The Mountain View

Last night, after watching "Earth Days" by Robert Stone at the tail end of a long, invigorating day full of big ideas and seemingly impossible projects, I became so confused and depressed and concerned for the sake of the world, that I actually wanted to give up. I told myself: just give up, drop our of school, live on a farm, forget about the world's larger problems. But I knew that I could never forget, and I could never escape my personal anguishing and yearning to make a difference. So in the growing darkness, I climbed to the top of the hill where we had all traveled as a group that morning when dawn was just breaking. And I wrote. The reflection was necessary, and this morning I awoke with a renewed passion to make change.

Here is a bit of what ran through my mind on that hill in the night:


For millennia, humans have been heading to the mountains in search of wisdom. Perhaps that's simply because mountains give you the best vantage point. Sitting at the precipice of the world, you can examine a scene in which all the details bled together to give you one whole image- one single manifestation of the question. And from that oneness, we seek the truth.

As I write this, I sit on top of a hill in the Marin headlands. I’ve come here because my mind is full of questions, full of doubts, full of the re-realization of the magnitude of the environmental issues I am meant to solve.

Before me, I see our mother nature’s luscious peaks curving down to the sacred valley from which point springs forth the ocean. Out to the horizon stretches the Pacific, obscured only by fog, rolling gently up the bank, and winding up the slopes to feed the hills’ verdant offspring.

Behind me stretches the Golden Gate bridge: a feat of man-made brilliance, and dazzling in the night as its lights extend across the water. The vision of the bridge connecting to the equally well-lit city of San Francisco enlivens the senses, as the sight of stars and moonlight on the water must have long ago.

But as one of these vistas expands, gorging itself on the wastes and excesses of ill-conceived human ingenuity, the other pales. The rolling fog spreading up the hills is smog, and trash washes up on mother’s naked shores. And all things we can’t see, greenhouse-gas-intangibles, waft around us; mustard gas that slowly asphyxiates us even if we ignore its presence.

In the 1960s, we already knew this. We could already see the effects of unchecked growth and a human-centric relationship with the earth. In the 1960s, we already had the solutions. We had electric cars, we had solar panels, we had wind turbines. In the 1960s, we had social will. We had people returning to the earth, people demanding responsible action, people seeking change. And in the 1960s we had political will. We had clean air acts, clean water acts, clean energy acts, and in 1970, we had Earth Day. And by 1980, we had nothing. Nothing except political rhetoric, empty of all the words used to mean to a generation.

A movement that developed over 30 years collapsed as another portion of Americans fought back to maintain our way of life in the face of a movement that seemed to drain this life of all that was familiar. “Why should we destroy all that we care about America!” people cried out from both sides. “Why should we compromise one American vista, the Golden Gate bridge, a symbol of our way of life,” some shouted. “Why should we destroy the natural world around us that we depend on for our very lives,” others pleaded in return.

From here on the hill, I hear the hooting of the owls, the fog-horns of ships, the chirping of crickets, and the distant rumbling of cars. And together they form what my brain knows as the sounds of life. These sounds are equal parts of the land in which I was raised. But which sounds do I value more, and which sounds are more deserving of protection? And how can that possibly be done.

The problem with seeking wisdom on mountains, is that the view from the top is too expansive. The problem is too huge, the forces at work too plentiful and powerful, to possibly be changed. Staring at the magnitude of the issue is overwhelming, over burdening, and ultimately debilitating. It traps you out on the mountain’s edge, unable to climb back down, but unable to leap; unable to go forth and solve the problems you cared for so deeply to begin with.
But if you never ventured to that mountain at all, how would you know the vastness of what is at stake?

Today, at the Bioneers Conference, I was first stimulated by the beauty of nature, then inspired by the work of humans to protect that beauty, then frustrated by the complexities of the seemingly simple solutions, and then utterly depressed by the knowledge that we’ve been here before. They tell me that the next ten years will be crucial, and that we have to mobilize within that time or face near-certain loss of our existence- no just our way of life. And while it is at some level invigorating- The Time is Now! We are Ready! We Have the Solutions! –it is at the same instance terrifyingly, paralyzingly daunting.

But we must have hope. The country was mobilized before. And we must have hope that we’ve learned since then. We can move forward when we stop dwelling on our failures and our insecurities. As Joanna Macy reminded us today, we need to awaken to the gifts of uncertainty. “When you recognize that hopefulness and hopelessness are just feelings,” you stop putting so much weight on them, she tells us. “You don’t stop David on his way to battling Goliath and ask him ‘Are you hopeful?’”

They say our generation is one of idealists without hope. We must retain that piece of naïve idealism if we are going to maintain our hope and energy for change. Never underestimate the power of your motivation. Without that drive, we have nothing to intend, and so we have nothing. Listen to the ache, to the all-consuming drive that sits in the folds of your body and cries- what can I do. And never fall to the world’s desire to pathologize your pain, because it is that pain that will drive your strength.

We must descend from the mountains, and learn to find truth in the small details of the universe, with the uncertain faith that they add up to the big picture we know instinctively.

But we must still continue to climb! We cannot look only at the details, as it gives us the distorted sense that we can pick and choose the solutions that are comfortable or convenient for us. We must climb the mountains and see the world as it is, and appreciate the size and the weight of our efforts.

Every small-scale solution that I’ve heard of this weekend sounds fantastic, sounds perfect, sounds like the answer to all our problems. We need to reform agriculture, we need to stop the proliferation of chemicals, we need biomimicry technology, we need to preserve wilderness, we need to abolish a culture based on consumption, and we need to embrace not only biodiversity, but our own diversity and human community. But do I have the power as only one person to support it all? If we don’t embrace all the solutions together under one agenda, there are simply too many to hold up on our own.

But again, we must reawaken our hope! Annie Leonard taught us today that 70% of Americans are sympathetic with environmental issues. That is a higher percentage that supporters of abolition, or women’s rights, or other movements of equality and justice. Here we can find our new optimism. We need only invigorate this 70% to become active, in any one of the possible pillars of environmental action we will need to lift ourselves from our descent.

We have so much to do. But as I sit here on the hill, I know that the solutions must start with the understanding that this landscape has thrived without the Golden Gate bridge, and will thrive again without it, but that this great bridge, and all the human ingenuity and history that went into it, could never have been without the mountains and the valleys and the birthing water stretching to the dawn.