Who Are the Watchers?: Sightseers, Snails, and Spirits of Guam
"My mind keeps going back to the sight of that sign on the cave floor, warning that someone was watching, the feeling of sacredness I had in the cave, and the sound of chainsaws outside."
The Fragile tree snail of Guam
My wife and I were driving east across Guam, from the tourist center of Tamuning on the west coast through the rural interior. It was a short trip. It’s only a 20-minute drive across the width of the entire island nation, which is about 12 miles wide and 30 miles long. To the residents of Guam, that’s a trip, but to someone raised in the Midwest of the continental United States, everywhere seemed local.
Still, it was a dramatic change of scenery. Almost before the hotels and trilingual signage of the tourist center was out of sight, the scene shifted to lush tropical forest with only sporadic and light human development. Almost half of Guam is forested. The temperature is around 75-85 degrees Fahrenheit year-round. And though it rains on three-quarters of the days of the year, the rainstorms we experienced were brief and gave way rapidly to sunshine. It seemed like paradise.
However, like most islands which are exposed to a large amount of traffic from other places, the ecosystem of Guam has not fared well. The forests are almost completely devoid of birdsong, for example. Of Guam’s 13 native forest bird species, three have gone entirely extinct, two exist only in captivity, five persist on neighboring islands, and the remaining three are barely hanging on. This is due largely to the brown tree snakes, which were accidentally introduced to the island by U.S. military transports. The island previously had no native species of snake, and there is no natural predator of the snake on the island. As a result, the snake nearly eliminated the native bird population. And the absence of birds, and thus seed transmitters, has caused the forests to start thinning.
We were visiting my sister-in-law, a traveling nurse, and her partner, who is Chamorro—the name for the indigenous people of Guam and the Mariana Islands. Guam had just opened up from its extended COVID quarantine, and we were eager to escape the feeling of isolation created by over a year of social distancing, masking, and remote work. The Asian countries which supplied most of Guam’s tourism had not yet opened up, so it felt like we were the only tourists on the island. The tourist district was abandoned. Never one drawn to crowds or “touristy” places anyway, I was on the hunt for sites of natural beauty, which are abundant in Guam. On this day, we were headed to Marbo Cave on the east coast.
Guam, as I found out from a little pre-trip research, is the largest and southernmost of the Mariana Islands, a Pacific archipelago comprised of fifteen volcanic islands (mostly dormant), ten of which are uninhabited. If you included the part of the island that is underwater, then Guam would be the world’s largest mountain, at almost 39,000 feet tall, stretching from its modest summit 1,300 feet above sea level to its underwater base, which is the deepest surveyed point in the ocean.
Guam lies about half way between Japan (to the north) and Australia (to the south). Though part of the U.S., it’s farther west of Hawaii than Hawaii is west of the continental U.S. It’s both in the “middle of nowhere” and at the center of everything. Its location made it the subject of multiple imperial conquests. First settled by the Chamorro people around the 15th century BCE, it was then colonized by Spain in the 17th century, then occupied by the U.S. after the Spanish-American War in the 19th century, then the Japanese during the Second World War, and then the U.S. again. Guam is a U.S. territory—one step up from a colony. Its residents are U.S. citizens, but their vote isn’t counted.
Guam has long been and remains an important military harbor. The island has been called "the tip of America’s spear” and “America’s unsinkable aircraft carrier”. Almost a third of the island is taken up by U.S. military properties, a naval base, an air base, and a huge ordinance complex–most of it taken with little to no compensation to the residents. In 2011, the military promised to return some of the “excess” land it had taken to the people of Guam, but only about 600 acres of the 36,000 occupied by the military. As of 2021, the military had returned only about half of what was promised. The plan called for about 5 acres near Marbo Cave to be returned, but it also called for a “reversion” (read, taking) of another 80 acres near the cave back to the military.[FN 1]
In spite of its centuries-long history of occupation and takings, my brother-in-law explained to us that the Chamorro people are highly patriotic and view the United States with a mixture of adoration, pride, and envy. This is mostly due to the horrific nature of the Japanese occupation during World War II and the Americans’ subsequent liberation of the island. The rate of military enlistment for residents of Guam is higher per capita than any other grouping, and one in twenty residents of Guam is a military veteran. Nevertheless, in recent years, there has been growing interest in decolonization and even independence.
