Ariana Nadia Nash
We spilled oil as war. 11 million barrels across Kuwait.
We spill oil into our waters. 500 barrels into our Gulf of Mexico every day.
We have seen pictures of ourselves, our oil-slicked tortured bodies. We do not recognize
ourselves in these images.
We do not stop the spilling. We feel helpless in our failures.
Our metallic rainbowing waters. Think of them as a body. Think of blood sluggish with oil;
think of bodies on the skin, in the gut, in every inch of the body, annihilated.
We figure this truthfully.
Millions of bodies.
We make war. Create war from metals mined, oils refined, and
weapons manufactured.
We make peace with profit.
We make war on bodies we racialize, then denigrate. Create war
by mangling these bodies.
We make peace with their subjugation.
We sell ourselves.
We measure the value of a body over a lifetime.
We ask of a body: equivalent to what?
We clear cut ourselves, plant vast monocultured bodies, bodies commodified before birth.
Our razing depletes the soil and off-gasses 3 billion tons of carbon dioxide each year.
A number inconceivably large, a process immense, planetary, and unseen.
We read the newspaper &
feel helpless.
We say a couple of degrees warmer. It sounds so small, just over one degree Celsius, just
over two degrees Fahrenheit, in a hundred years. A mild fever. We need to imagine
beyond a human body. This heat acts unlike a fever.
We read the newspaper &
feel helpless.
We try to speak our way out. We escape to optimism, surrender to pessimism. We point
to others. We pretend policy solutions can reach sufficiency — pretend we do not need
total transformation. We place responsibility on consumers, individual choices — as if we
could buy our way out. We place faith in technology — as if every new technology did not
present its own new strains. We wait for compromise, consensus —
as if cruelty, negligence, greed
deserved our regard.
How, we ask, surveying an unlogged valley, do we value one redwood body?
At $700 per 1,000 board feet, an older body = $10,000.
An especially large, especially old body = $100,000.
$100,000 = 1,000 rings
$100,000 = 365,000 turns to sun in photosynthesis
$100,000 = 54,750,000 gallons of fog & rain absorbed through roots & needles
$100,000 = 7,000,000,000 seeds over 100 more years might have how many more rings
& days & turns to sun & fog & roots & needles & bark & seeds
& seeds
& seeds
& seeds
& seeds
& seeds
& seeds
& seeds
& seeds
& seeds
& seeds
& seeds
& seeds
& seeds
& seeds
& seeds
& seeds
& seeds
& seeds
& seeds
& seeds
& seeds
& seeds
We
who sit in a dark corner of what remains.
We
who go out into what remains.
originally published in asides // besides #1 in December 2024.