Ruby McConnell's Blog, page 2

The Way Forward

I write this to you from the now time, a time of angst and strife and struggle and chaos in which none of us knows what things shall come to pass. From this time, two decades into the 21st century and six months into the Great Pandemic, it is clear that we have reached a fulcrum, a new place in history that requires a new way of being. It’s a place of great awakening as we are thrust rapidly out of our magical thinking and into a new future. Sadly, it is an awakening born out of fear and necessary action in response to unprecedented changes in our environment, driven by a virus. But it is an awakening.

In the before time, like now, humanity and all of its machines and engines roared in their forward press towards development, growth, and expansion. In the before time, the wheels turned and the levers pulled and the world strained at the weight of its own endless desire to build and consume and none of us thought it could ever be stopped. And then the pandemic came, arriving as a whisper, blanketing the world with silence and slowing the turn of the wheel until even time stood still, days passing like water in a lazy stream. And for a while we sat as stones in that water, allowing the wonder of it all to wash over us in the time we will recall to future generations as ‘the quieting’.

In the quieting, the world changed. Streets emptied of cars. Skies emptied of planes. The oceans emptied of noise. Smog cleared. City lights dimmed. And people changed. Without restaurants, people cooked. Without masks, people sewed. With nowhere to go, people walked. They checked on neighbors. Gardens appeared in front yards. Children rode bikes. On the streets, homeless people were allowed to retain their dignity, to claim a space in the world, to not be criminalized for their poverty or drug addiction or hard knock lives. Corporations and governments changed too, redirecting funds towards communities, providing healthcare services, barring evictions, reducing interest rates, and extending debt relief.

From the quieting it was easy to see just how closely tied our fates are to the fate of our surroundings, how we reflect and amplify the human condition onto the world around us and how the state of nature, when impaired, impairs our own health. It was easy to see how we are all butterflies of a sort, capable of causing hurricanes with a flutter of our wings. And it became easy to see that the old ways of being, the old systems and ways of thinking will not serve us from this place in history. Why? Because in the past, our attempts at environmental remediations, rehabilitation, and even conservation reflected our continued attachment to our own dominion, our ongoing belief in our separate and superior standing in the natural world and even amongst ourselves.

But in the quieting, we learned that we are vulnerable.

What follows the now time surely, then, must be different. To build a future from this time, one that is worthy of hope, we will need a new environmental ethos for the post-millennial era. One that acknowledges this new paradigm of connectedness and cosmic egalitarianism mandated by circumstance, backed by history and science, and rooted in radical love and uncommon generosity. What will this post-millennial environmentalism look like in practice? It will look like a deeply personal and visceral shift in how we approach and integrate lifestyle, health matters, mindfulness, economics, and social justice into our lives. It will look a lot like the steps we need to take to pull ourselves from the grasp of the pandemic. It will look a lot like the quieting.

First though, we have to emerge from the digital space into the physical space. We have to go outside. Immersion in the natural world is good for us and through increased accessibility, conservation of public lands, destigmatization, demasculanization, and declolonization of the outdoors and the embracing of urban and home-space wildernesses it can (and must) become a sanctuary. Perhaps more importantly, we have to send the kids outside. We have to send them outside and that time outside should be considered an integral part of their education, an education focused on the acquisition of a living skill set rather than a collection of static facts. These kids will need to be resilient and adaptable and able to innovate in ways we can’t yet dream of so we need to teach them curiosity and problem solving in addition to scientific and emotional literacy.

As adults, we need to invest in rejuvenation in all its forms- habitat restoration, food network security, preventative medicine and good mental health, decreased pollution and carbon footprints, organic, regenerative practices, living wages, and egalitarian resource distribution. As inheritors of complex histories and inherently imperfect beings, we need to seek out reconciliation and the making of amends, including recognition of harm, the extension of rights to all things, the sacrifice of privilege for equality, reparations, and a peace-centered culture. Only then can we begin to manifest. Manifestation, a return to a culture of doing and a place-centered lifestyle. Sustainable wellness hinges on our ability to step away from mass production and invest in small-scale, local industries and economies, and craftsmanship and the arts. Essential to this is a reconnection of our workscapes with landscapes, a shift in our built environments in terms of engineering, design and construction, and the restoration of the concept of dignity in all work.

Then? Then we return to the stream of time, to sit as stones and abide and endure and press into our future seeking out that essential state of wonder that allowed us to see the truth in the first place. Simple wonder, the wide-eyed fullness that arrives with new-found possibilities, a potent tonic for the spirit- the gift of the quieting.

