New article in Backpacker Magazine

My piece in Backpacker Magazine ran last week. It’s part of their “public lands” issue, so the article has as much to do with my Scottish hike as the public lands situation in America.

The photos below are from my hike, from Inverie to Fort William.

I don’t know if I can watch football anymore

During the Bills-Jaguars playoff game last week, two Bills players went down with head injuries. When I watched football years ago, an injury timeout was a bathroom break. Now it’s a lump in my throat.

Head injuries, and what we now know about head injuries, have changed the way I watch the game. Each time a running back gets stood up at the line, I see CTE. Each time a receiver goes up for a ball, I see CTE. Each time the ball is snapped, I see CTE.

CTE, or chronic traumatic encephalopathy, is the brain disease that leads to depression, dementia, and early death among athletes who take repetitive hits to the head.

I’ve watched football since I was a little boy. I played organized football from ages 11 to 18. It taught me discipline, toughness, teamwork. I knew the primal joy of driving your shoulder into a QB’s ribs. I loved football. Part of me still loves the game.

It’s more than just the thrill of being on the field. It’s a family conversation topic—a noncontroversial go-to that serves as a common interest between my dad and me. Since I’ve moved away from Buffalo, I no longer pay attention to local news or politics, but I always keep tabs on the Bills—one of the few things that tethers me to my hometown. It’s a holiday ritual. It’s a source of diversion and high entertainment. It’s the reason I’ve given more Sunday afternoon hugs and high-fives than I can count. I don’t want to stop watching football. But I don’t know if I can anymore.

While researchers have known about CTE occurring in NFL players since 2002, it’s only these past couple of years that fans like myself have become aware of the NFL’s CTE problem. A spate of shocking CTE-related suicides have raised public awareness, most notably in 2012 when Hall of Fame linebacker Junior Seau shot himself in the chest, just three years after retiring. Seau had CTE, as have at least eight other former NFL players who’ve committed suicide in the past ten years.

CTE sank in for me when, a few years ago, I found out that Pro Bowl linebacker and tackling-machine Darryl Talley, was suffering from CTE-like symptoms. As a boy, I remember watching Talley hunt down running backs in his trademark Spider-Man ski suits that he’d wear under his Buffalo Bills uniform on the Bills’ early ’90s Super Bowl teams. Talley, who retired in 1996, has since suffered from depression, chronic injuries, and suicidal thoughts.

“His mental issues have accelerated a lot in the last year,” said Darryl’s wife, Janine Talley, to The Buffalo News. “I don’t know what the future holds for either one of us. I don’t know if in a few years dementia will set in. I don’t know if I’ll be able to care for him.”

Before, I used to cheer whenever there was a big hit. Now I cringe. Before, when players got concussions, I figured they’d gotten their “bell rung” and would be back the following week. Now I imagine them suffering years later from a horrible brain disease. Before, I thought I was being entertained by rich and very lucky athletes. Now I think I’m watching human beings destroy their bodies. And for what? To entertain me?

Darryl Talley — an amazing, unstoppable athlete — is now likely up against a brain disease that he’s totally defenseless against. And maybe it’s partly my fault. It was I who cheered him on to make tough tackles, to play 204 straight games at one of the most punishing positions in the game, to sacrifice his body for his team and fans. Sure, it was Talley’s decision to pursue a dangerous career path, but does he deserve all the blame for his condition? Have I not, with my money and my viewership, turned my thumb in approval? As a fan, am I not partly responsible for supporting a game that reloads onto the field one player after another whose body will be injured and sacrificed and eventually golf-carted away?

Societies have done away with gladiatorial combat, duels, and dog fighting because they’ve deemed such activities barbaric and inhumane. When does a sport cross the line and become inhumane? What is an unacceptable percentage of NFL players doomed to be diagnosed with CTE? Dr. Ann McKee, a director of neuropathology at the Department of Veterans Affairs in Bedford, Mass, says researchers have an “enormously high hit rate” for discovering CTE among deceased NFL players. The brains brought in for study have often been from players who suspected they had CTE, so the numbers are flawed but no less startling: Of the 111 brains of deceased NFL players that have been analyzed, 110 have tested positive for CTE, or 99 percent.

More alarmingly, research has shown that it’s not just the big-hit concussions that cause CTE, but the frequent “subconcussive hits.” Dr. Robert A. Stern, a co-founder of the Center for the Study of Traumatic Encephalopathy at Boston University, estimates that an NFL lineman experiences 1,000-1,500 hits over the course of a season. So on virtually every play we may be seeing CTE developing somewhere on the field. And despite new rules designed to prevent head injuries, there were 199 concussions in 2015, 77 more than the 2014 season’s total.

