The Synergy of Action

There is a connection between the smallest individual deeds and greater acts of courage.

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.

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“There is nothing rational about rebellion. To rebel against insurmountable odds is an act of faith without which the rebel is doomed. This faith is intrinsic to the rebel the way caution and prudence are intrinsic to those who seek to fit into existing power structures.”

— Chris Hedges, Wages of Rebellion

Those of us who live inside industrial civilization (basically all of us) are embedded in and reliant on a system that is destroying the planet. We are surrounded by plastic, concrete, and metal. We are in daily relationship with machines rather than wild animals. We live lives powered by fossil fuels, dammed rivers, and increasingly by wind and solar energy built on bulldozed habitat.

Arroyo Ojo De Agua in Redwood City, California once watered redwood and oak groves, and now lined with concrete.

And so, we work to do better; to not only reduce our harm through conscious individual choice, but to change the world through collaborative action. For me, that has looked like blocking coal trains, fighting the tar sands, battling logging projects, organizing against water extraction, and working to Protect Thacker Pass. It has also meant writing Bright Green Lies and this newsletter.

Closer to home, it has meant smaller actions: stopping on the side of the road to shoo a snake off the warm pavement; encouraging neighbors to delay mowing their meadows until plants are done flowering; digging up oak seedlings from gravel driveways and sending them to friends in the north so their heat-tolerant genetics can accelerate climate-adaptation. In the last essay I shared here, I wrote about another small action I take each year: picking up plastic trash when I visit ocean beaches.

It is, I wrote, “a ritual… an act of devotion, a prayer, a cry into the darkness. It is a responsibility, a sacrifice. It is a promise. A payment on a debt owed.”

The relationship between internal conviction and external action is fascinating to me. My friend Holly Truhlar says the process of change begins with acknowledgement, expands to deeper awareness, then builds to taking action. Finally, it leads to “expansion of the sense of self.” She calls this cyclical process a “map for activating an individual.”

A decade ago, I moved into a small cabin in western Oregon. My home is tucked between oak woodlands and savannah. Ponderosa pine trees, white and black oaks, and saskatoon surround us. Wild Nootka rose, hairy cat’s ear, feral garlic, and Queen Anne’s lace are blooming. While it’s only a rental — I can’t afford to buy — it is my home, and I am blessed to live here.

Away from the hustle and bustle of the city, I sink into seasonal rhythms. My muscles unclench. Tensions I didn’t even realize were there melt away. I wake up to sounds of birds in the trees. “Bu-da-beep!” means a special neighbor had returned. Lately I’ve been watching two black-tailed deer fawns grow up. Their mother was born here, too. Several readers of this newsletter may have attended a direct-action training I helped teach here in 2016; she was the fawn resting in the heat of the day next to our latrine.

I have been observing and studying the land since I moved here. This land has seen abuse. The forest was logged 90 years ago. There are only two trees within a mile who are, I suspect, older. Most of the meadows have been plowed. Fires have been suppressed. Garbage has been buried and pesticides sprayed. Non-native species proliferate, and more and more homes are being built where not long ago was forest.

Several native species are gone (wolves, grizzly bears, salmon, steelhead) and others are quite rare (cougar, black bear, elk, and at least a dozen others).

Wetlands have fared poorly here, as in most of the world. First, beavers were systematically trapped and skinned, their furs sold to market. That alone was enough to seriously harm the water cycle. But then, agriculture came. Wetlands were dammed, diked, and drained. Rivers, creeks, and streams were channelized, and natural curves of the landscape were made linear. Roads were cut through land that had never known anything straighter than a wild rose or Ponderosa pine, diverting water into ditches and cutting into hillside aquifers.

But this place is incredibly alive compared to a city.

I’ve been obsessed with water since I was a child. Water is life, and so living here, I watch the wild water. The way it falls. The places it pools and flows. The locations where it gathers and sinks in.

There is a spot at the bottom of a hill here where fall rains gather an inch or two deep and flow gently through grass and sedges. In storms, the flow is faster and the water deeper. I put on my boots and slosh in to get a sense of the power of the flow. And I stand back to see how long the area remains wet into the spring and how wildlife uses it.

As drought grips the land, I begin to wonder: what can I do for this water? How can I slow it down and sink it into the soil? Can I emulate some of the ecological benefits of beavers by gathering water, creating riparian habitat, cooling and recharging the aquifer, slowing floods, and creating fire breaks in the process?

Slow water is essential for biodiversity and the stable climate it produces. As Alpha Lo of the

Climate Water Project

has written:

“Evapotranspiration [the water that is sucked up from the ground by plants and released through leaves into the air] can help increase rains in dry areas, and reduce drought. Evapotranspiration can help increase dew and fog as a way of hydrating vegetation into the dry seasons, and help reduce wildfire risk… Chains of forests and wetlands can help moisture transport inland, in the form of rain, dew, humidity, without exponential decrease. Without a chain of forests, rain decreases exponentially as we move inland.”

