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D i s c u s s i o n C o u r s e o n

discovering a sense of place

I n t r o d u c t i o n / D i s c o v e r i n g a S e n s e o f P l a c e N O R T H W E S T E A R T H I N S T I T U T E

Northwest Earth Institute 317 SW Alder, Suite 1050

Portland, OR 97204 (503) 227-2807

E-mail: [email protected] Web site: www.nwei.org

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See “Permissions” pages for information on reading materials; these cannot be

reproduced without separate permission.

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Four artists contributed original illustrations to this course book. NWEI is deeply grateful for their generosity.

Illustrations on pp. I-1, II-1, and III-14 were contributed by Virginia Church, 823 S.E. 45th, Portland, OR 97215.

Illustrations on p. IV-1 and p. VI-1 were contributed by Jere Grimm, 2774 N.W. Thurman, Portland, OR 97210.

Illustration on p. III-18 contributed by Joy Prideaux.

This publication was printed on 100% recycled, 100% postconsumer paper with soy-based ink.

N O R T H W E S T E A R T H I N S T I T U T E C o n t e n t s / D i s c o v e r i n g a S e n s e o f P l a c e

coUrse evalUaTion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5

preface . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8

gUidelines for THe WeeKlY faciliTaTor . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9

inTrodUcTion (with map) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10 "The United States of Nature" by William Stolzenburg

discUssion gUides and readings

session i . a sense of place . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . I-1 “Living Where You Live” by Hannah Holmes “The Sense of Place” by Wallace Stegner “Everybody’s Ditch” by Robert Michael Pyle “The Spirit of Place” by Wade Davis “In Praise of Hometowns" by Mary Pipher “My Empty Lot” by Joseph Kastner

session ii . responsibiliTY To place . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . II-1 “The Land Ethic” by Aldo Leopold The Rediscovery of North America by Barry Lopez “Homeplace,” by Scott Russell Sanders “Notes on Living Simply in the City” by Marilyn Welker

session iii . KnoWing YoUr bioregion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . III-1 “Initiation” by Tom Jay “Where Currents Merge: The Maritime Northwest” by Steve Johnson “Valley of the Long Grasses” by Peter Boag “Sauvie Island: A Remnant of the Old Time” by Florence Riddle “Geology of Portland” by Marshall Gannett

session iv . living in place . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . IV-1 “Bioregionalism: The Politics of Place” by Daniel Coleman “Speaking for Douglas Fir” by Gary Snyder “Crafting Nativeness" by Jeff Bickart “Gardening at the Seam” by Judith Larner Lowry “There’s No Specialization Like Home” by John K. Bullard “Reweaving Our Soul Connection with Food” by Paul Conrad

session v . Mapping YoUr place . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . V-1 “Mapping the Biosphere” by Gene Marshall “Mapping the Sacred Places” by Jan DeBlieu “Raise the Grates!” by Sabrina Merlo

conTenTs T A B L E O F

C o n t e n t s / D i s c o v e r i n g a S e n s e o f P l a c e N O R T H W E S T E A R T H I N S T I T U T E

session vi . bUilding local coMMUniTY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . VI-1 “The Web of Life” by Scott Russell Sanders “Home is Other People" by Mary Pipher “Community-Based Restoration” by Christine Schneider “A Watershed Runs Through You" by Freeman House “A Green Architect Falls in Love...with FrogSong Cohousing" by Joseph F. Kennedy “Help Groups” by Steve Whitson Neighborhood connections worksheet

session vii . eMpoWerMenT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . VII-1 “Making a Difference” by Katrina Shields The Power of One by Sharif Abdullah “Making the Connection" by Susan Cerulean "Push for Change" by Ann Sihler “Facts about Geese” by Angeles Arrien

session viii . celebraTion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . VIII-1

appendiX Instructions for Local Supplements for Session III . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . A-1 Bioregional Quiz Answer Sheet (Example for Portland area) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . B-1 Script for the Mapping Exercise . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . C-1 Permissions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . D-1

N O R T H W E S T E A R T H I N S T I T U T E E v a l u a t i o n 2 0 0 7 / D i s c o v e r i n g a S e n s e o f P l a c e

evalUaTion Discovering a sense of Place

Course location: _____________________________ Your name (optional): _______________________________________________ This evaluation form is extremely important for use in revising and upgrading the course book . We suggest removing this page now and using it as a bookmark. please fill out part 1 of the form weekly, while thoughts about the readings are still fresh in your mind . fill out part 2 after the last class .

Part 1. Please fill out weekly. please rate the seven sessions and write suggestions . What was best about each session and what was weakest? be as specific as possible about suggestions for improvement .

poor choice - - - - - - - - - - - - - - excellent

I. A Sense of Place 1 2 3 4 5

suggestions

_____________________________________________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________________________________________

II. Responsibility to Place 1 2 3 4 5

suggestions

III. Knowing Your Bioregion 1 2 3 4 5

suggestions

IV. Living in Place 1 2 3 4 5

suggestions

V. Mapping Your Place 1 2 3 4 5

suggestions

E v a l u a t i o n 2 0 0 7 / D i s c o v e r i n g a S e n s e o f P l a c e

N O R T H W E S T E A R T H I N S T I T U T E

VI. Building Local Community 1 2 3 4 5

suggestions _____________________________________________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________________________________________

VII. Empowerment 1 2 3 4 5

Were the following readings helpful? circle “Y” if we should continue to use the article, or “n” if we should look for better reading material . leave blank if you didn’t read it or have no opinion . comments: I. “Living Where You Live,” Holmes Y N “The Sense of Place,” Stegner Y N “Everybody’s Ditch,” Pyle Y N “The Spirit of Place,” Davis Y N “In Praise of Hometowns," Pipher Y N “My Empty Lot,” Kastner Y N

II. “The Land Ethic,” Leopold Y N The Rediscovery of North America, Lopez Y N “Homeplace,” Sanders Y N “Notes on Living Simply in the City,” Welker Y N

III. “Initiation,” Jay Y N “Where Currents Merge,” Johnson Y N “Valley of the Long Grasses,” Boag Y N “Sauvie Island,” Riddle Y N “Geology of Portland,” Gannett Y N

IV. “Bioregionalism: The Politics of Place,” Coleman Y N “Speaking for Douglas Fir,” Snyder Y N “Crafting Nativeness,” Bickart Y N “Gardening at the Seam,” Lowry Y N “There’s No Specialization Like Home,” Bullard Y N “Reweaving Our Soul Connection With Food,” Conrad Y N

V. “Mapping the Biosphere,” Marshall Y N “Mapping the Sacred Places” DeBlieu Y N “Raise the Grates,” Merlo Y N

comments:

N O R T H W E S T E A R T H I N S T I T U T E E v a l u a t i o n 2 0 0 7 / D i s c o v e r i n g a S e n s e o f P l a c e

VI. “The Web of Life,” Sanders Y N “Home is Other People," Pipher Y N “Community-Based Restoration,” Schneider Y N “A Watershed Runs Through You," House Y N “A Green Architect Falls in Love...,” Kennedy Y N “Help Groups,” Whitson Y N Neighborhood connections worksheet Y N

VII.“Making a Difference,” Shields Y N The Power of One, Abdullah Y N “Making the Connection," Cerulean Y N "Push for Change," Sihler Y N “Facts About Geese,” Arrien Y N

Part 2. Please comPlete at enD of course.

do you know of other articles, books, chapters or excerpts that should be included in one of the seven sessions? if so, describe:

__________________________________________________________________________________ __________________________________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________________________

What one thing would you change in the course?

__________________________________________________________________________________ __________________________________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________________________

Has the course made a difference in your life? Yes no if so, describe:

__________________________________________________________________________________ __________________________________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________________________

The NWEI volunteer will collect evaluations at the final session. If that does not work out, please send your completed evaluation to

NWEI, 317 SW Alder, Suite 1050, Portland, OR 97204.

Thanks for your participation!

The Northwest Earth Institute currently offers seven discussion courses:

• Discovering a Sense of Place focuses on knowing and protecting the place you live. • Choices for Sustainable Living offers practical ways to preserve the Earth for future generations. • Globalization and Its Critics explores the impacts of the global economy on the Earth. • Healthy Children/Healthy Planet examines the issues parents face raising children in a

consumer-driven culture. • Global Warming: Changing CO2urse addresses the urgent need for change in order to respond effectively to climate change.

The courses are intended to promote dialogue, not consensus. With the aid of readings in the course book and the discussion format, participants learn from themselves and from each other.

In offering the following courses, NWEI has a singular purpose: motivating people to accept greater responsibility for the Earth and to act on that commitment. Because participants come into the course with diverse values, attitudes, and habits, accepting greater responsibility is an individual matter.

As you begin this course, we urge you to make it a high priority for the next eight weeks. Consider carefully your reaction to the readings and the thoughts of others in the class.

This revised course book is the result of work by a dedicated committee of NWEI volunteers. For those who will benefit from their efforts, we thank Kathy Brewer, Beth Heins, Elise Lind, Dana Greyson, Jon Hoff, Charolotte Meyer, Kate Stephenson, Jan Lorah and Jeanne Roy.

Benefits of this course will be greatest wherever there is a local supplement for communities outside the Willamette Valley, particularly for Session III, Knowing Your Bioregion. If you do not receive a supplement, the Northwest Earth Institute has developed a guide for groups interested in creating a local supplement for Session III. The guide can be found on page A-1 in the Appendix.

Please complete the evaluation form at the beginning of the course book. The course will be revised based on these evaluations.

Thank you, The staff of NWEI

preface

P r e f a c e / D i s c o v e r i n g a S e n s e o f P l a c e

N O R T H W E S T E A R T H I N S T I T U T E

N O R T H W E S T E A R T H I N S T I T U T E G u i d e l i n e s / D i s c o v e r i n g a S e n s e o f P l a c e

gUidelines FOR THE FACILITATOR AND OPENER

For each session of this course, one participant brings an “opening,” and a second participant facilitates the discussion. The roles rotate each week with a different group member doing the opening and facilitating. This process is at the core of the Earth Institute culture —it assumes we gain our greatest insights through self- discovery, promoting discussion among equals with no teacher.

for THe session faciliTaTor:

As facilitator for one session, your role is to stimulate and moderate the discussion. You do not need to be an expert or the most knowledgeable person about the topic.

Your role is to: • Remind the designated person ahead of time to bring an opening. • Begin and end on time. • Ask the questions included in each chapter, or your own. • Keep discussion focused on the session’s topic. A delicate balance is best— don’t force the group into

the questions, but don’t allow the discussion to drift too far. • Manage the group process, using the guidelines below:

A primary goal is for everyone to participate and to learn from themselves and each other. Draw out quiet participants by creating an opportunity for each person to contribute. Don’t let one or two people dominate the discussion. Thank them for their opinions and then ask another person to share. Be an active listener. You need to hear and understand what people say if you are to guide the discussion effectively. Model this for others. The focus should be on personal reactions to the readings—on personal values, feelings, and experiences. The course is not for judging others’ responses or problem solving. Consensus is not a goal.

for THe session opener:

• Bring a short opening, not more than five minutes. It should be something that expresses your personal appreciation for the natural world. Examples: a short personal story, an object or photograph that has special meaning, a poem, a visualization, etc. You can be creative.

• The purpose of the opening is twofold. First, it provides a transition from other activities of the day into the group discussion. Second, since the opening is personal, it allows the group to get better acquainted with you. This aspect of the course can be very rewarding.

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Indigenous peoples around the world have always had a sense of place. Their survival depended on an intimate understanding of and respect for their bioregion: the distinctive climate, soils, water sources, plants, and animals of the places where they lived. Caring for the Earth was caring for themselves.

Since the industrial revolution, our survival needs have been met in ways that do not require an intimate connection with the Earth. We have become separated from nature, seasons, and the places we live, as our daily activities have moved indoors to schools, factories, and offices. Time once spent outdoors is now spent interacting with machines. Where the original inhabitants of our homeplaces gained their sustenance from the land, we purchase goods in stores, often after they have been transported from distant places. Where people once had no choice but to focus their energies on their immediate community, we have the use of automobiles, airplanes, and electronic media to extend our reach across town, across the country, across the ocean. Consequently, we are much less aware of our impact on the natural world.

In our mobile society, human artifacts — shopping malls, office towers, restaurants, and supermarkets — arise with no relationship to the environment around them. Similarly, we have

refined methods to transport mass culture everywhere, rather than allow a diversity of cultures to grow from nature’s abundant variety. The result is an increasing number of cities and towns that are similar in appearance and feel.

The readings in this course describe an alternative future. The authors suggest that we consciously immerse ourselves in our place, by learning as much as we can about it and concentrating our energies there. The more we receive our sustenance from, and take care of our wastes in, our own bioregion, the better we can see the effects of our living patterns on the water, soil, and living beings around us. When we have a stake in our own place and are committed to making it last over time, the benefits can be immense — to ourselves, our communities, and to the Earth.

The curriculum is divided into eight sessions, designed for weekly discussions. Each session except the last includes brief readings and topics for discussion. Each focuses on a different aspect of living in place. As the course progresses, you may want to identify your own bioregion. What watershed, landforms, vegetation, animal life, and traditional culture do you identify with? On the next two pages is a map of the United States divided into regions that have these factors in common.

inTrodUcTion

I n t r o d u c t i o n / D i s c o v e r i n g a S e n s e o f P l a c e N O R T H W E S T E A R T H I N S T I T U T E

The UniTed STaTeS of naTUre By William Stolzenburg

Long before the map, there was the land. Before kingdoms and their cartographers, the land had etched borderlines of its own. These were visible, ecological boundaries hewn by climate, geology and corresponding vegetation, into states of desert, steppe, forest and tundra. Anyone who has traveled up a southwestern mountain of some size — feeling the tan and spiny desert give way to fragrant foothills dappled green with juniper, to parklands of tall pines, to forests of spruce and fir, they finally withering beneath the blasting winter winds and blinkingly brief summers of the alpine meadow — has witnessed, in minute scale, what ecological jurisdictions are all about.

As they are more scientifically viewed, ecological regions transcend single mountains; they encompass entire ranges of mountains. They circumscribe whole plains, plateaus, prairies, deserts, basins, foothills and coastlines, each with a correspondingly distinct covering of plants and wildlife. Across the country, as the Earth’s active crust pushes up mountain ranges or spreads into basins, as latitude alters average temperatures from swelter to frostbound, as airstreams dictate realms of monsoon or drought, ecological regions grade from one to the next, conspicuously. Interrelated, they are nonetheless individuals.

And so, each ecological region would naturally require customized attention. In the Conservancy’s evolving practice of conservation biology, where the mission is to save the richest diversity of species, the political boundaries are logically giving way to those set by these ecological criteria. Within each are specialized conditions for life, hence specialized prescriptions for care. They have become the natural frames within which the seemingly impossible task of sheltering a continent’s worth of biological diversity becomes workable.

To that end, the Conservancy has outlined 63 such ecological regions within the Lower 48, from a Black Hills island of forest nearly twice the size of Delaware, to a spread of northern Great Plains steppe larger than California. Within each region, conservation professionals are carrying out plans individually tailored to the life and the land, yet collectively coordinated toward supporting the greatest variety of healthy species, humans among them.

— This essay and map appeared in Nature Conservancy, May/June 1998

continental u.s. ecoregions 1 - West Cascades and Coastal Forests 2 - Puget Trough and Willamette Valley 3 - North Cascades 4 - Modoc Plateau and East Cascades 5 - Klamath Mountains 6 - Columbia Plateau 7 - Canadian Rocky Mountains 8 - Idaho Batholith 9 - Utah-Wyoming Rocky Mountains 10 - Wyoming Basins

11 - Great Basin 12 - Sierra Nevada 13 - Great Central Valley 14 - California North Coast 15 - California Central Coast 16 - California South Coast 17 - Mohave Desert 18 - Utah High Plateaus 19 - Colorado Plateau 20 - Colorado Rocky Mountains 21 - Arizona-New Mexico

Mountains 22 - Apache Highlands 23 - Sonora Desert 24 - Chihauhuan Desert 25 - Black Hills 26 - Northern Great Plains

Steppe

27 - Central Shortgrass Prairie

28 - Southern Shortgrass Prairie 29 - Edwards Plateau 30 - Tamaulipan Thornscrub 31 - Gulf Coast Prairies and

Marshes 32 - Crosstimbers and Southern

Tall grass Prairie 33 - Central Mixed-Grass Prairie 34 - Northern Mixed-Grass

Prairie 35 - Northern Tallgrass Prairie 36 - Central Tallgrass Prairie

37 - Osage Plains/Flint Hills Prairie

38 - Ozarks

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N O R T H W E S T E A R T H I N S T I T U T E I n t r o d u c t i o n / D i s c o v e r i n g a S e n s e o f P l a c e

39 - Ouachita Mountains 40 - Upper West Gulf Coastal

Plain 41 - Piney Woods 42 - Mississippi River Alluvial

Plain

43 - Upper East Gulf Coastal Plain

44 - Interior Low Plateau 45 - North Central Tillplain 46 - Prairie-Forest Border 47 - Superior Mixed Forest 48 - Great Lakes 49 - Western Allegheny Plateau 50 - Cumberlands and Southern

Ridge and Valley 51 - Southern Blue Ridge 52 - Piedmont 53 - East Gulf Coastal Plain 54 - Tropical Florida

55 - Florida Peninsula 56 - South Atlantic Coastal Plain 57 - Mid-Atlantic Coastal Plain 58 - Chesapeake Bay Lowlands 59 - Central Applachian Forest 60 - High Allegheny Plateau 61 - Lower New England/

Northern Piedmont 62 - North Atlantic Coast 63 - Northern Appalachian/

Boreal Forest

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I - 1

N O R T H W E S T E A R T H I N S T I T U T E S e s s i o n 1 / A S e n s e o f P l a c e

Goals of the session • To get acquainted during the introduction; to observe a class “opening.”

• To establish a schedule for future meeting dates for the class and identify two volunteers for each session: (1) someone to lead the opening and (2) a facilitator.

• To introduce the concepts of a sense of place and a bioregion.

• To widen our perception of “place” beyond a geographic site or political subdivision; to explore what it means to belong to a place.

BackGround The notion of a “sense of place” finds its roots in human

awareness and consciousness. In indigenous societies, the individual and place have no separate identity because they define each other.

In North American culture, we view ourselves as separate from our land, and land is a commodity in a world defined by economic value. Maps of land delineate political boundaries and road systems. In western North America, we have a tradition of using land and moving on. Knowing our place is not part of our tradition.

The American bioregional movement takes a radically different view of land. Bioregions are geographic areas defined

To be rooted is perhaps the most important but least understood need of the human soul.

— Simone Weil

Of all the memberships we identify ourselves by (racial, ethnic, sexual, national, class, age,

religious, occupational), the one that is most forgotten, and that has the greatest potential for

healing, is place. We must learn to know, love, and join our place even more than we love our own ideas. People

who can agree that they share a commitment to the landscape/cityscape — even if they are otherwise locked in

struggle with each other — have at least one deep thing to share.

— Gary Snyder

a sense of place

s e s s i o n 1

by natural features like watersheds, landforms, vegetation, animal life, and indigenous cultures. Wisdom comes from truly knowing the place we live.

Bioregionalists seek to create lifestyles and social institutions in harmony with their unique place, fitting culture to nature rather than the reverse. This means providing for energy, food, shelter, and transportation in a manner that promotes local self- reliance and long-term sustainability.

This session begins with an introduction to the concept of bioregionalism by Hannah Holmes. In “The Sense of Place,” Wallace Stegner comments on rootlessness and notes what must happen to develop a sense of place. Robert Pyle tells how everyone has a connection to nature in “Everybody’s Ditch.”

In “The Spirit of Place,” Wade Davis describes native people who are intimately connected to their place and the traditions and rituals that cement that relationship. Mary Pipher describes her deep appreciation and loyalty to the place she calls home in her essay “In Praise of Hometowns.”

“My Empty Lot” focuses on a type of place that is common but that most people ignore — a vacant lot. In his article, Joseph Kastner describes how he came to appreciate the richness of an undeveloped patch of New York City.

PossiBle discussion Questions

1. Simone Weil is quoted, “To be rooted is perhaps the most important but least understood need of the human soul.”

• Do you feel this need? If so, is the feeling pronounced or something that comes up from time to time? • Is Weil’s statement relevant in a modern society?

2. Wendell Berry says, “If you don’t know where you are, you don’t know who you are.” Has a place helped to shape your personal identity?

3. Stegner says we have tendencies to be a “placed” person (like Thoreau) and a “displaced” person (like Daniel Boone). (p. I-3) Which tendency is the strongest in you?

4. Do people in the U.S. tend to be more restless and rootless than those in other societies? If so, why? Have you been influenced by these forces?

5. What are your feelings about living in one place for the rest of your life?

6. For your next vacation (if cost were not an issue), would you choose to spend time in a foreign country of your choice, or time in your bioregion? Why?

7. Davis suggests that indigenous people possess a unique spiritual connection with the place they inhabit. What does he mean? Can a non-indigenous person hope to achieve such a connection?

8. Davis describes rituals of the Quechua (in southern Andes) honoring their connection with place through ritual. What are your thoughts about such ritual? Has ritual been part of your experience of place?

9. Mary Pipher writes "with our state, the trick is knowing how to find its beauty." Describe a special place near you that a visitor might overlook.

PuttinG into Practice

• If you made an annual run around your village (neighborhood) as the Chinchero Indians did, consider the route you would take. Walk or run that route.

• Establish a new ritual that reminds you of your connection to your natural surroundings. You might trace the source of your food before starting the evening meal, or go outside each morning to hear which birds are singing or to see what the clouds are doing.

• Walk to the store instead of driving. What do you see, feel, hear, and smell that you didn’t notice before?

• Choose a spot in nature to sit for one hour. Record your observations.

S e s s i o n 1 / A S e n s e o f P l a c e

I - 2

N O R T H W E S T E A R T H I N S T I T U T E

( E a c h M e m b e r A n s w e r s )

In considering places you have lived, to what place (land area) do you feel most connected? Briefly describe the nature of your connection, and

why this place stands out for you.

CirCle Question

I - 3

N O R T H W E S T E A R T H I N S T I T U T E S e s s i o n 1 / A S e n s e o f P l a c e

excerpt from livinG Where you live

By Hannah Holmes

I live on a granite substratum, topped with sandy soil, formed into a ridge by heavy glacial traffic, and located in the Gulf of Maine bioregion, which is distinguished by a watershed that empties into the Atlantic and which is populated by mixed hardwoods and evergreens — but you can send my mail to Portland.

