Category Archives: Death

What Did I Learn This Quarter?

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While my action project experience in this class could have been better, I am able to recognize the valuable lessons I learned from it – primarily about the importance of having a group leader. If we had one person taking charge, I think we could have gotten a lot more done. Regardless, I am proud of how we came together in the end to create engaging and informative content, despite our busy schedules.

In the context of our class, I found that our project, promoting the passage of legislation aimed to revolutionize plastic recycling in Washington, perfectly represents political ecology. We live in a system where we elect individuals to make environmental policy decisions on our behalf, and this recycling bill relies on them to pass it. I don’t want to say that my group’s action project was worthless (because I think there is a lot of value in public education), but we should acknowledge that a social media campaign will likely have a limited impact on the decisions made in Olympia.

Honestly, that is the reality of political ecology in the Anthropocene.

As far as the other action projects, WashPIRG’s Save the Orcas campaign was what finally allowed me to understand what our class was about. I could see that, like my group’s, theirs hinged on the actions of legislators, and that Senator Cantwell’s refusal to support breaching the dams might be motivated in some way by her fear of dying. Relatedly, the Ernest Becker group was contributing to the study of conceptions of death, which is beneficial in helping us to predict whether future environmental reforms might be possible in the face of climate disaster, given that Terror Management Theory explains our actions in response to death reminders. As this group mentioned in class, they were frustrated at the constraints they were given by the people in power over them, which is exactly what the ICA is for. This last group’s action project was directly investigating the political ecology of UW in the Anthropocene and trying to get our Board of Regents to follow through on their fossil fuel divestment commitments, again relying on people in power.

All in all, while it wasn’t my own group’s action project that led to me discovering the true meaning of our class, it was the action projects of our class in general that helped me to understand what it means to survive the political ecology of death in the Anthropocene.

How then shall I live?

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My major takeaway from this course regards how I want to proceed with living my life.

We have learned that death anxiety rules our lives and decisions, and that we cope through various forms of terror management. This constant fear drives our species to war, industrialization, colonization, exploitation, and now to the brink of a planetary climate disaster.

One of our contemplative practices asked us to consider three mindsets. Where 1) the world is generally getting worse, 2) the world is generally getting better, and 3) the world is how it is. I find the 3rd mindset to be the most realistic and empowering. In this view, we see the world as it is without sugarcoating it or focusing purely on evils. In this view, humanity has agency. We can sit back and continue our trajectory toward a terrible future, or we can choose to collaborate, innovate, and save our species from collapse.

With this mindset of agency, I am struck by the question: “how then shall I live?”

I need to start with my forms of terror management. Before this course, my management consisted of spree online shopping to fill a non-existent gap in my life and constant distractions because silence allowed intrusive thoughts to run rampant. These are unsustainable strategies.

Professor Jem Bendall in his video about Deep Adaptation asks viewers to cherish what they have. To enjoy life in the short time that we have it. Though I talk about why I dislike Bendall’s perspective in another blog post, I have come to accept this concept when taken alongside the strategies presented in Active Hope, the relief and fulfillment of volunteer work like my action project for WashPIRG’s Save the Orcas, and the hope that humanity still has agency to change.

Image Credit: Syracuse Peace Council

To answer the question “how then shall I live?,” I must adjust my terror management. Rather than needlessly consuming, I can focus on being grateful for what I already have. Rather than constantly distracting myself, I can spend more meaningful time with friends and family to feel reassured that I have people I care about who also care about me. I can take part in local efforts that better my community and environment. I can make changes like being better about recycling and using my purchasing power to favor local, sustainable businesses. I can choose to live with hope.

There are easily implementable things I can do to live a more conscientious and sustainable life without drastically changing my lifestyle. I don’t know if this is enough, but I hope that between collective individual action, death anxiety harnessed by corporate inventors to find technological solutions, and global politicians trying to one-up each other, we will find a way to persist as a species.

Fear Within our Anthropocence and How We Can Over Come It

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My biggest takeaway about the political ecology of death in the Anthropocene is that people are ruled by fear. Political leaders, religious leaders, everyday people, and everyone in between has some amount of fear in their lives. Fear of our death, fear of failure, fand ear of how our world is being run.

This poem by Shakespeare speaks of fear:

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/50428/song-fear-no-more-the-heat-o-the-sun-

Fear does not have to be a negative influence. Letting fear control you allows for it to have power over you. But, acknowledging this fear creates a new opportunity. An opportunity for love, desire, hope, and a life full of adventure.

The Worm at the Core states “Why not depart from life as a sated guest from a feast” (Solomon) and I agree. Why not take our life for everything it has to offer. Living in the depths of despair does nothing for for anyone. This class has shown me that yes, our world is dark, has several demoralizing issues, and needs some fixing-but the beautiful thing is that we have the power to change this. We can be the light in our own world.

