Lives on the River

Lives on the River: Rachel Jacobs

We’ve moved our narrowboat from our lockdown spot on Tottenham Marshes after a dramatic series of events. First, the government decided to ease the lockdown – despite the UK having the second highest virus death rate in the world. Then the Canal and River Trust told us we could no longer stay in place. So we have returned to moving every two weeks, up and down the river, finding moorings where we can.

I’m beginning to really love this river. To love a place you need a level of intimacy with it. To understand something of its essence. I love this river despite its deterioration. Overgrown algae, rubbish, endless plastic, a bubbling mix of toxins, detergent, sewage and oil slicks. Yet it’s full of life, the algae teeming with fish and eels. New swans are born, cygnets with their patient sometimes violent parents. Ducklings waddle, facing risk of murder by the prowling fox I met the other night. Blackberries prepare to fruit. Grasses, meadow life, marshland, families of old trees with their fungi and lichen friends greet the days.

Whilst we were in place in Tottenham, we found a corner of the marshes my partner and I called the ‘magic circle.’ Daily we went there to look at the sky, meditate, picnic, exercise.

Our magic circle was recently destroyed. A murder investigation connected a burnt-out moped on the edge of our woodland to a shooting. The destruction spread to our place on the marshes. Police vans, tents, portaloos, divers, drones arrived, searching the waters for the gun. Our boats were used as anchors, holding the ropes for divers scouring the silt below. Then the cutting started, decimating bushes and plants. The nesting birds, butterflies, bees moved on. They didn't find the gun, just a lot of hidden rubbish.

We moved on, and moored in Springfield Park, Stamford Hill.

One day we walked from Stamford Hill, close to my Jewish roots in London, to the Olympic Park in Stratford. A journey down Cazenove Road to Stoke Newington takes us to where my mum, aunt, grandparents, their cousins and my great grandmothers lived before, during and after the Second World War. Then they were moved out of what was considered the East London slums to one of the shiny new post-war council estates in Essex. I suppose this is the closest to roots on this English island as I'm going to find. A sense of place, moving on, thriving is very much on my mind at this moment as I reflect on the Black Lives Matter protests and the virus.

My great grandparents arrived here illegally on a boat, escaping a cholera epidemic that killed one of my great grandfathers and fleeing pogroms that violently chased Jews from their homes. My family, as well as my partner’s family who came from Chile in the 1970s, all ended up here, close to these marshes and this river. They were seeking a safe place, trying to find ways to thrive--nutritionally, politically, metaphorically, spiritually, emotionally, communally. I seek the same things.

As we walked from where our roots and boat are, the river became increasingly closed in. We moved onto the tributary river behind the marshes, turned now into flats, stables, roads and football pitches. No longer meadows and woodlands. The tributary has some appearance of 'wild-ness', but damage is visible everywhere. The algae thickens, plastic is embedded in the mud and silt at the river's bottom. Still there is beauty, a twisting turning water flow, with lilies, reeds and willows and giant invading hogweeds, all squashed between the roads and industries of London. A miracle in the metropolis. Along the river families emerge from lockdown to sunbathe, barbeque and party. We stopped to salsa with a party of South Americans. My partner reminisced about his Chilean childhood summers. We celebrated the mixed-up aliveness of London.

The river keeps changing. The incredible landscaping feat of the Olympic Park has a different type of beauty, more in keeping with urban life. Regimented, serene, colour-coded, the water flows wide, straightened, rippling yet dull. No lightning-struck willows, huge nettles, hemlocks and hogweeds with hand-burning stems.

We reached the park, the stadium and Anish Kapoor's iconic roller coaster. The river split and split again, making it hard to follow the flow of water, locks, closed cafes, building developments and cement. We tried to find somewhere to eat and ended up at an epitome of consumerism and capitalism – a burger place in Westfield Shopping Centre. I had a mushroom burger and my partner 'treated' himself to a beef burger.

Walking, we spoke of damage, faith and medicine. Much of my research, the public workshops I run and the artworks I make, consider how we can be positive in the face of environmental and climate change. I am not using the words emergency, catastrophe or crisis. My research, which incorporates environmental psychology, shows that these words, a narrative of apocalypse, can encourage despair. We desperately need the urgency of 'emergency', just as the world has (partly) responded to the pandemic. But despair is where damage is done. Despair turns us into zombies. Despair is not where life is.