Bioregionalists, a breed of environmentalists who live the “Think globally, act locally” bumper sticker, hold that the state and city lines by which we normally locate ourselves are about as silly as the SaladShooter. Nature has its own systems of boundaries and divisions, and we’d do well to understand it and fit in unobtrusively.

Bioregionalists don’t agree on how to divide up the map — nor need they. All their methods respect natural divisions, not the arbitrary straight lines that political boundaries often observe. Some advocate bioregions defined by species — grasslands or evergreen forests, for instance. The Ozark Area Community Congress holds the oak tree near and dear. Others organize regions around major formations, like a big mountain or a lake — hence the Shasta Bioregion in California. Most common is the watershed approach, defining a bioregion by a system of streams and rivers that drain a particular patch of earth. Among the areas organized on this model are the Kansas Area Watershed and the Ish River subregion of the Cascadia Bioregion in British Columbia.

Much more important than making maps, though, is the ethic of living in the land, not on it. The first order of bioregional business is to learn so much about your habitat that you can live within its seasons and its soil conditions, and with its other species — not in spite of them. This living in the land might take the form of planting trees to counteract erosion and restore wildlife habitats in your area. Or you might be digging in the garden, coaxing your own food from the native soil, thwarting the global network of trucks and airplanes and agribiz. In the evening you might go to the local planning board meeting, to be sure that the needs of the environment are considered. While this is easiest in rural areas, even in the city you can tune into which way the wind blows, when the first frost comes, which species of trees in the park are native to your area, and where you can find locally grown produce.

“Home” is a key word in the movement. “Find your home,” bioregionalists advise. “Go home and stay there.” This means that you need to study one place. You need to learn the ecological history of your place and know its rhythms and its weaknesses, its wounds and its strengths. Only by becoming intimate with the species and natural conditions that share your patch of ground will you be able to make decisions that truly benefit your part of the planet.

— This article appeared in Ms., Sept/Oct. 1993. Ms. Holmes is the author of Suburban Safari: A Year on the Lawn.

the SenSe of place From Where the Bluebird Sings, by Wallace Stegner

If you don’t know where you are, says Wendell Berry, you don’t know who you are. Berry is a writer, one of our best, who after some circling has settled on the bank of the Kentucky River, where he grew up and where his family has lived for many generations. He conducts his literary explorations inward, toward the core of what supports him physically and spiritually. He belongs to an honorable tradition, one that even in America includes some great names: Thoreau, Burroughs, Frost, Faulkner, Steinbeck — lovers of known earth, known weathers, and known neighbors both human and nonhuman. He calls himself a “placed” person.

But if every American is several people, and one of them is or would like to be a placed person, another is the opposite, the displaced person, cousin not to Thoreau but to Daniel Boone, dreamer not of Walden Ponds but of far horizons, traveler not in Concord but in wild unsettled places, explorer not inward but outward. Adventurous, restless, seeking, asocial or antisocial, the displaced American persists by the million long after the frontier has vanished. He exists to some extent in all of us, the inevitable by-product of our history: the New World transient. He is commoner in the newer parts of America — the West, Alaska — than in the older parts, but he occurs everywhere, always in motion.

To the placed person he seems hasty, shallow, and restless. He has a current like the Platte, a mile wide and an inch deep. As a species, he is nonterritorial, he lacks a stamping ground. Acquainted with many places, he is rooted in none. Culturally he is a discarder or transplanter, not a builder or conserver. He even seems to like and value his rootlessness, though to the placed person he shows the symptoms of nutritional deficiency, as if he suffered from some obscure scurvy or pellegra of the soul.

Migratoriness has its dangers, unless it is the traditional, seasonal, social migratoriness of shepherd tribes, or of the academic tribes who every June leave Cambridge or New Haven for summer places in Vermont, and every September return to their winter range. Complete independence, absolute freedom of movement, are exhilarating for a time but may not wear well. That romantic atavist we sometimes dream of being, who lives alone in a western or arctic wilderness, playing Natty Bumppo and listening to the loons and living on moose meat and moving on if people come within a hundred miles, is a very American figure but he is not a full human being. He is a wild man of the woods, a Sasquatch.

He has many relatives who are organized as families — migrant families that would once have followed the frontier but that now follow construction booms from Rock Springs to Prudhoe Bay, or pursue the hope of better times from Michigan to Texas, or retire from the midwestern farm to St. Petersburg or Sunshine City, or still hunt the hippie heaven from Sedona to Telluride to Sand Point. These migrants drag their exposed roots and have trouble putting them down in new places. Some don’t want to put them down, but at retirement climb into their RVs and move with the seasons from national park to national park, creating a roadside society out of perpetual motion. The

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American home is often a mobile home.

I know about this. I was born on wheels, among just such a family. I know about the excitement of newness and possibility, but I also know the dissatisfaction and hunger that result from placelessness. Some towns that we lived in were never real to me. They were only the raw material of places, as I was the raw material of a person. Neither place nor I had a chance of being anything unless we could live together for a while. I spent my youth envying people who had lived all their lives in the houses they were born in, and had attics full of proof that they had lived.

The deep ecologists warn us not to be anthropocentric, but I know no way to look at the world, settled or wild, except through my own human eyes. I know that it wasn’t created especially for my use, and I share the guilt for what members of my species, especially the migratory ones, have done to it. But I am the only instrument that I have access to by which I can enjoy the world and try to understand it. So I must believe that, at least to human perception, a place is not a place until people have been born in it, have grown up in it, lived in it, known it, died in it — have both experienced and shaped it, as individuals, families, neighborhoods, and communities, over more than one generation. Some are born in their place, some find it, some realize after long searching that the place they left is the one they have been searching for. But whatever their relation to it, it is made a place only by slow accrual, like a coral reef.

Once, as George Stewart reminded us in Names on the Land, the continent stretched away westward without names. It had no places in it until people had named them, and worn the names smooth with use. The fact that Daniel Boone killed a bear at a certain spot in Kentucky did not make it a place. It began to be one, though, when he remembered the spot as Bear Run, and other people picked up the name and called their settlement by it, and when the settlement became a landmark or destination for travelers, and when children had worn paths through its woods to schoolhouse or swimming hole. The very fact that people remembered Boone’s bear-killing, and told about it, added something of placeness.

No place is a place until things that have happened in it are remembered in history, ballads, yarns, legends, or monuments. Fictions serve as well as facts. Rip Van Winkle, though a fiction, enriches the Catskills. Real-life Mississippi spreads across unmarked boundaries into Yoknapatawpha County. Every one of the six hundred rocks from which the Indian maiden jumped to escape her pursuers grows by the legend, and people’s lives get lived around and into it. It attracts family picnics and lovers’ trysts. There are names carved in the trees there. Just as surely as do the quiet meadows and stone walls of Gettysburg, or the grassy hillside above the Little Big Horn where the Seventh Cavalry died, even a “phoney” place like the Indian maiden’s

rock grows by human association. In America the process of cumulative association has gone

a good way by now in stable, settled, and especially rural areas — New England, the Midwest, the South — but hardly anyway at all in the raw, migrant West. For one thing, the West has been raided more often than settled, and raiders move on when they have got what they came for. Many western towns never lasted a single human lifetime. Many others have changed so fast that memory cannot cling to them; they are unrecognizable to anyone who knew them twenty years ago. And as they change, they may fall into the hands of planners and corporations, so that they tend to become more and more alike. Change too often means stereotype. Try Gillette, Wyoming, not too long ago a sleepy cowtown on the verge of becoming a real place, now a coal boomtown that will never be a place.

Changing everywhere, America changes fastest west of the 100th meridian. Mining booms, oil booms, irrigation booms, tourist booms, culture booms as at Aspen and Sun Valley, crowd out older populations and bring in new ones. Communities lose their memory along with their character. For some, the memory can over time be reinstated. For many, the memory too will be a transient, for irrigation agribusiness from California and Arizona to Idaho has by now created a whole permanent underclass of the migrant and dispossessed, totally placeless people who will never have a chance to settle down anywhere, who will know a place briefly during the potato or cantaloupe or grape harvest, and then move on.

As with life, so with literature. Except in northern California, the West has never had a real literary outpouring, a flowering of the sort that marked New England, the Midwest, and the South. As I have noted elsewhere, a lot of what has been written is a literature of motion, not of place. There is a whole tradition of it, from Mark Twain’s Roughing It to Kerouac’s On the Road. Occasionally we get loving place-oriented books such as Ivan Doig’s This House of Sky and Norman Maclean’s A River Runs Through It, but even while we applaud them we note that they are memorials to places that used to be, not celebrations of ongoing places. They are nostalgic before history has taken its second

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step, as much a looking-back as Huckleberry Finn was for Mark Twain.

And that is a curious phenomenon, that nostalgia that has marked American writing ever since Irving and Cooper. From our very beginnings, and in the midst of our perpetual motion, we have been homesick for the old folks at home and the old oaken bucket. We have been forever bidding farewell to the last of the Mohicans, or the last of the old-time cattlemen, or the last of the pioneers with the bark on, or the vanishing wilderness. Just at random, read Willa Cather’s A Lost Lady or Conrad Richter’s The Sea of Grass or Larry McMurtry’s Horseman, Pass By, or even William Dean Howells’s The Rise of Silas Lapham, with its portrait of a businessman possessed of an antique and doomed integrity. We have made a tradition out of mourning the passing of things we never had time really to know, just as we have made a culture out of the open road, out of movement without place.

Freedom, especially free land, has been largely responsible. Nothing in our history has bound us to a plot of ground as feudalism once bound Europeans. In older, smaller, more homogeneous and traditional countries, life was always more centripetal, held in tight upon its center. In Ireland, for example, Yeats tells us, “there is no river or mountain that is not associated in the memory with some event or legend. . . . I would have our writers and craftsmen of many kinds master this history and these legends, and fix upon their memory the appearance of mountains and rivers and make it all visible again in their arts, so that Irishmen, even though they had gone thousands of miles away, would still be in their own country.”

America is both too large and too new for that sort of universal recognition. It was just the lack of such recognitions and acceptances, the lack of a complex American society rooted in richly remembered places, that led Washington Irving to transplant European legends to the Catskills, and Hawthorne to labor at creating what he called a usable past. The same lacks drove Henry James, later, to exploit his countrymen not as dwellers in their own country but more often as pilgrims and tourists abroad, hunting what their own country did not provide. When native themes, characters, and places did emerge, they were likely to be local-colorish, exploiting the local picturesque and probably mourning its passing, or expressions of our national restlessness, part of the literature of the road.

Indifferent to, or contemptuous of, or afraid to commit ourselves to, our physical and social surroundings, always hopeful of something better, hooked on change, a lot of us have never stayed in one place long enough to learn it, or have learned it only to leave it. In our displaced condition we are not unlike the mythless man that Carl Jung wrote about, who lives “like one uprooted, having no true link either with the past, or with the ancestral life which continues within him, or yet with contemporary human society. He . . . lives a life of his own, sunk

in a subjective mania of his own devising, which he believes to be the newly discovered truth.”

Back to Wendell Berry, and his belief that if you don’t know where you are you don’t know who you are. He is not talking about

the kind of location that can be determined by looking at a map or a street sign. He is talking about the kind of knowing that involves the senses, the memory, the history of a family or a tribe. He is talking about the knowledge of place that comes from working in it in all weathers, making a living from it, suffering from its catastrophes, loving its mornings or evenings or hot

noons, valuing it for the profound investment of labor and feeling that you, your parents and grandparents, your all-but-unknown ancestors have put into it. He is talking about the knowing that poets specialize in.

It is only a step from his pronouncement to another: that no place is a place until it has had a poet. And that is about what Yeats was saying only a moment ago.

No place, not even a wild place, is a place until it has had that human attention that at its highest reach we call poetry. What Frost did for New Hampshire and Vermont, what Faulkner did for Mississippi and Steinbeck for the Salinas Valley, Wendell Berry is doing for his family corner of Kentucky, and hundreds

of other place-loving people, gifted or not, are doing for places they were born in, or reared in, or have adopted and made their own.

I doubt that we will ever get the motion out of the American, for everything in his culture of opportunity and abundance has, up to now, urged motion on him as a form of virtue. Our tradition of restlessness will not be outgrown in a generation or two, even if the motives for restlessness are withdrawn. But after all, in a few months it will

be half a millennium since Europeans first laid eyes on this continent. At least in geographical terms, the frontiers have been explored and crossed. It is probably time we settled down. It is probably time we looked around us instead of looking ahead. We have no business, any longer, in being impatient with history. We need to know our history in much greater depth, even back into the geology, which, as Henry Adams said, is only history projected a little way back from Mr. Jefferson.

History was part of the baggage we threw overboard when we launched ourselves into the New World. We threw it away because it recalled old tyrannies, old limitations, galling obligations, bloody memories. Plunging into the future through a landscape that had no history, we did both the country and ourselves some harm along with some good. Neither the country nor the society we built out of it can be healthy until we stop raiding and running, and learn to be quiet part of the time, and acquire the sense not of ownership but of belonging.

“The land was ours before we were the land’s,” says Robert

A lot of us have never stayed in one place long enough

to learn it.

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Frost’s poem. Only in the act of submission is the sense of place realized and a sustainable relationship between people and earth established.

— Wallace Stegner was a well known author of numerous books including Angle of Repose and Beyond the Hundredth Meridian.

everybody’S ditch From The Thunder Tree by Robert Michael Pyle

A green ravine creases northeast Seattle, draining into Lake Union near the University of Washington. My mother grew up in a white shingle house beside this ravine and it became her constant haunt. Whenever she was able to return to Seattle, Mother’s first impulse was to visit “her” ravine. On one of these pilgrimages she took me along, and I saw in her face the meaning of place. At Ravenna Park she made a personal connection that transformed the way she looked at the land for the rest of her life.

When people connect with nature, it happens somewhere. Almost everyone who cares deeply about the outdoors can identify a particular place where contact occurred. This may have been a wilderness, a national park, or a stretch of unbounded countryside, but more often the place that makes a difference is unspectacular: a vacant lot, a scruffy patch of woods, a weedy field, a stream, a green ravine like Ravenna — or a ditch.

My own point of intimate contact with the land was a ditch. Growing up on the wrong side of Denver to reach the mountains easily or often, I resorted to the tattered edges of the Great Plains on the back side of town. There I encountered a century-old irrigation channel known as the High Line Canal. Without a doubt, most of the elements of my life flowed from that canal.

From the time I was six, this weedy watercourse had been my sanctuary, playground, and sulking walk. It was also my imaginary wilderness, escape hatch, and birthplace as a naturalist. Later the canal served as lover’s lane, research site, and holy ground of solace. Over the years I studied its natural history, explored much of its length, watched its habitats shrink as the suburbs grew up around it, and tried to help save some of its best bits. Despite the losses, the High Line remained a place to which I would often return. Even when living in national parks, in exotic lands, in truly rural countryside, and in Seattle near Mother’s ravine, I’ve hankered to get back to the old ditch whenever I could.

Around dry Denver, of course, the canal has many adherents. Since the public trail along the canal service road was opened in the seventies, tens of thousands have taken their pleasure there. But even before that, in the days of its unofficial access, I was not alone in finding it. A young woman named Laura Corliss wrote her “Study of the High Line Canal” for school in 1975, telling of her family’s longtime dependence on the ditch for recreation. The Corlisses lived along the canal in Denver, between Eisenhower and Bible parks. Laura’s dad, Charles, rafted significant portions of the canal, and his children tubed, biked, chased frogs and crawdads, swung, dived, and swam all summer long. It was all against water department rules, but “without the canal I don’t know what I would have done,” Laura

told me, “or what growing up would have been like.” She spoke for many kids and many ditches when she wrote, “During those hot and long summer days, I would have been bored stiff if it weren’t for that High Line Canal.”

It isn’t difficult to find lovers of the High Line around Denver, but I’ve been surprised by the number of people from elsewhere who care for this particular ditch. Three women I’ve met in the Pacific Northwest exemplify this phenomenon. Evelyn Iritani, a Seattle journalist whose father spent a lot of his time on the

ditch when he lived near it in the forties, knows it through his tales. Elen Lanier-Phelps, a land planner in Portland, gained her appreciation for urban greenspaces from growing up beside the canal in a Denver suburb. Norma Walker now lives in Ocean Park, Washington, near my home, but the High Line was her son’s “safety net” when her family lived in Colorado and she was mayor of Aurora. I am no longer surprised when conversation comes around to a common affection for the

High Line Canal. Even if they don’t know “my” ditch, most people I speak

with seem to have a ditch somewhere — or a creek, meadow, wood-lot, or marsh — that they hold in similar regard. These are places of initiation, where the borders between ourselves and other creatures break down, where the earth gets under our nails and a sense of place gets under our skin. They are the secondhand lands, the hand-me-down habitats where you have

The General Situation of the High Line Canal in Colorado (with kind permission of the Denver Board of Water Commissioners). The Front Range of the Rocky Mountains lies to the left, the western edge of the Great Plains to the right. X marks the Thunder Tree.

And in time there’s no

more telling which is

which between them,

no sharp distinction,

no clear edge of

difference where it can

be said that here the

land ends and here the

man begins. — don berry, Trask

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to look hard to find something to love. This book is my love song to damaged lands, a serenade for

all such places. I want to ask: What do shreds and scraps of the natural scene mean, after all, in the shadow of the citified whole? What can one patch of leftover land mean to one person’s life, or to the lives of all who dwell in the postindustrial wasteland? In the end, this is not a book about a ditch. It is a book about everybody’s ditch, and what Kim Stafford calls “weaving a rooted companionship with home ground.”

Nearly forty years have elapsed since I first saw the High Line Canal. The landscape that so touched me has changed almost beyond recognition in those years — until I get down inside the ditch. Except for the proliferation of plastic among the flotsam in the bottom, the scene between the bank grass and the cottonwoods remains much the same as that which first enchanted me so long ago. As a ditchwalker in that silty bed, I have had none of the rights enjoyed by the farmers, no responsibilities such as the ditchriders bear — just the exercise of my free senses in company with the wind, the rain, and the place.

It is through close and intimate contact with a particular patch of ground that we learn to respond to the earth, to see that it really matters. We need to recognize the humble places where this alchemy occurs, and treat them as well as we treat our parks and preserves — or better, with less interference.

Everybody has a ditch, or ought to. For only the ditches — and the fields, the woods, the ravines — can teach us to care enough for all the land.

— Robert Michael Pyle is a distinguished nature writer. He has penned over a dozen books amd is currently working on a book about his home in Southwestern Washington.

the Spirit of place By Wade Davis

One of the intense pleasures of travel is the opportunity to live among peoples who have not forgotten the old ways, who still feel their past in the wind, touch it in the stones polished by rain, recognize its taste in the bitter leaves of plants. Just to know that nomadic hunters existed, that jaguar shamans yet journey beyond the Milky Way, that the myths of the Athabaskan elders still resonate with meaning, is to remember that our world does not exist in some absolute sense but rather is just one model of reality. The Penan in the forests of Borneo, the Vodoun acolytes in Haiti, the wondering holy men of the Sahara teach us that there are other options, other possibilities, other ways of thinking and interacting with the earth. This idea has always filled me with hope.

Yet the very ease with which we move about this small

planet confronts us with a terrible irony. We journey to learn, yet in travelling grow each day further and further from where we began. When the American poet Gary Snyder was once asked to discuss at length how individuals could best help resolve the environmental crisis, he responded with two words: “Stay put.” Only by rediscovering a sense of place, he suggested, a commitment to a particular piece of ground, will we be able to redefine our relationship to the planet.

For many people around the world, particularly those few still living in small communities unaffected by the frenzy and disappointments of the industrial age, this notion of belonging has never been forsaken. Indigenous cultures, though neither sentimental nor weakened by nostalgia, have forged a traditional mystique of the earth that is based not only on deep attachment to the land, but on far more subtle intuition — the idea that the land itself is breathed into being by consciousness. Mountains, rivers, and forests are not perceived as inanimate, as mere props on a stage upon which the human drama unfolds. For these societies, the land is alive, a dynamic force that is embraced and transformed by the human imagination. Whether this is true in some absolute sense is not the point. Rather the significance lies in the manner in which the conviction plays out in the day-to-day lives of a people. A Canadian child brought up to believe that a mountain is a pile of rocks will be a fundamentally different person than a Quechua Indian youth raised to revere a mountain as the incarnation of a god.

In the winter of 1982 I was fortunate to live among the Quechua while engaged in ethno-botanical research in the small village of Chinchero in the southern Andes of Peru. Though the highland flora was spectacular and the agricultural skills of these descendants of the Inca nothing short of genius, what impressed me most was the daily round, the accumulation of gestures that together spoke of an intimate and profound reverence for the very soil upon which the village lay. The village, of course, was not merely the warren of adobe and thatch houses clustered around the small church. It was the totality of the existence of the people — the ancient ruins that ran away from the village and hung like memories to the edge of the cliffs overlooking the river, the fields cut into the precipitous slopes of the sacred mountain Antakillqa, the lakes on the pampa where the sedges grow, and the waterfall where no one went for fear of meeting Sirena, the malevolent spirit of the forest.

For the people of the village, every activity was an affirmation of continuity. In the morning, before the labor in the fields began, there were always prayers and offerings of coca leaves for Pachamama, the Great Mother. The men worked together in teams forged not only by blood but by reciprocal bonds of obligation and loyalty, social and ritual debts accumulated over lifetimes and generations, never spoken about and never forgotten. Sometime around midday, the women and children would arrive with great steaming cauldrons of soup, baskets of

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potatoes and flasks of chicha. The families feasted together every day, and in the wake of the meal the work became play, the boys and girls taking their place beside their fathers — planting, hoeing, weeding, harvesting. At the end of the day, the women scattered blossoms on the field, and the oldest man led the group in prayer, blessing the tools, the seed, the earth and the children.

This spirit of place, this sense of life as community, manifests in ways that are both exquisite and profound. Every February, for example, at the height of the rainy season, the fastest young man in the village dresses up as a woman, and pursued by virtually the entire population, races around the boundaries of the community’s land. It is an astonishing physical feat. The distance travelled is only twenty miles, but the route crosses two soaring Andean ridges. The runners first drop a thousand feet to the base of Antakillqa before ascending four thousand feet to the summit of the mountain. They then descend to the valley on the far side, only to climb once more to the high pampa and the trail home. It is a race, but also a pilgrimage, and the route is defined by sacred places: crossroads and rock cairns, waterfalls, and trees, where the participants must stop to make ritual offerings. Warmed by alcohol, fueled by coca leaves, the runners fall away into trance, emerging at the end of the day less as humans than spirit beings who have fought off their adversaries and redefined for yet another year the boundaries of their land. It is their way of defining their place, of proclaiming their sense of belonging.