Because what we learned from that time is what is possible from humanity, the lengths to which we can go, the sacrifices we can make for our own sakes and the sakes of others. What we learned from the quieting is that the engines- of commerce, busyness, consumption, oppression, waste, pollution, expansion, they can be turned off. In that time, as a human collective, we almost succeeded. Then, we just we let it slip away. And for what? A haircut, Sunday brunch, a weekend at the beach, a beer with friends, profit, power, pride. No reason good enough.

We know what we are capable of doing. We have felt the cool water run across our backs. And we can return there anytime.

We Called Them Polar Bears- Part 4

Three years after camp, at the mid-point of the Great Recession, I broke. I quit teaching and my consulting job, which I had only managed to keep because I was paid $30,000 a year less than my (less qualified) male counterparts and took on the task of writing an outdoor guide especially for women. I hoped I could provide them with some of the basic skills and straight-talk they needed to overcome the barriers they faced to getting outdoors. It was more than education or a call to wellness, it was an act of resistance and political subversion. Women controlled more than two-thirds of the purchasing power in the United States and, with a slight edge in the total population, constituted the largest voting block. Perhaps in getting them outside they would see the value of the natural world and in assigning value, decide to take action.

Six years later, A Woman’s Guide to the Wild was published. I toured and gave lectures, hoping to recruit women to the environmental movement by encouraging them to step out, go wild, and lose themselves in the outdoors for their own mental and physical health, and the overall health of the planet (and the polar bears). At those events I discovered that there was a greater need too, a need for women to see other women insisting on having a voice and being comfortable as who they were in the world. At my events, that meant a lot of frank talk about fears, stigmas and bodies. I quickly became the Judy Blume of the outdoor world, seemingly the only woman comfortable talking about peeing on shoes, menstruation, and whether or not we might be eaten by bears. The response was visceral and invigorating. It was clear that women were sick of hazing, condescension, and minimization for the sake of machismo. I kept writing with a watchful eye on the end of the hopeful era of the Obama Administration. In spite of early protestations from my fellow liberals, I was sure that Donald Trump would become the next President of the United States. 

One of his first acts as President was to sign an executive order changing the ‘navigable waters of the United States’ rules, rules that specify exactly which waters can be extended Clean Water Act, including wetland status protections. The order was largely overshadowed by his actions to reduce the scope of the Affordable Care Act, and, like the plight of the polar bears, largely ignored or misunderstood by the American public. It marked the beginning of what has proven to be a steady erosion of environmental protections, regulations and wilderness areas.

In January 2017, just days after the Women’s March, I heard of another movement, focused on the new president’s relationship to science, the environment, and truth, the March for Science. Within minutes, I had, without thought or consideration of what it might mean for my life, started organizing the local march in Eugene, Oregon. That Earth Day, we gathered in front of the University of Oregon Library, close to 6000 strong, elected officials, community members, scientists, and students and marched peacefully through the streets in defiance of the City’s terms of use that would have required us to keep to the sidewalks.

It energized me. Since then, I have written a similar guide to the outdoors for girls, providing a new generation with inspiration, skills and basic environmental education in the hopes that it combats the epidemics of inactivity, screens, mental health, low self-esteem, and nature deficit disorder they face. I have used my platform as a vehicle for education, showing people the wilderness, what logging looks like, the size of old growth trees, and sharing with them step they can take to protect natural resources. I call and write elected officials, attend community meetings, town halls, and city council forums, sit on rules committees, and have formed relationships with legislators and advocates to inform, brainstorm, and craft the way forward. I volunteer my time to environmental groups focused on action, including Oregon Wild and Beyond Toxics, young women’s groups like Ophelia’s Place, and food activism, so important to us as a dominant predator species, focusing on making healthy food, procured from local resources available to all people. I vote.

2006 still sits with me, idling at the center of my rage, fueling my resistance and giving me hope. That term, after the final, my students directed my attention to a large cardboard box addressed to me that had appeared on the lectern. It was wrapped in yellow tape with a sign that read CAUTION: CONTENTS MUST REMAIN COOL. I should open it, they urged. I rummaged through a drawer to find a pair of scissors, cut through the tape, and tugged off the lid. Out sprang, jack in the box style, a cascade of white teddy bears. Each one different, close to thirty in all. A simple acknowledgment, we hear you; we must not be lost at sea, but find our footing on the ice.

