or “dismantle” it. (similar vocab exists in relationship to oppressive systems, too.) all of this thinking continues to focus on the block itself, ignoring the rest: infinite space around it that i could potentially move through: alternate paths.

there’s a freedom that comes with seeing** the spaces instead of seeing the obstacle. you’re not impeded, rather, you have choice. it feels powerful. that you get to decide how this is going to play out. that there are so many more ways than one of going about this.

(**i realize i am very visually-dependent in describing my ways of sensing, but other senses are surely implicated: feeling and hearing come up for me, too. smell and taste don’t feel that relevant at this moment.)

who or how do i have to be to exist in that space?

i believe that developing this wider way of sensing and being is necessary for the next phase of humanity. and as soon as we can develop, practice, and share it, it becomes immediately easy to know that transformation/transition is well under way. you begin to see the edges of structures of capitalism crumbling. you see the germinating seeds of what’s next. you see elders and those who have maintained connection folding time, pulling indigenous tradition through colonial contexts. you see experiments and less solid formations which may or may not persist.

i suppose i always end with questions…so some questions on my mind are: how do we start to see what artists call “negative space” in a physical and social sense? where are the negative spaces around us, and how do we inhabit them? what do we notice about our being when we’re in that space – do we have to shift somehow to be able to fit in there, or do the expand once we’re there? how do we develop shared vocabulary or ways of collective sense-making about being in these ways?

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what is the way from here to there?

sometimes i record myself reading blog posts – use this to listen instead of read

i just got off a call with two people who are starting up a program for strategic planning for non-profits. they had heard about my work on The Light Ahead podcast and wanted to chat with me about next economies and NGO networks.

on the call, one of them used the metaphor of “blowing things up” a few times. in that they had created a plan for their work, but blew it up last week (which was both frustrating and good). or that non-profit sector employees are in a different place than many board members and funders, and those relationships need to change (or “blow up”) for real transformation to be possible.

i wondered, asking that if we’re trying to get from here to there (or if we’re just trying to get out of the “here” we identify as undesirable), what is that process like?

what do we call it? change? transformation? culture shift?

what metaphors do we use for it?

and are these metaphors violent? scary? doom-and-gloomy? apocalyptic?

do we perceive this as a painful, difficult experience? (does your body even react viscerally because of this question, because it can already imagine the answer?)

do we assume there will be some kind of revolution? and, given our limited understandings of revolution, do we imagine it as hard, bloody, with much sacrifice and death?

it’s important to consider the metaphors we use in how we understand and talk about what’s next.

it’s also important to be clear about whether we are in the camp that is a) making incremental shifts so that there is less harm done within current systems, or b) working from a totally different set of assumptions, values, and ways of being. (or c) some mix of the two.)

to be explicit, i’m pretty sure i’m in B. i tried camp A for a while but the kind of energy required to say “NO” so strongly and so repeatedly always turned into a kind of self-incendiary anger that my body just couldn’t sustain. (check out block, build, be as a framework for figuring out where you might be if you’re not sure – their model supports being in multiple categories.)

in my very non-scientific way (sorry, entomologists), i’ve been using the metaphor of a butterfly chrysalis to describe the process, as such:

an intact caterpillar decides one day to create a cocoon for itself. then, magically, they break down into liquid form while maintaining the imaginal discs they had been carrying since birth. (tangent: imaginal discs are actually magic, by the way, and they are the genetic codes that create new body parts: caterpillars go around carrying the seeds for wings before they know they’ll be able to fly. (this is real.)) then, somehow they reconfigure themselves and emerge as a being capable of flight, light enough to float on air and to travel with millions of their peers to other worlds thousands of miles away.

(brief pause for the several questions i have for these beings that i’m just going to leave here: does this hurt? what happens in how you understand the world and your surroundings? as a butterfly, do you remember what being a caterpillar was like?)

on the other hand, the metaphors i have been given from mainstream media are more in the direction of fear-based, apocalyptic, individualistic, and escapist. this is evidenced by the fact that it’s way easier for me to imagine the gritty details of specific apocalyptic scenarios: zombies, natural disasters, wars, escapist so-called “cottagecore,” nuclear bunker canned food storage, etc. there are so many movies about this and the mainstream/corporate news broadcasts every night look very similar to this. my social media feed has so many millennials glamorizing the process of redoing old vans and then living in national parks with their cats who have been trained to walk on leashes so as to not get eaten by bears. (ok, maybe that’s because i often share these stories because they’re so ridiculous, but hey, don’t judge me by my algorithm.)