The flight to Guam from Chicago was over 18 hours long. I can’t write about my visit to the island without acknowledging that flying in a commercial airplane is one of the least environmentally responsible things a person can do nowadays. As far as lifestyle choices go, it’s right up there with eating meat and having lots of children in a country like the US. A 747 uses about one gallon of jet fuel every second. The flight I took to Guam burned around 70,000 gallons of fuel, one way.
I was thinking about this before takeoff when the airline’s welcome video came on the screen in front of me. United Airlines was announcing its pledge to become “100% green” by 2050. It would do this, said the spokesperson, by investing in carbon capture technology and using “sustainable aviation fuel”. In case you’re wondering, no technology currently exists at the scale necessary to significantly offset airline emissions.
Of course, there was no mention of actually reducing flights. Carbon emissions from aviation have continued to rise steadily since the 1940s, in spite of more than three decades of warnings about climate change. The only things that caused aviation emissions to drop (and then only temporarily) in the last two decades were 9-11, the 2008 financial crisis, and COVID.
I wondered what the point of the video was. To make passengers feel less guilty about flying and sell more tickets, no doubt. But I think they were selling something else too, whether or not they realized it: a paradigm or a worldview, one which tells us that technology will solve all of our problems (eventually), that we can enjoy all the perks of late stage capitalism with none of the costs, that we can have our cake and eat it too.
I looked up the company website and found another video talking about future (read, imaginary) technologies, like “jet fuel made from banana peels, electric planes, and zero-emission hydrogen engines”. I wondered how many bananas the passengers of my flight would have to eat to create enough jet fuel to fly to Guam.
As we neared Marbo Cave, we came over a hill and went around a bend, where the road seemed to come to an end. Where the GPS said the road to the cave was, there was instead a fence. And on the other side of the fence was the largest solar farm I had ever seen. Much of it was still under construction. Cut out of the rainforest, leveled, and stretching for what looked like miles, all the way to the ocean, were thousands of solar panels. The size of it is hard to convey. Even the photos I took don’t really do it justice. The size of it was all the more disturbing, given how small the island as a whole is.
Mangilao Solar Project in Guam
There was a time when this sight would have brought me great joy, when I would have thought that projects like this were going to save the planet. Now, I saw something else instead. Destruction. Destruction of forest. Destruction of the home of the other-than-human beings who lived in the forest.
A lot of people might ask, “But isn’t it worth it to save the planet?” Well, I guess that depends on what you mean when you say “the planet”. Clearly “the planet” does not include the forest or the inhabitants of the forest. The solar farm wasn’t being built on the land occupied by the military. And it wasn’t being built in the tourist center either. So when we talk about saving the “planet”, apparently that means human beings (mostly people in the Global North) and all the things we humans like to do–like shop and wage war.
Paul Kingsnorth[FN 2] has written about the transformation of the environmental movement and its appropriation by capitalists and techno-optimists. Environmentalism today, says Kingsnorth isn’t about protecting wild nature; it’s about something called “sustainability”, which means “sustaining human civilization at the comfort level that the world’s rich people–us–feel is their right”.
The environmental movement has become so preoccupied with slowing carbon emissions and promoting renewable energy that it has lost sight of the earth. With the political right denying climate change and chanting “burn baby burn”, and the political left captured by neoliberals who see a “green” economy as an investment opportunity, there’s very few people left to challenge the march of the industrial-capitalist machine across the landscape.
“… vast new conglomerations of human industry are going to appear in places where [renewable] energy is most abundant. Unfortunately, these places coincide with some of the world’s wildest, most beautiful and most untouched landscapes. The sort of places that environmentalism came into being to protect. And so the deserts, perhaps the landscape always most resistant to permanent human conquest, are to be colonised by vast ‘solar arrays’, glass and steel and aluminium, the size of small countries. The mountains and moors, the wild uplands, are to be staked out like vampires in the sun, their chests pierced with rows of 500-foot wind turbines and associated access roads, masts, pylons and wires. … the rainforests, the richest habitats on this terrestrial Earth, are already highly profitable sites for biofuel plantations designed to provide guilt-free car fuel to the motion-hungry masses of Europe and America.
“What this adds up to should be clear enough, yet many people who should know better choose not to see it. This is business as usual: the expansive, colonising, progressive human narrative, shorn only of the carbon. It is the latest phase of our careless, self-absorbed, ambition-addled destruction of the wild, the unpolluted and the non-human. It is the mass destruction of the world’s remaining wild places in order to feed the human economy. And without any sense of irony, people are calling this ‘environmentalism’.”
