I'm not out to solve the world’s problems.
Taylor Miller Photo.
“It's all up to you now, your generation,” says my hopeful father, his own unlived passion for environmental and social justice seeping from the corners of his pep talk. “I see it in you all, your capacity to create change. You have the numbers, you just have to vote, come together and demand that change.”
As he speaks, the weight of one thousand years of bad behavior is placed on my shoulders. My cheeks burn, and I can hardly hear him finish his “call to action.”
“Don’t you dare put that burden on me,” I say, throwing the weight off my knotted back, though much of it landed back onto me. “I will fight as long as I live for the land, but don’t tell me that this change is all on my generation. This is on all of us. Don’t tell me that your kids and grandkids will fix all the problems your parents and grandparents created. It is a fucking cop-out.”
Dizzy with rage, my mind swirls around my college studies in environmentalism. The terrifying feedback loops happening in real time as our climate bears the burden of fossil fuels, as the seas gobble up the endless supply of plastic water bottles, as my generation of the working class and the wildlife alike are bought out and driven away from our own homes—a faint echo of what happened to the native people who tended this land before me.
I am no longer out to solve the world’s problems, I thought to myself.
It's not that I am giving up. It’s that this problem is not cut out for solving and I was never cut out for fixing it. Our society is already too obsessed with fixing things, and too good at giving up when the mess becomes too burdensome.
I both love and hate Hope. The Hope that is a longing for change so great that it drags me to my knees in lament and to my feet in unrelenting will is the kind I love. I also brush Hope aside as yet another cop-out, like Dad's passive hope for the new generation to create change soothes him into a deeper complacency with his own unwillingness to change himself. I see that dirty side of Hope every time I turn it over in my hands, holding on to the Hope that one day I can have a comma in my bank account for longer than 2 weeks, or that maybe humanity’s tirelessly abusive relationship with Earth can heal for once. It is not Hope itself that I hate, rather it is the way Hope is leaned upon like a crutch. Transferring the weight of truth onto something else, and doing so without action, is a cop-out. To shrug that weight off for the sake of our own emotional comfort poisons real Hope. It costs us half of our vision, we pay with our ability to see the entirety of things. Hope is indeed everywhere—and coupled with it the very real possibility that this story will not end how we all want it to. Both are important.
I have hope, but I don't place my bets on fixing the world's problems, no matter how proud it would make my dad.
With all due respect to Gandhi, I used to choke on “be the change you want to see in the world.” Yeah, right. I have been systematically disempowered to make change, and then systematically told that I need to be the change maker, as long as it all goes down within the confines of the system that is causing the problem in the first place.
When I turned 18, I went out into the world hellbent on fixing the environmental crisis within this system. I shot my little arrows into the grotesque knees of a monster grown out of control, and they landed like bee stings in its skin. “Welcome to the machine,” it groaned into my ears. I am an adult now, not the “just turned 18” kind but the “I have betrayed, loved, grieved, and broken promises” kind of grown-up. I am part of this machine now, in an adulthood where I have to fight upstream against meaningless tasks, expectations, and questions about when I will start having babies. Dodging clocks and distractions, swimming toward the things that really matter. The stuff of soul, the stuff of beauty. I am a spawning trout, surrounded by paperwork, fighting to get back to my birthplace and my birthright (and no, not for the purpose of making offspring).
I get it now, Gandhi. Because I am tired of explaining, over-explaining, and then explaining again to deaf ears. Here I stand in the middle of a tightrope stretched out between fixing what is broken and tenuous, and cutting the rope. Not lost, just balanced. Wondering. Looking at my hands; do I create or destroy? Neither entails fixing.
Is it so bad to walk away from a sputtering, dying machine? I can salvage the parts, perhaps turn them into a new one… but I am not sure that I trust machinery anymore.
I wish I could say I did my best, threw myself into activism for the environment. I cannot say that. Not because I didn’t care or try, but because there is only so much that a single person can do before they go mad and lose themselves. Each problem is interlocked with another, a gridlock of hard heads and self-centered productivity. I spent 5 years asking where home is, moving too many times too quickly. What I was really asking was who I was, and what I am doing. I suppose I really am just here to create more beauty where I can, and to make myself a little more human the best I can. To step out of the shit show and into my love for life and the land I live on, and stop screaming about it so much. You know, that whole Gandhi thing.
So urgent is this tug toward slowness and beauty. To create beauty just as the Colorado River carved an oasis into the desert of my home. Lapping at my feet with the most graceful motions while racing down the canyon, carried by gravity and the moon alone. Twisting through hard places, softening them with time. The river breathes from canyon to delta. It tumbles toward the full bellied sirens of the sea, who reach over the dams and the severed dry delta, singing the melancholy cry of a canyon wren. A mourning for the places that are full of unrecognized life.
I long to step away from the broken machine. Maybe I will leap off the tightrope, maybe I will cut it free. Is that giving up? No… I like to think of it as an act of Hope.