In 2015, promising Bills rookie Karlos Williams, a big and fast 230-pound running back, known for his downhill power running, experienced a concussion in Week 4 against the Giants. He was out for a month. For days, Williams had to sit in a dark room without light or sound.

“It’s not going to change the way I run the football,” Williams told reporters. “It hasn’t changed the way I run the football. I run the football with an attitude. And I think that’s what the coaches expect of me coming back.”

A player like Williams got to where he is because of his running style. As a fifth round pick in a cutthroat league, Williams knew he couldn’t let up. To remain in the NFL, he has to run “with attitude,” which is another way of saying that he has to continue to run without worrying about getting another concussion. Unlike the players in Talley’s era, Williams probably knows of CTE, yet it didn’t slow down him or his fellow players.

I squirmed whenever Williams got the ball. I want to just root for players to score. But now I root that they don’t get nailed in the head. With knowledge of CTE, the game no longer seems merely tough. Suddenly it feels grotesquely violent, savage, depraved.

We’ve long known that football was dangerous. But up until recently, we thought “dangerous” meant that the players might retire from the league with busted knees and sore backs. We imagined our childhood heroes leaving the game with a hard-earned limp—an inconvenience, but also a scar they’d proudly bear as payment for their years in the spotlight when they had money, fame, and glory. We imagined them coaching a high school football team, or, if they’re lucky, joshing around with fellow ex-ball players on one of those half-time analyst panels. We never imagined them broke, living with dementia, or suicidal.

More and more, I notice the injuries. It seems rare when a full possession goes by without anyone getting hurt. Between 2000 and 2014, there was an average of more than 2,000 injuries in the NFL per year. Because of all these injuries, football players find themselves battered and addicted to pain medications at the end of their careers. The NFL expects that 6,000 of its 20,000 former players will suffer from Alzheimer’s or dementia.

Head injuries are not just an NFL problem. The brains of kids between the ages of 8 and 13 are particularly susceptible to concussions, one of which makes them one and a half times more likely to experience a second. High school football players experience 11.2 concussions for 10,000 practices and games, which may be a fraction of the real number, as studies have shown that 50 percent of high school concussions and 70 percent of college concussions go unreported. In the brains of high school football players, CTE has been found in three of 14 cases. In college players, it’s 48 of 53.

Parents, though, are taking notice. According to an HBO Real Sports/Marist poll, 89 percent of fans are aware of the connection between concussions and long-term brain injury. About a third of adults polled said this information has made them less likely to allow their son to play football. This is supported by a Sports & Fitness Industry Association survey, which found that, between 2008 and 2013, kids playing football between the ages of 6 and 12 fell 29 percent.

Aside from inventing some new concussion-free super helmet, I don’t know if there’s much else the NFL can do to limit head trauma. They’ve made late hits and helmet-to-helmet hits big-yardage penalties. They’ve instituted a concussion protocol for injured players. They settled a $1 billion lawsuit with over 5,000 ex-players who have suffered and were mislead about the risks of concussions. Yet there are as many concussions as ever, not to mention the head trauma that’s a part of each play.

So, given that the danger inherent in the game will never go away, I feel it’s up to me as a fan to decide if I’m okay watching people destroy themselves every week. I don’t think I am, but I still watch.

What will it take? Another high-profile suicide? Another discovery of CTE in one of my favorite players?

Perhaps I should say goodbye, but, after so many years, it’s hard to look away.

Predicting the future with kindness

I’m not so arrogant to think that I’ll have a reader in the distant future. After all, getting read in the present is hard enough. Still, if just out principle, I aspire to be in the good graces of tomorrow’s readers, as I live far more in fear of being called “backwards” by the future reader than “crazy” by the modern.

It’s a reasonable fear. There are countless examples of slaveholders, racists, anti-suffragists, and others who, to our modern eyes, seem like intellectual dunces for being so terribly, terribly wrong. How could they not see that owning another person might someday seem universally wrong and morally stupid? We can’t hand out immoral dunce caps just to the ignorant and dimwitted, because even the brightest of minds are limited by the narrowed thinking of their eras. John Muir, despite being broadminded enough to sympathize with even the most loathed animals, still said some inconsiderate things about Native Americans. Walt Whitman, despite his fondness for all things natural and human, had some expansionist rhetoric that rubs modern readers the wrong way. George Washington, despite risking his life to liberate the colonies of British tyranny, couldn’t properly condemn American slavery. In the eyes of posterity, few of the greats have departed from the world without a serious blemish on their moral resumes. With them in mind, it might be helpful to ask ourselves if we might be clinging onto beliefs that will someday be considered backwards.

