Mazama as Change Agents

MAZAMAS AS CHANGE AGENTS FOR OUR COMMUNITY

Editor’s Note: Chris LeDoux and Jesse Applegate are participants in the Intertwine Cohort. This column includes articles from each of them.

In the last newsletter, we introduced our new column. Here, we’ll both share some ideas, continuing to think about what it means for the Mazamas to be change agents for our community. There was an error in the last article. The two instructors for the Intertwine Change Agent Cohort are Dr. Derron Coles, a learning strategist and Executive Director of The Blueprint Foundation (theblueprintfoundation.org), and Alexis Millet, a Consultant Partner at Capacity Building Partnerships (capacitypartnerships.com) and member of the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) Committee.

by Chris LeDoux

Here’s the idea that I would like to share for reflection: Derron shared with us the idea that “unpacking how the system we grew up in has impacted our thoughts, feelings, biases, and behaviors, is the first step in being able to have conversations that are fruitful and that help us connect to each other in experiences that are different from our own.”

Wait! What do you mean by unpacking?

Often it can be the things we take for granted in our lives. Here’s an example, and it may not be your case, but you probably have something in your life in which you had an opportunity. For example, were you able to go camping as a kid? If you were, would you have been able to do that if your family couldn’t afford a car? Were you able to go because at least one parent or caregiver was able to have the time off to go and do that with you? Unpacking is looking at your life as you lived it and realizing that not everybody else had the same things or the same experiences.

Do you mean privilege?

Maybe, it could be privilege, part of what is described as internalized superiority. It could also be limitations or disadvantages, part of what is described as internalized oppression. I think it often comes down to resources and policies, and whether these were available or applied equitably. In that way, I think it’s really a more compassionate lens in which to view most things, and to better understand the solutions that are needed. Alexis shared with us how it is essential to examine, understand, and heal our internalized superiority and oppression to avoid recreating patterns of oppression that we are trying to dismantle.

Here are some resources (in no particular order) to understand these ideas more: ■ National Museum of African American

History and Culture (NMAAHC): Social

Identities and Systems of Oppression (tinyurl.com/NMAAHC1) ■ NMAAHC: Whiteness (tinyurl.com/ whitness) ■ Peggy McIntosh’s White Privilege:

Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack, tinyurl. com/knapsack1 ■ Dismantling Racism Works (dRworks) web workbook: Internalizations: tinyurl. com/wkbook1

Books such as Ijeoma Oluo’s So you want to talk about race, Austin Channing Brown’s I’m Still Here: Black Dignity in a World Made for Whiteness, Ibram X. Kendi’s How to be an Antiracist.

I’d like to introduce a tool that Derron shared with us that is another way for us to look at culture. The tool is called the culture cycle and looks at culture as a dynamic and iterative system of individuals, interactions, institutions, and ideas.

The iterative culture cycle can start at either end, at individuals or with ideas, or really at any point--follow the arrows. For example, starting with individuals, individuals interact with others to form institutions which institute policies, which feed back into cultural norms and ideas about what is good, moral, and who has power and who doesn’t. From the other end, ideas come first and ideas are used to create institutions, which control who we are able to interact with, which then has an impact on our thoughts, feelings, biases, and behaviors. A change in any of these entities—individuals, interactions, institutions, ideas—has an impact on the others.

Do you mean segregation?

Sure, segregation was a policy that was born from the idea of white supremacy, was enforced by institutions that placed limits on people’s interactions, which had impacts on individuals. There are examples all around, including school funding and sidewalks, and much more.

What about the Mazamas?

A question to ponder, to reflect, many answers, no wrong ones, each valid and personal.

For me, I’m very interested in expanding access to the healing aspects of the mountains and nature. I look forward to conversations examining the Mazamas and the culture cycle. Together, we can help the Mazamas become a more inclusive organization.

by Jessie Applegate

Along with some of the tools Chris has shared from The Intertwine Cohort, one of them that struck me was this paper on White Supremacy Culture* (based on Dismantling Racism by Kenneth Jones and Tema Okun), and particularly how white

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Climate Change, continued from page 16

existent. And of course, that’s just the tip of the fire research iceberg.

