A Revolution of Slowness
By Matt Hart
The word is beautiful, demands attention. Say it aloud. Revolution. What images does it conjure? For most of us, the answer is unlikely to be lunar phases or a model solar system, those cyclical circumnavigations of a middle school science class. No, revolutions are political things according to our frantic, contemporary zeitgeist. And whether it’s powdered wigs signing a declaration or a rumpled septuagenarian waving his arms, urgency seems a prerequisite for the term’s use. Momentousness, in the sense of not waiting a moment longer.
As February temperatures rose into the mid-fifties last week, Missoula hosted esteemed thinker and activist Vandana Shiva. On a Wednesday afternoon that saw sandals and Frisbees reemerge from closeted torpor, students and community members packed into Gallagher Business Building – oh, the irony – to hear Dr. Shiva deliver a ringing denouncement of profit-driven global food systems. That evening, in an enthusiastic Dennison Theater, she carried similar themes into her lecture, “We Are All Seeds: Food Security and Environmental Sustainability.”
Perhaps her most cutting and comprehensive moment came when she said: “The ability to choose what we eat surely has to be the most foundational freedom.”
In Latin, revolvere, the root of revolution, means “to roll back.” Political revolutions, we like to imagine, are inherently progressive, an acceleration of forward thought, a venture into uncharted provinces of human affairs. But ecofeminism – among other discourses – reminds us that such linearity is a colonial construct, that the life systems of Earth are overwhelmingly cyclical.
If you haven’t done so already, you must witness the “Super Bloom” happening now in Death Valley, the first such event of the 21st century. Stop reading this post, watch this video, and marvel at the beauty of Earth’s slow cyclicality.
More Shiva from last Wednesday: “If being primitive means taking care of the prairies, taking care of our forest, then I would rather be primitive and be a member of the Earth family than have the illusion of being part of man’s empire over lesser creatures.”
What if we viewed revolution etymologically? What if the revolution we need is truly a rolling back of superficiality, a revelation of that slower, older wisdom – call it primitivism if you must – so often hidden by the flimsy crust of techno-modernity?
This, I believe, is what Wallace Stegner called for when he challenged the American West to learn that “cooperation, not rugged individualism, is the quality that most characterizes and preserves it.”
There is no site more ripe for revolution, for rolling back, than the West. Amid the urgency of August smoke and February thaw, centuries of Indigenous history teach us that here, lasting prosperity is only achieved when we act for the benefit of the many, not the few. We are revolutionaries when we preserve soil, when we slow down and think cyclically, when we fight the greed of Bundy and Bishop with the magnanimity of Stegner and Shiva.
“Where would we be without a Rachel Carson?” Dr. Shiva asks us.
In the age of fast technology, to write, to slowly search for truth on the page, might be the most radical act of all. We at Camas invite you to share your searching with us. The seeds of revolution have long been drenched in ink.