This loyalty to the land is perhaps the single most powerful distinction between indigenous peoples and those of us whose ancestors grew up on distant continents across endless oceans that for so long isolated the Americas. I once attended a public hearing in northern Canada where a number of different organizations and individuals — both Native and non-Native — had come together to speak out against a proposed hydroelectric development. At the climax of a tumultuous meeting, just after an old Native trapper promised to use his pension money to buy dynamite to blow up whatever it was the company intended to build, a young white settler stood up and spoke passionately against the proposed dam. “If they build this thing,” he proclaimed in what he took as a gesture of solidarity, “I’m just going to have to leave this country.” The next speaker was Tahltan. With quiet dignity, he turned to the previous speaker. “Partner,” he said, “that’s the difference between you and me. If they build this dam, I’ll still be here.”

There is a fire burning over the earth, taking with it plants and animals, cultures, languages, ancient skills and visionary wisdom. Quelling this flame, and reinventing the poetry of diversity, is the most important challenge of our times.

— This article first appeared in EarthLight, Winter 1994-95. Wade Davis is an ethnobotanist who has lived with indigenous people throughout the tropics in order to learn how they use medicinal plants. He is author of eight books including his most recent, Spheres of Life and the Comedy of Survival.

excerpt from "in praiSe of hometoWnS"

By Mary Pipher

Early evening, I drive with my friend Pam past crowded malls, cinemas, and fast-food joints. Pam has been my friend for thirty years. Her husband and mine have been best friends since kindergarten and Pam sings with my husband’s band. We’ve had babies together.

We drive to where there is plenty of quiet space and park in an empty lot. We step out into the grainy thick air to hear the trill of larks and the cries of bats trolling for mosquitoes. I ask myself, as I always do at this place, “Where is everybody? Don’t people realize what we have right under our noses?” On the other hand, I am glad everybody is not here. For a few hours, Pam and I have the luxury of a world without humans.

Tonight the tall grasses are backlit by the sun and flame against the green cottonwoods. It’s the time of day that wise traders sell horses. With their coats burnished by the sun, they’re irresistible.

Rose hips sparkle like Christmas decorations in the bluestem and gamma grass. Wild plums, a frosty purple color, hang thick over fences. We’ve picked them many times to make Chinese plum sauce. Rose mallow and goldenrod are blooming. Rare prairie orchids should be blooming, but they are hard to find.

Sometimes we walk on paths and sometimes we tromp through ten-foot tall grasses where we lose each other and shout to identify our location. We fall down on purpose and allow red waves of grass to roll over us. Back on the paths, we hear and then see an eastern bluebird. He flies ahead of us, stops, then when we catch up with him, he leads us on. At dusk, the first few fireflies light their lamps, creating the illusion of a little prairie town. To the east, the lights of Lincoln twinkle on. The dome of the capitol is a rosy-gold in the sunset. We watch our town light up, then continue our search for prairie orchids.

Pam and I had busy weeks and, like all humans, we have our problems, but as we walk here, breathing in the aroma of the grasses and flowers, feeling the scratchy seedheads and the soft breeze, seeing the blue-pink sky and hearing the

animals at work, these problems fall away. We grow quieter. Our breathing changes. We feel at home.

This night turns out to be a night of surprises. As we walk west toward our favorite ridge, we notice dozens of mating monarchs. The males are flying above the females, holding their wings together and uniting in the air.

We stand and watch. We can almost touch them, so oblivious are they to our presence. One

couple tangles Pam’s hair and five couples land on the Joe Pyeweed plant by my side. We are awash in monarchs.

We congratulate each other on being here on the monarch date night. We follow them west right into a small glen, where we discover some prairie orchids blooming. They are tiny white flowers with petals like flags swirling around a delicate silver pole. We breathe in their fragrance. Prairie aromatherapy.

We hike to the ridge and watch the red sun melt into the ground. High above us to the north a red-tailed hawk circles. The lightning bugs continue to switch on, mostly down in the glen among the cottonwoods and sumac, and beside us in the tall grasses.

I wonder, as I always do, what this land looked like to the Native Americans, what our country was like when it was, to quote Paul Gruchow, “a great green heart.” The pioneers talked of birds so thick they blocked out the sun, of wild strawberries so plentiful they stained the horses’ fetlocks red.

Slowly we walk toward our car, quieter now and calmer, our worries put into perspective, our arousal systems tamped by that greatest of all antianxiety drugs – a sunset.

Nature always speaks if one listens. T o n i g h t she whispered to me, “The world i s bigger and older, and more important than you are. It is stronger, more fragile, more complex and beautiful than you can comprehend. And yet, you are a part of it. Take care of it and let it take care of you.”

Once when I was in New York City, a woman asked me where I was from? When I answered, “N e b r a s k a , ” she asked rather rudely, “Have you considered moving?”

I mumbled an inane answer, but I have been thinking of a better answer ever since. My answer tonight would be, “No. I am home and home is not a salable piece of real estate.”

It’s that simple and that complicated. Nebraska for most people is the state they drive through on the way to someplace else. Our state is six hours of Interstate 80. Of course, that’s not the way to see any place.

In general, Nebraska is too stark to be pretty, but it’s beautiful. It’s beauty is its scope, its great table of horizon,

its skies that dominate all earthly landscapes, and its great rivers; the Loup, the Dismal, the Niobrara, and the Platte. Nebraska contains the vast and quiet Sandhills, where the population is less than one person per square mile. It shelters cranes, meadowlarks, and mourning doves. With our state, the trick is knowing how to find its beauty. Once when someone said Nebraska wasn’t beautiful, my husband responded, “Come back with a better pair of eyes.” But Nebraska isn’t my home because of its beauty. It is beautiful because it is my home. The curve of its hills and the songs of its cicadas have etched themselves into my mind. The landscape of my childhood is the Nebraska horizon. When I am away from here for more than a few days, I yearn for the sights and smells of Nebraska. Wherever I travel, I look for the geese overhead, the empty spaces, the cottonwood and Russian olives that remind me of home.

As Eudora Welty said, “As soon as a man stopped wandering and stood still and looked around him, he found a god in that place.” That’s how I feel. Anyplace can be home, can be beautiful, if you stop and claim it, if you take the trouble to discover what is available to love.

— Mary Pipher is a nationally recognized writer, therapist and speaker. Her special area of interest is how American culture influences the mental health of its people. Her books include Reviving Ophelia, The Shelter of Each Other and Another Country.

excerptS from my empty lot By Joseph Kastner

This past Spring, while walking along Houston Street in lower Manhattan, I passed a wooden fence too high and tight to see over or squeeze through. Nosy, as all urban explorers should be, I turned the corner and, stepping through a break in the fence, entered an empty lot not much different from any other in New York, except that it seemed particularly littered with the city’s leftovers. In the middle of it I stumbled upon a bright yellow flower called coltsfoot.

Coltsfoot is usually seen in early spring along rural roads and damp woodland edges. There, it pokes up among last year’s brown leaves, fresh patches of onion grass and the first budding violets. Here, though, it had pushed between shards of soda bottles, pieces of moldy cardboard, rotting plasterboard and a used hypodermic needle. Nearby, a pair of mourning doves were foraging among old potato chip bags, and a starling sat on a leafless ailanthus branch, whistling. Spring was stirring this untidy patch of urban wasteland and so, kicking aside the rubbish, I began my brief and star-crossed study of the natural history of an empty lot.

In a few weeks the lot would resemble a field of wildflowers. But on this gray April morning I found only a few hints of that future — a dandelion in bud, an ox-eye daisy plant and the dried seedpods of last year’s evening primroses. Cataloging what I could identify, I listed: aster, clover, daisy, goldenrod, locust, mugwort, mullein, sorrel. But the lot was so rich in rubbish, which seemed more natural to it than flora, that I started making a field guide to urban litter: apple juice cans, asphalt slabs, baby

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carriage, bar stool, bedroom slippers, bicycle wheel, blinds, bottles, a brassiere, bulbs. . . . I seemed to be stuck in the B’s so I skipped through cardboard and deep freezer to radiator, an old Singer sewing machine with “Model A97900029” on its base in elegant gold and black lettering and finally to vacuum cleaner and window glass. . . .

The lot is at the northwest corner of Houston and Elizabeth Streets, in a neighborhood where several historic sections of the city meet: the old Jewish East Side, Little Italy, Chinatown, SoHo. The Bowery lies a block to the east, Broadway four blocks to the west. It is an area dense with low houses, apartment buildings, small businesses and truck traffic.

The lot, which occupies a quarter of the block, is bounded on the west by old tenements renovated into modern apartments and on the north by the Holy Name Center. The terrain, at least when I first visited, was flat, except for a large hole at the southeast corner where a Texaco gas station once stood and which now was filled with large metal junk and slabs of broken concrete; and four mounds of gravel and clay, which created a miniature hill-and-dale effect in the northeast corner.

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[W]hen I returned to the lot in early May, the desolate dumping ground had turned, implausibly, into a meadow. I was accompanied by Stuart Lowrie, a botanist and urban ecologist at Eugene Lang College of the New School for Social Research in New York, and deputy director of Operation Greenthumb, a city agency that, among other things, helps turn vacant city land into community vegetable and flower gardens.

As he stepped over the broken fence, Lowrie noted a dead vine. “Hops,” he said. Then he glanced at branches coming into leaf (“ailanthus, of course, and a paulownia and cottonwood”), and knelt down to examine several saplings (“Japanese pagoda tree, black cherry, mulberry”), tested a prickly branch with his thumb (“honey locust, and that one over there must be black locust, and that one crab apple”) and uncovered several seedlings (“American elm, quaking aspen, plane, Norway maple, silver maple, mulberry, honeysuckle, multiflora rose, and at the bottom of that mound, willow”). That made 19 different trees, shrubs and vines, an astonishing arboretum for so barren a place.

The plant count was even more surprising: alfalfa, annual wormwood, annual bluegrass, aster, bindweed, boneset, burdock, Canada thistle, chicory, coltsfoot, common plantain, curly dock, daisy fleabane, dandelion, deadly nightshade, English plantain, evening primrose, false buckwheat, field garlic, goldenrod, lady’s thumb, lamb’s quarters, mugwort, mullein, orchard grass, ox-eye daisy, pepper grass, phragmites, pigweed, potentilla, Queen Anne’s lace, red clover, smartweed (two kinds), shepherd’s purse, sorrel, speedwell, strawberry, Veronica peregrina (which Lawrie had never seen before), white

clover and wild lettuce. That came to 41 different plants, plus the 19 trees, shrubs and vines, for a total of 60 plants on a disturbed area in existence for only five years.

The forces of nature must work fast in any lot. Here, the plants were helped by a fair amount of sunlight, by some gravelly soil dumped on it and by the compost created over the five years by decaying paper, cardboard and garbage. The plants themselves were tough and opportunistic, testament to what will grow wild in the city when given half or even a hundredth of a chance. Perhaps the lot should be viewed as a metaphor for the city in general — a tough place where opportunists survive by working fast and bending the odds to their advantage. But the lot is not a metaphor. It’s a lot and if there is any philosophizing lying around in its litter, it concerns nature’s

constant confrontation with the city. Falcons nest on skyscraper ledges and prey on street pigeons. Owls hunt rats in abandoned landfills. Seeds fall into subway gratings and sprout into underground trees. In this lot, nature — an obsessive housekeeper — had moved in to build a meadow from man’s mess.

And nature was proceeding in a very classy manner. The lot was no mere weed patch, a bunch of plants settling for any home that would take

them. The plants are residents of country fields and medieval tapestries, of still lifes and pastoral sonnets. They had a long local lineage. Many were native to

Houston Street, flourishing there in 1626 when the Dutch bought their bargain $24 island. . . . A stream evidently ran north from what is now Rivington

Street and, as it came to Houston Street, turned east and emptied into a large marsh.

. . . [M]any of the plants that fill the empty

lot were immigrants — grown from seeds stowed away in bags of grain and

vegetables, crates, and bales and trunks. “Aliens,” botanists call them, although it is hard today to think of such familiar plants as dandelion, daisy, chicory and Queen Anne’s lace as foreigners. Several dominant plants of the empty lot — plantain, ailanthus, mugwort — are aliens. . . .

Sidney Horenstein grumped when I asked him in late May to come down and look over the empty lot. “No such thing as an empty lot,” he exclaimed. Horenstein works at the American Museum of Natural History, where he lectures on the urban environment and creates exhibits of it.

Horenstein rummaged the lot, with a particular eye toward his interest, geology. He found less evidence of earthly cataclysm than of man’s disruptions. Picking through the brick and cement, he arranged odds and ends of stone on the ground. “Black limestone probably comes from upstate New York,” he began. “These pebbles and sandstone come from New Jersey. This is diabase, what the Palisades is made of; once it was molten rock. The green slate was the steps of an old apartment house, and the black slate was a rooftop.” Underlying all of this, he explained, is Manhattan’s durable bedrock, mica schist.

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He looked up to survey the topography. “Those mounds of debris are little reservoirs, about 10 percent air. When it rains, the water collects in the air spaces and seeps down (instead of running right through) and is stored at the bottom.” Growing at the top were patches of parched mugwort and plantain. Around the bottom grew phragmites, a tall plumed marsh reed, and a willow that favors moist places. . . .

Horenstein took out a soil-testing kit, mixed some gravelly dirt with a chemical in a large glass vial, stopped it with his thumb, shook it and waited. The sludge soon turned to purple. Matching the color to his chart, Horenstein said: “Pretty alkaline.” He repeated the ritual a few yards away, near a patch of white clover. Even deeper purple. “Very, very alkaline. Probably a big piece of decayed cement buried here. . . .”

Horenstin was impressed by the lot’s variety and lushness. “Empty?” he said, beaming, and I felt a surge of pride in the lot. “My lot,” I would call it when describing it to friends. I walked blocks out of the way to admire its progress, and was pleased in mid-June to discover a wild pea winding into a cottonwood and a jimson weed at the fence line. I stood next to a paulownia tree that, when I first encountered it, was barely chin-high, but which now was a foot taller than I. The ailanthus trees, thick with foliage, offered a shady respite from the heat. . . .

From the far side of Houston Street I could see where some of the trees in the lot had come from. Plane trees, Norway maple and a cherry tree lined the median strip, and in a small space right next door grew a large crab apple. Farther down Elizabeth Street stood a row of Japanese pagoda trees.

But most of what grew in the lot had traveled longer distances, borne as seeds by wind and passing birds. The phragmites likely blew across the Hudson River from the New Jersey swamps. Never mind the almost incalculable odds against a seed falling on a spot of soil in the paved city. A single plant produces thousands of seeds every year — for just such exigencies, it seems, as an empty lot.

The trees, now grown well above the fence line, gave the lot the aspect of a leafy woodland; the cottonwood near the back was at least 35 feet tall. Earlier this year the city discussed a proposal to spend millions of dollars to plant trees to cool the streets in summer and help cleanse the air, at the cost of at least $200 a tree. A quick tally showed that some $6,000 worth of trees grew on the lot, cooling and cleaning the local air free of charge. I felt even prouder of my lot.

So I was deflated when Steven E. Clemants, whom I had asked in June to rate the lot on a scale of 1 to 10, gave it only a 6. Clemants, a taxonomist at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, is fast becoming a connoisseur of empty lots, as a result of a grand study he is conducting of all the uncultivated flora in New York City. . . .

Clemants views all New York as one disconnected empty lot, encountering flora in any piece of vacant land — railroad

rights of way, city landfills, the shores of dirty streams, overgrown backyards. ...

Meanwhile, some white butterflies had been flitting around the lot, so I asked Nick Wagerik to come over and check them out. One of the city’s most highly regarded amateur lepidopterists, Wagerik works nights as an usher at the Metropolitan Opera so he can spend his days studying butterflies and dragonflies. The white butterflies, he said, are cabbage whites, attracted by the various mustard plants growing there. “They’ll lay their eggs on a shepherd’s purse or pepper grass. When they hatch,

the larvae will feed on the leaves. But the adult butterflies feed on the nectar of the flowers.” Different plants would bring other butterflies to the lot — monarchs drawn to milkweed, painted ladies seeking thistles.

A honeybee hovered at the clover. A larger bee droned idly by. “Carpenter bee,” Wagerik said. “Maybe it’s nesting in one of those old fence posts and eating it away.” He picked up a brown beetle. “Wharf beetle. Eats dock pilings. Very destructive.” Lifting a piece of cardboard, he disturbed a sow bug. He placed it in a glass vial, studied it

with his magnifying glass and rhapsodized over the ugly creature: “So precise, look at its legs and joints, how finely manufactured it is. . . .”

[U]nder an old plank, he uncovered a colony of ants, many of them winged females, ready to

fly off and found new colonies; a brown spider had spun a web on a nearby mugwort to catch them. Under some old rags were centipedes, while an old wine carton sheltered some millipedes. A slug oozed around a plastic Clorox container. . . .

Except for the mice and rats, which live in a labyrinth of nests and passageways underneath the rubble, and the bats that flit around the street lamps on summer nights, the lot harbored no indigenous animal life. The resident birds — sparrows, starlings, finches and mourning doves — nested on nearby windowsills, ledges and roofs. In early May I had spotted a yellow rumped warbler in the flowering crab apple next door; Houston Street serves

as a flyway for birds migrating to Long Island or New England. On other occasions, a song sparrow, a robin and a mockingbird were heard singing somewhere in the vicinity.

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Stopping by one day in late June, I found the lot in a state of unnatural neatness. Whole sections had been cleared and a cleanup crew was stuffing rubbish into tall paper bags. Vesta Howard, in charge of the operation, explained. Neighbors, it seemed, had complained that rats had been venturing boldly into the streets in the evenings, scaring everyone except the cats that guard Parisi’s Bakery. The Board of Health moved in. “And such a pretty place it’s become,” Howard said admiringly as he walked among the clover and wild peas. After he finished the cleanup, Howard said, a bulldozer would come in and scrape the whole place.

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Suddenly the lot was not a dump but an endangered species. I climbed one of the mounds and, from the six-foot peak, surveyed my sturdy little ecosystem. White cabbage butterflies floated over the blue chickory, the yellow sweet clover, the pink wild pea. The locust trees dappled the mugwort with shadows; the leaves on the top branches of the tall cottonwood fluttered in a breeze drifting over from the Bowery. In its own scruffy way, I decided, the empty lot was as much a feat of nature as a flowered New England roadside or any shaded prairie grove.

When I next visited the lot, in early July, the only things still standing were some stumps along the north wall. “A neighbor wanted us to leave some trees,” the bulldozer operator said. “But we couldn’t.” The lot was completely scraped — flat, sterile, bare even of rubbish. I found hard consolation in remembering that it is the fate of empty lots to lead brief desperate lives.

I should not have given up so soon. The first rubbish over the new chain-link fence that now

surrounds the lot appeared a few days later: a Sprite bottle and a nail-studded 2-by-4. Then came some used paint rollers, Moroccan sandals, old bricks, a miraculously intact pane of window glass, a painting of a lobster and a stuffed animal that looked like a bee. Meanwhile, up against the north wall, the stumps that had been spared in the cleanup were sprouting into locust trees, and ailanthus saplings all over the lot had grown a foot high. Jimson weeds were thick with purple flowers, a bindweed crawled across the rubble, some thin blades of Phragmites had sprouted in a wet spot and a bunch of Chinese takeout containers had settled on a patch of mugwort. When I last looked, in early autumn, the place was beginning to look like its old self again — plants growing, rubbish piling up, everything going along as it inevitably does in an empty lot.

— This article appeared in The New York Time Magazine, October 10, 1998. Joseph Kastner, the author of several books on natural history, has been drawn to empty lots since he was a boy in Brooklyn. His books include A World of Watchers and A Species of Eternity.

dWellinG By William Riley

Each of us is responsible to those who dwelled here before us and those who will inherit our decisions. What we do now will be recorded not only in the mind of God but in the bowels of the Earth where trees invent their roots. The Earth is alive with the ecstasy of those who dwell forever in a place our spirit knows as home. Home is the membrane that envelopes spirit in the face of character for only within limits is the infinite real and only within boundaries is the Earth whole. Boundary marks the gateway between here and there without which place is only space ungrounded and one space the same as any other. In a world without places there is no responsibility for yesterday and tomorrow.

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responsibility to place

Goals of the session • To examine our values and attitudes toward the land.

• To explore the concept of knowing a place and the ways in which knowledge of place can contribute to the welfare of the Earth and the human community.

BackGround Is there a difference between living on the land and dwelling

in it — understanding its rhythms, its potential, and its limits? The authors of this session developed the latter kind of intimacy,

particularly Aldo Leopold, who wrote the 1949 classic A Sand County Almanac. Spending time in the wilderness as a forester, at the university in wildlife management, and on land along the Wisconsin River restoring a worn-out farm, Leopold gained insights into the importance of land health and ecological diversity. In “The Land Ethic,” an essay from his book, he explores our ethical responsibility to the land and to other species.

Barry Lopez, in The Rediscovery of North America, asks us to shift from our conquering heritage and to find a place we know intimately and accept responsibility for.

Preservation of diversity in the face of global industrial monoculture is one of

the prime ethical tenets of our time.

— David McCloskey

If we could think locally, we would take better care of things than we do now. The right

local questions and answers will be the right global ones. The Amish question, “What will this do for our

community?” tends toward the right answer for the world.

— Wendell Berry

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In “Homeplace,” Scott Russell Sanders explores some of the pressures that argue against staying put. He finds that the spiritual healing that comes from a connection with place can lead to a physical healing of the Earth.

In “Notes on Living Simply in the City,” Marilyn Welker shows how one urban family applies the concepts expressed in the preceding pieces. “Nature always speaks if one listens,” even if the voice of nature is harder to hear in the city.

PossiBle discussion Questions

1. Did anything in the readings strike a particularly positive or negative note with you?

2. Aldo Leopold says, “A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.” Does that state your view?

3. Leopold says, “Land use ethics are still governed wholly by economic self-interest, just as social ethics were a century ago.” (This sentence was written over 50 years ago.) Do you agree? If so, can this ethic change within our economic system and tradition of private property ownership?

4. Leopold says the extension of ethics — to an ethic dealing with the human’s relation to land and the animals and plants that grow on it — is “an evolutionary possibility and an ecological necessity.” Is it necessary? Is it possible? Is it probable?

5. The article by Lopez seems to be a call to action. What was your general reaction? If you were to heed his call, what would you do personally?

6. Sanders suggests “staying put, learning the ground, going deeper.” (p. II-8) How do you feel about his admonition?

7. Sanders compares an “inhabitant” with a “drifter,” and concludes that drifters generally do not respect or protect their place. Do you agree?

