Excerpts for Freshman Year Reading

EXCERPTS FOR

FRESHMAN YEAR READING Free Press is an imprint of Simon & Schuster known for serious non-fiction, affecting memoirs, and notable fiction.

Download this PDF to your electronic reader or computer to read excerpts from four recommended common reading titles: All Things Shining, The Memory Palace, Tattoos on the Heart, and The Story of Stuff. For more information, please write to claire.kelley@simonandschuster.com.

FREE PRESS

All Things Shining Reading the Western Classics to Find Meaning in a Secular Age

j Hubert Dre y f u s and

S ean Dorranc e K e l ly

Free Press New York ​ London ​Toronto ​ Sydney

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A Note to the Reader

j

The world doesn’t matter to us the way it used to. The intense and meaningful lives of Homer’s Greeks, and the grand hierarchy of meaning that structured Dante’s medieval Christian world, both stand in stark contrast to our secular age. The world used to be, in its various forms, a world of sacred, shining things. The shining things now seem far away. This book is intended to bring them close once more.

The issues motivating our story are philosophical and literary, and we come at them from our professional background in these disciplines. But All Things Shining is intended for a nonspecialist ­audience, and we hope it will speak to a wide range of people. Anyone who lives in the contemporary world has the background to read it, and anyone who hopes to enrich his or her life by experiencing it in the light of classic philosophical and literary works can hope to find something here. Anyone who wants to lure back the shining things, to uncover the wonder we were once capable of experiencing and to reveal a world that sometimes calls forth such a mood; anyone who is done with indecision and waiting, with expressionlessness and lostness and sadness and angst, and who is ready for whatever it is that comes next; anyone with hope instead of despair, or anyone with despair that they would like to leave behind, can find something worthwhile in the pages ahead. Or at least that is what we intend.

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1 Our Contemporary Nihilism

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t was warm on January 2, 2007. The newspapers reported that week that an optimistic cherry tree at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden had sprouted thousands of blossoms. Throughout the city people gathered spontaneously, drawn together by the hopeful atmosphere of spring.1 On the subway platform at 137th and Broadway in Manhattan, however, just after lunchtime, the spring mood vanished in the blink of an eye. Cameron Hollopeter, a twenty-year-old film student, collapsed to the ground, his body overtaken by convulsions. According to newspaper reports at the time, a man and two women rushed to help him. As they did, Mr. Hollopeter managed to raise himself, but then stumbled to the platform edge and fell backward to the subway tracks below.2 What happened next both inspired and awed the spring-softened world of New York. Wesley Autrey, the fifty-year-old construction worker who initially rushed in to help Mr. Hollopeter, had left his two young daughters, Syshe, four, and Shuqui, six, farther back on the platform. When the headlights of the southbound No. 1 train appeared, however, he did not hesitate. Leaping onto the tracks he pressed his body down on top of Mr. Hollopeter, pushing him into a trough that was about a foot deep. The train’s brakes shrieked before 1

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them, but the train was unable to stop: five cars screeched over the top of the two men, missing them only by inches, before the train finally came to a halt. As they lay there beneath the train Mr. Autrey heard the screams of terrified onlookers above. “We’re okay down here,” he yelled, “but I’ve got two daughters up there. Let them know their father’s okay.” Cries of wonder and applause erupted from the platform.

Later, after cutting the power, workers were able to extricate the two men from beneath the train. Except for the grease that smudged Mr. Autrey’s blue knit cap, and some bumps and bruises, both men were unhurt.

The newspapers dubbed Wesley Autrey the “Subway Hero,” and he enjoyed a well-deserved spate of popular press. Politicians rushed to be seen with him3 and scientists and culture commentators debated whether his actions showed that he was “more hard-wired for heroism”4 than the rest of us, or just that New York City has the same small-town values and caring attitude that you might expect to find in Dubuque.5 A self-congratulatory public insisted that they too would have acted as Mr. Autrey had, and a solemn police chief advised that New Yorkers take Mr. Autrey’s lead and act when people near them are in distress.6 But throughout it all, Mr. Autrey himself insisted that he was no hero, had done nothing out of the ordinary. “I don’t feel like I did something spectacular,” Mr. Autrey said. “I just saw someone who needed help.”7 Not only a hero, one might think, but humble too! And there is no doubt that Mr. Autrey’s actions are indeed inspiring and heroic. But it may be that what comes across as humility is really just Mr. Autrey’s honest report of his own experience. As it happens, although heroic actions like this are of course rare, it is not at all uncommon for the people who perform them to report that they were just doing what anybody in their situation would have. As Dr. Charles Goodstein, a clinical professor of psychiatry at New York University School of Medicine, said at the time:

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If you look at the history of most people who are designated heroes in the military and in other places, most of the time they say the reaction they had was without any mental preparation.

It was spontaneous, it was without much consideration for the practicalities, the realities of the moment. I think they’re honest when they say they don’t think of themselves as heroes, they just reacted to something they saw as an emergency.8 The point here is not that anyone in a similar situation actually would do the same thing. There is ample evidence that most people would not. But perhaps what Mr. Autrey and others are honestly reporting is that when they are in the midst of acting heroically, they do not experience themselves as the source of their actions. Instead, the situation itself seems to call the action out of them, allowing for neither uncertainty nor hesitation. As Mr. Autrey said, “I just saw someone who needed help.”

This sense of certainty is rare in the contemporary world. Indeed, modern life can seem to be defined by its opposite. An unrelenting flow of choices confronts us at nearly every moment of our lives, and most of us could admit to finding ourselves at least occasionally wavering. Far from being certain and unhesitating, our lives can at the extreme seem shot through with hesitation and indecision, culminating in choices finally made on the basis of nothing at all.

The truly extreme version of this, of course, is a parody. The paralyzing level of neurosis to which a Woody Allen character descends, for example, is fortunately not the lot of most. Or consider T. S. Eliot’s famous version of this parodic extreme. J. Alfred Prufrock is so unable to take action that to him a single moment before tea consists of an almost immeasurable series of uncertainties:

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Time for you and time for me, And time yet for a hundred indecisions, And for a hundred visions and revisions, Before the taking of a toast and tea.

And yet if these are parodies, they resonate precisely because there is some recognizable element of truth in them. We are not constantly paralyzed by the choices that confront us, thank heavens, but we recognize their constant flow. And sometimes we wonder on what basis we should choose among them.

The choices that confront us are recognizable to all. Some of them seem trivial: Should I hit the snooze bar again? Is this shirt too wrinkled? Fries or a salad? And so on. But some of the choices we confront, perhaps even regularly, seem deeper and more troubling. It can feel as though they cut to the core of who we really are: Is it time to move on from this relationship? This job? Shall I pursue this opportunity or that one? Or none at all? Shall I align myself with this candidate, this co‑worker, this social group? Shall I choose this part of the family over the rest? Many of our lives seem rife with these kinds of choices. We wonder on what basis to make them; we regret or rue or celebrate the ones we have made.

Many will point out that the freedom to choose is one of the great signs of progress in modern life. And there is certainly some truth to this. Those who live in abject poverty worry very little about which kind of food to eat precisely because there are no choices before them.

The freedom to choose one career over another is not available when a poor economy has stripped all the jobs from the area. And yet the characteristic feature of the modern world is not just that many of us have a wider range of choices than ever before—choices about who to become, how to act, with whom to align ourselves. Rather, it is that when we find ourself confronted with these kinds of existential choices, we feel a lack of any genuine motivation to choose one over the others. Indeed, about our own lives, our own actions, it is rare to

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find the kind of certainty that Wesley Autrey felt when confronted with a person in distress.

There are at least two kinds of people who manage to avoid the contemporary burden of choice, but in the wrong way. First, there is the man of self-confidence (usually it is a man). He plunges forth assuredly into every action he takes. He presents the world as obvious— “How could anyone wonder about the right move here?” he seems to ask—and in certain cases his assurance draws others along with him.

The man of self-confidence is often a compelling figure. Driven and focused, he is committed to bringing the world into line with his vision of how it should be. He may genuinely believe that his vision for the world is a good one, that the world will be a better place if he can shape it to his will, and sometimes he is capable of making changes for the better. But there is a danger to this attitude as well. Too often it turns out that the blustery self-confidence of such a person hides its own darker origins: it is really just arrogance combined with ambition, or worse yet a kind of self-delusion. As a result, when his plans fail, as they are bound to do at least some of the time, the self-confident man is often unable to recognize the failure. Stubbornly and inflexibly committed to his vision of how things ought to be, he has no ability to respond to the world as it actually is. The self-confident man believes that confidence is its own virtue; at the extreme, this kind of self-confidence can lead to fanaticism, as we’ll see in the monomaniac Captain Ahab that Melville portrays in Moby Dick.

Perhaps a good example of such a willful character can be found in Orson Welles’s portrayal of the newspaper magnate Charles Foster Kane in his great movie Citizen Kane. Welles’s Kane is charming and powerful, and he demands total loyalty and obedience from those around him. He is astonishingly successful, enormously wealthy, and through the influence of his newspapers he claims even to be capable

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of directing the course of history. As he says, in a famous line from the movie, “You provide the prose poems, I’ll provide the war.” Kane is a man who never looks back, who would never dream of a moment of weakness, and who despises those who are incapable of moving with enough alacrity and force to rebut his attacks. Eventually, however, his arrogance and his lust for power become his undoing. When an affair ruins both his marriage and his political aspirations, Kane’s life spirals out of control. His dying word, “Rosebud,” turns out to be a wistful reference to the only time in his life when he lived in poverty, when his self-confidence wasn’t itself sufficient to ensure the satisfaction of his every desire.

Kane’s self-confidence allows him to avoid the burden of choice.

He is clear about his desires and forges ahead in fulfilling them. But the self-confidence upon which he bases his existence turns out to be empty, grounded in nothing but his own lust for power, and in the end it is insufficient soil for a worthwhile life. In contrast with this, a genuine confidence of the sort that seems to have directed Mr. ­Autrey’s actions is driven not by some internal set of thoughts or desires, nor by a calculated set of plans or principles. Indeed, as in the case of Mr. Autrey, it is experienced as confidence drawn forth by something outside of oneself. It is grounded in the way things actually are, not in the confident person’s perhaps self-serving characterization of them. The genuinely confident agent does not manufacture confidence, but receives it from the circumstances.

There is a second way to avoid the contemporary burden of choice, but it is at least as unattractive as the path of manufactured confidence. We are thinking here of the person who makes no choices about how to act because he is enslaved by obsessions, infatuations, or addictions. Such a person is, it is true, drawn by something beyond himself to act in the way he does. But there is a world of difference between him and the heroic Mr. Autrey.

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The case of addiction is well known in the modern world, and there is no need to mention its various forms. As always, there are drugs, entertainments, and manifold other temptations in the face of which we can lose all sense of ourselves. But the peculiar phenomenon of addiction is highlighted well by a modern form unknown before the technological age: blogs and social networking sites. Many people have experienced the draw of these sites. At first there is an excitement associated with them. When one discovers the world of blogs, for example, one finally feels as though one can be up-to-the-minute with respect to every breaking event on the current scene. Suppose that politics is your bailiwick. All of a sudden it seems possible to keep up with precisely what is happening on Capitol Hill. Not just this week but this very moment; not just today but somewhere between the onset of one breath and the conclusion of the next. Similarly with social networking sites. Finally one feels completely in touch with all of those friends you didn’t realize you had been missing for so long.

If one falls into the grip of these kinds of obsessions, its phenomenology has a sinking dimension. For one finds oneself constantly craving the newest, latest post, wondering what the most recent crisis or observation or tidbit could be. One cycles through the list of websites or friends waiting for the latest update, only to find that when it is completed one is cycling through the sequence once again, precisely as expectant and desiring as before. The craving for something new is constant and unceasing, and the latest post only serves to make you desire more. With this kind of addiction there is a clear sense of what one must do next. But the completion of the task fails entirely to satisfy the craving that set you on your way. By contrast with this, the heroic actor experiences a heightened sense of joy and fulfillment when a noble and worthy action draws him to its side.

The burden of choice is a peculiarly modern phenomenon. It proliferates in a world that no longer has any God or gods, nor even any sense of what is sacred and inviolable, to focus our understanding of what we are. What we have seen just now, though, is that not every

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way of resolving choice is equal. Although willful self-confidence and addictive loss of control are both ways of shirking the burden—the first because it refuses to recognize alternatives and the second because it is incapable of doing so—neither of these conditions characterizes the experience of the unthinking heroic actor.

What can it be like to act with certainty in the way that Mr. Autrey did—to act but not experience oneself as the source of one’s actions; to be drawn by a force outside oneself but not enslaved to it? In fact, although we do not pay attention to it, a mild version of this is familiar to us in everyday life. The morning commuter all of a sudden realizes that he has gotten on the bus, but doesn’t remember doing so.

The long-distance truck driver all of a sudden realizes that he has been driving for some miles without “paying attention.” Stumbling home from a long day’s work, the tired worker finds herself in a favorite chair, but then realizes that she never decided to sit there. Habitual actions of these sorts can occur “offline,” as one might say, without the agent even noticing that she is performing them. And yet it is part of the habitual action that the person performing it can break in at any moment and resist. In some sense the habitual actor, like the heroic one, is neither willful agent nor unwilling slave.

But habitual action is not heroic. The difference is that whereas the habitual actor lacks a sense not only of himself but of his surroundings, the heroic actor by contrast has a heightened awareness of what the situation calls for.

This sense for what the situation demands is nothing like an objective awareness of what is happening. The other bystanders on the subway platform presumably saw that Mr. Hollopeter was in distress; in this sense they were good, objective witnesses to the event. Many of them presumably saw, in addition, that the situation called for some kind of action. Presumably many of them even felt an urge to act themselves. But they were not sufficiently motivated to act on his

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behalf. Their experience allowed for hesitation; Mr. Autrey’s did not.

It is hard to blame someone who responds in a nonheroic way to such a situation; most of us are familiar with their experience. Perhaps they thought desperately to themselves, “Oh my God! That poor man has fallen on the tracks—somebody do something!” They were not lacking empathy for the victim, we can assume, and indeed perhaps they felt strongly that something must be done to help him. But if we are to take Mr. Autrey at his word, then none of these desperate thoughts ran through his head, and he therefore never decided to do anything at all in response to them. Rather, it was Mr. Hollopeter’s distress itself that drew him to act without hesitation. In this way his experience was different from that of people acting habitually with no experience of their surroundings at all. He differed from the bystanders at the scene as well, since the experience they had of the situation allowed them to wonder what must be done. By contrast with both of these, Mr. Autrey not only experienced his surroundings, he experienced them directly in terms of what they demanded from him.

This can sound like a bizarre phenomenon, and we admit that it is rather rare. In the extreme form, indeed, it is about as rare as heroic action itself. But if we pay attention we can find versions of it in our daily lives. Perhaps the most common version is found in the domain of sports. Indeed, some of our everyday locutions even emphasize this phenomenon. When someone is playing very well, for example, we can say that they are playing “out of their head”; they have left the domain of thought altogether, in other words, and are carried along by the flow and demands of the game. A master athlete at the top of his game has a heightened awareness of his surroundings not unlike what Mr. Autrey experienced.

One of the great descriptions of this kind of athletic mastery is found in John McPhee’s A Sense of Where You Are.9 McPhee’s book profiles the college basketball career of Bill Bradley, whom he describes as perhaps the best college basketball player ever. Bradley went on, of course, to be a Rhodes scholar, a Hall of Fame basketball player

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for the New York Knicks, and eventually a U.S. senator and presidential candidate. But McPhee’s book is about Bradley’s presence on the college court, and here he describes the phenomenon we are after.

One of the most impressive features of Bradley’s game, according to McPhee, was his ability to be aware of everything that was going on in the game at once. He had this awareness without needing to look, as in the case of a certain shot he had perfected: The over-the-shoulder shot had no actual name. He tossed it, without looking, over his head and into the basket. There was no need to look, he explained, because “you develop a sense of where you are.”10 This kind of vision for the court allowed Bradley to be aware of everything going on around him until the moment he let himself be drawn in directly by an opportunity in the game. As McPhee describes: His most remarkable natural gift, however, is his vision. During a game, Bradley’s eyes are always a glaze of panoptic attention, for a basketball player needs to look at everything, focusing on nothing, until the last moment of commitment.11 The vision that is a “glaze of panoptic attention,” in McPhee’s delightful phrase, is precisely not the kind of awareness that the eyewitness has. It is attentive to opportunities for action, not to details of the scene. It is what allows a master player like Bradley to perform, in the biggest game of his career, against the top-ranked team in the nation, before thousands in Madison Square Garden, like this: Michigan played him straight, and he played Michigan into the floor. . . . He stole the ball, he went back door, he threw unbelievable passes. He reversed away from the best defenders in the Big Ten. He held his own man to one point. He played

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in the backcourt, in the post, and in the corners. . . . Once, he found himself in a corner of the court with two Michigan players, both taller than he, pressing in on him shoulder to shoulder. He parted them with two rapid fakes—a move of the ball and a move of his head—and leaped up between them to sink a twenty-two-foot jumper. The same two players soon cornered him again. The fakes were different the second time, but the result was the same. He took a long stride between them and went up into the air, drifting forward, as they collided behind him, and he hit a clean shot despite the drift. . . . [When he fouled out toward the end of the game, he had to watch the rest] from the bench. As he sat down, the twenty thousand spectators stood up and applauded him for some three minutes. It was, as sportswriters and the Garden management subsequently agreed, the most clamorous ovation ever given a basketball player, amateur or professional, in Madison Square Garden. . . . [D]uring the long applause the announcer on the Garden loudspeaker impulsively turned up the volume and said, “Bill Bradley, one of the greatest players ever to play in Madison Square Garden, scored forty-one points.”12 Greatness of this sort is nearly mystical to apprehend. It is characterized by the kind of sustained responsiveness to the demands of the situation that the Subway Hero embodied when he leapt onto the tracks. It is unflinching, unhesitating, and unwavering, and it has these certain qualities precisely because the activity flows not from the agent but through him. As a spectator of heroic activity one has the sense of watching something nearly inevitable, as though it is ordained by some force beyond the mere whim of human selfassertion. Indeed, one indication of the similarity between Bradley and Autrey is the spontaneous eruption of applause that both performances elicited from witnesses to the events. It is clear to all those present that something superhuman has been achieved.

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One name we have for the superhuman is the heroic, and there is a sense in which both Bradley and Autrey are properly considered heroes. There is an important difference between them, however.

Bradley’s activity, superhuman as it may have been, took place only in the context of the limited domain of basketball. Autrey’s actions took place in the broader domain of life. But for the moment it is the similarity between the cases that we would like to emphasize. Both are at the pinnacle of human possibility precisely because they leave no room for the kind of human indecision that plagues us all.

The burden of choice, as we have called it, can seem like a necessary feature of human existence. Even if heroic actors such as Bradley and Autrey can escape it for moments, in certain circumstances, the broader existential form of this burden seems to weigh heavily upon all of us. In the most basic case it amounts to profound questions: How, given the kinds of beings that we are, is it possible to live a meaningful life? Or more particularly, where are we to find the significant differences among the possible actions in our lives? For it is these differences that provide a basis for making decisions about who we are to be or become. At a certain stage in life these questions can seem unavoidable. The college students we teach everyday, for example, cannot keep from asking them. When they wonder whether they want to become doctors or lawyers, investment bankers or philosophers, when they try to decide whether to major in this or that, when they ask themselves whether they want to advocate liberal or conservative political positions, or associate themselves with a place of worship, or remain faithful to their boyfriend or girlfriend back home—all of these questions ultimately seem to lead them back to the basic one: On what basis should I make this choice?

But it is not only the maturing adult who is confronted with these kinds of existential choices. Even if we are firm in our identities—­ father or mother, businessperson or software designer—even if we

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have already made our political or religious commitments, we are always susceptible to good reasons for rescinding these commitments.

And even if we were not so susceptible, the question of identity is never concluded. Feeling a certain commitment to my identity as the father of my son doesn’t by itself tell me how to take up that role. The basic question always seems to be just around the corner: On what basis am I to make this choice? The heroic certainty of a Bradley or an Autrey seems a distant hope in this existential domain.

Although the burden of choice can seem inevitable, in fact it is unique to contemporary life. It is not just that in earlier epochs one knew on what basis one’s most fundamental existential choices were made: it is that the existential questions didn’t even make sense.

Consider the Middle Ages, for example. During this period in the Christian West a person’s identity was determined by God. To say this is to take no stand on whether there actually was a God in the Middle Ages. The classic metaphysical arguments for the existence of God, or for the necessity of his various attributes, are irrelevant here. What matters instead is that in the Middle Ages people could not help but experience themselves as determined or created by God. Indeed, it was so much a part of the way they understood the world they lived in, so taken for granted by everything that made sense to them, that it was virtually inconceivable that one’s identity might be determined in any other way. This was true, of course, about kings and queens. To say that they ruled by divine right, as was commonly understood in the Middle Ages, is to say that they were chosen specifically by God to be the rulers of society. But it was not only the kings and queens who were chosen by divine right: everyone else fell into a place in society according to the divine plan of God himself. Indeed, not just people but every item in creation had its place in the divine order, in the Great Chain of Being: kings above noblemen, noblemen above townspeople, all these above serfs, and so on, but also all people above all other animals, all animals above all inanimate objects, and all these, including people, below the angels and ultimately below

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God. This order of things was not a belief that anyone argued for or a worldview that anyone proposed; it was simply taken for granted by everyone worth talking or listening to. Members of this society made sense of everything in terms of this fundamental idea—one could explain a victory in battle, for instance, or an untimely storm in terms of the will of God—but the idea that everything had its proper place in God’s divine plan was not itself a belief one could accept or reject.

It was an entire way of life.

The way of life of a culture is not an explicit set of beliefs held by the people living in it. It is much deeper than that. A person brought up in a culture learns its way of life the way he learns to speak in the language and with the accent of his family and peers. But a way of life is much broader than this. It involves a sense for how it is appropriate and inappropriate to act in each of the social situations one normally encounters; a familiarity with how to make sense of things and of how to act in the everyday world; and most general of all, a style, such as aggressive or nurturing, that governs the actions of the people in the culture although they are normally not aware of it. We can think of it as a cultural commitment that, to govern people’s behavior, must remain in the background, unnoticed but pervasive and real. In the Medieval World, when this commitment involves a sense of God’s divine plan, there is simply no question on what basis a person should choose who he is or is to become. For after all, that one chooses one’s identity at all is inconceivable.

That is not to say that in the Middle Ages one never made any choices. One could always willfully turn away from God’s plan and pursue a course that deviated from his desires. Or one could aim for the course of right action and fall short. In the terminology of medieval Christendom there were not only Saints but Sinners too, not only those who lived Virtuous lives but those who succumbed to the perilous attractions of Vice. Dante’s Inferno, which we shall discuss in greater detail in chapter 5,13 contains a large and informative discussion of the various ways a person of the Middle Ages could go

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astray. (Dante wrote around 1300, at the height of the Late Middle Ages.) Despite their extraordinary variety, what is characteristic of all of Dante’s sinners is that their actions involve deviations from or perversions of a path already understood to be laid out by God. Consider a characteristic example. In the second circle of Hell Dante discovers Paolo and Francesca, two lovers who in life were overcome by their overwhelming desire for one another. After being caught together by Francesca’s husband, who was also Paolo’s brother, and killed by him for their adulterous affair, the two were condemned to spend eternity blown about by the tempestuous wind of their uncontrollable passion for one another. We shall consider this example again in our discussion of Dante later, but for the moment all we need to notice is the medieval conception of sin that it illustrates. Dante’s presentation of the case makes it clear that there was one right path of action for Paolo and Francesca—to avoid the adulterous ­affair— and that their sin lay in succumbing to the attractions of Vice. It has always been difficult, in certain situations, to act in accord with the standards for living well—the Greek philosophers called this difficulty akrasia, or weakness of the will; it is the inability to do what we know to be the right thing. At least some of Dante’s sinners are victims of this kind of incontinence.

But in the contemporary world we face a deeper and more difficult problem. It is not just that we know the course of right action and fail to pursue it; we often seem not to have any sense for what the standards of living a good life are in the first place. Or said another way, we seem to have no ground for choosing one course of action over any other.

Consider, by contrast with Paolo and Francesca, the more modern, nineteenth-century case of Emma Bovary. In Flaubert’s Madame Bovary we are told the story of Emma, who is married to the boring and talentless country doctor Charles. To escape her superficial, banal, and empty life in the provinces, Emma has adulterous affairs and lives beyond her means. Things end up badly, of course, but even

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so it is not obvious that Emma’s adulterous affairs themselves are what was wrong. We have some sympathy with her desire to get more out of life, little sympathy for Charles and his empty mode of existence, and in some sense are meant to understand and endorse Emma’s desire for escape. The lust for life that she exhibits seems admirable, and provides a creditable counterweight to the commitment her marriage engages her in.

