all of the reasons to hate ai and to love ai are valid, to a point. it does things for us that are helpful to have done for us. it does things to us that are harmful to have done to us.
the main thing we should focus on is what it requires of us. it requires that power be centralized in such a way that concerns about water and land use are deprioritized. it requires that people who don’t have our best interests in mind influence elections. it requires that we relinquish our rights to our own ideas in the tos agreement required to use it.
ai is not local: it requires centralized control of a vast network of resources from around the globe. it doesn’t fit in a backpack.
ai is not democratic: the algorithms that deliver it’s results are designed by a small team that does not answer to us. it doesn’t respond to community review.
ai is not neutral: it’s knowledge base is a collection of writings that represents centuries of colonizers writing about encounters with beings deemed lesser. it doesn’t weight indigenous voices higher.
ai is not embodied: nothing in its database includes information that can only be experienced through the senses. it didn’t smell what you smelled.
ai has not experienced loss: it can tell you what grieving people have said, but it cannot experience their pain, and console you in the ways that only someone who has experienced loss can console you. it can’t adjust the way you’ve adjusted.
ai has never attended a birth, nor tasted the final breath of a loved one. it doesn’t know the poem your mother needed to hear for comfort.
ai is a performance by someone who was never there, but who requires you to hand over all rights to land, water, minerals, species diversity, diplomatic nonpartisanship, labor justice, bioregional congruity, indigenous stewardship, ecosystem integrity, economic equity, cultural heritage, family legacy, intellectual architecture, emotional elaboration, and environmental renewal.
How Making Sense of My Child’s Cannabis Use Helped Me Understand The Beauty of Human Adaptation
Does Domestication of the Human Species Really Represent Our Shared Future on the Planet?
My almost-adult child is a gifted and challenged person, navigating the transition to adulthood in post-industrial American society. They’re a systems thinker, who aces every test, and who also can’t sit still or conform to the demands of a quiet workplace or a grid-based schedule. They often miss appointments due to oversleeping, and sometimes sleep for periods that don’t align with respectable industrial grid time.
They are highly engaged in any task at hand, but have difficulty playing the long game of connecting with a regular schedule. They pick up new skills very quickly, but express little interest in developing any of those skills into something that, in a modern context, looks like a career.
The environments they express the most affection for are highly cooperative: soccer is a big one; skateboarding in community, where peers are moving together, both in synchronous and asynchronous formations; making public art in strategically complex spaces, that require collaboration to envision, coordination to plan, and cooperation to execute. They are the epitome of the team player, as long as the team has a clear plan that serves the collective need for transparent and direct expression of experience in a creative and innovative way.
Making Sense of the Early Adult Drive for Autonomy and Relevance
My child’s challenges have moved them toward strategies to mitigate those challenges, and cannabis has been a recurring strategy that serves some need.
As an engaged parent, who is trying to nurture their adult child’s independence, while managing my alarm when witnessing behaviors that appear problematic, or as leading toward future failure to integrate into the workplace, I’ve been trying to make sense of what I’m seeing: a young person who is fiercely dedicated to their friends; who takes pride in a complex task well-executed; who resists being pigeonholed into existing categories of social, ideological, economic, or aesthetic legibility; and who sincerely wants to play a meaningful role in their community, despite repeated experiences of mismatch with established academic and occupational cultures.
Considering all of this, I’ve been unsatisfied with the ‘just say no’ or ‘avoid this substance because of the potential dangers involved’ frameworks of personal discipline, relative to what I see as cannabis use as substance-scaffolding.
I ask instead, “How is this scaffold serving their needs,” and “what is this person seeking to satisfy, according to the tendencies of their nervous system?”
Asking these questions, and exploring the range of possible resolutions, has caused me to rethink everything I know about individual competence, self-medication, and utility-within-community.
Here’s the story that unfolds in my brain, starting with trying to understand my child’s use of cannabis.
Understanding Cannabis as a Regulation Support
Question: A subset of neurodivergent people find cannabis to be highly regulating. Using current diagnostic frameworks, would we be able to reverse engineer this mechanism and suggest alternative supports for regulation?
Answer (from multiple channels): Diagnostic frameworks don’t code this directly—no DSM category for “cannabinoid-responsive regulation phenotype”—but the mechanistic literature gives us enough to reverse-engineer some plausible pathways, and each one maps to a non-cannabis lever.
The candidate mechanisms, each with its alt-support:
Excitation/inhibition imbalance (the leading cortical model in autism/ADHD research)—the nervous system runs with too much glutamatergic drive relative to GABAergic brake. CB1 agonism works presynaptically to turn down excess signal. Alt-support: deep pressure/proprioceptive input, rhythmic bilateral movement, anything that mechanically dampens throughput rather than trying to out-think it.