My action project was built around WashPirg’s Save the Orca Campaign with the goal of breaching the Lower Snake River Dam to allow more salmon to be available for the Orca’s to feed on. This is a passion project, and as I reference in my paper all passion projects are a way of coping with death anxiety. Passion projects to me are a positive way of working through personal death anxiety on some level. Being a part of something greater than oneself is an incredible feeling, and to me gives the feeling of hope.

Hope is stronger than fear, but when paired together can create opportunities to better our world

Shakespeare’s poem talks about how we will all come to rest as dust eventually (Shakespeare), and The Worm at the Core talks about how we are no more valuable to this Earth than a lizard or a potato from a biological perspective (Solomon), so then what is the point of being riddled with anxiety. This ay be a blindly optimistic point of view, but with how things are currently going… What do we have to lose by giving our best effort to enact change?

“I thought death would smell worse”: How Death has Crawled into Every Crevice of Society… and my Attic

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One of the main takeaways I got from this course is that death lives everywhere in society; if we take Terror Management Theory and Ernest Becker at face-value, everything we do, whether directly or indirectly, is to manage our own death anxiety. When I first heard that, it seemed a little convenient. Of course something that all humans experience was at the root of all our social, political, and environmental problems.

However, upon reflecting more upon the ways that death has influenced my own life—from trying to be remembered, to “doing good,” and more—I recognize that, in someways, it makes a lot of sense. Death has invaded pretty much every aspect of human life. And then, it invaded my attic.

I always thought I’d be able to tell if something had died in my house; if not by sight, then by smell. I never thought I’d spend more than three months living under death—and before you freak out and think there’s a dead body in the attic, there’s not—but, it seems like, similar to the way death operates in our society, it’s actually pretty easy to live under death if you have no idea it’s there. Until, of course, things start going wrong.

My roommate got severely ill almost a month ago, and it became clear that something in the house was causing it. She hired a mold inspector and, upon our exploring our attic, he found something that was admittedly much worse than mold. The wet spot on her ceiling wasn’t a water leak, and he didn’t think it was mold, either. No, he thought it was rodent urine. There were rat and squirrel nests in the attic. And carcasses. So. Many. Carcasses.

Immediately, he told us to be on the lookout for any kind of symptoms for illnesses we struggled to say and/or spell—oh, and ammonia poisoning. Leave the house if you get a headache. With one trip to the attic, it felt like our house had crumbled around us. We realized that this space that we had started to make a home could be killing us.

In the same ways that talking about death anxiety altered the way I view the world and those around me, the rat carcasses altered the way my roommates and I saw our home. We were no longer safe, and everywhere we looked we saw death.

Manhattan Wildlife Stock Illustration - Download Image Now - Rat, Cartoon, Death - iStock

“I am not my body. My body is not me”

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CW: Sickness/illness

I refuse to be the sum of my parts.

Monday, November 13th was a day like any other. I went to class, drank one too many coffees, procrastinated my homework. I fell asleep curled around a book.

Tuesday, November 14th, I woke feverish, teary-eyed, shaking. I fell asleep clutching a thermometer that read 103 degrees. 

I can’t remember November 15th, or 16th, or 17th, or 18th. I know my partner helped me write emails to my Professors explaining absences. I know my fever did not break 103 degrees until Friday night. I know I received three rounds of treatment. I know, almost a month later, I am still recovering.

It’s in moments like these, I find myself aligned with death apathy. In the obliterating pain and sadness, I become resigned to the prospect of death, probably because it feels so intimately close. In moments like these, it is extremely hard to remind myself I am more than the body that is making me feel this way. 

The awareness icon for my disease.

Our conversation last week regarding what we conceptualized as our “I” continues to resonate with me. My classmate, Ryan’s, comment about the view of their body and mind being inherently linked struck me. Why did my body so viscerally reject this statement? Why did I feel so disconnected from so many of my peers? Why didn’t I feel the connection between my body and my Self? 

Because my disability lives in my body, whatever form it chooses to manifest in is physical. While it continues to facilitate the degeneration of my body, it cannot touch my mind, my spirit, my soul. These aspects of me – despite feeling physically exhausted – feel so alive. If we were truly just our bodies, this would be incompatible – at least, to me it would be. 

Despite the yearly, monthly, weekly breakdown of my body, I feel stronger than ever. I frequently combat anger, frustration, and feelings of unfairness due to my disability, but that does not hinder my ability to feel generative, creative, and as I said before, alive. I don’t write this post to try to change anyone’s mind, but write it to explore how our lived experiences and identities shape how we talk about ourselves and relatedly, our future deaths. How do you think our  conceptualization of our “I” fosters death anxiety/death apathy? Do our personal identities and experiences help us create our conceptualization of our “I”? 