— Paul Kingsnorth, “Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist” (2011)[FN 2]
The cave was actually still there, it turned out. Following the road around the solar farm, we found a dirt parking lot and a path leading a short way to the cave. When we parked and got out of the car, we were surrounded by forest, but I could hear chainsaws nearby. We were on the edge of an active deforestation. Carbon sinking trees were being cut down to make way for more solar panels.
We walked to the cave entrance and then climbed down the stone stairway. Marbo is a small limestone cave, but nonetheless unique. The water is crystal clear. The place had the feeling of a religious shrine. We could feel it was sacred. Instinctively, we kept our voices low. We couldn’t hear the chainsaws inside the cave, but the memory of the sound hung over us ominously. Later, we found out that the cave is indeed a sacred place to the Chamorro people. We spent an hour or so wading and exploring the cave’s nooks and crannies.
Marbo Cave in Guam
As we were getting ready to leave the cave, I found the remnants of a sign on the ground. The part that I could read said:
“ANCIENT CHAMORU CAVE”
“[?]TORS ARE WATCHING NO LITTERING”
The name of those watching was damaged. Maybe it said “ancestors” or maybe something else. I was left wondering: Who was watching? How had the sign been damaged? Was it intentional or neglect? What was the meaning of the sign’s destruction? Were the watchers still watching? Was the destruction of the sign related to the destruction that was happening a short distance from the cave’s mouth? Was it related to a loss of respect for whoever was said to be watching?
Today, almost all of Guam is Christian–mostly Catholic. But before their assimilation by Christianity, the Chamorro people were animists. They did not have gods, in the Western sense of the word. They told the Spanish missionaries that the world had been created by beings with whom they claimed kinship, the taotaomo’na [click here for pronunciation], the ancestral spirits. They honored, but did not “worship” per se, these spirits.
I later learned that the taotaomo’na include both those ancestors who are remembered, as well as the remote ancestors from before the time of the colonizers. These spirits lived in the material world with the Chamorro. They might reside in the skulls of the deceased, kept in household shrines, or they might inhabit remote places in the forests, especially banyan trees, which they would protect. Even today, locals will request permission of the spirits before entering the forest, taking fruit or wood from it, or relieving themselves in it.[FN 3]
When I got back home and looked it up, I learned that the solar farm is called the Mangilao Solar Project, which was being built by Korea Electric Power Company (KEPCO). At the time I saw it, there were about 150,000 solar panels. Another similar-sized project was underway on another part of the island.
The Mangilao project was delayed in 2019, I learned, due to concerns about erosion and the discovery that the site was home to a population of very rare snails, called the “Fragile tree snail”, aka Samoana fragilis. The half-inch long Fragile tree snail is so named for its thin, semi-transparent shell. The snail population on Guam has long been threatened by invasive species and habitat loss. Tree snails play an important role in forest communities by breaking down decaying plant matter and removing microorganisms from leaves.
At one time, snails were so abundant on the island that thousands could be counted in a single day. Now, only four or five communities of the Fragile tree snail exist, each with less than 100 individuals. It is one of six snail species native to the Mariana Islands, three of which are already extinct. This extinction event has taken place over just 20 years, making it one of the most dramatic rates of extinction ever recorded. Guam is a condensation of the same forces that shape the U.S. mainland: colonization, exploitation, racism, militarization, environmental degradation, and extinction. Because of the small size of the island, those forces are amplified and accelerated.
One of the remaining communities of the Fragile tree snail lives near Ritidian, on the northern point of Guam. In 2019, as part of a buildup of military personnel, the Marine Corp announced the construction of a new base, which would include housing and firing ranges. The plans called for the destruction of 1,000 acres of forest. The area includes the habitat of the endangered Mariana fruit bat and the Mariana eight-spot butterfly, Guam’s sole mature hayun lagu tree, and a community of Fragile tree snails. To “mitigate” the destruction, the Marine Corps promised to “enhance” 1,000 acres of forest elsewhere on Guam—not that it will help the Mariana fruit bat, the hayun lagu tree, or the Fragile tree snails. Sienna Hiebert, a Navy-contracted botanist on Guam, summed up the situation well: “For some reason, to save a forest you have to destroy a nicer one.”[FN 4]
Another one of the surviving communities of Fragile tree snails is near Marbo Cave. A study done by researchers from the University of Guam between 2016 and 2018 found a previously unknown population of Fragile tree snails which extended into the footprint of the construction zone of the Mangilao Solar Project. In 2017, researchers reported finding 61 individual snails. The next year, they found only 30.[FN 5] Because the snail is on the Endangered Species List, the solar farm project had to revise its plans to avoid the snail habitat.
