Recollections of My Nonexistence A Memoir - Rebecca Solnit Page 0,66
on the wild grass that reached down into the earth, looking into the stars until I felt that I could fall into them, found it in flying dreams, in wandering on foot, in wandering in time and space through books. And then I got more than I had dreamed of, almost as much as I needed.
It’s generally recognized that you have to learn how to enter enclosed and guarded places, but to enter these vast spaces also takes application. A few years earlier, on a road trip with my boyfriend through Death Valley and the Southwest, we had turned back early, not knowing how to find the oases hidden in the valleys and canyons where water collects, or how to appraise the beauty that has little or no verdure, or how to let the quietness and sense of deep and cyclical time enter us. The Nevada Test Site was how I learned to enter, because these annual spring campouts and protests introduced me to people with deep ties to the remote places and gave me time and, quixotically, a place where I felt safe. Safe even though we were facing down the nuclear weapons being exploded not far away, wondering about the radioactive fallout we might be ingesting, and getting arrested, sometimes roughly, by the armed guards protecting the Test Site. Safe from assault because I was camping with friends among thousands of people dedicated to peace and disarmament (though dodging hippie dudes demanding hugs was an ongoing project for us young women).
My younger brother was instrumental in the Test Site organizing by the time he got me to come along in 1988, and it was a place where my environmentalism and his antiwar activism converged. The nuclear bombs being exploded there regularly were a brutality against all the living things downwind, reservation dwellers, ranchers, livestock, small-town people, and wildlife, in those rehearsals for the end-of-the-world war. Our family had immigrated to big cities and it sometimes seems to me that it was through those outback adventures we had, with the ranchers, Native Nevadans, activists, Mormon downwinders, and atomic veterans we worked with and lived among, that the two of us finally truly arrived on the bare soil of this continent.
And then we became part of a great project to redefine it all. A number of Western Shoshone elders had joined us at the actions to say that the nuclear testing was being done on their land, which they’d like back, preferably without any more bombing and contamination. The environmental justice movement—an endeavor to address the race and class of who was impacted by environmental devastation—was gathering momentum and spreading new ways of thinking then. I had volunteered in the late 1980s at Earth Island Institute, an umbrella for a host of environmental projects, including a still-young Rainforest Action Network and EPOCA, the Environmental Project on Central America. Both addressed the fact that the tropical places they were trying to protect had long had human inhabitants and that human rights and environmental protection were inseparable goals. That may sound obvious now; it was new then.
It may be hard for those who came later to understand how utterly ignorant we non-Natives were then, how much Native people had disappeared from or never entered the mainstream conversation or were talked of exclusively in the past tense as people who had vanished long ago and would never appear to speak up on their own behalf. They were also treated as people who had never existed in the first place when artists, photographers, environmentalists, poets, explorers, historians imagined and depicted North America as a place in which human beings had just arrived, or rather that white men had recently discovered.
Ideas that seem ordinary now overthrew whole categories of thought then. They ended—to some extent, if not enough—an era of telling stories about a North American landscape that had been, until Europeans arrived, without human contact. I sometimes thought of this as the Madonna/whore theory of landscape: human contact was imagined as inevitably violating a vulnerable, passive nature that was inevitably degraded by us. White people were imagined as discoverers of a place that lay waiting, before history, before culture. Beyond this binary lay other ways of being human, other ways of being in the natural world. Being an environmentalist was coming to mean, at last, recognizing and respecting the first dwellers in these places and that human impact—hunting, harvesting,