Believers: Making A Life At The End Of The World
As climate crisis, social fragmentation, and a global pandemic continue to evolve, we are faced with an increasingly urgent question: how are we to live?
Lisa Wells’ Believers (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021) critically examines some possibilities. Each chapter of the book invites a study of people, as Wells’ puts it, “who came to believe that their inherited way of life was destructive and so pursued a different way, each by their own methods and according to their own beliefs”(9).
Woven into these explorations of community and place is Wells’ own story, her early experiences coming of age in 90’s Portland, OR, when radical eco activism, deforestation and development permeated the culture. As she shares in the introduction, her early idealism “was slowly overwhelmed by feelings of fear, anger, powerlessness, and exhaustion…One world was ending, but I had no image for what would come next, and the longer I knelt on the lip of that abyss looking in, the deeper and more cryptic its darkness”(7). Believers seems, in part, an expression of Wells’ ongoing struggle to imagine.
Wells does not shy away from but rather embraces the complexity of the people she profiles, highlighting a central thesis of the book, which is that our flaws are both liabilities and strengths. While we need many ways to imagine and enact new ways of being, community and relationship are essential to all of them.
One of the more interesting and controversial figures of Believers is Finisia, “at once regal and macabre—an otherworldly queen in an elaborate gown of hair and skin” (17). Finisia, who died in 2020, was an “itinerant outlaw” traveling for thirty years of her life, planting swathes of native roots (often illegally on private land), in her mission to “tend and keep the garden of God’s original planting”(13). By turns acerbic, prophetic and sometimes just fowl, Finisia embodies such an absorbed commitment to her calling that it often alienates those around her and undermines her own efforts. A trans woman, Finisia personal stories of transformation and religious conversion are dramatic and well documented in her lively memoirs, which are amply quoted in Believers.
Wells catches up with her in the Wallowa Mountains of Eastern Oregon where she and a small crew are “planting back” native Lomatium, a genus of more than eighty flowering herbs with their own diverse history of uses within Indigenous food and medicine systems. Finisia’s planting process is more nuanced than “simple dropping seeds in the dirt…Successful planting-back requires an intimate knowledge of the plants and a good sense of timing” (25).
It’s Finisia’s relationship with and belief in the plants, above all else, that make her efforts noteworthy but also complex, and circle back to the question of how we are live. While Finisia’s single minded crusade left sustainable gardens and intriguing stories, what meaning do we make of what she left behind? Wells reflects, “While planting a bunch of native species on degraded land is a decent impulse, if you don’t continue to tend them, if you don’t understand the broader context in which you’ve place them, you’ve wasted your time” (260).
The chapters that take up the question of context and offer a deeper exploration of relationships are some of the meatier in the book. Exploring what happens when “community(or the attempts to build community) become the source of tragedy”(168), Wells returns to her early adulthood in Portland, describing in detail the various “scenes” and subcultures espousing and sometimes self-defeating their values and ideologies through a kaleidoscope of questionably radical acts, truly subversive goals, lots of parties and a few meaningful actions. Her friend Peter, known as “the Urban Scout” becomes a parable for “subcultural factionalism” and its various discontents. Wells shares, “The people I knew who cared about living on a just and habitable planet spent much more time and energy negotiating in-group politics, minor disagreements, and lateral aggression then they did confront those entities that posed the greatest threats” (194). Wells’ transformation from idealist to someone else less confident and perhaps more cynical about how to meet the problems that ail us is honestly won.
Relational pitfalls and the “problem of other people” invites a more psychological turn as Wells consider fragmentation of self and community, as well as the project of reconciliation from a psychoanalytic perspective. She arrives at the tentative conclusion that “unless we reckon with what we’ve denied, unless we risk obliteration by bringing the shadow to light, those faces will persist in affecting our life and relationships and nothing will transform” (227).
A curious aspect of the book is its focus on Christianity. Not a Christian herself, Wells positions her interest in exploring Christianity and those working within Christian traditions as an effect of Christianity’s role in shaping empire. Though we might call Christianity the companion of empire, it also becomes the companion of language in Believers. Metaphors and conceits rooted in talk of paradise, resurrection and grace are prolific. And projects rooted in rehabilitating Christianity from a settler colonial force to a “subversive, earth-honoring, empire-resisting, hope-engendering kind of thing…” as the founder of a Christian commune in the New Mexico puts it, are well covered (106).
Though not misplaced, the presence of the Christian project seems to take on a more feverish redemption story as the book advances and one wonders why? There are surely scores of examples of people doing equally interesting work that are not faith based or come from other traditions. The problem here is not what is in the book in this regard, but what might be missing. If we are to radically reimagine life on earth, Christianity, even radically reimagined, may not contain the story that takes us into a new paradigm of relationally.
Overall, Believers is an interesting read that looks at interesting people. It provides a solid analysis of the climate crisis from a particular place, time and vantage point. It is said that you can’t save a place until you love a place and Wells’ choice to include her own journey through time and place help to localize the story, which will be of particular interest to people who reside in the Pacific Northwest. It also helps to underscore the tension between the personal and the collective. It is not one climate crisis we are living in, not one story we all ascribe to or experience. Past, present, and future, are all ongoing, shaped and reshaped by our unique relationships to the land and to the many beings who inhabit the land, including our fellow humans.