Vic Thasiah on Trail Running, Public Lands, and Environmental Advocacy, with Poetry by Leigh Scarber
“We act in peace, with ferocious love of these lands in our hearts.” Extinction Rebellion
Having met last summer in the alps, where “knife-edged peaks split open the bellies of clouds” (Terry Tempest Williams), Mr. Fromage, a journalist, and Vic Thasiah, a trail and ultra runner, hike the Cozy Dell Trail on the lower slopes of the Topatopa Mountains, the ancestral homelands of the Chumash peoples. On switchbacks surrounded by toyon, Fromage recites a poem by Leigh Scarber titled, “I Prefer the Toyon” (included in full at the end), leading to questions for Vic on trail running, public lands, and environmental advocacy.
Fromage: I prefer the Toyon / Over the toys and trinkets / On Christmas Day…Leigh’s lines (in italics) light up this landscape, just as this landscape illuminates her lines. Vic, you seem to ground yourself in ancient Chinese wilderness poetry, a layer of your cultural heritage. How did these poets — obsessed with clouds and forests, and mountains and rivers — experience the natural world, and did they run trails?
Thasiah: They viewed the natural world back then just like scientists view the natural world right now — everything and everyone being made of the same stuff. Channeling these Chinese poets, David Hinton explains: “The Cosmos evolved countless suns and planets; and here on our planet Earth, it evolved life-forms with image-forming eyes like ours. So what else is that gaze but the very Cosmos looking out at itself?…And our inexplicable love for this world, our delight and grief — what is that but the Cosmos loving itself, delighting in itself, grieving for itself? We are wild through and through: wild mind, wild earth, wild Cosmos.”
I’m not sure whether these poets ran trails or not. If they didn’t, they certainly missed out. Sometimes I try to run my way into their vision of nature. Their goal was to join the landscape and flow with it at a visceral level, like when our bodies feel the shifting colors and moods of the sky. Hinton further recounts that these Chinese poets regularly sipped both wine and tea: wine as a way of easing self-consciousness, and tea to heighten their awareness. This led to the profound realization that each and every member of the landscape, including oneself, has a particular glory and depth, and thus, each and every member, from rock to wren, is valued, honored, and celebrated for its sheer existence.
Fromage: The rosy red holiday berry / Asks for nothing but the sun / And the rain and a glimpse of the moon…I’ve heard you say that such rapport with the natural world is your basic ideal. How does this translate into advocacy?
Thasiah: I often feel a sense of wonder, curiosity, and joy as I run through natural landscapes. These attachments to, and affections for, everything from rock formations to cloud formations prompt protective instincts and intuitions, sensitivities to devaluation and degradation, and an otherwise unexplainable generosity toward nature — an overwhelming feeling of wanting everything around me to thrive.
Gabor Maté thinks that advocacy for a better world — such as speaking up for someone or something violated and voiceless (in terms of power) — is essential to experiencing wholeness. This makes some advocacy, with some frequency, necessary for our health and well-being, in addition to justice and restoration. Moreover, it’s a natural way to build community, joining others in advocating for the protection of the lands we depend on and hold in common. And, these bonds can transcend the divides of race, ethnicity, class, and politics.
Fromage: It waits in reverent silence / And beckons the birds / To delight in sweet harvest…The Indigenous perspectives of respectful relationships and restorative reciprocity with the natural world further guide you. What do these things mean, and what does it look like for a non-indigenous trail runner like you to incorporate these perspectives into a coherent vision.
Thasiah: Robin Wall Kimmerer calls non-indigenous people like me to “become indigenous to place” and heal our relationships with land and history. She explains: “This does not mean appropriating the culture of indigenous people, but generating an authentic new relationship…It means becoming involved with the ‘language’ and dynamics of the place you live — learning its landforms, weather patterns, animals, plants, waterways, and seasons.” (Kimmerer also refers to this as “becoming naturalized to place,” which is a better way to put it.) Based on such respectful relationships — including solidarity with Indigenous communities — restorative reciprocity is a good way to frame our environmental and social activism, where the way that we restore our ecosystems contributes to the restoration of our culture, and the way that we restore our culture likewise contributes to the restoration of our ecosystems. Creating this “authentic new relationship” with the land, together with both Indigenous and non-indigenous people, is our calling.
Fromage: A ritual, that in turn, sprinkles / Its precious seeds about the forests / And the hillsides…You liked two running brand slogans last year: HOKA’s “time to fly,” and Salomon’s “time to play.” Meanwhile, you and your friend François Appéré came up with your own slogan: “time to connect.” What’s this connection about for you?
Thasiah: Last summer, François and I hiked around Mont Blanc with Jeffrey Mathes McCarthy’s anthology Contact: Mountain Climbing and Environmental Thinking in our packs. The book is about connecting with the mountains, as opposed to conquering or even conserving them. It all starts with contact. That connection in the alps with everything from icefields to ibexes led to my preference for the language of partnership over that of stewardship in terms of how we work with nature. While the concept of partnership, just like stewardship, doesn’t automatically tell us what we should or shouldn’t do to save the planet’s capacity to save us, partnership centers our connection with the natural world as opposed to our control.
Fromage: So that the next time the light begins to fade / And we descend into / The welcome wanderings of winter / We are held in the darkness…As we wander together through these mountains, I wonder about what public lands are, and how we should think about them.