Being ahead of one’s time is not impossible. John Stuart Mill, in 1869, was among the first men to call for gender equality. (This was after many women advocated for suffrage, it should be said.) Henry David Thoreau, in the mid-nineteenth century, was in many ways ahead of his time. Thoreau was sympathetic to the plight of Native Americans, accommodating to runaway slaves, outspoken about environmental degradation, and prescient in forecasting the demise of America’s open roaming culture. Aldo Leopold, in the mid-twentieth century, saw that the arc of justice doesn’t just bend toward humankind, but toward animals and ecosystems, too.

We can learn a thing or two about how to see into the future from these philosopher-prophets. I think all it takes is kindness. Kindness of the expansive and openhearted sort. Kindness and consideration for all of life, human and nonhuman.

When we look at the world with kindness, it’s easy to see injustice and suffering. And when we can see injustice and suffering, we can see into the past and future, because what made one person suffer a thousand years ago will probably make another person suffer a thousand years into the future. Slavery, subjugation, inequality, deprivation—they make us suffer no matter our class, country, or century. We’d feel these indignities just as terribly as a galley slave in Rome as we would a mining slave on the moon.

If the arc of the moral universe does indeed bend toward justice, then it’s safe to predict that rights will eventually be given to those who are, and that which is, currently suffering. This is how we can see into the future.

Roderick Nash, in The Rights of Nature, documents the many ways in which the arc of the moral universe has been bent in the last thousand years. Nash suggests that we can anticipate our ethics to expand to welcome other life forms, even lifeless forms, like rocks.

While there’s still much work to be done, we can see, in the past 150 years, amazing progress made in expanding the rights of other races, women, the LGBTQ community, and animals.

What’s next? The climate? Life itself? Ecosystems? Here are a few (plausible) reforms I’d like to see come into force during my lifetime.

• We will no longer be okay with letting creatures live and die by the billions in factory farms.

• The concept of the nation-state erodes to some extent. Our embrace of humanity widens to more fully accept those currently regarded as foreigners.

• Rivers, wildlife corridors, and landscape-scale ecosystems earn legal standing as humans (or some equivalent status that provides them their due protection).

What are your ethical predictions? I don’t think any of the above are a stretch. On all of these topics, books have been written, films have been made, and research has been done that have expanded our knowledge, pricked our consciences, and infiltrated our collective consciousness. If we can predict the things that deserve protection, then maybe, for those of us who consider ourselves writers, we won’t be doomed to be remembered as a laughingstock or an absurdity to future readers. We could be more respected, more oracular, more Thoreauvian.

To the future reader of my work (specifically This Land Is Our Land), if I’m lucky to have one, I’d like to say that I’ve tried to be open minded and forward thinking. Yet I’m sure that I am blind to things that will be self-evident to the people of the future. I’m sure I’ve goofed up. I’m sure I’ve been insensitive. I am, as we all are, constrained by milieus.

Bold and progressive? Maybe in 2018. Yet I wonder if my more sophisticated reader of the future will find something offensive about it. Maybe the idea of people owning land will someday carry the same stigma that people owning people does with us. Maybe I should have titled my book This Land Is Not Our Land or The Land Owns Us. Maybe Woody Guthrie’s lyrics about how this land is “my land” and “your land” will one day seem hopelessly backward. After picking my cover and title, I watched a YouTube video where Native Americans booed Guthrie’s song. I understood why they booed and sympathized, and their boos made me wonder if I’d chosen well.

Accidents happen. While I’ve tried to write all of my books with sensitivity and a kind heart, I already regret a few ignorant passages in Trespassing across America. I wrote that book just a couple of years ago. How insensitive will I look in 300 years? Let those boos and this regret be a reminder for me to more carefully write with the sophisticated reader of the future in mind. Writing with a healthy fear of future readers and with an expansive kindness for the universe may be a good way to keep ourselves from saying things we’d later regret. It might be a good way to be one step ahead of our evolving morality. But this is about more than just how we’ll simply look. I’d like to argue that for the sake of our prosperity, for the sake of our collective conscience, for the sake of the health of the earth, we owe it to ourselves, to future generations, and to all existing life, to treat the universe with an expansive and revolutionary kindness.