Low endocannabinoid tone—some autism research finds blunted anandamide signaling tied to social ease and anxiety regulation. If the system’s baseline ECS is running lean, exogenous cannabinoids are topping up a deficit rather than adding a foreign effect. Alt-support: sustained aerobic movement (the “runner’s high” is partly endocannabinoid-mediated), omega-3s as ECS precursors, consistent touch/massage.
Thalamic sensory gating failure—the filter that should mute irrelevant input doesn’t, so everything arrives undifferentiated and loud. Cannabinoids affect thalamic gating directly. Alt-support: environmental engineering, without pharmacological substitution: reduce raw input volume rather than trying to improve the filter (single-channel environments, structured monotropic focus, noise reduction).
Vagal/parasympathetic underactivation—anxiety compounding the sensory load, cannabis’s anxiolytic effect partly vagally mediated. Alt-support: direct vagal stimulation—humming, slow exhale-longer-than-inhale breathing, cold water on the face.
Dopaminergic under-stimulation(more ADHD-coded)—restlessness eased by mild dopaminergic modulation. Alt-support: novelty-structured tasks, high-engagement movement, body doubling.
Considering this data, relative to the questions that framed my inquiry, here’s how I connect the dots when I choose to view my child as perfectly-abled, rather than disabled, and here’s how I attempt to contextualize this for my community.
Greetings, esteemed community:
I compiled this explanation of how cannabis helps regulate the neurodivergent nervous system. This all maps very cleanly onto our child’s character, and shows why they miss soccer so much (missing as ‘longing for,’ and not ‘fails to show up for.’ I think you get my meaning, but it’s good be precise where language suggests multiple meanings).
This all points to running (‘rhythmic bilateral movement,’ ‘sustained aerobic movement’), with intense interest-based focus (‘structured monotropic focus,’ ‘high-engagement movement’) and cooperative participation (‘high-engagement movement,’ ‘body doubling’) as being the the regulation supports they are reaching for, or the activities that they are predisposed to seek in making their character meaningful in a human community engaged in dialogue with a natural environment.
Basically, our child shows the collection of ecological adaptations that would enable ice-age hunter-gatherers to hunt and bring down a wooly mammoth, as a source of food and raw materials for clothing, shelter, and tools. Mammoths were herd animals, much larger than humans, with thick skins and wooly coats that were very difficult to pierce with the projectiles of the time—wood or bone projectiles that were either sharpened or had separate affixed bone or stone tips specialized for cutting/piercing.
Bringing down a mammoth would require a high degree of coordination and sustained movement by a group of humans—to first isolate an animal from the herd; bombard it with a number of projectiles, none of which would be able to kill the animal on its own, but only weaken it when applied in numbers; and then chase the animal until it was weak enough to be able to approach directly, to apply severing cuts with stone knives at strategic points, to bring on death. Then, the animal had to be processed fairly quickly, before bacteria, insects, and scavengers moved in to take their share.
The Mental Health Day
This coordinated activity would involve great risk-taking, and sublimation of fear-response. In other words, badass individuals engaged in a life-or-death struggle to meet the needs of their community.
Engaging in this way would have resulted in a huge output of energy in a specific time period, that would likely extend beyond one cycle of dawn-to-dusk; which could not be segmented into work hours that resemble modern industrial time cycles of work and rest; by an individual who could literally measure their life by their proximity to such a resource as a mammoth herd. The individuals involved in this project would have needed extended periods of rest to recover from the endeavor, perhaps spanning multiple day-night cycles; and the community would have been happy to oblige, considering the benefit of their energy expenditure to the community.
Where Do We Go From Here?
in the context of domesticated society, none of our child’s particular traits make sense. but our period of domestication has been a tiny blip in the overall arc of the human project. human evolution, and adaptation to changing environments, is a very long and slow process, relative to our understanding of adapting to environmental changes within our lifetimes.
Considering those changes, i hope we can find ways to recognize our child’s unique gifts as adaptations that are valuable to the community; to recognize the range of skills required to make the human project work; and to rediscover how a person with these natural predispositions is a valuable contributor to their community — because of, and not in spite of, their characteristic rhythms and sensibilities.
Thanks for coming to my TED talk, and thank you for your cooperation in this project of nurturing a unique person to be their best self in the rapidly-shifting priorities of life in modern industrial society.
I’m not sure we should even be studying autism in the United States.
