Let My Labor Be My Prayer
A Conversation about Defending the Natural World with Will Falk
Will Falk is a poet, environmental activist, and attorney who has dedicated the last 14 years of his life to land defense campaigns. His efforts have taken him to a pipeline blockade in British Columbia, a telescope construction blockade on a sacred mountain in Hawai’i, and to endangered pinyon-juniper forests in the Great Basin. Most recently, he set up a protest occupation of Thacker Pass, Nevada, to stop the construction of an open pit lithium mine.
I first encountered Falk when I read his book-length essay, How Dams Fall, which was published in 2019 by Homebound Publications, the small press that published my essay collection, In Between Places in 2022. How Dams Fall documented his involvement in a federal lawsuit seeking personhood and rights for the Colorado River ecosystem. Two things stuck with me long after finishing that book: the intensity of Falk’s convictions and his commitment to treating the natural world as kin.
This spring, I was honored to get an advanced copy of Falk’s first full-length poetry collection, When I Set the Sweetgrass Down (Homebound Publications, April 2023). While reading it, I could not help but think of the words of the prophet Isaiah: “the voice of one crying in the wilderness.” In this 74-poem collection, Falk cries out for the places, plants, and animals he has fought so hard to defend. Steeped in religious imagery and Biblical allusions, these poems are indictments of a way of life built upon greed, settler colonialism, and human exceptionalism, but they also are invitations to fall in love with the world and a stirring appeal to let that love guide us.
When I Set the Sweetgrass Down left me wanting to know more about Falk’s poetic practice, his commitment to defending the natural world, and his spirituality. Falk, who is currently based in Crescent City, California, agreed to answer some questions via correspondence. What follows is our written conversation, which unfolded the month before his book’s release.
Bryan: You’re a poet, an environmental activist, and an attorney. That strikes me as a fairly unusual combination of vocations. Can you talk more about the ways these roles or identities inform each other?
Falk: These roles are all rooted in a deeper identity—the fact that I’m an animal who depends upon the natural world for my life. Ten summers ago, experiencing a terrible bout with major depression that was exacerbated by my job as a public defender, I tried to kill myself twice. Afterwards, I spent whole days sitting on the shore of Lake Michigan in Milwaukee, WI, just listening to the water, to the bugs, to the birds and breeze while trying to heal from this episode of my life. Lake Michigan taught me that not only has the natural world given me my life, the natural world continues to save my life. Plants give me the oxygen I require to breathe. Clouds, lakes, oceans, rivers, and the rest of the water cycle make up 60% of my body. Animals and soil provide me with food. Sunsets and stars teach me that I do, in fact, possess a spirit. And, they teach me that what my spirit needs for nourishment is found in the natural world.
Realizing all of this, I vowed, in an act of gratitude, to devote my life to protecting as much of the natural world as I possibly can. The next step after making this vow was to figure out how to do that. I’ve never been married, and I don’t have any kids. I don’t have anyone counting on me. With no one depending on me, I can live more austerely than others. I can take more risks. I can throw myself into environmental activism. So, I’ve spent a lot of time over the last 10 years traveling to frontline land defense campaigns to offer whatever help is needed. Oftentimes, lawyers are needed—especially lawyers who can work for free. And, again, with no one depending on me, I don’t need very much money and can offer my law practice to land defense campaigns for free.
My poetic practice flows from the fact that the natural world is full of creatures and beings who are capable of communicating with us and who really do want to offer their wisdom to humans. I write all my poems while listening—to the land, wind, red-winged blackbirds, coyotes, creeks, and earthworms. My poems are what I hear these beings saying. The best poetry sneaks around our cultural conditioning and speaks directly to our hearts and to our animal bodies. I write poetry to help my readers fall in love with the natural world. And then, to act to defend their beloved.
Bryan: Thank you, Will. Your life seems so integrated, so free of the compartmentalization that our culture demands of us. I really admire that.