there are other metaphors, other ways of understanding what is possible. a lot of “what if…” questions come to mind:

what if the shift was easy, or at least easeful?

what if it was like how Tricia Hersey imagines it in her work with The Nap Ministry? (or the #softlife trend that’s emerging as the antithesis to #grindculture?)

what if, instead of it being punitive, returning to community felt like a warm embrace? (see: the book we will not cancel us, circle practice, transformative justice)

what if relinquishing stolen land and resources made us feel whole instead of empty? and helped us start to repair relationships with land and communities? (see: the land back movement, though not everyone is non-violent, and with good reason.)

or look at all these amazing “what if” questions created by intelligent mischief, asking us to consider:

i asked before about going from here to there, or at least just getting out of the “here.” i don’t know that we have to know where we’re going. i think it’s ok that we don’t, and maybe even good. (though certainly some of us know more details about the next place(s) than others.)

In the book Bird by Bird, Anne Lamott wrote: “E.L. Doctorow said once said that ‘Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.‘ You don’t have to see where you’re going, you don’t have to see your destination or everything you will pass along the way. You just have to see two or three feet ahead of you.”

the other thing is, is that if we’re still deeply in the “here,” (or even just in the mentality of the “here”), our ideas about the “there” will be really similar to what we can currently understand, embody, feel, or imagine. so in the meantime, i propose that we focus more on the breaking down, on the cocooning and going back to imaginal discs (one of which is definitely about justice and reparations, and we have ideas about others), and, importantly, becoming less attached to the “there” as the goal. for now the outcome is the process: the process of slowing down, and as norma wong says, the process of creating the conditions to become aware of what else is emerging.

additionally, if we’re so caught up in an anxiety about where we’re going, we won’t be able to be present with the process (and, therefore less likely to be able to support others in it), and we won’t know how we got to the next place either. this anxiety limits our possibilities, too.

so…how do you imagine the work of our time, the work to move ourselves outside of extractive, imperialistic, racist capitalism? is it a violent, rough, scary thing? or is it an easeful return into the embrace of true community and wholeness?

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economic hope and the smell of mushrooms

i’m finally understanding the creative block i’ve been feeling since visiting my parents in arizona last month. it’s related to the tension between, on the one hand: the ongoing and active deprivation of hope from where you expect it and, on the other hand: a very steady certainty that there is so much good happening in the world right now.

the mainstream news outlets’ lights and cameras are narrowed to a point, highlighting so much going on, but it all just looks so hopeless. the new supreme court justice being treated with such disrespect. the contrast of growing wildfires with bumper stickers on massive pick-up trucks: “trump 2024, save america.” this media spotlight reinforces a complete lack of vision for the future, let alone suggesting movement toward anything else than what we already know. and then there are the random distractions like will smith punching chris rock. (and then all the memes on social media, and then all of the people giving their opinions about it, and then news outlets pitting them against each other!)

the tension between all of this garbage and the absolute knowing i have that there are SO many amazing leaders, projects, groups doing such great work. “work,” though, is too narrow of a word to describe what i mean: it’s not sitting at a desk, it’s not something you clock into. it has to do with opening up worldviews, creating and repairing cultures, seeing each other in fuller ways. and i can feel it. i’m remembering this shortened version of a quote used as the motto of the US Social Forum by Arundhati Roy: “Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.” the longer quote has to do with imperialism and capitalism:

“Our strategy should be not only to confront empire, but to lay siege to it. To deprive it of oxygen. To shame it. To mock it. With our art, our music, our literature, our stubbornness, our joy, our brilliance, our sheer relentlessness – and our ability to tell our own stories. Stories that are different from the ones we’re being brainwashed to believe.

The corporate revolution will collapse if we refuse to buy what they are selling – their ideas, their version of history, their wars, their weapons, their notion of inevitability.

Remember this: We be many and they be few. They need us more than we need them.

Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.”