From a certain perspective, one I shared not too long ago, the notion of slowing the progress of a solar farm to save a rare species of snail, one probably destined for extinction anyway, would have been absurd at best, and suicidally misanthropic at worst. Nowadays, my perspective has largely flipped. Now it is cutting down the forest for a massive solar farm which appears to be absurd and suicidal, part of a suicide pact that we humans have made with industrial capitalism.
In Hawaii, the indigenous peoples call tree snails “the voice of the forest”. The snails don’t actually make noise, but as evolutionary biologist Rebecca Rundell explains, “These species are an important part of life on earth, and when they start going extinct, it means that something is really wrong with the environment that supports us.”
When I went looking for more information about the Fragile tree snail, I came across a truly unique document called “The Tree Snail Manifesto” by Michael Hadfield and Donna Haraway. It’s not really a manifesto, per se, but a “two-voiced paper” which combines autobiography, science, politics, and philosophy. The first part of the Manifesto is written by Hadfield, a professor of marine biology. It is the story—his story—of a scientist’s unique love for marine invertebrates, especially endangered Pacific land snails, and how that led to a life of political activism, focused on resisting the anthropogenic extinction of other-than-human species, the military’s destruction of Pacific islands, and Washington’s political suppression of science.
Dr. Michael Hadfield. Photo taken in 2019 for an interview following the death of the tree snail, “George”, age 14, the last survivor of the yellow-tipped snail species, Achatinella apexfulva. George didn’t become sexually mature until 2012, by which time, every other member of his species was already dead.
Hadfield began studying Pacific island tree snails in Hawaii in 1973. When he first encountered the snails, two-thirds of them were already extinct due to tree harvesting for timber, livestock grazing, clearing of forests for agriculture, introduced predators from the U.S. mainland, and shell collecting. Tree snails are especially vulnerable to these threats due to their late sexual maturity and low fecundity. Eventually, with Hadfield’s help, the tree snails were extended protection under the Endangered Species Act, despite the resistance of the Reagan administration. Hadfield went on to establish a laboratory devoted to the captive propagation of the snails and constructing fences in the field to protect the snails from predators and shell collectors.
One of Hadfield’s studies was conducted in the Makua Valley on the northwest coast of Oahu. The valley was the location of live-fire training for the U.S. Army. Conducting the searches for the snails was difficult, not only due to the remoteness of the location, but also because of the large amount of unexploded ordinance which was present, which required the researchers to be accompanied by Army explosives specialists. Hadfield’s alarm at the rate of disappearance of the forest from year to year led to one of his first acts of resistance in 1982, when he escorted a Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund lawyer to the valley to show them what was happening. That led to a lawsuit being filed for violations of the Endangered Species Act and ultimately the cessation of the Army’s live-fire activities in the valley.
Hadfield’s study of tree snails eventually took him from Hawaii to Guam and then to the island of Pagan, one of the Northern Mariana Islands in the same archipelago as Guam. He describes the dramatic beauty of the island, which consists of three volcanos, one of them active. The island was long inhabited by the Chamorro people, but was depopulated after a volcanic eruption in 1981. Hadfield found remains of ancient Chamorro villages in the form of large stone house posts (latte stones) and stones with depressions used for grinding nuts. (We came across these in the jungle in Guam as well.) They also found several populations of endangered tree snails.
Pagan island in the Northern Mariana Islands was the planned site for military live-fire practice.
Thus, Hadfield and his students were shocked to learn of a plan to use Pagan island as a dumping ground for debris from the 2011 Fukushima tsunami. They began a campaign to stop the planned dumping.[FN 6] They succeeded, only to find out that the U.S. military then planned to use the island for live-fire practice. There is a long and shameful history of the military using Pacific islands as targets for bombs and artillery, rendering them unsafe for future habitation, either due to unexploded ordinance or radioactive waste. As of the writing of the Manifesto in 2019, Hadfield was still fighting to protect Pagan island. Just last year, though, after nine years of protest, an announcement was made that the military was finally withdrawing its plan for Pagan island.