Although in some general sense Emma’s adulterous affairs share much with that of Paolo and Francesca, Flaubert’s treatment of the situation could not differ more radically from Dante’s. For Emma is presented by Flaubert as having been faced with the kind of existential question that Paolo and Francesca, as characterized by Dante, were not. The medieval couple knew that it was wrong to engage in an adulterous affair—there was no question about it; unfortunately, they couldn’t resist the sinful passion of lust. Emma’s situation is much more complicated. Do we really believe that she should stay with Charles? On the contrary, not only can we understand her desire to leave him, it seems at least possible that it could be for the best.

Indeed, Charles himself recognizes her actions as admirable: he continues to idolize her after she dies, never criticizing her, and indeed he attempts to adopt her way of life. So the question of whether Emma’s actions were admirable or not is a vexed one, and the confusion she felt about her course of action is supposed to be immediately recognizable to us. After all, she felt the burden of choice that nowadays seems so obvious to us all.

How did we get from the fixed certainty of Dante’s world to the existential uncertainty of our own? The story is long and complicated, and this book is devoted to articulating the bones of that story. But it may help to get at least a brief sense for one of the major transition points, which occurred at the beginning of the seventeenth century, in what is known as the early modern period of the West.

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By 1600 the Medieval World was breaking down. In particular, it was no longer possible to take it for granted that God’s will structures the universe. Very few people at the time, if any, explicitly recognized this development. Practices that a whole culture takes for granted are extremely difficult to identify. But we can find the clues to this historical development throughout the literature and philosophy of the time. Let us take two examples.

First, Shakespeare himself seems to have been nearly obsessed with the breakdown of the divine order. Whether he knew it or not, this development motivates many of his plays. As a great and sensitive artist, Shakespeare seems intuitively to have sensed that the breakdown of the divine order was one of the world-historical issues of his day. Many of his most successful characters confront this modern development in one way or another. Consider Macbeth, for example.

Here we find an individual who by his “o’ervaulting ambition” alone hopes to leap beyond his natural place in the divine order into a new and higher place as king. The very idea that one should, by one’s own will and desire, transform the divine order of the universe would have been anathema to Dante in the world of the Middle Ages. Indeed, we shall see that the character whom Dante most associates with this kind of self-directed ambition is Satan himself, who attempts to substitute his own will for God’s, and is banished to the bottom of Hell for the attempt. Far from condemning Macbeth’s ambition, however, Shakespeare seems fascinated by the way it pulls our intuition in different directions. On the one hand, Macbeth is in some ways a sympathetic character: his ambition to improve his position in the world seems understandable even if his particular strategy for doing so does not.

Indeed, it is not just that Macbeth is in fact a sympathetic character; the very success of the play absolutely depends on our finding him so.

This is because the tragedy of the play cannot get a grip on us unless we are rooting for its main character to succeed; there is no tragedy in a purely evil character getting his due. Despite being in some way sympathetic, however, Macbeth is doomed to failure. For better or for

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worse, the divine order is tenaciously resisting the rise of self-directed ambition. It is as if Shakespeare can see this ambition as a potentially admirable trait even though the world he lives in will not yet support this way of life. The divine order is tenaciously resisting the rise of self-directed ambition, for better or for worse. In other plays, such as Troilus and Cressida, the breakdown of the divine order is presented as comical at best, and very likely as unambiguously bad. In general, it seems Shakespeare can see that the way of life based on a divine plan is crumbling but he can’t figure out exactly what to think about it.

Or consider the case of Hamlet. His famous soliloquy from Act III Scene 1, “To be or not to be, that is the question,” takes on the fundamental issue of whether he should choose to live or choose to die. The very idea that he understands this as a choice open to him indicates that his culture no longer takes it for granted that God determines these fundamental facts of our existence. This is not to say, of course, that nobody ever contemplated suicide before Hamlet. But the cultural interpretation of what one is up to when one is contemplating such a thought is radically different for Hamlet than it would have been for a character of the Middle Ages. In the medieval tradition suicide is understood as an act of rebellion against God, an attempt to take over from God a decision that is rightfully his. (Indeed, Dante puts the suicides in the seventh of the nine circles of Hell, sitting right beside the blasphemers against God.) Once again, we find an act of rebellion of the same sort that Satan engaged in when he tried to organize a rebellion of the angels against the Lord. For Hamlet, by contrast, the thought that suicide would be an affront to God never seems to occur. The question is simply “whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune / Or to take arms against a sea of troubles. / And by opposing, end them?” The question, in other words, is not whether it is an affront against God, and therefore obviously the wrong thing to do. The question is whether it’s a better decision—“nobler in the mind”—to suffer or to commit suicide. God, or the understanding of God as the divine planner of the

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universe, offers no help to Hamlet in considering this question. The breakdown of the divine order of the Middle Ages, in other words, has opened up the possibility for genuine existential questioning.

The freedom to choose who we are to be, however, comes with a heavy burden. For without God’s divine plan to ground us, on the basis of what are we to make our existential choices? The desire for a fundamental ground, for some unshakeable conviction on the basis of which to build our understanding of ourselves and the universe, can be seen most clearly in the philosophical tradition.

René Descartes, surely the most important philosopher in the history of modern philosophy, was writing in France approximately one generation after Shakespeare wrote in England. (Descartes’ most important works were written around 1630.) One of his main philosophical projects was to show that it is possible to know for certain, and without any doubt at all, the most basic things that we know.

That there is an external world, for instance, or that people other than ourselves exist. It turns out to be very difficult to prove these things with absolute certainty. The characters in the movie The Matrix, for example, seem to be living lives just exactly like ours; it turns out, however, that although they are having the very same kinds of experiences that we all have, in their case there is no world at all of the sort they seem to be experiencing. The idea that the world is as it seems to be is a very basic idea. Descartes showed, however, 350 years before Hollywood, that it is very difficult to know this basic fact without doubt. But the idea that this is the kind of thing we could doubt at all, and the even more extreme idea that we should have to try to find out whether we could know this kind of fundamental thing for certain, is an idea that wouldn’t occur to someone who lived in a world in which these kinds of questions don’t really make sense. The Cartesian project itself would be understood as an act of hubris in the Middle Ages.

The idea that we have to prove to ourselves that God isn’t tricking us takes as a background assumption that, well, for all we know God is tricking us. But this kind of assumption doesn’t even make sense in

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a world in which God is from the start understood to be the divine and benevolent architect of the universe. The fact that Descartes not only could ask the skeptical question, but could be taken seriously— indeed, could be held up as a paradigm of philosophical thinking— shows that by the time he was writing in the early 1600s the medieval assumptions were no longer taken for granted. And if something so basic as whether there is an external world at all can be shown to be in need of philosophical grounding, then how much less grounded must be our existential choices about how to act?

Friedrich Nietzsche, the great German philosopher of the late nineteenth century, famously claimed that God is dead. What he meant by this is that we in the modern West no longer live in a culture where the basic questions of existence are already answered for us.

The God of the Middle Ages played the role of answering existential questions before they could be asked; but such a role is no longer conceivable. This is true for modern religious believers and skeptics alike, as the contemporary philosopher Charles Taylor points out.14 Even if there is, as some have claimed, a Third Religious Awakening in the modern United States, the kind of religious belief available in our culture today is not sufficient to quell existential questioning. It is no longer taken for granted that nonbelievers are outside the realm of the human. That was the case in medieval Christendom: to be a nonbeliever was ipso facto to be evil, to have set yourself against the delights of all that is humanly worth attaining. Perhaps there are some fanatical religious subcultures that manage to sustain this exclusionary belief today. But insofar as a religious believer’s belief in God is consistent with the idea that there are admirable people who nevertheless do not believe, as for the most part is the case in the modern West, then religious belief cannot by itself close off existential questioning. For the idea that a nonbeliever is not ipso facto execrable means that nonbelief is a choice that even a believer must take seriously. To say that

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we live in a secular age in the modern West is to say that even religious believers face existential questions about how to live a life.

Facing existential questions is not such a bad thing if one has the resources to answer them. Perhaps some religious believers in the modern West do have such resources; Taylor’s recent work begins from this premise. Indeed, Taylor sees the radical proliferation of religions and spirituality—a veritable explosion of religious lives—as the central feature of the modern age. The idea that there is no reason to prefer any answer to any other, however, is called nihilism, and Nietzsche thought this the better description of our current condition after the death of God. Nietzsche thought that nihilism was a great joy, since it frees us to live any life we choose, but many find it horrifying instead. As Dostoyevsky puts it, “If there is no God, then everything is permitted.”

Our view is that nihilism is every bit as closed-minded as fanaticism, and that neither is a sufficient ground on which to base a livable life.

But we are more skeptical than Taylor that Judeo-Christian monotheism can be culturally satisfying in the modern age. Even if it could be, there are other religious traditions in the history of the West that allow one to live a life guided by something experienced as beyond oneself.

Chapter 3 considers one such tradition, the tradition of Greek polytheism as it is portrayed by Homer. Before we turn to that, however, we will look at the most sensitive current account of the sadness and lostness of the present age.

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The Memory Palace Mira Bart贸k

Free Press New York London Sydney Toronto

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Homeless A homeless woman, let’s call her my mother for now, or yours, sits on a window ledge in late afternoon in a working-class neighborhood in Cleveland, or it could be Baltimore or Detroit. She is five stories up, and below the ambulance is waiting, red lights flashing in the rain. The woman thinks they’re the red eyes of a leopard from her dream last night. The voices below tell her not to jump, but the ones in her head are winning. In her story there are leopards on every corner, men with wild teeth and cat bodies, tails as long as rivers. If she opens her arms into wings she must cross a bridge of fire, battle four horses and riders. I am a swan, a spindle, a falcon, a bear.

The men below call up to save her, cast their nets to lure her down, but she knows she cannot reach the garden without the distant journey. She opens her arms to enter the land of birds and fire. I will become wind, bone, blood, and memory. And the red eyes below are amazed to see just how perilously she balances on the ledge—like a leaf or a delicate lock of hair.

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Every passion borders on chaos, that of the collector on the chaos of memory.

Walter Benjamin, “Ich packe meine Bibliothek aus�

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Part I The Order of Things

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. . . Climb the mountains, search the valleys, the deserts, the seashores . . . the deep recesses of the earth . . . for in this way and no other will you arrive at . . . the true nature of things.

Petrus Severinus, 16th century Danish alchemist

The Subterranean World Even now, when the phone rings late at night, I think it’s her. I stumble out of bed ready for the worst. Then I realize—it’s a wrong number, or a friend calling from the other side of the ocean. The last time my mother called was in 1990. I was thirty-one and living in Chicago. She said if I didn’t come home right away she’d kill herself. After she hung up, she climbed onto the second-floor balcony of my grandmother’s house in Cleveland, boosted herself onto the banister, and opened her arms to the wind. Below, our neighbor Ruth Armstrong and two paramedics tried to coax her back inside. When the call came the next time, almost seventeen years later, it was right before Christmas 2006, and I didn’t even hear the phone ring.

The night before, I had a dream: I was in an empty apartment with my mother. She looked like she had that winter of 1990—her brown and gray hair unwashed and wild, her blouse stained and torn. She held a cigarette in her right hand, fingers crossed over it as if for good luck. She never looked like a natural-born smoker, even though she smoked four packs a day. The walls of the apartment were covered in dirt. I heard a knock.“What do you want?” I asked the stranger behind the door. He whispered, “Make 3

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this place as clean as it was in the beginning.” I scrubbed the floors and walls, then I lifted into the air, sailing feet-first through the empty rooms. I called out to my mother, “Come back! You can fly too!” but she had already disappeared.

When I awoke there was a message on my machine from my friend Mark in Vermont. He had been keeping a post office box for me in Burlington, about three hours from my home in Western Massachusetts. The only person who wrote me there was my mother. “A nurse from a hospital in Cleveland called about a Mrs. Norma Herr,” he said. “She said it was an emergency.” How did they find me? For years, I had kept my life secret from my schizophrenic and homeless mother. So had my sister, Natalia.

We both had changed our names, had unpublished phone numbers and addresses.

The story unfolded over the next couple days. After the ambulance rushed my mother to the hospital, the red sweater I had sent her for the holidays arrived at the women’s shelter where she had been living for the last three years. Tim, her social worker, brought the package to her in ICU to cheer her up after surgery. He noticed the return address was from me, care of someone in Vermont. He knew I was her daughter. A nurse called information to get Mark’s number and left the message on his machine.

How easy it was to find me after all those years. When I called a friend to tell her I was going to see my mother, she said, “I hope you can forgive her for what she did to you.” “Forgive her?” I said. “The question is—will she ever forgive me?”

The night before I left for Cleveland, while Doug, my fiancé, was making dinner, I went to my studio above our barn to gather some things for my trip.

I did what I always do when I enter: I checked the small table to the left of my desk to see if I had written any notes to myself the day before. It’s there, on my memory table, that I keep an ongoing inventory of what I’m afraid I’ll forget. Ever since I suffered a brain injury from a car accident a few years ago, my life has become a palimpsest—a piece of parchment from which someone had rubbed off the words, leaving only a ghost image behind.

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Above my desk are lists of things I can’t remember anymore, the meaning of words I used to know, ideas I’ll forget within an hour or a day. My computer is covered in Post-its, reminding me of which books I lent out to whom, memories I’m afraid I’ll forget, songs from the past I suddenly recall.

I was forty when, in 1999, a semi hurtled into my car while a friend and I were stopped at a construction site on the New York Thruway. The car was old and had no airbag—my body was catapulted back and forth in the passenger’s seat, my head smashing against the headrest and dashboard. Coupcontrecoup it’s called, blow against blow, when your brain goes flying against the surface of your skull. This kind of impact causes contusions in the front and back areas of the brain and can create microscopic bleeding and shearing of neural pathways, causing synapses to misfire, upsetting the applecart of your brain, sometimes forever. Even if you don’t lose consciousness, or, as in my case, don’t lose it for very long.

The next days and months that followed I couldn’t remember the words for things or they got stuck in my head and wouldn’t come out. Simple actions were arduous—tipping a cabbie, reading an e‑mail, and listening to someone talk. On good days, I acted normal, sounded articulate. I still do.

I work hard to process the bombardment of stimuli that surrounds me. I work hard not to let on that for me, even the sound of a car radio is simply too much, or all those bright lights at the grocery store. We children of schizophrenics are the great secret-keepers, the ones who don’t want you to think that anything is wrong.

Outside the glass door of my studio, the moon was just a sliver in the clear obsidian sky. Soon I’d be in the city again, where it’s hard to see the stars.

Hanging from a wooden beam to the right of my desk is a pair of reindeer boots I made when I lived in the Arctic, before my brain injury, when I could still travel with ease. What to bring to show my mother the last seventeen years of my life? How long would I stay in Cleveland? One month? Five? The doctor had said on the phone that she had less than six months to live—but he didn’t know my mother.

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What would she think of the cabinet of curiosities I call my studio: the mouse skeleton, the petrified bat, the pictures of co‑joined twins, the shelves of seedpods and lichen, the deer skull and bones? Would she think that aliens had put them there or would she want to draw them, like me? I fantasized about kidnapping her from the hospital. I would open the couch bed and let her spend her last days among the plants, the paints, and the books; let her play piano anytime she wanted. I’d even let her smoke. She could stay up all night drawing charts of tornadoes, hurricanes, and other future disasters, like the ones she used to send me through my post office box. But she would never see this place. She probably would never leave her bed.

Lining the walls in my studio was evidence of a life intersecting art and science: books on art history and evolution, anthropology, polar exploration, folklore, poetry, and neuroscience. If I brought her here, would my mother really be happy? There was a cabinet of art supplies, an antique globe, a map of Lapland. I had star charts, bird charts, and a book of maps from the Age of Discovery. Had my mother ever been truly happy? Had she ever passed a day unafraid, without a chorus of voices in her head?

The questions I wrote down before I left for Cleveland: How long does she have to live? Does she have a coat? Will she remember me? How will I remember her, after she is gone?

2 The next day I flew into Cleveland Hopkins International Airport. I almost always travel with Doug now: he is my compass, my driver, my word-finder and guide. How would I fare in this place without him? When I collected my suitcase from baggage claim, I half expected my mother to appear. She had slept on one of the benches off and on for years. Sometimes people came up to her and gave her money but she never understood why. Once she wrote to say: A kind man offered me five dollars at the airport for some reason. A bright moment in a storm-ridden day. I bought a strawberry milkshake at Micky D’s then pocketed the rest.

I had flown to Cleveland just two months before to go to my thirtieth high school reunion. The day after the reunion, Doug and I drove to Payne

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Avenue near downtown Cleveland to see the shelter where my mother lived.

She had given me her address in 2004, not a post office box number like she had in the past. I had no idea she had cancer then, nor did she, even though her body was showing signs that something was seriously wrong. I live in pain on Payne, she had written to me several times. I am bleeding a lot from below. But how to know what was real? Are you sick? I’d write her; she would respond: Sometimes I am taken out of the city and given enemas in my sleep. It’s what they do to Jews. In her last few letters, she always ended with: If you come to see me, I’ll make sure they find you a bed. Doug and I parked across the street from the shelter; I put on dark sunglasses and wouldn’t get out of the car. “I just want to see where she lives,” I said. “If I go in, she’ll want to come home with me, and then what?” I sank low in the seat and watched the women smoke out in front, waiting for the doors to open. It was windy and trash blew around the desolate treeless road.“I wish I could take her home. It looks like a war zone,” I said to Doug as we drove away. “At least I saw where she lives. It makes it more real. But now what?”

I felt worse, finally knowing where she lived, knowing exactly what the place looked like. How could I turn my back on her now when her sad life was staring me in the face? And if I didn’t do something soon, what was to stop her from moving on yet again, to another shelter, another town?

I had been communicating with my mother’s social worker for the past year about reuniting us, with a third party present for support. I wouldn’t do it without a third party, without my mother living somewhere under close watch, in a halfway house or a nursing home. Even though she was now elderly, in my mind she was still the madwoman on the street, brandishing a knife; the woman who shouts obscenities at you in the park, who follows you down alleyways, lighting matches in your hair.

I had no idea if my sister Natalia would want to see her at all, but planned to ask her when the time came. The organization that was helping my mother, MHS (Mental Health Services for Homeless Persons, Inc.), had been trying to arrange a legal guardianship for her so she could be placed in a nursing home where she could get adequate care. She would finally have an

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advocate—someone to make decisions for her about finances, housing, and health. But when MHS presented my mother’s case before the court, they lost. It didn’t matter that she slept outside on the wet ground some nights, or that she was incontinent, nearly blind, and seriously ill, or that she had a long history of suicide attempts and hospitalizations. The judge declared my mother sane for three simple reasons: she could balance a checkbook, buy her own cigarettes, and use correct change. It was just like when my sister and I had tried to get a guardianship for her in the past.

I picked up a rental car at the airport and met my childhood friend Cathy at my hotel. We had seen each other for the first time after thirty years when I came to town two months before. Except for a few extra pounds and some faint lines etched around her blue eyes, Cathy hadn’t changed. I could still picture her laughing, leaning against her locker at Newton D. Baker Junior High—a sweet, sympathetic girl in a miniskirt, straight blond hair flowing down to her waist.

As we were going up the elevator at University Hospital, I told Cathy about what the doctor had said to me earlier that day on the phone. He had said that my mother’s abdomen was riddled with tumors, and that he had removed most of her stomach and colon. He explained what stomas were, how her waste was being removed through them and how they had to be kept clean. I said, “He claims she’ll never go back to the shelter. They’ll get her into a good nursing home and make her as comfortable as possible before she dies.”

“That’s a relief,” she said, taking my hand.

“I don’t know, Cathy. I still think she’ll just get up, walk out the door, and disappear.”

The door was slightly ajar when we arrived at my mother’s room. I asked Cathy to wait in the hall until I called her in. The lights were off when I entered. I watched my mother sleep for a few minutes; the sun filtered through the slats in the shades, illuminating her pallid face. She looked like

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my grandfather when he was dying—hollow cheeks, ashen skin, breath labored and slow. Would she believe it was really me? She thought that aliens could assume the shape of her loved ones.

“Mom,” I said.“It’s me. Your daughter, Myra.” I used my old name, the one she gave me. She opened her eyes.

“Myra? Is it really you?” Her voice was barely audible and her cadence strange.

“I brought you a little gift,” I said, and placed the soft orange scarf I had knitted for her around her neck.

I sat down and took her hand. How well could she see? She had always written about her blindness, caused by glaucoma, cataracts, and “poisonous gas from enemy combatants.” I wondered if she could see how I had aged.

My dark brown hair was cut in a bob, like the last time I had seen her, but I had a few wrinkles now, a few more gray hairs. I still dressed like a tomboy, though, and was wearing black sweatpants and a sweater.“That’s a good look for you, honey,” she said.“You look sporty. Where’s your sister?”

“She’ll be here in a couple days,” I said.“She sends her love.”

I was relieved that I could say that. What if my sister couldn’t bear to come? What would I have said?

When the nurse came in I asked her how much my mother weighed.

“Eighty-three pounds. Are you her daughter?”

“Yes,” I said, then hesitated.“I haven’t seen her in seventeen years.”

I expected the nurse to reproach me, but instead she was kind.“How nice that you can be together now. I hope you two have a great reunion.”

My mother brought her hand up to shield her eyes. “Turn that damn light off.”

“It’s off,” I said.

“Shut the curtains. It’s too bright in here. Where’s my music? When am I going home?”

“Where do you want to go?” I asked.

“Back to my women.”

Did she mean the women’s shelter? Or did she want to be with my sister and me in her old house on West 148th Street?

“Where’s my little radio? Did someone steal it again?”

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The last time I visited my mother in a hospital, it was over twenty years ago. She was in a lockdown ward at Cleveland Psychiatric Institute (CPI) and had asked me to bring her a radio. She had always needed a radio and a certain level of darkness. In her youth, my mother had been a musical prodigy. When I was growing up, she listened to the classical radio station night and day. I always wondered if her need for a radio meant more than just a love of music. Did it help block out the voices in her head?

I pulled the curtains shut over the shades.“Is that better?”

“Yes, honey. You’re a good girl.”

I could smell lunch arriving down the hall—coffee, soup, and bread.

Comforting smells in a world of beeping machines and gurneys—the clanking, squeaking sounds of the ICU. “Are you hungry?” I asked.

“Not that hungry these days,” she said.“You want something to eat? You’re too thin. Go ask them to make you a sandwich. I’ll pay. Bring me my purse.”

My mother was missing all but her four front teeth. I remember her writing me several years before to say that she had had them all removed because disability wouldn’t pay for dental care. According to the Government, teeth and eyes are just accessories, she wrote. Like buying a belt or a brooch.

“Where are your false teeth?” I asked.“They’ll be serving lunch soon.”

“Someone stole them,” she whispered.“They always steal my teeth.”

We sat for a while, holding hands. She drifted in and out of sleep. I put my mother’s palm up to my lips. For the first time in my life, I couldn’t smell cigarettes on her skin. She smelled like baby lotion. She opened her eyes.

“You should be proud of me. I quit smoking,” she said.

“When did you quit?”

“A week ago. When they brought me here.”

“Good for you,” I said.“You know, I always loved you, Mommy.”

It was the first time I had used that word since I was a child. My sister and I always called her Mother, Norma, or Normie, or, on rare occasions, Mom. It was hard to call her anything maternal, even though she tried so hard to be just that. But in the hospital, as she lay dying, Mommy seemed the only right word to use.

“I love you too,” she said.“But you ran away from me. Far away.”

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“I know. I’m sorry.”

“A lot happened,” she said.

“A lot happened to me too. But I’m here now.”

“Yes,” she said.“I’m glad you came. Now let me sleep. I’m so very tired.”

On Tuesday, my second day at the hospital, a nurse came in and asked me how old my mother was.“She just turned eighty in November,” I said.

My mother threw me a nasty look.“It’s a lie!”

“How old are you?” I asked.

“Not that old,” she said.

“I was just kidding,” I said. “Are you in your forties now?” I winked at the nurse.

“A little older but not much. A woman should never reveal her age.”

“She’s fifty-two,” I said to the nurse but mouthed the word eighty when my mother turned away.

Later, the surgeon talked to me outside the room. He said that the pathology report had finally come in. What he originally thought was colon cancer was late-stage stomach cancer, which is more deadly and was moving fast. I bombarded him with questions: “Where else has the cancer spread? Is she too far gone for chemo? How long does she have?”

“Well, the good news is that your mother is doing remarkably well!” How can a dying person do remarkably well? I wondered. He added, “She’s recovering great from the surgery but there’s nothing we can really do for her anymore, just keep her comfortable.”

“Can you explain what you did?” I asked.