― Arundhati Roy, War Talk (2003)

but what does she say after that?? (adding reading that book to my library’s waitlist right now!)

so what i feel compelled to do is write into each of these things that are happening. to show them as an interconnected movement, a thriving ecosystem complete with several kinds of functioning parts – composers, pollinators, whatever other parts there are (ha!)

not to overwhelm us even more, but to let people know what is happening. not just to give us hope, but also to showcase the variety of what we could get more involved in. maybe for each section that could be a little part: how to get involved locally – what it takes, what you need. (and maybe those could connect later to parts of the personal work, thinking specifically about decolonial projects.)

like i want to inspire and excite people by sharing this sense of knowing i have – of how much is happening! so we can stop looking at where the lights and cameras are pointed and see all of what else there is. we get to be ecologists, to look into all of the parts that are happening, get our hands dirty in the soil, smell fresh air. but like… economically.

redwoods in “muir woods” on Coast Miwok land

really when was the last time you felt invigorated economically? i mean something similar to those feelings you get in a healthy forest: filling your lungs up with the dense humidity of a lush, damp forest; taking in the honey-like notes of pine sap; the slight decomposing sense of mushrooms’ presence; hearing bird chirps far up in the canopy; your movement silenced by pine needles underfoot.

i can say for sure that i have a visceral feeling when i pay my taxes. maybe that would be akin to the choking smell of coming across a dead animal in the forest. but i mean, when was the last time i felt something good in my body because of my relationship to economics?

i used to have that feeling, the slight tingling feeling: “yes, i’m saving the world,” kind of thing happen at farmers markets, or purchasing at my community food co-op (of which i was a member). i remember that feeling when seeing visionary art (favianna rodriguez comes to mind) that invites my true self into economics (not just an outstretched hand with dollar bills). hearing gopal from movement generation speak about their visions for the future. i definitely felt a lot while i was organizing for occupy on my university campus (not as an undergrad, i’m not that young!). and i felt new sensations like a folding of time from past to future while i was supporting the sogorea te’ land trust in “oakland” “california:” that the way these leaders were thinking was connecting their 5,000+ year old traditions through colonial rupture to a future that continues and preserves what is sacred.

how can we imagine more into this? (one way is to listen to this short episode of the light ahead) what feelings can we hope for, economically? what do we already know in our bodies (not necessarily just the physical ones, but also ancestral, spiritual, etc) that can guide us?

so i guess my creative block is letting up – i’ve got a list and a diagram of the ecological parts of next economies drawn up and am excited to start writing about each of them, sharing examples and ways we can support and/or participate in them. i imagine navigating this landscape like butterflies in migration – moving from the death and decay of capitalism, through decomposition (smelling the mushrooms!), through healing together, to creating next economies that support our “soft animal bodies” (as mary oliver might say).

in the meantime, if you liked the content of this post, you might be interested in this session, happening next week:

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Register/learn more here.

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Reflections on writing one essay

i’ve been in the process of reworking an essay (with very necessary help from my book midwife) that has taken months of re-relating to the initial topic, shifting it, finding new ground, and then losing it. it’s been frustrating that i’ve been writing this essay since august (3+ months now) and i still don’t have a final draft. but the process has been very enlightening and is helping me move more into the space of the book i’ve been working on for a little over a year now. here’s some reflection on the process so far:

if writing the essay was a transformation from what i thought was logically needed (i.e. following BIPOC leadership) to something more spiritual, deeper and more wide-spreading (e.g. seeing the unseen worlds where our post-capitalist dreams live), maybe that’s what i’m feeling about the book, too: an opening to this other level, of moving beyond logic. moving beyond the frames of logic we’ve been given toward something that is more human.

i had a flash upon waking this morning about butterflies and river currents and mushrooms and the worry behind “how would mom see this book” or how would it compare, to say, what my partner is reading now – an academic treatise on the end of capitalism (which he often reads to fall asleep, btw). and how my book doesn’t really respond to that. it doesn’t respond to the last book my partner read either, a chronicling of capitalist thought and practice. i think this is because my ideas are no longer caught in the call and response cycle, precisely because we need to move out of it and into a different kind of relationship to what we know as economy. at this point it’s about our psyches, not just about “mental health” (in a western psychological sense) and how we relate with the world. there’s so much anxiety right now. and so many people also yelling “REST.”

i just paused and read some tweets from @storyofwealth on instagram, which is a pretty good account. the tweets were about how taxing the rich is futile (because if we the people don’t have control over where that money goes, what’s the point anyway). true AND i’m not sure that it gets us into a different paradigm. which is what we need: to be able to see other paradigms, not just this one. this feels like having to swim past the breaking waves near the shore to get to a deep calm: there’s a lot within these dominating systems that try and keep us only able to see what they tell us and nothing beyond that.