He calls this chain of forests and wetlands a bio-rain corridor:

“Why is slowness so important? Imagine an art museum where a patron walks in every minute. If people walk briskly through the museum the total amount of people in the museum at any one time will be a lot less than if people walk slowly... If the land is able to slow the water, and guide it into the vegetation and soil to evapotranspire, then the small water cycle increases, and the amount of water on our continents increases.”

Dreaming of slow water, I begin to create a plan to dig out a larger, longer-lasting seasonal pond. There are many rules for any interference with the natural world. Observe for at least a year, and preferably far longer, before acting. Be site specific. Go slow. Be cautious. Do no harm. Observe the ripple effects of any action you take. Promote diversity and abundance.

So once the summer comes around and the last frogs are long gone, I dig a few inches deep over a small area. It’s covered in non-native pasture grass, and I figure if this project is a mistake, the meadow will heal in a few years.

Then I sit back and wait to see how the land will respond.

That winter, I watch how the water pools and slows down. I observe the speed and power of the water’s flow and the erosion patterns it creates. I watch the sedges to see how they respond to the additional water. As winter becomes spring, I notice more insects than before, and the area around the pond stays green and moist longer into the dry season.

This is good. With the ongoing insect collapse, anything that creates habitat for bugs is positive. Insects support a whole web of other creatures: birds, newts, lizards, dragonflies, bats. Seasonal wetlands—pools which dry out fully at times—are also very important to amphibians. In my area, non-native bullfrogs (which eat all the native frogs) can’t survive in seasonal pools. The native Pacific tree frog, on the other hand, loves them.

So, I decide to dig deeper.

With help from a few friends, we deepen the pond to about 18 inches, and expand it to about 7 feet long and 5 feet across. We pile the dirt and woody debris along the drainage to make a “beaver dam analogue,” hoping to further slowdown the water to increase infiltration into the soil and the aquifer, and to create further habitat in the moist microclimate of the tangled vegetation and downed logs. And we plant willows and cattails (they died) and Ash trees (they’ve survived so far) for shade and more habitat.

Then we sit back to observe again. The cycle continues.

This story began six years ago. Since then, the area has come alive. Tree frogs and rough-skinned newts breed and lay eggs in the pond. Violet-green swallows swoop for flying insects overhead. Lesser goldfinches flit from one blade of grass to the next. Water striders row across the surface of the water, while beetles swim underneath. When the tadpoles mature, Alligator lizards hunt the baby frogs making their way onto dry land. Dragonflies dart back and forth. Deer, coyotes, and foxes come for a drink, leaving their prints in the mud that’s exposed as spring matures. Even after the water dries up, the pond is a biodiversity hotspot. The grass stays greener. The birds keep visiting. The frogs find dark, moist places in the logs piled there.

“Restoration” is a fraught word. I’ve seen the Bureau of Land Management clearcut a thousand acres of native forest and call it restoration. I’ve seen the U.S. Forest Service greenlight commercial logging under the guise of “thinning” and say it’s “promoting forest health.” One of the main restoration organizations in my area regularly uses pesticides like glyphosate (Roundup)—and this is not unusual.

Greenwashing is incredibly common in land management. It’s easy to begin conflating human desires for profit, food production, timber, etc. with “restoring” the natural world. It’s easy to lose sight of what the land wants. But despite those pitfalls, I believe it is possible for human beings to work with the land, not just against it.

It isn’t hard to do. With a few shovels, a wheelbarrow, our attention, and some fallen logs, we’ve helped to land to be better off. I’ll keep doing what I can for this place. I’m considering digging another pond further up the drainage, creating contour swales, and planting more native trees and shrubs. Each year I add more structure—rocks and logs—for shade, moisture retention, and habitat complexity. But I will be cautious.

My friend Derrick Jensen often says that the real distinction is not between those who take perfect strategic actions, and those who don’t, but rather between those who do something and those who do nothing. I try to do something to make the world a better place every day. You can do this to. But I am not content with this scale of action. Ultimately, if these amphibians are going to thrive; if songbird populations are going to recover; we need more than minor restoration projects like this. We need social change. We need habitat protection on a massive scale. That is far more complex than deepening a pond.

When we act in ways that are in alignment with our dreams and our values, we unlock new levels of commitment and courage. Action is impossible without commitment. And commitment is built first by taking small actions, then, gradually, by taking larger ones.

I’m sitting on the porch of my cabin, making my final edits to this essay, when the mother deer who is my neighbor walks out of the forest, her fawns trotting closely behind her. She stops to drink from the birdbath. Her babies begin to nurse as she drinks the water. From cloud to pond; from aquifer to mother’s milk.

So in between my bigger, more dramatic organizing projects, when my mind is tired and my body needs to be stretched, you can find me at the bottom of the hill, shovel in hand, working to slow down the water, to make a home for frogs and goldfinches, to direct more water to trees who fill my lungs with oxygen every day.

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May 26, 2023

The spring has finally dried out

And the pond has turned to mud

So I gather the tadpoles and froglets and mud

Cupping my hands together

And carry them, squirming wetly

To a vernal pool down the road

Shaded and deeper, wet for another week

A place to develop

For some, it's too late

The beetles are on them like crocodiles

But the survivors relief is palpable

in cold, clean water is salvation