Author: Absaroka Mann-Wood (Page 2 of 2)

We’ve been spending a lot of time in class discussing what it means to be an activist, and what is ‘good’ activism as opposed to ‘bad’ activism. By reading The Monkey Wrench Gang and watching Bidder 70, I feel as though we have gotten an in depth look at at least two separate ways that activism (as it would be defined by the people doing the acts) is informed and enacted. What surprised me about both of these examples is the apparent lack of planning that went into the initial acts. In The Monkey Wrench Gang no one member decided that they wanted to form a gang and go, as it would later come to be known as, monkeywrenching. It was a spontaneous decision made around a fire by a group of people who just happened to meet each other. In Bidder 70 he did not go into the auction with  plan, but, as he described it, had a moment of clarity in which he could not imagine taking any other action.

This really surprised me because I have always considered activism to be carefully thought out and planned acts. I imagine activism as marches that require intense organization and forethought. The fact that these two examples were each capable of spurring movements in reaction, point to there being something compelling about people taking action that, in the moment, simply feels right.

However, in spite of the similarities in initial action between the two examples, I also think that there is significant differences in the actions following the initial action. After he won dozens of bids in the auction, the audience gets to see and hear Tim DeChristopher processing the consequences of those actions, and coming up with real and valid reasons for why it was warranted. The audience doesn’t get a similar sense of thoughtfulness when reading The Monkey Wrench Gang. The rag tag group of misfits going out for a joyride together stays pretty constant throughout the novel. An aimless group with some sort of a sense of a greater purpose, but with real difficulties in articulating that greater purpose. It’s difficult to determine how these different approaches resonated with different audiences. Both DeChristopher and the gang inspired people into action, as we can see with the formation of EarthFirst! and Peaceful Uprising. But it’s difficult to get a sense for how effective either of those organizations have been simply by consuming the media created by them. I would be interested in discovering how these drastically different methods of inspirations affected their respective audiences in the long term.

In our class discussion today on Monkey Wrench Gang by Edward Abbey, one point really called my attention. Someone mentioned how they would have respected the actions of the gang more if they had accepted responsibility for them, or at least hadn’t actively tried to frame others. This made me think about who, in the end, will actually face the consequences of the actions taken by the gang. They are trying to fight the big corporations that are ruining the land for profit, but in the end it is far more likely that the laborers at the sites they are vandalizing will face the worst of consequences. The gang abides by the rule that they kill monsters, not machines, but what does it mean when laborers lose their jobs because of the actions they’ve taken? Obviously they haven’t killed them, but they have significantly harmed the life of someone who had no decision making power in mining the land.

This leads me to the real problem I found myself coming back to with the characters in Monkey Wrench Gang, which was their lack of thoughtfulness. My bar for activism, as we’ve discussed in class, is pretty low. I have refined it a bit since class, but not in content so much as in articulation. Any action taken with purpose. Even with a bar this low, somehow I think the gang has managed to miss it. Part of acting with purpose involved the critical evaluation of those actions, especially when you claim to be doing the same to others. The gang is fighting against actions they view as unjust on the part of the corporations, but they spend very little time considering what unjust consequences will result from their own actions. Will their destruction of machines really hurt the owner and decision maker behind the mining, or will it simply inconvenience them and require them to buy more machines. Will this decision lead to the firing of a minimum wage worker who is working to support themselves and their family? Does littering on a road because you don’t like it hurt the road, and the people who put it there? Or does it just add more litter into the world. Does your choice to pin the blame on Native communities give them the glory you claim to be ascribing to them, or will it bring more anger and blame to an already marginalized community? I feel like these are just some of the questions you need to ask if you are going to be taking actions that will affect people other than yourself. The gang simply appears to have no well-defined purpose. 

One of the most powerful aspects of It’s Not Climate Change, It’s Everything Change, by Margaret Atwood, is the inclusion of visual images throughout the article. Although we discussed this briefly in class, there was one aspect to the images that I feel like we did not spend enough time discussing. Margaret mentioned how, in the first section of the article, the visuals changed from Picture One to Picture Two to Picture Three. She mentioned how in Picture One the visuals appear futuristic and fantastical, taken from movies or of models posing for ‘future’ pictures. We also talked about how Picture Two features dystopian pictures, and how Picture Three feels more ‘realistic’ because they are pictures we are confronted with on a daily basis. One thing that struck me about this discussion, that we did not get a chance to discuss in class, is what it means that Picture Two, while appearing dystopian, also pictures real people’s lives. They simply appear dystopian because we are not confronted with them as often as Picture Three.  I have included the image that I found most powerful from this section as a reference. We talked about how Pictures One and Two seemed less ‘believable,’ and how that was supported by the choice of visuals, but what does it mean when Picture Two doesn’t seem ‘believable’ to us, when it clearly depicts a real world in which real people are living? There are people on earth right now who have experienced that ‘dystopian future’ that we cannot believe. Their images are used here in an attempt to paint a picture of the end of times, with no mention of who they are or what, exactly, is happening in these photos. While I recognize the work they did in helping to paint Atwood’s version of a dystopian future, I am left to wonder how the people in those pictures would feel about their lives being used as a picture of the worst possible future.

Name: Absaroka (Abbie) Mann-Wood

Hometown: Lander, WY

Major: Public Policy with a certificate in Policy, Journalism, and Media Studies

Three topics/ideas/issues that intrigue me: Environmental Justice, power of stories to drive change, educational equity

Interesting/exciting bit of news I read today (or lately): https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/11/hummingbird-tongues/546992/ on how our understanding of how hummingbirds drink has been wrong for almost 200 years.