8. Sanders says, “I cannot have a spiritual center without having a geographical one.” (p. II-10) Is that true for you?

9. From your perspective, do you have to find the right place first? How long does it take for you to establish your connection to place?

PuttinG it into Practice • Interview someone who lived in your neighborhood at least 40 years ago. How have things changed?

• Identify the indigenous people of your area. What can you learn about how they lived? What did they eat? What were their shelters like? What stories did they tell?

further readinG

A Sand County Almanac by Aldo Leopold. An ecological classic published in 1949, it remains an essential work today.

HOME! A Bioregional Reader edited by Van Andruss, Christopher Plant, Judith Plant, and Eleanor Wright. A collection of important essays on bioregionalism.

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( E a c h M e m b e r A n s w e r s )

How would you describe your feeling of responsibility for the land in the neighborhood or the area where you live? What factors have contributed to that feeling?

CirCle Question

As you complete the weekly readings, please remember to fill out the course evaluation form. Your comments will help to improve the course. Thank you.

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The Land eThic From A Sand Country Almanac, by Aldo Leopold

When god-like Odysseus returned from the wars in Troy, he hanged all on one rope a dozen slave-girls of his house-hold, whom he suspected of misbehavior during his absence.

This hanging involved no question of propriety. The girls were property. The disposal of property was then, as now, a matter of expediency, not of right and wrong.

Concepts of right and wrong were not lacking from Odysseus’ Greece: witness the fidelity of his wife through the long years before at last his black-prowed galleys clove the wine-dark seas for home. The ethical structure of that day covered wives, but had not yet been extended to human chattels. During the three thousand years which have since elapsed, ethical criteria have been extended to many fields of conduct, with corresponding shrinkages in those judged by expediency only.

the ethical seQuence This extension of ethics, so far studied only by

philosophers, is actually a process in ecological evolution. Its sequence may be described in ecological as well as in philosophic terns. An ethic, ecologically, is a limitation on freedom of action in the struggle for existence. An ethic, philosophically, is a differentiation of social from anti-social conduct. These are two definitions of one thing. The thing has its origin in the tendency of interdependent individuals or groups to evolve modes of co-operation. . . .

The complexity of co-operative mechanisms has increased with population density, and with the efficiency of tools. It was simpler, for example, to define the anti-social uses of sticks and stones in the days of the mastodons than of bullets and billboards in the age of motors.

The first ethics dealt with the relation between individuals; the Mosaic Decalogue is an example. Later accretions dealt with the relation between the individual and society. The Golden Rule tries to integrate the individual to society; democracy to integrate social organization to the individual.

There is as yet no ethic dealing with man’s relation to land and to the animals and plants which grow upon it. Land, like Odysseus’ slave-girls, is still property. The land relation is still strictly economic, entailing privileges but no obligations.

The extension of ethics to this third element in human environment is, if I read the evidence correctly, an evolutionary possibility and an ecological necessity. It is the third step in a sequence. The first two have already been taken. Individual thinkers since the days of Ezekiel and Isaiah have asserted that the despoliation of land is not only inexpedient but wrong. Society, however, has not yet affirmed their belief. I regard the present conservation movement as the embryo of such an affirmation.

An ethic may be regarded as a mode of guidance for meeting ecological situations so new or intricate, or involving such deferred reactions, that the path of social expediency is not discernible to the average individual. Animal instincts are modes of guidance for the individual in meeting such situations. Ethics are possibly a kind of community instinct in-the-making.

the community concePt All ethics so far evolved rest upon a single premise: that

the individual is a member of a community of interdependent parts. His instincts prompt him to compete for his place in that community, but his ethics prompt him also to co-operate (perhaps in order that there may be a place to compete for).

The land ethic simply enlarges the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants, and animals, or collectively: the land.

This sounds simple: do we not already sing our love for and obligation to the land of the free and the home of the brave? Yes, but just what and whom do we love? Certainly not the soil, which we are sending helter-skelter downriver. Certainly not the waters, which we assume have no function except to turn turbines, float barges, and carry off sewage. Certainly not the plants, of which we exterminate whole comuniies without batting an eye. Certainly not the animals, of which we have already extirpated many of the largest and most beautiful species. A land ethic of course cannot prevent the alteration, management, and use of these ‘resources,’ but it does affirm their right to continued existence, and, at least in spots, their continued existence in a natural state.

In short, a land ethic changes the role of Homo sapiens from conqueror of the land-community to plain member and citizen of it. It implies respect for his fellow-members, and also respect for the community as such.

In human history, we have learned (I hope) that the conqueror role is eventually self-defeating. Why? Because it is implicit in such a role that the conqueror knows, ex cathedra, just what makes the community clock tick, and just what and who is valuable, and what and who is worth-less, in community life. It always turns out that he knows neither, and this is why his conquests eventually defeat themselves. . . .

The ordinary citizen today assumes that science knows what makes the community clock tick; the scientist is equally sure that he does not. He knows that the biotic mechanism is

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so complex that its workings may never be fully understood. . . .

the ecoloGical conscience Conservation is a state of harmony between men and

land. Despite nearly a century of propaganda, conservation still proceeds at a snail’s pace; progress still consists largely of letterhead pieties and conventional oratory. On the back forty we still slip two steps backward for each forward stride.

The usual answer to this dilemma is ‘more conservation education.’ No one will debate this, but is it certain that only the volume of education needs stepping up? Is something lacking in the content as well?

It is difficult to give a fair summary of its content in brief form, but, as I understand it, the content is substantially this: obey the law, vote right, join some organizations, and practice what conservation is profitable on your own land; the government will do the rest.

Is not this formula too easy to accomplish anything worth-while? It defines no right or wrong, assigns no obligation, calls for no sacrifice, implies no change in the current philosophy of values. In respect of land-use, it urges only enlightened self-interest. Just how far will such education take us? An example will perhaps yield a partial answer.

By 1930 it had become clear to all except the ecologically blind that southwestern Wisconsin’s topsoil was slipping seaward. In 1933 the farmers were told that if they would adopt certain remedial practices for five years, the public would donate CCC labor to install them, plus the necessary machinery and materials. The offer was widely accepted, but the practices were widely forgotten when the five-year contract period was up. The farmers continued only those practices that yielded an immediate and visible economic gain for themselves.

This led to the idea that maybe farmers would learn more quickly if they themselves wrote the rules. Accordingly the Wisconsin Legislature in 1937 passed the Soil Conservation District Law. This said to farmers, in effect: we, the Public, will furnish you free technical service and loan you specialized machinery, if you will write your own rules for land-use. Each county may write its own rules, and these will have the force of law. Nearly all the counties promptly organized to accept the proffered help, but after a decade of operation, no county has yet written a single rule. There has been visible progress in such practices as strip-cropping, pasture renovation, and soil liming, but none in fencing woodlots against grazing, and none in excluding plow and cow from steep slopes. The farmers, in short, have selected those remedial practices which were profitable anyhow, and ignored those which were profitable to the community, but not clearly profitable to themselves.

When one asks why no rules have been written, one is told that the community is not yet ready to support them; education must precede rules. But the education actually in progress makes no mention of obligations to land over and above those dictated by self-interest. The net result is that we have more education but less soil, fewer healthy woods and

as many floods as in 1937. The puzzling aspect of such situations is that the

existence of obligations over and above self-interest is taken for granted in such rural community enterprises as the betterment of roads, schools, churches, and baseball teams. Their existence is not taken for granted, nor as yet seriously discussed, in bettering the behavior of the water that falls on the land, or in the preserving of the beauty or diversity of the farm landscape. Land-use ethics are still governed wholly by economic self-interest, just as social ethics were a century ago. . . .

the outlook It is inconceivable to me that an ethical relation to land

can exist without love, respect, and admiration for land and a high regard for its value. By value, I of course mean something far broader than mere economic value; I mean value in the philosophical sense.

Perhaps the most serious obstacle impeding the evolution of a land ethic is the fact that our educational and economic system is headed away from, rather than toward, an intense consciousness of land. Your true modern is separate from the land by many middlemen, and by innumerable physical gadgets. He has no vital relation to it; to him it is the space between cities on which crops grow. Turn him loose for a day on the land, and if the spot does not happen to be a golf links or a ‘scenic’ area, he is bored stiff. If crops could be raised by hydroponics instead of farming, it would suit him very well. Synthetic substitutes for wood, leather, wool, and other natural land products suit him better than the originals. In short, land is something he has ‘outgrown.’

Almost equally serious as an obstacle to a land ethic is the attitude of the farmer for whom the land is still an adversary, or a taskmaster that keeps him in slavery. Theoretically, the mechanization of farming ought to cut the farmer’s chains, but whether it really does is debatable.

One of the requisites for an ecological comprehension of land is an understanding of ecology, and this is by no means co-extensive with ‘education’; in fact, much higher education seems deliberately to avoid ecological concepts. An understanding of ecology does not necessarily originate in courses bearing ecological labels; it is quite as likely to be labeled geography, botany, agronomy, history, or economics. This is as it should be, but whatever the label, ecological training is scarce.

The case for a land ethic would appear hopeless but for the minority which is in obvious revolt against these ‘modern’ trends.

The 'key-log" which must be moved to release the evolutionary process for an ethic is simply this: quit thinking about decent land-use as solely an economic problem. Examine each question in terms of what is ethically and esthetically right, as well as what is economically expedient. A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.

It of course goes without saying that economic feasibility limits the tether of what can or cannot be done for

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land. It always has and it always will. The fallacy the economic determinists have tied around our collective neck, and which we now need to cast off, is the belief that economics determines all land-use. This is simply not true. An innumerable host of actions and attitudes, comprising perhaps the bulk of all land relations, is determined by the land-users’ tastes and predilections, rather than by his purse. The bulk of all land relations hinges on investments of time, forethought, skill and faith rather than on investments of cash. As a land-user thinketh, so is he.

I have purposely presented the land ethic as a product of social evolution because nothing so important as an ethic is ever "written." Only the most superficial student of history supposes that Moses ‘wrote’ the Decalogue; it evolved in the minds of a thinking community, and, and Moses wrote a tentative summary of it for a "seminar." I say tentative because evolution never stops.

The evolution of a land ethic is an intellectual as well as emotional process. . . . Conservation is paved with good intentions which prove to be futile, or even dangerous, because they are devoid of critical understanding either of the land or of economic land-use. I think it is a truism that as the ethical frontier advances from the individual to the community, its intellectual content increases. The mechanism of operation is the same for any ethic: social approbation for right actions: social disapproval for wrong actions.

excerpT from The rediscovery of norTh america

By Barry Lopez

A few hours after midnight on the morning of October twelfth in the Julian calendar of the West — or October twenty-second, according to the modern Gregorian calendar — Juan Rodriguez Bermeo, a lookout aboard the caravel Pinta, spotted the coast of either San Salvador Island or Samana Cay in the Bahamas and shouted his exclamation into the darkness. It was the eighteenth year of the reign of Ferdinand and Isabella of Castile, and these mariners were their emissaries.

  

It has been my privilege to travel, to see a lot of country, and in those travels I have learned of several ways to become intimate with the land, ways I try to practice. I remember a Nunamiut man at Anaktuvuk Pass in the Brooks Range in Alaska named Justus Mekiana. I was there working on a book and I asked him what he did when he went into a foreign landscape. He said, “I listen.”

And a man named Levine Williams, a Koyukon Athapaskan, who spoke sternly to a friend, after he had made an innocent remark about how intelligent people were,

saying to him, “Every animal knows way more than you do.”

And another man, an Inuk, watching a group of polar bear biologists on Baffin Island comparing notes on the migration paths of polar bears, in an effort to predict where they might go. “Quajijaujungangitut,” he said softly, “it can’t be learned.”

I remember a Kamba man in Kenya, Kamoya Kimeu, a companion in the stone desert west of Lake Turkana — and a dozen other men — telling me, you know how to see, learn

how to mark the country. And he and others teaching me to sit down in one place for two or three hours and look.

When we enter the landscape to learn something, we are obligated, I think, to pay attention rather than constantly to pose questions. To approach the land as we would a person, by opening an intelligent conversation. And to stay in one place, to make of that one, long observation a fully dilated experience. We will always be rewarded if we give the land credit for more than we imagine, and if we imagine it as being more complex even than language. In these ways we begin, I think, to find a home, to sense how to fit a place.

In Spanish, la querencia refers to a place on the ground where one feels secure, a place from which one’s strength of character is drawn. It comes from the verb querer, to desire, but this verb also carries the sense of accepting a challenge, as in a game.

In Spain, querencia is most often used to describe the spot in a bullring where a wounded bull goes to gather himself, the place he returns to after his painful encounters with the picadors and the banderilleros. It is unfortunate that the word is compromised in this way, for the idea itself is quite beautiful — a place in which we know exactly who we are. The place from which we speak our deepest beliefs. Querencia conveys more than “hearth.” And it carries this sense of being challenged — in the case of a bullfight, by something lethal, which one may want no part of.

I would like to take this word querencia beyond its ordinary meaning and suggest that it applies to our challenge in the modern world, that our search for a querencia is both

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a response to threat and a desire to find out who we are. And the discovery of a querencia, I believe, hinges on the perfection of a sense of place.

A sense of place must include, at the very least, knowledge of what is inviolate about the relationship between people and the place they occupy, and certainly, too, how the destruction of this relationship, or the failure to attend to it, wounds people. Living in North America and trying to develop a philosophy of place — a recognition of the spiritual and psychological dimensions of geography — inevitably brings us back to our beginnings here, to the Spanish incursion.

The Spanish experience was to amass wealth and go home. Those of us who have stayed, who delight in the litanies of this landscape and who can imagine no deeper pleasure than the fullness of our residency here, look with horror on the survival of that imperial framework in North America — the physical destruction of a local landscape to increase the wealth of people who don’t live there, or to supply materials to buyers in distant places who will never know the destruction that process leaves behind. If, in a philosophy of place, we examine our love of the land — I do not mean romantic love, but the love Edward Wilson calls biophilia, love of what is alive, and the physical context in which it lives, which we call “the hollow” or “the canebrake” or “the woody draw” or “the canyon” — if, in measuring our love, we feel anger, I think we have a further obligation. It is to develop a hard and focused anger at what continues to be done to the land not so that people can survive, but so that a relatively few people can amass wealth.

I’m aware that these words, or words like them, have historically invoked revolution. But I ask myself, where is the man or woman, standing before lifeless porpoises strangled and bloated in a beach-cast driftnet, or standing on farmland ankle deep in soil gone to flour dust, or flying over the Cascade Mountains and seeing the clear cuts stretching for forty miles, the sunbaked earth, the streams running with mud, who does not want to say, “Forgive me, thou bleeding earth, that I am meek and gentle with these butchers”?

If we ask ourselves what has heightened our sense of loss in North America, what has made us feel around in the dark for a place where we might take a stand, we would have to answer that it is the particulars of what is now called the environmental crisis. Acid rain. Soil erosion. Times Beach. Falling populations of wild animals. Clearcutting. Three Mile Island. But what we really face, I think, is something much larger, something that goes back to Guanahani and what Columbus decided to do, that series of acts — theft, rape, and murder — of which the environmental crisis is symptomatic. What we face is a crisis of culture, a crisis of character. Five hundred years after the Nina, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria sailed into the Bahamas, we are asking ourselves what has been the price of the assumptions those ships carried, particularly about the primacy of material

wealth. One of our deepest frustrations as a culture, I think, must

be that we have made so extreme an investment in mining the continent, created such an infrastructure of nearly endless jobs predicated on the removal and distribution of trees, water, minerals, fish, plants, and oil, that we cannot imagine stopping. In the part of the country where I live, thousands of men are now asking themselves what jobs they will have — for they can see the handwriting on the wall — when they are told they cannot cut down the last few trees and that what little replanting they’ve done — if it actually works — will not produce enough timber soon enough to ensure their jobs.

The frustration of these men, who are my neighbors, is a frustration I am not deeply sympathetic to — their employers have behaved like wastrels, and they have known for years

that this was coming. But in another way I am sympathetic, for these men are trying to live out an American nightmare which our system of schools and our voices of government never told them was ill-founded. There is not the raw material in the woods, or beyond, to make all of us rich. And in striving for it, we will only make ourselves, all of us, poor.

When people have railed against environmentalism for the restrictions it has sought to impose, they have charged

— I’m thinking of loggers in Oregon, and shrimp fishermen in the Gulf, and oil drillers on

the North Slope — that environmentalists are out to destroy the independent spirit of the American entrepreneur. They’ve meant to invoke an image of self-reliance and personal responsibility. They’ve meant by their words to convey this: If something is truly wrong here, we’ll see it and fix it. We don’t need anyone to tell us what to do.

The deep and tragic confusion here is that this pose of responsibility, this harkening to a heritage of ennobled independence, has no historical foundation in America. Outside of single individuals and a few small groups that attended to the responsibilities of living on the land, attended to the reciprocities involved, the history of the use of the American landscape has been lawless exploitation. When an industry asks to police itself, we must have the courage to note that there is no precedent, that the entrenched precedent, from the time of the Spanish, is lawlessness in the quest for wealth, with the extension of enough local generosity to keep from being run out of town, enough respect for institutions to keep from being hauled before the bar, and enough patriotism to be given the benefit of the doubt by society.

We cannot, with Huck Finn and Mark Twain, light out for the territory any more, to a place where we might continue to live without parental restraint. We need to find our home. We need to find a place where we take on the responsibilities of adults to the human community. Having seen what is going on around us, we need to find, each person, his or her querencia, and to believe it is not a matador in a bullring we face, a rigged game, but an assailable beast,

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another in our history like Tamerlane or the Black Death. What we need is to discover the continent again. We

need to see the land with a less acquisitive frame of mind. We need to sojourn in it again, to discover the lineaments of cooperation with it. We need to discover the difference between the kind of independence that is a desire to be responsible to no one but the self — the independence of the adolescent — and the independence that means the assumption of responsibility in society, the independence of people who no longer need to be supervised. We need to be more discerning about the sources of wealth. And we need to find within ourselves, and nurture, a profound courtesy, an unalloyed honesty.

Some hold that this task is hopeless, that the desire for power and wealth is too strong. Without denying in any way the dark flaws in human nature, I wish politely to disagree. I would like to put forth what may pass for sources of hope but which are in fact only examples that we can follow, situations that we can take advantage of, and people who I think might inspire us.

If we are looking for some better way to farm, we need look no further than the Amish and Mennonite communities of the country for that kind of intelligence. And we should remind ourselves that it is not necessary to be a people in order to avail ourselves of their intelligence — that in fact such a tack is unwise.

If we are to find examples on which to model our courage, we need look no further than Bartholomé de las Casas, who wrote 450 years ago what is relevant to us today. And if we are afraid of human angels, we need only remind ourselves that Las Casas was, to some extent, also a man of his day. He paid little attention to the plight of black slaves in the New World.

If we would search for a contemporary hero, fighting still this beast the Spanish loosed on these shores, we need only turn our eyes to El Salvador and the murdered archbishop Oscar Romero.

If we require heroes closer to home, people who in their writing, in their essays and meditations, have given us good prescriptions for behavior, we need as a country look no further than the work of Wendell Berry or Thomas Merton.

If we feel wisdom itself is lost, we need only enter a library. We will find there the records of hundreds of men and women who believed in a world larger than the one defined in each generation by human failing. We will find literature, which teaches us again and again how to imagine.

If we become the prisoners of our own minds, if we think ourselves into despair, we can step onto wounded ground with a shovel and begin to plant trees. They will grow. They will hold the soil, provide shelter for birds, warm someone’s home after we are gone.

If we lose faith in ourselves, we can in those moments forget ourselves and dwell on the future of the larger community, on the blessing of neighbors. Your neighbors are those you can see when you look out your window, but today

these are not our only neighbors, if we mean by that word a common burden, a common joy in an abstract terrain.

If I think back on that long night when the caravels rolled in heavy seas off the coast of Guanahani, the waning moon setting, the wind blowing hard beneath a clear sky, I can easily imagine men of conscience lying there awaiting the dawn. They could not have known — for they were the first there — what was ahead of them, neither the wonder of it nor how their mettle would be tested.

In a sense we lie there with them. It is our privilege to know what the landscape is actually like — its people, its animals. But we are like them, I think, because we too feel ourselves on the verge of something vague but extraordinary. Something big is in the wind, and we feel it. And we feel, with them, the weight of Columbus’s authority, his compelling political and ecclesiastical power. And we sense our own reluctance, our lack of objection, before it. His vision, however mad or immoral, is forceful. Even if we see him as a man flawed like other men — his megalomania and delusion, his uncommon longing for noble titles — we are inclined to see that he got us across the literally uncharted ocean, and that that takes a kind of genius.

It puts us, somehow, in his debt. It leaves room to forgive him, even to believe in his worthiness. If this search of his for gold should produce a holocaust, we say to ourselves, well, then, we might take only a little, something for our children, a poor wife waiting at home. And be done with the man. Who can fight the conviction that is in Columbus? Who can deny his destiny? Life is short. Let someone in authority take him to task. We lie in the ships with those men, I

think, because we are ambivalent about what to do. We do not know whether to confront this sea of troubles or to stand away, care for our own, and take comfort in the belief that the power to act lies elsewhere.

It is this paralysis in the face of disaster, this fear before the beast, that would cause someone looking from the outside to say that we face a crisis of character. It is not a crisis of policy or of law or of administration. We cannot turn to institutions, to environmental groups, or to government. If we rise in the night, sleepless, to stand at the ship’s rail and gaze at the New World under the setting moon, we know we are thousands of miles from home, and that if we mean to make this a true home, we have a monumental adjustment to make, and only our companions on the ship to look to.

We must turn to each other, and sense that this is possible.

— Barry Lopez is the author of Arctic Dreams, and other works of natural history and fiction. He recently co-edited Home Ground: Language for an American Landscape, with Debra Gwartney.

homepLace By Scott Russel Sanders

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As a boy in Ohio, I knew a farm family, the Millers, who suffered from three tornadoes. The father, mother, and two sons were pulling into their driveway after church when the first tornado hoisted up their mobile home, spun it around, and carried it off. With the insurance money, they built a small frame house on the same spot. Several years later, a second tornado peeled off the roof, splintered the garage, and rustled two cows. The Millers rebuilt again, raising a new garage on the old foundation and adding another story to the house. That upper floor was reduced to kindling by a third tornado, which also pulled out half the apple trees and slurped water from the stock pond. Soon after that I left Ohio, snatched away by college as forcefully as by any cyclone. Last thing I heard, the family was preparing to rebuild yet again.