The doctor borrowed my notepad and drew a picture. His pen flew over the paper; it was a map of what my mother looked like inside.“Here’s what I did,” he said.“I redirected what’s left of her colon and moved this over here, so that her waste can exit through this stoma, see?”

He spoke too fast for my brain, using words like fistula, ileostomy, and carcinomatosis. I had no idea what he was talking about. It looked like he was drawing the map of a city as seen from above. Was this what is inside us, these roads and byways, these rotaries and hairpin turns?

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“Thanks,” I said.“That explains a lot.”

“Super,” said the doctor, perpetually upbeat. “We can talk more later. I want to speak with your mother now.”

The doctor and I went back inside her room. “Good morning, Norma!

How are you doing today?”

She smiled weakly.“All right.”

He turned to me.“Her abdomen is completely diseased. We couldn’t take everything out.”

I glared at him and put my finger to my lips. The day before I had said on the phone that discussing this with my mother would just upset her and that she wouldn’t really understand. The doctor continued anyway.

“It’s much worse than we thought, Norma. People always want to know how long, but I can’t tell them. I could say a few weeks, months, either way I’d be wrong.” He sat down beside her, took her hand in his, and said loudly, “You have cancer, Norma. It’s very bad. Do you understand?”

She looked baffled. The night before she had told me it wasn’t anything serious, she just had food poisoning from bad Mexican food. “Don’t eat at Taco Bell,” she had warned me.“They poison the beans there.”

The doctor said again, “Norma. Do you understand that you have cancer?”

“Get me a Danish,” she whispered in my ear as if it were a secret. She thought for a second.“One with sweet cheese.”

Later that day, my mother suddenly became concerned about her things at the shelter. “Where’s my black backpack? Where’s my purse? Who took them?”

I asked Tim, her shy young social worker from MHS, to retrieve her two large garbage bags from the shelter on Payne Avenue. I assumed these were the only things she owned in the world. In the years that we were apart, she often mentioned in her letters that she still had some of our family things in storage. Was it true or did she just imagine they were locked up somewhere for safekeeping? Sometimes she wrote me urgent letters, begging me to come to Cleveland and help her move her things

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from one place to another, but I suspected that it was just a ploy to get me to come back home.

In the hospital parking lot Tim and I rummaged through her bags to see if there was anything she might want. We found her backpack in one of them, filthy and ripped, filled with laundry detergent, toothpaste, damp cigarettes, receipts, a diary, a sketchbook, a medical dictionary, incontinence pads, and a dirty white sock filled with keys. I took the keys and counted them, seventeen in all. Most looked like they went to lockers and storage units. One was a house key. Did it unlock our old red brick house?

Back in her room I showed her the sock.“Where do these go to?” I asked.

“I’m tired. I don’t know. Let me sleep.” Then she motioned me to come closer. “I have Grandma’s diamond rings for you girls. They’re locked up in a safety-deposit box.”

“Where?” I asked.“What box? What are all these keys for?”

“Tell you later. Too tired now. Shut lights. Don’t let them steal my pack.”

That evening, in the hotel room, I picked up the diary I had found in her backpack. It was a pocket-sized purple notebook with red hearts on the cover, like the diary of a ten-year-old girl. I wondered if she had more of them hidden somewhere. I flipped through the coffee-stained pages. The book had the same faint odor of stale smoke and mildew that her letters had.

I turned to her last few entries. Two weeks before the paramedics picked her up from the Community Women’s Shelter, my mother wrote: Magma: Hot liquid rock can be three shapes: spherical, spiral or a rod. It flows out like lava or cools underground.

They had told me at the shelter that when they called 911 that day, she couldn’t stop vomiting and her stomach was distended as if she were about to give birth.“That Norma, she didn’t want to go to the hospital,” one woman had said to me on the phone. “She is one stubborn lady.” She had been sick for months, but wouldn’t see a doctor. Finally, the day the ambulance came to take her to the hospital, the women at the shelter convinced her to go.

In her diary, my mother wrote: If lava reaches Earth’s surface it turns into igneous rock. Basalt: dark gray rock forms when magma cools into a solid. My mother had been studying geology. I turned back the pages. Before geology, she had reread all of Edgar Allan Poe. Before that she had turned to the stars:

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Recently, I had a dream of a cataclysm. Was not prepared for study of the planets, which has fevered my imagination once again.

Before I left for Cleveland I had been studying geology too. I was in the middle of a book about Nicolaus Steno, the seventeenth century Danish anatomist, whom some call the grandfather of geology. Steno was fascinated by what the oceans hid and left behind. I had read about how one day, in 1666, young Steno was in an anatomical theater in Florence, Italy, dissecting the head of a shark. It wasn’t just any shark but a great white. The shark was a wonder, and Steno’s patron, the Grand Duke Ferdinando II de’ Medici, wanted to know what was inside. This was the time when wonder and scientific inquiry were intricately entwined—when collectors collected the rare and the mysterious, the miraculous and mundane, from the bounty that explorers brought back to Europe from the New World.

When Steno peered into the monster’s mouth he noticed that the shark’s teeth resembled the little stones people called “tongue stones,” or glossopetrae, the mysterious stones Pliny the Elder said fell from the heavens on dark and moonless nights, what the church said were miracle stones left from Noah’s Great Flood. Steno’s mind leapt from shark to sea to a question that plagued him for the rest of his life: why are seashells found on mountaintops? Even his scientific colleagues thought the fossils were signs from God. Nicolaus Steno laid the foundation for reading the archival history of the earth: How crystals are formed, how land erodes and sediment is made over time. How over centuries, seashells become fossils embedded deep inside the bedrock of mountains.

My mother would have liked Nicolaus Steno. She’d marvel at the way his mind flew from one thought to another, uncovering the truth about ancient seas, how he learned to read the memory of a landscape, one layer at a time. The earth is also a palimpsest—its history scraped away time and time again. If my mother were well enough, I would tell her this. She’d light up a cigarette, pour herself a cup of black coffee, and get out her colored pens.

Then she’d draw a giant chart with a detailed geological timeline, revealing the stratification of the earth.

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That Tuesday night I met my sister, Natalia, at the airport. I spotted her cherry-red coat in the thick throng of hurried holiday travelers. She lugged a huge suitcase behind her, walking a fast clip in high black boots. Like me, it had been close to seventeen years since she had last seen our mother, but my sister had made the painful decision never to write to her. When I had called her about our mother dying, I didn’t know whether or not she would come. Her last vision of our mother was a nightmare, indelible in her mind.

I was relieved when, without even deliberating, she said she’d join me in Cleveland.

“Nattie, I’m so happy you’re here.” I ran up to hug her. I had almost called her Rachel, her birth name before she changed it more than a decade before.

Being back in Cleveland made her newer name feel strange on my tongue for the first time in years. Just as well. Around our mother, we’d have to be Myra and Rachel one last time.

“How is she?” asked Natalia.

“Don’t be shocked. She looks like a survivor from the camps.”

“I really want to see her. Let’s go first thing in the morning.”

“Before I forget, I wanted to tell you—I found some keys. And receipts from U‑Haul. She must have a storage room somewhere.”

“What do you think is in there?”

“I don’t know. But we can go this week and see. I imagine there’s a lot of junk.”

The next morning Natalia woke up early to work out in the gym. She has always kept a strict regimen—a daily exercise routine, a rigorous schedule for writing, teaching, grading her students’ papers before bed. While Natalia was out of the room, I skimmed through my mother’s dairy. She wrote about staying up all night in the rain on a stranger’s porch and trying to sleep at the bus station without getting mugged. Should I read any of this to my sister?

When we walked into our mother’s room at the hospital, she looked up at Natalia and said,“Who are you?” She turned to me.“Who’s this lady?”

How could my mother not recognize her? Did she look that different seventeen years ago? The last time our mother saw her, Natalia was running away from the house on West 148th Street. Maybe that was how our

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mother remembered her—a terrified young girl in flight, long hair flying in the cold January wind.

“It’s me. Rachel,” said my sister.

How could we explain that we had changed our names so she could never find us? That we had been so scared of her all these years? She was the cry of madness in the dark, the howling of wind outside our doors. I had changed my name the year after my sister did, reluctantly, giving up the name signed at the bottom of my paintings so I would be harder to find. But I could never relinquish my first name. I simply exchanged a y for an i. My sister couldn’t give up her first name either and kept it sandwiched between the first and the last: Natalia Rachel Singer. She took Isaac Bashevis Singer’s last name, I took Béla Bartók’s.

“Rachel? I thought you were dead.”

“I’m not dead,” said my sister.“I’m here, right beside you.”

“Is it really you?”

Natalia pulled up a chair next to the bed. “It’s really me. How are you feeling?”

“You girls have got to get me out of here! We have to go back to the house.

There are criminals inside.”

“Don’t worry, the house is fine,” I lied to her. “Everything is just like you left it. You can go home as soon as you are better.”

After all these years, our mother was still obsessed about her parents’ house she’d sold in 1989. When she signed the papers over to the new owner, she believed that she was only renting it to him for a while. Not long after the sale, and after my sister’s and my last failed attempt to get her a legal guardian and medical treatment, our mother disappeared into the streets.

“Do you have a husband?” my mother asked Natalia. “Are you wearing a ring?”

“Yes,” said my sister.“I’ll tell you all about him.”

Natalia, who had seventeen years of stored-up conversations, began to talk. But after a few minutes, I could tell our mother was too exhausted and frail to listen anymore.

“She can’t tolerate that much talking or sound,” I said. “She gets overwhelmed like me. Just sit with her. That’s enough; she’s happy you’re here.”

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Natalia took out a brush from her purse. “Can I brush your hair?” she asked.

“If you like,” said my mother.

I looked at them, mother and eldest daughter, strangers for seventeen years.“I’ll leave you two alone,” I said, and left.

If you glanced in the room at that moment, you would see two women in tranquil silence, one tenderly brushing the hair of the other, as if she had been doing it her entire life.

2 When I called U‑Haul, they confirmed our mother had a storage room there. It was at Kamm’s Corners in West Park, not far from our old neighborhood. Early the next day, on Thursday, before heading over to the hospital, Natalia and I drove to the U‑Haul on Lorain Avenue. Natalia sat in the passenger’s seat, clutching the map, nervous about getting lost. I expected to get lost. I got lost nearly every day.

When we arrived, the man at the counter said, “Norma used to change clothes in there sometimes, even in winter. There’s no light or heat in the rooms. She was one tough broad.”

Natalia and I wound our way through the maze of corridors. I could see my breath and regretted not having brought a hat or a pair of gloves. Fluorescent lights hummed, casting a pale, eerie glow on the high metal walls. I wondered how many other homeless men and women used these rooms to store their belongings, to change, or to catch up on sleep. Finally we came to our mother’s room; it was just like all the others, eight-by-eight feet. I pulled the keys out of the sock. We tried them all. The last one fit; the padlock clicked open.

I hesitated for a moment before I looked in. I was terribly curious to know what was inside, but I also wished I never had found the key. I was afraid of what we would find, even more afraid to find out what had been lost. Wasn’t it enough that we were here, now, in her final days? I shone my flashlight into the cold dark room. Things were piled up to the ceiling: furniture, boxes, trash, clothes, books, cans of soup. I imagined her changing clothes in the dark, shivering, cursing to herself, taking off one shirt and

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putting on another, then layering on three more for warmth. Natalia and I began to dig.

My sister and I worked fast, sorting things into piles. We needed to get back to the hospital and didn’t have the luxury of taking our time. There was that familiar sense of purpose that I hadn’t felt in years, that old “it’s an emergency, let’s just get the job done” kind of feeling. I was glad not to do it alone.

I first tried to separate all the trash from things that we needed to save.

I almost tossed out one of my mother’s old grimy pocketbooks when I felt something hard inside. I pulled out a butcher knife.“Jesus, look at this,” I said.

“Do you think that’s the one she had when the police caught her at Logan Airport?” said Natalia.“I’m sure she was on her way to find me.”

Natalia and I excavated. We found a 1950s Geiger counter, and a bag of our mother’s hair with a note taped to it with instructions on how to make a wig. I found a chart she had drawn showing all the nuclear power plants in the world, similar to one she had sent me when I lived in the Norwegian Arctic ten years before. There were boxes crammed with newspaper articles on cryogenics, alien abductions, radon poisoning, global warming, child abuse, train wrecks, and unsolved murders in Chicago. I discovered a huge box labeled “Scribing Books” filled with notebooks devoted to my mother’s eclectic research: geometry, poetry, chemistry, botany, geography, art history, medicine, fairy tales, zoology, car mechanics, physics, and the Bible. For each subject, she made vocabulary lists with detailed definitions, something I would have done even before my brain injury. Her files could have been my files; her notes, mine.

I came across the chiffon scarf I had bought for her in New Orleans years ago. In the same box were many of my favorite books from childhood.

I pulled out a collection of Jack London I’d read when I was about eleven.

After reading Call of the Wild, I became obsessed with polar exploration. If a man could survive by boiling his boots, or walking out onto the glacial ice with nothing but a few sled dogs and a piece of seal blubber in his pocket, then certainly I could withstand whatever obstacles came my way.

At the bottom of the box were two big fairy-tale collections our father had sent us sometime after our parents divorced in 1963. I was four and my sister was five. We never saw him again. One book was a beautifully illus-

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trated collection of Russian fairy tales inscribed, To Rachel, from Daddy. The other, a book of Japanese fables, was inscribed to me. It had been years since I had opened them. I stared at the handwriting. Something seemed a bit off.

Then it dawned on me—both inscriptions bore my own adolescent scrawl.

I had always remembered the books and our father’s dedications as proof of his love for us. Yet, how malleable our memories are, even if our brains are intact. Neuroscientists now suggest that while the core meaning of a longterm memory remains, the memory transforms each time we attempt to retrieve it. In fact, anatomical changes occur in the brain every single time we remember. As Proust said,“The only paradise is paradise lost.”

As I paged through the Russian fairy tale book, a piece of paper fell out—a photocopied picture of a piano keyboard. Was this how my mother played music all these years? Did my homeless mother, once a child prodigy, play Bach inside her head, her hands fluttering over imaginary keys?

What I found next took my breath away. “Nat,” I said. “She saved my pony.”

I took out the old palomino horse I used to call Pony from a torn moldy box. The horse’s right foreleg was broken. My mother had tried to mend it with a piece of packing tape, then wrapped it in a red wool hat I had sent her for her birthday two years before. I put it in my bag to take back to the hotel.

In the same box were all the letters I had written my mother over the last seventeen years. There were also photocopies she had made of her letters to me. Natalia glanced over to see what I was looking at. I wondered what she felt as she saw me sifting through the stack. We had barely spoken about our mother for years.

At the bottom of the box were thirteen pairs of scissors. Right after her divorce, when I was four, my mother tried to slit her wrists with a pair of cutting shears and was rushed to the hospital. I remember sitting at the foot of the stairs, my grandfather looming over me, puffing on a cigar. He handed me a rag and told me to wipe the blood off each and every stair. At the top of the staircase was the open door to our apartment; inside, a limp frilly blouse draped over an ironing board, on the floor a pair of scissors and a pool of blood. My sister remembers the incident too but neither of us recalls the other being there. Did it even happen? Before the age of ten, children have a

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kind of childhood amnesia. We lack developed language skills and a cognitive sense of self, especially when we are very young. It’s hard to even know if our memories are real. Even though we feel they are, they might not be. And in family narratives, what if the person you learned your early autobiography from couldn’t tell the difference from reality and a dream?

In another box were all the museum date books I had sent my mother over the years. I found a little stuffed owl, a teddy bear, and a children’s book I once sent her called Owl Babies, about a mother owl who disappears but is reunited with her children in the end. There were nursing textbooks and lists of medical schools my mother planned to apply to. When she turned seventy-nine she wrote to tell me that although she was now legally blind she had decided to study medicine: I am thinking of going to nursing school, maybe in a foreign country. That way, if I ever get sick or lose my sight completely, I’ll know what to do. I found a set of her teeth stuck inside an old eyeglass case. I uncovered dozens of legal claims filed by her, accusing various moving companies, housing projects, the Chicago Transit Authority and the city of Cleveland of stealing her teeth, her glasses, her house, her hair, her children, her memory, and her youth. I pulled out stacks of drawings she had made of street scenes, family members, flowers, and fairies. One was titled Rachel Has No Flowers in Her Hair, a desolate stretch of gray land with nothing in it but one scraggly tree.

Our mother was expecting us and we had already been at U‑Haul for over two hours. My hands were so cold I could barely feel my fingers anymore. I’d been about to suggest leaving when I found the box.

“Nattie,” I said.“You better take a look.”

We dragged the heavy box out into the hall. It was stuffed with diaries, seventeen years of secrets: typewritten journals in bulging three-ring binders, others pocket-sized and written by hand. I skimmed through them for half an hour or more, but had to stop. It reminded me of when I was a teenager and hid in our grandparents’ attic, digging through boxes, searching for a father who had disappeared, searching for a mother before she lost her mind. Then I saw several papers stapled together, stuck in between two journals. At the top of the page, my mother had written,“Life Story.” It began like this:

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There was danger imparted to me at birth. The street was well kept and quiet during the day. You hardly saw anyone. In 1945 I suffered a childhood nervous breakdown. I was nineteen. My father and I were supposed to go to a party at my uncle’s, but instead, we went to a foreign film and as we returned home by bus on 148th Street, my father became angry and said something about not liking my uncle’s associates.

Leaving the bus I dropped coins in the fare box. My father was angry that I paid for myself. He became more and more enraged and I became mildly hysterical. When we were in the house, he seized a lamp and said, “I’ll kill you” to parties unknown.

My early childhood was deprived in some respects. I did not view television until 1963 and now I see that little bits of my life in distorted form have gotten into movie stories.

I still have received no compensation for that. Ultimately, what I do know is this: I am a homemaker, my records have never been straightened out, and my need for privacy and house is greater than ever. I write this in a motel room looking out onto garbage bins.

I slumped down onto the floor and couldn’t move. I write this in a motel room looking out onto garbage bins. How much more did I really want to know about her life on the street? My brain was done for the day.

“Nattie,” I said. “Maybe we should go.” My sister didn’t hear me; she was lost in her own little world. She sprang up into a standing yoga posture, stretching her arms high above her head. Before my injury, I would have been just as resilient. After a few more stretches, Natalia went back in. I gathered my reserves and went back in too.

“Look at this!” she said. She pulled out something big, white, and fuzzy from deep within our mother’s den. It was a teddy bear the size of a toddler, dressed in a festive red dress. The red bow around its neck said 2000.

“It’s a millennium bear,” I said.

I tried to remember where I was on New Year’s Day 2000, but couldn’t.

Where was my mother that day? Who gave her this bear? Would she still be here this coming January 1?

“Let’s bring the bear,” said Natalia. “We better go back,” she added. “You look tired. Besides, she’s going to think we’re not going to come.”

Before we left, we made a stack of things our mother might want at the hospital. My sister placed The Brothers Karamazov on the pile and a torn

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almanac from 1992.“Definitely this,” she said, holding up our mother’s Glenville High School yearbook from 1945. “She loved looking at pictures of her old friends.”

I flipped through the pages to find her maiden name, Norma Kurap. The portrait of her in a simple white blouse was sweet and demure. She was eighteen, and schizophrenia had yet to rear its ugly head. I read the list of activities below her smiling face: Orchestra, Play Production, Choral Club, Accompanist, Student Council, Music Appreciation Club, National Honor Society, the list went on. She was voted “Most Versatile” in the Popularity Poll. Her classmates wrote: Good luck at Carnegie Hall! May your magic piano fingers charm all the hearts of the world. One boy wrote, To my dream girl, the sweetest and prettiest gal at Glenville. Another wrote, So when are you going to teach me how to rumba? And another, It will take more than a war to make me forget you. The introduction to her yearbook, written by a boy named Marvin, is titled “War Baby.” He writes at the end: We are the class of January, 1945—a war class. We leave Glenville, determined to finish the fight.

I never realized until then that my mother lost her mind the year we dropped the bomb. Seven months after she graduated, in August 1945, America obliterated Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Shortly afterward while on a bus coming home from a movie with her father, the voices inside my mother’s head arrived unannounced, in all their terrible glory.

Our mother was wide awake when we arrived. “Where were you? I thought you weren’t going to come. You girls need to help me. We have to get back to the house before it’s too late.”

“Don’t worry,” I said.“We’ve got everything under control.”

“But I’m so worried about everything.” My mother reached up and touched the back of my head. “And you. What about your little noggin?

Does it still hurt?”

“My head’s okay,” I said.“Just some problems here and there, you know.”

“You should wear a helmet,” she said. “That way, they can’t get you again.”

When I injured my brain, I almost didn’t write her about it, but changed

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my mind. It seemed like the kind of thing a mother should know, even if she was indigent and ill. When I wrote, I spared her the gory details, like I did with most things.

“They stole my memory too,” she whispered, as I straightened out her pillows.“They have their tricks.”

When the truck hit, I was in the passenger’s seat, leaning over, looking for a cassette. The man driving my car, who suffered whiplash in the accident, was a guy I was dating at the time. We were on our way home from my sister’s house in northern New York. The truck driver, who must have fallen asleep, swerved toward the right and tried to put on his brakes. The next thing I recall was a pair of white-gloved hands reaching in to pull me out of the car. I remember a blur of blinking lights, and the feeling of hot lava dripping down the back of my head.

When I eventually told my mother about the accident, I said that I suffered from memory loss, mostly short-term but some long-term memory as well, which isn’t that common with traumatic brain injury. I didn’t tell her about the strange sensations of lost time that one doctor thought might be temporal lobe seizures, or that I no longer could follow directions, that I didn’t know how to leave a tip, and had trouble reading, writing, and doing just about anything that required over ten minutes of concentration. Why tell a homeless woman who slept at the airport that it felt like it was raining inside my body and ants were crawling up and down my legs? My mother thought there were rats living inside her body, aliens in her head.

Natalia and I returned to the storage room before dinner. “We should have worn headlamps,” I said.“It’s like going down into a cave.”

“Let’s not stay long,” said my sister. “I want to go back tonight to see her.

How are you doing, by the way? You look exhausted.”

Even though I usually appear fine to the outside world, when I do too many things, say, shop for food and have coffee with a friend on the same day, I might not be able to drive home or talk to anyone for two days after that. If I’m exhausted, I stutter or shut down. If I go to a noisy dinner party, I can easily press down on the accelerator instead of the brake on my way

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home. Because I didn’t learn how to drive until I was almost forty, the act of putting my foot on the brake isn’t the same kind of habitual memory as tying my shoe. It’s frightening when the part of my brain that’s supposed to process all those stimuli being hurled at me won’t do its job anymore. I get terribly frustrated with myself and with friends who don’t understand. My judgment isn’t always the best either. I think I’m able to handle much more than I really can.

“You have to drive back, you know,” said Natalia.“We didn’t put me down on the rental. Maybe we should do that tomorrow.”

“I’m fine. Let’s keep going,” I said.

I was packing more journals to take back to the hotel when Natalia found a big black trunk with brass trim. We hauled it out and yanked the top open.

“Jesus,” I said.“I thought these were lost.”

Inside were family photos we thought we’d never see again: our mother at sixteen, smiling from a tenement window, our father’s black-and-white glossy for his first book, our grandfather standing with a menacing grin in the garden, holding a pair of pruning shears. And nestled in a pile of loose photos was my sister’s and my baby album. I skimmed through the pages till I came to a picture of my sister as a chubby toddler, sitting on top of a baby grand, looking at my mother, eyes closed, playing with abandon. My sister seemed frightened in the picture, as if she were about to fall. I imagined her during the fourteen months before I came into the world—an infant living with a gifted and beautiful mother who lived in an alternate universe, a brilliant father who drank himself to sleep each night. A bit like Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald, I thought. I put the book aside to bring back to the hotel.

Natalia and I continued mining. Inside the trunk, there were pictures I had drawn when I was small, report cards, my art and music awards. I picked up a small plastic grandfather clock to toss into the garbage pile.“Look at this crappy old thing,” I said.“I can’t believe the things she saved.”

“There’s too much here,” said my sister.“I can’t take it all in.”

“I can come back tomorrow by myself.”

“Don’t exclude me. Stop thinking that you have to do everything. It’s annoying.”

“I’m sorry it’s just . . . Nattie, there’s something inside this.”

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I pried open the little glass window below the clock face—inside was a drawing of two little rabbits, and below the rabbits was a drawing of a tiger.

“There’s another picture hidden underneath!”

On the back of the picture was a list of birth dates for those born in the Chinese Year of the Tiger, which included my mother, and a detailed description of feline carnivores written in tiny script. Underneath the tiger my mother had placed a photo of my sister and me at ages five and six. I look stiff and unhappy; my sister smiles at the viewer and strikes a girlish pose.

Behind the photo was yet another picture, cut from a 1960s Life magazine— a still life of red and green Christmas ornaments and holly. Was she trying to protect us? Did she believe a drawing could be a talisman against the forces of evil in the world?