My mother just turned 82 today. She has faced challenges in every measurable area of her life, that I won’t go into—that’s a different story. Her diagnosis has changed with the trends of the healthcare industry, and she has only recently been recognized as autistic. It’s hard to imagine that someone who has experienced the challenges that have been placed on her would have such a sweet and sunny disposition and enthusiastic and optimistic outlook during times when her accommodations meet her needs. During times when her challenges are centered, she can be deeply dysregulated and difficult to comfort.
I’m going to take this in a surprising direction, at least considering the thrust of my advocacy, which is that love is the missing accommodation that’s never measured in any diagnostic framework. I never want to look at a person in a way that frames them according to their worth as a producer of economic output. Yet a remarkable characteristic of my mom is that throughout every stage of her life, from the time she was 6 years old until now—76 years and counting—she has been continuously engaged in making.
Her discipline is the fiber arts, and within that her skills and output are varied and broad—sewing, knitting, crochet, natural dyes are the main ones, and she’s dabbled in all other areas of the work. She has worked for brief periods in her industry, but there are so few compensated roles in the US that she has mostly done work in highly unaccommodating environments and lived on public assistance.
She’ll spend her last $20 on a skein of yarn to make a garment for a friend she met yesterday. No amount of reminding or cajoling can convince her to practice practical economy.
Making is literally self-regulation for her. When she is focused on a project, all of the other challenges stop being centered. As long as her needs are provided for, making work is her happy place. She also loves to share information, and she delights in the opportunity to pass on her skills and knowledge. I wish more of those opportunities existed, because they provide the context for the type of social interaction that both feeds her heart and nurtures her community.
76 years and counting of continuous making. What metric in the paradigm of industrial capitalist culture and disability accommodation factors in that part of her profile? None that I’ve ever come across. And this with a history of social isolation that can be viewed as a life-limiting condition on its own.
The condition of her disability makes sense in the context of the socioeconomic realities that her culture presents to her as the standard environment against which fitness is measured—where the type of handwork she produces is only valuable in a privileged family who can afford to accommodate the person making it, or in a country designated, within the global economy, as a labor-extraction zone—where high-skill, low-output handwork like hers becomes an input in production channels serving that economic system. Using that lens, it’s difficult to recognize her as a person of great economic value to any community. Her challenges add up to a net liability, when public housing, mental health care, and economic assistance are factored in.
When we recognize this person, nearing the end of their life expectancy, which is an important stage to factor into any metric of fitness—where will this person be expected to be in their later years? Will they still be enjoying life and engaged with their community? Any metric of fitness should take in the full arc of a person’s life, and not just ability to function at the level required to be measured as functional relative to potential economic output at the age of eligibility for the workforce.
When we recognize this person independently of their cultural frame, we can notice some things that are both remarkable and unremarkable, depending on how they are viewed.
Relative to an 82-year-old person who is engaged in a 76-year-and-counting period of productivity, who is warm, congenial, and who shares information and mentors freely when she is in her element (that seems like a good standard of fitness), let’s reframe the history of accommodations she’s received.
My mom’s primary relationship has been with the healthcare system and the public assistance apparatus that negotiates access on her behalf. Looked at honestly, her mental health accommodations have been based around her ability to interact in working environments that don’t meet her needs, and in intimate relationships with people who are similarly undervalued in our society, who also have communication differences, social challenges, unaddressed trauma, and self-regulation strategies that involve substances and power-balancing behaviors that are responses to perceived loss of autonomy.
In retrospect, all of that could be accommodated quite simply in another cultural context: recognize her as valuable; provide her with food and housing, for which her needs are quite modest relative to the median; interact with her socially in ways that suit her needs—let her interact with people in all stages of life, engage her on topics in which she has deep and exceptional knowledge, allow her to mentor people who share her interests, and accompany her in gentle restorative exercise like a walk through the neighborhood; and make sure she has a project and the resources to complete it.
The culture that frames the conditions of industrial capitalism as the standard environment within which fitness is judged is in fact a statistical anomaly, a tiny blip in the arc of human evolution relative to a variety of environments—5 centuries of organization and 2 centuries of implementation—in a journey of hundreds of millennia. Changing that frame, how could her life, and her value to a community, look different?
As this is not a dissertation, but meant to inspire dissertations based on different paradigms and cultural assumptions, I’m going to share information without proof. I’ll leave it to the inspired and informed reader to explore the connections I’m pointing to. Let’s continue having these conversations.
Consider that a cross-cultural examination of precolonial land-embedded societies around the world reveals a consistent pattern—deities and portions of cultural mythology that represent the role of the maker—the smith, the weaver—as the one who provides the necessary bridge from the natural world to a world of order that human habitation demands. The mythology directly legitimizes a person like my mother as the person who makes human existence possible—the skills they possess to transform raw materials into the tools, roads, clothing, and artifacts of material culture are seen as literally connecting humans to their environment in the exact ways necessary to support a community sustainably. Not as decoration—as vital infrastructure.