Why did the Millers refuse to move? I knew them well enough to say they were neither stupid nor crazy. Plain stubbornness was a factor. These were people who, once settled, might have remained at the foot of a volcano or on the bank of a flood-prone river or beside an earthquake fault. They had relatives nearby, helpful neighbors, jobs and stores and schools within a short drive, and those were all good reasons to stay. But the main reason, I believe, was that the Millers had invested so much of their lives in the land, planting orchards and gardens, spreading manure on the fields, digging ponds, building sheds,seeding pastures. Out back of the house were groves of walnuts, hickories, and oaks, all started by hand from acorns and nuts. April through October, perennial flowers in the yard pumped out a fountain of blossoms. This farm was not just so many acres of dirt, easily exchanged for an equal amount elsewhere; it was a particular place, intimately known, worked on, dreamed over, cherished.

Psychologists tell us that we answer trouble with one of two impulses, either fight or flight. I believe that the Millers exhibited a third instinct, that of staying put. They knew better than to fight a tornado, and they chose not to flee. Their commitment to the place may have been foolhardy, but it was also grand. I suspect that most human achievements worth admiring are the result of such devotion.

The Millers dramatize a choice we are faced with constantly: whether to go or stay, whether to move to a situation that is safer, richer, easier, more attractive, or to stick where we are and make what we can of it. If the shine goes off our marriage, our house, our car, do we trade it for a new one? If the fertility leaches out of our soil, the creativity out of our job, the money out of our pocket, do we start over somewhere else? There are voices enough, both inner and outer, urging us to deal with difficulties by pulling up stakes and heading for new territory. I know them well, for they have been calling to me all my days. I wish to raise here a contrary voice, to say a few words on behalf of staying put, learning the ground, going deeper.

Claims for the virtues of moving on are familiar and

seductive to Americans, this nation founded by immigrants and shaped by restless seekers. From the beginning, our heroes have been sailors, explorers, cowboys, prospectors, speculators, backwoods ramblers, rainbow chasers, vagabonds of every stripe. Our Promised Land has always been over the next ridge or at the end of the trail, never under our feet. In our national mythology, the worst fate is to be trapped on a farm, in a village, in the sticks, in some dead-end job or unglamorous marriage or played-out game.

Stand still, we are warned, and you die. Americans have dug the most canals, laid the most rails, built the most roads and airports of any nation. In a newspaper I read that, even though our sprawling system of interstate highways is crumbling, politicians think we should triple its size. Only a populace drunk on driving, a populace infatuated with the myth of the open road, could hear such a proposal without hooting.

Novelist Salman Rushdie chose to leave his native India for England, where he has written a series of brilliant books from the perspective of a cultural immigrant. In his book of essays Imaginary Homelands he celebrates the migrant sensibility: “The effect of mass migrations has been the creation of radically new types of human being: people who root themselves in ideas rather than places, in memories as

much as in material things.” He goes on to say that “to be a migrant is, perhaps, to be the only species of human being free of the shackles of nationalism (to say nothing of its ugly sister, patriotism).” Lord knows we could do with less nationalism (to say nothing of its ugly siblings, racism, religious sectarianism, and class snobbery). But who would pretend that a history of migration has immunized the United States against

bigotry? And even if, by uprooting ourselves, we shed our chauvinism, is that all we lose?

In this hemisphere, many of the worst abuses — of land, forests, animals, and communities — have been carried out by “people who root themselves in ideas rather than places.” Migrants often pack up their visions and values with the rest of their baggage and carry them along. The Spaniards devastated Central and South America by imposing on this New World the religion, economics, and politics of the Old. Colonists brought slavery with them to North America, along with smallpox and Norway rats. The Dust Bowl of the 1930s was caused not by drought but by the transfer onto the Great Plains of farming methods that were suitable to wetter regions. The habit of our industry and commerce has been to force identical schemes onto differing locales, as though the mind were a cookie cutter and the land were dough.

I quarrel with Rushdie because he articulates as eloquently as anyone the orthodoxy that I wish to counter: the belief that movement is inherently good, staying put is bad; that uprooting brings tolerance, while rootedness breeds intolerance; that to be modern, enlightened, fully of our time is to be displaced. Wholesale displacement may be inevitable in today’s world; but we should not suppose that it occurs without disastrous consequences for the earth and for

But if you stick in one

place, won't you be . . .

narrow, backward, dull?

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ourselves. People who root themselves in places are likelier to know and care for those places than are people who root themselves in ideas. When we cease to be migrants and become inhabitants, we might begin to pay enough heed and respect to where we are. By settling in, we have a chance of making a durable home for ourselves, our fellow creatures, and our descendants.

The poet Gary Snyder writes frequently about our need to “inhabit” a place. One of the key problems in American society now, he points out, is people’s lack of commitment to any given place: “Neighborhoods are allowed to deteriorate, landscapes are allowed to be strip-mined, because there is nobody who will live there and take responsibility; they’ll just move on. The reconstruction of a people and of a life in the United States depends in part on people, neighborhood by neighborhood, county by county, deciding to stick it out and make it work where they are, rather than flee.”

But if you stick in one place, won’t you become a stick-in- the-mud? If you stay put, won’t you be narrow, backward, dull? You might. I have met ignorant people who never moved; and I have also met ignorant people who never stood still. Committing yourself to a place does not guarantee that you will become wise, but neither does it guarantee that you will become parochial.

To become intimate with your home region, to know the

territory as well as you can, to understand your life as woven into the local life does not prevent you from recognizing and honoring the diversity of other places, cultures, ways. On the contrary, how can you value other places if you do not have one of your own? If you are not yourself placed, then you wander the world like a sightseer, a collector of sensations, with no gauge for measuring what you see. Local knowledge is the grounding for global knowledge. Those who care about nothing beyond the confines of their parish are in truth parochial, and are at least mildly dangerous to their parish; on the other hand, those who have no parish, those who navigate ceaselessly among postal zones and area codes, those for whom the world is only a smear of highways

and bank accounts and stores, are a danger not just to their parish but to the planet.

Since birth, my children have regularly seen images of the earth as viewed from space, images that I first encountered when I was in my 20s. Those photographs show vividly what in our sanest moments we have always known — that the earth is a closed circle, lovely and rare. On the wall beside me as I write there is a poster of the big blue marble encased in its white swirl of clouds. That is one pole of my awareness; but the other pole is what I see through my window. I try to keep both in sight at once.

For all my convictions, I still have to wrestle with the fear — in myself, in my children, and even in some of my neighbors — that our place is too remote from the action. This fear drives many people to pack their bags and move to some resort or burg they have seen on television, leaving behind what they learn to think of as the boondocks.

I deal with my own unease by asking just what action I am remote from — a stock market? a debating chamber? a drive-in mortuary? The action that matters, the work of nature and community, goes on everywhere.

Since Copernicus, we have known better than to see the earth as the center of the universe. Since Einstein, we have learned that there is no center; or alternatively, that any point is as good as any other for observing the world. I find a kindred lesson in the words of the Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh: “This spot where you sit is your own spot. It is

on this very spot and in this very moment that you can become enlightened. You don’t have to sit beneath a special tree in a distant land.” If you stay put, your place may become a holy center, not because it gives you special access to the divine, but because in your stillness you hear what might be heard anywhere.

I think of my home ground as a series of nested rings, with house and family and marriage at the center, surrounded by the wider and wider

hoops of neighborhood and community, the bioregion within walking distance of my door,

the wooded and rocky hills of southern Indiana, the watershed of the Ohio Valley, and so on outward — and inward — to the ultimate source.

The longing to become an inhabitant rather than a drifter sets me against the current of my culture, which nudges everyone into motion. Newton taught us that a body at rest tends to stay at rest, unless it is acted on by an outside force. We are acted on ceaselessly by outside forces — advertising, movies, magazines, speeches — and also by the inner force of biology. I am not immune to their pressure. Before settling in my present home, I lived in seven states and two countries, tugged from place to place in childhood by my father’s work and in early adulthood by my own. This itinerant life is so common among the people I know that I have been slow to conceive of an alternative. Only by knocking against the golden calf of mobility, which looms so large and shines so brightly, have I come to realize that it is hollow. Like all

idols, it distracts us from what is truly divine. I am encouraged by the words of a Crow elder, quoted

by Gary Snyder in The Practice of the Wild: “You know, I think if people stay somewhere long enough — even white people — the spirits will begin to speak to them. It’s the power of the spirits coming up from the land. The spirits and the old powers aren’t lost, they just need people to be around long enough and the spirits will begin to influence them.”

As I write this, I hear the snarl of earth movers and chain saws a mile away destroying a farm to make way for another shopping strip. I would rather hear a tornado, whose damage can be undone. The elderly woman who owned the farm had it listed in the National Register, then willed it to her daughters on condition they preserve it. After her death, the daughters, who live out of state, had the will broken so the land could be turned over to the chain saws and earth movers. The machines work around the clock. Their noise wakes me at midnight, at three in the morning, at dawn. The roaring abrades my dreams. The sound is a reminder that we are living in the midst of a holocaust. I do not use the word lightly. The earth is being pillaged, and every one of us, willingly or grudgingly, is taking part. We ask how sensible, educated, supposedly moral people could have tolerated slavery or the slaughter of Jews. Similar questions will be asked about us by our descendants, to whom we bequeath an impoverished planet. They will demand to know how we could have been party to such waste and ruin.

What does it mean to be alive in an era when the earth is being devoured, and in a country that has set the pattern for that devouring? What are we called to do? I think we are called to the work of healing, both inner and outer: healing of the mind through a change in consciousness, healing of the earth through a change in our lives. We can begin that work by learning how to inhabit a place.

“The man who is often thinking that it is better to be somewhere else than where he is excommunicates himself,” we are cautioned by Thoreau, that notorious stay-at-home. The metaphor is religious: To withhold yourself from where you are is to be cut off from communion with the source.

It has taken me half a lifetime of searching to realize that the likeliest path to the ultimate ground leads through my local ground. I mean the land itself, with its creeks and rivers, its weather, seasons, stone outcroppings, and all the plants and animals that share it. I cannot have a spiritual center without having a geographical one; I cannot live a grounded life without being grounded in a place.

In belonging to a landscape, one feels a rightness, an at-homeness, a knitting of self and world. This condition of clarity and focus, this being fully present, is akin to what the Buddhists call mindfulness, what Christian contemplatives refer to as recollection, what Quakers call centering down. I am suspicious of any philosophy that would separate this- worldly from other-worldly commitment. There is only one

world, and we participate in it here and now, in our flesh and our place.

— This article appeared in Orion, Winter 1992. Scott Russell Sanders is a major literary voice for environmental protection and for social justice. His most recent work is A Private History of Awe.

noTes on Living simpLy in The ciTy By Marilyn Welker

The Cree saying, “To live a simple life one must understand many complex things,” describes our family’s efforts as urban dwellers well. We’re still on the path to understanding. Take our sweet cherry sapling growing in the front yard, for instance. Our family watched with fascination this past spring as it budded out with beautiful verdant leaves. Within a month of achieving its full form, I realized it had a very serious aphid infestation. Ants moved in to tend the aphid colonies, licking their honeydew secretions. We began to see signs of ladybugs, which might remedy the situation eventually, but the young tree was suffering. Hoping to make some “safe” application, I dipped the branch tips in some cayenne and soapy water. After the initial dip the death count looked something like 387 aphids (when it comes to aphids, who’s counting?), and, unfortunately, 2 ladybugs.

We definitely needed to rethink this. I did not know what the statistics are on ladybug consumption of aphids, but I did know they were part of the solution. I decided to be an observer rather than a participant. Sure enough, the ladybugs thrived on the aphids. I became privy to not only the four stages of ladybug life but also nature’s clock. Although the final damage to the tips was considerable, nature dramatically achieved her balance.

Urban life with its monoculture of concrete can easily remove the unfolding complexities that nature builds into her ecosystems. Yet the specter of people inhabiting the land surrounding urban areas in order to “own some land and a little bit of peace” is also frightening. This consumption of land usually brings with it the further destruction of wildness and nature’s intelligence. Back-to-the-land movements in which people attempt to balance harmony with productivity seems unrealistic for the large numbers of us urban dwellers who seek simplicity and holistic living.

The question, then, is not whether one can live simply in the city, but how? “Want what you have,” suggests Vicki Robin. Whatever you have, it is enough. Let me share a quick inventory of what our family has: a plot of land measuring, 50’x120’ in the most densely populated section of the city, the Ohio State University area. Our six 9’x4’ raised vegetable garden beds claim the prime sun location, and various flower beds are tucked here and there. On our land is a two-car-garage (housing anything but cars) and a friendly 90-year vintage wood frame 3-story house. I love this house, and I love our little piece of land. I see endless possibilities, limited only by my playtime and resourcefulness.

My learnings with this place take many turns. My father, who has earned his mantle of wisdom from years of earthy experience, told me some time ago that to have a healthy environment nature needs a place of wildness. That makes sense. And so, perhaps with some muted consternation on the

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I cannot have a

spiritual center

without having a

geographical one.

part of our neighbor, we have a strip of land on the west side of our house (8’x40’) that assumes quite a remarkable degree of wildness. Not withstanding the two cultivated pear trees that grow there, the succession of weeds shows that the soil, which most surely is the subsoil from the backroom addition added to our house before our time, is slowly regenerating. An occasional glimpse of a garter snake is testimony to the wisdom

of “maintaining” this strip. Nature always speaks if

one listens, but it is the listening which gets tricky. We planted a semi-dwarf apple tree years ago, which defiantly assumed full proportion. We share our harvest of golden delicious apples with greedy and wasteful

squirrels, but they consider this friendly turf with an ever available compost pile and all the latest trimmings. We share our neighbor’s towering white pine with nesting grackles every spring and have not yet discovered why this is their heaven. I am heartened by the occasional sighting of goldfinches and downy woodpeckers, the frequent serenade of resident house finches.

Our backyard is taken up with vegetable and flower gardens, clothesline area and compost heaps, but our front yard has unnecessary grass which most certainly can be beautified or sanctified. When our children were young it was necessary to curtail my urge to cultivate gardens in the interest of cultivating children. They required dirt — to dig, to make roads, to create “swimming holes,” to build a clubhouse. And our front bank was nicely proportioned for small children’s sledding needs. Now that they are bigger than I, every parcel of land is fair game for nature’s dance. I thrill at the monarchs and other winged beauties who visit our flowers and at being able to grow a mammoth sunflower, loved by bumblebees and people alike.

Our vegetable garden is small but intensive. Our children are certain they are the only children in the world who have to eat kale and beets. My efforts to create 50 recipe variations on beets have fallen by the wayside — beets are just too assertive to hide. Even though I have not seen evidence that my love for gardening has passed on to my children, I must be patient.

I remember the sense of drudgery I associated with helping my mother in her vegetable garden. Gratitude is cultivated along with the vegetables, and my discoveries and ever unfolding amazements of the garden probably do not fall on deaf ears. What more can a mother ask than for her children to furtively slip into the garden and devour the peas or cherry tomatoes with an air of bliss?

Living amidst the city’s densest human life, one mile away from the interstate highway and state fairgrounds, and beneath

the major incoming flight route of Port Columbus, I am amazed at the times when I step into the backyard and hear only breezes and birdsong. I share Thomas Merton’s sentiments that silence is the strength of our interior life. “If we fill our lives with silence, then we will live in hope.” Part of the mindfulness of living simply has been reducing drastically our consumption of airwaves and print media. Reinforcement comes from unexpected places: one of Columbus’ most respected radio talk show hosts recently admitted that were he not in his present employment he would choose not to listen to the morning news, “because I love the morning silence and birdsong.”

More and more I find the sacred and secular merging. When one lives a life of interdependence and connection, there is no distinction. Hanging out clothes is a sacred ritual. Sorting the daily clutter of throwaways is a discipline that is, yes, time consuming but I cannot do otherwise. It is too important. Going to the local market Saturday morning and buying fresh produce from area growers is participating in the cycle of renewal. Purchasing from small businesses in our neighborhood reinforces the vitality of our community.

Having grown up in rural Western Ohio and moving to “the big city” during my college years, I expected the largeness to be overwhelming. Quite the contrary, the more Columbus has grown, the more I feel attached to a small community no bigger than a 4 mile radius from our home.

So what is home and what is community? My husband and I have invested 22 out of 23 years of our marriage in creating home for our children. Our home is bigger than a mere plot of land. We have supported our urban school system and send our children to neighborhood schools. They have attended “regular” and “alternative” schools. One year our high school was home to students from 17 countries. This is home in a larger world.

Our children regularly see the urban gleaners, those individuals who live on the spoils of others. They live and have their being in the shadow of college students who cannot even find their way to a convenient trash receptacle. Our family, too, benefits from the carelessness and abandon of others. Many a fine clothing and furniture specimen has been plucked from our alley dumpsters and sometimes turned around after a laundry session to our neighborhood clothing room for the comfort of others.

All of the choices and patterns of our life ultimately ask larger questions. What would the community look like if each of us urbanites were contributing to a greater good? And if that

greater good were not belittled by greed, selfish power, or hierarchical status? And if nature were not mocked by our defiant and thoughtless behaviors? Urban community seems particularly fragile when I experience the stories — and strengths — of rural community dwellers whose lives by necessity must be shaped by the land. We city dwellers need tangible expression and intentional

I I - 1 1

S e s s i o n 2 / R e s p o n s i b i l i t y t o P l a c e

The question is not

whether one can live

simply in the city,

but how?

What would the

community look like

if each of us urbanites

were contributing to a

greater good?

N O R T H W E S T E A R T H I N S T I T U T E

mindfulness of our connections, and it is much harder. Our behaviors are for the most part masked by “successful” systems which “remove” our residual waste, deliver our water and energy “effortlessly,” and provide for our insatiable mobility.

Having heated our home for over 15 years with a wood- burning stove, we’ve foregone the comforts, convenience and cost of central heating. The knowledge of what “cold” and “warm” are is embedded in our bones. Family life centers around the stove. As everyone gathers to its warmth, we know the stove is our lifeline. We see how this has affected our family. When bedrooms are not heated, it’s harder to run from disputes. When the thermostat doesn’t determine household climate, it’s everyone’s responsibility to gather wood and tend the fire. In every way our stove has been good.

Might it be that a life of comfort is dangerously deceptive? We are seduced into thinking that we are independent, when in fact we are more dependent — more dependent on systems which are not life- enhancing. We need not look far to realize this seduction of comfort contributes to our denial of complicity in destroying life. Call it the Great Disharmony.

What is at stake is life itself. Brian Swimme, co-author with Thomas Berry of The Universe Story, uses the following example to illustrate the fragility of human life. If we were to take one molecule of DNA from every human being who is now living and who has ever lived, do you know how much DNA we would have? One tear drop. All human magnificence, mastery and madness lies within that teardrop. This sacred text includes each of us and the larger community of life. Our assault on this sacred text is unprecedented and accelerating. We surely are called to honor this “communion of subjects” in our every moment.

My yearning for tangible community has led our family and others to build a group with like-minded individuals. Known as Simply Living, our organizational mission is to provide a supportive place for people to learn how to live joyfully, responsibly and sustainably. Ultimately

that means living simply. We are creating a community, and I am acutely aware of the fragility of that community. The wonder is that people come, and they come with commitment and hunger and belief in the goodness and mystery of life. So much works against those forces of goodness in our lives. In small groups we gather to reflect and learn and act on dimensions of our lives which affect the larger community—living an ecologically balanced life within our household, defining what enoughness is in our relationship with money. Backsliding comes easily. Change comes subtly, indirectly. Our learning groups, informal gatherings of 5-10 individuals who meet on a regular basis, provide the setting for people to hear themselves reshape their lives. Speaking about dreams among listeners is a powerful incentive to act on them. Knowing what one ought or should do is quite different from doing it — the distance can be vast. How human that trait is and how powerful community can be to mitigate and transform it.

Terry Tempest Williams says, “It just may be that the most radical act we can commit is to stay home.” Staying home is not a passive game. It involves

creative, regenerative, imaginative work and play. Each of us can do it, regardless of where we are. I fervently believe each of us must do it — together.

— Marilyn Welker and her family live in Columbus, Ohio. The population within city limits is 632,910. Inquiries about Simply Living can be addressed to 205 Crestview Road., Columbus , OH 43202.

S e s s i o n 2 / R e s p o n s i b i l i t y t o P l a c e

I I - 1 2

More and more I find

the sacred and secular

merging. When one

lives a life of

interdependence and

connection, there is no

distinction. Hanging

out clothes is a

sacred ritual. Sorting

the daily clutter of

throwaways is a

discipline that is, yes,

time consuming but I

cannot do otherwise.

NWEI volunteers and support staff invite you to become a member and support our continuing outreach. A membership form is included on the last page.

It can be removed from the book and returned with your membership contribution to NWEI, 317 SW Alder, Suiite 1050, Portland, OR 97204. If you know of others who might sponsor an NWEI course in a workplace, home, or faith center,

put their names and phone numbers on the back of the form. Thank you.

I I I - 1

N O R T H W E S T E A R T H I N S T I T U T E S e s s i o n 3 / K n o w i n g Yo u r B i o r e g i o n

KNOWING YOUR BIOREGION

Goals of the session • To learn how well you know your bioregion. • To inspire a deeper knowledge of the natural features of your place.

BackGround The term “bioregion” refers to land areas of various shapes

and sizes, each with unique watersheds, soils, climate, plants, and/or animals. On a large scale, the Pacific Northwest is known as the bioregion Cascadia. Including the watersheds of all rivers flowing into the Pacific Ocean through North America’s tem- perate rain forest zone, this bioregion extends from northern California to southern Alaska, from the Pacific Ocean to the continental divide. See map on page III-5.

David McCloskey, who spent 15 years driving, hiking, and climbing over 80,000 miles to find the natural boundaries of Cascadia, says no single characteristic defines the bioregion. Key features are the face of the land, and its geology, climate, forests, and wildlife.

Cascadia has valleys and plateaus, but it is basically a land of mountains with cascading rivers from the continental divide to the sea. In fact, Cascadia is named after these rivers. In geologic terms, the western edge of Cascadia is the place where the North American plate overrides the Pacific and other smaller plates. This feature, called the Cascadia subduction zone, runs from northern California (where the San Andreas fault runs out to the sea) to the northern tip of Vancouver Island.

Note for facilitator: This session includes a bioregional quiz. An illustrative set of answers to the quiz (for Portland-area residents) is in Appendix B.