The second part of the Tree Snail Manifesto was written by Donna Haraway. Haraway is a difficult thinker to classify. She writes about ecology, science, feminism, and epistemology. Her style could not be more different from Hadfield’s economical and understated writing. She uses densely wound language to weave a vision of embodied ecocentric alternatives to our alienated anthropocentrism.
”The dominant western philosophical and scientific traditions have emphasised the exceptional nature of human beings. Since the 18th-century Enlightenment, what constitutes the human is its difference from all the “others”—from gods, demons, creepy-crawlies, blobs, slaves and, above all, animals. The relentless quest for something that creates a gap between what’s human and what’s not, that’s human exceptionalism.”
— Donna Haraway, “Interview: The age of entanglement”, The New Scientist (2008)
At the core of Haraway’s thinking is the idea of “entanglement”, the notion that:
“To be a human is always to be in a relationship with a host of others: plants, animals, humans, dead, living, fantasised. To be on Earth is to be in a companion-species relationship in the sense of coming into being with a crowd of others, and in the sense that we shape and reshape each other into what we are.”
We are never so alone as we think. We are always together with the other-than-human, both the living and the dead. We are always already entangled with one another in webs of materiality and significance. Haraway uses the story of her friend and colleague, Hadfield, to illustrate this. She concludes the Manifesto by highlighting how the entanglement of scientists and snails opened space for environmental justice.
“Michael and scientists like him fiercely claim other forces of love, knowledge, and rage nurtured from the beginning in marine laboratories in order to expand them now for the work of holding open space for possible multispecies, including human, flourishing in the face of past and ongoing destruction. Multispecies environmental justice is the goal. Making peace (for snails as well as people) in the Pacific requires a militant practice. … revolt is both possible and necessary. The tree snails are not the only ones depending on this fact. …
“the Pacific Island tree snails have led their scientist to ideas, places, and practices that the graduate student enthralled by the vermetid mollusks could not have imagined. The geopolitical scientific practice of care changes lives across species … What has followed for a marine invertebrate developmental biologist in love with tree snails and their knotted, entangled worlds has been a storm of sustained activism in league with diverse allies who refuse to cede this place, with its human and nonhuman beings, to destruction.”
— “The Tree Snail Manifesto”, Donna Haraway and Michael Hadfield (2019)
The snail community at Marbo Cave is located in an area of less than one square mile, which is supposed to be quarantined from the construction–though I have my doubts about the effectiveness of isolating such a small area for protection, as if the forest weren’t a vast interconnected web of which the snails were a part. When I was at the cave, they were probably close by. But at the time, I didn’t even know it. For all intents and purposes, they were invisible to me. Kind of like spirits, now that I think about it.[FN 7]
In Spell of the Sensuous: Perception & Language in the More-Than-Human World (1996), ecologist David Abram describes an experience he had in Bali while staying at the home of a magic practitioner. He describes how he observed the wife of the magician carrying little platters of rice into the forest in the mornings. When he asked her about it, she said it was for the spirits.
One day, Abram went to the place where he had seen her go and noticed that the platters of rice were empty. Upon closer examination, he saw that tiny black ants were carrying off the rice kernels. At first, Abram mused that the ants were “stealing” the woman’s offerings. But then he wondered: What if the ants were the very spirits to whom the offerings were being made?
According to anthropologists, the Balinese people practice “ancestor worship”. The same is said of the Chamorro people. But what does that mean? Westerners, influenced by a dualistic Christianity, have a certain conception of what a “spirit” is, one which often differs from that of people who have not been assimilated by Christianity. Abram suggests that the spirits of indigenous cultures might simply be other-than-human forms of awareness or intelligence, which are neither anthropomorphic nor incorporeal.
“… most indigenous tribal people have no such ready recourse to an immaterial realm outside earthly nature. Our [Western/Christian] strictly human heavens and hells have only recently been abstracted from the sensuous world that surrounds us, from this more-than-human realm that abounds in its own winged intelligences and winged powers. For almost all oral cultures, the enveloping and sensuous earth remains the dwelling place of both the living and the dead. … and at death the body’s decomposition into soil, worms, and dust can only signify the gradual reintegration of one’s ancestors and elders into the living landscape, from which all, too, are born. …
“death, in tribal cultures, initiates a metamorphosis wherein the person’s presence does not ‘vanish’ from the sensible world … but rather remains as an animating force within the vastness of the landscape … ‘Ancestor worship,’ in its myriad forms, then, is ultimately another mode of attentiveness to non-human nature.”