A culture with these embedded myths would have recognized my mother early, and, knowing her value to the community, would have nurtured her unique qualities.
Keep in mind: my mother acquired her skills at her own expense, in pursuit of her personal interests. The type of obsessive attention to detail that is required to turn raw fiber into garment, implement, or tool does not come easily to many people. To take the average person and force them into a program of training would be an energy-demanding exercise that would place possibly debilitating demands on most people. The demands of industrial capitalist economies force people through training programs like this as a matter of course. She pursued her program with joy, determination and pride, not to meet the demands of a credential, but to satisfy her precise curiosity, to regulate her life, and make it meaningful.
How would my mother’s brain, her nervous system, her psycho-emotional development, her ability to connect socially, have grown differently, had she been recognized within a community that valued her unique qualities? I’ll leave it to the reader to do the emotional and cognitive work of making those connections.
For me, understanding is inseparable from grief. If you understand, let’s pause, and reflect, and grieve. But also celebrate, and repair.
Back to my opening statement: I’m not sure we should even be studying autism in the United States, at least without radically reframing our metrics for how autistic people are judged relative to the societies they are embedded within.
Many will dismiss my argument as lacking data, as naive projection onto indigenous cultures of inclusiveness that wasn’t present, as mythologizing an idealized past I wasn’t present for. My hope is that the smiths and weavers of paradigms will sew together the threads of our precolonial collective past and show where specific human cultures crossed the boundaries of acceptable behavior by making portable mythologies that didn’t keep the connection legible of the natural world to humanity’s space within it. I hope they might show how specific cultures subjugated the role of the highly interested woman that weaves the community together to that of the warrior bent on destroying anything that doesn’t resemble it.
I realize that I’ve forced the ending here. I’m rushing an idea that deserves more space, for the comfort of the reader. How is this functionally different from rushing my mother into a diagnosis and cultural ghetto for the comfort of a diagnostic committee that is suffering cognitive overwhelm, too tired to assess the arc of a person’s life? And, if we’re kind, this is not an indictment. It’s the gentle reminder to the researcher with low interoception that it’s time to go to bed. Because you are an important asset to the community and we recognize your value.
I have such mixed feelings here. I feel terrible, having reduced my mother’s life to a case study. But having rendered her as valuable, and worthy of the recognition of a community that values her specific qualities, I rest, hoping that in making her legible, a community might find a better way to organize itself.
Saying that autistic people who question the current paradigm of neurodivergence are seeking proof of a superpower does real harm. Diagnostic criteria are a snapshot. To refer to the snapshot as reality, without considering the hand that crafted the lens it was taken with, and for whose benefit, or what it distorts, cannot be seen as anything other than harmful to an understanding of complex systems.
Downstream of that, to then force people to identify with a disability designation that hints at accommodation, while the already meager care infrastructure is being actively dismantled by a government that wants to put autistic people on a list and ‘cure’ us, while at the same time removing funding from research that doesn’t agree with their agenda… to watch this all unfold is beyond heartbreaking. It’s criminal and cruel, and to enter neurodiversity justice spaces and hear the rhetoric from people who are claiming to advocate for the best interests of autistic people is just another example of the gaslighting being replicated by the gaslit.
It’s also understandable. We work from the models we’ve been given to work with. We recognize that there are privileged people and marginalized people. It seems to make sense to keep the structure intact and simply reset the algorithm to bring marginalized people in. But the system depends on there being marginalized people, and changing the algorithm simply shifts the suffering onto a different group of people. If we want equity to work, for real and for everyone, we need to learn how to work together differently.
Western science is good at some things, but it is also a paradigm that is easily gamed. What question we choose as a thesis determines the field of inquiry, the variables we can see (and the ones we can’t from our viewpoint), and the output is a snapshot. If we limit our questions to support a funding requirement, a political climate, a class preserving mechanism, or a corporate agenda, the snapshot is distorted, and this has real consequences.
I live in Berkeley California. Do you know how many people I have crossed paths with who are engaged in a research project that is losing funding due to the political climate? Let’s just say that we are not living in a time when good information is on the ascendancy, even at the academic level. I know people whose whole departments are fundraising to keep the lights on, and funders are not neutral.
In hostile times, it’s time to circle the wagons and protect the children within. The wagons here are perhaps a poor metaphor, being a symbol of colonial expansion. But what works is the idea of a circle protecting the future health of our community. The civic infrastructure that was supposed to protect us is being dismantled and defunded, along with the research institutions that were ostensibly designed to help us describe ourselves in ways that align with our nature.