S E S S I O N 3

A location halfway between the equator and the North Pole and between the ocean and the high mountains gives Cascadia its unique climate. Winds interacting with the north Pacific Ocean current (running from 40 to 60 degrees latitude) create a pattern of winter wet and summer dry. The region contains the preferred water temperature for Pacific salmon and the preferred climate for the greatest temperate-zone coniferous forests in the world: Douglas fir, hemlock, spruce, cedar, fir, and pine.

Within Cascadia are countless smaller bioregions, including Maritime Northwest, the strip of land about 100 miles wide adjacent to the Pacific Ocean where rainfall is a dominant characteristic. Within Maritime Northwest is the Willamette Valley, described in the reading, “Valley of the Long Grasses.” Within that valley is the Tualatin Watershed, and so on.

Before You Go to class

Before class, fill out the bioregional quiz on page III-3. This quiz is for your use only in the exercise with others in the class when you meet for Session III.

PossiBle discussion Questions

As a group, see how many answers to the quiz you can come up with. For help (only if needed), the facilitator will have an answer sheet (Appendix B). If there is extra time, ask for comments about the readings.

PuttinG it into Practice • Start a daily observation journal. Document a natural event every day. For example, “The leaves have turned crimson on the maple tree.”

• Your group may wish to invite a guest speaker for an extra session on knowing your bioregion. Steve Johnson (503/654-7948 or [email protected]) is available in the Portland area. Johnson, author of “Where Currents Merge,” is a local bioregion expert.

• Some local environmental organizations sponsor walks or tours led by naturalists. Your local Audubon Society chapter or parks and recreation department may be a good source of information.

• Visit your local botanical gardens. Many have native plant information and tours.

• This might be a good point in the course for your group to plan an outing together to explore some aspect of your bioregion.

further readinG

Familiar Bird Songs of the Northwest (audiotape), Portland Audubon Society, 503/292-9453.

Cascade Olympic Natural History by Daniel Matthews. Trees to Know in Oregon/Ferns to Know in Oregon, OSU

Extension Bulletins, 541/737-2513. Leaflets on Oregon animals Oregon Department of Fish

and Wildlife; 503/872-5264, Ext. 5528; PO Box 59, Portland, OR 97207, Attn: Information & Education or visit their Web site at www.dfw.stare.or.us/

nWei has develoPed seven discussion courses:

• Exploring Deep Ecology

• Voluntary Simplicity

• Discovering a Sense of Place

• Choices for Sustainable Living

• Globalization and its Critics

• Heathy Children/Healthy Planet

• Global Warming: Changing Co2urse.

If you would like to take another course, or know of others who would be interested, call NWEI at (503) 227-2807 in Portland, or call the coordinator in your community.

S e s s i o n 3 / K n o w i n g Yo u r B i o r e g i o n

I I I - 2

N O R T H W E S T E A R T H I N S T I T U T E

( E a c h M e m b e r A n s w e r s )

If you could become an expert in one aspect of your bioregion, what would it be? Why do you feel drawn to that aspect?

CirCle Question

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N O R T H W E S T E A R T H I N S T I T U T E S e s s i o n 3 / K n o w i n g Yo u r B i o r e g i o n

a BioreGional Quiz The quiz is adapted from “A Normal Way to Organize: Bioregions,” by Bill Devall and George Sessions in Deep Ecology,

Gibbs M. Smith, 1985, p. 22.

1. Trace the water you drink from precipitation to tap.

2. How many days until the moon is full—plus or minus a couple of days?

3. Describe the soil around your home.

4. What were the primary subsistence techniques of the culture(s) that lived in your area before you?

5. Name five edible plants in your bioregion and their season(s) of availability.

6. From what direction do winter storms generally come in your region?

7. Where does your garbage go?

8. How long is the growing season where you live?

9. On what day of the year are the shadows the shortest where you live?

10. Name five native trees in your area.

11. Name five resident and five migratory birds in your area.

12. What is the land use history of humans in your bioregion during the past century?

13. What primary geological event/process influenced the land form where you live?

14. Name one species that has become extinct in your area.

15. What was the total rainfall in your area last year?

16. From where you are reading this, point north.

17. What spring wildflower is consistently among the first to bloom where you live?

18. Name five wild animals that live in your bioregion.

19. What kinds of rocks and minerals are found in your bioregion?

20. What are the primary energy sources for electricity in your area? What are the potential sources?

S e s s i o n 3 / K n o w i n g Yo u r B i o r e g i o n

I I I - 4

N O R T H W E S T E A R T H I N S T I T U T E

ExcErpt from InItIatIon By Tom Jay from Reaching Home by Natalie Fobes,

Tom Jay, and Brad Matsen

Once nearly every watershed around the North Pacific Rim, from San Diego, California, to Kyushu Island in southern Japan, supported one or more runs of Pacific salmon (king, sockeye, pink, chum, coho, steelhead, masu, and amago). Each run or stock of salmon fits itself over eons to local conditions, its adaptability tempered by ice ages, floods, and droughts. The vital beauty of salmon has been shaped by the infinite refinements of necessity. The salmon’s genius is in making friends with fate. The king salmon of the Elwha River in Washington, for example, have evolved to enormous size, up to six feet and 100 pounds, because females must be powerful enough to excavate spawning beds (redds) below the scour depth of this steep and highly energized river.

The myriad life histories and the fine and grand morphological differences the salmon have evolved over thousands of years might be imagined as embodiments of watershed character — the salmon an expression, a vernacular of the watershed. Logically and poetically, the salmon are the soul of the watershed, its glory. Salmon are, as salmon restoration herald Freeman House announced thirty years ago, the totem of the North Pacific Rim. Freeman was restating a wisdom familiar to the indigenous peoples of the North Pacific Rim. The Yurok of California and the Ainu of Japan, while separated by thousands of miles of ocean, celebrated the salmon as a vital element of their cosmos. In many regions the human culture coevolved with the salmon, because both species — Homo sapiens and Oncorhynchus — were recolonizing the post-glacial barrens at the same time.

In the rub of weather and landscape, Native peoples and salmon adapted behaviors to fit local conditions. As the glaciers retreated, strays from refuge salmon populations began to probe the meltwater rivers and streams that drained the tundra landscapes of the glacial wake. Periodic heavy glacial outwash could wipe out generations of salmon and limit the success of salmon forays into new watersheds. While the persistent salmon fertilized the raw waters of glacial watersheds, plant communities migrating

north and south from unglaciated botanical preserves were gradually reestablishing conifers in the post-glacial landscape. It was this “conspiracy” of salmon and trees that transformed and stabilized the watersheds of the North Pacific.

Large conifers provided shade, stream structure, and a detritus-based aquatic food chain that nurtured the various species of Pacific salmon. Salmon runs moved tons of sediment

downstream and helped stabilize river channels. Salmon also returned ocean-gathered nutrients to the

rain-leached and glacially plowed soils of much of the North Pacific. As

spawning and spawned-out salmon were retrieved from streams by

bear, otter, eagle, raven, and others, their nutrients were distributed throughout the forest.

A local forester once took me to a gargantuan grandmother fir, regal still in a mature second- growth forest. Four large people holding hands could barely encircle its girth. Its wind-blasted top was crowned with an active osprey nest. While we all craned our necks to view the nest, the forester pointed to the foot of the tree and asked what we saw. Around the base of the tree were tracks and scat of all kinds — coyote, raccoon, bear, deer, squirrel. “You see” he said, “the young osprey are much like our children when they dump their oatmeal off the high chair, except here the dropped food (salmon) is mopped up by a host of creatures, even deer and squirrel, who nibble the bones for calcium.” This great fir, miles from any salmon

creek, was a distribution point for forest nutrients. By dropping salmon from the treetops, the osprey were providing a welcome feast for the savvy creatures below. Seen in this light, salmon is a current between the forest and the sea. Salmon is a sea-bright

silver shuttle weaving the rain-green world of the temperate Pacific watersheds.

About 5,000 years ago, when salmon were established and abundant, Native peoples would move seasonally to fishing camps along streams and feast. But when the runs were over, the people had to move on after other food, for they had yet to develop food preservation techniques to take full advantage of the salmon bounty.

Once Native peoples mastered salmon food

Pacific Rim Peoples share a long tradition of watch- ing rivers for the return of salmon. The First-Salmon Ceremony evolved among the cultures of salmon eating people. At Celilo, the great falls on the Columbia River now submerged behind The Dalles Dam, native fishers awaited the first salmon with great anticipation. When it had been caught, fishing stopped until a ceremony was organized. The fishermen would take the fish to the shaman, who would cut it lengthwise and remove the backbone and the head. It would be baked in a hole in the ground lined with choke-cherry leaves and covered with mats. Everyone would be invited to taste the fish; prayers would be said. Following the ceremony, fishing would resume, its success or failure determined by the respect shown the salmon during the ceremony. Thus, homage was paid to the return- ing ones, those who brought with them their fat flesh and its promise of sustenance, and along with it a sense that the world was working as it should.

— Source: Field Guide to the Pacific Salmon by Robert Steelquist, 1992

I I I - 5

N O R T H W E S T E A R T H I N S T I T U T E

preservation, they settled in permanent villages near preferred fishing sites. They learned through overharvest and calamity-induced famine to manage the salmon resource at maximum sustainable yield. Pre-contact native cultures were probably harvesting more salmon than nineteenth- and twentieth-century industrial fisheries. Some researchers estimate that Native harvest of salmon in the Pacific Northwest had been reduced ninefold before the large influx of European pioneers. The thundering “walk-across” runs reported by early European settlers were likely the result of tribal populations being decimated by the epidemics and whiskey that announced European eminence.

In pre-contact times, by working diligently during the salmon season, a family could store in a few months enough fish to meet its basic food requirements for a year. Of course there were supplemental foods — whale, fowl, shellfish, and plants, berries, and seaweed — but the fundamental food resource was salmon. It was the axis of their economy and for many the hub of their culture. The salmon’s abundance gave early peoples leisure, the time to develop the refined and distinct cultures of the North Pacific Coast.

Given their long association with salmon and its importance to them, it is no wonder that original peoples developed a deep and coherent connection to salmon. We moderns love salmon; it is the choice food of our region. But to the first peoples of the North Pacific, salmon was not merely food, it was energy. It was not energy in our sense of Btu’s or calories, but was what William Blake meant when he said energy is eternal delight. Native peoples’ close relations with salmon had worn through to a kind of intuitive essence: the salmon was the animate representative of greater powers, a fellow being in this fateful universe.

In the Native cosmos, salmon can choose to present itself in abundance or not at all. This vision required special treatment for the salmon. When the S’Klallam of Beecher Bay, British C o l u m b i a ,

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S e s s i o n 3 / K n o w i n g Yo u r B i o r e g i o n

I I I - 6

N O R T H W E S T E A R T H I N S T I T U T E

caught the first sockeye salmon, little children sprinkled their hair with sacred white eagle down, painted their faces, and put on white blankets. They met the canoe and carried the first salmon in their arms as if it were an infant. An older woman cleaned the fish with a mussel-shell knife, after which the flesh was boiled and given to the children to eat. To the S’Klallam, the sockeye is a person and deserves careful treatment. Versions of the first salmon ceremony were practiced by Native peoples from

California to Japan.

ExcErpts from WhErE currEnts

mErgE: thE marItImE northWEst By Steve Johnson from Knowing Home

Ten thousand years ago the last great advance of ice had peaked and was declining. Most of Canada and much of the United States was covered with ice and snow. But even then the area we call the Maritime Northwest, a thin strip of land 100 miles west to east, and extending the length of British Columbia, Washington, Oregon and northern California, was relatively moist, more humid than today, and green.

The glaciers extended into Washington, but in Oregon did not reach out much beyond the higher elevations of the present Cascade mountain range. The storm track, bringing moderate marine air into the region, was eight degrees further south than it is today. The climate of western Oregon shifted accordingly and was more like the present day climate of the British Columbia coastal area.

It was this narrow strip of land that allowed the migration of tribes from the Asian continent; with its north and south running mountains, the greenbelt of land also allowed for the migration

of plants and animals, throwing their seed forward in advance of the glaciers, like a vital dossier, keeping their DNA instructions just ahead of extinction.

The effects of the glacial activity are still visible in both Washington and Oregon. The North Cascades remain uncovered by earth, and this region is today the largest glaciated area in the continental United States. Puget Sound is the result of glacial flooding that covered a series of river valleys. The Scablands in eastern Washington are the result of a flood that emptied a lake one-half the size of Lake Michigan out over the eastern part of Washington, down the Columbia River, and up the Willamette. This same flood rushed out across Washington, through the Columbia Gorge and, at the confluence with the Willamette, was deflected up the valley, creating a lake (400 feet deep) extending as far as Junction City in Lane County.

Deposits of material transported from such floods fill the valley floors of the Maritime, creating sometimes shallow topsoil on top of undigested upper elevation material (gravels), or deposits of very fine material, known in the geological trade as “rock flour.”

  

the Willamette valleY The Willamette Valley separates the Coast Range from

the Cascade Range, between the Columbia River on the north and the Siskiyou/Klamath Mountains on the south. It is approximately 100 miles long and 40-50 miles wide.

The drainage area of the Willamette River is 11,000 square miles, which represents 11.7 percent of the land area of the state, while containing two-thirds of the state’s residents.

It seems likely that before native Indian habitation the valley was more completely forested, filled with alders, cottonwoods and maples along streams, and lodgepole pine covering the rest.

By the time the early white explorers and settlers came to the valley, the vegetation was altered. The settlers found open prairie land. The native Indians conducted annual burnings of vast stretches of the valley, and earth records reveal that these intentional burnings dated back at least as far as 1647.

It is thought the burning was a form of game management. Deer and other animals were forced to graze on the remaining unburned areas where they could be easily hunted. Honey and grasshoppers became easier to harvest, as well as the seed of the sunflower plant and the tarweed, which was referred to by the white settlers as “wild wheat.”

Early white settlers were surprised by the burning just as today’s newcomers to the region are surprised by late summer air pollution from grass field and forest slash burnings:

It is probable we did not yet know that the Indians were wont to

baptise the whole country with fire at the close of every summer; but very soon we

were to learn our first lesson. This season the fire was started somewhere on the south

Yamhill, and came sweeping through the Salt Creek Gap. All our skill and perseverance

WhEn It raIns It DoEsn’t pour

I’ve reached the land of rain and mud where flowers and trees so early bud. It rains and rains both night and day in Oregon, it rains always. Oh Oregon, wet Oregon, as through the rain and mud I run, I look about and see it pour and wish it wouldn’t rain anymore.

Oh, Oregon girls, wet Oregon girls, with laughing eyes and soggy curls; They’ll sing and dance both night and day ’Til some webfooter comes their way; They’ll meet him at the kitchen door Saying “wipe your feet or come no more.”

— Manuscript from the Randall U. Mills Archives, University of Oregon

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N O R T H W E S T E A R T H I N S T I T U T E S e s s i o n 3 / K n o w i n g Yo u r B i o r e g i o n

were required to save our camp. As the shades of night deepened, long lines of flame

and smoke could be seen retreating before the breeze across the hills and valleys. (Jessie

Applegate, 1844)

The Willamette Valley is actually a broad flatland with several distinct sections. From the beginnings of the Siskiyou/ Klamath Mountains, south of Eugene, and north of the confluence of the McKenzie and Willamette Rivers, the valley floor is narrow and flat, only occasionally interrupted by a few volcanic buttes.

Further north, near the junction of the Santiam River and the Willamette, several hills intrude on the valley floor: the Waldo Hills on the east and Eola Hills on the west. Just north of Salem the valley opens up, reaching its maximum width and flattest terrain. Here the Pudding and Molalla rivers flow into the Willamette, while from behind the Eola Hills, on the west, the Yamhill River, for a short period an important transportation river, flows east also to meet the Willamette.

Past the junction of the Yamhill River, near Newberg, the Willamette curves toward the east to skirt the southern edge of the Chehalem Mountains, a short spur of the Coast Range (1,000 feet elevation at Bald Peak), which separates the Yamhill River from the Tualatin River.

Greater Portland area Here, on the west, we pass into the Tualatin Plains, and into

the Greater Portland area through its western gate.

the tualatin Plains The valley created by the Tualatin River is about 200

miles square. Today it is home to some 200,000 people. It is a microcosm of the Willamette Valley surrounded on all sides by hills and mountains. The settlement of the valley has spread out across the lowlands; developers, taking advantage of the “cheapest” landscape, displace farms along the way.

The Tualatin Plains are separated from the Yamhill River by the Chehalem Mountains, which act as an additional buffer from the moisture-laden storms passing through the Coast Range. At the peak of the mountains the annual average rainfall is 54-55 inches, whereas only several miles northeast near Aloha on the Tualatin Plains, the annual average rainfall is 38 inches. Compare this to downtown Portland with an annual average rainfall of 46 inches.

oreGon citY Past the junction of the Tualatin River, the Willamette

Valley narrows down to a few miles in width. On the west the Chehalem and Tualatin Mountains come close to the river’s edge, while on the east a ridge of the Cascades, which separates the Molalla and Clackamas river watersheds, comes close to the shore of the river as it falls 30 feet at Oregon City.

Here both salmon and settlers have come to rest; the salmon do not naturally make it past the falls, and the settlers stopped here, forming Oregon’s leading city in the 1840s. But Oregon City was not destined to continue its primary role due to its restricted physical site and inaccessibility by river for larger boats.

Oregon City is the southern gateway into the Greater Portland area and, because of prevailing wind patterns, has some of the highest air pollution readings in the area.

clackamas river As we move downriver from Oregon City, the Tualatin

Mountains begin to take hold of the landscape on the west side of the river; on the east side the Clackamas River joins the Willamette. The Clackamas passes mostly through a narrow channel, seldom given a chance to meander in its 80-mile journey.

The town of Estacada, 30 miles southeast of downtown Portland along the Clackamas River, is the last outpost before the Cascade Mountains. The climate of Estacada is a far cry from downtown Portland, with 100 fewer days in the growing season and 15 inches more annual rainfall.

Above the Clackamas on the north and south are plateaus punctuated by higher hills. On the south is an open prairie area which in former days was referred to as Horse Heaven Ridge. Just west of McIver Park is an excellent viewpoint of the brief Clackamas River Valley. To the north of the Clackamas, the westward expansion of Portland creates an incongruous mix of berry farms, tree nurseries and post World War II housing developments.

Both plateaus, especially Horse Heaven Ridge, are under the influence of the Columbia Gorge winds, and both have more rainfall and snow accumulations than the city of Portland.

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Gresham, for example, several hundred feet above the elevation of downtown Portland, experiences about 55 inches of rainfall annually.

columBia GorGe The Columbia Gorge commences graphically at Troutdale, a

small community just above the Columbia River floodplain and at the confluence of the Columbia and Sandy rivers.

West of Troutdale, the east wind, as it is simply referred to, fans out over the flatlands of suburban east Portland. During January the wind can sweep through Portland, trapped between the bluffs north and east of Vancouver, Washington, and the hills of far southeast Portland (Mt. Scott, Kelly and Powell buttes), rush toward the Tualatin Mountains and (sometimes) bully its way over the Tualatin Plains and clear across the Coast Range. But more often the winds are felt only in the Gorge, with significant differences in frequency (and strength) of the wind appearing even between Troutdale and the Portland International Airport only eight miles distant.

columBia river floodPlain Along the Columbia between Troutdale and the river’s

junction with the Willamette are the lowlands of the Columbia floodplain. Before the settlement of Portland extended its grasp, the flatland was more laced with entrenched riverwater ponds and sluggish sloughs. The wetlands, once called home by millions of malaria-carrying mosquitos are mostly gone. The Bybee and Smith Lake area probably most resembles the previous state of the floodplain.

At the actual junction of the Willamette and Columbia lies Sauvie Island, a rich delta area that, without mountains and volcanos in the distance, could be mistaken for a midwestern farm area. The island is the largest island in western Oregon and contains the largest natural lake, Sturgeon. In the middle of Sturgeon Lake, this largest lake on the largest island, is an island — Oak Island — where large oak trees stand guarding a place where Indians came to seek spiritual awakening.

From the northwest corner of the Portland International Airport, northwest toward Sauvie Island, is the most dramatic rainfall shadow area in Portland. The average rainfall here is 38 inches, compared with 46 inches in downtown Portland.

  

the maritime climate Living in the Maritime Northwest is sometimes like living in

a frog pond. The pond in the summer is a pleasant, cool place to live, and in the winter it is damp and moist.

Although the latitude is far north (Portland, for example, is at the latitude of Montreal), the Maritime has striking similarities to a sub-tropical climate like that of the southeastern United States. Walking through a typical rain forest, like those found on the western slopes of the Coast Range, one can easily imagine the few characteristics that might be tampered with that would change our maritime region into a sub-tropical one. Raise the temperature annually 15 degrees, push the humidity level up, and create some thunderstorms rather than drizzle, and it is easy to imagine the local critters such as the alabaster salamander

growing to science-fiction proportions and turning into alligators. There are some obvious differences that help define the

climatic region. The Maritime experiences its largest daily temperature range during the warm months when the skies are clear. In a sub-tropical area (and in fact over much of the eastern United States), rain pours; here it drizzles. During a typical rainy day in winter we may only get two-tenths of an inch of rain. The Maritime climate is also unique in that we receive about half of our rainfall within three months — November through January. Most regions in the United States receive more or less equal amounts of rain year-round. The humidity level of the Maritime is more comparable to the sub-tropical. However, our highest humidity levels occur at night, and our lowest levels correspond to the hottest part of the day.

Portland’s climate Portland’s climate exhibits most of the general characteristics of

other inland valleys in the Maritime; cloudy and moderate. There is less fog in the Portland area than further south in the Willamette Valley; Eugene, for example, has twice as many foggy days.

There are three primary characteristics about Portland that differentiate its climate from the more typical inland Maritime valley:

1. The Columbia Gorge allows more continental air to move in from the east. In fall this creates warm and dry “east wind weather”; in winter Portland gets more than its share of transition weather such as freezing rain and “silver thaws.”

2. Portland is a “heat island.” The cement buildings and roads radiate heat slowly at night.

3. The major part of Portland is in a bowl surrounded by hills which trap air and pollutants, saved only by our eastern chimney — the Columbia Gorge — which draws air in and out of the bowl.

season BY season May and June — Gray Spring

In April about 30 percent of the winds come from the north/ northwest. In May and June it is up to about 55 percent, and by July, our warmest month, over 70 percent of the winds come from the north/northwest.

June is a deadend month. The continual flow of storms coming over the Pacific since October slows down. The interior, east of the Cascades, has warmed faster, creating a thermal low in the Maritime valley regions which, like clockwork, every late afternoon and evening draws the mostly rainless Pacific air over itself like gray flannel pajamas.

