Essay - Reckoning Ecocide’s Ground Zero by Dr. John Kuo Wei Tchen
Jack (John Kuo Wei) Tchen is a historian, curator, dumpster-diver, and teacher surfacing the disappeared stories othered by systems of power and wealth. Dr. Tchen is the Clement A. Price Professor of Public History & Humanities and Director of the Price Institute on Ethnicity, Cultures, and the Modern Experience Rutgers-Newark. His ten-years of work on anti-Asian xenophobia produced: Yellow Peril! An Archive of Anti-Asian Fear (2014), a two-hour PBS documentary on the “Chinese Exclusion Act,” and an exhibition at the New-York Historical Society--all leading him to focus on intersectional history of the ongoing legacies of American eugenics.
Like a flash of lightening across a dark landscape, coming to awareness requires paying attention. This happened to me when I served on the NYC Mayor’s Commission on Public Art, Markers, and Monuments in 2017–18. The whirlwind ninety days made it clear this gesture at a democratic, deliberative process was chaotic and poorly organized.
The crush of press coverage focused on Mayor de Blasio’s ill-chosen framing of the four sites he speculated should be taken down. We discussed guidelines for future monuments, markers, and public art and which monuments should be kept or taken down. During this flash experience, I came to understand three interlocking truths—obvious but long hidden in plain sight.
ATTENTION DEFICIT
These blatant denials, active erasures, massive holes in our awareness are:
First, NYC as a municipal government has no story of the City’s own history. This emptiness leaves untroubled the fanciful Dutch “purchase” of Manhattan Island and the Puritan “founding” of Newark. Neither city grapples with their colonial origins stemming from Papal Bull of the Doctrine of Discovery, 1493.
Second, the Dutch and British settler colonial history of the region is a little understood gloss to the story of the US. We blithely have no story to tell. The decades of violent dispossession, enslavement, and the drive for massive extraction of the land and water’s “natural resources” are not understood as foundational to New York City, Newark, nor to the Thirteen Colonies.
Third, having no birth story, we also have no genealogical curiosity other than grade school discussions of “the triangular trade.” We have no public understanding of our carrying on the British extractive system of colonization in the sovereign lands of Indigenous peoples. The British colonial occupation of the land linked the NYC metropolitan region into their Atlantic world industrial system, gobbling up resources and enslaving people and expanding into more of “Indian country” under the banner of “Manifest Destiny” to maximize possession, wealth, and power at the fastest rate possible.
These obvious truths are why we started the Newark–New York Estuarial Public History Project. (Yes, it’s a long clunky name!) The PHP is about the urgent, necessary historical reckoning with the truth we are avoiding. And more critically, this deep denial of this past, this obliviousness is responsible for the cascading climate changes already underway. We are the historical ground zero for our current climate crisis.
FOCUSING
What’s happened to the Turtle Clan of the Ramapough Lunaape Nation is part of this massive denial. It’s the warning that the toxic waste of extractivist destruction endangers a whole watershed. It’s the canary in the coal mine. And it’s also how systemic denial is the eye of the storm of White Supremacy. This obliviousness renders the national culture generally incapable of reckoning with the past. We’ve been made insensate, coarsened to what we don’t want to grapple with.
What continues to happen at the Upper Ringwood Superfund site is a glaring example of our inability to pay attention to the horrifying disaster just 30 miles outside of the world’s information, media, and cultural center. Yet we actively remain oblivious.
The mounting death toll in this community, month by month, is the mirror of the violence of the other historical blank spot from our public awareness—the 1643 Pavonia Massacre in which 80 some women, children, and elderly were slaughtered on the night of February 25th and the Pound Ridge Massacre in which It is also the warning of what viciousness soon comes—unless we pay real attention. [i]
To care about the Turtle Clan is also to become alert to what is going on all around us. Or, are we incapable of empathy outside of our immediate bubbles?
[i] Distraction and denial are commonly linked to inattention. See: L. M. Sacasas, "Attending to the World," The Convivial Society, February 19, 2022, Vol. 3, No. 2, https://theconvivialsociety.substack.com/p/attending-to-the-world?s=r ; and Crary, Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999).
PAST INJUSTICES STILL ALIVE
Thanks to #MovementforBlackLives and many activist justice memory projects linking the past with the present, the unjust past legacies on the present are more tangible, at least for a moment.