But there is so much we can do if we train ourselves to abandon those decaying structures and find support through cooperation. Tōjisha Kenkyū is a self-study paradigm developed by people in the mental health community in Japan, who recognized that the stories being told to them by clinicians did not match their experiences nor provide support in the ways they needed. Through deep inquiry and information sharing, people working in this modality are learning bottom-up strategies and new language that allows them to access mutual support and offer more effective advocacy.
Every healthy community has access to its own story, that changes and unfolds within its very ecosystem. The questions that arise might not fit a funding landscape, but mutual support makes things possible that top-down institutions won’t.
The understanding of neurodiversity is in its infancy relative to Western scientific paradigms. As far as I can tell, the word neuronormativity only emerged within this century. Paradigms this new are bound to experience shifts that change the landscape of our understanding. When I hear people in the neurodiversity community loudly advocating for top-down paradigms that view neuronormativity as a standard of human growth and ability, and neurodivergence as a collection of abberant deviations from the norm, I can’t help but wonder who they are representing, and why they feel so confident in articulating the boundaries of an emerging paradigm.
Nature has amazing ways of achieving balance in a changing ecosystem. The whole reason we look like we do, and not like our ancestors Australopithecus, is that we diverged. Does that make us disabled versions of our ancestors? No. Evolution is a series of mistakes, that sometimes end up being helpful to the community, even as they are divergent from what came before.
Sometimes, what’s helpful to the community is someone tall enough to reach a food source inaccessible to most, and perhaps communities who had a few statistical outliers in height were more successful. In the context of industrial productivity, maybe the tall ones are just a liability, but is that the driver of change we want to follow? Look what doing so has done to biodiversity on the planet.
Sometimes what’s helpful might be someone with sensitive hearing, who can hear the approach of a predator or track game hidden in the canopy. Again, in an office, they are just seen as annoying, asking for accommodation again. Sometimes what’s helpful might be someone who thinks differently. When I think of the process of getting nutrition out of cassava, I wonder who on earth would have the patience and determination to figure that out. I’m sure it wasn’t one person, and parts of the process probably unfolded over centuries. But it’s not hard to imagine that at some point in the process, someone with cognitive differences might have thought to try something new. That’s not evidence of a superpower. It’s a person working the way they work, in the context of a team that values them. That’s the person we all know who we find frustrating, because their thinking seems so contrary.
In a society that’s not conforming to an origin story that pathologizes differences and that recognizes that through drought and famine and herd depletion and times of bounty, differences in the community are an asset, not a liability. They might develop ways of doing things that build respect for these differences. If we look at the practices of various cultures we can actually see that this is true.
Are autism advocates who advocate for the model of neurodivergence as a deviation from neuronormativity simply trying to practice realpolitik in social terms, accepting that industrial agriculture, production, and the administrative mechanisms that support them are the way it will always be, and we should engineer ourselves to align with that reality? If so, count me out. That’s the project I thought we were trying to abandon at all costs. If not, where does your confidence come from, and why does it feel so much like a story we’ve heard before, that got us into this mess?
Two people in a boat. One can row, but cannot navigate. The other can navigate, but cannot row. If we view each as a whole, each has both an asset and a liability—each is both abled and disabled. If we view the relationship as a whole, we can describe things differently.
If participation and cooperation are both given, and both needs and abilities are transparent, we can say, for the sake of argument, that we have a balanced system. Ability and disability are actually complementary parts of a balanced system.
For the system to remain balanced, the requirement is that we do not judge one by the standards of the other. Both are necessary for the system to be balanced. It is only in separating the ability and disability within the system—through creation of a standard that applies to each equally—that disability as a permanent status arises (or ability, as a permanent status, for that matter).
Humans are a social animal, and no human can be said to exist in isolation. The work of survival as a cohesive community is complex. If we view human evolution as a community project, rather than a process of creating ideal and identical individuals, perhaps it’s fairer to say that humans are more like the two people in the boat that opened this narrative than like individuals striving toward undifferentiated perfection.
I believe that as our understanding of neurodiversity deepens, we will begin to see the complementary nature of different sensory, cognitive, behavioral, emotional, somatic, and relational expressions within a community of people engaged in the work of surviving within an ecosystem, and start to recognize the unique socio-ecological niche that each is adapted to.
That being said, humans have created systems that separate us from the ecology we evolved over millions of years to function within—capitalism being the most recent and totalizing form this separation has taken. Any framework, whatever its organizing logic, that substitutes an abstracted, portable standard for embedded relationship will distort our ability to view each type of expression fairly, in context. In the deepest sense, it is these imposed frameworks—not one’s specific neuropsychobiology—that create the permanent state of ability or disability.
