Our guest blogger is Bob Gough, who among many titles, is the attorney for the Intertribal Council On Utility Policy, which works on energy solutions including developing wind farms and straw bale housing construction on Indian reservations. Bob hosted Hal on the Rosebud Sioux Reservation several years back, and I finally met Bob when he set up a sample straw bale house in Washington, DC (!) and later came to our town of Media, PA, to give a talk on climate change. He has a great and contagious smile although he sent me this serious but wonderful photo!
Bob recently mentioned his PTSD to me, and I suggested he write about it for the sake of all of us. Here’s Bob:
My heart goes out to all of you wrestling with the questions involving telling the truth about the environment even when it’s bad news.
Recently, in the cold-breathed face of a life threatening situation, I found myself heading to the hospital to undergo a third major procedure to address the state of my heart. This time, in the twin spirits of precaution and prevention, I am now bionic through the installation of a titanium defibrillator wired to my most vital of organs. An occasion for sobering reflection upon the fact that, being most intimately connected to a highly charged de-fibbing device, I am constrained under the very real threat and penalty of a self-administered electrical shock upon the occasion of communicating anything less than the truth in the most unerroringly way I am able. Most sobering indeed! Especially for a lawyer, -eh?
Prior to the procedure, and in the spirit of the medical release forms I needed to review and acknowledge, fleshing out all the worst case scenarios which ‘free, prior and informed consent’ require, I wrote letters to several friends and family members heartfully sharing in what could have been my last opportunity on this side, my deepest feelings, which helped to unburden the ticker in ways beyond my expectations. What they are moved or not to do with those truths is surely up to them. I fully understand that these were ‘my truths” I shared, and not necessarily theirs.
But then, I do not owe them ‘their truths’. I can only offer the honest and clearest reflections of my own. As my Hawaiian braddah says, with a wisened twinkle in his eye: “I am probably wrong, … but it is true for Kalani!” These are the opportunities we have to over come the seemingly inevitable march of fate and to chance the realization of destiny! Always an uncomfortable and incalculable risk. But this is a most critical part of why we are here, why we are in relationship, and what we must do with the unmeasured moments we are granted in this life. I suffer you might forgive me my truths.
I have, as some of you know, previously identified a malady plaguing me, which I call Pre-Traumatic Stress Syndrome, having spent the last dozen plus years dealing with climate change, seeing things coming down the pike that a lot of folks are not quite focused on. I found several observations that truly capture it nicely, my favorite of which is this, from the astute mind of one of the fathers of ecology, which has guided me over the years through the issues raised in Carolyn Raffensperger’s most thoughtful essay:
“One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds. Much of the damage inflicted on land is quite invisible to laymen. An ecologist must either harden his shell and make believe that the consequences of science are none of his business, or he must be the doctor who sees the marks of death in a community that believes itself well and does not want to be told otherwise.” ~ Aldo Leopold
The disquieting honesty of one’s own, personally crucibled truth, is perhaps the closest thing we can hope to administer in the line of a cure.
“There are no passengers on spaceship earth. We are all crew.” Marshall McLuhan