To have faith in our future, to envision any positive continuity, not the future we fear, we need trust alongside urgency. We need to trust that no matter how much we turn the river into a 'navigation', straighten it, add locks to manage the flow of water and the beings living in the water, throw rubbish into it – the water will still try to do what water does. Flow towards the sea. Evaporate. Rain. Keep being in the water cycle.

The water in the river is never the same water.

The problem is that our destruction has reached the water cycle. We experience an increase in droughts, storms and floods at unseen levels. Yet if we leave water alone, if we learn how to protect and be with it and not dominate it, water will be what water is. The same with plants, birds, fish. The same with mammals and humans. Despite the damage, despite burgers at Westfields, a return of cars to the roads and even higher levels of pollution and CO2 emissions--water will still try to do what water does. We started to see this when we stopped some of the travel and consumption during lockdown. Some humans and non-humans could freely return to what they do when they are not adapting, mutating, hiding and dying from destructive ways.

I don't believe it’s enough to acknowledge this just so we feel better. There are too many points of no return. We are discovering that atmosphere and weather systems can severely malfunction. Ice, soil, the whole of Earth's life supporting systems, can go awry. Yet even with our mutated, damaged world, surely we need to trust that the cure for the damage is also in our hands.

We can create vaccines and sustainability plans. We can re-landscape industrial land, change the politicians, the regulations. We can root out corruptions, reform the police and legal system. All this we desperately must do. But there is another type of healing we need: finding ways to nurture life. When natural life is thriving, we will thrive. Where we see no life (Westfield and a burger place, pollution in a river, the top of a sacred mountain removed for mining) life won't thrive. Despair comes. We turn into zombies. We seek to dominate, believing the myths about winning through infinite growth and consumption, technological determinism, extraction and progress. We create nothing but death. We experience nothing but despair and indifference.

The fundamental question for all of us: how do we sustain our massive populations, our health, our food, our economies, our communities, families, identities so that life can thrive? We are not yet answering this question.

We returned to the tributary river on Hackney Marshes. Hundreds of people were in the water and on the banks in the heatwave, the river smelling of sewage and rubbish from the incinerator upstream and human waste, fecal, food and plastic deposited after our emergence from lockdown. Pissing in the woods is a different experience now from the beginning of lockdown. Gone is the romantic dream of nature saving us. The atmosphere was shocking, joyful, electric. Terrifying.

Back at our magic circle, we discovered the police had cut it down. Razed it to the ground. Gone are the ribbons tied to the dog rose bush with dates and names on them. The brambles arranged in a circle. The beautiful pink roses and blackberries coming into flower. The birds soaring, singing and settling. I felt despair. Sadness at the spreading damage in the lives of everyone, for the birds, bees and butterflies who had even less place to roam and make a home, the fruits and flowers that would not grow there this summer.

Yet something remains in this place that was once a magic circle, now dead brambles and dust. Something ineffable is still here, a tingle of something in my bones, a memory of regrowth. Something bubbling up from below, something shining from above. The dog rose was left with one flower.

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Rachel Jacobs is a Consulting Editor to Emerging Voices. She writes on climate issues and the role of the artist in addressing them

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The Fire This Time

The Fire This Time: Josh Buchin

America is on fire. In truth, America has always been on fire. The fire has raged for 400 years. But now it feels as if people are finally looking out their windows and noticing the conflagration. While America burns, I’ve been thinking about privilege, one of the main reasons America is aflame. Some people have privilege and others are denied access to what advantage brings. Consider two kinds of ‘entitlements’: the privilege of ignorance and the privilege of choice. Combined, these two permit the larger indulgence of inaction.

It’s maddening how slowly we respond to the suffering of others. Had the level of outrage happening now taken place years ago, perhaps George Floyd would still be alive. Breonna Taylor might still be among us. How many African-American lives could have been saved? But belatedly, people are paying attention. And by people, I mean white people in America. Because if you are a Black person in America, you never have the luxury of not paying attention to race. Your whole existence is defined by your skin colour. And now White people are thinking about race too. The fact that, like most White people, I have spent most of my life never thinking about my own race is privilege. White Americans have always had the liberty to plead ignorance about race, to talk about it only in the context of the other, to behave as if race is something that happens to someone else.

