Environmentalism is not for hippies: "Synchronicity" by John Keeble

We often treat caring about the environment as though it belonged psychologically to the same class of people who listen to flute music played in caves while trying to align their chakras with crystals. It's for hippies, for those who worship some benign and feminized nature goddess and think there's a spirit in every blade of grass.

If there's one thing "Synchonicity" by John Keeble, the second story in the 2019 O.Henry Prize Anthology, does, it's to uncouple this connection. The story takes place in a world where a series of environmental threats are facing the population of a rural Northwest American community. There's a roaming buffalo herd that escaped their corral. There are fires. There's blight of native flora and fauna. There's drought. It's a world a lot like ours now, in other words. But the hero of this world is not the dreamy guy looking to join a nature-worshipping cult. It's a man of action who is expert in fixing things. Ward and Irene's lives have a "deep-seated sobriety and intactness," while Ward cannot understand his sister-in-law's new age religion: "But what does she mean that God is in the trees and rocks of the world, in every animal and plant?"

This PSA's sentiment is not the environmentalist sentiment of "Synchronicity"

The first two people we meet are Ward and Irene, anachronisms who don't own a cell phone or a computer. But man, can Ward fix things. He's extremely capable, and so is Irene. The narrator is always coming to Ward for advice on how to fix his farm tools or to borrow equipment. The opening act is Ward looking through a tractor manual to talk the narrator through fixing his John Deere, while Irene is cooking the tongues of two buffalo Ward had to put down. Telling the story of those buffalo bulls is the majority of the action of the story.

The bulls came into the story when Ward's spacey brother-in-law, Leland, the husband of Irene's sister, bought them in order to take them to the compound of a nature-worshipping cult preparing itself for the end times. But Leland didn't prepare for the bulls correctly, and they immediately escaped. Ward has to come to the rescue, and afterwards, Leland is so scared of the two bulls he asks Ward to keep them. 

Ward prepares and takes action. Leland does not. Leland is the one who believes the "right" things about the environment in the sense that he understands the situation is dire; he is preparing for the end of the world by trying to join the cult. But Ward is the one who prevents waste by keeping things running and getting the maximum value out of everything. Even Ward's name seems to suggest he is a protector, of his family and neighbors for one, but also of nature, since he's the one who is able to successfully corral the bulls for a time.

When Ward rescues the bulls, Leland insists that they were set off by a group of escaped buffalo from an Indian reservation miles away. The story of the escaped Kalispel herd has been on the news, and Leland thinks they came to bring his buffalo away. Ward doesn't believe it. He thinks Leland has an over-active imagination.

Leland imagines that an almost divinely ordained coincidence of events took his buffalo away. The narrator tries to sympathize with Leland by putting a word to all of the things happening at the same time: synchronicity. It's a word that in many ways means the same thing as "coincidence." Both refer to things happening at the same time. But while coincidence is often used specifically to deny divine intervention, as in "it's just a coincidence," synchronicity includes the idea that someone is making those things all happen with a particular timing. The narrator himself isn't quite sure what the word means, but he suspects it "has something to do with the paranormal." Moreover, the word helps to bring "the paranormal within the bounds of intelligibility. It was a question of things falling together in time, a kind of simultaneity...Two things connected by meaning, but not by cause and effect." The narrator seems to be playing it both ways. He uses synchronicity as both "coincidence"--things happening at the same time that seem meaningful--but at the same time not something that someone caused to happen at the same time. So why synchronicity rather than coincidence? Is the narrator himself unsure whether he sides with Leland or Ward? Does he find so many things happening at once too unnerving to write off as caused by blind forces?

The narrator is thinking of a larger synchronicity than just Leland's bulls and the Kalispel herd. He has a long list of things that have happened in one summer. It includes the bulls, but also the drought and fires. He and his wife like to joke that it began with a cow who had a miscarriage and now has put a curse on the year. But maybe their joke hides a real belief in mystical explanations for calamities they are too proud to state out loud. They are not as practical as Ward and Irene. They cannot abandon the idea that the gods are angry.

More than anything, the story debunks this mystical belief in why things are happening to us. As long as human civilization has been around, it's been tempting to ascribe bad things that happen to a community to divine anger. The gods are unhappy with our sacrifice, or our performance of some religious duty, or with how we are selling liquor on Sundays now, or with how our society does not provide for the poor.

Ward refuses this mystical notion of cause and effect. Things have a practical reason. Moreover, the reason isn't really what matters to him so much as how to fix it. Ward has a pragmatic sense of time to match his pragmatic sense of causality. Rather than concerning himself with metaphysical synchronicity, Ward tends to follow "farmer's time," which means something like doing a job when it's time to do it.

Ward never shows his practicality more than when he faces a setback. Ultimately, he fails to keep the bulls safe. They escape one day. The didn't seem to break out; the door was just open. He has to shoot the two bulls, which is why the story opens with Irene cooking their tongues. He could philosophize on why he has failed to be a "ward" or protector of the bulls. He could see divine intervention in the fact that the door was open, but instead he stays focused on practical matters.

Essentially every mention in the story of anything Native American--which we tend to laud in environmental philosophy as the model for how to think of the environment--is derided as hogwash, something gullible white people buy into. The only mention of actual Native Americans is of the "enterprising"--that is, practical--tribe that raised the Kalispel herd. The point isn't to criticize Native Americans themselves, but how Americans are sometimes happy to rewrite their culture as a Mazola commercial. We choose the mystical explanation when there's a plain-sense explanation right in front of us. Environmental calamities have a natural explanation, and either we try to fix that natural cause or, if there's nothing we can do about it, we ignore it and get to work cleaning up the mess.