so this opening feels like an invitation into magic, into the unseen, into the worlds that are around us but we can’t yet feel or live into. they’re there nonetheless. (could this be faith?)

the feeling of “void”ness or “emptiness” outside of capitalism/colonialism/dominating systems is also part of those systems, not a part of the other(ed) realities. the idea that there’s nothing outside the gender binary is a lie…because outside of it there are billions of genders. though it may feel confusing at first stepping outside, perhaps those are the first steps toward our authentic, real, liberated selves.

i sense that’s how it will be (and is) when we step out of capitalism. though it feels like we’re stepping off a cliff, maybe we realize we have wings. maybe these are the first steps toward true freedom: returning to interconnectedness, collaboration, harmony. through practicing repair, trust, returns. through feeling reckoning, grief, and also joy, love, wholeness.

i’m still in this tension with SPEAKING IN A WAY THAT IS LEGITIMATE. speaking in a way where my argument is logical, rational, and follows the rules of dominating culture. (perhaps my role is one of codeswitcher.) i’m pretty (ok, very) sure that that is just part of staying stuck in the same paradigm. AND WE KNOW IT’S WRONG. we know the dominating paradigm is killing many of us, killing the planet and (literally) life as we know it. why do i need to respond to that? i feel like that has to be a point or two up front in the book: as simple as a bulleted list of the harms of capitalism, citing other authors who’ve already done that legwork, just to make the point that we know it’s wrong.

but we can’t stop there.

because we know there were and are civilizations that have lasted in sustainable, harmonious relationship with the planet for millennia.

the difficult part for me is that what i’m trying to say DOES feel illogical. it FEELS all the ways that these dominating systems de-legitimize all the rest: too “airy,” (pun intended!) fluffy, “woo,” not real, not possible, not at scale so therefore irrelevant. it doesn’t play within the rules of logic. and my well-trained brain, educated within this system, says that this means i’m wrong. this is how i get stuck.

but then i remember Alok (a non-binary poet, fashion icon, and visionary) saying how they don’t want to be legitimized by that system. that’s not part of what they seek as it has nothing to do with their freedom. i appreciate the clarity.

this has to do with my fascination with the absurd: those things we can see and may be able to understand, but then label them illogical and “wildly unreasonable” (per the dictionary definition). if those who determine what is reasonable and what is not are those who decide to drill in the arctic, to create borders to justify their xenophobia, to give guns to kids to shoot other kids in school, those deciding that “justice” is white murderers going free, et cetera ad nauseum. if those are the people deciding what is reasonable, then very clearly this kind of “reason” should have no bearing on where we’re going. (let alone limit our possibilities!)

we can’t wait for legitimization from within dominating systems. (i should really write what i mean by dominating systems if i haven’t already.) it will never come. this would only wear us down and burn us out.

so instead i want to move toward freedom, toward liberation. this move might initially feel uncomfortable. we’ll have to learn how to move not just on our own but in connection with others – relearn how to flow together in community. i guess i believe we can. maybe that’s my FAITH.

this could be such an exciting time in human history. where we oppressors right that which we’ve acknowledged we’ve done wrong. where we can learn from all the diversity of ways we live in relationship with the planet. where we can make decisions with our whole selves: heart, body, mind, and not just a logical part conditioned by rules that aren’t grounded in anything. can you see this? can you start dreaming into this space?

dreaming and hoping and faith. opening past containments that no longer serve us: twisted rules of logic, borders, binaries, fragmenting our selves into parts that are “right” and “wrong,” fragmenting nature into value and waste. this opening as not a one-time event but a repeated, fraught attempt to wrestle past them. it is a wrestling that builds muscles. we persist because we know we need what’s on the other side. we need each other. we need a planet that is healthy. we need joy instead of anxiety, celebration and dance instead of burnout. we need dirty fingernails instead of keyboard-trained hands (hold on while i go plant some tomatoes). we need relationships to our selves based in health and “prevention” instead of treating symptoms. we need communal structures that support all of these things – and in some ways, we have ideas as to what they are: universal basic income, healthcare, labor rights, democracy and shared governance, cooperatives, decolonization of land, reparations for all that was stolen. though most of these ideas come from within the dominating system, they have underpinning values that can set us up and help us practice into what will support us more fully.

all of this accidental essay is to say: i think i am inviting us into being less legible, more illogical and perhaps even absurd as we move beyond these structures of “reason” that don’t serve us. i am inviting us into a place where we can radically imagine cultures grounded in care and connection, in wholeness and harmony. i am inviting us into shifting from seeing endings into seeing beginnings and continuations.

