Activism as Medicine
On heartbreak, solastalgia, and action as a daily practice
If you’re new here, welcome. I’m Max Wilbert, the co-author of Bright Green Lies: How the Environmental Movement Lost Its Way and What We Can Do About It and co-founder of Protect Thacker Pass. This newsletter focuses on sustainability, greenwashing, and resistance. You can subscribe for free. Paying for a subscription supports my writing and organizing work, and gets you access to behind-the-scenes reports and unreleased drafts.
A few weeks ago, I was interviewed by an old friend, Frank Forencich, and two men who I didn’t know prior to this conversation: John Hager and Jonathan Logan. Most readers are probably not aware that in addition to activism, I love athletics, sports, and physical movement. Frank has been a movement educator and trainer for decades, and is well known in some circles for his “Exuberant Animal” approach to movement training.
In recent years, Frank’s approach brings together the twin realities of 1) global ecological collapse and 2) the fundamental mismatch between our paleolithic bodies and modern industrial civilization. Our shared passion for this intersection led to an interesting exchange on the daily practice of activism that I share here in full (lightly edited for print). The full video of our conversation can be viewed at the bottom of this post, and at https://www.activismismedicine.net.
Frank Forencich:
I have a question that is personal, because I'm curious about you, and your life, and in particular, your body. You've been engaged in some of these pretty titanic battles and do you see your activism as a stressor, or do you see it as something that helps you integrate into a higher state of health? How do you preserve your health and your physical integrity in the face of these big battles that you're fighting?
Max Wilbert:
I love that question, Frank, especially given your background and the work that you do. I've been a climber, a runner, and an outdoor person for a long time, and there's a relationship there that's often unexplored.
A lot of people look at activism — or more broadly, work in general — as an inherently draining and a self-destructive process. I think that is a dangerous mindset. In a way, it's a self-fulfilling prophecy. As you know — you and I have talked about this, Frank — I got into parkour when I was younger, which is a teenage boy paradigm for sure [laughs]. But what's really interesting about parkour to me is that it integrates a lot of martial arts philosophies around the importance of training, preparation, mindset, mental strength, and fortitude. It's not just about throwing yourself off a wall or doing a flip.
There's some more depth to the ideas that underlie it, similar to a lot of martial arts, where these practices are looked at as this is not simply a physical practice, but as almost a spiritual practice. Through movement, one can access different states, states of mind, states of being, states of understanding of self and relationship to challenges, setbacks, accomplishments.
I'm really glad you bring this up Frank, because most people look at an athlete or a martial artist, and they think “that person is incredibly talented. I could never do that.” What they don't realize is that that person's success is made up of 100,000 tiny steps repeated over 15 or 20 years to get them to that point. They don’t see that it's a very deliberate practice that involves a lot of setbacks, a lot of injuries, mistakes, frustrations, and plateaus.
Anyone who has trained any sort of sport will understand this. And the exact same lessons can be applied to activism.
There are times when your energy will wane, when you will have injured yourself and you will need to take a break or change the form that your activity is taking. But you'll also know that if you've trained for sports, that every injury has an important lesson in it. And every injury is also an opportunity.
When I was 20 years old, I sprained my ankle badly while rock climbing, when I took a bad fall. For the next six months, I couldn't do my normal activities. But I just love movement, so I found different ways. I had to change what I was doing. The form changed, but the core of the activity was still there.
You're probably much better than me, Frank, about putting some of this into words, because I know you've been exploring this relationship between movement, physical practice, exercise, or sport (to use some reductive terms) and activism for many years now.
There is a relationship, and it's very important. And the core to is looking at things as a practice.
Ichiro Suzuki, the baseball player, was the Mariners star for a long time in my hometown, and before that, he was a big star in Japan. Amazing defensive player, amazing offensive player, just one of the greatest.
Most baseball players take the offseason off and they rest. They don't play baseball. They go on a vacation, they go golfing, they do whatever these multi-millionaires do with all their money. But Ichiro would train every day, pretty much year-round. He said he averaged 360 training days a year. And it was because he loved the sport. He loved the craft.
For someone who's like that, it's not about the championship ring. It's not about the external accomplishment. It's about the relationship between you and your body and a baseball and a bat and a glove and physics. It's about understanding your own limits and then trying to figure out how to push them a little bit further. It's about this very subtle relationship.
I've heard that a lot of Olympic athletes, after they go to the Olympics, they get really depressed, because they've been training their whole life to go to the highest level and to have this opportunity to compete.
And then they go and they do it, and they realize that life is exactly the same as it was beforehand. Nothing has changed whatsoever. It was just this transient thing that really in the scheme of life, doesn't matter.
As I was reading about each Ichiro and these Olympic athletes getting depressed, I was reflecting on how I think activism is similar. There’s no denying that, just like a competitive athlete, we care about outcomes. Of course, when we're doing this work, we want to win the campaign. We want to stop the mine. We want to stop the pipeline. We want to defend the forest. We want to win everything that we're doing.
And that's not bad. It’s good. It reflects our heart. And it’s very important that we stick with that.
And at the same time, we have to approach this work as a practice, a daily practice, not as something that is driven by external markers of success or failure. It has to be driven by our internal sense of integrity, and relationship with ourself and our own motivation, our own sense of love and desire to protect and desire to do the right thing.
That has been something that I've been in deep and intimate relationship with over the last couple of years with this whole Thacker Pass fight. As you know, we've gone through heartbreak. The land is being destroyed out there right now, after we did everything we could short of open guerrilla warfare and eco-sabotage to stop this mine. Literally, everything. And we’ve failed. We have failed to stop this corporate monstrosity.
And it is absolutely heartbreaking. It has knocked me down. It's put me on my knees at times, a lot of tears, a lot of exhaustion and burnout and all these different feelings.
And, yet, I come back to what I just said, that this isn't ultimately about winning or losing. I could lose every single fight and every single campaign that I'm involved in for the rest of my life. And I would keep going, because that's not the driver for me. Yes, I want to win. Yes, it would be great to win. That is my goal. Yes, I'm heartbroken. And at the same time, this is a practice. It's a daily practice, and it's not about the championship ring or the trophy. It's about the relationship between me, the mountain, and my integrity — my sense of self.
As I often say, if we do take action, we might lose. But we also might win. If we don’t fight, if we don’t take action, we guarantee failure.
thanks for showing the wholistic picture!