Making Change: Love 

In honor of this week's Green Issue, let's talk about ... love. Welcome to part four of Making Change, a six-week series on the how and whys of personal, social and political change.

Sometimes to define what one means requires explaining what one does not. I confess to an inner eye-roll when people talk about Mama Ocean and Mother Earth. Clearly these are people who have never been in rough seas, in currents cold, powerful and indifferent. And children who treat their mothers like we do our planet? We would think them horrible, spoiled brats exploiting their poor parent.

As I talk about love and environmentalism, I'm also keen to avoid the Spiritual-Not-Religious approach practiced by some white people, the picking and choosing from other cultures' beliefs like buffets. As Patty Krawec, author of Becoming Kin: An Indigenous Call to Unforgetting the Past and Reimagining Our Future, has asked of non-Native people, "Are you just taking parts of our spirituality because you've realized that your own belief system is somehow empty and bankrupt, and this speaks to you?" As I said, I'm wary.

Here are three practical arguments activists use when trying to sway policymakers to draft, support, implement and enforce environmental laws:

1. Human health depends on a healthy environment.

2. Protecting the environment is good for the economy.

3. We owe it to future generations to do what's right.

Here are three arguments activists use when trying to sway individuals to make more environmentally sustainable choices:

1. It's healthier.

2. You will ultimately save money.

3. It's what's best for your family.

All these ring true, prove effective. But I wish we could also call for change for reasons such as the intrinsic right of other species to exist without humans poisoning their water, decimating their habitats, turning them into products or otherwise treating them as expendable, lesser beings. I want to say we should stop inflicting pain upon the ocean and the animals in it because the ocean and the creatures belonging to it gleam with life. Shouldn't that be enough? I want to say that I love the ocean and all it holds, and therefore the hurting must stop. To note that our willingness to accept violence against other species — what is the destruction of homes and torment of bodies if not violence? — as the cost of business makes it easier to accept violence against anyone deemed lesser, deemed Not Us.

But the language of policy, even if shaped by an undercurrent of love for what needs protecting and saving requires one become fluent in politics, a place where success necessitates compromise, where to speak of love would invite dismissal.

Book rec: Undrowned, Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals by Alexis Pauline Gumbs

Here is where author, poet and self-described "Queer Black Troublemaker and Black Feminist Love Evangelist and an aspirational cousin to all sentient beings" Alexis Pauline Gumbs comes in. Like policymakers, scientists, she says, also rely on passive voice, "in order to take themselves out of the intimacy of their research towards the illusion of objectivity." But, she notes, nothing is objective, observing, "scientists, especially those people who have designed their entire lives around the hope, the possibility that they will encounter a marine mammal, and who have taken extreme measures (like moving to Antarctica) in order to increase the likelihood that they will see some particular marine being, cannot be unmoved. They are clearly obsessed, and most likely, like me, in love."

Undrowned is the guidebook Gumbs created out of that love, a blend of science and poetry for the entire human species, for "dreamers that live near the shore and wonder about the whale bones you find ... for those ... lobbying at the United Nations about deep ocean ecology and what it takes to honor it. And you, the ones who can't keep from crying when you read the daily news." This is no passive catalog: The word "love" appears over and over again. This is not anthropomorphism serving as a tool to impart human-centered lessons. No, Gumbs approaches the mysteries of marine mammals (and some sharks) with wonder and awe burnished by science and removed from the "colonial, racist, sexist, heteropatriarchalizing capitalist constructs that are trying to kill [her]." (Think of who names different types of animals and why, and the names that are given.)

Undrowned is a meditation, which is to say the book is built on breath, the importance of it, the right to it. Gumbs creates portraits of marine mammals familiar to us and not. More types of dolphins, whales and seals exist in the Earth's waters than you might think. Gumbs nails together scientific facts about marine mammals like the ribs of a boat, then builds a hull of poetry, a keel connecting past sins and present harms. From the deck of this boat, we dive.

In her exploration, Gumbs wanders, asking questions, considering meanings, drawing conclusions. The connection between the slave trade in the Middle Passage and the scientifically unexplained disappearance of Atlantic gray whales during that time recurs. When writing about the southern four-toothed whale, an animal often described by scientists as "shy," she notes that shyness may be, in fact, stealth and that "sometimes when someone is avoiding you, they are just avoiding you." One has a right, especially when discovery has a history of leading to harm, to evade and avoid those who seek. Gumbs acknowledges this truth for the whales and for herself (and through herself, all of us), making clear, "I don't have to be available to be eligible for breath. I don't have to be measurable in a market of memes. I don't have to be visible to be viable on my path."

She is poetic but not vague. "The actual suffering and endangerment of marine mammals on the planet right now is caused by the extractive, destructive processes and consequences of capitalism," Gumbs writes. One could replace "marine mammals" with any form of life and the statement would remain true. Gumbs is poetic and also practical. The book concludes with activities aligned with the chapters, specific suggestions: Listen, Be Vulnerable, Remember, Be Fierce, Refuse, Take Care of Your Blessings. In the context of Gumbs' guidebook, these activities leave us awash in love and remind us that, ultimately, love is what transforms. To anyone desiring a healthy self, a healthy planet, a healthy future, Gumbs' blend of curiosity, science, history and beauty makes a case for how to allow love — how to cultivate love — within the political and personal spaces we inhabit. And this is what truly might save us.

Longtime advice-giver and professional change-maker Jennifer Savage (she/her) is the keynote speaker for this year's League of Women Voters of Humboldt County 31st annual State of the Community event on April 19.