Something that struck me in your response was your description of your poetic practice. As I read When I Set the Sweetgrass Down, it was clear to me that your poems were the products of deep listening. While I heard your voice in the collection, I also heard the voices of so many plants, animals, rocks, rivers, and places. Hearing those voices really shaped my experience as a reader, but your poems also felt like an answer to something I have wrestled with as a writer and an activist. One of the phrases that gets thrown around in many of the circles I inhabit is “being a voice for the voiceless.” I think this well-intentioned idea often has problematic effects. Specifically, it can lead people who are used to being heard to speak over and on behalf of others—beings who are not in fact voiceless and who never asked to be spoken for. At the same time, being silent often feels like being complicit, especially if you are someone who holds power in an unjust system.
What I love about your writing is that you identify the natural world not as voiceless but as speaking. And yes, you acknowledge that many “original languages” have been forgotten and in some cases forcibly and violently silenced. But you don’t seem to anoint yourself a spokesperson. Instead you listen—which requires you to get close enough to actually hear. And once you have not only heard but also connected, you act as a conduit. Which I guess makes you a prophet?
We need prophets like you right now—I believe that. But I am also a skeptic, wary of all the ways voices can be misused and misrepresented. Add imagination to the mix, and there are so many ways to go astray. So I’d like to know, in addition to listening, how do you navigate the stickiness and trickiness of translating what you hear into poetry? And how are you able to trust your representation of the voices that have spoken to you?
Falk: One way I navigate the stickiness and trickiness of translating what I hear into poetry is by insisting that what I hear and how I translate what I hear are not infallible. When we listen to humans speaking English—even humans we know intimately, like lovers, friends, and family—we often misunderstand what we hear. Taking this a step further into the natural world, anyone who has a dog or cat knows that dogs and cats can communicate with humans. But, this communication is rarely perfect. A dog’s bark might mean a stranger is approaching or that the dog spied a plump rabbit through the window. Dogs and cats, of course, have been domesticated and bred by humans to be ever-better companions to humans, so communication from dogs and cats is often more easy to understand than communication from a river or stone. The most important thing for humans to remember, though, is not that we need to perfectly understand the countless voices filling this beautiful planet with music—it’s that these voices are singing, are sacred, and deserve to continue singing whether humans understand the music or not.
I also do not spend too much time worrying about whether I’ve perfectly understood a snake’s rattle or the breeze through redwood trees, because I think Aldo Leopold got it right in A Sand County Almanac. He wrote: “A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.” If my poems help my readers fall in love with the natural world and act to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community, then my poems are “right.” I’m able to trust my representation of the voices that have spoken to me in a similar way: Poetry is a communal thing. I write a poem and my readers read them. If my readers find meaning in my poems, if their hearts are stirred to courage in defending the natural world, then I trust that I found some truth.
I should be clear, though, that most of what I hear from the natural world is the pain and anguish of a planet being destroyed at a currently intensifying pace. I could not trust myself if all I did was sit around listening to this pain and anguish, trying to pull pretty language from the suffering. Everyone recognizes how a mining corporation, for example, profits off the destruction of the natural world. But, in my experience, artists rarely confront the truth that profiting from a poem inspired by the destruction of the natural world can be similarly extractive and exploitative. If your child was seriously ill, for example, you wouldn’t sit around writing heartbreaking poems about how terrible it is to see your child suffering. Poems might come from this experience. But most of your energy would be consumed with healing your child. None of us would trade a poem for a child’s health. When we really think about it and choose how to spend our time, I don’t think most of us actually would trade art for the health of the natural world. When I write poetry, I only do so with any time I have left over from my work as a lawyer and an activist trying to directly defend the natural world. I love poetry. But, for me, poetry is not the point. The health and well-being of Earth is.
Bryan: It’s clear that you are driven by a singular vision. I feel both intrigued and intimidated by your ability to wholly give yourself to the work of stopping the destruction of the natural world.
One of the things I struggle with, as someone who cares deeply about places and the biotic communities in those places, is the scale and scope of changes that our species needs to make. It is not enough for me to drive a Prius, line-dry my laundry, and buy second-hand clothes for my kids. Even some of the more extreme measures I’ve taken—like choosing not to travel for extended periods of time—feel like raindrops falling on a parched reservoir. They are terrifyingly insufficient to the task. When I consider the allure of comfort, my attachment to certain kinds of security, and the power of my own enculturation, it is hard to find hope that humanity, as a whole, can change course.