Parallel to Climate Politics

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Walking around a room with 18 other people, eyes on the floor, lights off, mind adrift in thoughts of death, climate change, and politics, was a confounding experience.

My takeaways from this strange contemplative practice did not become clear until days later. In the moment, the practice seemed somehow ironic and meaningful, yet I could not understand why. I now see my experiences in this practice as almost representing or paralleling the politics of climate change.

Mindfulness among the masses. Image Credit: Unknown

With our eyes on the ground, I felt overwhelmed. Listening to Karen’s descriptions of the world, I felt helpless in the face our extensive problems. There is so much to unpack, not enough time, and I don’t even know where to start. Amongst all these other shoes walking around the floor, how can anything I do be significant? How can I sway people to my side if we all come from different backgrounds, have different priorities, and live in a polarized playground where everything is black and white, or so gray in between that it is unintelligible? This overwhelming feeling is matched in the politics of climate change. It is such an extensive issue that leaders and individuals have no idea where to start or how to help. This overwhelmingness is dangerous because it can lead to stalling on solutions, and inaction which could effectively cause voluntary human extinction.

When we lifted our eyes to acknowledge each other I struggled to remain serious. I found the reality of 19 of us aimlessly wandering the tiny classroom, trying not to hit each other, while listening to poems about death funny. Sort of a “laugh because otherwise you’ll cry” response. This reaction is similar to how many people handle the climate crisis—they don’t take it seriously. They laugh because it is a wild idea that humans could unintentionally cause so much destruction and death while wandering the earth industrializing. They ignore it, because if they believe that there is nothing they can do, then it is better to laugh and cherish what they have while they are alive, rather than to get lost in a spiral of despair waiting to die.

In this practice I felt myself putting on a face for my peers. I couldn’t just acknowledge them with an honest expression of my feelings because that would have been too vulnerable. I felt like I had to smile, exaggerate my expressions, and communicate a false narrative. This, too, is similar to the politics of climate change. World leaders go to climate conferences and exaggerate their actions and intentions, project their virtue and strength, and hide their vulnerability and honest reality of confusion and disaster. We want to die with pride, and for our largely old politicians, acknowledging a problem would mean dying guilty.

Bonn, Germany Climate Conference. Image Credit: UNFCC

Why Won’t My Brain Shut Up?

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When we first started contemplative practices, I couldn’t focus. My mind has a habit of wandering. I find myself lost in streams of consciousness, daydreaming, dissociating – whatever you want to call it, I cannot focus on a thought. When told to close my eyes in a dark room in the morning, my brain rushes – when told to think of one thing, it tries even harder to think of something else. Specifically, when asked to think about my death and mortality, I want to think about it and try to, but I struggle to produce fluid thoughts. What comes out is fragmented notions of what I think I should think about death rather than anything connected to an actual feeling.

I constantly feel distracted, and the contemplative practices have often only exacerbated it. So, why won’t my brain shut up? Why is it continually running from something, like it is afraid to take a break like it is afraid it won’t come back on again? I can tie my fear of death to

‘Busy Brain’ stock image represents the way capitalist productivity infiltrates the human mind.

my experiences with contemplative practices. I am constantly distracted as if my brain is allowed to settle for a second, and I just do nothing, my mind no longer feels as if I am living a fulfilling life. In Western capitalist society specifically, it is not common to just do nothing. The way society functions are through extreme productivity, individualism and competition, meaning you cannot sit and think, you cannot do nothing, and you cannot contemplate. Once you do, you are no longer a meaningful part of society.

In The Worm at the Core, Terror Management Theory explains that people are constantly craving distraction, either consciously or subconsciously, from their looming mortality. To subscribe to this, they chase a cultural worldview that fills them with a sense of self-worth. Western capitalism plays into this model extremely easily. Using contemplative practices to face this, therefore, seems beneficial, so why has it still been extremely difficult for me? Am I too caught up in the cycle of productivity that my mind will not contemplate? Is my mind too indoctrinated with the Western capitalist system? Or is it rather the contemplative practice itself that will not work in a classroom, in a university, that is entirely orientated around productivity and capitalist prosperity?

Chocolate and Chip

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During our most recent contemplative practice, which Professor Litfin recorded for us to listen to over Thanksgiving break, I took some time to reflect on where my holiday meal came from.

My aunt hosted our annual family dinner this year, so we were incredibly lucky to enjoy potatoes, green beans, eggs, and various fruits straight from her farm. But some of our food, like the turkey, needed to be bought from the grocery store. That turkey is what (or who) I thought most about during the contemplation exercise. Specifically, I considered what that turkey’s life must have been like before it ended up on our table. The article we read last month about slaughterhouses (Working Undercover in a Slaughterhouse: an interview with Timothy Pachirat) had a profound impact on my thought process.