Today I no longer worry for the polar bears, but not because they are recovering. No, now there is a lake on the north pole and though most people got the climate change message when the big storms started, they still do not go outside, assign value, or take action. And there is an uphill battle against a president that has never had to swim in search of ice. The polar bears are lost, and I have reconciled myself to that. I know that someday I will live in a world where we will tell our children that back when we were kids, there were these great white bears that lived on the ice, and we called them polar bears.

We Called Them Polar Bears- Part 3

By 2006 it was already clear that the erosion of the American wild, while driven by development and resource extraction, was primarily a function of our mindset. We alienated ourselves from the wilderness by creating a social structure focused on passive entertainment, extreme hygiene, and the elimination of risk, one that prefers the sterile and controlled environment of the internet over the unknowns of the wild. 

Our increasing addiction to and dependence on technology is also intimately linked to the disconnect between the American lifestyle and the outdoors. The immediacy of portable technology and the relocation of our social structure to online media have resulted in a culture of multitasking and the lack of the ability to either be present in the moment or be comfortable without constant stimulation. When we do go outside, we proudly post pictures, often while still outside, proof being in the outdoors without having to actually engage in it. Our mindset is reflected in our public polices and management agencies. On a recent trip to the John Day Fossil Beds National Monument in Oregon I arrived at a trail head only to find a sign saying that the fossils along the hike were replicas and that if I wanted to see the real fossils, I should continue down the road to the visitor’s center. It was then unsurprising when I passed no one on the trail and watched as car after car stopped, read the sign, and continued down the road to the comfort of air conditioning and interpretive videos. 

This alienation is particularly profound in American women and codified in the persistent and systemic media portrayal of women as helpless, clueless, and burdensome outside. Even the strong female characters that I grew up with the 1980's, Carrie Fisher's Princess Leia and Kathleen Turner in Romancing the Stone for example, were ultimately portrayed in this manner. These characters were strong, smart women, allowed to be multidimensional, muscular, and mouthy, but they were still shown to be all but useless outside, dragged to safety by hand, by men, through half the movie. In fact, most movies and television shows, now as then, fail to show women in the outdoors whatsoever, and certainly not in competent, capable contexts.

This myth of female helplessness has only been compounded and exasperated by a lack of wilderness education for girls and women. While learning to backpack, camp, and hunt are considered important rites of passage for our young American men, American girls are more likely to learn an art or craft, how to cook, or play a sport before they are taught how to pitch a tent or use a compass. American women are also not supposed to sweat, carry heavy things, be able to read maps, be seen without their makeup on, or know how to build a fire. Outdoor pursuits then, have a way of putting us in the untenable position of trying to balance our culturally requested veil of helplessness and delicacy with a very real and immediate need to be neither helpless nor delicate.

While women in the United States have met or surpassed men in the workplace and higher education and rallied for the right to be included as equals in traditional male pursuits and vocations but there is still a gender gap in outdoor pursuits. The feminist movement of the late seventies and early eighties cast aside some unnecessary cultural norms; opening up professional opportunities and releasing us from the shackles of unwanted pregnancy and unhappy marriages. It also created two generations of women working both inside and outside the home, an ever-increasing number of them doing so as single parents. Where in the modern model of the American woman is there time, training or opportunity for outdoor recreation? 

We Called Them Polar Bears- Part 2

In truth, my inner worry for the polar bears had begun to intersect with my external self and was quietly boiling over into a sustained rage.

How could one teach about the fall of dinosaurs and mass extinctions and not see climate change, the plight of polar bears and sundry other environmental issues as modern, human-driven allegories? How was I to impart the value or urgency of these topics to students with no lived experience of the natural world? The irony of living in an age that has made access to the outdoors safer and easier than ever before was not lost on me. Outdoor trails, campsites and parking areas are clearly labeled, well maintained, and typically have some kind of bathroom facility, outdoor gear and clothing is lighter and generally more efficient and reliable, and more of us own cars than at any other time. 

In spite of these things and as evidenced by my students, the abandonment of the American wild has happened in my lifetime.

Trail heads at which I fought for a parking space fifteen years ago are now empty. I can walk for over an hour on a once-popular trail without passing a soul. Those I do see are either focused athletes or overweight, over-worked, and in over their heads. More often than not I marvel at how few people I encounter, that the great expanse of American wild lands are seemingly mine alone to play in. It is not an exaggeration to say that the wilderness in America, after more than a century spent finding it, has largely been lost. Gone are the days of summer-long family vacations, outdoor schools, and over-packed hiking trails. Also gone are the Hawaii chaff flower, the Passenger Pigeon, and the California Tapirs. Parents and children alike have taken to the couch, to twitter, to their phones, to doing absolutely nothing. And it is killing us. 

