Raftography Writing

Dear Jimbo,

I think I had a nightmare. 

I woke up to the alarm in my head singing like a Wrecking Ball, wrecking my REM, but it wasn’t the end of the world as I knew it. Or, maybe it was. The alarm was actually in my head, part of the microprocessor super-mini I had installed, which also served as a shield over my temple to unexpected blunt force trauma. I tapped my temple twice and the video remote displayed its options in front of my eyes. I did my morning checks; the robot bugs were buzzing about on microplastic island – once known as Kailua Beach. The Sustainable Coastlines Hawaiʻi PINCHERS (Plastic Is Not Cool Here Ever, Regardless, Sorry) had to finish their morning cleans before the PCPs (Pepsi Coke Petroleum Shitstorms) rained on their parade by ferry dusting their most recent load of human (in)convenience across the island. Of course, what I knew, was that the PCP Alliance used 1/1,000,000,000th of its annual profits to fund cleanups as misdirection to their ongoing and intentional pollution that allowed their shareholders to sleep on real expensive pillows.

I stretched and looked out the window across Wai-kaka-lulu. The Hawaiian Exploitation, I mean Tourism, Syndicate (HTS) coined the new area name using an ‘ōlelo mashup they sold as meaning “A Shelter for Cleaned Water” and was as offensive and bastardized as the project itself – a sprawling wasteland developed over once flourishing wetlands in a sea-level inundation zone by HBOAFPP (Howard Baldwin Office of the Alliance for Polynesian Progress). Back in 2015, the plans had ended at 28 towers and promised infrastructure upgrades, but after the Great Slowdown of 2020, everyone quadrupled down on visitors, foreign investment sales, and tech imports as saviors. Infrastructure retrofits were once again promised, but instead what we got was 777 new towers filled with a couple more million wealthy people parking money in homes and either shitting in Hawaiʻi or leaving spaces occupied only by greed of appreciation but absent of humans. The infrastructure projects failed because the city couldn’t find a DVD player to load the grant requests they mandated on the now 40-year outdated plastic data storage and the 13 paper copies that supplemented the VHS replacements seemed to have been lost in a filing cabinet of bureaucracy and resistance to change.

I noticed a scratch in my throat as I stood and hoped I would make it to my meeting without the virtual MD visit that seemed inevitable. In that moment, my supermini skipped to displaying my calendar for some reason. March 17th, 2030. Something twitched in my human brain, not the microprocessor, but an actual thought… this day, and that tickle in my throat had some distant correlation. I searched for as long as I could before the next notification pinged in my skull, and though nothing significant formed, there was a vague memory of something called Cofefe, or was it COVID?, death, opportunity (or opportunism), and a 6-packed man with a bear-hat called Q-shaman. 

From Dreams to Reality

The alarm went off again, not in my skull, but on my outdated iPhone-8 in the living room. “It’s a beautiful morning, momma, I wanna go surfing…” I shook myself awake from the dream of future dystopia into the moment of now, 2021, the crossroads of dystopia and the alternative, the path not worn down by pavement and wanton greed, but a path of nutrient-rich, permeable soils and a renewed sense of civic/community duty…. But not a duty of despair or unwanted burden, one of accepted kuleana – an energetic and often times unnoticed want to contribute. Here we stand, not together naked in my bedroom – that would be weird if you were here without being invited, but here we stand on the precipice of an important, most likely imperative, choice – a choice that begins with little choices in order to equal the larger choice of a more reciprocal symbiosis in favor of the radical individualism that divides, destroys, and destines our species towards the unsettling predictions of a climate gone wrong. 

Not all of the nightmarish dream was a false future, some was distinct reality.

The U.S. Capitol was stormed by a bear-hooded Q-drop-following misguided human and a posse of similarly confused, clearly traumatized, and masterfully manipulated people looking to hurt others and insight destruction based on lies. Biff really had stolen the time machine and royally fucked the space-time continuum into some frat-boy’s wet-dream where women were meant to be grabbed by the pussy and a man-child had his finger over the nuclear button. That happened. Don’t forget it. It could happen again.

The conglomerates of plastic power, led by an extractive fossil fuel addiction, perpetuated by pedlars of convenience, and backed by chemical subsidies of corporate welfare, have been accelerating rather than de-escalating the production of plastic despite the knowledge of oceanic demise and biological intoxication they have been creating.

Unaffordable, half-empty luxury towers continue to rise and block the connective vision from mauka (mountain) to makai (ocean) across the island of O‘ahu.

