Believing

If bravery is the capacity to act in the face of fear, Lisa Wells’ Believers is a stunning reminder of the power of courage, asking us to face our troubled moment with wide-open hearts.

Let’s get one thing straight.

My finger is not on the pulse. I don’t read best-seller lists or consume new media, and my pop culture references suggest I’m an 80-year-old—not the 50-something I really am. Still, being shiny and new isn’t everything. And when a book as profound as Lisa Wells’ Believers crosses your transom, it’s worth waiting for.

An exploration of a largely invisible world of outcasts, off-gridders, neo-Christian missionaries and other dreamers, the book addresses climate disaster in a manageable format, if such a thing is possible, by reminding us that if it will require the kind of Big Interventions that are hard to enact—and that so many of us feel powerless to even engage with—it will take small ones too, ones we are not only capable of doing but who are the only ones capable of doing: Rekindling our reverence for place, stoking the possibility of hope, and reinvesting in deeper connection with the neighbors who so often remain strangers to us. 

The Replanters

One of Believers’ most indelible characters is Finisia Medrano, the warrior queen of the Prairie Faeries, a ragtag group who travel the backcountry of the once-fertile Great Basin, painstakingly reseeding native plants in places where overgrazing, monocropping, and other land-use practices have denuded the soil.

A corrosive and foul-tempered trans woman of indeterminate age, Finisia comes off as a sort of latter-day temperance prophet in constant conflict with landowners, police, the BLM, and her own semi-mutinous crew. Her quest is preposterously futile—she travels with half-broken horses and a wagon, her tools discarded pieces of silverware. And yet despite—or perhaps because of—her essential incompatibility with civilization, there’s an eerie gravitas to her pronouncements. Before Wells has revealed her troubling chronic symptoms to Finisia—unexplained fatigue, itchy skin, rolling panic, stabbing stomach pains—the older woman has already twigged her malaise:

“This place eats fucking souls and spirits. How healthy you think you are? You probably look as poisoned as that landscape around you. You’re probably as devastated as those woods in Oregon. You’re probably as polluted as Fukushima.”

This dynamic—between our internal dysbiosis and the collapse of the ecosystems we imagine to be external to us—gives the book much of its tension, and we return to glimpse it from new and revealing angles again and again. The land is sick because we are sick and vice versa, and neither our own skins nor the border walls we erect are sturdy enough to separate one from the other.

Pranksters, Trackers, and Other Wildlife

So, what’s to be done about it? Wells has spent much of her life trying to find those who think they know, and as the book wends back and forth in time and place, she plants tiny mustard seeds of backstory. As a barely 17-year-old dropout, she and two friends pool their money to take a Greyhound across the country and enroll in a questionable wilderness survival course. Disappointed in its failure to make them even marginally competent survivalists, she returns to Portland and hangs out on the fringes of the then-burgeoning ELF / ALF movements instead.

At first, the authorities don’t seem to much care. But in summer 2001, when the timing of an arson attack on the office of a timber researcher is “so extraordinarily bad as to be predestined by a cynical god,” Wells learns a hard lesson in her essential powerlessness, watching as friends and associates are taken down by the Feds—sometimes fatally.

Before long, Wells is toggling between boosting prankish performance artists—anyone in Portland remember The Urban Scout?—and “slumping paralytically stoned on the couch…watching a group of dudes diddle out round after round of Mortal Kombat.” Eventually she rouses from her existential torpor and goes in search of people who are making better use of their time.

Among them are a wilderness tracker—the haunted and relentless Fernando—a native elder, and Todd Wynward, a community leader who claims to only be “a part-time religious fanatic.” The scale of their efforts runs the gamut, from Finasia—planting thousands of seeds with a teaspoon—to John D. Liu, a land restoration expert working with country-sized canvases.

Compelling though Wells’ human portraits are—she writes with the scalpel of a poet—it’s her confrontation with the land that resonates even more deeply. As we survey scorched and waterless landscapes, that tension returns—the nagging sense that our inner and outer landscapes are inseparable, and that the challenging emotions like grief and rage we imagine are confined to our own bodies are in fact being played being played out on a global scale:

“Maybe a natural disaster—some original trauma—led the progenitors of empire to feel that the environment had flooded their boundaries, that the ur-mother had become unresponsive, withholding. Maybe they bucked against their dependence in a ‘childlike rage’ and turned away. We’ll never know. All I know is, the antidote for an ‘inner, alienated core’ is relationship, and the answer to exile is finding a home.”

Is that so farfetched? We once believed that emotions were solely the province of the brain, a theory currently undergoing serious revision. One thing is for certain: Without major changes in how we currently relate to the earth, our only home, we don’t stand a chance. 

That’s not to say there’s no hope in Believers—far from it. Wells’ observations that century-old seeds can sprout in a restored wasteland in Jordan—or that a Belgium-sized chunk of China’s desertified Loess Plateau can become a lush forest within the span of 20 years—lend me a hope I can find hard to come by. These large-scale examples aren’t the answer, at least not by themselves. But bravery, they say, is the capacity to take action in the face of fear, and reading about them makes me feel just a little bit braver.

Coming Home

The Portland author Omar el-Akkad once shared a quote by his fellow Egyptian Naguib Mahfouz:

“Home is not where you were born; home is where all your attempts to escape cease.”

As the son of a Hungarian Jew who learned to run too early and then never really stopped, the truth of this statement hits uncomfortably close. Any place you currently inhabit has the potential to become your home, should you submit to it. And yet I’ve always felt essentially disconnected from the concept of home, surrendering instead to the sense—especially vivid after this week’s presidential debate—that we’re all trapped in some vast simulation. What place is worth committing to anyway, when the wildfires come a bit closer with every passing year?

Wells deepens the shading of Mahfouz’s statement, asking: “What does it mean to ‘go back to the land’ in a country that was never yours?” You could apply the question to indigeneity, as Wells does, but it describes everyone now alive on earth. Just as botanists are increasingly moving past the dualism of “native” and “non-native” plants, we have to face the world as it is, not as we wished it were.

Like Wells, I believe we won’t forgo the pleasures of a fundamentally destructive culture until there’s nothing pleasurable left to take from it. But we’re not alone, and we can—we must—start reaching for the others who still believe the earth is worth saving.

In a tragic irony, Finasia—the fierce and feral queen of the Prairie Faeries—is herself destined to leave the earth before the story’s end. But her parting shot to Wells has the bitter ring of prophecy:

“One of these days people will wake up in a near-dead world, and they will look around them and they will look inside and see that same devastation. They’ll reach for some lie, for some comfort, and they ain’t gonna find none. They’re going to reach for absolutions and find none. And they will hunt for excuses and they will find none.”

Reading Believers reminds me that I have a stake in the matter, and thus a say. It’s my world, too, and—fucked up though it might be—I still want to live in it.