Chapter 13: Who Is Wellness For? - Who Is Wellness For?

PART IV: INTRODUCTION TO JUSTICE

“What goes too long unchanged destroys itself. The forest is forever because it dies and dies and so lives.”

— Tales From Earthsea : Dragonfly , Ursula Le Guin

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The thing of it is, we must live with the living.

—Montaigne

Who is wellness for? I’ve been asking myself this for years, wondering if it was possible to even answer this absurdly complex existential question.

When I was growing up in Brisbane, Australia, where the wildlife was plush and sometimes punishing, I understood that nature was in charge. There is a great beauty, wild and untamed, in the heart of Australian flora and fauna. But it was also dangerous, beckoning reproach. When I say I’m Australian, people often remark at the harshness of our landscapes. We have some of the world’s deadliest animals, from bull sharks to inland taipan snakes to box jellyfish. As a child, you are taught to be on the lookout, to be aware of your surroundings. I got good at snapping the earth brown snakes in half with a big tree branch. I was ruthless, my heart in my throat as I did it, but knowing their venom was mighty for me and my family, I acted as a territorial avenger. I was seven. Redback and funnel spiders were common, as were huntsmans, and there were protocols that I learned through osmosis—always check the bottom of your chair if you’re sitting outside, there might be a redbelly lurking. Echidnas were often on the road, and possums ravaged my mum’s garden, especially when it was bearing fruit. It was normal for blue-tongued lizards to lounge on our backyard tiling, and many times the small ones would get into the house and just stay there for weeks on end until finally finding a way out. I miss the way tamarind trees plunged neighboring streets with their poo-colored seeds and how my mother and I would stack the sour fruit in our pockets to make paste for chotpoti, a delicious cold mung bean dish. In Australia, I got used to being with the trees, within the wide scope of the jacaranda stumps that would shadow me in between moments of play, the purple leaves lively and punctuating. The folds of the earth have always been my sacred place.

What I’m trying to say is I was raised on and close to the land. The land and her creatures were a major part of my life growing up, so much so now I wonder why I live in a country where the divorce and severing of humans with the land is so apparent. Maybe it’s because if we were living in accordance to the land then we would have to also face the bodies that are buried here, the blood that has been spilled, and how the ghosts still haunt. That’s the reality for every colonial nation on this planet, then this one, the United States, also has the added history of hands, of labor, of toil, of more blood, of injustice laced in her soil, in her cotton, in her roots.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the Anthropocene recently, about how the Geological Society of America entitled its 2011 annual meeting “Archean to Anthropocene: The Past Is the Key to the Future.” “The Anthropocene,” Hannah Morris explains to Penn Today, “is a term that describes the supposedly new epoch we as humankind find ourselves in due to our own large-scale acts of environmental destruction. It was first suggested as a suitable term to denote the increasingly observable and convergent forces of global environmental change in 2000, by Nobel Laureate Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer.”^[1] To me (and others, like Vandana Shiva) the Anthropocene started with colonization, and though the act of colonizing existed prior to European colonizers (in China, in Japan, even with the spread of Islam in Europe, Africa, and Asia prior to this), the tenor was different, the barbarism that the former exhibited was a protracted assault at dehumanization through terror and extraction. By divorcing a people from their own cultural and spiritual compass, they were dislodging us from our power, which means sovereignty, but it also means resistance.

In The Red Deal: Indigenous Action to Save Our Earth, the Red Nation writes, “Framing this as a panhuman problem or a problem of the species—such as the term ‘the Anthropocene,’ the geological age of the fossil fuel economy—misses the point.”^[2] Especially when “the upper one-tenth of humanity is responsible for half of the carbon emissions from consumption. . . . The richest 1 percent similarly emit 175 times more CO₂ than the poorest Hondurans, Mozambicans, or Rwandans. Twenty-six billionaires hoard half the world’s social wealth that the 4.6 billion people who make up 60 percent of the planet’s population—numbers that appear to get more extreme as CO₂ concentrations rise.”^[3] I have come to understand that true wellness means witnessing even the grit and texture of the pain, of the wound, of the mystery that lies behind it. Studying the Anthropocene while doing research for this book, I’ve gathered that there’s a disregard for the ways in which white supremacy has caused our climate catastrophe, through the choices of colonization and onward, and now it really is up to white people to lead us to a space of evolutionary shift. This means tending to the damage. This means white people have to commit to not just environmental action, but to understand the totality of why we are here. There needs to be a vulnerability to listen and a heartfelt desire to change.

Too often, spaces of catastrophe are taken over by anger from the wrong people instead of compassion for the right people. It’s interesting, then, that “early environmentalists in the U.S. were anti-immigrant eugenicists whose ideas were later adopted by Nazis to implement their ‘blood and soil’ ideology,” writes Sarah Jaquette Ray.^[4] “In a recent, dramatic example, the gunman of the 2019 El Paso shooting was motivated by despair about the ecological fate of the planet: ‘My whole life I have been preparing for a future that currently doesn’t exist.’ Intense emotions mobilize people, but not always for the good of all life on this planet.”^[5] In a piece for Scientific American, Ray asks, “Is climate anxiety a form of white fragility or even racial anxiety?”^[6] These are important observations and a vital part of understanding the depth of our species’ climate issues.