Back at the hotel that night, as my sister and I got ready for bed, I wondered what lay ahead. The next day or the day after that, our mother would be moved to a nursing home for hospice care. How long would she hang on?

Days? Weeks? My sister, who suffers from insomnia, performed her nocturnal rituals to calm her nerves. She took an aromatherapy bath, stretched, and read before inserting her earplugs. She put on her eye mask and turned off her lamp. We are both vigilant sleepers: she can’t fall asleep; I wake at the slightest sound.

“Good night,” she said.

“Night, Nattie. I’ll turn off the light in a little bit. Sleep well.”

I pulled a few of our mother’s journals from the pile. As the years passed, I saw how they became smaller and more portable. She daily mulled over her dreams, trying to interpret them and discern if they were real or not.

She recorded exactly what she ate each day—mostly donuts, small cups of chili, cheap black coffee, and hamburgers from McDonald’s. She recorded what she spent, down to the penny. She spoke to someone in her head and struggled to understand what was an outside influence and what came from within. She wrote about how light fell on certain trees and described the delicate scents of flowers she saw in the park; she also wrote each flower’s common and Latin names, and drew a picture of it. One sentence stuck in

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my head and I marked its place in the book. It sounded like something she had written to me in a letter once: Of my life at the piano, I shall say nothing for the time being.

I picked up her very last journal, the diary I had found when I looked through her backpack. In the pages I read prescient signs of her living with cancer, unaware. My mother was nauseous, dizzy, incontinent, and had blood in her stool. She doubled over with abdominal pain. She was bloated from a tumor but thought it was because she was overweight, so she tried to eat even less. She ate most meals in hospital cafeterias, the cheapest places, and rode the subway all over the city to get there, no matter how bad the weather. She recorded the weather daily, sometimes every hour. Near the end of her last diary, she wrote: Awoke today with stronger remembrance for loved ones.

I knew I should go to bed—it was well past midnight and we wanted to get an early start. but I couldn’t stop reading. She wrote: This a.m. I’m in a hotel I can’t identify, I see so many gray closed doors. I cannot work with poor memory. To note something, a rat will find incentive to report. Caution: I’ve suffered as much as anyone in history. Note: Metamorphic rock means changes deep inside earth from heat and weight of other rocks.

I cannot work with poor memory either, I thought. How will I remember these passing days? Once again, I thought of Nicolaus Steno. My mother was dying and yet I turned to history for solace, to ancient geology. I thought of when Steno made his final public appearance as a scientist. These things I remember well, these odd little facts from science, history, and art. That year, in 1673, Steno was dedicating an anatomical theater and gave a speech on the importance of scientific research. He told the audience, “Beautiful is what we see. More beautiful is what we understand. Most beautiful is what we do not comprehend.”

Natalia was fast asleep in the bed next to mine, like when we were little and our names were Rachel and Myra. I read about how many nights my mother slept outside in the rain one November, hungry and cold, suffering from a bladder infection and a terrible cough. She had been sleeping in her old backyard while the owner was out of town. This was how she spent her birthday in the fall of 2001, two months after the tragedies of 9/11. I felt sick

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to my stomach, knowing that my own mother spent so many nights outside in the rain. Why didn’t anyone help her, lead her to safety? I wanted to go back in time and be the person who took her in.

In my mother’s very last diary, from the fall of 2006, she returned to the history of the earth: The outer shell . . . is divided into about thirty large and small pieces that fit together . . . called tectonic plates. They move on hot layers of rock within the mantle. Continents sit on top of the plates; plates are also under the ocean floor. As the plates move, the continents and oceans slowly change.

What hadn’t she studied these seventeen years? I searched her journals for my name, my sister’s, but she barely mentioned us at all, and even then only obliquely: Long nightmare dream of losses. Bury the nightmare. Bury the losses.

Bury the dream.

On Friday morning, Natalia and I sat side by side next to our mother’s bed.

My sister graded her students’ English papers while I drew in my sketchbook. It felt like old times. When we were children, Natalia sat on the bed and wrote stories while I sat next to her and made pictures—rare moments of calm in a turbulent world. I still felt at home sitting only a few inches apart, her writing, me drawing, neither of us saying a word. Soon our mother would be moved to a nursing home. We were waiting to find out where she would be placed. She still thought she was going “home.”

There was a radio in the room now; one of the nurses had brought it in after I told her how my mother’s favorite classical music station calmed her down, and that she listened to it twenty-four hours a day. Christmas was in three days and every radio station was playing “Jingle Bells.”

“Turn that holiday crap off,” said my mother.“I can’t stand it anymore.”

“I’ll bring some CDs as soon as I can get a CD player,” I said.

“What’s a CD?” “It’s a little record. I’ll get you some classical music. Don’t worry.”

“Well, hurry up. This crap is killing me.”

I only came home once during Christmastime, the first year after I left for college. My Russian Orthodox grandfather was still alive then and he was the only one in the family who celebrated Christmas. After he died in

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1980, our mother always spent the holidays alone, or with our grandmother, the two of them eating corned beef sandwiches, watching sitcoms on TV. I always told myself that it didn’t matter anyway, that they were secular Jews who had no interest in any religious celebrations, Chanukah or otherwise. A neighbor from next door told me that my mother spent her last Thanksgiving in the family house locked up inside. When the neighbor peeked in the window, she saw piles of dishes in the sink and garbage on the floor. “I was afraid to go in but was worried your mother would starve to death.” The neighbor left food in the milk chute, then came back later to retrieve the empty plates.

As my mother slept, I tried to draw her face. It was my fourth attempt since I’d arrived on December 18. It had been many years since I had drawn her. When I was in high school, I stayed home on weekend nights sometimes so she wouldn’t be alone. We listened to the radio together or to records.

She’d lie on the couch and smoke and I would sketch her. Now I drew her asleep and dying, head tilted back upon the pillow, her mouth open as if in song.

I took out the drawing the doctor had made of what my mother looked like inside. It reminded me of choreography, the staging of an intricate dance. It reminded me of my own inevitable demise. There is a Buddhist meditation I do sometimes. I imagine the layers of my body as I sit, mindful of my breath. I picture my flesh falling away, then the muscles and connective tissue, the organs, and finally the bones. I do this once in a while to remind myself of where I’m going. A rather macabre way to comfort myself, I suppose. Sometimes I take it a step further, into deep time—I imagine my bones beneath the earth, crumbling to gypsum, forming into chalk held by a child writing words upon a blackboard. I imagine the words erased by another child’s hand, and still another, breathing in chalk dust, exhaling into air.

An aide came into the room to remove my mother’s tray. She had barely touched her eggs. Little by little, we cease to consume, take in food, water, air. My sister glanced up, then jotted something down. What would she remember? What would I? Our brains are built for selective attention—we focus on some things while ignoring a vast array of other stimuli around

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us. It is those select things that we recall, not the rest. I couldn’t take notes about what was going on around me like Natalia. Just the act of taking visual and auditory information in, processing it, then writing it down, is an act of multitasking, something I don’t do well anymore. I was afraid I would miss something, something so small you can’t see or sense if you are putting words to the page—the subtle twitch of a finger, a swift sideways glance, a snippet of song down the hall.

And yet, what does it matter anyway? Memory, if it is anything at all, is unreliable. Even birds, with their minute brains, have better memories than we do. Nuthatches and black-capped chickadees remember precisely where they stored food in the wild. Honeybees have “flower memory” and remember exactly where they already have been to pollinate a flower. They can even recall the colors and scents of their food sources, and the times of day when their food is at its best. We humans are different—our brains are built not to fix memories in stone but rather to transform them. Our recollections change in their retelling.

Still, I wondered if I should try to take notes. Without some kind of written record, would I remember these quiet, fleeting days? Nobel Prize–winning neuroscientist Eric Kandel says we are who we are because of what we learn and what we remember. Who am I, then, if my memory is impaired?

And how will I remember my mother after she is gone?

Some of my old memories feel trapped in amber in my brain, lucid and burning, while others are like the wing beat of a hummingbird, an intangible, ephemeral blur. But neuroscientists say that is how memory works—it is complex and mercurial, a subterranean world that changes each time we drag something up from below. Every sensation, thought, or event we recall physically changes the neuroconnections in our brain. And for someone who suffers from brain trauma, synapses get crossed, forcing their dendritic branches to wander aimlessly down the wrong road.

And yet, I can still walk into a museum and name almost everything on the wall. I can recall pictures I drew, even ones I made as a child. I remember artifacts from museums, fossils, masks, and bones. The part of my brain that stores art and all the things I loved to look at and draw is for the most part intact. Perhaps the visual part of my brain can help retrieve the events

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that are lost. If neuroscientific research suggests that the core meaning of a memory remains, even if its details have been lost or distorted, then if I find the right pictures, the pictures could lead me to the core.

In my mother’s room, while she slept and Natalia wrote, I took out one of my mother’s diaries, one from 1992. That year I had gone to Israel and brought back a bag of stones. One contained an ammonite, a fossilized nautilus shell. When I got home I poured water on it to see what it might have looked like centuries ago in the sea. I wondered how long it had been hidden in the earth, a rock shifting against rocks, rising up over time from primordial sediment. Isn’t that how memory works too? We look at something—a picture, a stone, a bird—and a memory surfaces, then that memory carries us to another, and another. Memory isn’t just mutable, it is associative. Thomas Aquinas once said, “One arrives at the color white through milk, to air from the color white, to dampness from air and on to Autumn.” How, then, would I arrive back at my own past?

“Myra?” my mother said, her eyes half shut.“Are you still here?”

I hid her journal inside the book in my lap.“I’m still here.”

“Where’s your sister?”

“She’s here too. She just stepped out for a second but she’ll be right back.”

“You won’t run away?”

“No,” I said.“I won’t run away.”

“Myra?”

“Yes?” “Would you do something for your old lady?”

“Anything.”

“Brush your hair. It’s really a mess.”

“I’ll do it right now.”

“Good. Because a girl has to put her best foot forward whenever she can.”

We left the hospital late that night. Most of the day had been quiet, just the sound of our mother’s slow breathing and the radio purring in the background. My sister got ready for bed while I pulled out one of the photo albums we’d brought back from U‑Haul, our baby book. “You coming?” she

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asked. She switched off her light and turned her masked face to the wall.

“Soon,” I said.“Good night.”

I held the photo album up to my nose. It smelled like my mother used to smell—cigarettes and Tabu, her favorite perfume—our sense of smell, the strongest memory trigger of all, the only sense that travels directly to the limbic system in our brain. I thought of my mother’s small white face in the hospital bed, her delicate, cold hands. Then another picture of her rose up in my mind, her hands hovering over mine at the piano—a younger Norma; my mother in the bloom of life, a dark-eyed beauty in a red silk dress, her face unreadable, listening to something no one else can hear.

I took out my mother’s last diary. Her final entry was a random list: Hyssop: plant used in bunches for purification rites by ancient Hebrews. Po River: Runs through Italy into Adriatic. Avert: to turn away or aside. Note: My white cane is missing. I dropped my sunglasses on the bus. Then farther down, these words: Chica—drink of Peru. Hecuba—wife of Priam. Baroque Palace—? What palace?

What did her last entry mean? A few pages back were little sketches she had made: a leaf, her hand, a shoe.

I thought of random pictures from my past—paintings from the Cleveland Museum of Art, objects from our grandparents’ house, things I liked to draw. What pictures did I remember? What could I create to contain them all? Was the answer in my mother’s very last page? Hadn’t she herself built a memory cabinet at U‑Haul to contain her beautiful, tragic, and transient life? Was there something I could build too?

A memory palace. A man named Matteo Ricci built one once. I read about him the year after my accident. Ricci, a Jesuit priest who possessed great mnemonic powers, traveled to China in 1596 and taught scholars how to build an imaginary palace to keep their memories safe. He told them that the size of the palace would depend on how much they wanted to remember. To everything they wanted to recall, they were to affix an image; to every image, a position inside a room in their mind. His idea went back to the Greek poet Simonides, who, one day while visiting friends at a palace, stepped outside for a minute to see who was at the door. As soon as he went outside, the great hall came crashing down. All the people inside were crushed to death and no one could recognize them. Simonides, however, remembered where every-

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one stood at the party, and recalled them one by one so their bodies could be identified.

My mind was full of so many pictures—with each one I could build a different room, each room could lead me to a memory, each memory to another. Since I knew what Ricci didn’t at the time, that memories cannot be fixed, my palace would always be changing. But the foundation would stay the same.

Ricci told the scholars that the place to put each picture must be spacious, the light even and clear, but not too bright. He said that the first image they should choose for their memory palace must arouse strong emotions. It was the entranceway, after all. I closed my eyes and opened a door. I turned to the right and there, in a reception room with high arched ceilings, I placed two pictures on opposite walls. The light was clear in the room, the space free of clutter.

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Tattoos on the Heart The Power of Boundless Compassion

Gregory Boyle

Free Press New York London Toronto Sydney

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1 God, I Guess

G

od can get tiny, if we’re not careful. I’m certain we all have an image of God that becomes the touchstone, the controlling principle, to which we return when we stray.

My touchstone image of God comes by way of my friend and spiritual director, Bill Cain, S.J. Years ago he took a break from his own ministry to care for his father as he died of cancer. His father had become a frail man, dependent on Bill to do everything for him. Though he was physically not what he had been, and the disease was wasting him away, his mind remained alert and lively.

In the role reversal common to adult children who care for their dying parents, Bill would put his father to bed and then read him to sleep, exactly as his father had done for him in childhood. Bill would read from some novel, and his father would lie there, staring at his son, smiling. Bill was exhausted from the day’s care and work and would plead with his dad, “Look, here’s the idea. I read to you, you fall asleep.” Bill’s father would impishly apologize and dutifully close his eyes. But this wouldn’t last long.

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Tattoos on the Heart Soon enough, Bill’s father would pop one eye open and smile at his son. Bill would catch him and whine, “Now, come on.” The father would, again, oblige, until he couldn’t anymore, and the other eye would open to catch a glimpse of his son. This went on and on, and after his father’s death, Bill knew that this evening ritual was really a story of a father who just couldn’t take his eyes off his kid. How much more so God? Anthony De Mello writes, “Behold the One beholding you, and smiling.”

God would seem to be too occupied in being unable to take Her eyes off of us to spend any time raising an eyebrow in disapproval. What’s true of Jesus is true for us, and so this voice breaks through the clouds and comes straight at us. “You are my Beloved, in whom I am wonderfully pleased.” There is not much “tiny” in that. *

*

*

In 1990 the television news program 60 Minutes came to Dolores Mission Church. One of its producers had read a Sunday Los Angeles Times Magazine article about my work with gang members in the housing projects. Mike Wallace, also seeing the piece, wanted to do a report. I was assured that I’d be getting “Good Mike.” These were the days when the running joke was “you know you’re going to have a bad day when Mike Wallace and a 60 Minutes film crew show up at your office.”

Wallace arrived at the poorest parish in Los Angeles in the stretchest of white limousines, stepped out of the car, wearing a flak jacket, covered with pockets, prepared, I suppose, for a journey into the jungle.

For all his initial insensitivity, toward the end of the visit,

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God, I Guess in a moment unrecorded, Wallace did say to me, “Can I admit something? I came here expecting monsters. But that’s not what I found.”

Later, in a recorded moment, we are sitting in a classroom filled with gang members, all students in our Dolores Mission Alternative School. Wallace points at me and says, “You won’t turn these guys in to the police.” Which seems quite silly to me at the time. I say something lame like, “I didn’t take my vows to the LAPD.” But then Wallace turns to a homie and grills him on this, saying over and over, “He won’t turn you in, will he?”

And then he asks the homie, “Why is that? Why do you think he won’t turn you over to the police?” The kid just stares at Mike Wallace, shrugs, nonplussed, and says, “God . . . I guess.”

This is a chapter on God, I guess. Truth be told, the whole book is. Not much in my life makes any sense outside of God. Certainly, a place like Homeboy Industries is all folly and bad business unless the core of the endeavor seeks to imitate the kind of God one ought to believe in. In the end, I am helpless to explain why anyone would accompany those on the margins were it not for some anchored belief that the Ground of all Being thought this was a good idea. *

*

*

Rascal is not one to take advice. He can be recalcitrant, defensive, and primed for the fight. Well into his thirties, he’s a survivor.

His truck gets filled with scrap metal and with this, somehow, he feeds his kids and manages to stay on this side of eviction. To his credit, he bid prison time and gang-banging good-bye a long time ago. Rascal sometimes hits me up for funds, and I oblige

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Tattoos on the Heart if I have it and if his attitude doesn’t foul my mood too much.

But you can’t tell him anything—except this one day, he actually listens. I am going on about something—can’t remember what but I can see he’s listening. When I’m done, he says simply, “You know, I’m gonna take that advice, and I’m gonna let it marinate,” pointing at his heart, “right here.”

Perhaps we should all marinate in the intimacy of God. Genesis, I suppose, got it right—“In the beginning, God.” Ignatius of Loyola, the founder of the Jesuits, also spoke about the task of marinating in the “God who is always greater.”

He writes, “Take care always to keep before your eyes, first, God.” The secret, of course, of the ministry of Jesus, was that God was at the center of it. Jesus chose to marinate in the God who is always greater than our tiny conception, the God who “loves without measure and without regret.” To anchor yourself in this, to keep always before your eyes this God is to choose to be intoxicated, marinated in the fullness of God. An Algerian Trappist, before his martyrdom, spoke to this fullness: “When you fill my heart, my eyes overflow.” *

*

*

Willy crept up on me from the driver’s side. I had just locked the office and was ready to head home at 8:00 p.m.

“Shit, Willy,” I say, “Don’t be doin’ that.” “ ’Spensa, G,” he says, “My bad. It’s just . . . well, my stomach’s on échale. Kick me down with twenty bones, yeah?”

“Dog, my wallet’s on échale,” I tell him. A “dog” is the one upon whom you can rely—the role-dog, the person who has

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God, I Guess your back. “But get in. Let’s see if I can trick any funds outta the ATM.” Willy hops on board. He is a life force of braggadocio and posturing—a thoroughly good soul—but his confidence is outsize, that of a lion wanting you to know he just swallowed a man whole. A gang member, but a peripheral one at best—he wants more to regale you with his exploits than to actually be in the midst of any. In his midtwenties, Willy is a charmer, a quintessential homie con man who’s apt to coax money out of your ATM if you let him. This night, I’m tired and I want to go home.

It’s easier not to resist. The Food 4 Less on Fourth and Soto has the closest ATM. I tell Willy to stay in the car, in case we run into one of Willy’s rivals inside.

“Stay here, dog,” I tell him, “I’ll be right back.”

I’m not ten feet away when I hear a muffled “Hey.” It’s Willy, and he’s miming, “the keys,” from the passenger seat of my car. He’s making over-the-top, key-in-the-ignition señales.

“The radio,” he mouths, as he holds a hand, cupping his ear.

I wag a finger, “No, chale.” Then it’s my turn to mime. I hold both my hands together and enunciate exaggeratedly, “Pray.”

Willy sighs and levitates his eyeballs. But he’s putty. He assumes the praying hands pose and looks heavenward—cara santucha. I proceed on my quest to the ATM but feel the need to check in on Willy only ten yards later.

I turn and find him still in the prayer position, seeming to be only half-aware that I’m looking in on him.

I return to the car, twenty dollars in hand, and get in. Something has happened here. Willy is quiet, reflective, and there is

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Tattoos on the Heart a palpable sense of peace in the vehicle. I look at Willy and say, “You prayed, didn’t you?”

He doesn’t look at me. He’s still and quiet. “Yeah, I did.”

I start the car.

“Well, what did God say to you?” I ask him.

“Well, first He said, ‘Shut up and listen.’”

“So what d’ya do?”

“Come on, G,” he says, “What am I sposed ta do? I shut up and listened.”

I begin to drive him home to the barrio. I’ve never seen Willy like this. He’s quiet and humble—no need to convince me of anything or talk me out of something else.

“So, son, tell me something,” I ask. “How do you see God?” “God?” he says, “That’s my dog right there.”

“And God?” I ask, “How does God see you?”

Willy doesn’t answer at first. So I turn and watch as he rests his head on the recliner, staring at the ceiling of my car. A tear falls down his cheek. Heart full, eyes overflowing. “God . . . thinks . . . I’m . . . firme.”

To the homies, firme means, “could not be one bit better.”

Not only does God think we’re firme, it is God’s joy to have us marinate in that. *

*

*

The poet Kabir asks, “What is God?” Then he answers his own question: “God is the breath inside the breath.”

Willy found his way inside the breath and it was firme.

I came late to this understanding in my own life—helped along by the grace-filled pedagogy of the people of Dolores

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God, I Guess Mission. I was brought up and educated to give assent to certain propositions. God is love, for example. You concede “God loves us,” and yet there is this lurking sense that perhaps you aren’t fully part of the “us.” The arms of God reach to embrace, and somehow you feel yourself just outside God’s fingertips.

Then you have no choice but to consider that “God loves me,” yet you spend much of your life unable to shake off what feels like God only embracing you begrudgingly and reluctantly. I suppose, if you insist, God has to love me too. Then who can explain this next moment, when the utter fullness of God rushes in on you—when you completely know the One in whom “you move and live and have your being,” as St. Paul writes. You see, then, that it has been God’s joy to love you all along. And this is completely new.

Every time one of the Jesuits at Dolores Mission would celebrate a birthday, the same ritual would repeat itself. “You know,” one of the other Jesuits would say to me, for example, “Your birthday is Wednesday. The people are throwing a ‘surprise party’ for you on the Saturday before.” The protests are as predictable as the festivities.

“Oh come on,” I’d say, “Can’t we pass this year?”

“Look,” one of my brothers would say to me, “This party is not for you—it’s for the people.”

And so I am led into the parish hall for some bogus meeting, and I can hear the people “shushing” one another—El Padre ya viene. As I step in the door, lights go on, people shout, mariachis strike themselves up. I am called upon to muster up the same award-winning look of shock from last year. They know that you know. They don’t care. They don’t just love you—it’s their joy to love you.

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Tattoos on the Heart The poet Rumi writes, “Find the real world, give it endlessly away, grow rich flinging gold to all who ask. Live at the empty heart of paradox. I’ll dance there with you—cheek to cheek.”

Dancing cumbias with the women of Dolores Mission rhymes with God’s own wild desire to dance with each one of us cheek to cheek.

Meister Eckhart says “God is greater than God.” The hope is that our sense of God will grow as expansive as our God is. Each tiny conception gets obliterated as we discover more and more the God who is always greater. *

*

*

At Camp Paige, a county detention facility near Glendora, I was getting to know fifteen-year-old Rigo, who was about to make his first communion. The Catholic volunteers had found him a white shirt and black tie. We still had some fifteen minutes before the other incarcerated youth would join us for Mass in the gym, and I’m asking Rigo the basic stuff about his family and his life. I ask about his father.

“Oh,” he says, “he’s a heroin addict and never really been in my life. Used to always beat my ass. Fact, he’s in prison right now.

Barely ever lived with us.”

Then something kind of snaps in him—an image brings him to attention.

“I think I was in the fourth grade,” he begins. “I came home.

Sent home in the middle of the day. Got into some pedo at school.

Can’t remember what. When I got home, my jefito was there. He was hardly ever there. My dad says, ‘Why they send you home?’

And cuz my dad always beat me, I said, ‘If I tell you, promise

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God, I Guess you won’t hit me?’ He just said, ‘I’m your father. ’Course I’m not gonna hit you.’ So I told him.”

Rigo is caught short in the telling. He begins to cry, and in moments he’s wailing and rocking back and forth. I put my arm around him. He is inconsolable. When he is able to speak and barely so, he says only, “He beat me with a pipe . . . with . . . a pipe.”

When Rigo composes himself, I ask, “And your mom?” He points some distance from where we are to a tiny woman standing by the gym’s entrance.

“That’s her over there.” He pauses for a beat, “There’s no one like her.” Again, some slide appears in his mind, and a thought occurs.

“I’ve been locked up for more than a year and a half. She comes to see me every Sunday. You know how many buses she takes every Sunday—to see my sorry ass?”

Then quite unexpectedly he sobs with the same ferocity as before. Again, it takes him some time to reclaim breath and an ability to speak. Then he does, gasping through his tears. “Seven buses. She takes . . . seven . . . buses. Imagine.”

How, then, to imagine, the expansive heart of this God— greater than God—who takes seven buses, just to arrive at us. We settle sometimes for less than intimacy with God when all God longs for is this solidarity with us. In Spanish, when you speak of your great friend, you describe the union and kinship as being de uña y mugre—our friendship is like the fingernail and the dirt under it. Our image of who God is and what’s on God’s mind is more tiny than it is troubled. It trips more on our puny sense of God than over conflicting creedal statements or theological considerations.