Oh, and yes COVID-19 now lingers in the periphery as it hovers still and asks humanity emerging from the pandemic cloud what it learned.

Dialogues now are rich in disparity on either end of the spectrum of vitriol; from fake news afficionados to crusading cancelors. And… there is still the opportunity sitting here on our doorstep, an opportunity that involves middle grounds and uncomfortable change, one that might mess with our normality, one that requires opening our eyes after a few hard blinks and rearranging our priorities away from convenience, shaming, and apathy… and towards a collective interest in connection. 

My Living, Awake Dreams Continue

Another year passed, I blinked hard, still not really sure how I got to Busan, Korea, in this year of grieving and transformation. 2022 was a blur, from walking the John Muir Trail with my love, to celebrating the memory of my now-dead father deep in the Cascades, to a bullet train spanning the north-south length of the South Korean peninsula after a brain-probing COVID test in delirious arrival to Incheon. Wait, I remember, I was there to present our work (my fiancé’s and mine) at the 7th International Marine Debris Conference and hopefully listen to solution-oriented interventions to the escalating issues of my nightmare. Instead, I was seated in an auditorium listening to a head lobbyist for The Alliance to End Plastic Waste (ATEPW). It was as if my exploration-centric dreams and dystopian nightmares had merged with the now in a form that was equal parts inspiring and depressing. But Raf, you may ask, why would an alliance to end plastic pollution be a depressive turn in your otherwise amazing journey abroad? Shell, Exxon, DOW Chemicals, Proctor and Gamble, Pepsi, Chevron. Those are a handful of the partner members of the ATEPW and on stage was Martyn Tickner, one of their chief advisors who was sitting with an air of arrogance reserved for the people who know the words coming out of their mouth are bullshit, but the money going in their pockets silences their moral compass and pads their pillows for a luxury comfort induced sleep (most likely aided by a pharmaceutical eye-shutter, legal in the profiteers’ world, but prison sentencing on the streets). 

When asked why the plastic industry keeps doubling, tripling, or quadrupling down on production, when we know that plastic pollution is such a problem, it was Martyn’s thesis that consumers are demanding the plastic, so ATEPW’s members have to make it. He tried to turn the complex into the simple. I thought to myself about the 3 layers of plastic it takes to get to a plastic-encased SD card for my camera; nobody asked for that struggle of unwrapping something that takes industrial scissors and small slits on our fingers just to get to the already protected product that we purchased into our now bleeding hands. 

The excess is marketing, not demand. 

Martyn showed no remorse for the overwhelming problems his industry was amplifying. His smugness in response was palpable, delighting in his role as the fox in the hen house. He knew he was in front of a hostile audience and he pridefully promoted an agenda that did the opposite of the name of his hideous propaganda machine organization. Let’s rename them: The Alliance to Blindly Use Fossil Fuel Subsidies to Continue to Get People Like Martyn Rich While Toxicly Destroying Communities and Pushing Blame on Consumers Trapped in a Machine of Capalitstic Oligarchy. If that’s too long for your precious tweet character limits, you can call them ABFFSCGPLMRWTDCPBCTMCO. Don’t you love how acronyms make language easier? X. 

I blinked again, 2023 had arrived, and I was back at my graduate alma mater, the University of Hawaiʻi Mānoa campus, and sitting in front of me was one of my heroes – Robin Wall Kimmerer. Robin’s book, Braiding Sweetgrass, transformed me during the pandemic by lyrically interweaving indigenous knowledge, modern science, and a reverence for this planet to provide a blueprint for a world built in reciprocity. Her voice was the manifestation of her written words, a soothing and poetic mix of inviting urgency. Opening for her were a variety of poets weaving stories, mo‘olelo, ‘õlelo Hawaiʻi, into a quilt of connection grounded in rage, humor, and an outcry for collective community action. Robin took the stage of the music auditorium having been seated just a seat in front of Nicole and I after we had volunteered as the intimidating ushers for the more than sold-out auditorium. No tickets were actually sold, The Better Tomorrow Speaker Series, curated and hosted by Robert Perkinson (who never gets enough credit for his work to make these events happen), was always free to those who registered. A flash of hope transgressed across my brain, still a solo entity without embedded AI, as I saw humans by the hundreds line up to see this auspicious hero speak her calm words of prophetic encouragement.

“The fork in the road stands atop a hill. To the left the path is soft and green and spangled with dew. You want to go barefoot. 

