Trees, Truth, and Our Way of Life

When I was twenty-two years old, I worked during the summer of 1995 at an Illinois state park as a Seasonal Interpreter. During the last month of earning my undergraduate degree, the phone in my dorm room woke me from a deep sleep early one April morning after a late-night of playing cards and drinking beer.  “What the hell are you doing, wake up!” laughed the state park ranger.  I met Jeff several years prior at a local restaurant and bar that I worked at while attending community college.  He took a liking to me and thought I was a hard worker and good with people because of how I interacted with employees and customers in the restaurant.  Many late nights were spent after work drinking beer with Jeff in the bar, which often included my weekly Saturday night performance of a Billy Connolly stand-up comedy routine that I memorized.  Based on this, Jeff illogically concluded that I was a perfect fit for the Seasonal Interpreter job that required taking campers on hiking trails and educating them about nature and the history of the park.  “Are you sure about this, Jeff?  I have a bachelor’s degree in sociology with a minor in anthropology.”  “Well, you can use that can’t you?” he replied with another laugh.  A month later, I was sitting in Jeff’s truck getting a behind-the-scenes tour of the state park where I spent much of my adolescence.   

I was in over my head, and most of the full-time park employees resented the creation of the position, let alone that I was filling the position.  While I had a philosophical appreciation for nature and environmental justice, I knew virtually nothing about plants, trees, birds, and the animals of the forest.  I had to start somewhere, so I selected a good and conveniently located trail near the campgrounds, packed a backpack with nature books, and spent several weeks reading and exploring the trail on warm summer days below the shaded cool of the canopy of trees.  I picked out several stops along the trail and did my best to research the trees and plants at those points.  My first guided tour was not exactly stellar or well-attended, and I quickly realized that I needed professional help.  I contacted my former biology teacher at the local community college and, mercifully, he agreed to give a guest tour.  The day of his tour was a beautiful Saturday morning, and I and approximately twenty campers were treated to an educational hike that included deer running across our path, which delighted the urban campers.  I now had a script to build on.  I spent more time on the trail, looking through nature books, and learning how to listen and interpret nature. 

I didn’t realize it, but my senses were adjusting.  Sounds became distinct voices.  Trees swayed, groaned, and danced in the wind.  Birds sang and spoke to me. I gradually began to experience nature differently.  Then one day, near the end of my stint as a Seasonal Interpreter, I was sitting at the trail head reading about plants and trees when off in the distance on the playground a young child picked up a plastic whiffle-ball bat and began pounding it against the side of a tree.  The tree let out a cry.  I’m not speaking figuratively.  It was very brief, but I heard it.  For a long time, I talked myself out of admitting that I heard anything.  Twenty-six years later, I’m convinced that I didn’t imagine this.  The only reason I was able to hear it is because I spent three months immersed in a natural environment, away from machines, concrete, glass, and steel.  For one brief moment, the truth of what human existence really is and how deeply connected we are to the planet, nature, and nonhuman species was revealed. 

Last week I spent several days on my porch in the sweltering, unseasonably hot weather.  It seemed the appropriate setting to read a book about climate science, human disconnection and disregard for nature, and environmentalism.  The air-conditioners hummed as tree shade and a light breeze offered some respite from the heat and humidity emanating from the metal and concrete surrounding me.  I opened the book and began.  “It’s customary when writing about nonhumans to use the relative pronoun that rather than who: ‘We cut down the tree that used to grow by the pond,’ not ‘We cut down the tree who used to grow by the pond.’  The authors of this book use who whenspeaking of nonhumans because we believe that how we speak of the world profoundly affects how we perceive and experience the world, which in turn profoundly affects how we act in the world.  If we perceive the life around us as a collection of resources to exploit, then exploit them we will—and ultimately, we will destroy the world in our attempts to control it.”