Is this an argument that disability does not exist, or should not be accommodated? Absolutely not. Does the human organism itself demand that we recognize the various socio-ecological niches for which each individual may be uniquely adapted? Also no—evolution continues, and each part of any ecosystem is changed by interaction with the others—just as we were once single-celled life forms adapted to an underwater ecosystem that no longer exists, we will adapt to whatever conditions our survivors find themselves within (if there are survivors—evolution is a slow process, and the changes we have made to our ecosystem have arguably outpaced it).
What, then, is the good of understanding or accepting a principle like complementary adaptation, if we are eventually going to change anyway? From a human sociological perspective, it allows us to be both kinder and more accommodating of difference. In recognizing the many ways that variations in human adaptive expression contribute to the well-being of a complex social organism within an ecosystem, we can move people toward societal roles for which they may already be well adapted, rather than forcing them to adapt to environments where their permanent disability status is the only option. It changes the framework for our application of care—to use our earlier analogy, to match rowers with navigators, those who thrive as nurturers with those who thrive with care, across a broad spectrum of socio-ecological niches.
What this requires of us, as those who study human variation, is to recognize the many ways that current conditions game the system for the comfort of some, at the expense of basic human dignity for others, and to recognize the gatekeepers who enforce the conditions we find ourselves in, be they actual humans, economic systems, or simply cognitive frameworks. It would be naive to think that we can simply abandon every framework we’ve inherited outright, but making the shift to recognizing human variation as a relationship affords us a direction for a new field of study—and nudges us toward a kinder, more integrated relationship with our world and with one another.
I recently received pushback from the usual channels when I posted about decolonizing the gender binary. As is my way, I went looking to history to see if I was being unfair to white guys. What I found was pretty clear, and it’s not just related to race (like gender, a relational construct), but more about power.
Gender flexibility tends to appear in cultures where gender is understood as a relational/functional/spiritual category rather than a biological one. The binary hardened historically where:
Roman law codified sex/gender into property and inheritance structures: strict gender roles ensure that only certain people are eligible to pass along the family name, and that eligibility is determined by the accidental conditions of one’s birth, framed as divine right—the same power structure that legitimized the emperor.
Abrahamic traditions systematized binary creation theology: by encoding the male/female pair as the first and foundational act of divine sorting, the binary was lifted out of social negotiation and into ontology—it became not a human arrangement subject to revision but a feature of reality itself, which meant that any person who didn’t fit wasn’t merely unusual but was an offense against the created order, converting natural human variation into theological emergency.
Colonial administration required legible, fixed categories for population management: census-taking, taxation, land assignment, and conscription all demanded that bodies be sortable into stable, enumerable units—and a population with fluid gender categories resisted that enumeration, making it ungovernable by the ledger’s logic, which is why colonial law didn’t merely discourage gender variance but criminalized it, converting a bureaucratic convenience into a moral imperative.
Industrial capitalism needs stable labor and domestic role assignments: the factory and the household have to be administered as separate spheres with non-overlapping populations, because the system’s profitability depended on reproductive and household labor remaining unwaged. Enter binary gender roles, enforced at the level of law, medicine, and social shame simultaneously.
Each of these systems borrowed legitimacy from the one before it, passing the same externalization cost forward in an unbroken chain.
What’s lost if we only recognize the one narrative? We miss that the relational/functional/spiritual frame for gender is much older than the biological one—many traditions that include multiple genders are thousands of years old. The binary as a rigid universal is, relatively speaking, a recent and geographically specific imposition.
And in many countries around the world where gender and sexual binaries are strictly enforced after the supposed retreat of colonialism, it’s not a return to some older tradition. Many of the countries with the most prescriptive gender codes had some of the most complex and dynamic relationships to gender in pre-colonial times: they are literally continuing to do the colonizers’ work. It turns out that the gender binary’s effectiveness as a sorting mechanism is often seen as more important than recognizing a history that embraces human variation.
So yeah, it’s looking like mostly white guys. I look enough like a white guy that I don’t have any trouble pointing out this information. My inner white guy can handle it. I choose to transcend the binary. How? Understand the history of the sorting mechanism, and for whose comfort it was designed—and then decide whether your discomfort with dismantling it is really yours, or just the mechanism doing its job.
as a practicing buddhist, “leave no trace” is a guiding principle embedded into every teaching: leave no physical trace of your passage through the busy world, and leave no stinky teaching behind that muddies the waters of the dharma.
how do we practice this, living as we do with the legacy of colonialism, cultural appropriation, and industrial capitalism? do i join a monastery that maintains a culture derived from practices developed thousands of miles away within a separate but equally asymmetrical power structure as medieval Japan?
maybe—but what other options are there?
considering that i was born and raised in California, what models for living are available for living a leave-no-trace lifestyle in this place?