As a writer—and I guess as a human, too—I often feel that the best I can do is bear witness. I can choose to not look away and to record what I see with fidelity. I think some of your poems do just that, but I also think many of them do something more radical. As I was considering your response to my last question, I kept thinking about a Bible story I grew up with—the one about Jesus walking on the water. His disciples were crossing the Sea of Galilee by themselves, and they got caught in a storm. And all of the sudden, Jesus was there beside them, walking on the water. He invited Peter to join him—to do the impossible, to step out of the relative safety of the boat and to join him atop those wind-whipped waters. And Peter did. He walked on the water too, though ultimately his amygdala kicked in and said, “Dude, you're gonna sink,” and Jesus had to give him a hand.
Part of the role of a prophet, then, is to make the impossible seem possible. And isn’t poetry a fertile medium for this kind of alchemy? I know you see ties between prophecy and poetry because in your collection, you write of “prophets in poets’ clothing” and the “bardic prophet’s storytelling tongue.” When it comes to the environmental crises unfolding all around us, I would love to know what you think is possible. What disasters might be averted? What changes in our way of life might be enacted? And how might poetry help generate the imagination and faith needed to step out of our boats onto wild waters?
Falk: Before I describe what I think is possible, I should probably start with what I think is certain. The dominant culture is one based on the infinite consumption of finite resources. Industrial humans, today, are consuming more of Earth’s materials than Earth can regenerate. There are more humans than ever before. They are using more of Earth than ever before. And they’re doing so at an intensifying pace. Basic arithmetic shows that this can’t go on forever.
Furthermore, ecologists have known for decades that the human population has overshot Earth’s carrying capacity. Carrying capacity is the maximum population of a given species which a particular environment can support indefinitely. Overshoot is the condition of having exceeded for the time being the permanent carrying capacity of an environment. The laws of ecology teach that any population that overshoots carrying capacity eventually collapses. It’s not a matter of if, it’s a matter of when. To make matters worse, the longer a species overshoots carrying capacity, the more that species draws down an environment’s finite resources and permanently reduces that environment’s carrying capacity. Overshoot, in other words, steals resources from the future.
Humans have been able to put the crash off through the use of ever-more extractive technologies. Most people don’t understand, for example, that industrial agriculture is completely dependent on fossil fuels for things like nitrogen fixing (not to mention all of the fuel for agricultural machinery). Human population has only recently exceeded 8 billion because of the food provided by industrial agriculture. When fossil fuels are used up (currently our consumption of fossil fuels is only increasing), industrial agriculture will collapse, and there will be mass starvation and die-offs. There will also be far less of the raw materials of life (healthy soil, freshwater, clean air) that Earth will need to heal herself.
A terrible crash is coming. The longer that crash takes to happen, the less life on Earth will be possible. The longer that crash takes to happen, the more suffering there will be for both humans and other-than-humans. So, I believe, the most ethical thing to do right now is to try to dismantle those technologies, like fossil fuel infrastructure, that enable humans to destroy and control the natural world while overshooting Earth’s carrying capacity.
This might sound like I’m advocating for causing a disaster, not averting it. But we must understand that most human lives today are only possible by stealing from future generations of humans and other-than- humans while directly destroying the natural world in the present. The longer this goes on, the worse the inevitable crash will be.
I want to be clear that I’m not advocating for killing humans. But, we must understand that many of the processes keeping many humans alive are killing the natural world. If we truly want to return to some semblance of balance with the natural world, the human species is going to have to make sacrifices. We can forgive the ghosts of the 100 species currently being driven to extinction every single day if they say: It’s about time.
Of course, most humans will violently oppose any serious efforts to slow, much less stop, the destructive and extractive processes that make the dominant culture possible. And, this is where I see poetry helping us step out of the boat and into the wild waters. We need courage. We need to know that our sacrifices mean something. We need to know that there is beauty in resistance. That’s where poetry comes in.
