Running Home, Running Away, Running Together

One reason I have such a hard time writing consistently on environmental problems is that it is so bloody depressing. Sometimes I want to throw up my hands in despair and run away screaming. Of course, part of the problem is that there is nowhere to run, and in fact part of how we got where we are was by assuming that we could “externalize” costs and let other people “over there” pay for our wastefulness “here.” And often “over there” is the developing third world and here is the developed first world. Gotta love globalization!

But I was watching the first episode of the TV series Xena, Warrior Princess the other day and it offers some insight about when we can and can’t—and maybe even should and shouldn’t—run away.

The episode opens with Xena (Lucy Lawless) riding through a burned-out village, remembering its destruction. A boy asks her for food. She tells him no one has anything to spare, and asks what happened to his village. He says that Xena the Warrior Princess came down out of the sky on a flaming chariot and destroyed it, killing everyone, including his parents. She drops a package on the ground and rides away. He opens it to see bread and cheese. In the next scene she strips off her leather armor and buries it and her weapons.

But almost immediately a ruckus ensues. A warlord and his minions are gathering villagers to sell as slaves. Dressed only in a linen shift and boots, Xena fights them off, first with her bare hands, then with a sword she takes from a minion, and finally with her weapons that she digs out of the ground. She returns with the people to their village and puts her armor back on while a young villager named Gabrielle (Renee O’Connor) begs her to tell her how she did her fighting moves and Gabrielle’s father insists that Xena move on and not get their village in bigger trouble.

The episode is titled “Sins of the Past” and it is clear that Xena cannot escape hers.

As she prepares to leave, Gabrielle begs to come too, saying, “You’ve got to take me with you and teach me everything you know. You can’t leave me here…. Xena, I’m not cut out for this village life. I was born to do so much more.” Xena refuses and leaves alone, so Gabrielle packs her things and runs away to follow Xena. She uses her wit to elude a Cyclops and get a ride on the cart of a farmer so she doesn’t have to walk all the way to Amphipolis, Xena’s home town.

Back home, Xena faces the people who knew her back in her village-burning days and want nothing to do with her—even her mother. Xena’s former warlord partner, Draco, and his army have started a campaign of burning and pillaging in Xena’s name, so when Xena warns the villagers that slavers are coming and tells them to defend themselves, but they accuse her of building an army that will get their loved ones killed, as she did in the past.

The people of Amphipolis surround Xena, who puts down her sword and offers herself as “one unarmed woman” that they can feel brave enough to attack. But just as they are about to attack, Gabrielle appears and testifies to Xena’s reformed ways, causing the citizens to let her go, just in time for her to save them from the slavers.  

After winning the fight against Draco, Xena declines the reward of the villagers and moves on, but again Gabrielle follows her. She convinces Xena to take her along, saying, “I’m not the little girl that my parents wanted me to be. You wouldn’t understand.”

Xena replies, “It’s not easy proving you're a different person.”

And here we see their similarities and differences. Both perceive themselves to be something their families can’t comprehend or accept. Xena, because of her conversion away from her days as a warlord, is seeking redemption through helping the helpless. Gabrielle, who feels like more than a village girl destined for an arranged marriage, is inspired by seeing Xena who is larger than life. Neither woman can be who she perceives herself to be, not within the social constructs that surround her.

But together? That might be a different matter.

As they move off the next morning, Xena says, “You know, where I’m headed, there’ll be trouble.” Gabrielle responds, “I know.” Xena says, “Then why would you want to go into that with me?”

And Gabrielle give us the answer. “That’s what friends do. They stand by each other when there’s trouble.”

And so they give us the answer to my dilemma too. We can’t do it alone, any of it. It’s too troublesome, dangerous, or, at the very least, depressing. But with a few friends? A small cohort of folks who know what we are deeply concerned about and agree? Maybe we can stand by each other.

Just maybe.

This Is Not A[n Ethnic] Joke

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Grr. Arrgh.

As it turns out, writing regularly about something you care deeply about is a problem. I do not say this as a “normal” person. I say this as a writer and a teacher of writing.

Writing is hard at the best of times. And right now when, quite literally, the water is rising in many low-lying parts of the world including our own major cities, is not the best of times. So, in the interest of offering my take both on environmental issues (on which I am surely not an expert) and on writing (on which I really am), I offer you here a frame tale, a story told about a story (kind of like Wuthering Heights, but with less over-the-top emotion and I hope more pragmatic usefulness). You can judge the ins and outs for yourself and, hopefully, draw your own (Earth-conscious) conclusion.

Two weeks ago I was in Philadelphia on a sustainability retreat organized by GreenFaith, an interfaith environmental education organization. Along with about 35 other people—including roughly 30 Christians, 3 Hindus, a Buddhist, a Jew, and a Muslim—we stayed at a Quaker retreat center called Pendle Hill and visited several sites where people are doing a variety of sustainability initiatives.

We saw the geothermal energy system and green roof at the national center for the American Friends Service Committee (Quakers). We visited the Energy Coordinating Agency, a green-jobs training center where young people learned how to weatherize and retrofit existing buildings to make them energy-efficient. And we conducted environmental audits of a church and a synagogue.

Interfaith initiatives are always fun, because you learn so much about other faiths, and they also require a little patience for the same reason, because somebody always has to explain why X Group does Y Crazy Thing, and sometimes the explanations can take a while. As you might imagine, when 35 people from 5 different faiths walk into a bar, it can take a long time to get to the punchline.

The half of the group that I was a part of was assigned to the synagogue, and my subgroup covered the Water part of the audit for that space. We looked at sinks, water fountains, toilets, urinals, refrigerators, coffee machines, potted plants, and the general risk of pipe leaks. Now, I have never spent any time in a synagogue and absolutely not while only paying attention to the water.

My group discovered that the synagogue was doing a good job avoiding bottled water at its events, but that all the toilets were standard flush. The easiest way for them to decrease the amount of water they used would be to change to low-flush toilets—the kind that make a distinction between “Number 1” and “Number 2” and allow you to choose the size of your flush accordingly. (I am not kidding. We have these at MIT and that is exactly the language they use.)

The other groups found ways for the synagogue to decrease the overall energy use and made recommendations for the avoidance and (when unavoidable) safe storage of toxic cleaning chemicals. And because they already kept a fairly complicated kitchen due to the need to separate kosher and non-kosher food, they had already done a lot of thinking around food issues.

The folks at the synagogue were as grateful for our help as we were to them for allowing us to get experience auditing with their community’s building. The exercise made the systems nature of environmental problems so much clearer, and also showed how different systems—like food and water, or water and energy—interact and/or overlap. Such dynamism means that thinking environmentally requires thinking flexibly, in a way that more traditional A-to-B-to-C linear thinking does not.

And that alone is interesting to me as a writer, since language is unavoidably linear: article to noun to verb to preposition to object… To accurately write down a complex environmental idea, one would practically have to borrow a baby’s mobile and put the words on the ends of the strings to show the dynamic relationships.

And then, if, for example, one had started writing a blog with a convenient image or phrase (ethnicity, jokes), which one thought at the time could be used to hook the reader at the start and gain closure at the end (environmental problems are no joke; insert interfaith humor here), and which later one realized wasn’t going to fly—

And if, just for example, one were Trying Very Hard to post to one’s environmental blog More Often than, say, every year or so—

Then one would, I suspect, have to be honest rather than perfectionistic, and simply post the damn thing without the pretty closure one had been, for example, hoping for.

* Sigh. *