The obesity and related health crisis, the rampant rise of heart disease, type II diabetes, and sundry other obesity and sedentary-related illnesses has been helped by the abandonment of the American wild, as has our increasing dependence on modern convenience. We no longer hunt, fish, or gather in our natural lands for food, fuel, building supplies or even Christmas trees. We do not cook or clean for ourselves, do our own gardening, or send or children outside to play, much less go out to play with them. 

Our educational system, overrun, under-funded, and focused on standardized testing, is no longer teaching us to be inquisitive, no longer providing outdoor educational experiences, no longer teaching the life or earth sciences that inform our understanding and enhance our appreciation of the natural world. Conservation and educational organizations such as the Nature Conservancy and Greenpeace lost funding in the post-9-11 economic crisis and are still cutting programs and staff.

It is not just that we have abandoned the wild, we have allowed it to shrink, stripped it of its diversity, dammed its rivers, fouled the waters, clear cut the trees and strip-mined the land. We have traded parking lots, big box stores and miles and miles of subdivisions for our once resource-rich and expansive wild lands.

We Called Them Polar Bears- Part 1

In 2006 at the age of twenty-six, I became worried about the polar bears. Really worried. This was the year that Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth had come out and several new studies were released regarding these most fearsome and self-reliant of mammals. Studies documenting bears caught in open ocean swimming for days over astonishing distances in search of ice. Studies showing population declines, increased encroachment into human settlements, and most disturbingly, pictures of polar bear carcasses, mauled and eviscerated, clearly eaten by other bears, a kind of cannibalistic behavior never before observed. Without sea ice, polar bears cannot hunt for seals. Without another food source, they had turned on one another.

At that time, I was on sabbatical from my job as an environmental geologist, burnt out from long hours digging out contaminated soils from industrial sites and surveying soon-to-be logged forests for wetlands. Instead, I had taken a ten-week stint at Outdoor School, a week-long, state-sponsored environmental education program for fifth and sixth graders. From our coastal location we taught marine biology, geology, ecology, and climate change. Sometimes orcas or seals would play in the surf, sometimes the water would be low enough to see into the deepest tide pools, crowded with sea stars and anemones. Once, the body of a sea lion washed up on shore. We integrated it into the curriculum, marching the kids down the beach to the slowly decomposing carcass to let them stand at his nose and peer down his long, bloated body, easily three times their size. There was learning in that sea lion, even when it became a stinking, rotted, sack of bones and flies, especially then. But there was also something humbling in witnessing the demise of a beast so much larger and better suited for survival than ourselves.

On Fridays, we sang the kids out of camp and I drove back to Portland just in time to hit rush hour traffic. The transition was abrupt and painful. Camp was far from the sound of engines, attuned to the rolling hum of the waves. The city was staccato in comparison. Each week I felt the loss of the wilderness, the disconnect from nature. The following mornings, I taught a three-hour Geology of the Pacific Northwest class at the local community college to a motley, half-awake group of students clearly far more removed from the environment than myself. Apparently, I spent a lot of time talking about the polar bears. At some point, they mentioned it. So did my then-boyfriend, who accused me of projecting my own insecurities and neediness onto an entire dominant species. And my parents who, while sighing with sympathy for the bears, wondered if perhaps I had too much time to think. One of my friends bought me a polar bear mug.

A Poem of Persistence

In April, I had the great pleasure of speaking with Sarah Neilson from Seventh Wave Magazine about Ground Truth and what the geosciences have to teach us about life during a pandemic. It was a conversation steeped in hope and quiet fortitude that I am grateful for and excited to share with the world. You can read the interview in its entirety here.

Simple Resistance- Part 2

If you are just arriving to the resistance, welcome. Some actions to take:

Read Black authors including Angela Davis, Bell Hooks, Maya Angelou, Marge Piercy, James Baldwin, Ta-Nahisi Coates, Alice Walker, Colson Whitehead, Audre Lorde, and Michelle and Barack Obama.

Spend your money at Black-owned businesses.

Refuse to spend your money at businesses that are not actively anti-racist.

Re-learn American history.

Seek out and celebrate Black art, innovation, success, and joy.

Vocally and visibly stand up to racism in action.

Raise compassionate children and talk to them about the inequalities of the system into which they were born.

Vote.

