14 minute read
Trudging through the ash cloud
KATU Portland cameraman Dave Crockett had an intuition something was about to pop at Mt. St. Helens. The mountain had been rumbling and bulging for a couple of months. Now on the morning of May 18, 1980 it seemed ready to erupt. So he drove up from Portland, and sure enough, at 8:32 am, the mountain blew its top and began to spew a column of ash into the stratosphere.
But the mountain erupted in an unexpected direction. A rare lateral blast sent ash and mudflows north across the landscape, creating a 230-square-mile blast zone. Of the 57 people who died that day, only two were in the red zone, the area which had been evacuated in anticipation of the blast. Dave was beyond the zone so he thought he was safe while he recorded the initial moments of the eruption.
But quickly, mudflows cut off the road in front of Crockett’s car and the ash cloud enveloped him. He abandoned the car. Camera on his shoulder, he began walking along the old logging road through a day turned dark as night, guided only by the sliver of light he could see beyond a nearby ridgeline. The pictures show a small white patch jostling around in the black cloud while he trudged along trying to stay fixed on it. Crockett believed he was a goner. He was recording for whoever found his body. (The shots are in the 15:05-18:02 segment in the embedded video here.)
“At this moment I honest to God believe I’m dead,” Crockett was saying. “There’s really no way to describe this feeling. I feel the ash now in my eyes. It’s getting very hard to breathe. It burns to breathe. Oh dear God! My God this is hell! I just can’t describe it. It’s pitch black. It’s hell on Earth I’m walking through. One step at a time. If I can just keep walking.”
Ultimately, a breeze cleared out the cloud. Crockett was rescued by helicopter, and he lived to see another day.
Sometimes I feel like Dave Crockett, enmeshed in the blinding, suffocating cloud of our human eruptions, barely able to catch my breath, conversing with myself about death and hell while steering through the darkness toward any patch of daylight I can find. And hoping better winds will blow the ash away. A lot of the past 12 months has been that way.
Disruptions coming faster than expected
When I launched The Raven a year ago, it was in the spirit of looking for the daylight in dark times, of finding a way through the great disruptions we are experiencing. The opening posts were about the blockage of the Suez Canal by a monster container ship, the MV Ever Given, how it clotted a key global artery and threatened to create a global economic heart attack. I wrote about how the incident underscores the fragility of the global system and demonstrates the need for a return to economics based closer to home.
I knew greater disruptions were coming. I just didn’t know how fast. The Ever Given crisis was a precursor for the year since, marked by global supply chain disruptions rising from many sources, climaxing with the ultimate disruption of the Ukraine War and resulting dangers to world food and energy supplies. A world rapidly breaking into competing economic blocs poses the prospect of supply snaps creating a new great depression.
Long engaged in the towering challenge of climate disruption as both a writer and activist, I knew that climate would be a hallmark of The Raven. I also understood that radical disruption of Earth systems is already with us, and that one of the most radical is the distortion of the jet stream which drives global weather patterns. Temperature contrasts between the Arctic and equator keep the jet stream spinning tightly around the globe. But the Arctic is heating faster than anywhere on the planet, and the jet stream is slowing, becoming broken and wavy, locking in weather patterns that create intense rainfalls and heat waves over entire regions.
When I started The Raven in March, I could not have anticipated that this phenomenon would by June and July create the greatest heat wave in world records over my Cascadian head. Temperature records far exceeding the previous spread over British Columbia, Washington and Oregon, while hundreds died of heat-related causes. I wrote about how the visceral reality of radical climate disruption spurred a sense of climate grief that called for a people power uprising. I also wrote about jet stream disruption here and here. When wildfire smoke from dried out forests blanketed Seattle a month later, I contemplated our everyday climate catastrophe.
Over the year, The Raven speculated on the breakdown of the U.S. political system, wondering if a nation marked by such widening divides could even hold together. I wrote about how I pondered national breakdown when I visited an Indian reservation in Northeast Washington before the 2020 election, then looked at the post-election evidence a soft breakdown has already taken place, with harder in prospect. Not with neat dividing lines along state boundaries, but between urban and rural areas, and the inner and outer bands of metropolitan regions. Looking at polling data indicating high support for secession across the political spectrum, I asked whether national breakdown is inevitable.