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Remixing as colonial practice

i’ve been attending Writers’ Hour almost every morning since mid-November. it is a supportive space to come to weekday mornings to “either do nothing or write. ” having this group and routine has encouraged me to have discipline around writing like never before in my life and has helped me write more than 100,000 words toward a book i’m working on. every morning, the hosts share an inspirational quote. generally they’re by other authors encouraging us to bloom into our writing and are a little snack to get us going. however, today’s quote landed differently for me: today’s “words of wisdom” came from james clear, author of a new york times bestseller, and i’ll share my responses.

“Italy is known for tomatoes. Thailand for chilies. Germany for sauerkraut.

But tomatoes originated in Peru. Thailand imported chilies from Central America. Sauerkraut started in China.

Everything is a remix—and the world is better for it. Share what you know. Learn from others.” – James Clear, as shared in Writers’ Hour, Apr 26, 2021

THIS SHIT PISSES ME OFF. how a lie can pass as truth. how these seemingly innocent, *white* lies serve to manipulate and eventually serve a violent, extractive, historically inaccurate status quo. anger bubbles from my chest through my throat and is transformed into rapid keystrokes.

first, tomatoes are from mexico. which is to say that indigenous people here on the land currently known as mexico cultivated an intentional, multi-generational relationship with this plant in these soils to produce what is now known as jitomate or tomato. these relationships are not ignorable or irrelevant. the existence of italian tomato sauce is due to thousands of years of human relationship with this plant — but not any humans, and not in any place. indigeneity matters. roots matter. that this work was done in a specific place by specific people matters. and to ignore that is to ignore the sacred, to ignore history, to erase relationship.

second, the reason these fruits arrived to italy was through a process of intended (and failed) genocide, a process that killed millions of people and affects their surviving descendants to this day. this pomodoro pasta dish is not free of its heritage of violence, rape, destruction, desecration. let us not forget that christopher colombus, one of the first people to set foot upon this land as a colonizer, was of italian descent. that next to his tomb in sevilla, spain, there is still a “treasure room,” full of stolen gold, locked away within the walls of the church.

finally, the construction of this lie is not only of direct and convenient benefit to its author (a man who gains his wealth from writing), but also serves to further justify appropriation en masse. appropriation, as i’ve come to understand it, is a cutting off from the roots. yoga practiced as exercise, a series of stretches completely disconnected from a deep spiritual tradition. indigenous community-made textiles stolen and sold to be marketed as fashion. your remixing is not inherently innocent, nor necessarily of benefit to the world. some remixings perpetuate harms that began on this landmass currently known as “america” (also an italian namesake) 500 years ago.

as a writer (and as a human), i am angry that “truth” seems to not mean anything anymore. that a few select people have been granted power by a fictional worldview and thus can proclaim lies as truth. some of these lies-masquerading-as-truths are deadly. that “truth” that indigenous people no longer exist supports continued exploitation of land and labor to fuel an ongoing colonial process of development. that “truth” that Black people are a threat maintains a population captive for 500 years, under penalty of death by simply driving, walking, even while sleeping.

so no, james clear, i will not remix. i will not mix and match where it serves me in convenience. i understand the power i have been granted by these oppressive systems that would allow me to cut the fruit from its root and i reject that power. instead, we must seek another way. we must seek a truth with roots. we must seek to return to our own roots and tend to them.

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Land as Investment

This post was originally written while I was part of Regenerative Finance.

Take-away points

  • Remember to broaden frame of investment/wealth beyond cash assets
    • SRI and impact investing will tend to focus on cash.  Continuing to ignore other types of assets is colonial.
  • Investment in land seen as “safe.”
    • Doesn’t depreciate, doesn’t require maintenance, tangible asset
  • Investing in land is reliant on historical and continued genocide, forced assimilation, colonization.

Commodification of nature

Capitalism rooted in colonialism erases or downplays the importance of land and “natural resources” as foundational to growth.  One of the major ways to turn land into a natural resource is called commodification — or the process of turning something into a commodity by converting it from its original form to a value that can be measured in dollars.