Yet how white supremacy continues to impact our region is not felt and understood as real. That’s elsewhere or another time. Nor understood is the entwined history of enslaved peoples and the Indigenous coast peoples who stayed and still live here.
We need these more grounded, complex stories of what really happened. Many of us, myself included, are fascinated watching Julian Fellowes’ “The Gilded Age.” I too am drawn into the emotional turmoil of the “new” money arrivistes struggling to be accepted by the “old” money yet that’s only the beginning of the ramifying story.
Did those of wealth and power, who made these decisions, know what they were doing with carbon release? Unlikely, although conservationists did call for saving Indian lands as Federal Parks—that’s a eugenics story. In a global gilded age today, the billionaires still compete for status, and more wealth and more power.
As regular people, the 99% focused on making a living. We don’t have the same reckoning to contend with but align with the misdirection of historical irresponsibility. We float in the attention draining commercial culture they’ve created all around us. And by being in this bubble of distraction, we barely notice what’s happening to the failing ecologies around us.
The Guardian reports global billionaires making investments in mountaintop bunkers, hedging their personal “risks” against the rising oceans and escaping on spaceships to Mars. While climate change refugees are on indefinite detention on closed borders, 1/3 of the birds have disappeared, 7 of 10 insects have disappeared, and the entire late fall “crop” of Long Island scallops have died in warming waters. [i]
We have to work against distractions. The Public History Project favors the reparative, deeper choice of focusing on healing. “[A]ttending to the world suggest[s] the idea of ‘stretching toward’ something—a capacity to actively engage the world—to stretch ourselves toward it, to reach for it, to care for it, indeed, to tend it.” [ii] We need to come together around transitional justice.
[i] Mark Connell, “Why Silicon Valley billionaires are prepping for the apocalypse in New Zealand, The Guardian, Feb. 15, 2018; Hannah Selinger, Climate Change Is Most Likely to Blame for This Year’s Peconic Bay Scallop Harvest, Edible Long Island, 15, 2019; Brooke Jarvis, “The Insect Apocalypse is Here, What does it mean for the rest of life on Earth?” New York Times, Nov. 27, 2018; Carl Zimmer, “Birds Are Vanishing From North America,” New York Times, September 19, 2019. https://www.ediblelongisland.com/2019/11/15/the-year-climate-change-claimed-the-peconic-bay-scallops/
[ii] #16, Sacasas, "Attending to the World," The Convivial Society, February 19, 2022, Vol. 3, No. 2.
OUR CHOICE IS CLEAR
Once we start paying real attention, we can sense the slow motion erosion and hollowing out of the land, waters, and air around us. My students certainly do, when I have them slow down, get outside, and feel around them. As we defrost from the attention sucking commercial, commodity bubble, we start feeling our fingers touching plants again. We start noticing the smells of the warm soil. We start listening to natural sounds.
It’s been reported that young people are feeling massive anxieties “due to endured or anticipated ecological losses, the disruption of environmental knowledge, and the loss of place-based identity due to environmental changes.” This has been labeled “ecological grief.” [i]
In the framing of Reverend Serene Jones, eco grief gives us something to work with. Dr. Jones says, “to move from grief to mourning is to move from a place of sheer loss to a place of acknowledging the loss, and . . . mourning the permanence of the loss . . . creates a space . . . to make sacred the pain so that the rest of your life is transformed by it. It allows the possibility of a future.” [ii]
Rather than giving into factionalism, finger wagging, and bullying, we have to come together to heal our hemorrhaging life systems. Our “empire” region is ground zero to the ecocide committed upon the planet today.
Winona LaDuke makes the choice crystal clear. “In this time of windigo cannibal economics, we’ll have a choice between two paths. One being well-worn but scorched and the other being renewable and green.” [iii]
[i] Aylward, Cooper, and Cunsolo, “Generation Climate Change: Growing Up With Ecological Grief and Anxiety,” Published Online:27 May 2021. https://psychnews.psychiatryonline.org/doi/full/10.1176/appi.pn.2021.6.20
[ii] Rev. Dr. Serene Jones, “Grace in a Fractured World,” On Being with Krista Tippet, Dec. 5, 2019, podcast. https://onbeing.org/programs/serene-jones-grace-in-a-fractured-world/
[iii] Winona LaDuke, “Our House Is On Fire” with Naomi Klein, Price Institute, Rutgers-Newark, Nov. 26, 2019. https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=Price+Institute+Winona+LaDuke