As the article points out, death is widely normalized in our culture, but, at the same time, we all take great care to willingly ignore it. Deep down, I’m sure my family and I all understood that the turkey on our table had suffered for most of its life. It probably lived in awful conditions in a factory farm, where it was forcefully fattened up and bludgeoned to death, all for some family to eat in celebration of a holiday whose origins are rife with much of the same exploitation and violence. This reality is not one that many of us want to think about, but it’s one I forced myself to confront to help me be more appreciative of the (unwilling) sacrifice that animal made.

(Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images)

After gaining this clarity, I found myself thinking back to Thanksgiving morning, when President Biden officially pardoned Chocolate and Chip at the White House (pictured right). When I was watching this event, I felt joy that these turkeys would go on to live happily and healthily for many more years. However, I’ve realized instead that our country has this tradition of sparing the life of one or two turkeys every Thanksgiving merely to obfuscate those we’d rather not see.

In closing, I am thankful for the many insights I have gained throughout this quarter from our weekly contemplative practices, and as this class comes to an end, I am beginning to realize the positive impact they have had on me. Setting aside some time to just sit with my thoughts is something I plan to do more of in the future.

We are Social Creatures

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I’ve always found contemplative practices to be a frustration that I endure rather than something beneficial. No matter how hard I try, I often can’t even fully register what is being said by the person guiding the practice, and my thoughts will jump everywhere except where I want them to be. I find myself having not a single helpful thought when it’s just me by myself trying to look inwards.

 For our contemplative practices specifically, I wonder if my lack of connection with them is my own personal TMT come to life. Our practices are often heavy and full of mortality and death. Perhaps I am subconsciously choosing not to engage with them so I don’t have to face my own death anxiety? On a similar train of thought, maybe I just don’t like being alone with my thoughts. Maybe the topics we cover in this class are simply too heavy and big to bear alone. By nature, we are social creatures, and I personally value group discussions and group learning when faced with the monumental challenges we’ve covered in class.

The one contemplative practice that did really work for me was one we did in a group of three taking on different perspectives (everything is great, everything is terrible, and everything is as it is). After each perspective we shared about what we were feeling. It was interesting to me how the thoughts that I was so firm on in my own head were drastically changed and shifted by my group mates when they shared their ideas. I discovered that we all have deep rooted anxieties and fears about death and the state of the world, but that we all think about them differently, and all come to the same conclusion: we want to do something about it.

This contemplative practice made me realize that we all inherently fear death and for the future of our civilization, but it’s not as heavy of a burden to carry when you talk about it with others. At the end of the day, it’s important to be able to sit with your own thoughts, but it’s equally, if not more important, to talk about them and experience them with others. We are a social species, and so contemplating the problems that we face shouldn’t be a solitary experience.

A rather cheesy, yet appropriate graphic from Ben & Jerry’s

Contemplating the Contemplative Practice

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Contemplative practices, meditation, or nap time mid class-or is it all three? Each class we take the time to look inward and are guided through a meditation that reflects our course content in some form. Honestly, this form of meditation is not for me.

The contemplative practices in our class are heavy, often broaching the subject of social racism, white supremacy, and even our own death-all topics that to me take more time than the allotted fifteen minutes in class to reflect and meditate on. I don’t usually partake, but I always respect my classmates and sit quietly to not distract from their experiences. In my mind, meditation is supposed to be calming, centering, a time of peace in a busy day to help get my mind and body back on track. Taking the time to meditate about the heavy issues of our world is difficult, a task that should not be taken lightly or with brevity.

https://www.contemplativemind.org/practices/tree

When I googled “contemplative practice” this was the first thing that came up, the tree of contemplative practice. This image gave me a greater insight to what a contemplative practice truly is. It is more than meditation, is about action and intention. This is something I can appreciate as I begin to understand it more.

With all this said, one contemplative practice that stuck with me more than some of the others was when we were guided to take the feeling of white supremacy and racism and to feel the weight in our right hand as our left hand felt the weight-or lack of weight-of freedom. Once we distinguished those two feelings, we were asked to squish them together as we folded our hands and to think about how our hands felt. The weight of freedom ad racism all mashed together and what it did to our hands, mind, and body. I don’t know why this stuck with me, maybe it was because it caught me off guard-maybe it was because I focuses on the emotions linked to these two topics a little more than I usually do. Most likely, it is because I get to experience freedom in my everyday life. I am white, I can speak my mind, I can wear what I choose, I have freewill-all of these freedoms I take for granted and I feel as if this practice reminded me of how lucky I am.