Flee To The Woods

Working in a forest, strings of small choices cut across the rings of years. A hole here, healing there, fresh wounds, the divots of hands before you now nearly filled with moss.

In a time of absurdities and atrocities foreign and domestic, there are little acts of consequence which every day can sustain us indefinitely or endanger us permanently.

And so every day on this mountain we are building a place where we can gather. We are tapping trees. We are calling our senators, our congresspeople, our state reps. We are planning to plant seeds, and host celebrations of queer love. We are making dry sugar. We are hosting antifascist trivia night at our local bar. We are working on revolutionary art for special bottles of syrup.

The regime’s freezing of funds, stalling the federal government mid flight, is a disaster that has yet to fall to earth. We are one of thousands of farms with grant contracts from the Natural Resource Conservation Service, funded by the US Department of Agriculture, whose purpose is to guide and support wise forest stewardship, land management, building infrastructure, fighting invasives, and preventing erosion. They help us grow our business as young, queer, women, first generation farmers who are spiritually and materially invested in loving the land that loves us back. They help us take risks to start new ventures. They help us endure and prepare for wave after wave of extreme weather wrought by climate change and capitalism’s refusal to contend with reality.

We spent our January thinning and trimming a gorgeous hardwood stand below the saphouse. Timber Stand Improvement, prescribed by our EQIP grant from the NRCS, is a practice that yields forest health, carbon-neutral firewood for our winter heat, and hardwood logs for another round of gourmet shiitake mushroom food production next summer. We hired all women - a local forester, an expert feller, and dedicated weeks of our crew’s time to this stewardship, trusting that we had the support of our federal government. We finished the week of the inauguration.

“Timber Stand Improvement” is an old world way to frame it - as if forests are nothing but commodities in waiting. As if they do not have a strictly circular economy, an intelligent distribution of resources, a diverse portfolio of investments, a rich network of kinships and interdependencies across kingdom and phylum. When there is too much crowding, too few resources, too much disease, and too few elder trees in a forest, thinning brings light and and air. It allows established trees to grow stronger, diversifies the canopy heights and ages of species, and sequesters carbon.

Our local NRCS agents are passionate, committed, thoughtful, helpful people who care about our soils, our farms, and our livelihoods. But the regime is forcing them to scrub any and all mention of diversity or climate change from their language. No grants with these verboten words in them “align with the administration’s goals.” Not even TSI with its built-in notion of extraction is safe. And since we’ve never seen a sorer loser in our entire lives, everything funded by Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act is held hostage. So on January 28th when our agent came to review our work and submit the payment approval, we were told that we may never see their end of the deal - the delivery of funds that were legitimately appropriated by congress. There are hundreds of thousands of farmers and contractors across the country in blast zone of this constitutional demolition.

We are watching a clear cut of our federal government. There is no wise, targeted approach to help restore balance. There is only a brutal regime armed with billionaires and bluster who agree on nothing if not that supporting the actual citizens of this purported democracy is a criminally corrupt abuse of their opportunity to rob us blind.

The damage to the ecosystem of human land stewards will take decades to repair - decades that we do not have. In an otherwise snowy and perfectly charming New Hampshire winter, the elimination of every single American effort to curb carbon emissions and transition away from fossil fuels means that the event horizon of climate collapse is accelerating nearer.

These days every friend I speak to - friends in major cities and other states, who knew me before I came home to run this farm - tells me “you had the right idea.” But there is no “flee to the woods” in this world. There is no guiltless hermitage, no non-dependence, no freedom from the exploitations of late capitalism, no shelter from the hundred year floods that ravage us each July.

There will soon be calls for each of us to take actions of greater consequence. Actions which will represent small rings of growth, each one only possible from an entire unflinching season of holding ourselves to the light. Under a regime of corporate kleptocracy, we must speak the only language it knows: withholding. boycotts. mass strikes. rent strikes. tax strikes. collective action. mutual aid. opting out.

I am not a theorist of how we’ll get there, let alone build what’s next. But I am one of you. Whatever you choose to do, choose it with conviction. We each have a role to play in revolution, so find yours. We’ll be out here “making syrup.”