What unfolds in the pages that follow are some inconvenient details of the environmental impact of the manufacturing of renewable energy and power infrastructure.  The environmental impact of the mining required to build renewable energy infrastructure remains highly problematic.  Manufacturing solar cells (silicon) and building wind turbines (copper) is not a pristine environmental process.  While building renewable energy infrastructure is less environmentally destructive to the planet and nonhuman species than fossil fuel infrastructure, the mining and manufacturing process remains environmentally destructive.  Whether people deny the impact of human-made climate change and pretend fossil fuels are infinite or they accept climate change and work to build less environmentally destructive sources of energy, none of it is sustainable.  The environmental debate is now framed between those who deny reality in order to rationalize continuing on the path of fossil fuel extraction and those who are willing to accept climate science but who lie to themselves that manufacturing renewable energy infrastructure is somehow sustainable and capable of delivering enough energy and power to allow our way of life of consumerism, trade, agriculture, and travel to continue unabated.  We simply refuse to accept that our way of life is at the heart of the human dilemma, and speaking this truth out loud is political suicide.      

As demand grows for the dwindling and thus increasingly expensive fossil fuel infrastructure, social, political, economic, and environmental chaos has begun.  As people and nations get more desperate, military action will become more likely.  The United States, China, and Russia have the capacity to unleash massive armies and weapons of mass destruction and cyberwarfare in a race to monopolize access to remaining fossil fuels in an effort to control, dominate, and gain strategic advantage over other nations.  As people and nations become more desperate to hold onto our way of life, they’ll become more susceptible to anti-democratic and authoritarian appeals by strongmen promising safety and security through military force to protect our way of life. 

The seeds of this predicament were sown in the domestication of plants and animals approximately 10,000 years ago.  Human efforts to control soil, water, plants, and animals began slowly.  The surplus and steady supply of food allowed for population growth.  Humans became sedentary, and we began to build permanent structures, towns, and cities.  Humans cleverly employed language to symbolically construct a “reality” that disconnected humans from nonhuman species in order to rationalize and justify environmental destruction and build and preserve our way of life.  Hierarchies of human supremacy grew stronger.  Humans abandoned religions that worshiped the sun and all of nature as sacred in favor of worshipping the son.  Patriarchal social relations replaced the egalitarianism, cooperation, and interconnection so integral to our hunting and gathering ancestors’ ability to survive with the lies of dominance, competition, and disconnection that accompany civilization and the falsehood of infinite economic growth.  Cultures of control and dominance brought colonialism, militarism, enslavement, the creation of race and white supremacy, and resource extraction and exploitation to build and maintain the tools of domination.  Humans disconnected from nature, from others, and ultimately from ourselves.   

Modern humans existed on this planet for 190,000 years before building cultures of disconnection, domination, and control.  Our way of life, for the past one-hundred years in particular, is profoundly out of balance and completely atypical of human existence on this planet. We’ve lost our capacity for perspective at a time when we most need to understand the uncomfortable and inconvenient truth.  We cannot farm the way we are farming.  More of us need to grow food and in ways less damaging to soil and water.  We have to voluntarily deindustrialize.  We cannot travel as much or the way we are traveling.  We have to think more carefully about the construction and size of homes and limit the extent to which we heat and cool our living space.  We cannot produce and consume the way we are producing and consuming.  Instead of truth, we lie to ourselves that it’s possible to reconcile our way of life and the demands of industrial capitalism with the limitations of the planet and a population of eight billion people.  Nature says otherwise.  The process of planetary correction has begun and is picking up speed, and it will proceed with or without human cooperation, understanding, or humility.  

When I was twenty-two years old, the tree WHO cried out revealed the truth to me and told me everything I needed to know. When trees grow close to one another, they learn from one another and help one another.  Their roots become entangled, and trees learn to communicate with one another.  In a sense, tree roots have memories and store history.  Trees embody the wisdom of our hunting and gathering ancestors: egalitarianism, cooperation, and interconnection.  Trees transfer energy and resources to other trees in need.  Trees understand not just how to survive but how to live and support all species in the desire to live well, including maintaining an ecosystem that is hospitable to humans.  Trees are resilient teachers, forgiving, nurturing, and loving, even in their death. 

When I die, I am going to be cremated and my ashes will be planted with an Oak Tree, location to be determined.  Perhaps one day humans might relearn how to hear the truth from trees and create a way of life built on harmony rather than hierarchy. 