As a Bangladeshi, I’m well aware that the land of my parents’ home will be one of the first to sink into water. Bangladeshis are also (no surprise) a significant percentage of the world’s labor force. The people who pay for the wealthy’s greed are the people who always pay for them—through their labor and eventually through their death. According to the Red Nation, Lakotas call owasicu owe, the fat taker, the colonizer, the capitalist economy.” It is also what Ojibwe activist Winona LaDuke calls weitiko—the cannibal economy,” and what Robin Wall Kimmerer calls windigo thinking. “They’re everywhere you look,” she writes. “The stomp in the industrial sludge of Onondaga Lake. And over a savagely clear-cut slope in the Oregon Coast Range where the earth is slumping into the river. You can see them where coal mines rip off mountaintops in West Virginia and in oil-slick footprints on the beaches of the Gulf of Mexico. A square mile of industrial soybeans. A diamond mine in Rwanda. A closet stuffed with clothes. Windigo footprints all, they are the tracks of insatiable consumption. So many have been bitten. You can see them walking the malls, eying your farm for a housing development, running for congress.”^[7]

Ray asks, who protects climate refugees? Or Indigenous peoples whose very livelihood is tied to the land? “Will the climate-anxious recognize their role in displacing people from around the globe? Will they be able to see their own fates tied to the fates of the dispossessed? Or will they hoard resources, limit the rights of the most affected and seek to save only their own, deluded that this xenophobic strategy will save them? How can we make sure that climate anxiety is harnessed for climate justice?”^[8] As lands burn, floods and hurricanes spur across landmass, earthquakes shift us palpably, the tectonic plates will continue to shift to the groove of their own intuition. We are at the behest of this Earth, not the other way around, and we are running out of time to listen to her and to meet her demands.

North Americans, Westerners, people who live on colonized lands as settlers, as I do and I have in three nations, three vast continents, owe everything to these lands and to the people whose lands are still unceded. I was born on Anishinaabe land, raised on the land of the Gadigal people in the Eora nation, and now live on Tongva land. This Earth, and the custodians of it, the people who have cared for it, who knew how to tend to it, to hear her speak through the weave of spiders, through the call of the hawk, through the pitch of the wind, they knew, and have always known, more than us. We owe them not just their land, we owe them our lives. We owe them for all that we’ve taken and continue to take without concern, and we show our respect for what they have given us, and what we have stolen, by being and becoming ardent warriors and defenders of this Earth.

“In the indigenous worldview, a healthy landscape is understood to be whole and generous enough to be able to sustain its partners. It engages land not as a machine but as a community of respected non-human persons to whom we have a responsibility,” writes Kimmerer. “Biocultural restoration raises the bar for environmental quality of the reference ecosystem, so that as we care for the land, it can once again care for us.”^[9] In Maxine Bédat’s Unraveled, she discusses the effects of industrial farming on the soil in an enlightening interview with Carl, an organic farmer in the United States who tells her, “Not using synthetic chemicals—that is, organic—can help to improve soil health and thereby prevent the need for fertilizers and pesticides to begin with. Within five or six years of being organic, you can start seeing changes in the soil—its crumble, ability to retain moisture, nutrient level, even the smell are all different.”^[10] Yet there are so many farmers who use the herbicides and pesticides because that’s the dynamic of commercial farming; it’s a naive belief that you can be in control of ecology, of harvest, and that it won’t have grave impacts and repercussions. As USDA soil scientist researcher Rick Haney puts it, “We are essentially destroying the functionality of soil, so that you have to feed it more and more synthetic fertilizers just to keep growing this crop.”^[11] It’s the cycle of capitalism to want more, it’s windigo thinking, and this—our need for things is the very thing that needs to change. But before that, we must come back to the land. We must rematriate her, respect her and find ways to be in true communion with her.

“Among the three human obligations, the third is paramount,” writes Bri. Maya Tiwari in The Path of Practice about the declaration of the Vedas. “Reverence to the Divine, reverence to Nature—to the earth, river, wind, fire, and space, to the animals, plants, and every blade of grass, every speck of dust.”^[12] I carry this with me as I look toward my life now, thinking about how my life changed when I found humility, when I found sanctuary in the land. I came back to her through the use of sacred medicines, and she has reminded me of her compass in all of us, how she is always there when we need her. I think of the power of sacred medicines and that to sit with plants, like Grandmother ayahuasca, mushrooms, guided by elders and the traditional custodians of those medicines is a privilege. I am humbled when I think of how the Huni Kuin, the indigenous peoples of Peru and Brazil, have received downloads from Grandmother to share her sacred wisdom with the world. There is so much intangible wisdom that we’ve blocked ourselves off to so much as a species. There’s so much we refuse to see, or account for, but the plants around us, the Earth, I believe, is asking for our full attention.

As a Muslim, I have always been prepared for death, have had a specific awareness of it. This life, this material plane, is just one part of existence. Empires collapse and we die. That is what will happen to me, and it’s what will happen to you. So, what do we do in the interim? In this space where we have found each other, found this ground, found this universe where we are all alive, facing these realities. We have the power to change, we have the power to make change. We have to understand that we are interconnected, and that global capitalism is an insidious fraud that compels you to believe you don’t have any responsibility for what you buy. That extracting from people and the planet has no impact on you, but it does. You are complicit, we all are. It’s not about guilt, it’s about truth. It’s about healing in a truthful way.

In the question of who is wellness for, I’ve come to understand that wellness isn’t for anyone if it isn’t for everyone. Otherwise it’s a paradox.

As I slow down and sit with my own mistakes, I find myself full of compassion for others. I stopped needing to be right a little while ago, and that’s been liberating: to accept that I’m faulty, as we all are. If we stopped targeting others, if we stopped severing relationships and connections, only to replicate the brashness with how we have been taught to treat the land, we could nurture a shared reliance on each other. This is what justice feels like for me.