We can see this in the statement I made about the ghosts of extinct species insisting it’s time that humans make more serious sacrifices. Only in a poetic context can you make a statement like that and not be met with immediate sniggering. Everyone raised in the dominant culture knows other-than-human species cannot speak. Everyone knows extinct species don’t have ghosts. But, here’s the thing: They can. And do. It’s just that we’re only allowed to talk about it through poetry.
Bryan: Thank you for your boldness and for speaking those hard truths. And I appreciate your willingness to challenge “what everyone knows” and to offer alternative ontologies.
I wonder if this might be a good opportunity to pivot to the topic of religion. I’ve noticed that your poetry often incorporates Biblical allusions and the language of Christian and Celtic religious traditions. And the title of your collection references the Native American spiritual practice of burning sweetgrass. In your book, you set poems on Good Friday, Imbolc, and Beltane. You invoke doubting Thomas, John the Baptist, Saint Brigid, and Saint Patrick. You speak of the Creator, of sin, of turning the other cheek. All of this makes me curious about your background and beliefs. Would you be willing to tell us a little bit about your religious upbringing and where you find yourself now in regards to religion and spirituality?
Falk: Yes, When I Set the Sweetgrass Down is a record of my attempts to articulate an honest spirituality for myself. Much of this has to do with my identity as a European settler in North America. As I’ll describe below, the Catholicism I was raised with doesn’t work for me. I see a lot of other white folks turn either to spiritualities that seem to me to be thinly-veiled appropriations of Native American traditions or attempts to revive old Pagan traditions. But neither of these avenues are acceptable to me.
I was brought up in a devoutly Catholic family. My maternal grandmother spent several years in the Poor Clare monastery in Evansville, Indiana before older nuns decided my granny was a little too loquacious to take her final vows. I had three great uncles who were priests. We never missed Mass on Sundays. I went to Catholic grade schools and a Catholic college (the University of Dayton). First Communion and Confirmation were some of the biggest celebrations in the first 13 years of my life. So, Catholic imagery played a major role in forming my young imagination.
I was 19 when I lost my Catholic faith. I was kneeling beneath a life-size crucifix depicting Jesus’ suffering on the cross in the typically gruesome Catholic way. I was supposed to be asking God’s forgiveness for engaging in actions I’d been taught my whole life were sins. But, many of these actions brought me joy, and I couldn’t figure out how they were hurting anyone. I walked out of Mass that day and decided I’d never go back, unless it was to accompany family during times they might really want me to go (funerals, weddings, or holidays).
I want to be clear: I don’t hate Catholics or Christians. There have been many Catholics and many Christians who have done amazing things for the world. I’m very grateful for these people. But, I do think that any spirituality—Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, Islamic, Buddhist, New Age—that removes the sacred from the real, physical, natural world and places it in an abstract deity who somehow exists beyond the natural world is problematic. The real world is primary. Freshwater has done more for me than any invisible sky god ever has. Clean air answers my lungs’ prayers constantly. I find my spirit in the stars above sagebrush steppes, in the Colorado River as she carves her way through red rock deserts, in yearling antelopes leaning on their mothers’ flanks while learning to run.
I believe human spirituality, like everything else, is created by the natural world. The natural world creates human spirituality to teach humans how to live on the land they find themselves on. The great Lakota scholar, lawyer, and author Vine Deloria Jr. (who wrote what should be mandatory reading, God is Red: A Native View of Religion and Custer Died for Your Sins, among many others) explained that his Lakota traditions taught his people how to live on the Great Plains that are the Lakota homelands, that Hopi traditions taught the Hopi how to live in the deserts of the southwest, that Haudenosaunee traditions taught the Haudenosaunee how to live along the Great Lakes. He also explained that bad things happen when you try to remove a spirituality from the land that created it and apply that spirituality to a different ecotype. He theorized that perhaps the reason why Christianity has been so devastating to the rest of the world is that it was removed from the deserts of Palestine and streets of Jerusalem, where Christianity originated.