The desire of God’s heart is immeasurably larger than our

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Tattoos on the Heart imaginations can conjure. This longing of God’s to give us peace and assurance and a sense of well-being only awaits our willingness to cooperate with God’s limitless magnanimity. *

*

*

“Behold the One beholding you and smiling.” It is precisely because we have such an overactive disapproval gland ourselves that we tend to create God in our own image. It is truly hard for us to see the truth that disapproval does not seem to be part of God’s DNA. God is just too busy loving us to have any time left for disappointment. *

*

*

One day I receive a phone call in my office around three in the afternoon. It’s from a twenty-five-year-old homie named Cesar.

I have known him for most of his life. I can remember first meeting him when he was a little kid in Pico Gardens during the earthquake of 1987 when the projects had become a tent city. People lived outside in carpas well past the time of any danger. Cesar was one of the many kids seeking reassurance from me.

“Are we gonna be okay? Is this the end of the world?”

I spent every evening of those two weeks walking the tents, and I always associate Cesar with that period.

He’s calling me today because he has just finished a four-year stint in prison. Turned out, earthquakes were the least of Cesar’s troubles. He had joined the local gang, since there wasn’t anyone around to “chase his ass” and rein him in. At this point in his life, Cesar had been locked up more often than not. Cesar and I chit-

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God, I Guess chat on the phone, dispatching the niceties in short order—“It’s good to be out—I’d love to see ya”—then Cesar says, “Let me just cut to the cheese.”

This was not a spin I had heard on this expression before.

“You know, I just got outta the pinta and don’t really have a place to stay. Right now, I’m staying with a friend in his apartment—here in El Monte—away from the projects and the hood and the homies. Y sabes qué, I don’t got no clothes. My lady she left me, and she burned all my clothes, you know, in some anger toward me, I guess.”

I’m waiting for him to cut to the cheese.

“So I don’t got no clothes,” he says. “Can you help me?”

“Sure, son,” I say, “Look, it’s three now. I’ll pick you up after work, at six o’clock.”

I drive to the apartment at the appointed hour, and I’m surprised to see Cesar standing on the sidewalk waiting for me— I’m used to searching for homies when asked to retrieve them. I guess you might say that Cesar is a scary-looking guy. It’s not just the fact that he’s large and especially, fresh out of prison, newly “swole” from lifting weights. He exudes menace. So there he is, standing and waiting for me. When he sees it’s me, this huge excon does this bouncing up and down, yippy-skippy, happy-to-seeya, hand-clapping gleeful jig.

He flies into my car and throws his arms around me. “When I saw you right now, G, I got aaaallllll happy!”

There was some essence to him that hadn’t changed from that child wanting to know that the world was safe from earthquakes.

We go to JCPenney, and I tell him he can buy two hundred dollars’ worth of clothes. In no time, his arms are filled with the essentials, and we both are standing in a considerable line to pay

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Tattoos on the Heart for it all. All the other customers are staring at Cesar. Not only is he menacing, but he seems to have lost his volume knob. People can’t help but turn and look, though they all take great pains to pretend they’re not listening.

“Hey,” he says, in what you might call a loud-ass voice, “See dat couple over there?”

I am not the only one turning and looking. The entire checkout line shifts. Cesar points to a young couple with a tiny son.

“Well, I walk up to that guy and I look at him and I say, ‘Hey, don’t I know you?’ And his ruca grabs the morrito and holds him and shakes her head and says, ‘NO, WE DON’T KNOW YOU!’ all panickeada así. Then the vato looks at me like he’s gonna have a damn paro cardiaco, and he shakes his head, ‘NO, I DON’T KNOW YOU.’ Then I look at him more closer, and I say, ‘Oh, my bad, I thought you were somebody else.’ And they get aaaaallllll relaxed when I say that.” He takes a breath. “I mean, damn, G . . . do I look that scary?”

I shake my head no and say, “Yeah, pretty much, dog.”

The customers can’t help themselves, and we all laugh.

I drop Cesar off at his friend’s apartment. He becomes quiet and vulnerable, as frightened as a child displaced by shifting ground.

“I just don’t want to go back. La neta, I’m scared.”

“Look, son,” I say to him, “Who’s got a better heart than you?

And God is at the center of that great, big ol’ heart. Hang on to that, dog—cuz you have what the world wants. So, what can go wrong?”

We say our good-byes, and as I watch him walk away alone, I find his gentleness and disarming sweet soul a kind of elixir, soothing my own doubts and calling me to fearlessness.

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God, I Guess At three o’clock in the morning, the phone rings. It’s Cesar.

He says what every homie says when they call in the middle of the night, “Did I wake you?”

I always think Why no, I was just waiting and hoping that you’d call.

Cesar is sober, and it’s urgent that he talk to me.

“I gotta ask you a question. You know how I’ve always seen you as my father—ever since I was a little kid? Well, I hafta ask you a question.”

Now Cesar pauses, and the gravity of it all makes his voice waver and crumble, “Have I . . . been . . . your son?”

“Oh, hell, yeah,” I say.

“Whew,” Cesar exhales, “I thought so.”

Now his voice becomes enmeshed in a cadence of gentle sobbing. “Then . . . I will be . . . your son. And you . . . will be my father. And nothing will separate us, right?”

“That’s right.”

In this early morning call Cesar did not discover that he has a father. He discovered that he is a son worth having. The voice broke through the clouds of his terror and the crippling mess of his own history, and he felt himself beloved. God, wonderfully pleased in him, is where God wanted Cesar to reside.

Jesus, in Matthew’s gospel, says, “How narrow is the gate that leads to life.” Mistakenly, I think, we’ve come to believe that this is about restriction. The way is narrow. But it really wants us to see that narrowness is the way.

St. Hedwig writes, “All is narrow for me, I feel so vast.” It’s about funneling ourselves into a central place. Our choice is not to focus on the narrow, but to narrow our focus. The gate that leads to life is not about restriction at all. It is about an entry

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Tattoos on the Heart into the expansive. There is a vastness in knowing you’re a son/ daughter worth having. We see our plentitude in God’s own expansive view of us, and we marinate in this. *

*

*

In March of 2004, Scrappy walks into our office and, I’m not proud to admit it, my heart sinks. From the perch of my own glass-enclosed office, I can see Scrappy talking to Marcos, the receptionist, who is also from Scrappy’s gang. He is apparently signing up to see me. I haven’t seen Scrappy in ten years, since he’s been incarcerated all that time, but even before that, I’m not sure if he’s ever set foot in my office. My heart is in some lower register. Let’s just say Scrappy and I have never been on good terms. I first met him in the summer of 1984. I was newly ordained at Dolores Mission. He was fifteen years old, and his probation officer assigned him to the church to complete his hours of community service. The chip located on his shoulder was the size of a Pontiac. “I don’t have to listen to you.” “I don’t have to do what you say.”

Some five years later, I am standing in front of a packed church, preaching at the funeral of one of Scrappy’s homeboys.

“If you love Cuko and want to honor his memory,” I say to the congregation, “then you will work for peace and love your enemies.” Immediately, Scrappy stands up and moves out of his pew and into the center aisle. All eyes are on him. I stop speaking. The eternal scowl I had come to know in that summer of 1984 is fixed on me as he walks straight ahead. We stand face-to-face, he maddogs me with some intensity, then turns and exits the church by the side door.

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God, I Guess Three years later, I’m riding my bike, as I would in those days, “patrolling” the projects at night. I enter Scrappy’s barrio, and there is a commotion. The homies have formed a circle and clearly two of their rank are “goin’ head up.” I break through the mob and, indeed, find Scrappy throwing down with one of his own homies. I discover later that the beef was over some jaina (girl). I stop the fight, and Scrappy reaches into the front waist of his pants and pulls out a gun that he waves around wildly. The crowd seems to be more horrified than I am. There are great gasps and pleas, “Hey, dog, damn, put the gun away.”

“Don’t disrespect G.” Scrappy steadies the gun right at me and grunts a half laugh, “Shiiittt, I’ll shoot his ass too.”

Are you getting a sense of what our relationship was like?

So years later when I see him enter my office, it takes me a moment, but I locate my heart, hiding in Filene’s basement, and Marcos intercoms me: “Scrappy’s here.” Then his voice gets squeaky and tentative. “Ya wanna see him?” Marcos knew enough that this would be in some doubt. “’Course, send him in.”

Scrappy is not a large fellow, but there is no fat in his midsize build. His hair is slicked back and his moustache is understated.

He hugs me only because not to would be too awkward. We have, after all, known each other for twenty years.

He sits and wastes no time.

“Look, let’s just be honest with each other and talk man to man. You know that I’ve never disrespected you.”

I figure, why not, I’m gonna go for it.

“Well, how ’bout the time you walked out on my homily at Cuko’s funeral? . . . or the time you pulled a cuete out on me?”

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Tattoos on the Heart Scrappy looks genuinely perplexed by what I’ve just said and cocks and scrunches his face like a confused beagle.

“Yeah, well . . . besides that,” he says.

Then we do something we never have in our two decades of knowing each other. We laugh. But really, truly laugh— head-resting-on-my-desk laughter. We carry on until this runs its course, and then Scrappy settles into the core of his being, beyond the bravado of his chingón status in his gang.

“I have spent the last twenty years building a reputation for myself . . . and now . . . I regret . . . that I even have one.”

And then in another first, he cries. But really, truly cries. He is doubled over, and the rocking seems to soothe the release of this great ache. When the wailing stops and he comes up for air, he daubs his eyes and runs his sleeve across his nose. He finally makes eye contact.

“Now what do I do? I know how to sell drugs. I know how to gangbang. I know how to shank fools in prison. I don’t know how to change the oil in my car. I know how to drive, but I don’t know how to park. And I don’t know how to wash my clothes except in the sink of a cell.”

I hire him that day, and he begins work the next morning on our graffiti crew.

Scrappy discovered, as Scripture has it, “that where he is standing is holy ground.” He found the narrow gate that leads to life. God’s voice was not of restriction, to “shape up or ship out.”

Scrappy found himself in the center of vastness and right in the expansive heart of God. The sacred place toward which God had nudged Scrappy all his life is not to be arrived at, but discovered.

Scrappy did not knock on the door so God would notice him.

No need for doors at all. Scrappy was already inside.

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God, I Guess *

*

*

God seems to be an unwilling participant in our efforts to pigeonhole Him. The minute we think we’ve arrived at the most expansive sense of who God is, “this Great, Wild God,” as the poet Hafez writes, breaks through the claustrophobia of our own articulation, and things get large again. Richard Rohr writes in Everything Belongs that nothing of our humanity is to be discarded. God’s unwieldy love, which cannot be contained by our words, wants to accept all that we are and sees our humanity as the privileged place to encounter this magnanimous love.

No part of our hardwiring or our messy selves is to be disparaged. Where we stand, in all our mistakes and imperfection, is holy ground. It is where God has chosen to be intimate with us and not in any way but this. Scrappy’s moment of truth was not in recognizing what a disappointment he’s been all these years.

It came in realizing that God had been beholding him and smiling for all this time, unable to look anywhere else. It is certainly true that you can’t judge a book by its cover, nor can you judge a book by its first chapter—even if that chapter is twenty years long. When the vastness of God meets the restriction of our own humanity, words can’t hold it. The best we can do is find the moments that rhyme with this expansive heart of God. Shortly after I was ordained, I spent a year in Cochabamba, Bolivia. It was a gracious time that changed me forever. My Spanish was quite poor, and the year was to be filled with language study and ministry. I could celebrate the Eucharist in Spanish (after a summer at Dolores Mission), but I was a slave to the missal for some time to come. Early on, I began to minister to a community named Temporal, which had been without a priest for

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Tattoos on the Heart a long time. A few weeks into my time there, I was approached by a group of health workers who asked me to celebrate Mass in Tirani. This was a Quechua community located high above Cochabamba, whose indigenous folks harvested flowers for market. It was common to see campesinos making the long trek from Tirani with a huge weight of flowers tied to their backs. Like beasts of burden, they were doubled over all the way to town.

The health workers explain that the Quechua Indians in Tirani have not seen a priest in a decade, so they ask me to celebrate the Mass in Spanish, and one of the workers would preach in Quechua. (Everyone there speaks Quechua, with only the men able to defend themselves in Spanish.) The workers pick me up at the bottom of the hill at one o’clock on a Sunday afternoon. I hop into the back of the open-air truck with the others, and we climb to the top of the mountain. Midtrek, I decide to do an inventory of the contents of my backpack. I have brought everything I need but a missalette. I have not the words. At this point in my early priesthood, I couldn’t wing Mass in English.

The thought of doing so in Spanish was preposterous. I do have a Spanish Bible, so I frantically flip through the pages, trying to find any passages that sound like the words of consecration.

“Take this and eat.”

I locate any part of the New Testament that has Jesus kicking it at a table and eating. Soon, my body is introducing me to the marvels of flop sweat—and I haven’t even arrived at Tirani yet. I am red in the face and stingy hot.

We pull into a huge, open-air landing, a field cleared of all crops, and many hundreds of Quechua Indians have gathered and set themselves down around this table, our altar. I hobble and fake my way through the liturgy of the Word, aided by the

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God, I Guess health workers, who read everything in Quechua. After the gentleman preaches, it is my turn to carry the ball. I’m like someone who’s been in a major car accident. I can’t remember a thing.

I know only that I have a crib sheet with some notes I have made, with stolen scriptural quotations, all the while lifting the bread and wine whenever I run out of things to say. It would be hard to imagine this Mass going worse.

When it is over, I am left spent and humiliated. I am wandering adrift, trying to gather my shattered self back together again, when a female health worker walks an ancient Quechua woman up to me.

“She hasn’t gone to confession in ten years.”

She leaves her with me, and the viejita unloads a decade’s worth of sins in a singsongy and rapid-fire Quechua. I just nod like a menso waiting for a pause that might indicate she’s finished.

The woman’s got some pulmones on her and doesn’t seem to need to take a breath. She goes on for about a half hour. Finally she does stop, and I manage to communicate some penance and give her my memorized absolution. She walks away, and I turn to discover that I have been abandoned. The field where we celebrated Mass has been vacated. Inexplicably, even the truck and the health workers are gone. I am alone at the top of this mountain, stuck, not only without a ride, but in stultifying humiliation.

I am convinced that a worse priest has never visited this place or walked this earth.

With my backpack snug on my shoulder and spirit deflated, I begin to make the long walk down the mountain and back to town. But before I leave the makeshift soccer field that had been our cathedral, an old Quechua campesino, seemingly out of nowhere, makes his way to me. He appears ancient, but I suspect

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Tattoos on the Heart his body has been weathered by work and the burden of an Indian’s life. As he nears me, I see he is wearing tethered wool pants, with a white buttoned shirt, greatly frayed at the collar. He has a rope for a belt. His suit coat is coarse and worn. He has a fedora, toughened by the years. He is wearing huaraches, and his feet are caked with Bolivian mud. Any place that a human face can have wrinkles and creases, he has them. He is at least a foot shorter than I am, and he stands right in front of me and says, “Tatai.”

This is Quechua for Padrecito, a word packed with cariño, affection, and a charming intimacy. He looks up at me, with penetrating, weary eyes and says, “Tatai, gracias por haber venido” (Thanks for coming).

I think of something to say, but nothing comes to me. Which is just as well, because before I can speak, the old campesino reaches into the pockets of his suit coat and retrieves two fistfuls of multicolored rose petals. He’s on the tips of his toes and gestures that I might assist with the inclination of my head. And so he drops the petals over my head, and I’m without words. He digs into his pockets again and manages two more fistfuls of petals. He does this again and again, and the store of red, pink, and yellow rose petals seems infinite. I just stand there and let him do this, staring at my own huaraches, now moistened with my tears, covered with rose petals. Finally, he takes his leave and I’m left there, alone, with only the bright aroma of roses.

For all the many times I would return to Tirani and see the same villagers, over and over, I never saw this old campesino again.

God, I guess, is more expansive than every image we think rhymes with God. How much greater is the God we have than the one we think we have. More than anything else, the truth

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God, I Guess of God seems to be about a joy that is a foreigner to disappointment and disapproval. This joy just doesn’t know what we’re talking about when we focus on the restriction of not measuring up. This joy, God’s joy, is like a bunch of women lined up in the parish hall on your birthday, wanting only to dance with you—cheek to cheek. “First things, recognizably first,” as Daniel Berrigan says. The God, who is greater than God, has only one thing on Her mind, and that is to drop, endlessly, rose petals on our heads. Behold the One who can’t take His eyes off of you.

Marinate in the vastness of that.

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THE STORY OF

STUFF THE STORY OF

STUFF STUFF THE STORY OF

Annie Leonard

Annie Annie Leonard Leonard

Host of the Internet film sensation The Story of Stuff

of the Internet film sensation HostHost of the Internet film sensation with Ariane Conrad The Story of Stuff

The Story of Stuff

FREE PRESS New York London Toronto Sydney

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extrACtIon In order to make all the stuff in our lives, we first need to get the ingredients. now, some of these don’t occur naturally—the man-made synthetic compounds—and we’ll cover them too. however, many ingredients for our stuff exist inside the earth or on its surface. they only need to be harvested or extracted . . . only!

Once we start examining them, we soon find that each key ingredient requires a lot of other ingredients just to get it out of the earth, processed, and ready for use. In the case of paper, for example, we don’t just need trees.

We need metals to make the chainsaws and logging machines; trucks, trains, and even ships to cart the logs to processing plants; and oil to run all those machines and the plants themselves. We need water (a lot of it) for making the paper pulp. We usually need a chemical like bleach (no!) or hydrogen peroxide (better) to get a desirably light shade of paper. All in all, making one ton of paper requires the use of 98 tons of various other resources.1 And believe me when I say that’s a pretty simple example. That’s why we have to look at the whole materials economy, and often a map of the world, to get a clear picture of the ingredients that go into any one product on store shelves these days.

There are lots of ways to think about the various resources that come from the earth.

For simplicity’s sake I’ll use just three categories: trees, rocks, and water.

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THE STORY OF STUFF

Trees As I said in the introduction, having grown up in Seattle, a green city in an even greener state, I love trees. Half of the land area in Washington State is covered in forests,2 and I visited them every chance I had. Over the course of my childhood I watched in dismay as more and more forests gave way to roads and malls and houses.

As I grew older, I learned that there are more than sentimental reasons to worry about the fate of our trees. Trees create oxygen, which—may I remind us—we need to breathe. That alone would seem sufficient motivation for us to keep them intact. As the lungs of the planet, forests work around the clock to remove carbon dioxide from the air (a process called carbon sequestration) and give us oxygen in return. These days scientists concerned about climate change research all sorts of elaborate, expensive, man-made schemes to sequester carbon from the atmosphere in hopes of moderating climate change. Seems like a waste if you ask me. We already have a natural system that not only sequesters carbon but also provides the exact kind of air we need to breathe: our trees. And their services are free! It doesn’t get much better than that.

And there’s more—forests provide other vital services. They collect and filter our fresh water, maintaining the planet’s overall hydrologic cycle and moderating floods and droughts. They maintain soil health by keeping the nutrient-rich topsoil in place. What are we thinking, destroying these obvious allies?

To name just one more reason that it’s a terrible idea to cut down forests: one-quarter of all our prescription drugs are derived from forests—rainforests in particular.3 Curare, an anesthetic and muscle relaxant used in surgery 4 ; ipecac, for treating dysentery 5 ; and quinine, for malaria 6 are just a few examples. Not long ago, western chemists were turned on to a plant native to the tropical forests of Madagascar, the rosy periwinkle, after learn2

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EXTRACTION

ing that the island’s healers used it to treat diabetes. It turns out the pinkflowering plant has anticancer properties, and is now used to make the medicines vincristine and vinblastine. The former is used to treat Hodgkin’s disease, and the latter has proven to be a total wonder drug for those suffering from childhood leukemia, who now have a 95 percent chance of survival, up from their previous slim 10 percent chance before the plant was discovered.7 (Unfortunately, even though sales of the two drugs are in the hundreds of millions of dollars per year, almost none of this money winds up in the hands of the people in Madagascar, which is one of the poorest countries in the world.8 This will be a recurring theme.)

It’s nuts to be wiping out forests anywhere on the globe, but it’s especially crazy to be clearing the tropical rainforests because they contain such richness of biodiversity. Generally, the closer forests are to the equator, the greater the diversity of trees and other species they contain. A twenty-fiveacre plot of rainforest in Borneo, for instance, can contain more than seven hundred species of trees, which is equal to the total number of tree species in all of North America.9 And the plants and other life we’ve discovered so far are just the beginning; most scientists estimate that only 1 percent of the species that exist in the rainforest (and only there) have been identified and examined for their beneficial properties.10 If the loss wasn’t so tragic, it would be ironic that these invaluable repositories of not-yet-discovered useful chemicals are being cleared in the name of “progress” and “development.” It seems to me a far wiser development strategy would be protecting these forests that will potentially heal our ills (as well as provide the air we breathe, clean our waters, and moderate our climate).

When I was kid savoring my time camping out in the forest, I hadn’t ever heard of carbon sequestration, hydrologic cycles, or plant-derived pharmaceuticals. Instead, one big reason I loved forests was the many animals that lived in them. Forests provide homes for about two-thirds of the species on earth 11—from koala bears, monkeys, and leopards to butterflies, lizards, parrots, you name it. Cutting down these homes, especially in areas of rich biodiversity like tropical rainforests, leads to the extinction of as many as one hundred species a day.12 One hundred species per day? For some perspective, think of all the dogs you’ve ever seen; worldwide, they make up fewer than ten species (genus Canis).13 And there’s only one species of human! Losing one hundred species a day is a big 3

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deal. Those species could contain miracle medicines or could play some vital irreplaceable role in the food chain. Wiping them out is like throwing out our lottery ticket before we have even checked if we had the winning number.

Imagine for a minute that some other species (maybe Periplaneta fuliginosa, aka the smokybrown cockroach) had control over the planet and was eradicating one hundred species per day to satisfy their appetites. What would we say about them? We might think their actions were a little unfair.

What would we do about them? Lead an insurrection? Of course, we might not have a chance—from one day to the next we could just be extinguished, along with ninety-nine other lesser species.

And trees don’t just house wildlife—around the world about 300 million people live in forests, while about 60 million indigenous people are almost wholly dependent on them.14 Forests are the main source of life for more than a billion people living in extreme poverty.15 Forests provide the “four F’s” essential for survival: food, fodder, fiber, and fuel. From healthy forests, indigenous, tribal, or other forest-dwelling communities gather or hunt for food, feed livestock, obtain materials to build homes, and collect firewood for cooking and heat.

As I was growing up in Seattle, my primary relationship with forests was based on a fifth F: fun. I relied on the forests for hiking, camping, birding, and cross-country skiing, not for building materials. If I needed a snack, I’d head for the fridge, not the forest. Even after studying the issue, my understanding of the connection between forests and immediate survival was academic, not experiential. It wasn’t until I went overseas that I realized how directly forests sustain life in other countries.

While traveling in the once lush Haitian countryside, I met families who had lost their homes after forests were cleared. After the destruction of the roots that held the soil in place and moderated water flows following a heavy rain, mudslides took the homes of those families. No forests, no flood control. In India, I saw women walking miles a day to collect branches to feed cows, patch roofs, or cook rice. No forests, no fodder, fiber, or fuel.

Forests are essential to life. The values of all these kinds of services dwarf the price of timber from a felled forest.

In fact, economists are working to calculate the monetary benefits that forests produce. In October 2008, the European Union undertook a study to put a dollar value on the forest services that we’re losing through deforestation each year. This study, published in The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity report, warns that the cost to the global economy from the 4

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loss of forests is far greater than the economic losses incurred up to that point in the banking crisis that garnered so much media attention and government action that year. Further, the report points out, the losses from deforestation aren’t a one-time fiasco, but continuous, year after year.16 By evaluating the many services that forests perform and figuring out how much it would cost for humans to adapt to their losses and provide these services themselves, the study calculated the cost of forest loss at between $2 trillion and $5 trillion, or about 7 percent of global GDP each year.17 Now, if that doesn’t merit a bailout on both economic and environmental grounds, I am not sure what does.

Despite the implications, even though they provide frames for our houses and our lifesaving medicines, even though they filter our water and create the air we breathe, we’re still cutting down forests at breakneck speed. Globally, we’ve been losing more than 7 million hectares a year, or 20,000 hectares—almost 50,000 acres— a day.18 This is equivalent to an area twice the size of Paris each day, or about thirty-three football fields’ worth every minute.19 According to Rainforest Action Network, fifty thousand species of trees go extinct every year.20 Rates of forest loss are especially high in Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean, and much of Asia. According to reports, the exceptions are China and India, where large investments in forest plantations skew the data to hide the ongoing rates of loss of natural forests.21 However, industrial timber plantations are very different from real forests. The goal of a plantation is to produce wood products, with little or no regard to the many other services, resources, and habitat that real forests provide. To this end, they are generally intensely managed, evenly spaced, monoculture fields of imported species with the highest wood yields. Such plantations simply don’t hold a candle to the real thing in terms of biological diversity, resistance to disease, or provision of the many other nontimber forest products that people and animals depend on for survival. Tree plantations can generally only sustain 10 percent of the species that lived in the forests that preceded them 22 and are best described as “green deserts.” They also provide relatively few jobs, increase the use of pesticides, and negatively impact local water cycles.23 So scientists, climatologists, and economists—not to mention all the animals and other people—concur that we need real nonplantation forests.