July, August and September — Summer From June to July occur some of the most dramatic changes

of the year. Through the spring we average a gain of two hours of actual sunny conditions per month (except for June, which is a standstill month) and then July hits and we gain an average of 31/2 hours of actual sunny conditions per day. The rainfall average for July sounds like a Chilean desert report: .39 inches for the month.

The ocean temperature is actually highest in August (low 60s). The effect of this is felt in September and October, when we experience “Indian Summer.” As the sun gets lower in the horizon, the land cools off, while the Pacific Ocean, a boundless

thermos, is relatively warmer and therefore draws air from east to west. By the time the air reaches the Maritime it has warmed up considerably, passing through several mountain ranges and picking up degrees while descending into lower elevations. November, December, January — The Dead of Winter

During these months we get half of our annual average rainfall. There are about 15 hours of darkness a day and slightly less than two hours a day of sunny conditions. Over 50 percent of the winds come from the south/southeast, bringing in cold continental air from east of the Cascades. Any snow that falls in these parts is likely to fall now (six out of an average eight inches

annually).

— Steve Johnson is a faculty member in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning

at Portland State University.

ExcErpts from

VallEy of thE long grassEs From Environment and Experience by Peter Boag

Prehistorically, the Willamette Valley’s native peoples annually burned the valley floor to maintain a vegetative cover that provided foods necessary for their diet. This burning created in the valley large meadows interspersed with oak woodlands. Dense forests developed only in the foothills and along streams and rivers, where cooler and moister conditions prevailed, limiting the effects of fire. This was the Willamette Valley landscape that Canadian artist Paul Kane painted in 1847, before extensive white settlement (figure 1).

The natives’ use of fire in the valley encouraged the vigorous growth of tall grasses such as tufted hairgrass, sloughgrass, meadow barley, and bluegrass, some of which reached several feet in height. The native peoples called these long grasses kalapuya. When Europeans came to the valley of the long

grasses, they used this Native American word to refer to the Willamette’s people, thus dubbing them the Kalapuya.

Mid nineteenth-century Euro-American settlers found long grasses probably the most striking feature of the Willamette and Calapooia Valley landscape and remembered them for many years:

In the early days the tall, rank grass covered all this valley. We would turn out

our cattle on the valley and they would immediately be lost in the tall grass

which reached higher than their backs. In looking for cattle it was impossible

to find them by sight. It was necessary to listen for their bells, and when they

were lying down to rest during the heat of the day, one might pass within a

few feet without finding them.

Long grasses composed only one environmental element of the Willamette and Calapooia valleys that natives and nature wove together into a complex landscape. Understanding the natural history of this landscape, and the effect of the Kalapuya people on it, is requisite to comprehending the drama Euro-American settlers staged on it after their arrival in the mid nineteenth century.

natural historY Some fifty million years ago, the Pacific Northwest had a

tropical climate. At that time, the landmass that later became the Willamette Valley lay completely submerged under the warm waters of the Pacific Ocean, whose tides lapped at the base of the ancient western Cascade Mountains. Roughly thirty million years ago, the ocean’s waters began to subside to the west as huge basalt flows and folding and faulting uplifted new mountains, the Coast Range, from the floor of the Pacific. The submerged Willamette Valley now lay between two mountain chains, acting as a catch basin for eroding sediment. During the next twenty- five million years, the Willamette Valley landmass slowly rose, the inland sea that covered it drained, and the present river valleys formed.

About ten million years ago, basalt lava flowed and solidified across the northern outlet to the valley. The relatively modest flow of the Willamette River has been unable to breach this impediment, and thus over the millennia rich river alluvia of clay, silt, sand, and gravel collected behind it in the huge trough that is now the Willamette Valley. The ancient basalt flow forms a cliff over which the Willamette River plunges some fifty feet.

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Figure 1. Paul Kane, The Willamette River from a Mountain. The Canadian artist Paul Kane rendered this painting of the mid Willamette Valley about thirty miles south of Oregon City in early January 1847. The painting shows extensive prairies interspersed with large patches of forest; no Euro-American settlements are shown. The middle and northern portions of the Willamette Valley had more extensive forested areas than did the southern portion, where the Calapooia is located. Courtesy of the Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto.

Figure 2. Willamette Falls, 1878. Source: Wallis Nash, Oregon: There and Back in 1877.

Roughly one million years ago, the earth’s surface cooled, creating in North America a continental ice sheet that spread southward from the Arctic zone into the northernmost reaches of the Pacific Northwest. In high mountainous zones of the region, such as in the Cascades east of the Willamette, large alpine glaciers formed. Although these glaciers did not descend to the Willamette Valley lowlands, streams issuing from them carried yet more sediment down to the valley. At the end of this cool cycle, glaciers and the continental ice sheet retreated, releasing huge quantities of water and inundating the entire Willamette Valley with inland seas up to one hundred feet deep. By the time of the next glacial advance some sixty thousand years ago, however, the Willamette had once again been drained of its waters.

During this next ice age, the advancing continental glacier dammed a fork of the Columbia River far to the northeast of the Willamette Valley in what is now northeastern Washington and northern Idaho. Behind it formed a large lake. Several times as this ice sheet retreated, weakened, and broke before forming again, huge floods swept down the Columbia River. Because precipitous banks restricted the Columbia’s flow downstream from its confluence with the Willamette River, floodwater carrying chunks of glacial ice washed all the way back to the southern portion of the Willamette Valley. Each time floodwater backed up into the Willamette, it destroyed the natural vegetation and deposited huge amounts of silt and even some large boulders.

While the land was still marshy, only slowly draining from this cycle of flooding, a warming and drying period in the climate encouraged the growth of tree species such as Douglas fir, Sitka spruce, and western hemlock in higher areas and along the edges of the Willamette Valley. On the well-drained foothills surrounding the valley grew grand fir and ponderosa pine.

Beginning about eleven thousand years ago and continuing until about four thousand years ago, the Northwest’s climate became yet drier and warmer. During this period, marshlands and lakes on the Willamette Valley’s floor receded farther, more grasses appeared, and the more drought-tolerant western white oak and California black oak became the dominant tree species. Today, western white oak naturally occurs from Vancouver Island south into California’s central valleys, and thus grows throughout the Willamette. The California black oak’s range, however, extends only as far north as the very southern portion of the Willamette Valley. It does not occur naturally north of there.

About six thousand years ago, the valley became dry enough to inhabit, and humans descended to the valley floor from the surrounding hills, which they had occupied for at least two thousand and possibly as much as four thousand years. Although these people did not know it, their very act of moving from foothills to valley floor revealed a tension between human occupation and the natural features of the Willamette’s landscape. Recognizing this tension, especially with regard to the role of foothills and valley floor, is central for understanding the life and thought of nineteenth-century Euro-American settlers.

Two thousand years after humans arrived on the Willamette’s floor, the climate again changed, initiating a cooler and moister pattern that has persisted up through and beyond the arrival of Europeans in the Pacific Northwest at the end of the eighteenth century. This climatological pattern has continued to the present,

though indications are that the Willamette Valley, like much of the West, is entering another drying and warming period. During the last four thousand years, a strong marine influence has marked the region’s climate. Winters are especially wet, though coastal mountains to the west protect the valley from severe winds and driving rains that blow in from the ocean. Storms coming in off the Pacific drop much of their precipitation as they pass over the coastal chain. The valley, left with gentle yet persistent rains that fall from mid autumn to late spring, receives as little as thirty inches of rain on the Coast Range’s eastern slopes, but as much as sixty inches along valleys such as the Calapooia that reach back into the foothills of the Cascade mountains on the eastern margin of the Willamette. As the warm, wet winter winds push up the high Cascades, they cool and drop their remaining moisture as rain and snow in annual amounts of up to 120 inches. The Cascades also act as a cordon against the dry, frigid continental winds that influence the winter over much of the North American landmass to the east of the Willamette. This barrier, coupled with the Pacific’s warm winter storms, keeps valley temperatures moderate in winter, with a mean of forty degrees Fahrenheit during the coldest months. Snow does occasionally fall on the valley floor, though it rarely lingers. The predominantly southwest winter winds off the Pacific shift to the north in late spring, bringing a drier and warmer period when little if any precipitation falls and the mean temperature

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Map 1. The Willamette Valley.

Hills and Mountains

Plains

Calapooia Valley

Linn County boundary

reaches sixty-seven, with occasional hot spells resulting in daily temperatures of over one hundred. This pattern continues until the rainy season begins again in mid autumn.

Precipitation falling on the Willamette’s bordering foothills and mountains eventually finds its way to the valley floor, whose great expanse slopes gently, almost imperceptibly to the north. Native Americans and early European settlers witnessed how the absence of relief in the Willamette Valley forced streams, creeks, and rivers, after breaking out of the foothills, to meander sluggishly across the valley in a series of braided channels, oxbows, sloughs, and sandbars, depositing their sediments on banks that rose slightly above the surrounding plain. Choked with debris, vegetation, and mud islands, streams and rivers of the Willamette often overflowed onto nearby flood plains, leaving standing water for many months of the year. Lack of relief and drainage, coupled with occasional winter snows in the valley and foothills that melt quickly, caused major floods at least every tenth season, sometimes as often as every fifth season during prehistoric times.

This moderate, seasonally moist climate, along with the marshy conditions that have characterized the Willamette Valley for four thousand years, has in large part determined the flora that grow there and that greeted the earliest Euro- American settlers. These first settlers found along the Willamette River and its tributaries on the flat valley floor extensive gallery forests — often up to two miles wide — composed of Oregon ash, cottonwood, willows, red alder, and bigleaf maple, with Douglas fir and western red cedar sprinkled throughout. Along smaller streams such as the Calapooia, the gallery forests narrowed. Along the foothills of the Willamette Valley flourished Douglas fir, grand fir, ponderosa pine, and incense cedar, with western hemlock and western red cedar thriving in moister and cooler yet well-drained areas along upper foothills and streams. Hardwood trees such as bigleaf maple, western white oak, and madrone also grew in the foothills. Their understory consisted of shrubs such as hazelnut, ocean spray, and snowberry, and along prairie edges, smaller plants such as cheat grass, Oregon grape, and tar-weed. Between the foothills and the gallery forests of the Willamette Valley grew extensive meadows composed mostly of grasses, flowers, and scattered oak trees, or oak savanna.

Ecologists apply the term climax to the theoretically highest stage of ecological succession, or evolution, of a plant-animal community or ecosystem. At climax, the ecosystem is stable and self-perpetuating. Climax does occur in nature, but other natural factors, such as disease and fire, limit the stability, persistence, and extensiveness of a climax community. Had the Willamette Valley been left to “nature,” its gallery and foothill forests of maple, Douglas fir, and grand fir would theoretically have eventually covered the valley floor as a climax community. However, the Native American inhabitants of the Willamette, in order to ensure an abundance of the plants and animals essential to their diet and culture, used fire to keep the valley’s flora in a fire maintained subclimax state of grasslands and oak groves for

hundreds of years.

the kalaPuYa The Kalapuya traditionally occupied the Willamette Valley

between the basalt cliff forming the falls in the north to the Umpqua River basin bounding the south. . . .

Though historians and ethnologists have debated the point, the best analysis places the maximum Kalapuya population at about 13,500, or very roughly fifty people per one hundred square miles, during the last quarter of the eighteenth century. The availability of food, partly determined by the environment, limited the size of the Kalapuya population. The Kalapuya relied primarily on plants, less so on game, and almost not at all on fish. Plant resources of the Willamette provided a diet that was less varied and less nutritious than were the diets of other Northwest Coastal groups, such as the Kalapuya’s northern neighbors the Chinook of the Columbia River and the Coastal Salish of Puget Sound. These latter two groups relied principally on relatively abundant and nutritionally rich salmon and other forms of sea life, which could support larger and more densely concentrated human populations. The Chinook and Coast Salish populations

reached densities of perhaps four hundred people per one hundred square miles.

Conversely, the Willamette environment provided more abundant food sources than did the desertlike Columbia Plateau and the desert Great Basin

regions east of the Cascades. In the most extreme case, the Northern

Paiute of the Great Basin may have reached a population density of only five people per one hundred square miles.

On first consideration, it might seem surprising that, unlike other Northwest Coastal peoples, the Kalapuya did not rely on salmon and other fish for sustenance even though through their backyard flowed the Willamette River, which is, in terms of water volume, the tenth largest river in the United States. During prehistoric and much of early historic times in the Northwest (until Euro-Americans introduced fish ladders), few salmon actually came to the upper Willamette River because the basalt cliff on the very northern course blocked them from entering the valley. Only the smaller run of spring chinook could negotiate the falls, because at that time of year increased water flow from rain and melting snows allowed the strongest salmon to swim over the barrier. The much larger fall run of chinook and silver salmon, the latter of which migrate only in the autumn, returned to the Northwest’s streams after the long, dry summers, when low water flow prevented them from negotiating the falls of the Willamette. Furthermore, the powerful Chinook tribe, the Kalapuya’s neighbors to the north, controlled access to the falls, preventing other groups from harvesting any of the returning spring salmon.

Charles Wilkes, an explorer from the United States Navy, visited a Hudson’s Bay Company trading post at the falls on 5 June 1841 and recorded in his journal the following observations about the Chinook fishing operation:

At the time of our visit to the falls, the salmon fishery was at its height, and

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was to us a novel as well as an amusing scene. The salmon leap the falls;

and it would be inconceivable if not actually witnessed how they can force

themselves up, and after a leap of from ten to twelve feet retain their strength

enough to stem the force of the water from above. About one in ten of those

who jumped succeed in getting by. . . . I never saw so many fish collected

together before; and the Indians are employed in taking them.

The Chinook did, however, allow the Kalapuya to gather eels that clung to the basalt cliffs behind curtains of cascading water. The Kalapuya also collected eels and fished for salmon at smaller waterfalls and rapids on the Willamette’s tributary streams, such as the falls on the Calapooia. Often they fished at night, by the light of pitchwood torches, and took their catch back to camp to preserve it for winter storage through drying and smoking. In their fishing the Kalapuya used bonetipped spears, woven basketwork traps, weirs, and fishing poles with hair for string and grasshoppers for bait. But again, this food source played a relatively limited role in the Kalapuya’s diet.

Instead, the Kalapuya relied on plants, vegetable produce, and, to a lesser extent, wild game. To maximize food and natural resources in an environment not as naturally abundant as the lower Columbia River and the coast, the Kalapuya followed a seasonal routine, moving through a variety of task-specific sites and manipulating the environment through the use of fire to ensure the availability of food and other resources necessary for their culture. In late summer, when a number of other Pacific Northwest tribes congregated at fishing sites to harvest salmon, the Kalapuya converged on the dry Willamette Valley meadows to set fire to its grasses in order to encourage the growth of camas, the staple of their diet. Camas, a member of the lily family, requires open prairie habitat. Because geographical and climatological factors make lightning strikes in the Willamette rare, the valley would naturally have become overgrown with forest, and the camas would have become extinct. But the Kalapuya’s intentional burning of the prairies at the end of each summer eliminated the camas’s competition: shrubs and the seedlings of climax species such as Douglas fir and bigleaf maple. Since the bulb of the camas lies hidden underground and dormant at the end of summer, fire cannot directly affect this vital portion of the plant. During the following spring, the bulb multiplies and sprouts, sending up tall green shoots with spikes of purple, blue, and sometimes white flowers. Grass buds, also underground and thus also protected from fire, sprout in fall and grow during the mild winter and spring, but provide no competition for the camas. . . .

By burning the Willamette Valley, the Kalapuya altered the environment, prevented the growth of dense and continuous forests, and maintained a subclimax ecosystem of extensive grasslands and broad camas prairies. These grasslands also supported

a variety of wildflowers: larkspur, cranesbill, yarrow, aster, scarlet gilia, monkeyflower, poppy, buttercup, tarweed, balsam root, and narrow-leafed mule’s ear. Thickets or small forests of fir and maple still flourished in isolated patches throughout the valley, usually on the cooler and moister northern slopes of buttes and hills and often along river and stream banks. The northern Willamette, slightly wetter and much more hilly than the very flat and open southern portions of the valley, had more densely forested areas. And, of course, trees grew profusely on the valley’s surrounding foothills.

The point where two or more ecosystems — such as a prairie and a forest — intersect is a transitional zone ecologists call an edge or ecotone. Edges support the most diverse biological populations of the environment because plant and animal species native to both ecosystems and the transitional zone itself can be found there. At the edge between forest and prairie ecosystems, furthermore, waterflow from springs improves, and here, too, grow a profusion of transitional species of woody shrubs whose sprouts make up the primary food source for deer, which tend to be browsers rather than grazers. The Kalapuya consciously preserved edges both to support white-tailed and black-tailed deer populations and to concentrate them in certain areas to make hunting easier. . . .

Burning the Willamette Valley also increased production of acorns, another important component of the Kalapuya diet. Fire has little effect on mature western white and California black oak trees, whose corklike bark resists relatively cool ground fires fueled only by dead grass and low-growing shrubs. . . .

Without competition from other trees, oaks produce not only more leaves but more acorns as well. And burning grass cover in late summer allowed natives more easily to find ripe acorns that had fallen beneath the trees.

The Kalapuya thus resembled the natives of the central valleys of California, who also depended on the acorn as their staple. . . .

Though camas was the staple of the Kalapuya diet, one of this people’s

strategies for survival in the Willamette was not to depend wholly on one or a

limited number of foods. Thus, they also collected acorns and more

than fifty other plants, including wappato, a kind of tuber that grew along lake

shores in the northern valley. Again, fire aided the Kalapuya in collecting these foods. For instance, it parched the heads and pods of sunflowers such as

balsam root and tarweed, making their seeds easily shaken loose and collected. The Kalapuya also included a variety of animals and insects in their

diet, such as grasshoppers, whose baked bodies they collected after burning. And prairie burning enhanced

habitat for game animals other than deer. Shortly after the fires of late summer and early autumn, rains returned to the Willamette, encouraging grasses to green up in the burned-over areas. Elk, moving down from mountains at this time, and migrating geese, swans, ducks, and other fowl in both fall and spring concentrated to graze on and feed among these fresh young grasses. This concentration made hunting much easier.

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In addition to this game, other meat sources for the Kalapuya included beaver, river otter, muskrat, black bear, cougar, bobcat, rabbit, squirrel, and raccoon. The Kalapuya’s diversity of food sources guaranteed security. . . .

In winter the Kalapuya congregated in seasonally permanent villages located among willow, maple, and cottonwood thickets that bordered large streams such as the Calapooia. There they occupied large, rectangular, cedar bark and plank lodges, architecturally similar to the cedar plank houses of other coastal tribes from northern California to southern Alaska. Since western red cedar did not grow in some of the drier parts of the valley, the Kalapuya often substituted brush, mats, and bark as construction materials. Inside these lodges, the Kalapuya excavated floors of several feet in depth for hearths, drying racks, and cooking utensils. They arranged sleeping quarters along the edge of the lodge. Each lodge housed several related families and a group leader. All members worked together on tasks of hunting, gathering, and childcare. During winter occupation of villages, the Kalapuya engaged in storytelling and produced mats, baskets, and winnowing trays from tules, cattails, and beargrass while they lived off reserves stored up during the preceding seasons.

In the springtime, the Kalapuya harvested camas and hunted migratory fowl. As was typical of the sexual division of labor found among other Native Americans, Kalapuya women performed all the plant collection and preservation while men hunted. In the spring, women moved out from the winter villages onto the broad floodplains of the Willamette Valley, where they dug camas with wood and bone tools. Spring proved the best time for camas collecting for a number of reasons. First, at the end of winter the plains of the valley, largely composed of clay, are saturated, and digging is much easier than it is later in the

summer, when the soil dries and hardens. Second, death camas, a poisonous plant, occasionally grows among the edible camas. By digging in spring and early summer, the blooming seasons, the Kalapuya could differentiate between the two plants’ distinctive blossoms. Once the camas bulbs were collected, women preserved them by baking them in huge earthen ovens between alternating layers of hot rocks and coals, maple leaves, and soil; they then stored the bulbs in earthen pits for winter months. Meanwhile, men hunted migratory fowl, which returned to the valley at this time.

In the summer, large portions of the native population

retreated to the foothills. There men hunted with bow and arrow, pitfall traps, and snares, and women preserved hides and furs of captured game. They also picked and preserved ripening wild cherries, elderberries, huckleberries, salmonberries, thimbleberries, hazelnuts, and bracken, patches of which the women burned at the end of the season to ensure vigorous growth and production the following year. At sites adjacent to streams in the foothills, the Kalapuya worked oak, yew, and cedar boughs into tools. At the end of summer, they moved back down to the floor of the Willamette for annual prairie burning, acorn collecting, seed harvesting, and deer hunting. In the autumn, migratory fowl flocked through the valley once again, providing men another opportunity for hunting. As this season ended, the Kalapuya once more took up residence in their winter dwelling villages, and the cycle began anew.

sauVIE IslanD: a rEmnant of thE olD tImE

By Florence Riddle

Sauvie Island has always been a world apart, but in the old days it was a hub of civilization, while now it is a refuge from it.

The island is a pocket of topsoil 30 feet deep. For thousands of years, silt from the Willamette and the Columbia has piled up at their confluence where the Columbia slows down for a right angle bend to the north and then comes to a rock ridge which stands against its current. Warrior Rock, at the northern tip of this island, is the high point of this reef.

By the time of Christ, this silt deposit had grown into over 40 square miles of flatland thickly laced with lakes and waterways. Now it lies in the mouth of the Willamette like a loosely fitting stopper in a bottle, about 15 miles long and up to 4.5 miles wide. It is bounded by the slough-like Multnomah Channel on the west and a stretch of the Columbia on the east.

Before white civilization came, it was the heartland of the Chinook Indians who lived along the Columbia from the upper end of the Gorge to the Coast. They were the wealthiest Indians in North America because of the superabundance of food which was there for the taking, especially salmon and wapato (Sagittaria latifolia), otherwise known as Indian potato. Having no need to travel in search of food, they lived in large permanent villages in homes built of split cedar.

Sauvie Island was one of their main population centers, with 18 such villages, because it was their main source of wapato. In addition, Indians from the coast or from up river frequently set up temporary housing on the shores of the island when they came there to barter for wapato, to dig wapato for themselves, or to take a winter vacation. Lewis and Clark called it Wappato Island and estimated its permanent population at about 2,000 — twice what it is today.

Besides wapato, the island provided the Indians with plenty of salmon (their other staple) as well as sturgeon and other fish, camas (another root vegetable), berries, nuts, waterfowl (who also liked wapato), and other wild game, such as deer and elk.