The problem confronting settlers like me is that I live thousands of miles from my ancestral homelands in Ireland and Germany. Many white people in America today look to their pre-Christian pagan traditions. But I agree with Deloria. Transporting these pagan traditions across oceans and continents causes these traditions to lose much of their meaning—and can be downright dangerous. Plus, I don’t think we really can remember very much about these pagan traditions, especially because so much of the land that formed these traditions in Europe has been destroyed. So, where do we turn for spirituality?
The title poem in When I Set the Sweetgrass Down represents the best answer I have right now. The action of setting the sweetgrass down is a statement against cultural appropriation (“the fragrance is a borrowed prayer, anyway”). When I set the sweetgrass down in the poem, I look to “Brigid, Christ, the Creator,” but none of those answer me. So, I look to the land, to a mother bear and her cubs, before concluding that I should “let my labor be my prayer.” My work to protect the natural world is my spirituality now. I no longer get caught up in trying to perform the rituals my Celtic ancestors might have. I don’t make Beltane or Imbolc or Ostara a big deal. I just work in the hopes that one day humans will be freed from the responsibility of trying to avert total ecological collapse so they can focus on things like creating new spiritual traditions that make it less likely all of this will ever happen again.
Bryan: I’m fascinated by the idea that spiritual traditions emanate from place—and that when those traditions are displaced, they become impotent and even destructive. Like you, I come from a Christian tradition about which I have fairly complex feelings. I’ve long thought that the ecological hierarchy outlined in the Judeo-Christian creation myth is responsible, at least in part, for the way that so many Christians relate to the natural world. How much exploitation, extraction, and destruction is rooted in the idea that humans, as the crown jewels of creation, have dominion over all living things? But it’s interesting to think about how the place Christianity sprang from might have informed this perspective.
I’ve never been to the Middle East, but I have spent time in deserts. They are places of extremes, often inhospitable to human inhabitants. It makes sense to me that a religion of the desert would portray nature as something to be subdued and ruled over. And it’s easy to see how exporting that notion to different landscapes could have terrible consequences. Wilderness historian Roderick Nash actually touched on this in his seminal book Wilderness and the American Mind. Early American settlers, he said, absorbed from the Bible ideas about wilderness that caused them to fear it and associate it with evil. Wilderness, after all, was where Adam and Eve were exiled after they were cast out of the Garden of Eden. It’s where the Israelites were forced to wander for 40 years as punishment for their lack of belief in God’s promises. It’s where Jesus went to be tempted by the Devil. I admit I know very little about the land ethics of people presently living in the Middle East—but I would like to learn more about how Jews, Christians, and Muslims who are practicing their religions in their originating places interact with and think about the ecosystems in those places.
Turning back to you and your work, the idea of displacement shows up again and again in your poems. Throughout your collection, you explore your physical separation from Ireland, the land of your ancestors. You also write about what it’s like to live on land full of the bones of other people’s ancestors—there’s not a true sense of belonging there either. This liminality is so beautifully expressed in the poem “Searching for Brigid,” in which you describe searching for the patron saint of Ireland in Nevada, the traditional territory of the Paiute. I think it’s worth sharing three stanzas of that poem here:
Paiute ghosts rose from the highway
that paved over their burial cairns.
They climbed over barbed wire fences
to demand which borders
my ancestors had crossed.In a language I did and did not understand,
they reminded me that
this is not where my traditions were born.
And, if I found Brigid here,
I would never truly know.Nevada is much too far
from my greatest grandmothers’ Irish bones.
As someone who’s written an entire essay collection about being physically and existentially In Between Places, I am really compelled by the way your poems take up the themes of being in between, feeling lost, and longing to belong. For me, the middle—that sense of being in between—has been an incredibly generative space. I’d be interested in hearing more about what that space means to you as both a creator and someone seeking spiritual wholeness. And are you at peace with being in between, or is it a state that leaves you yearning for a home that doesn’t exist?