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Yet we continue to cut those down—not only in the biodiversity hot spots in the tropics, but also right here at home, in the temperate forests of the Pacific Northwest.

I got to see this firsthand during the summer of 1980, when I spent more time in the forests than out of them. It was the summer after tenth grade, and I signed up to work for the Youth Conservation Corps, or YCC. The YCC was a federal program, established a decade earlier to get kids out of the city, in some cases off of the street, and into the woods for a summer of service and learning. We worked hard, learned about natural systems, and earned a modest salary as well as a sense of purpose. It was my first experience with what my colleague Van Jones would later call “green-collar jobs.”

My YCC site was in the North Cascades National Park in Washington State, a breathtakingly gorgeous region with terrain ranging from alpine peaks and glaciers dotted with crystal blue lakes that literally sparkled in the sun to lowland forests, from mossy dark green water-soaked temperate rainforests to dry ponderosa pine ecosystems. Even for a forest connoisseur like me, this was truly a special place.

Jack Kerouac, who spent a summer there about twenty years before I did, does justice to the area in The Dharma Bums: “It was a river wonderland, the emptiness of the golden eternity, odors of moss and bark and twigs and mud, all ululating mysterious visionstuff before my eyes, tranquil and everlasting nonetheless, the hillhairing trees, the dancing sunlight ​. . . ​ The pine boughs looked satisfied washing in the waters. The top trees shrouded in gray fog looked content. The jiggling sunshine leaves of Northwest breeze seemed bred to rejoice. The upper snows on the horizon, the trackless, seemed cradled and warm. Everything was everlastingly loose and responsive, it was all everywhere beyond the truth, beyond emptyspace blue.” 24 Amidst this incredible natural beauty, my new YCC friends and I spent our days clearing fallen tree limbs from hiking trails, burying campfire remnants from careless campers, tending to the local salmon hatchery, and learning about the forest ecosystem from college students whose expertise and worldliness awed me. The program worked—at least for me it did.

I entered that summer loving forests because of the way I felt in them: secure, grounded, humbled in the presence of something that seemed divine. I ended the summer realizing that our rivers, the fish, and the planet as we know it depended on forests. I left with a solid commitment to protect them.

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That summer, I saw my first clear-cuts up close. “Clear-cutting” is the term for aggressive logging that removes all the trees in an area. All the roots, all the wildflowers, all the life. The ground is shaved clean like the head of a prison inmate, so nothing but scattered stumps and drying brown brush remains. I’ve heard clear-cut sites compared to ravaged, pockmarked bomb sites like Baghdad. That’s an apt description. Previously, I’d see them from the windows of a plane or just driving past, getting away as fast as we could. But that summer, we hiked in them to see how different they felt from a forest. We sampled water in the creeks that ran below them, to see the changes in temperature, oxygen, and aquatic life. It was shocking to me to see how far the damage spread, far beyond the scorched boundaries of the cut.

In contrast to forests, which act like giant sponges that hold water in their leaves and trunks and among their roots, regulating its flow into streams and rivers, clear-cut areas don’t hold soil and don’t absorb water.

During heavy rains, water just runs off clear-cut hills, causing mudslides, flooding, and erosion. Waterlogged earth comes down in landslides, clogging waterways and burying communities. Downstream, the water and mud destroys property and sometimes injures or kills people. In some cases, millions of dollars of government money is required to repair the damage. In other places, the people just bear the cost themselves, sometimes losing everything they have. And of course the damage impacts the entire delicate web of life dependent on forests: the fungi that grow in the roots of trees feed small mammals, which feed birds like owls and hawks, and so on.

For me, that summer in the North Cascades gave new meaning to something that early wilderness advocate John Muir once said: “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.” 25 I had heard that quote previously but had thought it referred to metaphorical connections. In fact, he meant it literally—the whole planet is, in fact, connected. The forests to the rivers to the ocean to the cities to our food to us.

The clear-cuts brought to mind the traditional folk hero image of a lumberjack: a smiling bearded guy wearing blue jeans and a plaid flannel shirt and holding an axe. His picture adorned local diners and bottles of maple syrup. If logging ever was like that, it sure isn’t anymore. Nearly all the flannel-clad guys with axes have long since been replaced with huge belching machinery: massive bulldozers, cranes, gigantic pincher things that pick up the logs in their huge metal claws to pile them on huge trucks. And 7

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while machines have taken the place of many human workers, they haven’t removed the risks for those workers who remain. Falling trees, heavy machinery, rough terrain, and weather all contribute to the International Labour Organization identifying logging as one of the three most dangerous occupations in most countries.26 And for what? There must be some darn good reasons why we are we undermining our planet’s health, destroying potentially valuable medicines, driving plants and animals to extinction, eliminating a much needed carbon storage sink, and harming loggers.

Right?

A whole lot of forests get cut down to make way for cattle ranches, soy fields, and other agricultural products. Ironically, a short-sighted quest for plant-based alternatives to fossil fuels, called biofuels, is now a major driver of deforestation around the world as forests are cleared to grow palm and other oil crops. “Biofuels are rapidly becoming the main cause of deforestation in countries like Indonesia, Malaysia, and Brazil,” says Simone Lovera, who works in Paraguay with the international environmental organization Global Forest Coalition. “We call it ‘deforestation diesel.’ ” 27 Forests are also cleared to make way for sprawl and so‑called development. Trees are taken for lumber that goes to build homes and furniture.

In many places in the world, millions of people depend on wood for heating and cooking. But excluding the trees used for fuel, the number-one thing made from trees is paper. Seemingly simple paper, then, is the main nonfuel product of deforestation. That doesn’t just mean newspapers, magazines, posters, books, and Lands’ End catalogs. There are about five thousand other kinds of products made with paper,28 including money, board games, microwave packaging, and even the inserts of fancy running shoes.

In the United States, we’re consuming more than 80 million tons of paper per year.29 For our books alone, a 2008 report calculated the amount of paper consumed in the United States in 2006 as 1.6 million metric tons, or about 30 million trees.30 For every ton of virgin office or copier paper, 2 to 3 tons of trees were cut down in some forest somewhere.31 And there’s no end in sight. Globally, paper consumption has increased sixfold in the last fifty years 32 and is projected to keep rising, with the United States leading the way. A typical office worker in the United States now uses more than ten thousand sheets of paper a year 33; together we Americans use enough paper each year to build a ten-foot-high wall from New York City all the way to Tokyo.34 8

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While there is a growing movement to make new paper from recycled or sustainably managed sources, most of the world’s paper supply, about 71 percent, still comes from forests, not tree farms or the recycling bin.35 The current trajectory of forest loss is bleak, but there are opportunities to turn things around. Over the past generation, paper recycling has increased at both ends: more discarded paper is being recovered for recycling, and more companies are using recycled paper. We’re closer to closing the loop and producing paper from paper, not from trees. The Environmental Paper Network (EPN) is a coalition of dozens of groups using market-based strategies to promote paper production from postconsumer recycled paper, agricultural waste, alternative fibers, or sustainably certified trees rather than virgin forests. Their members engage internationally in activities as varied as dialoguing with corporate CEOs and organizing large protests at stores and industry trade shows.36 One EPN member, ForestEthics, has been especially successful at getting highprofile companies—including Office Depot, Staples, and Home Depot—to source sustainable wood and recycled paper. They have also targeted highvolume catalog offenders, most notably Victoria’s Secret, to increase the use of recycled stock in their catalogs. Now they’re upping the ante by campaigning to establish a national Do Not Mail Registry, like the Do Not Call Registry, to stop the incessant flow of junk mail to our homes. According to ForestEthics, more than 100 billion pieces of junk mail are delivered to U.S. households annually—more than eight hundred pieces per household— almost half of which (44 percent) is thrown away before being opened.37 This consumes more than 100 million trees, equivalent to clear-cutting the entire Rocky Mountain National Park every four months.38 The thing is, we don’t just use a lot of paper; we also waste a lot of paper.

Almost 40 percent of the Stuff in U.S. municipal garbage is paper,39 all of which is recyclable or compostable if it hasn’t been treated with too many toxic chemicals. By simply recycling, rather than trashing, all this paper, we would reduce the pressure to cut more forests for our next ream. (We’d also reduce our garbage by 40 percent.) Of course, preventing the use of paper in the first place, as in the case with junk mail and catalogs, is even better than recycling.

Also, there are ways to harvest trees from forests without decimating the ecosystem and the communities that depend upon them. These environmentally preferable timber practices limit the intensity of timber harvest, reduce chemical use, maintain soil health, and protect wildlife and biodiversity. The potentially lower short-term profitability of implementing 9

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these practices, as opposed to clear-cutting the whole landscape, is far outweighed by long-term environmental and social benefits.

One attempt to track and certify forests that adhere to these higher environmental standards is the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC), which is active in forty-five countries. Over the past thirteen years, more than 90 million hectares around the world have been certified according to FSC standards; several thousand products are made with FSC-certified wood and carry the FSC trademark.40 While forest activists generally agree that the FSC isn’t strong enough and should not be seen as a label of eco-purity, it is a good start. “The FSC is the best forest certification system out there,” says Todd Paglia, director of ForestEthics, “and it needs to continue to get stronger. Compared to other comparable systems, like the timber industry’s greenwashed program called the Sustainable Forestry Initiative, FSC is the clear choice.” 41 Additionally, there’s a promising model of forest management known as community forestry, a new school of thought in which forests are managed by communities and maintained to protect the sum of their contributions, i.e., not solely for logging. Actually, this isn’t really a “new school of thought,” since many rural and indigenous communities around the world have a long tradition of managing forests through the collective efforts of community members. At last others are beginning to see the enormous benefits of this approach.

Water The summer I worked in the North Cascades National Park taught me about more than trees. I also spent a lot of time around rivers. We waded—if you can call being in water up to your neck “wading”—in icy waters that had recently been glaciers to retrieve trash left by campers and branches that blocked river channels.

Plunging into glacier melt to pick up an empty Coke can is a great way to solidify a commitment never to drop a piece of trash in a body of water, ever.

It was there I first saw the profound difference between a river at the base of a clear-cut and one below a healthy, intact forest. The rivers below a clear-cut were cloudy, full of muck and debris, with fewer fish, bugs, and life of any kind. When we took samples of the water, we learned that the rivers below the clear-cuts had a higher biological oxygen demand, or BOD, which is a measure of how much organic matter is in the 10

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water. A low BOD indicates healthy water, and a too high BOD means polluted water.

Now, in farming or in the produce aisle, the label “organic” is a plus. This is not always the case in the worlds of biology and chemistry, where “organic” doesn’t mean the absence of toxic pesticides. In biology, an organic substance is one that comes from living organisms. In chemistry, it is something that contains carbon among its elemental building blocks.

Organic material is part of nature, rivers included, and its presence is not by definition good or bad. As in many things, the dose makes the poison. Organic matter (like leaves or dead bugs) doesn’t become a problem in water unless it builds up faster than it can be decomposed. The tiny bacteria whose job it is to decompose all that organic stuff need oxygen; when their workload increases, their demand for oxygen outpaces the supply, leading to oxygen-deprived rivers, on their way to becoming dead ones.

Healthy forest floors are covered with organic matter known as “humus,” which is held in place by tree roots and shrubby plants. Humus decomposes just fine in the presence of bugs and oxygen, constantly replenishing the soil with its nutrients. In a clear-cut, the forests are wiped clear of tree roots and shrubs, leaving an exposed surface, so that come a rainstorm, all that nice rich soil rushes downhill into rivers and turns into a pollutant.

The rivers in the North Cascades feed multiple watersheds from which Washington State’s population draws water for drinking, washing, and irrigation. The water eventually makes its way to Puget Sound, where I dug clams and splashed in the waves as a kid. The health of those rivers impacts the health of bodies of water—as well as bodies of fish, birds, and people— hundreds of miles away.

Talk about being hitched to everything else in the universe. Water is the natural resource where we can most clearly see the interconnectedness of systems—as children we learn that the rain comes down, fills our groundwater reserves, rivers, and gutters, evaporates from lakes and oceans, and gets stored in clouds, only to reappear in the form of rain and snow. Water’s also not something only found out there in “the environment,” external to us: our own bodies are 50 to 65 percent water, 70 percent for babies.42 But somehow, as we grow into adulthood, we learn to think about water in a very disconnected way. Pat Costner, a retired Greenpeace scientist, expert in waste issues, and author of a book called We All Live Downstream: A Guide to Waste Treatment that Stops Water Pollution, believes that our 11

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water-based sewage systems do us a deep psychological disservice. From the age at which we get potty-trained, we begin to think of water as a waste receptacle and associate water with waste. Costner and many other water activists frequently point out the absolute absurdity of using our most precious resource—water—to transport bodily eliminations to expensive high-tech plants where the water has to be “treated” to remove the sewage.

Costner has gone so far as to suggest, only half jokingly, that new parents potty-train their kids in a sandbox to prevent the association of water and waste.43 There is a much better, cleaner, and saner solution: it’s called a composting toilet, and the simple, waterless technology is perfectly ready to be implemented everywhere on earth, preserving our water from contamination and turning a would-be pollutant and health hazard into a valuable soil additive (which we especially need in those clear-cut areas where the nutrientrich topsoil has washed away). Composting toilets are a winwin-win scenario. Good for the water. Good for soil. Good for plants. All around good.

Living in the United States, where our toilets gobble up gallons of water (even the low-flow ones, although they’re an improvement), and where both warm and cold water are on tap day and night in more than 95 percent of households,44 it is easy to forget how valuable and limited a resource this is. Once you’ve spent a while in a place with limited water, as I have, it is impossible to ever turn on that tap without feeling a rush of gratitude.

In 1993, I moved to Bangladesh to work with a local environmental organization in the country’s capital, Dhaka, for six months. Bangladesh experiences tremendous regular water crises. There’s often too much and there’s often not enough. It’s a low-lying country, basically a giant floodplain where three major rivers—the Brahmaputra, Meghna, and Ganges— all enter into the Bay of Bengal. During the monsoon season each year, about a third of the country floods. Really floods. Millions of people lose their homes. Entire communities of char dwellers—people who live on the islands of silt and soil formed in the constant shifting geography of the rivers—disappear.

Bangladesh’s floods are getting worse for the same reasons that other environmental problems are getting worse. The clearing of forests upstream in the river basin—as far away as the Himalayas in India—causes greater runoff after rainstorms. Without the tree roots to hold the ground in place, the runoff carries more silt and soil, which settles in the rivers, making them shallower and more susceptible to flooding. Global climate change is 12

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raising sea levels, which, in a low-lying country like Bangladesh, means that the water levels in the ground itself are also rising, making the land less able to absorb water in times of heavy rains and floods. If sea levels rise 30 to 45 centimeters, as many scientists predict, about 35 million people will literally lose the ground beneath them and be forced to migrate inland from coastal areas.45 More than once during my time there, the roads between my house and office in Dhaka were flooded so deep that the bicycle wheels of my rickshaw were completely beneath water.

Paradoxically, in a country that is increasingly under water, it can be hard to get water to drink. Millions of people in Bangladesh rely on surface water, such as ponds and ditches, which are frequently contaminated with human waste as well as agricultural and industrial pollutants. More than one hundred thousand kids die each year from diarrhea, an easily preventable condition linked to dirty water. Meanwhile many of the wells have been discovered to be contaminated with arsenic, which occurs naturally in the region. In 2008, up to 70 million Bangladeshis were regularly drinking water that doesn’t meet World Health Organization standards.46 While I lived in Dhaka I shared a house with eight Bangladeshis. They drank the tap water, but since my body wasn’t used to it, the two women who did the cooking constantly boiled pots of water for twenty minutes just for me. I was acutely aware of the imposition of using so much of our household’s precious cooking fuel to prepare water for me to drink. You can be darn sure I didn’t throw even one half glass of water into the sink in six months there. After traveling through the country, seeing communities with no access to water, and experiencing real, all-encompassing thirst for the first time in my life, I savored every sip of water I had. I appreciated the fact that this water was in a glass and not flooding my home. It is a very different way to drink water: full of awareness and gratitude.

Bathing in Bangladesh was also different. Every other morning, I got one bucket of cold water. That was it. Sometimes it was so cold that I could only bear a sponge bath to wash those parts of me that most needed it. I did have one other emergency option: I could take a rickshaw down to the fancy part of town to one of two luxury hotels—the Sheraton or the Sonargaon. In the women’s restroom I’d spend a good twenty minutes scrubbing my hands and face with hot water before indulging in the only thing— besides hot baths—that I missed in Bangladesh: a really good cup of coffee.

Then I’d sit in the little café sipping my café au lait, listening in on the conversations of businessmen and aid workers at neighboring tables, aware of the sparkling water in the pool, aware that my cup of coffee required about 36 gallons of water to produce, and acutely aware that the 13

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only reason that such a grubby person as me was permitted to spend twenty minutes in their fancy bathroom was the color of my skin and the American Express card in my pocket. I wondered how different life would be for those hundred thousand kids who would die from lack of clean water during the next twelve months, if they each had one of those cards, or even a safe tap in their yards.

Having experienced the level of scarcity that is the norm for most of the world’s people, I am now more aware of the many ways that so‑called advanced societies take for granted the one substance, after air, that we most need to survive. Remember we don’t just need it for drinking and bathing, but for growing our food too! Still, we let it pour down the drain when we brush our teeth, we dump everything from our poop to our hazardous waste in it, and we feed millions of gallons of it to our golf courses and lawns.

Did you know that in the United States we spend more than $20 billion a year on our lawns? 47 On average, we spend twenty-five hours a year mowing them, often with power mowers so notoriously inefficient that they consume 800 million gallons of gasoline a year.48 And that’s before we even get to the water use. We’re pouring humongous amounts of this liquid treasure onto our lawns: about 200 gallons of water per person, per day during the growing season is used just to water lawns. In some communities, that amounts to more than half of the total residential water use! 49 In the United States, the lawn, or “turfgrass,” is the single largest irrigated crop, three times larger than corn.50 Simply by replanting lawns with native plants that use less water and allow more rainwater to seep into the soil, rather than run off into drainage systems, U.S. homeowners could drastically reduce their water use at home.

As you may have guessed, we also use up a lot of this vital, precious resource to make our Stuff.

In fact, from my short list of key ingredients, water is the most fundamental one of all, because it’s a necessary input for virtually every industrial production process. Consider the fact that paper-making plants use 300 to 400 tons of water to make 1 ton of paper, if none of the water is reused or recirculated.51 Growing the cotton for one T‑shirt requires 256 gallons of water.52 To get your morning cup of coffee, 36 gallons of water are used to grow, produce, package, and ship the beans.53 Producing a typical U.S. car 14

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requires more than fifty times its weight in water, or more than 39,000 gallons.54 Much of the water used in producing these goods is badly contaminated by the chemicals used in the production processes, like bleach (for paper or white T‑shirts), lead, arsenic, and cyanide (for mining metals).

There is always the danger that these toxins will leach into groundwater or overflow from holding containers into rivers and seas—if the water’s not dumped there directly, as is still too often the case.

Water is also necessary to power the machines that make our Stuff. I’m not just talking about hydropower (electricity derived from the force of moving water); all power generated from fossil fuels such as coal, fuel oil, and natural gas is converted in thermal power plants that need water to cool them down. Together these make up the great majority of the world’s energy sources, and they all use water.

So for all these purposes we need water, and we’re running out of it.

Maybe you’re asking how can that be, on a blue planet that’s way more than half covered in water? Of all the water on earth, 97.5 percent is salt water; and most of the 2.5 percent that is fresh water is frozen in the icecaps or so deep underground in aquifers that we can’t reach it.55 Only about 1 percent of the world’s water is accessible for direct human use.56 This includes the water we see in lakes, rivers, and reservoirs as well as those underground sources that are shallow enough to be tapped affordably. Only this 1 percent is regularly renewed by rain and snowfall and is available to us on a sustainable basis. So we’re in trouble if we use too much.

It is that same 1 percent of water we use to meet all our needs for drinking, sanitation, irrigation, and industrial use. Increases in population, urbanization, industrialization, and consumption all mean that demand for water also increases. We’re using and wasting more water than ever before while the supply of clean available water is shrinking. During the last century, our use of water globally increased sixfold, which was twice the rate of population growth.57 There are more of us using more water. This is not a sustainable trajectory.

Already, about one-third of the world’s population lives in countries that are experiencing water stress.58 Despite all our technological know-how, at least one in six people doesn’t have access to safe drinking water. Every day, thousands of people—mostly children—die from preventable diseases contracted because they do not have access to clean water.59 In Asia, where 15

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water has always been regarded as an abundant resource, the amount of it available for each person declined by 40 to 60 percent between 1955 and 1990.60 Experts predict that by 2025, fully three-quarters of people on earth will experience water scarcity, a condition in which the demand for water outstrips the supply.61 Overuse of water, along with droughts, contamination, climate disruption, diversion for industrial or agricultural uses, and inequality in access to water all contribute to water scarcity.

As water becomes increasingly scarce, conflicts are emerging all over the world about its use, and perhaps more important, about the process by which its use is determined. Many people—myself included—fear that the growing phenomenon of private business interests managing water systems for profit is incompatible with ensuring everyone’s right to water and sustainable water management. Too often, the privatization of water systems has been followed by rate hikes, service interruptions, and an overall decline in access to water because there is often not money to be made in delivering water to the poorest communities.

Because water is absolutely essential to life, including the lives of future generations, it should be shared and allocated fairly.

Programs to manage water must be developed in this context, prioritizing long-term sustainability, ecological integrity, community participation in decision making, and fair access rather than individual private gain. A global movement is calling for water to be managed publicly rather than by private firms, while a network of “water justice” activists are working for a binding United Nations convention that secures every person’s right to water. Already, General Comment No. 15, adopted in 2002 by the UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, recognized that the right to water is a prerequisite for realizing all other human rights and for living in dignity.62 Still, a number of giant multinational companies are working to privatize public water systems in the United States and around the world, making decisions based on market opportunities and potential profit rather than meeting basic human needs and ensuring ecological well-being and social justice. These corporations are working to expand the market for bottled water and to sell “bulk” water, which will be transported miles to its new market. As communities run out of their own water, they’ll be forced to pay for it from other regions if there is no other option. For this reason, The Economist magazine has predicted that “water is the oil of the 21st century.” 63 The fact is, as with most of our dilemmas around diminishing natural 16

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resources, there is no one solution to the growing global water crisis; we need action on multiple fronts. Some experts recommend billion-dollar infrastructure and megadams, but I prefer what the Pacific Institute calls the “soft path” solutions to the global water crisis. In their words: “Soft path solutions aim to improve the productivity of water rather than seek endless new supply ​. . . ​[and] complement centrally-planned infrastructure with community scale projects; and soft path solutions involve stakeholders in key decisions so that water deals and projects protect the environment and the public interest.” 64 Such solutions include improved technology, improved conservation, and truly democratic, just decision-making processes, all done in concert.

One major step in the right direction is just uncovering and identifying where water is being used and wasted, which often includes uses invisible to us on a day-to-day basis. Hardly anyone looks at a cotton T‑shirt, a car, or a light switch and thinks about water. To bring this “invisible” water to light, a British professor named John Allan came up with the concept of “virtual water” to track the use of water in global industry and trade.65 Virtual water is the amount of water embedded in food or other products based on how much water was needed to extract and produce that item.

Countries that grow and export water-intensive crops, like cotton and coffee, can be thought of as virtual water exporters.

Another helpful concept is a “water footprint,” which calculates the total volume of fresh water used for the goods and services produced by a business or used by an individual or a community. If you’re curious, you can go to www.waterfootprint.org and get a rough calculation of your own water footprint. Professor Arjen Hoekstra of the University of Twente in Holland explains his creation of the “water footprint” tool as “rooted in the recognition that human impacts on freshwater systems can ultimately be linked to human consumption, and that issues like water shortages and pollution can be better understood and addressed by considering production and supply chains as a whole.” 66 In other words, the more Stuff that gets made, used, and replaced, the more water gets used.

When I calculated my personal footprint, I found that my total water footprint is about 500 cubic meters per year. I played around with the numbers and saw that I could reduce it by drinking less coffee, eating fewer animal products, and buying less Stuff.

I’d like to think that my grey-water system, which waters my garden with 17

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my washing machine drainage, after filtering it through a simple multitiered planter full of specifically chosen filtering plants, makes a difference.