The great evasions
This is a time of great disruption. Events are moving faster than most of us imagined. Comfortable assumptions that business as usual would continue are out the window. The illusion we live in a stable world is just that. Global disruption is invading our everyday lives, and uncertainty marks our future at all levels. The path through these disruptions is murky and dark, just like the logging road on which Dave Crockett slogged. Great evasions have brought us to this great disruption.
Political and economic institutions have evaded the fact that fossil fuel pollution is twisting the climate, while burning of coal, oil and gas grows to new levels, and is projected to rise even further. With climate chaos increasing, collapse of already stressed ecological and social systems draws ever closer.
National security elites have evaded the fact that the intensification of great power conflicts between nuclear-armed states threatens us with extinction or something near to it. Meanwhile, increasing military spending starves societies of capacity to meet social and environmental crises.
Self-aggrandizing upper classes promoting policies and philosophies which concentrate an ever greater share of wealth in their hands have evaded the fact that this can only intensify social conflict. The widening wealth gap spurs ethnic and racial conflict feeding reactionary political and cultural backlash.
A consistent theme of The Raven is that such dark times provide the virtue of clarity, busting unfounded assumptions and spurring us to ask fundamental questions about the systems that brought us here. Evasions become untenable when their consequences come in full view, if we can connect the dots. If there is a sliver of light to be seen through the ashfall, it is that emergent consequences open the way to see through the great evasions, envision a world that might be, and act to bring it about.
Devolving and democratizing power
I come from a tradition that may be a little out of fashion nowadays, but which I see as providing vital directions to that other world we have said is possible. Call it decentralist or devolutionist. It sees the scale of systems as fundamental to the problems facing us. That the larger systems grow, the less they are constrained by democracy, and the more unbridled and abusive they become of both people and planet. As recent events in Ukraine underscore. Whether large nation states or massive corporations, the pattern is the same. It goes back to that well known saying by British historian Lord Acton, “Power tends to corrupt; absolute power corrupts absolutely.”
The Raven “seeks to envision pathways and map futures through increasingly troubled and uncertain times, pointing toward solutions that distribute and democratize power.” That is how I began the introduction to this web journal a year ago today, as I explained why I named it after this mythic creature. “The raven is a fabled bird weaving through myths and legends of cultures across the world. Three of those mythic images define the prime themes of this journal. Raven as Harbinger. Raven as Trickster. Raven as Protector.”
Raven as harbinger, the raven that tells Edgar Allen Poe he will “nevermore” see his dear Lenore, or the Celtic raven goddess Morrighan who came as a precursor of death in battle, is the raven that looks ahead to warn of the increasing disruptions.
Raven, the trickster of native legends, takes the light from a selfish hoarder who has kept it locked in a box, keeping the world in darkness. Raven distributes it to all creatures, creating the world anew. Selfish hoarding characterizes our world today. This journal, as I wrote, “explores alternatives that share political and economic power more broadly, restoring democracy and the human scale to society, politics and economics. Like the trickster, we will need an asymmetrical savvy to cleverly break open the locked boxes of power. To shine the light on the stories that shape our minds and actions, and change them.” In other words, to bring clarity to the great evasions and shed the daylight on dark times.
The third mythos, raven as protector, derives from the medieval legends of Wales (part of my own ethnic heritage). I wrote, “Bran the Blessed, whose name is translated as raven, was King of the Britons. He was a giant who ruled over the entire isle until he was mortally wounded in a war with the Irish. Bran asked his companions to cut off his head and plant it on British soil to protect the island from invasion.”
Today the crucial need is to protect people and our planet from the massive institutions that are ravaging it. A steady theme through this first year of The Raven has been the crucial role of people power movements organizing at the grassroots. As I wrote in the introductory piece, “The movements and ideas that will shape tomorrow will gain traction in specific places first, spreading until they reach critical mass and win in national centers. Facing what is certain to be a fractious 2020s, we must grow local and regional centers of progressive strength that root in people power organizing and link with each other across the continent.” I highlighted the key role of broad-based urban political movements.