Falk: My sense of being lost begins in my recognition that we’re living through one of if not the worst biotic collapses Earth has ever experienced. I’m haunted by the statistics. In 2022, the Zoological Society of London—which tracks populations of mammals, birds, fish, reptiles, and amphibians—analyzed 32,000 wildlife species populations and found a 69% average decrease in these populations since 1970. In other words, in just over 50 years, Earth has lost two-thirds of the members of these species. Many species are completely gone, of course. Scientists estimate that humans are driving between 100 and 200 species to extinction every single day. This extinction rate is estimated to be between 1,000 and 10,000 times higher than natural extinction rates. A 2020 study published in the science journal Nature found that the global mass of plastic is now greater than the overall mass of all terrestrial and marine animals combined.
There’s a murderer in our home. He’s killed two-thirds of our family. He’s killing more of them than ever before at a faster rate than ever before. I cannot find peace until the murderer is stopped. And, while I will celebrate when the murderer is stopped, nothing will ever truly heal the trauma caused by the murder of so many of our kin. I don’t spend too much time worrying about spiritual wholeness because, until the murderer is stopped, I don’t think spiritual wholeness is possible.
I yearn for a home that isn’t being destroyed. But to actually stop our home from being destroyed is going to expose us to unspeakable violence and trauma. Those in power know that they derive their power from exploiting other humans and the natural world. They will not tolerate anything that seriously interferes with their access to the source of their power. They will not hesitate to use violence if we get in their way. Thousands of years of empire have made this perfectly clear.
If adults alive today are going to live up to our responsibility to ensure that our grandchildren and other-than-human grandchildren will have a healthy home to live in, or even just a home where life is possible, then we’re going to have to sacrifice our physical and psychological safety. Many of us will be imprisoned. Many of us may even be killed. We will experience PTSD, and our hearts will be permanently scarred. Because no one stopped the destruction before us, and because no one is coming to save us, it’s up to us. Unfortunately, that means we won’t get to enjoy life the way so many of our ancestors did. But if we don’t want to condemn our children to even more difficult lives than we’re living, we’re going to have to make the sacrifices.
To borrow your phrase, it’s not just individuals who are living in between, it’s whole generations of humans. Humans could have lived in balance with the natural world as traditional hunter-gatherers more or less forever. The Stone A world we evolved in—and evolved to need—was a paradise. Traditional hunter-gatherer lifeways respect this paradise and ensure humans do not destroy it. Some human cultures chose a different way and banished themselves from that paradise. We’ll never return to that paradise. Too much has been destroyed. Assuming the destruction is stopped, humans could learn to live as our ancestors once did and, in that way, participate in creating a new paradise with the rest of the natural world. But we’re the ones who will have to stop the destruction, and it’ll be up to other generations to find the new paradise.
So, I see myself as part of an in-between generation that will never find peace. I’ve always thought that if I cannot find peace, I can at least try to bring about a world that will one day be peaceful. I’ve accepted that my life will be one of constant toiling to bring that world about. I’ve accepted that my life will be incredibly difficult. Maybe one day those living in a peaceful world will be proud of me.
Bryan: What you’ve just described seems like an alternate interpretation of the Garden of Eden story—one that’s perhaps more useful than the interpretations I received growing up. So maybe Eve and Adam still serve as representatives of humanity, but the tree represents ecological balance? What if it literally is a tree of life? And what if eating the fruit of that tree represents irresponsible consumption—taking more than we need, using what should be left for others? If this were the story (as opposed to Eve and Adam simply being curious and wanting to understand good and evil), it would make so much more sense to me that the consequences of their choice would be the loss of paradise, would mean conflict with other humans and the death of animals and an extractive view of the earth.
Maybe the old stories—or reinterpretations of those old stories—have a role to play in inspiring the kind of revolution you’ve described. They’re familiar frameworks. They’re tied to belief and to the ways we understand our purposes. And I feel like to get people to make the kind of sacrifices you’ve just outlined, you’re going to need them to have belief and devotion and a sense of purpose that is almost religious in nature.