Variations of this system are used around the world to filter and reuse grey water in homes, universities, hotels, food processing plants, and other sites.

My garden loves it, but I know that the water diverted is just a drop in the bucket compared to the water that was needed to make the Stuff I use every day. The use of water in agriculture, energy production, and as an ingredient in industrial production is where the greatest potential exists to reduce water use.

The true cost of water is another one of industry’s huge externalized costs, meaning the costs they don’t actually pay. The prices of Stuff don’t reflect water’s real value (which economists are only now beginning to calculate) or the costs of the degradation of water resources through pollution and contamination, or the ecosystem services that are impacted. To capture its true value, some people are beginning to use what’s known as a total economic value framework, which includes direct uses (like drinking water) and indirect uses (like the level and flow of a river) as well as the so‑called bequest value (use by future generations) and “existence value” (the right simply to be present on earth).67 Along these lines, government representatives and NGOs from around the world created the Dublin Principles at the International Conference on Water and the Environment in 1992 to recognize the value of water and set standards for water management.68 This shift could motivate improved water productivity. If those hidden or “virtual” externalized costs of using and polluting water actually started showing up under “costs” on the balance sheets of businesses, companies would be highly motivated to reduce the amount of water they use or pollute. At the same time, we need to be sure that calculating the economic value of water doesn’t obscure our recognizing access to water as a basic human right. Assigning economic value to water is a strategy to better understand its overall value, not a step toward privatizing and selling it.

The hope is that if we make industries responsible for the full costs of water use, they will start employing the technological fixes to use and waste less. The tricky thing about economic, or market-based, strategies is that forcing companies to factor in externalized costs will invariably raise the price tags of goods, as industries pass the higher costs on to consumers.

While in many instances that might not be all bad (after all, do we really need yet another 256-gallon-of-water T‑shirt that we couldn’t resist because it cost $4.99 at Target?), increased prices for basic commodities can be devastating to the poorest people around the world.

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There are people already at work on this very issue to ensure that everyone, even those too poor to pay, get enough water for their basic needs, while those who use (waste) water for luxury consumption or excessive industrial use are charged extra. An international coalition of human rights activists, progressive municipal leaders, trade unions, and environmental organizations—collectively known as water warriors—are collaborating to achieve the recognition of water as a human right, improved access to water for poor people, the decommodification of water, taxes for excessive water use, and the defense of elected municipal governments as the key institution in water delivery, rather than private businesses.

On the technological front, many companies are already improving their processes so they use and waste less water through innovations like closed-loop factories, which continuously recycle all the water they use. As companies shift away from toxic inputs into their production processes, the water leaving the plant won’t be contaminated and so can be safely used again: this is a huge improvement. One company undertaking these kinds of practices is the carpet manufacturer Interface. Since 1996, under the visionary leadership of CEO Ray Anderson, the company has reduced water intake by 75 percent per production unit in its facilities.69 And they say they aren’t done yet!

Meanwhile, professionals in regional planning, industrial ecology, urban design, and architecture are redesigning our built environment—from individual homes to factory complexes to entire cities—to mimic rather than disrupt natural water systems or “watersheds.” Replacing lawns with native plants that demand less water; replacing solid surfaces with permeable ones that allow more rainwater to seep into the soil; removing industrial tie-ins that allow factories to dispose of hazardous waste in the municipal sewers; and many other shifts can help protect water supplies.

Not to mention (again) the composting toilet.

In addition to market-based and technological solutions—which are ready to be implemented as soon as we decide to do so—we also need changes in our cultural approach to water that would prioritize sustainable usage and access for all. Like the oxygen we breathe, water is absolutely essential to survival, and there’s no substitute waiting in the wings.

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Rocks The most elusive ingredients needed to make our Stuff are underground.

Metals, gems, and minerals—and their organic cousins petroleum and coal—are basically nonrenewable, unlike trees (renewable, as long as our rate of replanting is faster than our rate of use) or water (replenishable, which means a resource at risk of being depleted, but which can be restored in a healthy ecosystem over time). They’re also harder to reach. That’s where mining comes in.

You’re unlikely to hear someone wax sentimental about rocks. They’re not grand, awe-inspiring living creatures like trees or a serene, healing, cleansing substance like water. You don’t hear appeals from nonprofits to save the poor silver or uranium from being removed from its native habitat. You are likely to run in to people who are emotionally attached to their rock-based Stuff, though. Threaten someone’s wedding ring, cell phone, and car, and you’re likely to wind up underground yourself.

So what’s the big deal about removing these inanimate and uncharismatic resources from the earth in the name of our most cherished possessions? Well, for starters, there’s the issue of availability of these materials for future generations. What we use up today isn’t going to grow back. The fact that our primary economic model is based on using up nonrenewable resources, like minerals, is one of the main blind spots of the GDP as a viable measure of progress.

And then there’s the whole story of how we get at those materials— mining. No matter how you slice it, mining is a serious drag—for people and the planet. Open-pit, strip, shaft, above the surface, below it, it doesn’t matter: these are energy- and water-intensive, waste-spewing, often poisonous, and all-around dirty processes. Communities are evicted, workers’ rights are violated, and the toxic by‑products endanger everyone’s health, all in the name of mining. And the trauma doesn’t stop when a mine gets shut down—it continues for years afterward.

Underground, or subsurface, mining involves tunnels dug deep down into the earth. Although this is probably the image—along with headlamps and canaries—that most people have in their heads when they think of mining, most mining today occurs in gigantic open-air pits. In the United States, open-pit mining provides the bulk of the minerals extracted; globally, two-thirds of all metals are from open pits.70 Diamonds, iron, copper, 20

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gold, and coal are all commonly extracted from open pits, which can be huge. The Bingham Canyon copper mine in Utah, for instance, covers about 3 square miles (7.7 square kilometers) and the Chuquicamata copper mine in northern Chile covers about 4.5 square miles (12 square kilometers).71 There’s also mountaintop removal, usually used to get at deposits of coal found deep inside mountains (see the box on coal on page 35). Particularly in developing countries there are also still small-scale “artisanal” operations that employ workers in mining accessible surface deposits using their hands and basic tools.

Creating an open pit means chopping down trees (more trees!) and clearing off the land’s inhabitants, whether they walk on four or two legs. A report on the mining industry in India compared the mineral and forest maps, only to find that the highest concentrations of coal, bauxite (used for aluminum), and iron ore are all located in forest areas that are home to most of the country’s biodiversity and indigenous people as well.72 And the living things atop a mine only make up the first layer of what gets scraped off. All the stone and soil covering up the valuable ores— what the mining industry terms “overburden”—also have to be removed using heavy duty tools like bulldozers, drills, explosives, and trucks (all of which require their own long lists of ingredients to create and operate).

This rubble gets piled up, sometimes skyscraper high. In fact, open-pit mines produce eight to ten times as much waste rubble as underground mines.73 Getting at the ore is only the beginning. Because even high-grade ore only contains a little bit of the pure metal or mineral being sought, it has to be processed, which involves more machinery as well as loads of water and chemicals. Most of the ore—and an ever-increasing amount, as high-grade sources disappear—ends up as waste. According to a report by Earthworks and Oxfam America called Dirty Metals, in the United States, “the copper ore mined at the beginning of the 20th century consisted of about 2.5 percent usable metal by weight; today that proportion has dropped to 0.51 percent. In gold mining, it is estimated that only 0.00001 percent [that’s one hundred thousandth of 1 percent] of the ore is actually refined into gold.” 74 Chemicals used in processing contaminate at least 90 billion tons of waste ore per year globally, equivalent in weight to almost nine times as much trash produced annually by all U.S. cities combined.75 Of course mine workers suffer disproportionately from the toxins, as well as from injuries caused by using dangerous heavy equipment and from events like explosions, fires, mudslides, etc. The International Labour Organization reports that although mining accounts for only 0.4 percent of the 21

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global workforce, it is responsible for more than 3 percent of fatal accidents at work (about eleven thousand per year, about thirty each day).76 In Rajasthan, India, for example, miners—many of them women and children—toil long days to extract the marble and sandstone that furnishes fancy bathrooms and kitchens worldwide. GRAVIS, a nongovernmental organization inspired by Gandhi that works with Rajasthani miners, reports that about half of the mineworkers in the state have developed lung disease, such as silicosis. “The mineworkers work in deep open pits where the air is thick with dust from dry drilling, and safety equipment is nonexistent. There is no drinking water provided, no shade to rest in, no toilets, no first aid kits, and no worker’s compensation for accidents. Accidents occur frequently and often mineworkers have no extra money to pay for medical treatment.” 77 You would think, given all the costs, from contamination of water, air, and soil to the health care of workers, that mining companies would be hard-pressed to turn a profit. But only a smidgen of the true costs is borne by those companies; their balance sheets rarely factor in things like water or air quality. In fact, get this: it is virtually free to mine on U.S. federal lands. Under the General Mining Act, passed in 1872, any U.S. citizen eighteen years or older has the right to prospect and mine for minerals, such as gold, silver, platinum, copper, lead, and zinc, on federal lands. For free. The argument of the day was that miners and prospectors were performing valuable services by promoting commerce and settling new territory, particularly out west.78 Since the passage of the act, it is estimated the federal government has given away minerals worth more than $245 billion.79 This not only deprives the government of revenue, it also encourages use of virgin materials instead of recycled. One study found that in the United States fifteen federal subsidies—averaging $2.6 billion each—annually benefit resource extractive industries,80 again guiding them toward virgin rather than recycled metals. When minerals are basically free, there is little incentive to conserve them or to go to the effort to recover the gold, silver, lead, and other metals in all the electronics and other Stuff we throw out.

Thankfully, efforts are underway to update the antiquated mining law. In early 2009, the Hardrock Mining and Reclamation Act was reintroduced, after the 2007 version failed to pass the U.S. Senate. The new law would impose a royalty of 4 percent of gross revenues on existing mining from unclaimed mines and place an 8 percent royalty on new mining operations. Seventy percent of the royalty money would go to a cleanup fund for past abandoned mining operations, and 30 22

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percent would go to communities impacted by mining.81 While a step in the right direction, that law only pertains to mining on U.S. public lands.

Meanwhile, the subsidies encouraging the use of virgin materials still exist; they need to go!

If I wanted to examine every kind of metal and mineral that gets extracted to make our Stuff, it would take several books’ worth of stories.

So let’s look at a select handful of rocks that get dug up or blasted out of the ground. They’re pretty representative of the way all the metals and minerals needed for our Stuff are extracted.

Gold and Diamonds

Gold is used for a lot of things, from dentistry to glassblowing to stockpiling wealth. Gold is also used in electronics; virtually every modern electronic device—cell phones, laptops, televisions, GPS systems, MP3 players—has a bit of gold in it. But the biggest use, dwarfing all the rest, is jewelry. Jewelry accounts for more than 75 percent of the total amount of gold consumed today.82 Maybe you have a piece of gold jewelry that’s very dear to you. You’re not alone. I don’t have much of it, but I do have one little gold ring, given to me by a long-ago love.

When he wanted to buy me a ring, I insisted on an old one and a small one. I’d seen gold mines in South Africa. I knew that gold mining is horribly polluting, is routinely linked to human rights violations, and that more than three-quarters of the gold mined around the world ends up in jewelry.

Since there is a lot of gold in jewelry rattling around in old ladies’ dresser drawers and increasingly in piles of e‑waste, why fuel the market for mining more? So he got me an antique ring from the Tiny Jewel Box store in Washington, D.C. It’s inscribed “16 Mai 1896” and has a fleck of sapphire surrounded by tiny pearls not much larger than pencil dots.

I love that my ring has a past from long before me. Given the spelling of “May,” it was likely presented to someone in France or Germany. And given its tiny size, it seems unlikely to have been an engagement ring: perhaps a sweet-sixteen ring?

I’ve often gazed at it and imagined its life on the finger of a young European woman and wondered who gave it to her. And of course the metal had a life before her, before being shaped into a ring.

Where was the gold for my sweet little ring mined? Maybe South Africa?

For years, South Africa has supplied much of the world’s gold and still pro23

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vides more than a quarter of today’s demand. When I visited South Africa in the mid-1990s, I looked out the window of the car in which I was riding and wondered aloud what geologic processes could have created so many randomly spaced small hills that covered the countryside. “Those aren’t hills,” my South African host explained. “Those are piles of mining waste.”

Mining enough gold for an average gold wedding ring creates about 20 tons of hazardous mining waste,83 which is sometimes dumped in rivers or the sea, sometimes just left right where it was created, as I saw in South Africa. The reason it’s toxic is that to get the gold from the ore, mining companies use a process called heap leaching, which means piling up the gold-containing ore and pouring cyanide over it to let it slowly drip through, extracting the gold on its way. At the same time, the cyanide also extracts toxic metals, including cadmium, lead, and mercury. The cyanide and toxic metal liquid runoff ends up in a big pool, from which the gold is extracted, leaving behind a heavy metal and cyanide contaminated pond next to a heavy metal and cyanide contaminated hill of leftover ore. Cyanide, I probably don’t need to remind you, is a deadly poison. An amount about the size of a grain of rice is enough to off a human being, and onemillionth of a gram of it in a liter of water kills fish,84 which is a big problem since much mine waste ends up in rivers and lakes.

But my ring was so tiny! I reassured myself that it must have only created half the average amount of waste. Then I realized that’s still 10 tons.

I hope my ring wasn’t made by pouring cyanide over heaps of earth.

Cyanide wasn’t widely applied to gold ores until 1887.85 And maybe the gold in my ring is American, maybe even Californian, like me. Since early Californian gold miners didn’t use cyanide, this would free my ring from that toxic legacy but would unfortunately bring another equally problematic one.

Gold was discovered in Northern California forty-eight years before my ring was inscribed. In 1848, a man named James Marshall working on a sawmill in Northern California found the shiny metal in the American River in Coloma. Marshall’s discovery led to the Gold Rush of 1849: hundreds of thousands of people arrived in hopes of striking it rich.86 As a result the white population in California soared from 13,000 to 300,000 by 1854, while California’s native American populations were decimated, declining from a pre-gold rush population of 150,000 to about 30,000 by 1870. Sixty percent of those deaths were linked to diseases introduced by the invading gold miners, while others were hastened by forced relocation onto reservations or happened in outright massacres.87 24

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In that era, the ore wrested from riverbanks and mountains was soaked with mercury to extract the gold. Mercury, which I’ll discuss more fully in the upcoming chapter on production, is a potent neurotoxin that can affect the brain, spinal cord, kidneys, and liver. (The term “mad hatter” comes from the neurological damage done to those who cleaned felt hats, which used to be done with—you guessed it—mercury.88) During the gold rush, an estimated 7,600 tons of mercury were deposited into the rivers of the central Sierra Nevada alone.89 That mercury remains in the California environment, in rivers and in sediments, much of it being continuously transported to the San Francisco Bay, where people swim and fish.

The unfortunate fact is, I can’t tell you where the gold in my little ring came from, or who was harmed by its creation. All I know is that when it came to me, it was already secondhand—and that’s a plus. Since the great majority of gold is used for jewelry and since two-thirds of gold in use is newly mined, old gold is a good choice for people who believe that gold is the best way to symbolize love or commitment.

Buying previously owned or recycled gold, or forgoing it altogether, is the best way to ensure we’re not contributing to the devastation caused by gold mining. However, for those who are stuck on buying new gold, there are still ways to lessen the impact. There are a number of jewelers who have committed to ensuring that the gold in their wares wasn’t produced at the expense of local communities, workers, or the environment. The No Dirty Gold campaign has developed a set of voluntary guidelines called the Golden Rules that jewelry retailers can sign on to in order to promote environmental, worker, and community rights. You can find out which jewelers are on board at www.nodirtygold.org.90 Conflict Minerals

Unfortunately the story of gold has a lot in common with the stories of almost all of the minerals or metals needed for our Stuff. Unfortunately, it gets even worse than gold.

“Conflict minerals” is the term for valuable rocks that fuel violent conflict when the profit from their control, sales, taxation, or protection funds criminal gangs, brutal regimes, and weapons. These minerals and metals are usually mined under oppressive conditions, with workers paid little to nothing. According to Global Witness, a London- and Washington, D.C.based organization leading the campaign on conflict diamonds, these rocks “have funded brutal conflicts in Africa that have resulted in the death and 25

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displacement of millions of people. Diamonds have also been used by terrorist groups such as al‑Qaeda to finance their activities and for moneylaundering purposes.” 91 The role of “conflict diamonds” or “blood diamonds” in Sierra Leone’s civil war has received global attention, in large part thanks to Global Witness’ Combating Conflict Diamonds campaign, launched in 1998. The situation was also brought to light through the 2006 film Blood Diamond. The film does a pretty good job of illustrating the brutality of both the rebel forces that run the mines (kidnapping villagers to make them into miners and young boys to serve as child soldiers) as well as the government forces, which indiscriminately kill civilians and villagers alongside the rebels.

In real life, during Sierra Leone’s eleven-year civil war from 1991 to 2002, a vicious rebel army called the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) utilized violence and terror, including rape, the systematic amputation of victims’ limbs, and mass murder. Tens of thousands of Sierra Leoneans were killed.92 In early 2009, three senior commanders of the RUF were convicted of war crimes and crimes against humanity. They had participated in seizing diamond mines, forcing kidnapped citizens to mine diamonds, and then trading the diamonds for money and military support.93 “Trade in diamonds and other natural resources has underwritten some of the worst war crimes of the past two decades,” said Mike Davis, who campaigns for Global Witness, an international nongovernment organization (NGO). “Yet despite cases such as Sierra Leone, there is still no comprehensive international approach to this problem. Natural resources continue to fuel conflict to this day, notably in eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo, where armed groups are financing themselves through the trade in minerals and committing atrocities against the civilian population.” 94 In 2000, the South African government hosted a meeting of major diamond trading and producing countries, diamond industry representatives, and NGOs in Kimberley, South Africa, to launch an international diamond tracking and certification program, which became known as the Kimberley Process. Formally launched in January 2003, it aims to guarantee a “clean” source of diamonds, free of conflict and violence. In order for a country to be a participant, it must ensure that none of its diamonds have financed a rebel group or other entity seeking to overthrow a UN‑recognized government, that every diamond has official certification, and that no diamond is imported from or exported to a nonmember country.95 As Sierra Leonean 26

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Martin Chungong Ayafor testified to the UN, “ ‘Diamonds are forever,’ it is often said. But lives are not. We must spare people the ordeal of war, mutilations, and death for the sake of conflict diamonds.” 96 Unfortunately, the Kimberley Process has not lived up to its potential, and the diamond industry continues to be rife with human rights abuses and links to conflict. Global Witness reported that after the agreement’s first five years, “the trafficking of conflict and illicit stones is looking more like a dangerous rule than an exception.” 97 The best way to avoid fueling conflict and civil war is to not buy diamonds. Period. The diamond industry does a fabulous job marketing these rocks as a symbol of love, commitment, wealth, and status. But we don’t have to buy into it. There are plenty of better ways to demonstrate one’s love. If you are really compelled to go spend a month’s salary on a rock, then consult the diamond buying guide produced by Global Witness and Amnesty International, which includes a number of important questions to ask a jeweler.

Coltan

There’s another conflict mineral that’s in all of our cell phones, MP3 players, remote controls, and PlayStations: tantalum, derived from an ore known as “coltan” in miner slang. It’s known for its resistance to heat and to corrosion by acids—even when actually submerged in acid.98 Although coltan has mostly been sourced from other countries like Australia, Brazil, and Canada, 80 percent of the world’s supplies are in the politically unstable and violence-plagued eastern part of the Democratic Republic of the Congo.99 Congolese coltan mining has funded brutal guerilla forces and their backers in neighboring countries like Rwanda, Burundi, and Uganda. Coltan can be mined with very basic methods: simply dug up and sifted through pans, just as the forty-niners in the California Gold Rush worked. So when the global price of the metal shot up in 2000 to three hundred dollars per pound of the refined mineral (in part due to the huge launch of Sony’s PS2 game console), thousands of Congolese scrambled into the country’s lush green forests to get at it, destroying national parks and other pristine land, killing gorillas for food, and ruining the animals’ habitat.100 Various armies (official and rebel) rushed in to take over the trade, often employing children and prisoners of war, brutally raping local women (the UN estimated 45,000 raped in 2005 alone 101), and bringing prostitution and illegal arms trade with them. Oona King, a member of the British Parliament at the time, said about the situation: “Kids in 27

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Congo were being sent down mines to die so that kids in Europe and America could kill imaginary aliens in their living rooms.” 102

Coltan mining has been an enormously lucrative business for both the rebels and the armies of the Congo and its neighbors. By some estimates the Rwandan army, which has occupied parts of the Congo off and on for the last decade, made $500 million just between April 2007 and October 2008 on Congolese coltan.103 And, of course, the corporations selling all these coltan-containing products are making massive profit too, with most investing far more in advertising the latest gadget than in ending the trail of violence that too often follows this metal.

Congolese human rights activist Bertrand Bisimwa summarized the way far too many people perceive his country: “Since the 19th century, when the world looks at Congo it sees a pile of riches with some black people inconveniently sitting on top of them. They eradicate the Congolese people so they can possess the mines and resources. They destroy us because we are an inconvenience.” 104 Some electronics manufacturers have publicly declared their ban on African-mined tantalum altogether, although, as depicted in the film Blood Diamond, tracing the source through so many dealers and handlers means this is far easier said than done. A solution with more promise is a database of “coltan fingerprints” that scientists are creating, which is feasible because each mining site has a distinct geological history and produces metal with a specific composition.105 This database would allow an international certification system like the Kimberley Process to be established for coltan, so that electronics manufacturers could source their coltan from legitimate mines with decent working conditions and environmental standards.

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But the best solution of all—not just for coltan but also for gold and other metals contained in today’s array of electronic products—is to increase the durability and expand the life span of today’s electronics so we don’t have to keep chucking and replacing them so quickly. We also need to require manufacturers to take back electronics when we are done with them. Take-back programs, like those now mandated throughout the European Union, allow manufacturers to recover the tantalum (and other ingredients) for reuse, thus keeping electronic waste out of landfills and decreasing the pressure to mine more.

Earthworks, a Washington, D.C., based environmental advocacy group specializing in mining issues, estimates that if 130 million phones were recycled, they would yield about 202,000 ounces of gold alongside other precious metals. Every year 150 million cell phones are thrown out in the United States, along with over 300 million other electronic devices. It’s estimated that there are another 500 million unused cell phones sitting around in people’s drawers.106 That’s a lot of perfectly good rocks for the (re)taking.

Petroleum No discussion of wars fueled by natural resources is complete without mention of oil. In our current system petroleum is used to power many of the processes by which our Stuff is made. Powering machines and vehicles and heating our buildings takes 84 percent of the petroleum used every year.107 Petroleum itself is also an ingredient in a lot of Stuff: the remaining 16 percent of it goes into making plastics, pharmaceuticals, and fertilizers, as well as Stuff like crayons, bubble gum, ink, dishwashing liquid, deodorant, tires, and ammonia.108 Drilling, processing, and burning oil is dirty and damaging to the health of people everywhere, not to mention the health of the planet. The other big problem with oil is that we’re running out. “Peak oil” is the term used to describe the point at which we’ve used more oil than what’s left available to us because of technological and geological limitations. Once peak oil is reached, oil production declines. The International Energy Agency (IEA), which tracks energy supplies around the world, believes we may reach peak oil by 2020 but are likely to experience an “oil crunch” even earlier as demand outpaces supply and oil becomes increasing expensive to extract.109 In August 2009, Dr. Fatih Birol, chief economist at the IEA, said that “global production is likely to peak in about ten years—at least a decade earlier than most governments had estimated.” 110 After assessing eight hun29

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dred major oil fields around the world (three-quarters of global reserves), the IEA reported that oil is being depleted more quickly than the agency had estimated even a couple of years ago and concluded that current energy use patterns are “patently unsustainable.” According to Dr. Birol, if oil demand remains steady, the world would have to find the equivalent of four Saudi Arabias to maintain production and six Saudi Arabias if it is to keep up with the expected increase in demand between now and 2030.111 “We have to leave oil before oil leaves us, and we have to prepare ourselves for that day,” Dr. Birol said. “The earlier we start, the better, because all of our economic and social system is based on oil, so to change from that will take a lot of time and a lot of money.” 112 Yet despite the facts, many governments have been slow to invest in alternatives, and some—like our own—have instead invested in costly wars to protect access to it.

We’ve all heard about the connection between oil reserves and American military engagement in the Middle East. Meanwhile the extraction of oil from places like Ecuador and Nigeria has gotten less attention, but has been just as devastating.