Viewing the failure of institutions to provide climate justice, I pointed to the need for “serious, mass direct action. People power shutdowns of urban cores and government centers. Occupations of corporate offices and operations, and outside the homes of top corporate and political leaders. Shutdowns of highways . . . To make ourselves damned inconvenient. To nonviolently throw sand in the gears, stopping the flow on which business as usual depends.”
Over the coming year, I will continue exploring prospects for people power organizing and mass direct action. These are never easy projects, and, honestly, in a time of war, they become more difficult. Nonetheless, if we are to make progress addressing the critical challenges facing us, from climate to economic justice to, yes, issues of war and peace, we must step up our game and generate the numbers needed to make change. We don’t have them yet.
It doesn’t take everybody, just a core of committed people. As I wrote, “according to research by Harvard political scientist Erica Chenoweth, if only 3.5% of the population are active in protests for causes that have general support, they win. Chenoweth and her team based that conclusion on a survey of 323 movements from 1900-2006. Importantly, they found that nonviolent movements were successful in bringing change 53% of the time, twice the rate of movements that involved violence. That is because nonviolence can engage more people.”
Exploring the regionalist tradition
In pointing to a future where power is more distributed and democratized, I devoted a six-part series to the vision of radical historian William Appleman Williams for reconstituting the U.S. as a federation of democratically governed regional commonwealths. It begins here. Williams posed a communitarian vision to transcend what he called the possessive individualism that infuses U.S. life. He saw that we as individuals can fulfill ourselves “only as a member of a community.”
Over the coming year, I intend to dig deeper into the regionalist tradition, focusing on seminal figures such as Lewis Mumford and Leopold Kohr. What is the relevance of Mumford’s thinking on “the regional framework of civilization,” or Kohr’s radical critique of bigness and call to break big nations into smaller ones? How are modern forms of devolutionist thinking such as bioregionalism addressing the crises of today?
These views reflect a profoundly different way of organizing the world. Vast centralized empires go back to the earliest days of civilization. But when mass systems of power are taking the world off a cliff, whether slowly by means of fossil-fueled climate change, or prospectively very quickly via nuclear war, we must think in far deeper ways. We must move beyond the age of empires to one of living places. We must move beyond our own deep-seated empire as a way of life in the U.S. We must end empire, all empires, or empire will end us.
In any event, national and global institutions are breaking down. Over the coming year I will continue to explore centrifugal tendencies in U.S. political life, how we have always been a nation of distinct cultures that are now moving further apart. We are confronted with a need to build power in place whether we aim at a more localized and regionalized future, or are simply seeking to continue making progress against strong political headwinds. The high probability that the U.S. Congress and presidency will be in rightist reactionary hands by 2025 forces us to look closer to home, as I wrote, to states and cities, and to think beyond incrementalism and work for fundamental changes in places we live. Over the next year, I will delve more deeply into the practicalities of local and regional transformation, including a keystone, regaining control of capital through public banking.
Pathway to the future
The pathway to the future, that sliver of daylight through dark times, takes us through people power organizing, through social movements that catalyze action for change on the scale required to move off the catastrophic paths we are now travelling. Paradoxically, it requires we focus more on the places we live, and on the sense of a universal human family beyond nation states and empires, to bring the practice of compassion to all our political and economic institutions.
As I wrote recently, “A world grounded in compassion may seem utopian. But sometimes, what seems utopian is actually realistic, and what seems realistic is the road to radically dystopian outcomes. We are presented now with the picture of a world going toward just such outcomes. At this stage of human history and evolution, our powers having grown to the point where it is all too easy to envision us destroying ourselves, let us value the clarity of the moment and ask the fundamental questions of how we live here together as a human family. Let us make that other world we have said is possible. It will be if we learn to embody compassion in our institutions and our ways of life.”
We live in dark times. The ash clouds of erupting global crises swirl around us. We may only be able to see slivers of light in the distance. That is where we must move, looking for better winds to clear the way. By acting as people in place, coming together around visions for a better world, we can bring greater light to the picture. We can be the light. On that path The Raven will continue to fly in the coming year. I hope you will continue to fly with me.
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