— David Abram, Spell of the Sensuous (1996)
This description seems to fit what I was learning about the animism of the Chamorro people as well. The spirits of the Chamorro defy the Western dualistic categorization of nature versus culture; they are both nature spirits and ancestor spirits. I had remembered Abram’s story as I read about the Fragile tree snail and thought about the meaning of the damaged sign in Marbo Cave. If to be aware is in some sense to “watch”, then is it possible that those who the sign said were watching were the snails?
At this point, I have to pause to insert a caveat. It’s one thing for Abram to explain how he himself makes sense of the indigenous rituals he witnessed in Bali and other places. But I think he goes too far when he suggests that this is how the Balinese people–and indeed, all indigenous/tribal/oral people–understand their rituals. He may, in fact, be making the same mistake that he condemned in those Western anthropologists and missionaries–projecting his own interpretations onto colonized people. Notice, for example, that he did not go back to the wife of the magician and ask her what she thought of his insight into the meaning of her offerings.
But that’s not to say there isn’t value in Abram’s interpretation. After all, there is no such thing as a “pure” culture. The animism of the indigenous Balinese, for example, is now overlaid with centuries of Hindu influence, in much the same way that the underlying animism of the Chamorro is overlaid by centuries of Catholicism. Abram’s interpretation of the Balinese ritual, although it might differ from the interpretations of the local practitioners, is worthwhile in so far as it neither disregards the ritual as superstition, nor resorts to a supernatural, and hence dualistic, framework for understanding what was going on. This is, I think, the essence of animism.
But what exactly does this mean? Is Abram saying that, at death, the Balinese people are transformed into ants? Is he making a case for reincarnation or the transmigration of the soul? I don’t think so. I think what he is trying to say is that the world is full of intelligent awareness, and we humans are just one form of awareness, and when our current form disintegrates at death, we return to the elements and we become other forms of intelligent awareness. And so, if we wish to find our respected ancestors anywhere, we need look no further than the other beings–both human and other-than-human–all around us.
Marbo Cave after flooding caused by the construction of the nearby solar farm.
We were at Marbo Cave on June 29, 2021. Less than a month later, after we had returned to the continental U.S., my sister-in-law called to tell us that the cave had been flooded with mud. The formerly crystal clear waters were now opaque brown. My wife and I were heartbroken–and then angry.
The cause of the flood, it turned out, was the solar farm. The company doing the construction, Samsung E&C America, had failed to build the ponding basins which the project plans called for. Also damaged by the flooding were multiple cultural sites. And human burial remains were exposed. News reports reflected the outrage of many of the Chamorro people at the desecration. One unsympathetic observer remarked, callously but accurately, “Marbo Cave is toast; a burnt offering to the green god.”
A lawsuit was filed by the Guam government, which resulted in a measly $1 million settlement, down from an original fine of $18 million.[FN 8]
The Mangilao Solar Project went online last summer.
My mind keeps going back to the sight of that sign on the cave floor, warning that someone was watching, the feeling of sacredness I had in the cave, and the sound of chainsaws outside. I imagined that some harm had come to the snails, and that the flooding of the cave was the aggrieved response of their spirits. Or perhaps it was the taotaomo’na, angry at the leveling of the forest. Or maybe the spirits of the pre-colonial Chamorro were playing out the role of the devils to which they were relegated by their Catholic descendants. Or maybe it’s all the same thing, the snails and the spirits and the devils. The truth is, I can’t sort out the threads from where I now sit, over 7,000 miles and 15 time zones away, like some armchair anthropologist.
And maybe that’s not the point anyway. In fact, maybe that’s part of the problem—all of our attempts to pull things apart, to treat them like they exist in isolation, that they’re not all intricately wound together, or “entangled” to use Donna Haraway’s term. Conservationist John Muir famously wrote, “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.” When we tug at a single strand of the weave, the whole begins to unravel.
When we try to quarantine a snail population in a square acre of forest, the result is extinction. When we act like a solar farm isn’t part of the land around it, the result is mudslides. When we try to separate the spirits from the more-than-human material world, the result is spiritual alienation. When we try to separate ourselves from nature, the result is universal devastation.