Take a tree for example, a complex living being that can do many amazing things: turn what we breathe out into oxygen; produce a huge variety of delicious tasting fruits, nuts, syrup, and berries; provide a home for birds, mammals, and other animals; can induce a sense of awe in us if we pay attention (see: redwoods, live oaks in the south of the U.S., bristlecone pines that are 5,000 years old); I could go on.  In his book Cradle to Cradle, architect William McDonough illustrates this point too:

“Imagine this design assignment: design something that makes oxygen, sequesters carbon, fixes nitrogen, distills water, accrues solar energy as fuel, makes complex sugars and food, creates microclimates, changes colors with the seasons, and self-replicates.

Why don’t we knock that down and write on it?”

All of this is a long-winded way of saying that trees are – for a variety of reasons – magical.

Capitalism takes these magical beings and turns them into something that can be traded on a market – paper, lumber.  Occasionally, economics can understand “environmental services” – more of the things that McDonough was getting at – the valuing of sequestering carbon, and then complicate the tree’s value, as well as make a stronger economic argument to keep it alive and healthy.

By the way, this is all reliant on a lot of separations within nature.  Trees are separate from birds that live in them, separate from the soil and water and fungal networks that nourish them.  We are separate from them.

So…commodification turns parts of nature into things that can be traded on markets, and made money from the sale of, based on an agreed upon value.  “Raw materials.”

This relies on separating us from nature, from our other ways of relating, and the interrelatedness of its parts.

Other related ideas include water investment and privatization, carbon trading and treating land itself as property.

If you’re interested in any of these things, I highly recommend watch Tom B.K. Goldtooth’s video on Youtube:

History of the land under the United States

United States history is different than the history of the land that the U.S. currently occupies.  Who was here before the “start”?  How is their deep history erased by current narratives that start history at 1776?  How does our understanding of the U.S. as one nation erase the hundreds of other sovereign nations that also currently inhabit this land?

Here’s a quick timeline to illustrate the 1.5% of history since European settlement of the land as contrasted with a conservative under-estimate of total human habitation of the land, 20,000 years ago. It also includes what our current timeline calls “0.”

“Counter to the western stories that we’ve been here 12,000 years, we’ve been here over 60,000 years, likely over 100,000 years, and there is a great deal of evidence to support that,” says Paulette Steeves, director of the Native American Studies program at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

A more complicated understanding of history that many of us did not receive in school is necessary to understand the depth of relationship that indigenous people have had and many continue to have with this land currently called the United States for thousands of years.  In contrast, the colonized period of this land is relatively small, a few percent of total peopled time.

Land as Investment

Investing isn’t just about money.  All capitalism relies on commodification of nature and land and the genocide required to do those things as well as direct investment in land.

Wealth redistribution tends to focus on dollars and donation of money.

International land grabs are kind of a big deal too.  The Oakland Institute has some great resources on that topic.

It’s imperative that our interpretation of investment be broadened to also encompass land.  Investment in land doesn’t have to look like owning a real estate property, there are lots of ways to invest.  And certainly all of capitalism happens on land anyway.

The process of commodification – turning trees into paper, into an abstract commodity that can be bought and sold – is the process of disconnecting ourselves from place, of literally uprooting ourselves and nature and abstracting it into something else.  In its very nature, this is colonial — it is void of a sense of place, a sense of context, history, and connection.

There’s a strong connection to present-day gentrification and displacement – these are not new concepts.  This is also super connected to the gentrification that’s happening around the country (and many parts of the world) as people move around.  The idea that people are movable, easily displaced, that a value connected to a place will drive people out of being able to live there — rooted in racialized colonialism.

Land Reparations

Land is not arbitrary.  Things like “equal redistribution of land” or “land as commons”  are colonial concepts that continue to erase deep relationships of indigenous people to *specific* places.

For a really basic idea of what I mean here, think about a place you call home.  About how it smells, about the plants that live there and how they change over the course of a year.  About all the people you are connected to in that place.  That place can’t be anywhere, it’s a specific place to you with many histories.  Multiply that by 20,000 years and then it might be similar to indigeneity.

