The Wretched of Mother Earth: The Handbook for Living, Dying, and Nonviolent Revolution in the Midst of Climate Change Catastrophe

By Alycee Lane

If we hope to save ourselves from climate change catastrophe, we must face not only the prospect of human extinction; but also we must radically confront what produced the climate crisis in the first place: the "colonial power matrix" and our deadly attachments to it.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Alycee Lane
• Release date: Apr 4, 2018
• ISBN: 9781732141506

Alycee Lane

A graduate of Howard University, Alycee Lane studied English literature and later obtained her Doctorate of Philosophy from UCLA, where she specialized in African American literature and culture of the civil rights and black power movements. From 1995 to 2003, she served as an Assistant Professor of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara, after which she obtained her Juris Doctor from UC Berkeley (Boalt Hall). Alycee is author of the award-winning book, Nonviolence Now! Living the 1963 Birmingham Campaign's Promise of Peace (Lantern Books, 2015). She also authors the blog Coming in From the Cold, in which she explores political issues through the prism of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s philosophy of nonviolence. Good, bad or ugly: I welcome, encourage, and would greatly appreciate your reviews of my work!

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The Wretched of Mother Earth

The Handbook for Living, Dying, and Nonviolent Revolution

in the Midst of Climate Change Catastrophe

Alycee Lane

Copyright © 2018 Alycee J. Lane

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the written permission of Alycee J. Lane.

ISBN (ebook): 978-1-7321415-0-6

Cover and interior design by Jessica Reed

Published by Alycee J. Lane

Includes bibliographical references

For Keani, and all the little ones at Escuelita del Bosque

Table of Contents

Preface

Effect

THE LIVING

THE DYING

CAUSE

DEATH

ground

INSIGHT

REBIRTH

BODHISATTVAS

PURIFICATION

NOTES

Preface

For this book, I drew inspiration from Sogyal Rinchope’s The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, a work I read in 2010 as my father was dying from congestive heart failure, and again two years later as I faced my mother’s failing health and death. Modeled after the sacred Tibetan Buddhist text Bardo Thödol—a work that provides instruction for how to guide someone through dying, death and after death¹—The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying taught me how to sit with my parents’ dying; how to help them after they died; how to grieve; and, finally, how to face my own mortality.

Indeed, Sogyal Rinchope’s indispensable work helped me to see just how much grief—if harnessed and respected—can be a powerful force with which to affirm life and love and our connection to one another, as well as a means to let go of what does not serve us. For these reasons and more, The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying was the right book for me to turn to in order to sit with my own grief for what we are doing to our planet and all the lives it sustains, including but not especially our own.

Part of what makes death so difficult to bear is that it exposes just how deeply we are attached to whom and to what we have lost. It makes clear that, by and large, we live life ignoring the truth of impermanence.² As Sogyal Rinchope teaches, we so desperately want everything to continue as it is that we have to believe that things will always stay the same. But this is only make-believe.³ Our failure to take the radical action that we have needed to take in order to prevent climate change catastrophe is steeped in our make-believe. In particular, it is grounded in our attachment to a system that produced the problem in the first place. As the title of my book suggests (in it I bow deeply to Franz Fanon), we are facing this crisis because we are attached to a world system that constitutes the continuity of colonial forms of domination, which of course includes capitalism itself.⁴ Indeed, we are unwilling to imagine, or even believe in the possibility of, its impermanence. Because of our attachment and belief, we are living in the midst of mass extinction, and are truly facing the prospect of our own.

Yet grief is, as I said, a powerful force, one we can harness both to pry our fingers off this world system and to begin anew, even in the midst of our climate crisis. Facing our own impermanence, we can finally let go of everything that has not served us, that has not served Mother Earth, and that has not served other life forms.