The path to the right is ordinary pavement, deceptively smooth at first, but then it drops out of sight into the hazy distance. Just over the horizon, it is buckled with heat, broken to jagged shards. 

In the valleys below the hill, I see the people of the Seventh Fire walking toward the crossroads with all they have gathered. They carry in their bundles the precious seeds for a change of worldview. Not so they can return to some atavistic utopia, but to find the tools that allow us to walk into the future. So much has been forgotten, but it is not lost as long as the land endures and we cultivate people who have the humility and ability to listen and learn. And the people are not alone. All along the path, nonhuman people help. What knowledge the people have forgotten is remembered by the land. The others want to live, too. The path is lined with all the world’s people, in all colors of the medicine wheel—red, white, black, yellow —who understand the choice ahead, who share a vision of respect and reciprocity, of fellowship with the more-than-human world. Men with fire, women with water, to reestablish balance, to renew the world. Friends and allies all, they are falling in step, forming a great long line headed for the barefoot path. They are carrying shkitagen lanterns, tracing their path in light. 

But of course there is another road visible in the landscape, and from the high place I see the rooster tails of dust thrown up as its travelers speed ahead, engines roaring, drunk. They drive fast and blind, not even seeing who they are about to run over, or the good green world they speed through. Bullies swagger along the road with a can of gasoline and a lit torch. I worry who will get to the crossroads first, who will make the choices for us all. I recognize the melted road, the cinder path. I’ve seen it before.”

Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants

A Sad, Real Nightmare Illuminates Itself

I blinked again, maybe it was actually a wince, as I was transported to just a week before Robin spoke and was in a room of financial advisors with Jim Bowen, CEO of First Trust, mansplaining about how we had a gross overreaction to the pandemic and the people who died should have been pushed off the proverbial cliff anyway. This was the bully. This was the manchild urinating gasoline as he spewed inflammatory rhetoric from his narcissistic blowtorch of a mouth. He followed his inflammatory rhetoric with a rant disproving climate change by showing a chart that showed more people had died from cold than from heat in the past couple of decades. He kept chanting to the audience about “data”, “it’s just data” – and I realized in my head how powerful data is when it’s in the hands of assholes who want to keep making money for a select few. Jim was apparently an uninvited speaker who was then followed by the invited speaker of the night – Brian Wesbury, a leading economist with a multitude of appearances on MSNBC and a strong message that the US will not have any way of avoiding a recession sometime in 2023. I listened intently because I am trying my best to better understand our financial system and its ups, downs, nuances, deformities, inequalities, and opportunities. Brian wasn’t as offensive as Jim and his analysis made me realize once again how irresponsible the US is in the name of capitalism and its replication. 

In informing us that recession was inevitable, he was asked by an audience member, “So, can you just tell me how to get rich during the recession?” Here was the speeding maniac clueless about those who he had and would run over in pursuit of his next facelift and 7th investment home that displaced 10 more families who couldn’t afford the new housing market. 

The crowd chuckled, playing off the real question as a funny moment in the presentation, which translated to “cut to the chase, we want to know where to put our money to make more, while the rest of the country suffers and those who have no ability to save or invest lose their jobs and struggle to feed to their families.”

Wesbury’s answer was predictable and despicable. “Energy and major commodities.” But not energy in the sense of working towards a carbon drawdown, not healthy food grown in healthy soils… oh no, the answer was oil and corn. Here were conservative financial analyzers telling people that the way to survive a recession was to invest in the largest forms of corporate welfare in the history of the planet. Trillions in subsidies to make two of the most destructive forms of energy and food in the history of the planet cheap to the masses, while making a very few very rich, poisoning our families, and making it harder to grow hops in stable climates. Yes, climate change will affect beer lovers. I realized I was staring at the root of so many of our society’s problems. In that room were people who had the money to invest, and by listening to this earth-destroying perpetuating advice, the investing supported the destructive forms of commerce that I try to encourage communities to reject in their daily lives. The demand that Martyn Tickner spoke of in Busan wasn’t really being driven by the consumer, it was being driven by the greed of those who want to continue to get richer on commodities that have no ethical backing. For a century they have sucked everyone in; through 401k’s, through the sport of a stock market, through subliminal advertising, through overt appeals to lust for convenience. 

The future isn’t written. 