Let’s consider a moment like this.
dōgen, the go-to teacher in my particular subsect of zen buddhism, the Sōto school, was sharing his wisdom from a temple in a remote area of Echizen province in Japan in the 13th century. consider what was happening in California at that time.
California was arguably one of the most linguistically and culturally diverse regions in the world. people had lived here for millennia, and by 1500CE (3 centuries after Dōgen’s birth), there were somewhere around 80 distinct languages and cultural groups living in this place: in the coastal region; in the great valley between the coastal ranges and the Sierra Nevada; in myriad river valleys, watersheds, grasslands, and oak groves.
Consider this: upon arrival, on ships and overland, European colonists encountered a land that they believed to be pristine and uninhabited.
Let that sink in.
One of the most culturally diverse regions on Earth.
For anyone paying mindful attention (as we are entreated to do), this would seem to provide a textbook example of “leave-no-trace.” Look around. Where are the crumbling monuments and scorched places that a region with 80 distinct cultures would be expected to contain?
If you have the capacity to think about this for even a moment, it is likely to be almost unimaginable.
that being said, it would be inaccurate and unfair to say that the people who inhabited this place left no trace—on the contrary, the traces are there, if one knows where to look.
Let’s consider the traces left behind, in California, by the 80 or so distinct cultures that inhabited this place for millennia, before the ships came.
They left behind fire-shaped oak woodlands, park-like oak savannas with open understories, that early European observers admired and assumed were natural. They were natural, but they were also made—through precise, seasonally timed cultural burning that suppressed encroaching conifers, stimulated acorn production, and maintained the grassland-woodland mosaic that supported enormous biodiversity.
They left behind a superabundance of large game. The astonishing density of elk, deer, and pronghorn reported by early contact-era observers was not an accident of wilderness conditions—it was the managed outcome of burn regimens, selective harvest, and spiritual protocols around killing that functioned as de facto conservation law.
They left behind salmon run integrity—weir systems, harvest techniques, and first-catch ceremonies functioned together as a distributed watershed management system. The ceremonies were societal self-regulation—embedding catch limits and seasonal closures as cultural touchstones.
We knock on doors to ask for candy. They practiced similar rituals to ensure next season’s catch.
they left behind camas and brodaea meadows. These extensive bulb plantings, which fed both humans and animals across enormous areas, were cultivated through selective harvest, replanting, and burning. Europeans saw them as wildflower meadows—they were cultivated gardens in disguise.
Leave no trace, indeed.
They left behind tarweed and clover patches, in distinct patterns. Intentional burning created a patchwork of early-succession forb communities across hillsides—maximizing seed yield while simultaneously creating the habitat that makes species diversity possible. The quilt pattern that Europeans noticed in the landscape was an agricultural design, cultivated by people with intention and systems wisdom.
They left behind a near-universal network of dense, structurally complex riparian zones—willows, alders, sedges. These corridors were the circulatory system of the landscape, and they were kept open and healthy by people who understood the value of stewardship and systems thinking to their lifeways.
They left behind shell midden topography: shellmounds are found along the Bay, the coast, the rivers. They are features of the landscape now, that support unique alkaline plant communities. These indigenous communities had their landfills, but what they leave behind is kind of an accidental monument to valuable plant species that grow nowhere else.
They left behind stands of elderberry and hazel. Both were actively managed—elderberry for food and medicine, hazel for basket-making. Their distribution across the landscape reflects human intention. Where you find dense hazel stands, you are standing in someone’s workshop—again, disguised as natural selection.
They also left behind absence: absence of erosion signatures in pre-contact sediment cores. Paleoecological cores from California lakes and estuaries show remarkably stable sediment profiles through the pre-contact period—low erosion, stable watersheds, consistent organic input. In contrast, the colonial period shows up as an abrupt, catastrophic sediment disruption. These 80 cultures left behind measurable stability in the geological record. The entrance of Europeans is literally visible at the sedimentary level.
They left behind black, carbon-rich soils in valley and foothill community sites—soils darkened and enriched by millennia of habitation, burning, composting, and refuse incorporation. These patches grow differently than surrounding soils. Farmers and gardeners notice them. They are slowly-accumulated signatures of long residence—in the best way: they continue to support biodiversity and utility to the stewards who tend them.
Landscape. Systems. People. Intention. All working together for millennia. 80 distinct cultures.
Europeans arrive and see nothing but a natural landscape.