One example of a land reparations project I’m familiar with locally is an indigenous women led project called the Sogorea Te Land Trust. It asks settlers on Chocheño Ohlone land to pay a “tax” to fund the purchase of land to be stewarded and used in ceremonial practices.  There are several other indigenous led land trusts around the country.

Finally on a related note, it can’t be left unsaid that this country’s histories of slavery and (forced) immigration complicates our relationship to land in the present.  (For more on this, see my summary of an academic paper called Decolonization is not a Metaphor.)

I’m going to leave you here with a few resources, some questions to consider, and let you know some of the questions we’re currently holding as Regenerative Finance.  Want to be in conversation with us?? Far out!  Drop us a line.

Some Resources

Questions to consider

  • Do you have investments in land? What does that look like? REITS, a home you live in, homes you don’t live in, relationships to real estate developers, buildings, infrastructure, …?
  • Do you have investments that are involved in the commodification of land?
  • Whose land are your investments on or in? What’s your relationship to those people? What’s your current relationship and ideal relationship?
  • What has your family’s historical relationship to land been?
  • All of our wealth was extracted from land, what were the steps in that process, and how does that feel? What are you going to do about it?

Questions we’re dealing with as Regen

  • How does land fit into regenerative investing?
  • If a project we work with is not indigenous-led, what would it need to do to be decolonized?
  • Given that so much wealth is accumulated through direct investment in land, what are we doing about that?
  • How do we take this message as settlers to other settlers?  How do we continue to bring this topic up in the impact investing scene?
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Thoughts, questions, and responses to “Decolonization is not a metaphor”

“Decolonization, which we assert is a distinct project from other civil and human rights-based social justice projects, is far too often subsumed into the directives of these projects, with no regard for how decolonization wants something different than those forms of justice.” (pg. 2)

Reading this article shifted my perspective in 3 ways:

  • Really? Beginning to think about how decolonization is different and not overlapping with other social justice frameworks.
  • Beginning to think of how I and we want to alleviate our guilt – or “move to innocence” – around the violent issues that come with being a settler, benefiting from it, and continuing to perpetuate settler colonialism.
  • Learning to hold incommensurability, unsettling as it is.
cactus flowers in arizona, hopi land

First: Understanding our “moves to innocence” is part of interrogating our privilege

“Directly and indirectly benefiting from the erasure and assimilation of Indigenous peoples is a difficult reality for settlers to accept. The weight of this reality is uncomfortable; the misery of guilt makes one hurry toward any reprieve.” (9)

Understanding our own privileges often brings up a lot of guilt associated with our part in oppression. As part of human nature, we want to alleviate this guilt – to get to a state of cognitive consonance – we want to feel better! Things like developing a critical consciousness (ahem) of privilege/oppression, donating money to a cause, dedicating your career to it, claiming a distant (perhaps not real) native ancestor, are actually “diversions, distractions, which relieve the settler of feelings of guilt or responsibility, and conceal the need to give up land or power or privilege.” (21)

These are what Tuck & Yang call “moves to innocence,” ways we can rid ourselves of this pesky thing called guilt.

“Settler moves to innocence are those strategies or positionings that attempt to relieve the settler of feelings of guilt or responsibility without giving up land or power or privilege.” (10)

However, these strategies don’t actually remedy the thing we’re feeling bad about.

In particular, we can see our moves to innocence, engage with them, and transform them:

“We provide this framework so that we can be more impatient with each other, less likely to accept gestures and half-steps, and more willing to press for acts which unsettle innocence…” (10)

In other words, our guilt carries potential. Guilt is actually good in that it tells us that we know something’s wrong! However, most of our strategies to alleviate guilt claim to be finite — I donated, I’ve done my part, now I can resume whatever I was doing — and don’t really address the wrong we feel. On the other hand, the uncomfortable position of guilt is home to rich discussions, new ideas, and hopefully, transformation. It reminds me of a quote I just read:

“Our job is not to make young women grateful. It is to make them ungrateful so they keep going. Gratitude never radicalized anybody.” – Susan B. Anthony

Learning to embrace these very real feelings that come with privilege is important and necessary in moving toward decolonization.

redwoods in california, miwok land

Second: Decolonization is not a subset of social justice: “incommensurability is unsettling”

“The promise of integration and civil rights is predicated on securing a share of settler-appropriated wealth (as well as expropriated ‘third-world’ wealth.)” (7)

Tuck & Yang point out that much of social justice is based on the existence of a settler colonial state. Often, remediating the wrongs done to many people of color, rely on colonialism.