Continue in perpetuity.

#BlackLivesMatter

Introducing- Ground Truth: A Geological Survey of a Life

In 2013 I began writing a series of essays based on the concept of the home-place. The first of those essays, At the Counting Window, told the story of the Pacific Northwest salmon’s journey to sea and return to spawn as an allegory for my own life. The next took on the rains. The one after that contaminated soils and ground water, each one building a personal story around a part of the landscape until I came to see the ways in which my life, all of our lives, are knitted to the earth. That first essay placed third in the Northwest Perspectives Essay Contest that same year and the collection received an Oregon Literary Arts Fellowship in 2016. Many of the essays have been published in various forms over the years, but now, they’re being released in a single volume, my heart song, Ground Truth.

Please join me at one or many of these events celebrating the release of Ground Truth and the beginning of a post-millennial environmental movement.

April 11- Atlas Obscura Special Event! Ruby presents "The Rip Rapping of Rockaway Beach" a discussion of the policies, politics, and attitudes that have shaped Oregonian's relationship to the shoreline and response to climate change. 

"From 2005 to 2009 I worked as a consultant performing geologic hazard assessments on the Oregon coast as a part of a frantic push of development that challenged the out of date earthquake and tsunami codes and the integrity of the shoreline itself. These are stories from the front line as we worked to maintain purchase on the edge."

REGISTER HERE:

https://www.eventbrite.com/e/atlas-obscura-armoring-oregons-rockaway-beach-tickets-101760185454?aff=erelexpmlt

April 14- Ruby shares a nature journaling project in celebration of the release of her kids Nature Journal and Activity book on KATU Afternoon Live, 2pm PST

April 19- Earth Day Celebration and Ground Truth Book Launch Event hosted by Oregon Wild with Chandra Legue, author of Hiking Oregon’s Ancient Forests and Peter Brown Hoffmeister, author of The End of Boys and Let Them Be Eaten by Bears 4 pm PST

“The natural world offers beauty and resilience, and working to protect and restore it can give us hope and purpose in these grave times. Come together Cover of Ground Truth book(digitally!) with a community of other nature lovers and writing enthusiasts for a special Earth Day-related book launch event featuring three local environmental authors and a fantastic outdoor-inspired raffle.”

REGISTER HERE:

https://oregonwild.org/events/ground-truth-book-launch-earth-day-event

Or on Facebook Live:

https://www.facebook.com/events/206839227226611/

April 21- Ground Truth will be a featured release on A Mighty Blaze. Look for (and share) the official book trailer!

April 25- Atlas Obscura Wonder from Home Family-Friendly Nature Journaling Event 11 am PST

Writer and geologist Ruby McConnell cultivates naturalists by guiding parents and kids through nature journaling using her new book A Girl’s Guide to the Wild: My Nature Journal and Activity Book. With ample tips on making field observations, including sketching, writing prompts, nature logs, question lists, and projects, Ruby’s approach will engage even the most urban city kid with little or no outdoor access needed beyond a window. With great STEM learning content for parents struggling with homeschooling, these journaling exercises provide both interactive and self-directed activities. Also useful as a mindfulness and grounding practice for adults.

April 26- Ground Truth virtual book event and reading with Hidden Timber Books, 2 pm PST

REGISTER HERE:

https://zoom.us/meeting/register/uJ0vce2prTovQw8PeBdA2hZjS3zuQviesA

May 20- Oregon Wild Family Nature Journaling Event 6 pm PST

 

Coming April 7th! A Girl's Guide Nature Journal and Activity Book

This little volume is a love song to a younger self and any young person that is excited by exploring, watching, listening, playing, writing, drawing, and adventuring. Filled with prompts for sketching and writing, projects, checklists, and games, this books is everything I ever wanted as a kid. Buy it as a gift for an inquisitive and adventurous young person in your life or use it to supplement classroom and home school studies about the natural world. On sale everywhere April 7th.

The Simplest of Things

One of the things I rarely mention about the Girl’s and Woman’s Guides to the Wild are the projects, the hands-on crafts and games and small items that I included in the spirit of inspiring women and girls to be doers and makers. This April, Sasquatch Books will release the third book of the series, a journal and activity book for middle graders that is packed with games and drawing and writing prompts and, yes, projects. Like this little solar-powered mason jar lantern that sits on my windowsill most days but sometimes lights a summer picnic table. It’s simple, made out of reclaimed materials, and charming in a way that recalls an earlier time. Sometimes, it’s the simplest of things.