There is choice in the aftermath of all of these conversations, speeches, rants, blinks, and dreams. Beyond choice there is opportunity. Our human collective needs connection, we need a reset from the industrial consumption model and we need to be kinder to each other. I have no love for the Martyn Tickner’s and the Jim Bowen’s of the world, but I am learning that hate, aggravation, judgment, and a flood of cortisol to the system are destructive mechanisms that push the divide. Anger is real and can be used, but not if it transforms into the list in the previous sentence. Read Audry Lorde’s cry for an erotic anger that allows for revolutionary change and you will have an opportunity to resonate with directed anger.

Our earthly language has become collectively mediocre. We are talking in boxes, echo chambers of venting, and hiding in the cloud of social media mediocrity only to say that our ideas are the right one’s PERIOD, as if shouting a capitalized punctuation will bring more people into the fold that you are hoping to activate around. I did this consistently, I still have my moments where rage burns and my empathy dwindles. Yet, there are other more productive voices that sink into my soul these days – the Jedi wisdom of the departed Pono Shim, the gentle kindness of the ghost of my Dad, Jimbo, Robin’s soft path of spangled dew, the frustratingly simple yet difficult meditative tidbits from Thich Nhat Hahn, or the courageous choice of revolutionary love incited by Valerie Kaur. Those voices and whispers provide frameworks, but not the action itself. We are the action.

I don’t want to leave this journal with a series of elaborate complaints on your mind. I’d rather offer some of what I consider solutions to these grandiose problems routed in the renegade capitalist machine. Capitalism doesn’t have to be renegade. It could be evolved with social structure and constraint, to still honor a spectrum of effort, while serving an entire collective. I’m still on the forever learning journey and won’t ever claim to have the answers, but I’ll share starting points that I think could be important to reversing what seems to be a catapulting journey into my nightmare. Hopefully you won’t call them Q-drops. 

Interventions, Dreaming Solutions, Ideas

• Learn the word Nuance; love it, understand it, think about it before posting inflammatory commentary on yet another platform of division or ending your plea for understanding with a definitive and egotistical “Period”. When you’re settled with nuance, pick up Reciprocity, and give its virtues a whirl.
• The opportunity now for us millennials/GenZ is to move the needle on fossil fuel divestment and lawsuits against these companies until the subsidy makers know that they are backing the wrong horse and abandon them. We have to let the Jim Bowen’s and Brian Wesbury’s of the world know that their advice is wrong, immoral, and outdated. For those lucky enough to be feeding a retirement account, it’s time to take an active role in knowing what you are supporting. Most ESG funds are complete green-washed crocks of shit that support the industrial machine. Look at what is in the funds you are in and get out of anything that has fossil fuels in it as a start. Resist the urge for immediate returns.
• Grow your own food, even if it’s one plant. Compost. Trade and share with others who grow, catch, or hunt things that you cannot. Decomodify the food system. Support policymakers who believe subsidies should go to small organic farms so that all communities can eat healthily. Don’t support or vote for policymakers that support big ag – especially corn and beef. 
• Volunteer. Plant native plants with people who love them. Understand how these plants provide ecosystem functions that are invaluable.
• Bring your own bag, utensil, tupperware, water bottle (which can just be a jar with a lid)…. Reuse everything. 
• Read Braiding Sweetgrass
• Know that I’m not perfect, you’re not perfect, and neither is your neighbor. Perfectly Imperfect is the goal. We build on the small steps and give ourselves and others grace and kindness in the process. Shame oftentimes pushes us and our communities farther away from the goal we are trying to achieve. Anger will always exist, how we use it to move forward matters.
• When the solutions that are needed cause you inconvenience, pause before reacting, and know that the extra moments spent are part of the collective change we need. Dear Rafael, take your own advice.
• Try meditation; it will help with the previous bullet points and truly track our minds toward empathy. Dear Rafael, take your own advice.
• Find common ground, stand on it with others who are as uncomfortable standing there with you as you are with them. Shake their hand when you depart the space; hug them. 
• Civics is Sexy. Civic opportunity is everywhere. Join a neighborhood board meeting. Ask questions and listen to ideas without inserting your own. 

Goodnight for now, hopefully see you in my sweetgrass dreams instead of my…

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PS: If you haven’t been following along with my photography website or social media, you may be confused about why this blog started with “Dear Jimbo” – Jim Bergstrom is my Dad who we lost in 2021 to Dementia with Lewy bodies. He is my life-long hero and during his sickness and in the aftermath of his death, I found myself writing journal entries that were addressed to him as a way to process the loss and the nuance of the world that we live in. You can read my tribute to him here and the first “Dear Jimbo” entry here.

You can find my past blog posts here.