I’m saying this over and over again because it’s so easy to gloss over if you don’t make the effort to consider the alternative.
What is the alternative?
Let’s consider the legacy left behind by the people on ships (and overland) who saw a pristine place and sought to save the inhabitants from their sins.
If we consider the legacy of a supposedly civilized people;
and if we consider that what was left behind was left behind by a diversity of peoples whose numbers were diminished by 95% within 150 years of contact with the (supposed) savior peoples whose numbers arrived on ships (and overland);
what would be the legacy of the people who intervened in the millennia-long experiment of California’s indigenous peoples?
Let’s consider the legacy of an intervening people, if their numbers were suddenly diminished by 95%. Let’s consider (if we consider the intervening people to be more civilized) what we would expect to have found:
(I hope fellow buddhists are practicing mindfulness here)
Where are the prisons? The structures whose purpose is the forcible removal of human beings from the social body, if we assume that such removal is a necessary function of civilization? No pre-contact California culture is known to have required one. This begs the question: what kind of society needs this many cages?
Where are the parking lots? Surely an ecosystem that supports 80 different cultures must require an impermeable surface with zero ecological function, and a thermal mass that raises ambient temperature, that exceeds the footprint of habitable buildings, to carry out its work of saving a population from their sins. Surely they would have needed a warehouse for their means of travel.
Where are the landfills? We found shellmounds that became soil, ecology, and monument in one. What about their accumulated poisons, leachates, methane—sealed from the biological processes that would otherwise transform them?
Where are the strip malls—the commercial vernacular of a healthy market economy—built for a lifespan of 30 years, and already obsolescing before completion? We don’t see the parking lots (larger than the buildings themselves), but surely we would see some signs of commerce.
Where are the stadiums—the enormous structures used for roughly 20 days per year, built with public money, named for corporations, demolished when the team demands a newer one? The Romans had their amphitheater, that was apparently well-used—where did these people display their spectacle?
Where are the hospitals? is it possible that these people did not allow their baseline conditions—diet, air, water, social cohesion, meaningful work—to degrade so severely that industrial-scale intervention became necessary to sustain normal human function? Did they not live in such a way that made such monuments to care necessary?
Where are the highways? Roman roads are still visible from satellites. American interstates will be legible to geologists a millennium from now. Impermeable, like parking lots, severing watersheds, fragmenting habitat, producing runoff laced with tire particulate that is now measurable in the tissues of Pacific salmon. Surely civilized people would have needed a structure to move vehicles between parking lots, no?
Where are the golf courses? Doesn’t a civilized culture need a chemically maintained monoculture on land that could support hundreds of species, with water consumption needs on an agricultural scale—poisoned earth, to support a certain shade of turf, for the leisure of a few?
Where is the advertising infrastructure: billboards, signage, the entire visual apparatus of commercial persuasion permanently installed in the landscape? How would people have known what products to purchase to maintain legibility as citizens and support the corporate infrastructure?
Where are the Superfund sites? Certainly, a section of the continent that was home to 80 distinct cultures would have needed places where industrial processes so thoroughly poisoned land, water, and soil that the collective body would have designated them national sacrifice zones requiring generations of remediation—if remediation is even possible.
Shellmounds? Were these people even human?
Let’s pause, and reflect.
Eighty distinct cultures. Eighty different languages. Eighty different cosmologies, kinship structures, ceremonial calendars, ways of knowing. Not one people with one answer—eighty peoples with eighty answers, none of which required a prison, a landfill, or a Superfund site.
This is the part that is almost impossible to hold in the mind.
Dōgen’s monastery is a monoculture: an island of shared language and isolated cultural identity. The colonial project is a monoculture: a multivalent operation of power, subjugation, and extraction at industrial scale. Both operating from the assumption that there is one correct way, transmissible as doctrine, applicable universally, independent of place.
The eighty cultures of California suggest something the monastery and the colonial project both missed: that diversity of approach, held within shared relationship to place, is itself the technology of leave-no-trace. Not one answer refined to perfection—many answers, in conversation with one another and with the land. The oak savanna is not a monoculture. Its stability is a product of the diversity of its understory.
California today is one of the most diverse places on earth—again, still, differently. The question the land is asking has not changed.
What is meant by leave-no-trace? What traces have we been asked to reflect on?
From where we are, in this present moment,
what would buddha do?
Where would dōgen go to dispense his kitchen wisdom?
Does one attempt to move a civilization whose legacy is prisons and superfund sites toward a gentler stewardship?
What of the legacy of 80 cultures, across millennia, who left behind healthy fisheries, and pastoral oak groves that supported a diverse ecology?
What is a buddhist, who devotes themselves to leaving no trace, to do?