The second privilege relates to choice. I’m reminded of a piece of text from the Babylonian Talmud, the central work of Rabbinic literature, which is the major guiding light for Jews. Composed in Babylonia, now Iraq, the 6th century CE text feels eerily prescient, telling us: “Anyone who is able to protest against the transgressions of one's household and does not, is punished for the actions of the members of their household; anyone who is able to protest against the transgressions of one's townspeople and does not, is punished for the transgressions of the townspeople; anyone who is able to protest against the transgressions of the entire world and does not is punished for the transgressions of the entire world.” (Babylonian Talmud, Shabbat 54b-55a).

This text tells us something that should be intuitive – all of us, living in interconnected communities, are responsible for one another. However, just because it’s intuitive doesn’t mean it’s easy. I find many excuses not to actively protest. Primarily, my life is not threatened by a police force that exists to subjugate and control my race. Had I been born a different skin colour, my priorities would reflect this. But I am not afraid of the police, have never had any reason to be. My experience is a White one. I don’t know what it’s like to be pulled over while driving for doing nothing, to have to keep my hands where the officers can see them at all times, to fear my life is endangered by this encounter. I don’t know the urgency people of color feel right now. As a White person, I have the privilege of choices that many do not.

The privileges of ignorance and of choice combine to soothe me. I don’t have to do anything, retreating into my cave of Whiteness. I can stop Googling “protests,” ignore the New York Times for a few weeks, let everything go back to normal. What I am most afraid of is that this is what will happen. That most White people will feel that too much is being asked of us already – we are living through a plague, after all! – and that trying to navigate 400 years of systemic racism and systematic oppression is beyond the scope of what we can handle right now. I am worried that the fire currently igniting America will subside and leave only embers in its wake. I am worried that the privilege of inaction will win out.

Eventually, life will go back to some kind of normal. But for people of color in America, normal is totally unacceptable. We must continue to show up; not just now while BLM is trending on Twitter, but forever, even when doing so is unpopular again. We must change how we view people of color, starting with an examination of the ways we see our own race. We must advocate for deep structural and systemic change to almost every aspect of American life. Most critically, we must not fall back on our privileges – of ignorance, of choice, and of inaction. Moving beyond our White gaze will be uncomfortable, scary, challenging. But it’s time to give up our privileges, time to find a new way of being in the world with others.

……………

Recommended reading: So You Want to Talk About Race by Ijeoma Oluo; How To Be An Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi; I Am Not Your Negro by James Baldwin. .https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/306/306949/i-am-not-your-negro/9780141986678.html

Josh Buchin is a rabbi, scholar, teacher, writer. He currently does all of the above in Berkeley, California. He can be reached at joshbuchin@gmail.com

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Chalking It Up

Oakland, California; Spring 2020: Chalking It Up

When COVID-19 hit Oakland, California, the first thing to go was toilet paper. Videos of shoppers fighting over the last rolls went viral. By the time I got to the store, nothing was left but napkins.

On my first pandemic grocery store visit, I walked around an entire block just to get in line to enter. 6 feet markers were spray-painted onto the pavement to assist shoppers in social distancing. For two hours, dozens, or perhaps hundreds, of impatient strangers stood in line, shifting back and forth and trying not to step in the accumulating gum on the sidewalk. We stooped over our phones. Headphones in. Shuffling up 6 feet at a time.

Once we entered the store, it was a silent war. Over our masks, we glared at one another and speed-walked our shopping carts to the hand sanitizer aisle. The floor had grey streaks from people dragging their carts in the race to canned goods. Anyone comparing products in an aisle was impeding someone exiting the store as fast as possible. And then, in the unusually long check-out line, I realized the store was absolutely silent. No whining children, no negotiating couples, no friends planning parties. Because everyone in the store came alone.

Returning home, I washed the groceries. Supposedly it doesn’t do much for sanitation, but it goes a long way for sanity and the illusion of control. Then back to my “9-5”. I had stomached my shame and moved back to my parents’ house in Oakland to continue searching for a job. My “9-5” was scrolling through online postings. I covered my whiteboard with dreams and brainstorms. I would have my own apartment with a garden in the back. Somewhere pretty, not cemented over and gentrified like Oakland. On weekends, I’d paddle nearby rivers. Mornings would begin with a run through a beautiful network of trails. My partner would come with me to weekly environmental justice activism meetings. Our community would know they had to actively participate in making change, and would mobilize. These jobs would be far away, in places with natural spaces and communities that cared.

