We were given a couple of days off at Global Greengrants Fund recently, tagged on to Labor Day, to have extra time to breath and revive from working at a nonprofit where we dive daily into upending the worldwide abominations of our times and supporting movements building sustainability and resiliency when all else seems determined to destroy.
I planned to disappear into the wilds of my home in Colorado seeking restoration from the song of the mountains, but the wrath of Mother Earth took over that long weekend. Colorado firestorms, smoke, and heat were sandwiched by an overnight temperature drop of 70 degrees, followed by sleet, snow, and ice. Farther west, while frozen trees bent and snapped in Boulder, my birth land of Northern California woke to a rain of ash and a sky brown from the twenty-nine wild fires burning simultaneously.
With the outdoors feeling eerie and uninhabitable that weekend, I turned inward and read two brilliant books, seemingly as extreme from each other as the contrasts of Colorado’s weather: The Nickel Boys, and If Women Rose Rooted. The first is a novel by Colson Whitehead, a black American man, about the horrors of a juvenile reformatory school in Florida. This school really existed, unchecked, for 111 years warping the lives of hundreds of young black boys and ensuring the mild infractions and false convictions that got them assigned to the school caused most of them complete and everlasting mental defeat. The second is non-fiction by Sharon Blackie, a white English woman, about a Celtic-based journey to find feminine authenticity and belonging through a connection to the earth as a way to heal social and environmental devastation. Whitehead’s book focuses on the generational violations and oppressions of the non-white masculine and the consequential devastation to our humanity, and Blackie’s on the violations and oppressions of the feminine, and the subsequent demolition to our planet.
Deep connections are rooted between the two books, as well as with the forces of climate chaos we witnessed that Labor Day weekend. Both books discuss the profound psychological damage caused by the white patriarchal systems, which have long and insidiously been destroying justice and equality to serve profit while demolishing the fabric and power of local communities. These same systems have abused the earth to the brink of the irreparable.
Sharon Blackie writes, “They concern, quite simply, the world: a world in which feminine power and wisdom has been lost, in which nature has been violated and an Otherwordly treasure stolen; a world which, as a consequence of these circumstances, has become a Wasteland. The quest for the Grail, the female principle, the giver and sustainer of life, is not merely a quest to restore ourselves: it is a quest to restore the world.”
Generational suppression has been key to these systems’ twisted victories as Colson Whitehead addresses, “Their daddies taught them how to keep a slave in line, passed down this brutal heirloom…Take him away from his family, whip him until all he remembers if the whip, chain him up so all he knows is chains. A term in an iron sweatbox, cooking his brains in the sun, had a way of bringing a young buck around, and so did a dark cell, a room aloft in darkness, outside time…the rooms waited, blank and still and airless. They waited for wayward boys in need of an attitude adjustment. They wait still, as long as, the sons—and the sons of those sons—remember.”
Our current capitalist system is creating a global Wasteland. A Wasteland of spirit, of humanity, and it is working ceaselessly and successfully to make a Wasteland of our planet. The very few, a mere handful, in their skyscraper boardrooms, 900 feet above the earth and its people, are making decisions and holding the power in which Wastelands thrive and futures are destroyed. These few have made policies that ensure they’re untouchable, their power and profits unchecked. Until now. As the sun was disappearing in the California dawn, a report was released by federal regulators overseeing the nation’s commodities markets which concluded, “A world wracked by frequent and devastating shocks from climate change cannot sustain the fundamental conditions supporting our financial system.” If the current financial system and its subjugations are buckling from the consequences of its greed, then there is an opening for a new system, a true system.
Paul Hawken recently said of racial injustice and climate change, “We are dealing with a profound disconnection.” Indeed we are dealing with a disconnection to justice and health of the earth that nourishes the bodies and spirits of people. We are dealing with a disconnection to the voice and power of communities, which serve the many, not the few. Sharon Blackie wrote, “The most valuable allies are those who teach us that we cannot succeed alone—and more, that it is meaningless to succeed alone, for an essential feature of the Heroine’s Journey is uncovering the power of community.”
The power of community is one of our primary focuses of support at Global Greengrants Fund. Our funding goes to grassroots locally led projects throughout the world that put community first while promoting socially and environmentally sustainable ways of living. Since time immemorial our grantees and their ancestors have been living with justice and in harmony with the earth and its people, yet today they are among the most severely impacted by the destructive practices of our capitalistic systems. Encouragingly the movements we support are making headway and the key to their success is they come to us directly from the people who are impacted, not from those in the skyscrapers who are clueless, coddled, and disconnected.
It is time to reboot. It is time reconvene and reconnect as we follow the grassroots wisdom of those most tied to the earth and their communities. It is time to set out on a path of authenticity for our planet and people. It is time to raze power and systems that are corrupt and broken and turn our climate and justice devastations around.
The endings of both Whitehead’s and Blackie’s books sow determination. Without spoiling the endings I can reveal that you will read the last sentences, draw in the last words, and shut each book feeling a mix of a penetrating weight and revulsion at what was, and a renewed determination to pursue what can be. You will finish them yelling, “NO MORE!”