Prescribed burns are opposed, however, by interests who would rather run forests as industrial facilities where output must be maximized, rather than as assets to be carefully managed. There are a lot of causes of mega fires. Opposing prescribed burns, and demanding clear cuts, and continued logging of old growth, and minimal supervision or restraint on any forest activity, and privatization of forest management, to name a few. All are the “logic” of industrial forestry: awesome for a short term boom, great for cutting “red tape” and “bloated” budgets, but terrible for any sort of sustainable forest economy, not to mention forest health. And all add up to a recipe for fire disaster.

Of course, prescribed burns are just one of many under-utilized tools to keep forests healthy. To rephrase the above paragraph: End clear cuts. End old growth logging. Increase supervision and enforce regulation (Sorry, all you libertarian capitalists out there. We’ve tried your way. I write from within a choking smoke cloud as a result.) by hiring the correct number of public servants to oversee what goes on in the forests. Public servants, not minimum wage contractors beholden to a corporation for their livelihood.

Lack of supervision is the proximate cause of many of the fires in Oregon. Mt. Hood National forest staff has been cut to 25 percent what it ought to be. I’ll wager my house there was no ranger on patrol to warn people who started the 130-thousand acre Riverside Fire, the one burning 20 miles from my house, to put out their campfire because a windstorm was on its way. In a decade of hiking, camping, and climbing in Mt. Hood National Forest, I’ve met one ranger. One. On top of Mt. Hood, and that was pure chance, since he told me he had to split his time between patrolling Hood and St Helens.

Running a forest as an asset to be protected and developed is not a concept that’s radical or new or idealistic, or any of those other Regan-Bush Era epithets hurled at people who advocate for sensible forest policy. Gifford Pinchot, founder of the forest service, warned a century ago that wholesale industrial logging for short-term profit would be a disaster for forests. (Pinchot was no prototree hugger: he dismissed complaints from both John Muir and the lumber barons.) Turns out, he was right.

As for climate change. Yes. And a thousand time, yes. These fires are also a result of that other capitulation to the industrial resource “rationale” that is killing our biosphere, the fossil fuel industry. There is no doubt the weather and climate are hotter, drier, and more erratic, resulting in longer, deadlier fire seasons. Still, all of the above would hold true without the added burden of altered climate. At this point, fixing the climate mess is indeed paramount, but it’s also long term. Changing how we manage forests can happen tomorrow. And given climate change, it has to happen tomorrow, or we’ll all look back next year or two years or five from now and say, “Remember the good old days when only five million acres would burn in a season?”

Your turn. Here are some people to start talking about both climate change and sensible forest management:

■ Vicki Christiansen, Chief of the U.S.

Department of Agriculture’s Forest

Service, vcchristiansen@fs.fed.us ■ Ron Wyden: www.wyden.senate.gov/ contact/email-ron ■ Jeff Merkley: www.merkley.senate.gov/ contact ■ Kate Brown: www.oregon.gov/gov/

Pages/contact.aspx ■ Joe Biden: bidenpresident.com/Contact Culture, continued from previous page

supremacy culture hurts white people too. The paper lists 13 behaviors: 1. Perfectionism 2. Sense of Urgency 3. Defensiveness 4. Quantity Over Quality 5. Worship of the Written Word 6. Paternalism 7. Either-Or Thinking 8. Power Hoarding 9. Fear of Open Conflict 10. Individualism 11. Progress is Bigger, More 12. Objectivity 13. Right to Comfort

An updated version online has increased to 15 behaviors expanding “There is Only One Right Way” (every BCEP grad can relate) from Worship of the Written Word and “I am the Only One” from Individualism.

Reading through the list it’s pretty easy to see how these behaviors have existed in my own life for a long time whether it’s the workplace, family interactions, the Mazamas, the greater climbing community… Everywhere. Considering these behaviors, and their antidotes, in Mazamas activities can help give us some insight into our organizational culture and offer a dialog for the change we want.

Can you think of instances where you felt like you or your input wasn’t valued or was dismissed because of one of these behaviors? Can you think of a time you exhibited one of these behaviors? Given the perspective of white supremacy culture how would you want things to go differently from that interaction?

*https://tinyurl.com/intertwineculture