If I’m honest, I feel an internal resistance to what you are calling for. I do care about the reality that awaits my children and their children and all of my other-than-human grandchildren, as you put it. But I also care about myself. I don’t want to go to prison. I don’t want to die. I don’t want to have a life filled with suffering. And maybe that sounds selfish or myopic. Okay, it is selfish and myopic, but as far as I know, this is the only life I’m going to get. I want to experience joy and love and pleasure and connection while I can. I want to be present with and for the ones I love. I am willing to make some sacrifices—but not at the level you’re making them, not at the level you’re saying is necessary. So what do we do with that? Is there a place in the revolution for people like me, or are you making the same kind of call Jesus did when he said, “Whoever comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and even life itself, cannot be my disciple”?
Falk: I’m fascinated by how stories that achieve a foundational status in a culture can be coopted to serve the interests of power. My interpretation of the Garden of Eden story is simple: The fruit of the tree is literally fruit. Or more specifically, plants humans domesticated for human use. Or most specifically, agriculture. Yes, I know there are wildly occurring fruits. But, it’s always seemed very significant to me that the “fruit of the tree” is often depicted as an apple. Apples are a classic example of a domesticated fruit.
In my view, the ecological collapse we’re living through began some 12,000 years ago when a few human cultures around the world developed agriculture, which is to say: a few human cultures forsook hunting and gathering, forsook living primarily on what the land freely offers, and instead began clearing grasslands, cutting forests, damming rivers, and controlling local ecosystems to kill any threats to their crops. Agriculture creates a vicious cycle. Agriculture allows human populations to grow rapidly at the same time that agriculture destroys water and soil. Eventually, agriculturists exhaust their landbases and are then confronted with a choice: Either voluntarily reduce the community’s population and return to hunting and gathering. Or, find new land to grow crops on. Because traditional hunter-gatherers rarely give up their homelands without a fight, agriculturists must also be militant. And, because cultures who are willing to sacrifice long-term sustainability for short-term power in the long run always defeat cultures who aren’t willing to sacrifice long-term sustainability for short-term power, agriculture has dominated the world.
So, the Garden of Eden story, to me, is profoundly true. Once humans began eating the fruits of agriculture, they began destroying paradise. If the Garden of Eden story ended there, then I don’t think it would have achieved such a foundational status in our agricultural society. It would have been too threatening to agriculture. That’s where God comes in. The Garden of Eden story accurately reminds humans that some of us destroyed paradise. Instead of encouraging humans to do the incredibly difficult work of repairing our relationship with the natural world, of forsaking agriculture and stepping back into paradise, the Garden of Eden story offers a paradise outside of this world that is only accessible through an invisible god that similarly exists outside of this world. The sacred is removed from the natural world. And this new, invisible god offers us forgiveness instead of insisting that we heal the damage that we’ve done to soil, grasslands, forests, rivers, and the countless species agriculture has driven to extinction. We’re free to continue agriculture as long as we obey this invisible god’s commands.
This is all to say: Yes, re-interpretations of old stories have a role to play in inspiring revolution. The old stories, themselves, are re-interpretations of even older stories. The re-interpretation of older stories were part of a pastoral and agricultural revolution that occurred in the Middle East a few thousand years ago. We can create new foundational myths and try to convince our culture to adopt these new myths. But I suspect it would be easier to re-interpret foundational myths.
I might have been procrastinating in offering such a long explication of the Garden of Eden story. Your question about what do we do with the facts that most people want to experience joy, love, pleasure, and connection while they can, and that this desire makes people less willing to make certain sacrifices in defense of the land, is one of the most important questions for anyone to answer right now. It is also one of the most difficult.
I experience more joy, love, pleasure, and connection while I’m fighting to protect the land than I do when I’m not. For most of 2021, for example, I lived in a tent on land set to be destroyed by the Thacker Pass open pit lithium mine while working to stop that destruction. The weather, at times, was brutal. Blizzards in the winter. 100 degree temperatures in the summer. Non-stop wind. The cops were worse. They’d come up to our camp a couple times a week in their body armor with handguns, handcuffs, and pepper spray. They had shotguns in their trucks. They fined my friend and me nearly $50,000 for building composting outhouses for Native American elders to use during ceremony in the exact location a mining corporation is going to destroy with a 400-foot deep, 1100-acre open pit. It was one of the scariest, most difficult things I’ve ever done. I also never felt more connection to sage brush, sage grouse, coyotes, golden eagles, mule deer, pronghorn antelope, kangaroo rats, rattle snakes, badgers, meadowlarks, and many, many more.