Trees are sanctuaries.  Whoever knows how to speak to them, whoever knows how to listen to them, can learn the truth.   –Herman Hesse

Journalism, Education, & Democracy

I spend the first several weeks of the semester in my Social Problems class addressing the history, theory, and philosophy of journalism & democracy.  My pedagogical approach is to use this as the foundation upon which to understand the social construction of a “social problem,” the agenda setting impact of journalism, and to help students understand that in the absence of a well-funded, diverse, watchdog system of journalism that the wheels of democracy grind to a halt.  It’s highly unlikely that citizens will be able to hold elected leaders accountable for their policy positions if they do not have access to good, high quality journalism.  The theory is beautiful and aspirational: an all-inclusive democratic system with high voter turnout, a strong commitment to independent journalism, and a well-educated citizenry who are capable of critical thinking, rational debate, and proactively responding to collective problems.  Anti-intellectualism, the marginalization of the Liberal Arts, attempts to turn schools into worker-training sites, and news produced to entertain rather than inform are obstacles to this aspirational goal.  Democracy is fragile, and the primary purpose of education and journalism is to prevent an authoritarian slide.      

When I teach Social Problems, I focus on helping students understand the historical trend toward corporate monopolization of media and journalism, the public policies that have accelerated this trend, and how the profit motive undermines investigative journalism and democracy in favor of the interests of authoritarian capitalism and wealth concentration.  The FCC was established in 1934 to represent the public interest, and the deal was that we would permit companies to use OUR airwaves but they would be required to provide the public something in return, and this meant using a portion of their profits to provide the necessary public service of journalism.  However, good journalism is very expensive to produce, and our media have evolved in a way in which the “owners” of OUR media are fewer with less incentive to use corporate revenue to properly fund and support news bureaus.  More recently, the bi-partisan 1996 Telecommunications Act accelerated this historical trend by completely deregulating media, creating the conditions for continued corporate monopolization, providing massive corporate welfare in the form of free access to the digital spectrum, and laying the foundation for an internet that functions like the Wild West.  

When I began teaching Social Problems in the late 1990s, it was not uncommon for me to use video clips from mainstream investigative television programs such as Primetime, 20/20, Dateline, and 60 Minutes.  These programs used to produce good, investigative journalism on some of our most pressing social problems.  While many of these programs still exist, the content is now almost exclusively street crime that focuses on extreme acts of brutality.  Violent content is cheaper to produce, more appealing to more viewers, and more effective at attracting advertising dollars.  The only one of these programs that still occasionally produces good investigative journalism about social problems is 60 Minutes.  Corporate crimes and political malfeasance, which are far more dangerous to public health and democracy than street crime, are now nearly absent from these programs.  While you can still find excellent investigative programs and documentaries that address complicated social problems, this content is more costly, absent from the mainstream, and caters to the choir in niche markets.

In addition to the corporate monopolization of news, the United States is simultaneously underfunding PBS, forcing it to seek more funding from corporate foundations and individual viewers.  Instead of building PBS into a publicly funded powerhouse that could rival the BBC, the United States has been systematically dismantling it for several decades.  When you couple all these trends with the emergence of social media and the opportunity for everyone’s misinformed and overconfident uncle to share disinformation that circumvents academic research and investigative journalism, it’s not exactly a mystery why culture and politics have become so polarized and dysfunctional.  According to Pew Research Center, more than half of Americans report that they “sometimes” or “often” get their news from social media.  Despite the promise and potential to educate, the internet, in this sense, has made us stupid.   

An additional and dangerous by-product of all these trends is the peculiar notion that it’s reasonable to expect access to high-quality journalism without paying for it.  When journalism is reliant on advertising revenue rather than reader subscriptions, a dependency on corporate advertising leads to marketplace censorship.  This occurs when journalists self-censor what they write and what they choose to investigate so as not to challenge corporate power and run the risk of losing corporate advertising dollars.  If journalists are going to be able to effectively do their jobs, they must be free of fear of retribution for holding people, corporations, and government accountable to the public.  Not only has the total number of journalists declined with the corporate consolidation of news divisions and the push to make news profitable, but the journalists who are employed are less autonomous with less job security.  More than ever, journalists need and deserve the kind of employment protection that teacher tenure provides.

