BY ELAINE KLAASSEN
In his book “The Land Knows the Way—Eco-Social Insights for Liberation,” well-known artist/activist Ricardo Levins Morales offers a unique perspective on activism and politics as he finds parallels between nature and human social movements.
If you are looking for a warmly personal, expressive, creative and non-academic-sounding “textbook” that “makes ecology and history yummy,” as Levins Morales describes his intentions, this is the book for you. I read it twice and found passage after passage begging to be underlined.
The book was written to help people gain more clarity about making real change; many of his intended readers are organizers, leaders and educators. RLM is practical and said he wanted to give people an idea of how to implement ideas. Soon he will be going to Wisconsin to work with a group of people who have read the book and are looking to follow up with action. They told him they had been reading the book aloud to each other. My friend Nick told me that he and his wife have been reading it to each other too. It’s very beautifully written. Much beauty is also found in Levins Morales’ original artwork gracing the cover and the dividers between sections.
Thankfully, RLM had enough encouragement from enough people, and enough personal courage, to take on the gigantic task of writing in depth about the natural world in relation to facing human-made injustice. The book, equal parts rigor and lyricism, was published in 2025, but “The transition from material-gathering to book-writing took years,” says Ricardo in the acknowledgements at the end of the book. Footnotes and an index are provided to guide readers as they delve into RLM’s magic, sensitivity, deep knowledge, wisdom, strategic intelligence and imagination. Sections are not overwhelmingly long.
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Born to activist parents in Puerto Rico (in our conversation RLM said his dad came out of every possible activist tradition: socialist, labor, communes, Jewish, Left), he grew up close to nature in a low-tech world, tuned in to the sea and land. Landing on the south side of Chicago in the highly industrialized United States of America at age 11, in 1967, created a conflict and a contrast he has contemplated ever since. His respite from that harsh experience is richly remembered in the section “The Summer of ’68,” when he spent the summer with his family in Cuba at age 12.
RLM’s poster “What to do in a pandemic, Our cousins know”
Back in the U.S. after that summer, he describes injuries he incurred running on Chicago’s concrete sidewalks, injuries which he brought with him to his first years of physically demanding factory employment. He concluded that living with such a level of excruciating pain was just the way life was and he was ready to accept his fate. Luckily, he found a chiropractor who helped him. And, remarkably, he understood the chiropractor’s explanations about his spine and bones and muscles as a metaphor for how change takes place in society. It goes slowly, repetition is necessary, eventually there is adaptation, and so on.
Such comparisons, parallels and metaphors abound throughout the book. For example, there’s one about an ocean phenomenon unfamiliar perhaps to most of us landlocked Midwesterners: rip currents, colloquially known as riptides. In the ocean and in the political arena, when you swim right into a riptide, that is, against it, you can’t win. You’ll never get to shore. You are swept out to sea. RLM compared the message of the ultra right in our recent presidential election to a riptide that its opponents tried to counter by “swimming right into it—defending the status quo that the ultra right was attacking, which had no appeal to people hurt by the system.”
The other thought thread in the book contains numerous examples of people rising up against injustice, oppression and exploitation throughout history worldwide. He cites, to mention only a few, the Rebel Kingdom Palmares in the Brazilian jungle in the 1600s; also in the 1600s, impoverished English radicals enacting agrarian communalism; Tecumseh and his brother Tenskwatawa, in the 1800s, intending to unify Native people to hold onto control of their land as it was gradually becoming the United States of America; in the 1970s the liberation movement in Mozambique. Closer to home he talks about the Black Panthers and AIM.
There are so many treasures along the way as you are reading, such as insightful sections on persistence, nonprofits, and trauma.
The words socialism and capitalism, often hot-button words, appear sparingly. In our interview he said that by socialism he means “what’s good for people—every species needs safety, and real safety means safety for everyone, that is, equality … Socialism can encompass a range of social and economic arrangements. When a socialist system hurts people and the environment, it is betraying its mission.”
In “The Second Grade_Liberation Program” section, he writes, “My starting principle when it comes to a program for large-scale change, is that it should be clear enough and simple enough that it could be explained by a second grader,” such as, “No one gets seconds before everyone has had firsts”; and “Clean up after yourself”; and “Don’t take stuff that isn’t yours to take.”
I could go on and on. I first became acquainted with Ricardo Levins Morales’ work during the pandemic, when everybody was trying to “say something” profound about our experience of quarantine and our confrontation with a deadly virus that no one knew much about. Ricardo’s poster with thē profound statement about the pandemic that I really wanted to see— “What to do in a pandemic .… Our cousins know”—was in the window of his studio. And there were ten little squares with images of different animals in them doing what we all needed to do: “Stay aware, Support those most vulnerable, Limit exposure, Wash frequently, Spread calm, Check in with each other, Offer healing support, Rest, Accept your feelings, Organize for a better future.” When I discovered it was art I could afford, I bought the poster right away, and now it’s one of the first things you see when you enter my home. The animals in the little scratchboard images are so wise and endearing it wouldn’t hurt to continue taking their advice in the midst of our current terrible circumstances.
“The Land Knows the Way” is, of course, available in Minneapolis at RLM Art Studio, as well as at Minneapolis bookstores Moon Palace, Boneshaker, Birchbark, and Eat My Words; in St. Paul at Subtext Books; in Hopkins at Cream & Amber; and in Wayzata at The Thinking Spot.
