What keeps me writing
(with audio version)
Dear friends,
It’s hard to take in the devastation of our ecosystems, our climate, our living world, the threats to our communities and ourselves. It’s overwhelming.
After decades of resisting, I have a guilty daydream once in a while, of stopping and letting go. Of staying under the covers and waiting for spring. Let someone else do the work, I’ve done enough.
But one point where my activism and spiritual practice overlap is this: we have no choice but to face our difficult feelings. Escaping from reality won’t change a thing, the stakes are too high. And while I do experience multiple privileges, the struggle for liberation has never been abstract for me. The fight has always been for survival. Giving up on activism to work in ‘the bank of mum and dad’ was not an option and honestly who would want that?
Rest is important, of course. Despair and exhaustion are also difficult feelings to be embraced and taken care of, not pushed away or ignored.
Then, when I can, I keep going. There is so much to do.
The world is very different to the one I grew up in.
I know (because I was watching them) that the insect populations have crashed, and the lapwings have nearly gone.
I know (because I sat and cried with them) that dead seabirds are washing up on the beaches in incredible numbers.
In 1980 the average global temperature was a degree cooler than now; greenhouse emissions were around half. During my lifetime, marine and plastic pollution have increased tenfold [1, 2].
These are big facts, hard to absorb, so here’s something more tangible: there are half as many field birds in Europe as there were in my childhood. When I was watching birds in the grass behind my school, or by the brook at the bottom of the hill, there were 600 million more of them, just in the EU.
House sparrows, Passer domesticus, who were so common in the garden and the street that we took them for granted, have declined by half since the 80s. In one of the cities I know best, Brussels, starved, polluted, with nowhere to nest, sparrows have all but disappeared.
In 2002, while I was sat on Brighton beach, transfixed by murmurations of starlings gathering at sunset, Sturnus vulgaris was being added to the red list of the Birds of Conservation Concern. Their population had already halved in three decades and today they’ve declined even further - by 70%. I have watched them go from one of the most common birds in these lands to an endangered species.
Our liberation, and that of the starlings, are more tied to each other than we might realise.
As our ecosystems collapse, marginalised people are more at risk than ever, more precarious than ever, more scapegoated than ever. Whenever these words reach you, I know there will be no shortage of examples in the world, the headlines and maybe your own life. I hope I’m wrong.
I am reminded me of the pain in my heart from so much loss and the fire in my belly to make it stop. I am reminded that writing should be made of nothing less.
I will wander off the point many times with this project. I already know that I’m interested in more things than I can fit into one publication and writing about queer liberation and environmental defence (and ecology and transmisogyny and mutual aid and prisons and diversity and kinship and sexuality and interdependence and land and class and pandemics and resilience) was destined to be a wild, non-linear journey.
But when I get lost, when I doubt myself, when I freeze in fear, I will come back to this: for the starlings, for the sparrows, for all of us.