The threat of teachers and journalists losing their jobs and, in some cases their lives, for speaking truth to power is completely unacceptable and anti-democratic.  Rather than creating a tenure system for journalists, we’re witnessing the gradual erosion of tenure protections for teachers, including in higher education.  Eliminating teacher tenure is one method by which some politicians, school administrators, and parents undermine and eliminate curriculum that threatens power structures and the status quo.  If I felt that my job as a professor was potentially in jeopardy because some elected official, corporation, administrator, or parent of a student didn’t like what I was teaching, it would likely lead to self-censorship and impact what I teach and how I teach it.  As a “consumer mentality” regarding education and journalism has embedded itself in much of the culture, news has devolved into entertainment devoid of substance.  There is less appreciation, much less understanding, that the function of education and journalism is to provide the skills and information we NEED for citizenship. 

Additionally, elected leaders who fail to engage with the press are equally problematic.  On May 1, 2020, the Trump administration held a press briefing for the first time in over 400 days, and it’s conceivable that in the absence of a global pandemic that daily press briefings may have never resumed for the remainder of President Trump’s term.  This was just one of many insults aimed at journalism by the Trump administration and by Trump himself, who frequently demonstrated contempt for journalism and regularly referred to journalists as “the enemy of the people.”  We now also know that the Trump administration seized the phone records of four New York Times journalists in 2017 in an effort to uncover their sources. 

The Biden administration has held daily press briefings since taking office.  However, Biden himself has only held one Presidential press briefing.  While it’s a relief to no longer have a narcissistic egomaniac POTUS with authoritarian impulses and access to the nuclear codes demonstrating contempt for a free press and tweeting misinformation with infantile cravings for attention, it is preferable and necessary for the POTUS to have regular contact with and take questions directly from the press.  Long known for inartful communication when speaking extemporaneously, President Biden’s strategy thus far has been to rely on a small number of intelligent and articulate surrogates to handle daily press briefings and take questions on behalf of the administration.  In light of the damage done to journalists and the free press by the Trump administration, we need a more aggressive effort by the Biden administration to establish regular, open, and transparent communication with the press and more public pronouncements in defense of journalism and the indispensable role journalists perform.  Biden’s appointment of Jessica Rosenworcel, who has a record of supporting net neutrality and extending broadband access to underserved communities, as acting Chairperson of the FCC is encouraging but insufficient.  It is incumbent on President Biden to speak forcefully and clearly in defense of and in celebration of journalism and a free press in an effort to educate the public about the vital and necessary function of journalism.  This will also foster an understanding among young people that aspiring to a career in journalism is one of the most noble and patriotic professions and help rebuild the foundation upon which democracy rests.   

Beyond this, we need an administration supportive of policies that encourage, support, and fund news organizations.  We need regulatory policies that reestablish limitations on the number of news companies a single corporation can own in order to diversify ownership of radio, television, and newspapers and include the voices of marginalized and underserved groups.  We need a long-term commitment to net neutrality in order to level the playing field and prevent internet traffic from being driven by wealth and corporate power.  We need a well-funded Public Broadcasting System that is capable of serving both national and local needs.  We need an educated public capable of making a distinction between entertainment and journalism and who also understand that news and journalism that is free of charge also tends to be sensationalized and cheap in content.  Fact-checking complicated public policy issues is often a lengthy, complex, laborious task, and the public must be willing to pay for journalism through subscriptions and tax increases designed to pay for news content so that journalism is not completely reliant on advertising revenue and susceptible to conflicts of interest with advertisers and corporations.  We need all this because, in the words of Henry Giroux, “We live in a time that demands a discourse of both critique and possibility, one that recognizes that without an informed citizenry, collective struggle, and viable social movements, democracy will slip out of our reach and we will arrive at a new stage of history marked by the birth of an authoritarianism that not only disdains all vestiges of democracy but is more than willing to relegate it to a distant memory.”