I’m in love with Thacker Pass. I consider her a friend. And, I’ve never felt more present with a loved one than I felt camping in Thacker Pass while working to try to stop her destruction. It was one of the only times in my life where I knew—knew—that my relationship with the natural world was truly mutual. I wasn’t just passing through and admiring her. I wasn’t seeking relief from the stress of my life. I wasn’t seeking inspiration for poetry. I was trying to stop her destruction. I’ve never felt more alive. I’ve never felt more human. I’ve never felt more connected to all of my kin.
For the sake of argument, however, let’s assume that the sacrifices humans need to make to stop the dominant culture from destroying what’s left of the natural world are bereft of joy, love, pleasure, and connection. Would it still be worth it? My heart answers with a resounding yes.
My understanding of ecological reality is that most human lives today are only possible through the consumption of resources that humans and others will need in the future. Our lives now are only possible through theft from the future. It’s not our fault that this is happening. No one asked us if agriculture and industrialism were good ideas. We don’t need to feel personally guilty about it. But we do have a responsibility to recognize reality and change that reality.
Any joy, love, pleasure, and connection I feel now is offset by the knowledge that the possibility for those who follow us to experience joy, love, pleasure, and connection is rapidly diminishing. In my life, I’ve only found joy and pleasure to be fleeting experiences, anyway. It’s really hard for me to feel much joy and pleasure when our mother is being tortured all around us. I don’t think joy, love, pleasure, and connection will be more than fleeting experiences for me (and probably most others) until our mother is healing and the torture is stopped.
Is there a place for people who don’t want to make certain sacrifices? Of course. Earth needs all the help she can get. I don’t believe that there is anyone out there judging our actions—well, except for our own hearts and those who follow us. No god will punish us for how we live our lives. But our actions and our failures to act have consequences. We have the power to cause and to alleviate suffering. I am compelled to alleviate as much suffering as I can because I’m in love with this world and all the creatures I share this world with. I want to stop as much of their suffering as I possibly can.
I want to be clear that I don’t want to invoke guilt to motivate anyone. Acting from guilt, I believe, is fundamentally self-serving. I want to invoke love. I want us to consider that perhaps we do have more power to ensure our children and grandchildren have a better life than we do. And I want us to use that power with bravery, with empathy, with love. It will be incredibly difficult. But things are only going to get worse from here on out. The longer it takes to stop the dominant culture, the more suffering there will be. I don’t see any other choice but to fight like hell.
Bryan: Thank you, Will. I feel incredibly moved by your words and by the life you are leading. You’ve given me a lot to think about. And I suspect that if readers have made it this far, they feel the same rumbling in the depths that I do—the shifting of tectonic plates.
I’ve been thinking about how to wrap up this conversation, and I keep coming back to something I noticed when I read When I Set the Sweetgrass Down. The words pray and prayer appear over and over again in your book—in four titles and 21 additional times in the body of your poems, if I counted correctly. The prayers in this collection are not conversations with God. They are berry stains on bear cubs’ faces. They are “the speech of little lizard feet skittering across the baked, fallen fronds of a date palm tree.” They are wildfire smoke, curling around the earth—“the prayers of a planet that simply wants to stop burning.” They boil in your belly. They emerge as breath. And, of course, they are your labor.
You may not believe in God, Will, but you are a pray-er. So my hope is that you will close this conversation with a prayer. Offer it to or for whomever you choose.
Falk: My work is my prayer. The stress of federal litigation, the pressure that comes with trying to keep a beautiful place like Thacker Pass from being permanently destroyed, withstanding the harassment of cops and corporate agents, the depression I experience under this stress and pressure are all my prayers. I offer these prayers to our readers on behalf of Earth, on behalf of all of us. No one is coming to save Earth. No one is coming to save us. I pray that more of us will realize that our prayers are more likely to be answered when we join together and get to work.
Will Falk is an activist, attorney, and author. The natural world speaks and his work is how he listen.