Then there were the bad days. I would get a disheartening call from a friend, or slip up and go on Facebook. One friend just rented a house with her partner. Another friend just became a model. Someone else got published. How were they already so successful even though we are the same age? On those days, I counted the rejections I’d received. I reread the emails from organizations that had asked me to interview, only to shut down or cancel their job opening. I deleted all notifications saying there would be a delay because my application was one of thousands. There was no time for rest – I was competing with thousands! On those days, I had to justify my breaks with productivity. I’d head to the grocery store or pull out a recipe book. Let my hands feel good at something while my mind was despairing.

At the grocery store, the toilet paper is back on the shelves. A paper sign informs shoppers the store is enforcing a limit on how many rolls one person can buy. Everyone wants to be prepared for the apocalypse, but now we’re forced to let our neighbors survive too.

At home, I ask my sisters, finishing their university classes online, to help me wash the groceries. We argue over whether someone is legitimately too busy to help, before all pitching in. Then I check my email and fabricate the times I am “available” for an interview. Actually, I am all too eager to move my 10:00 breakfast or afternoon bike ride to any time of any day to start making progress. What does progress even mean in a time like this?

I daydream images of myself meditating, decide to sign up for some online classes, and somehow end up drowning in the most recent news updates and Coronavirus counts. I imagine being propped up on a hospital bed and breathing through a tube while sitting with the question everyone has when they are sick: am I going to be ok?

My siblings complain about their professors. I complain about how there are no jobs in my field. But this feels futile when I think about friends and family dying. I pick at my split ends and worry. Realizing I’m not getting anything done, I end my day at 4:00 on a bike ride.

I just start pedalling. Clunking over Oakland speed bumps and potholes, I tear up behind my sunglasses and mask. My breath feels heavy with thoughts of death and mortality, but my neighborhood forces me to keep looking around – if only to avoid hitting the dozens of other bikers who need the same escape I do.

A door slams and a neighbor shuffles onto the porch balancing gardening tools. Across the street, another neighbor is already on his knees in the dirt, humming. A camp chair sits on a porch awaiting social distance cocktail hours with friends. A block’s worth of kids are squatting in their front yards, fingers and knees covered in chalk. Up the street, a cardboard fort sits on a front lawn. Someone has a pool table in their driveway with rules about neighborhood quiet hours. Many houses have teddy bears tucked into street-facing windows.

Even with the pandemic’s horror, my neighbourhood is kid-friendly, urban, not unhappy. My friends and I trade photos of our thriving sprouts and joke about dreams we once had about our lives after college. In the void created by the pandemic, I can hear the world and the movements around me much more clearly.

And then the world explodes again. George Floyd is murdered. Minneapolis is on fire. Streets all over the United States are filled with chanting protestors. My neighborhood responds, and I am caught up in another enormous societal upheaval.

News reports tell of four Black people found hanging from trees. When it’s phrased that way, it sounds far too peaceful. Like a swing swaying in the breeze. It doesn’t consider the struggle leading up to that point. I can only imagine if it were me being pinned down and subdued by others’ brute strength. My own fear stifling my ability to scream; unable to draw upon my own strength because my body already knows and is quaking out of my control. That moment when I feel someone else overpower me, and I realize I’m going to die. My human life. Not a swing.

I start recognizing neighbors at Black Lives Matter protests. The antithesis of silent grocery shoppers pitted against one another. My voice unites with strangers’ as we chant and dance down familiar Oakland streets. We are thousands of diverse individuals marching to the same heartbeat. Even as we go back to isolated homes, we read and view the same things. We cry privately, but together. In front of the Oakland police department, several protesters kneel to chalk words of love for Black lives onto the pavement.

I see these messages affirming Black lives written on handmade signs taped to my neighbors’ front doors and rear windshields, painted in the windows of local shops. Black Lives Matter. Stay Safe. Defund the Police. Kindness is Everything. White Silence is Violence. We are All in this Together. When I climb on my bike, my tires roll over faded chalk-art and the meticulous labor of writing out the names of Black lives lost to police brutality. As I grapple with the weight of this time, I read in the chalked streets of Oakland that this struggle is shared.

Samara Rosen

Samara Rosen recently graduated from Hampshire College with a degree in the Human Dimensions of River Conservation and a craving for activism. Her recent research explores relationships with rivers and the motivation behind river rebels and change-makers. These days, you can find her exploring public lands, learning about the intersection of social movements and chalking up some Oakland sidewalks.

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