In Ecuador, Texaco (now Chevron) spent nearly three decades between 1964 and 1992 extracting oil from a chunk of the Amazonian forest three times the size of Manhattan, destroying much of the area’s life. Violating environmental standards, Texaco dumped toxic water and sludge by‑products from the drilling, saturated with carcinogens like benzene, cadmium, and mercury, in local waters. They left more than six hundred unlined and uncovered waste pits that leak chemicals like hexavalent chromium (remember Erin Brockovich?) into rivers and streams used by more than thirty thousand people for drinking water, cooking, bathing, and fishing. The local population is suffering from skyrocketing rates of cancer, severe reproductive problems, and birth defects.113 In a David versus Goliath protracted legal battle that is still underway, local people are demanding Chevron clean up the mess and pay for the tremendous devastation it caused.

The future looks slightly more hopeful; in 2007, Ecuadorean president Rafael Correa’s government announced that it intended to protect the oilfields located in the extraordinarily rich Yasuní rainforest. The Yasuní houses a million hectares of pristine rainforest, indigenous tribes, and glorious species of wildlife and plants, many of which are endangered. It’s also home to one of the world’s largest undeveloped oil reserves— close to 1 billion barrels’ worth. Not extracting that oil would prevent the release of an estimated 400 million tons of carbon into the atmosphere.114 30

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Taking a stand for the Yasuní oilfield’s protection is a bold move, considering that about 70 percent of Ecuador’s income is from oil.115 So how do they plan to accomplish it? They asked the international community to pay them half of the income that would result from the extraction over the likely lifetime of the oil fields, or $350 million a year for a decade.116 This is a big deal: a really innovative idea that other developing countries could employ to protect their own resources and help combat climate change.

Unfortunately, although the governments of Spain, Norway, and Italy voiced support for Correa’s plan, no one offered cash until Germany did in June 2009, with a promise to pay $50 million in grants annually.117 It remains to be seen how the Yasuní will fare.

In Nigeria, the villain has a different name (Shell), but the story is similar. Starting in 1958, Shell went into Ogoniland, one of the most fertile regions of the country. The five hundred thousand Ogoni who live there are an ethnic minority group; they are basically unrecognized by the Nigerian constitution and have few protections under it. They don’t have mineral rights to their land either, since all mineral rights are owned by the state.118 As in Ecuador, their land has been trashed by spills, sludge, and other by‑products from the drilling.

After decades plagued with poverty, public health crises, and environmental devastation, while Shell extracted millions of dollars’ worth of oil from under their homes, the Ogoni began to organize themselves to fight for their rights and their land. In 1990, they formed MOSOP, the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People, a peaceful resistance group under the leadership of a charismatic writer, businessman, TV producer, and environmental activist named Ken Saro-Wiwa.119 A brilliant public speaker, Ken traveled the world raising awareness about the little-known environmental and public health catastrophe that oil drilling had wreaked upon his homeland. His work created a strong international network of people inspired and committed to pressuring Shell to improve its operations, clean up past environmental damage, respect human rights, and share oil profits more fairly with host communities. Around the world, students began protesting at Shell stations. Filmmakers interviewed Ken and visited Ogoniland, ensuring that even more people would see the atrocities Ken described. Faith-based and corporate-accountability activists raised questions and eventually introduced resolutions at Shell’s annual meetings.

Greenpeace, Project Underground, Essential Action, and other groups developed campaigns in support of the Ogoni.120 At that time, Nigeria was controlled by a military dictatorship led by the infamous Sani Abacha. Shell was by far the largest oil company in a heavily 31

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oil-dependent economy and had a close, even symbiotic relationship with the government. Neither was pleased with Ken’s work at home and around the world. Shell had pulled out of Ogoniland in 1993, at least partly because of MOSOP, but they—and the Nigerian government, which gets more than 85 percent of its revenue from oil—still wanted the troublesome group silenced: correspondence between Shell and the Nigerian government revealed Shell’s desire to stop MOSOP.121 Even in the face of growing threats and government harassment, Ken didn’t give up his struggle for environmental justice and human rights, right up to his very premature end.

“Appalled by the denigrating poverty of my people who live on a richly endowed land, distressed by their political marginalization and economic strangulation, angered by the devastation of their land, their ultimate heritage, anxious to preserve their right to life and to a decent living, and determined to usher to this country as a whole a fair and just democratic system which protects everyone and every ethnic group and gives us all a valid claim to human civilization, I have devoted my intellectual and material resources, my very life, to a cause in which I have total belief.” 122 That’s from Ken’s closing statement to the military-appointed special tribunal that heard his case after he and fifteen other Ogonis were arrested on bogus charges. He was convicted of a murder that happened in an area that had been blocked off by the military—with Ken irrefutably outside the barricades, nowhere near it. As it turned out, Ken did devote his “very life” to the cause: he was hanged on November 10, 1995.

There was an international outcry over his wrongful execution. I remember exactly where I was when I heard: in New York City, in Riverside Church, at a gathering of international environmental and human rights activists discussing economic globalization. Many of the people there had followed the Ogoni case because it was so dramatically emblematic of the intersection of environmental, human rights, and economic abuses too often linked to extractive industries. I knew that Ken had been charged with murder in a secret, widely discredited trial. Yet I honestly didn’t believe he would be hung. He had too many international friends. Amnesty International had spearheaded a campaign on his behalf. Governments, human rights organizations, and prominent writers around the world had called on the Nigerian government to spare Ken and his colleagues. He had written one of the most-watched soap operas in all of Africa. He was charming and educated and internationally recognized. Many of the people in the church that day had met him, seen him speak in person, and considered him a friend. He wasn’t the kind of activist whose death could just be swept under the rug, unnoticed except by friends and family.

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Yet it happened. When we heard the news, literally hundreds of people rushed out of the church into the streets to march to Shell’s office in Midtown Manhattan. Some were crying. Some were so angry that they lay down in the entranceway, blocking the door and disrupting Shell’s business until the police came and dragged them away. I was just in shock.

I had overestimated the Nigerian government’s vulnerability to international pressure and underestimated the strength of their desire to silence Ken. They didn’t really silence him though; his memory continues to inspire people to take action against destructive oil projects. Ken’s last words are reported to have been “Lord, take my soul, but the struggle continues.” 123 And that it does. It continues in the courtroom as well as in the streets.

The lawsuit Wiwa v. Shell charged Shell with providing arms and transportation, collaboration and direction to the Nigerian military to suppress the Ogoni opposition. The plaintiffs included surviving relatives of Ken and his executed colleagues—now known as the Ogoni 9—as well as other Ogoni who were tortured, and in some cases killed, for their resistance to Shell and their support for MOSOP.124 Just days before the federal court trial date in June 2009 in New York City, Shell agreed to an out-of-court settlement of $15.5 million for the relatives of Ken and the other victims. However, Shell denied any wrongdoing or responsibility for the deaths, calling the settlement money a “humanitarian gesture” toward the families for their losses and their legal expenses.

Some of the money will also go into a trust to benefit the Ogoni people.125 While the settlement was meager compared to the extent of Shell’s wrongdoing, it’s still a step forward in holding all corporations accountable for crimes they commit in other countries.

Although Shell hasn’t been back to Ogoniland, it still pumps more than 250,000 barrels a day from Nigeria.126 And in June 2008, the Nigerian government announced plans to give rights to drill in Ogoniland to the Nigerian Petroleum Development Company, so operations there will begin anew.127 Even should Shell be forced to reform its ways, such disregard for both people and the environment in drilling areas continues to be an industry norm. In May 1998, less than three years after Ken’s execution, members of another Nigerian community—the Ilaje—were shot and two were killed while engaging in a nonviolent protest on a Chevron oil platform off the Nigerian coast.128 According to EarthRights International, which serves as counsel for Wiwa v. Shell and another case related to the killing of the platform protestors, Chevron called in the Nigerian military and police, flew 33

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them to the platform on Chevron-contracted helicopters, and supervised their attack against the protesters.129 The crazy thing is, we have perfectly good alternatives to petroleum for both energy and materials. There’s no need to continue such widespread environmental destruction and violence to meet our energy needs. As many scientists and business leaders now agree, solar and wind power can pick up much of our energy needs. Combining renewable energy with a much needed reduction in demand through greater energy efficiency and improvements in everything from land use planning to transportation systems to consumption patterns, we could have enough energy to just leave that oil in the soil.

And the oil used for plastics and other products is also replaceable with other materials, including bio-based ones. David Morris at the Institute for Local Self-Reliance has documented the technical potential and environmental benefits of shifting from a petro-based to a carbohydratematerial economy for more than a decade.130 A number of green chemists, sustainable agriculture activists, and environmental health advocates have formed a Sustainable Biomaterials Collaborative. This body has established criteria to ensure that the transition from petro-based to plantbased materials is done in a way that supports ecological health, healthy farms, good farm jobs, and other criteria for a safe, healthy, and just planet.131

Rethinking Extraction Perhaps, as some people claim, it is possible to take metals, coal, or oil out of the ground without widespread environmental and human rights abuses, but I sure haven’t seen it. The scale of investment and hard work it will take to turn those industries around is huge. And, in the case of the toxic heavy metals—like lead and mercury—or oil, getting it out of the ground is only the first problem. Use of these resources adds to a whole second generation of problems. Many heavy metals are neurotoxins, carcinogens, and reproductive toxins (which diminish your ability to have healthy children and your children’s ability to have healthy children).

While some extractive industries can be improved—the Golden Rules and Kimberley Process are examples of potential steps in that direction— attempting to fix others just won’t work. It is impossible to safely and sustainably extract resources that are, by definition, environmental and health problems themselves.

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In the case of the toxic metals, like lead and mercury, we should leave them in the ground and redesign our industrial processes and products to eliminate their use. Both lead and mercury have been eliminated from the many common uses of just a generation ago. Remember leaded paint and gasoline? Mercury thermometers?

I am not saying it is going to be easy. It’s a big job to redesign everything from consumer products, to sustainable energy systems, to cultural norms around diamond rings set in gold as the ultimate expression of love. But with the stakes so high—our very planet plus all our fellow planet-mates depending on us—we can do it.

Imbalanced Benefits Maybe you noticed a common thread in the stories of Madagascar’s periwinkle, Sierra Leone’s diamonds, the Congo’s coltan, Nigeria’s oil, and Appalachia’s coal. In all of these places there’s an abundance of valuable

Coal Coal doesn’t make my list of rocks because it’s used less often as a direct ingredient in consumer goods. Like water and oil, however, it powers the machines that make our Stuff, so it deserves mention.

Coal is used to generate a lot of electricity (40 percent of the world’s and approximately 49 percent of the United States’132 ), even though it’s hard to imagine a dirtier source. Back in the early days when coal was abundant and easier to reach, people didn’t necessarily know how bad it was. You’d think they’d have realized the mining of it wasn’t a great idea based on the fact that they had to send those poor little canaries in to make sure the air wasn’t poisonous! Or when mine roofs kept collapsing, fires and explosions occurred relentlessly, and black lung disease shrank the life expectancies of miners. But no.

And now we know so much more. Creating and running a coal mine destroys vegetation, soil, and groundwater; displaces and destroys wildlife and habitat; degrades air quality with ash and dust; and permanently scars the landscape, especially in the case of mountaintop removal mining. Mines produce tons of waste like ash and sludge that contains mercury, uranium, arsenic, and other heavy metals. The December 2008 tragedy in which a billion gallons of toxic sludge burst out of a holding pond into the rivers, towns, and land of Roane County, Tennessee, is just the latest in a litany of disasters associated with coal mines.133 Meanwhile, burning coal constitutes the largest human-generated contri35

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bution to atmospheric carbon dioxide and is a major source of methane; both gases are proven causes of climate change and global warming. In his book Big Coal, Jeff Goodell notes that “between 1975 and 2001, the annual releases of toxic metals from coal plants nearly doubled, from about 350 tons to 700 tons ​. . . ​Toxic emissions from coal-fired power plants account for over 40 percent of all air toxins reported to the EPA.” 134 And there are many more ecological impacts of burning coal that I don’t have room to cover in a short section devoted to its extraction.

Of all the impacts from coal mining, blowing the tops off mountains, the method prevalent in Appalachia, takes the prize for most vile. Coal mining companies started this practice when there were no more veins of coal near the surface and using tunnels and shafts became prohibitively expensive. The crazy thing is that even deep in those mountains there’s not that much coal— there’s just enough profit in it for the mining companies to do it, and only because they don’t have to pay anything for the ecological damage and havoc they’re wreaking.

Plus, there’s actually much more accessible coal in states like Montana and Wyoming.135 So why are we even mining for it in Appalachia? The mining companies there—and the local residents who’ve bought into the story—claim that the region will collapse without those mining jobs. But the truth is otherwise. For example, despite 13 billion tons of coal being pulled out of West Virginia in the past 150 years, West Virginians have the lowest median household income in the country, with the literacy rate in the southern coalfield region about that of Kabul, Afghanistan.136 I wanted to investigate any links between my own lightbulbs and blowing the tops off of mountains in Appalachia, so I went to the www.ilovemountains .org website, which allows anyone in the United States to type in a zip code and see which mountains were destroyed for your power. My search showed two power plants serving my area that purchase coal from companies blowing up mountains in Appalachia. Also on that site, I visited the powerful National Memorial for the Mountains, which identifies more than 470 destroyed mountains.137 The combined horror of mountaintop removal and massive climate disruption inspired me to put solar panels on my own house, so I can rest assured that no more mountains are destroyed to power my home.

Unfortunately, we don’t have time for every household to install solar panels and, even if we did, that doesn’t address the massive coal used to fuel industrial uses. The extraction and burning of coal is so devastating that there’s really only one solution: keep the coal in the hole. Leave it there. There’s a growing global consensus that the climate simply can’t sustain coal-fired power plants.

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natural resources, but somehow the local people get the short end of the deal, environmentally and economically. In fact, many places with valuable, nonrenewable resources like forests, metals, and minerals wind up as impoverished noncontenders in the global economy, with their citizens often left hungry and sick. This paradox is known as the resource curse.

Some economists and social scientists say the resource curse is caused when a country or region blessed with valuable resources relies too much on them, with its best people drawn to extraction-related work, so that other economic sectors just can’t compete. Meanwhile the prices for those native resources can fluctuate wildly based on the whims of the global economy, creating grave instability. Other observers point to the role of conflict minerals in sustaining political, and thus economic, chaos. American University professor Deborah Bräutigam suggests that governments in natural-resource-based economies don’t rely on taxes from citizens, which means that the contract between government and its citizens is weak; citizens can’t hold their leaders accountable. If ordinary folks complain about government in those situations, leaders can always use the money from the resources to fund a military presence that silences the grumbles.138 The practice of externalizing costs—which allows multinational companies to trash the environments in which they drill, mine, and extract, without financial consequences—compounds the local devastation.

The unfortunate fact is that a resource curse experienced by a single country is just one facet of a complex global situation riddled with unfairness and lack of equality. The benefits and costs of international extraction are not equitably distributed and, as we’ll see in the coming chapters, involve a messy web of often greedy and corrupt players, including multinational industries, national governments, and international development banks. As for the many millions of people who live and work on the land from which those resources are taken—they’re pretty much left out of the equation.

In particular, indigenous communities bear disproportionate impacts from extractive industries. Around the world, many indigenous communities are located in resource-rich areas that are targeted for logging, mining, oil and gas drilling, and other kinds of extraction. Indigenous peoples’ livelihoods and cultures often depend on access to land and natural resources, which they’ve respected and protected in sustainable relationships for hundreds if not thousands of years. Yet indigenous communities are often discriminated against and shut out of decision making about projects that affect their resources and their communities.

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I’m happy to report that indigenous communities are gaining ground in securing their rights to participate in environmental planning processes, even though it still irks me that this is something for which they need to fight. On September 13, 2007, after more than twenty years of advocacy and negotiations, the United Nations adopted a Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, which is a huge step toward protecting the environmental, economic, and other rights of these individuals and communities. The declaration was adopted by an overwhelming majority of 143 votes in favor, with only 4 votes—from Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the United States—against it.139 While the official international political recognition helps, there’s still a long way to go. As the International Working Group for Indigenous Affairs explains, “Translating this political recognition into concrete advances locally, nationally, regionally and internationally remains a big challenge for indigenous peoples.” 140 Indigenous communities continue to be targeted for destructive extractive projects around the world, often with little or no opportunity to engage meaningfully in the decision-making processes.

In our increasingly globalized economy, more and more extraction projects are run by multinational companies and financed by international financial institutions like the World Bank or the International Monetary Fund (for more on these institutions see chapter 3 on distribution), whose decision-making centers are far from the impacted communities. Having distant and often unresponsive decision makers running these projects makes it even harder for local communities to have a substantial voice in project planning. Too often, the most heavily impacted communities have the least say in the projects and gain the least from the downstream benefits of the resource use.

Many organizations around the world are working to influence these financial backers—both public and private—to get them to adhere to higher environmental, social, and human rights standards. To a limited extent, advocacy and activist groups have been able to force some public and private lenders to adopt policies that protect or promote environmental and social issues.

For example, the World Bank Group, one of the biggest financial backers of extractive, infrastructure, and policy projects around the world, loaning an average of $20 to $25 billion to developing country governments annually—including more than $1 billion specifically for extractive industries 141—did not even have mandatory environmental review proce38

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dures until 1987.142 It adopted the inadequate review process it now uses after lengthy, heated campaigns by coalitions of environmental, human rights, and other nonprofit organizations in countries that both lend to and borrow from the World Bank. In June 2003, the World Bank endorsed the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI), a voluntary program promoting greater transparency and civil society participation in extractive industries in resource-rich countries.143 Even with these policies in place, the World Bank continues both to fund devastating extractive industry projects and to fail to utilize its significant leverage in developing countries to promote transparency by industries or community involvement.

Appealing to these huge financial institutions to change their ways is a slow process and has so far proved inadequate in both pace and scale.

Many groups have abandoned efforts to reform them, believing that the structures and programs of the World Bank, along with its sibling organization the International Monetary Fund (IMF), are too deeply flawed.

Instead, these groups focus their efforts on restricting the reach and influence of these institutions. “The record of the IMF and the World Bank is one of unmitigated failure. Their ​. . . ​failed megaprojects have disqualified them from any future role in development. It is time to shrink these institutions,” explains Njoki Njoroge Njehu, a Kenyan activist who has focused on the World Bank and IMF for more than a decade.144 After witnessing many devastating World Bank projects in Asia and Africa with my own eyes, and getting inadequate responses from World Bank officials each time I marched up to their Washington, D.C., offices with my latest data and concerns, I have to agree that the best approach is restricting these institutions’ reach. Through an international campaign called the World Bank Bonds Boycott (WBBB), many individuals are ensuring that their pension funds, labor unions, churches, municipalities, and universities do not buy World Bank bonds. By withdrawing financing for its bonds, the WBBB exerts pressure on the Bank to, among other goals, stop environmentally destructive projects in oil, gas, mining, and dams.145 It’s clear that the risks and negative impacts of extractive projects are not shared equitably. The same holds true for the benefits—the profits and the actual resources. Some people are using way more than their share while others are using far too little. Jared Diamond, author of Collapse, notes that “the average rates at which people consume resources like oil and metals, and produce wastes like plastics and greenhouse gases, are about 32 times higher in North America, Western Europe, Japan and Australia than they 39

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are in the developing world.” 146 The United States consumes the highest percent; with only 5 percent of the world’s population, it accounts for about 30 percent of all resources consumed. Overall, the 25 percent of the world’s population in industrialized countries consume about 75 percent of global resources.147 In fact, all of us on the planet collectively are consuming more resources than the planet produces each year; we’re consuming about 1.4 planets’ worth of bio-capacity resources annually.148 It seems impossible: we’re consuming an amount equivalent to more than the total resources produced by the planet each year. In fact, it’s only possible because the planet’s been around a little longer than we have and has had time to accumulate extra.

Now the extra is running out. It’s as though a household saved income for years before ramping up its spending. It could spend more than it earned for some time, eating away at the savings, but eventually there’s nothing left. That’s what is happening with the planet.

And if all countries used resources at the rate that the United States does, we would need about 5 planets to sustain us.149 That’s clearly a problem, since we only have one. Two European-based organizations, BioRegional and World Wildlife Fund, have launched the One Planet Living program to reduce overall resource use, sustain ecological and community health, and ensure that the resources used are shared equitably. In order to achieve these goals, One Planet Living promotes a vastly reduced materials economy alongside new cultural norms that are proportionate to the resources we have.150 The equity piece means it’s not as simple as saying that everyone should cut their resource use—because that would be grossly unfair. Some parts of the world, like the United States and Europe, need to consume fewer resources, while other countries need to increase their consumption in order to meet even their basic needs. We’ve got to meet somewhere in the middle. And the total amount of extraction needs to stay within the planet’s ecological limits.

Transforming Extraction In order to turn things around, we need to extract less and ensure that the extraction processes we do use support environmental, community, and worker well-being. We need to utilize what we extract more efficiently, more wisely, and more reverently. And we need a much more equal distribution of both the harms and the benefits generated by resource extraction.

While advancing sustainability standards (like the Forest Stewardship Council) and integrating worker and community voices into the planning 40

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process for extractive projects (as in community forestry initiatives) can help lessen the impact of specific projects, if we’re going to seriously address the crisis of global resource depletion as well as the public health and environmental consequences of extraction, we need deeper changes.

We need to radically reduce the overall demand for the materials being extracted. We need to increase the efficiency or productivity of resources used and ramp up reuse and recycling programs. Finally, we need to seek out alternative ways to meet our needs, which, for many, means less focus on a constant flow of new Stuff.

There is another way. There are three places we can change the system so it uses fewer natural resources: at the front end, the back end, and in our hearts and minds.

1. At the Front End

At the design stage we must redesign our production systems to use fewer resources in the first place, thereby decreasing the need for more extraction.

From a materials and energy viewpoint, our current economy and industrial models are vastly inefficient. We could use less and waste less, starting right now. In the United States the materials used by industry amounts to more than twenty times each person’s weight per day—more than 1 million pounds per American per year.151 A growing number of scientists, activists, economists, government officials, and businesspeople are calling for a massive increase in our resource productivity—in other words, to get way more out of each pound of material or unit of energy consumed.

A German think tank called the Wuppertal Institute for Climate, Environment and Energy convened a group of designers, economists, development experts, and materials geeks and launched the Factor 10 Club. In 1994 they issued a declaration calling for an increase in resource productivity by a factor of ten within fifty years, which they believe “is technically feasible if we mobilise our know-how to generate new products, services, as well as new methods of manufacturing.” 152 There are loads of examples of making intense resource efficiency a design goal, such as reduced packaging or redesigning products to contain fewer materials, which is known as “light-weighting.” Other design strategies include making Stuff more: 41

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• Durable: So products last longer and don’t need to be discarded and replaced so quickly.

• Repairable: This has the added benefit of producing jobs.

• Recyclable: Materials should be chosen for their ability to maintain their integrity when recycled. Some materials degrade quickly, while others can be recycled many times.

• Adaptable: Instead of chucking our cell phones, laptops, etc. when new features become available, these items can have removable, update-able components, like lenses on a camera. The initial extra material or financial investment to make this change systemwide will be far outweighed by the costs saved on reduced extraction of new materials.

Our most brilliant minds can and should be let loose on cutting-edge industrial design that focuses not on improving just speed and style, but on dematerializing—using fewer resources. For example, digital music has replaced tons of vinyl records, plastic cassettes, and CD jewel cases. Sleek flat-screen TVs and monitors are replacing old washing machine-sized ones. Packaging has been made thinner, lighter. In lots of arenas, resource use per product is decreasing. (Unfortunately this progress can be canceled out if overall consumption rates don’t likewise slow down.)

2. At the Back End

Vast amounts of metals, paper, wood, and water wasted each year can be recycled or reused. Once materials have been extracted and processed, it is far better to keep them in use than to chuck them and go blow up more mountaintops or clear-cut more forests. (This is not true for toxic compounds, like PVC plastic, or heavy metals like lead and mercury, which should not be recycled but should be pulled out of use and replaced with nontoxic, ecologically compatible materials.)

3. In Our Hearts and Minds

We can and should always be asking the question, are there nonmaterial ways to meet our needs? For example, a diamond set in a gold ring doesn’t equal love—love equals love! Listening well, being respectful, offering to help out, tenderness and intimacy: that’s what equals love in my book. How can we show our affection, engage our kids, and amuse ourselves without using more and more resources? Rather than our status being signaled by the clothes we wear, the cars we drive, and the size of our homes, can’t status be based upon kindness, experience, and wisdom? Let’s get creative, people!

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And we can get back to that essential social activity known as sharing.

Car-sharing programs such as Zipcar, tool-lending libraries like the one offered by the City of Berkeley, and good old-fashioned borrowing between neighbors are great strategies for less resource intensive ways to meet our needs. This approach has the added benefit of building community and strengthening interpersonal relationships, which psychologists and social scientists have proven to be an important factor in mental health and happiness.

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