And when we try to separate the parts of our story that are simple or pretty from those that make us confused or uncomfortable, we get whitewashed history sanitized of our complicity, idealized myths of the “noble savage”, and political propaganda. The liberation of Guam by U.S. military forces in World War II can’t be separated from the unjust occupation of the island by the U.S. military today. The animism of the ancient Chamorro people can’t be separated from the Catholicism of their descendants. The renewable energy project at Mangilao can’t be separated from the corporate drive for profit over people. And this essay can’t be separated from the tens of thousands of gallons of jet fuel that brought me to Guam and back.
At hearing the news of the mudslide, I wondered what had happened to the Fragile tree snails. I can’t find any mention of them since the disaster. But I suspect that a company so careless about erosion and impact to sacred cultural sites would have little regard for 30 or so tiny snails. I wondered how I had come to care for these tiny beings, whom I had never actually met, whom I knew only in the absence of their presence and the presence of their absence.
And I wondered if the snails were those who watched the cave, and if they were gone, then who watches now? I think the answer is maybe that the snails were the watchers, but they weren’t the only ones. Other species watch. Other endangered species like the Guam tree snails and humped tree snails, the Green sea turtles and Hawksbill sea turtles, the Mariana fruit bats and the Mariana eight-spot butterflies.
And the dead still watch, like the many species of birds that once filled the forests of Guam with song, the Guam broadbills and the Guam reed-warblers to name a couple. I think the invasive species watch too, like the Brown tree snakes who ate so many of those birds—they are no less a part of that entangled world.
And the humans watch too, the local Chamorro—both the living and the dead, some of their bodies recently disinterred by the flood after who knows how long. The construction workers at the Mangilao Solar Project watch too. And even the tourists, like me, we watch.
There is no escaping our mutual entanglement. Birds and snakes. Snails and spirits. Scientists and sightseers. Human and other-than. Living and dead.
But we humans have to do more than watch. We have the ability to see this entanglement and know it for what it is—the web of life. And if we are to avoid greater catastrophe, then rather than denying the existence of the web or trying to untie its knots, we must hold it sacred, honor it, and protect it.
Notes
For more on the military’s use of eminent domain in Guam, see here. For more on the legacy of the military’s occupation of the Mariana Islands, see here.
I cannot unequivocally endorse Paul Kingsnorth’s writing after the spring of 2020. After that time, following his conversion to Orthodox Christianity, Kingsnorth’s slide from Green anarchism to proto-fascism became undeniable. All the quotes in this essay by Kingsnorth come from before that shift. See here for more on this.
For more on the military’s Ritidian project, see here.
For the findings of the study of the tree snails in Guam, see here.
For more on Hadfield’s campaign to stop the destruction of Pagan island, see here.
In his essay, “The Invisibles: Toward a phenomenology of the spirits”, David Abram writes that “Invisibility is not, at first, an attribute of some immaterial or supernatural domain beyond the sensuous, but is integral to our encounter with visible nature itself. … The ‘spirits’ or ‘invisibles’ spoken of by oral, indigenous peoples are not aphysical beings, but are a way of acknowledging the myriad dimensions of the sensuous that we cannot see at any moment. … They are a way of holding our senses open to what is necessarily obscured from view … a simple and parsimonious way of remembering our ongoing dependence upon powers we did not create, whose activities we cannot control.”
For more on the mudslide and the government’s settlement, see here and here.
JOHN HALSTEAD
John Halstead is the author of Another End of the World is Possible, in which he explores what it would really mean for our relationship with the natural world if we were to admit that we are doomed. John is a native of the southern Laurentian bioregion and lives in Northwest Indiana, near Chicago. He is a co-founder of 350 Indiana-Calumet, which worked to organize resistance to the fossil fuel industry in the Region. John was the principal facilitator of “A Pagan Community Statement on the Environment.” He strives to live up to the challenge posed by the Statement through his writing and activism. John has written for numerous online platforms, including Patheos, Huffington Post, and Gods & Radicals. He is Editor-at-Large of NaturalisticPaganism.com. John also edited the anthology, Godless Paganism: Voices of Non-Theistic Pagans and authored Neo-Paganism: Historical Inspiration & Contemporary Creativity. He is also a Shaper of the Earthseed community, more about which can be found at GodisChange.org.