In particular they point to three movements that neglect decolonization or turn it into a metaphor. Here are simple summaries:

  1. Third world decolonizations we often forget about what is happening and has happened here (where ever that is) in order to focus on imperialism/colonialism globally or abroad, elsewhere.
  2. Abolition of slavery and deconstructing the prison industrial complex rely on taking land from natives to give to previously enslaved peoples.
  3. Critical pedagogies like place-based knowledge situate our experiences upon land but do not move to include land itself as active, only as receiver/passive.

For each, Tuck & Yang provide the start of a “bibliography of incommensurability.”

Further, they suggest that real solidarity and collaboration arise from acknowledging our differences rather than smearing them together in order to construct makeshift coalitions:

“We argue that the opportunities for solidarity lie in what is incommensurable rather than what is common across these efforts.” (28)

“We offer these perspectives on unsettling innocence because they are examples of what we might call an ethic of incommensurability, which recognizes what is distinct, what is sovereign for project(s) of decolonization in relation to human and civil rights based social justice projects.“ (28)

prairie in illinois, winnebago land

Third: Now what? Holding incommensurability, guilt, and other unsettling feelings

“An ethic of incommensurability, which guides moves that unsettle innocence, stands in contrast to aims of reconciliation, which motivate settler moves to innocence. Reconciliation is about rescuing settler normalcy, about rescuing a settler future. Reconciliation is concerned with questions of what will decolonization look like? What will happen after abolition? What will be the consequences of decolonization for the settler? Incommensurability acknowledges that these questions need not, and perhaps cannot, be answered in order for decolonization to exist as a framework.

We want to say, first, that decolonization is not obliged to answer those questions – decolonization is not accountable to settlers, or settler futurity. Decolonization is accountable to Indigenous sovereignty and futurity. […] The answers will not emerge from friendly understanding, and indeed require a dangerous understanding of uncommonality that un-coalesces coalition politics – moves that may feel very unfriendly.”

So:

How can we start and hold spaces within ourselves for this unsettling feeling without moving straight to a way to alleviate our guilt?

How can we hold spaces that are problematic at a group level that create discussion and do not end with something that claims to be a solution? In other words, how can we create spaces that also hold unsettling discussions, and even the “dangerous understanding” that comes with it?

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Moving Beyond Marx: Some introductory resources and actions on decolonization

Image from An Indigenous History of North America

Intention

This document was created to serve as an introduction to the ideas of colonization and provide a glimpse into what decolonization means.  In particular, it is useful in broadening our thinking about classism beyond Marxism to also include indigenous people and their struggles.  It’s not exhaustive.  Please (please!) share your thoughts, questions and suggestions!

A little by way of background

Generally, in social justice circles, I hear Marx’s ideas as one of the primary and fundamental ways of understanding class-based oppression.  To put it simply: classism exists because certain people take advantage of others by exploiting their labor.  That profit is only possible when labor is under- or not paid.

However, this perspective continues to invisiblize native struggles: it ignores how nature and land get turned into natural resources and commodities to be traded.  These are huge parts of how profit gets generated within capitalism!  Furthermore, the violent transition from nature to natural resource isn’t a quick and easy shift, but rather often requires dispossessing native people, severing connections with land that have (in many cases) existed for several thousand years, and constructing histories that do not include these struggles.  For example, in thinking about any natural resource, is it part of our consciousness to include just where it comes from?  Where did the tree live that became a piece of paper?

For work around undoing classism to be successful – to move to a more just, equitable society – we must not only think about how people are turned into workers to be exploited, but also how trees must be turned into natural resources to be exploited and how natives must be erased to control land.  What follows are a few entry points into further understanding about these dynamics.

First steps

1) Learn about which people lived where you do before you did.  What are they called now?  What name(s) do/did they have for themselves?  What were their crafts, social structure, homes, types of food?  Are there any descendants still around your area?

2) Check out: Decolonize Myself & Shit people say to natives for some young people thinking about liberation

3) What thoughts, feelings, sensations do you have about living on land your people aren’t from (i.e. being a settler)?

Sensitizing readings & media

sen·si·tize: to make (someone) more aware of something

Indigenous media/information projects

Indigenous groups to get involved with or “follow”

UPDATE: A Google doc with more resources

Here is the link.