Which brings me to the second book from which I drew inspiration: Leela Fernandes’ Transforming Feminist Practice: Nonviolence, Social Justice and the Possibilities of a Spiritualized Feminism. Fernandes beautifully argues that too often those of us who are committed to beginning anew forego the labor of letting go of our own deep attachments to the world we want to change. However, to change that world actually requires that we engage in "both a radical movement for complete social, economic and political justice and in a profound spiritual journey through which we liberate the divine—within ourselves, our communities, our world."⁵

We must liberate the divine from a world system that has colonized our spirituality and has disabled our ability to see ourselves in one another, in other beings, and in Earth itself. We must do this without delay, so that in the midst of our climate catastrophe—which will cause great suffering for all sentient beings—we can live a divinity that can transform and transcend all forms of hierarchy, injustice and oppression.⁶ Such lived divinity, Fernandes teaches, "is the essence of any social or political activism that wants to transform rather than simply resist. Life and history are replete with instances of resistance—small and large. It is transformation that demands the tireless, unending labor of the soul."⁷

Transformation is what the climate crisis demands from us now.

While the argument I make in this work is a tough one—we will not save ourselves from climate change catastrophe—both The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying and Transforming Feminist Practice have helped me to find the place where hope resides. And where it resides is in the labor of letting go of both the system of domination that drives climate change, and our deadly attachments to it.

Though primarily nonfiction, The Wretched of Mother Earth would be best understood as a mixed-genre Buddhist, feminist, post-colonial, anarchist manifesto that is also a meditation on dying and death. It includes links to interviews and videos, as well as four short fiction pieces that I intersperse throughout the book. These fictional intervals I added because I did not want to appeal solely to your intellect. Indeed, I want my critique to land in your body and heart as well, and in this way defy the mind/body split through which many of us too often address the issue of climate change. Fiction, it seems to me, is an effective way to do this—precisely because of the ways in which an author can draw you deeply into the lives of her characters and, in the process, profoundly change how you walk in the world. Moreover, since fiction (primarily dystopian) seems to be the only way many of us are willing to look squarely at the looming catastrophes of climate change, I deploy it here with the hope that it will help us all face our collective crisis. You can choose to read the fiction pieces together; to read the nonfiction pieces together; or you can simply decide to journey through my experiment in form.

Regardless of the path you choose, however, know it is my deepest wish that this imperfect book will help you to loosen your grip on, and then to let go of, this system that is devastating the lives and livelihoods of so many as well as destroying the only home we have. Indeed, it is my hope that The Wretched of Mother Earth will help us all to leave, finally, the world of make-believe far, far behind us.

Effect

America when will you be angelic?

When will you take off your clothes?

When will you look at yourself through the grave?

—Alan Ginsberg, America⁸

eden

Alligator shoes. She had seen pairs like them in glossy magazines from the days before the oceans coughed up their dead on city sidewalks and then stayed to claim skyscrapers and parks and the bones of children parents thought lovingly and safely held by Earth.

They were not.

No, the bones the oceans take for themselves now, though they, too, are dead things, full of the stuff men dug up and drilled and fracked and burned. Bile heaved all over the earth. Though they no longer breathe, the oceans take the babies’ bones anyway. They are angry ghosts, all waves of rage and retribution.

But those alligator shoes. In the magazines, they were always worn by men (white) in dark glasses (now useless against the sun) who walked arm in arm with laughing women (white) in wispy dresses and shoes that should have been impossible to walk in (they were). Bodies thin with hunger but not deprivation, thin not because Earth no longer produced. Well-off hunger, as her Mommas used to say.

Where were they going? she would wonder, tracing their bodies with her forefinger, flipping through the magazines as if the answer was a surprise hidden somewhere in the pages that followed.

Humph, she answered herself, finally, after all these years.

Right here with the rest of us.

The man she watched and who stood hovering over alligator shoes (that’s what she decided to name him) jumped, startled by her noisy cynicism. He thought he was all alone. Finally. Just as she thought—incorrectly, as it turned out—that she was the very last.

And now she realized she had made a mistake. She announced her presence.

Recovering from his shock, the man stood up slowly. Then he smiled.

She thought, now he’s going to kill me. He will lift his machete high into the air and cut me to pieces. He will hack alligator shoes, head first. Then his arms. He will save the legs for last. He will gouge out