Thasiah: Public lands and parks (urban, rural, and remote), and open and green spaces — broadly conceived — are wondrous communities, rich in relationships among weather patterns, landforms, waterways, and organisms. These living landscapes — evolving through both seasonal changes and natural cycles — are critical habitats, breeding grounds, and migration corridors that support a diversity of life from cells and microbes to plants and animals; regulate the climate; and filter air and water, among other services like carbon storage and flood control.
Public lands are where Indigenous spiritual and cultural practices take place, such as ceremonies related to sacred sites; subsistence hunting, fishing, harvesting, and gathering; and resistance and resurgence. They’re also places with violent, complex, and fraught histories, where ideas like the Doctrine of Discovery and Manifest Destiny justified the theft and occupation of Indigenous lands (ongoing today), and the enslavement, assimilation, and genocide of Indigenous peoples. This settler colonialism (which Daniel Heath Justice summarizes thus: “through force, coercion, trickery, or other non-consensual means, Indigenous peoples lost lives, lands, and livelihoods as a result of non-Indigenous appropriations of lands and territories”) and white supremacy combined with the history of environmental injustice has extended to, among other things, a lack of safe, equitable, and sustainable access to public lands and parks, and open and green spaces, for marginalized communities of color and low-income communities across the country.
Public lands, from neighborhood to national parks, are natural landscapes open for public use and managed by federal, state, or local government, or by a sovereign tribal nation. They can also include nature preserves and conservation easements on private land, managed by non-governmental organizations like land trusts and conservancies that provide public access. Tribal sovereignty, self-determination, and treaty obligations pertaining to public lands should always be respected; and all derogatory signage on public lands should be removed. Learning about the landscapes we visit (and considering what it means to visit and enjoy places that have been stolen) — through natural and cultural histories, including Indigenous-sourced land acknowledgements — and our local impacts, help us cultivate and embody the virtues of a good guest. Moreover, building relationships with the Indigenous and non-indigenous communities where we frequent can help us play our part in sustaining these special places and the people who spiritually and materially depend on them.
Running through public lands and parks, and open and green spaces, can significantly improve our quality of life — our physical and mental health. They’re places to be offline and be ourselves; clear our minds and think things through; find creative solutions and ask better questions; and learn both cultural histories and Traditional Ecological Knowledges on the one hand, and natural histories and the natural sciences on the other. They’re often amazing locations for adventure, exploration, discovery, and awe. Public lands and parks provide places for gathering, building friendships, strengthening community, and, in a new climate era, finding relief when needed from increasing heat-related stress. Finally, they’re landscapes where we can learn from Indigenous ways of gift-giving to nature for nature’s gift-giving to us, and find our own ways of giving back.
For the reasons above, and many more, we’ve got to fight for public lands and parks, and open and green spaces — informed by, and in relationship with, Indigenous communities when relevant and possible — and ensure safe, equitable, and sustainable access for everyone. We must protect, expand, and establish more of these places where we urgently need them, prioritizing the rights and concerns of communities of color, low-income communities, LGBTQ+ communities, and people living with disabilities. The work Indigenous people and others are doing to return power and land to Indigenous people, from co-management to land-transfer successes, is promising, and calls for solidarity. This kind of solidarity might be how non-indigenous people can experience belonging to the land in an appropriate way, as their bodies naturally do (e.g., through the air they breathe, the water they drink, the food they eat, and the plants that heal them). Meanwhile, working through complex public land issues with government agencies, corporate actors, and other parties — such as fossil fuel phase-outs, natural resource extraction, renewable energy development, and living with wildfires — continues to challenge us.
Fromage: With the deep, lasting knowing / That when we feel / Like going Home / We are pulled into the mountains / Where the Toyon seedlings grow. I see nature’s beauty and bounty as sources of order, pleasure, and hope. But I also see that environmental degradation, climate destabilization, habitat fragmentation, biodiversity loss, mass extinction, and those painful realities of settler colonialism and white supremacy are sources of chaos, suffering, and despair. Is happiness without denial possible?
Thasiah: Nice try, Fromage, as if I knew the meaning of life. Just having a good cheese with you in the mountains is happiness to me. I think D.H. Lawrence, though, in his novel The Boy in the Bush, says all we can say: “All real living hurts as well as fulfills. Happiness comes when we have lived and have a respite for sheer forgetting. Happiness, in the vulgar sense, is just a holiday experience. The life-long happiness lies in being used by life; hurt by life, driven and goaded by life, replenished and overjoyed with life, fighting for life’s sake. That is real happiness.” Environmental advocacy is this fighting for life’s sake.
I Prefer the Toyon, by Leigh Scarber
I prefer the Toyon
Over the toys and trinkets
On Christmas Day
The rosy red holiday berry
Asks for nothing but the sun
And the rain and a glimpse of the moon
It waits in reverent silence
And beckons the birds
To delight in sweet harvest
A ritual, that in turn, sprinkles
Its precious seeds about the forests
And the hillsides
So that the next time the light begins to fade
And we descend into
The welcome wanderings of winter
We are held in the darkness
With the deep, lasting knowing
That when we feel
Like going Home
We are pulled into the mountains
Where the Toyon seedlings grow