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The island was also a very pleasant place for them to live, with its groves of willow, cottonwood, ash, and oak; its sunny meadows blooming with wild roses, buttercups, camas, and wapato; its garland of clear waters; and its temperate climate.

The Chinooks’ way was to take what they wanted from their environment and let the rest be. The Indians of the island did not practice agriculture, but just harvested what came along and used their considerable surplus of wapato in trade. They did not attempt to control the floods that covered the island twice a year, but let them work to their advantage. The floods brought fish into their lakes; nourished the wapato beds, which in turn nourished the waterfowl; and maintained the waterways which enabled them to get around in canoes.

This leisurely civilization came to a catastrophic end. By 1805, when Lewis and Clark came down the Columbia, half the native population had died of smallpox, brought to the Pacific coast by ships in the late l8th century. Of the rest, only a few survived “the great pestilence of 1829-1935,” a “fever and ague” which may have been malaria. Sauvie Island was completely depopulated. In 1834, when Nathanial Wyeth came to build Fort William, the first white settlement there, he found nothing of the Indians but “their decaying houses, their graves, and their unburied bones, of which there were heaps!”

Within two years, Wyeth’s Fort William trading post had failed and he was back in Massachusetts. Nevertheless, floods and all, the island continued to attract the earliest immigrants. By the 1855 deadline for homesteading under the Donation Land Claims Act, all of its even partially dry land had been claimed. Most of the southern end of the island and its northern tip had gone to the Miller family, who came in a wagon train which left Missouri in 1845. The mid-section, around Sturgeon Lake, had gone mostly to the Bonser family, who came in another wagon train the following year. The rest had gone to dairy farmers from the Hudson’s Bay Company, among them Laurent Sauvé, who gave the island its present name.

In their own way, these settlers were as conservative as the Indians had been. Unlike the Indians they grew crops and kept livestock. But like the Indians they relied on the fish, fowl, and game of the wetlands for a major part of their food supply. And like the Indians they let the floods be.

They built their homes on the high ground of former Indian village sites and routinely evacuated them at flood times. Because of the floods, they devoted most of their acreage to grazing, rather than tillage, and found a way of raising cattle in a single summer-fall dry season. They enjoyed the perennial renewal of their alluvial farmlands. They left the relics of Indian civilization to be buried intact under new layers of silt.

At the same time, the island came to be valued as a nature reserve. In the early l9th century, it drew special attention from such prominent naturalists as David Douglas, Thomas Nuttall, John Townsend, and John James Audubon. Later, one of its homesteaders, Thomas Howell, made collections of its plant life, which are still to be seen in Europe and the United States, and used them as the basis for a landmark book, Flora of Northwest America (1903). In a romantic novel of 1890, The Bridge of the Gods by Frederic Homer Balch, the island is seen as the precious remnant of a vanishing past: “The whites have changed its name to Sauvie’s Island,” wrote Balch, “but its wonderful beauty is

unchanged ... it is the most picturesque spot in Oregon.” Although the island homesteads were geographically isolated,

from each other as well as from the mainland, the settlers resisted the development of roads, diking, and access to the mainland. Not until 1911 was there regular ferry service. Diking wasn’t begun until the 1930’s and wasn’t reliably effective until after 1948. Not until 1950 was there a bridge to the mainland. While the wetlands of Portland were being diked, drained, paved, industrialized, and criss- crossed with utility lines, Sauvie Island was becoming a reservoir of farmland, wetland-wildlife habitat, and historical remains.

Since 1947, the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife has protected the northern half of the island. This area includes lakes which are visited by wintering Bald Eagles from the Coast Range and by waterfowl and Sandhill Cranes on their way up and down the Pacific Flyway. There, too, is Oak Island, where there are oaks from the time of Columbus.

Since 1954, the Oregon Historical Society has worked on restoration of the Bybee-Howell House, built on the south end of the island before Oregon became a state in 1859. The house sits on 100 acres of orchard, grassland, and marsh, now owned by Metro Regional Parks and Greenspaces.

Since diking has protected the southern half of the island, it

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Where Ice Age floods ponded.

Distribution of Columbia River Basalt.

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OR ID

Co lu

mb ia River

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portlanD’s gEology

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has become a cornucopia of all kinds of produce, from strawberries in June through pumpkins in October. The U.S. Department of Agriculture watches over this treasure trove of topsoil and works with local Soil and Water Conservation Districts on maintenance of water quality in the lakes to the north of it.

Crossing the bridge from U.S. Highway 30 to Sauvie Island is like stepping through a time warp from the rush and press of city life into a green oasis of peace and openness.

— This article appeared in The Urban Naturalist, Winter 1988, Revised 1999.

gEology of portlanD Written and illustrated by Marshall Gannett

All too many people live their lives and never stop to consider the ground beneath them, the hills around them, and where all those rocks in their gardens come from. In Portland, with its luxuriant vegetation, thick mantle of soil, and abundance of concrete, rocks are largely hidden from view. Out of sight, out of mind. Geologic processes literally leap out at you in Hawaii and California. In Portland they’re easily overlooked.

Geology is a science which deals in both space and time. To best understand Portland’s landforms, it’s necessary to know something of the processes involved in their geologic evolution. To do this, we must step back and look at the larger picture for a bit.

Prehistoric landforms The thick sequence of marine sedimentary rock in the Coast

Range indicates that most of western Oregon was once the site of a shallow ocean. Marine sandstones and shales of the Scappoose Formation are exposed in the Tualatin Mountains (Portland Hills) about 15 miles northwest of downtown Portland. Fossils indicate these rocks are 15 to 20 million years old. They are known to be at least 1200 feet thick beneath Portland, yet they represent just the top of a much thicker sequence. After deposition of the Scappoose Formation, western Oregon was subjected to east-west compression which caused uplifting of the coast range, and a down warping of the Willamette Valley. The coast line was pushed westward. Meanwhile, off to the east, the Cascade Mountains were coming into being, forming a major topographic barrier between western and central Oregon. The Willamette lowland was now starting to form between the Cascade Range and the Coast Range.

About 16 million years ago over 50,000 square miles of landscape of southeastern Washington and northern Oregon was inundated by a thick series of lava flows known as the Columbia River Basalt. The lava erupted from fissures in eastern Oregon and Washington. The Columbia River Basalt is the spectacular layered cliff-forming rock observed in the Columbia River Gorge.

The basalt flowed through the Cascades along the Columbia River Channel into the Willamette lowland and eventually all the way to the Pacific Ocean, where it now forms some of the spectacular coastal headlands such as Yaquina, Tillamook and Cascade. The Columbia River Basalt is over 1,000 feet thick beneath the Portland area. Compressive forces continued to hit upon western Oregon buckling the Columbia River Basalt flows and thrusting them upward, forming the Tualatin Mountains or

Portland Hills. The basalt can now be seen exposed many places in Portland’s West Hills.

After formation of the Portland Hills, the area was starting to take the general shape we see today. The Columbia River meanwhile was depositing large amounts of sand and gravel in the area, the remnants of which we call the Troutdale Formation.

About 1-2 million years ago, the Portland area was the site of volcanic activity which produced numerous cinder cones and basaltic lava flows known collectively as the Boring Volcanics — (after the town of Boring). Many of the hills around Portland are mounds of Troutdale Formation gravel which were protected from erosion by the presence of small cinder cones or lava flows. These include Mt. Tabor, Rocky Butte, Powell Butte and Kelly Butte.

the Great floods The most recent major geologic events to affect the

Portland area were truly amazing and somewhat unique

the GeoloGical sites

The following locations allow direct observation of geologic processes, features and formations mentioned in this article. If you know of additional sites, please let us know.

Columbia River Basalts • Enjoy a corned beef sandwich, thick shake and basalt

cliffs at the Carnival Restaurant, SW Terwilliger and Sam Jackson Rd.

• Cornell Road • Many walls and structures around Portland • The Columbia Gorge

Boring Lavas • Rocky Butte • Mt. Tabor (also exposed volcanic vent) • NW corner of Powell Butte • Wildwood Trail

Troutdale Formation (cobbles and sand) • Top of Powell Butte • Cornell Road (top of tunnels and rock quarry just down from

first tunnel) • Lower MacLeay Trail (NW Upshur) • Mt. Tabor (you can see rounded Troutdale material in the neck

of the volcano! How’d it get there?) • I-84 (look at cuts for light rail and roadcuts for typical round

rocks and sand)

Catastrophic Flood Deposits • Throughout the Portland area, especially gardens and in NE

Portland

Glacial Erratics • Erratic Rock Wayside, Hwy. 18 west of McMinnville en route

to the coast

Ancient Marine Sediments • Roadcuts on Sunset Highway • West of Scappoose, Highway 30 (St. Helens Rd.)

to the Pacific Northwest, the Missoula Floods. Evidence suggests that about 15,000 years ago, during the ice age, the Clark Fork River drainage in western Montana was dammed by glacial ice. A huge volume of water, an estimated 500 cubic miles, was impounded behind this ice dam. The dams failed, sending huge volumes of water surging across eastern Washington into the Columbia River Channel and through the Portland area to the ocean. The flow rate is estimated to have reached 386 million cubic feet per second, about 10 times the combined flow of all the rivers in the world. Water reached elevations of 1,000 feet in The Dalles area and 400 feet in the Portland area. As the water backed up and was ponded in the Willamette and Tualatin Valleys, it deposited up to 150 feet of silt, sand and gravel; and as the waters receded, the loose, unconsolidated sediments were sculpted by erosion. Many of these features are still part of the east Portland topography. One of these is Sullivan’s Gulch (now the I-84 and light rail route), which resulted from water being channeled around Rocky Butte. One consequence of this flood is that the Willamette Valley is sparsely dotted with very large granite and slate boulders of up to 15 feet across. These large exotic rocks were trapped in huge chunks of ice and literally rafted into the Willamette Valley from eastern Washington by the flood water. When the water receded, the icebergs were stranded and eventually melted, leaving these “glacial erratics” as their calling card.

After this brief introduction you can now pull one of those round rocks out of your flower beds and know that it

probably was among the gravels transported here during the Ice Age by a catastrophic flood. As you are enjoying an ice cream at Burnside and 23rd Place with someone special, you can casually slip into the conversation the fact that the rocks forming the bluff above you are 16 million year old basalts which erupted from vents hundreds of miles to the east. And watch the jaws drop at a party when you proclaim that Mt. Tabor is not a volcano, but rather a large pile of gravel protected from erosion by virtue of a small volcano on one edge of it.

Things probably seem pretty tame now in Portland, compared to its recent geologic past. In some respects, this is an illusion caused by our perception of time. The rivers and streams are still eroding the hills, carrying large quantities of sediment out to sea. Landslides are still sliding. Mt. Saint Helens has reminded us that Cascadian volcanoes are still erupting. Geologic evidence suggests that sizable earthquakes are probable in western Oregon. Since we’re not living in an ice age, at least we can rest assured that another flood of the magnitude of the Missoula Floods is out of the question, at least for now.

— This essay appeared in the The Urban Naturalist, Fall 1984, Revised 1995. Marshall Gannett is a professional geologist living in Tualatin, Oregon.

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Living in pLace

Goals of the session • To understand the concept of living in place.

• To explore the methods and potential benefits of consciously living in place.

BackGround In our modern, mobile society, at first glance “living in place”

seems like a nostalgic curiosity, not a workable plan for a more rewarding life. It requires an investment of time, a commitment to a place, and the discipline of shifting our passion to the place we live and the products of the local economy.

The authors argue that living in place not only satisfies our basic human needs, determined by genetic code, but it provides a path to sustainability for society generally and local determination of political issues that affect the place. In stark contrast, a “global consumer” with no attachment to place moves in the opposite direction.

Living in place means being actively engaged in the human and biotic communities of the place you live. It means spending time with others who live in your place and collectively making it a better place to live. It involves restoring natural areas degraded by prior human conduct and exotic species.

In “Bioregionalism: The Politics of Place,” Daniel Coleman introduces a bioregionalist view. Gary Snyder, in “Speaking for Douglas Fir,” describes what can happen when people choose to invest their energies in a single place.

In “Crafting Nativeness,” Jeff Bickart calls for an expanded sense of nativeness and describes what that looks like in Vermont.

The final three articles describe what people are doing to inhabit their places: gardening with native plants, changing careers rather than place, and buying locally grown food.

If we want to keep our thoughts and acts from destroying the globe, then we must see to it that we do not ask too much of the

globe or of any part of it. To make sure that we do not ask too much, we must learn to live at home, as independently and

self-sufficiently as we can. This is the only way we can keep the land we are using and its ecological limits always in sight.

— Wendell Berry

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PossiBle discussion Questions

1. Did you have a particularly strong reaction to any reading?

2. Do you tend to identify more with land areas defined by political boundaries or areas defined by natural features? Explain.

3. What are some of the “necessities and pleasures of life” that are provided by your unique bioregion?

4. Jeff Bickart offers an expanded defintion of the word "native." What does it mean to you?

5. Who do you know who lives up to Bickart's description of a true "native?"

6. Living in place involves consciously supporting your local economy. Considering your purchases over the last year (food, clothing, shelter, recreation, gifts, vacations, etc.), what purchasing habits could you change to support the local economy?

7. Berry, in the beginning quote, and Bickart advocate local self- sufficiency. Do you agree with this goal? What could you do, in addition to directing your purchases, to promote self-sufficiency?

8. Snyder suggests going to a hearing and speaking on behalf of another species such as a Douglas fir. Is that notion attractive to you?

PuttinG it into Practice

• Do you know where your purchases come from? Keep a list for a day of the things you buy and try to determine where they were produced.

• Take steps to conserve water by reducing your lawn area, installing drip irrigation, and using toilet-tank

displacement devices and low-flow shower heads.

• Many cities sponsor community gardens, divided into plots that individual residents can use. Call your local parks bureau. If you need instruction in gardening, take a master gardener class which may be offered through your county Extension Service.

• Purchase garden seeds and plants native to your region.

• Buy local produce direct from the farmer or from farmers’ markets. Or join Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) farms where members pay an annual fee and receive a share of the crop.

• Compost your yard debris and food scraps.

further readinG

Introduction to Permaculture by Bill Mollison. An inspirational, entertaining guide to creating sustainable human environments in our homes, farms, and communities. Loaded with illustrations, it covers permaculture principles and site designs.

This Organic Life: Confessions of a Suburban Homesteader by Joan Gussow. An inspiring story of how one woman turned an average-sized plot in the suburbs of Piedmont, New York into a thriving garden that feeds her througout the year.

Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future by Bill McKibben. A hopeful vision for the future based upon strong local communities.

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( E a c h M e m b e r A n s w e r s )

“Living in place” means knowing the uniqueness of the place you live, consciously trying to satisfy your needs and to find your pleasures in that place, and working to assure its long-term health and vitality for future generations.

Does this appeal to you? What might be the next step for you to live more fully in your place?

CirCle Question

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excerpts from Bioregionalism: the politics of place From Ecopolitics: Building a Green Society

by Daniel Coleman

The trend in the environmental movement that best captures th[e] sense of place, of commitment, and of home is bioregionalism. Although it sounds like a term from an advanced program in environmental studies, bioregionalism describes both a movement and a fundamental orientation toward attaining an ecological society. Quite simply, bioregionalism advocates that human society be consciously oriented to natural life (bio-) and that this consciousness be based on an understanding of a particular locale or region.

The phrase “the politics of place” is often used descriptively in lieu of bioregionalism and provides a sense of concern for home in the broader sense. The ecological issues that seem remote and impersonal or merely philosophical when addressed at the national or global level become immediate and personal when viewed at the regional or local level. For bioregionalists, the very concept of home must be changed from a salable commodity to a place where one puts down roots, a place one calls one’s own. No longer acceptable is the view of home as an exchangeable piece of real estate that goes along with exchangeable jobs in exchangeable “communities.” Bioregionalism demands the commitment to a place required for the intimate knowing on which care, respect, and responsibility can be based. . . .

A bioregion is itself a sort of geopolitical entity, one in which boundaries are set not by arbitrary political factors but with a sensitivity to natural conditions. These boundaries might follow

the definition of a watershed, changing flora and fauna, differing soil types, or geological formations. Most likely it will be a combination of these and similar factors. The identification of a bioregional entity will always be somewhat arbitrary, particularly as some bioregional criteria contradict others. North Carolina, for example, is commonly understood to have three geographic sections: the sandy coastal plains, the rolling hills of the piedmont, and the wooded western mountains. The rivers typically flow through all three. The solution, of course, is that a bioregionally-oriented community would apply different criteria to different needs. Those in the coastal plains might work together on coastal protection and issues to do with marine life. Then, coastal communities surrounding the rivers might also work with those upstream on water-quality issues or questions of permissible effluent. . . .

Commitment, one of the principles of community building, in this case a commitment to place, is the first step toward attaining the understanding of place advocated by bioregionalists. This understanding of and commitment to place leads to an emphasis on a self-reliant and sustainable way of life within the natural context of a particular region. Since each region has unique geological and biological features, its inhabitants will develop a unique way of life to ensure an ecologically sustainable community. These natural features will determine the way basic human needs — food, clothing, shelter, and energy — are met, which will in turn lead to a unique culture and economy. Certainly, the thousands of distinct cultures that have existed around the planet can at least partially be explained as having arisen in response to the natural qualities of distinct bioregions. The sustainability sought by bioregionalists requires a rootedness that persists over generations, during which time the politics of place can become well established. Bioregionalists believe that well-rooted people will work to ensure the viability of their communities.

—Daniel Coleman is an activist and political columnist for the Chapel Hill Herld. He is the author of The Anarchist.

speaking for douglas fir By Gary Snyder

The bioregional movement is an educational exercise, first of all. Next, when you really get down to brass tacks, what it really means is that you have people who say: I’m not going to move. That’s where it gets new. People say I’m going to stay here, and you could count on me being here 20 years from now. What that immediately does is make a politically-empowered community possible. Bioregionalism has this concrete base that it builds from: human beings that live in place together for the long run. In North America that’s a new thing!

Human beings who are planning on living together in the same place will wish to include the non-human in their sense of community. This also is new, to say our community does not end at the human boundaries, we are in a community with certain trees, plants, birds, animals. The conversation is with the whole thing. That’s community political life.

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The next step might be that you have an issue, and you testify at a hearing. You say: I speak as a local, a local who is committed to being here the rest of my life, and who fully expects my children and my grandchildren to be living here. Consequently, my view of the issue is a long- range view, and I request that you have a long-range view in mind. I’m not here to talk about a 20 year logging plan. I’m here to talk about a 500 year logging plan. Does your logging plan address 500 years? If not, you are not meeting your responsibility to local people.

Another person by this time takes the stand, from your same group, and says: I’m a member of this community who also intends to live here in the long run, and one of my friends, Douglas Fir, can’t be here tonight. So I’m speaking for Douglas Fir. That point of view has come to me by spending time out in the hills, and walking with the trees, and sitting underneath the trees, and seeing how it seems with them. Then speak a sensitive and ecologically-sound long-range position from the standpoint of the tree side of the community. We’ve done this in Northern California, in particular a character who always calls himself “Ponderosa Pine.” You can see how it goes from there. It’s so simple. Such common sense. And so easily grasped by children.

— This essay appeared in The New Catalyst, January/February 1986. Gary Snyder is an award -winning poet, essayist and environmental activist. Danger on

Peaks is his most recent collection of poems.

crafting nativeness By Jeff Bickart

I know some native Vermonters, all residents here for quite some time, all with a deep understanding of this place, all able to make their lives here perfectly, without excess and without waste, from the materials and resources they find around them, using only the tools given to them by birth. You know them too: sugar maples, black spruces, and Green Mountain maidenhair ferns; moose, deer, and fisher; the common whitetail dragonfly and the eastern tiger swallowtail; boreal chickadees, ravens, and Bicknell’s thrushes; spring peepers and painted turtles. And a few hundred others. There are even more I haven’t met yet. All these native Vermonters have likely been here for tens of thousands of generations, notwithstanding some long stays in the south when their home ground was buried in thick ice or still warming up after a few millennia of arctic weather. I don’t know any Vermont people who are native like this.

I don’t expect us, of course, to live up to the same high standards set by saw-whet owls and yellow birches. For us, being native to a place is a much more difficult task. It is, in fact, a becoming, a development of nativeness over generations—but not just generations of simply being born in a place. That may be only accident or happenstance. For people, complete nativeness is earned: being, or becoming, a native Vermonter must be a conscious act. And it must be renewed, revitalized, and strengthened with every generation.

There can be no doubt that knowledge of and personal

connection to the human history of a place is part of being native. Growing up on the farm that has been in one’s family for decades, a century, or more, could be nothing but deeply meaningful. Newcomers like me will never have that blood connection. We are not going to know, for example, what it means to get up at 3:30 every morning, in every sort of weather, to go out to milk in the same barn that one’s grandfather, or great-grandfather, or great-great-grandfather went out to; we will not ourselves know what it means to look out over fields once hayed with scythes by the sweat of one’s own family, and still kept productive by ferociously hard work. We can only hope that our children will choose to come back and settle here after the wanderings and explorings of young adulthood, and carry on with making a family history.

Two miles down the road from our place, Robert Linck has come back to Craftsbury after college in New York and a bachelor’s degree in anthropology. His mother’s family has been here since the 1830s. During summers in college and after graduating, Robert worked for Pete Johnson, a local organic vegetable grower. Now he’s moved an old trailer onto the family land, has planted 500 black currant bushes, and has additional plans. His sister has also moved back, with a passion for sheep and organic dairying, after college and a stint teaching high school in Massachusetts.

Family history and continuity are important, but are only one part of being native. I was born in Baltimore, Maryland, and grew up in Syracuse, New York. I’ve lived in Maine and Vermont all but two of the past eighteen years, since 1998 in Craftsbury. The biomes of the northern deciduous forest and the boreal forest are where my heart is, and where I have chosen to make my home. In a slim volume titled The Rediscovery of North America, author Barry Lopez writes of the Spanish word querencia, “a place on the ground where one feels secure, a place from which one’s strength of character is drawn . . . a place in which we know exactly who we are . . . from which we speak our deepest beliefs.” The northern forest, and the farm country that has been made from some of that forest, are my querencia. To here I always come back, here I gather strength, to this land I have pledged my life and my fidelity.

Americans have almost always been happy to move on to the next chance, the beckoning frontier, the unsettled country. We are mobile. And our willingness to imagine, to head down a fresh trail, to throw everything we’ve got into

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something new, to take risks, has shaped us deeply. But we have often left wreckage behind—worn-out farms, cutover forests, cities with severe problems. Some people, however, have always stayed behind, for whatever reasons, in difficult places, on difficult land. Some have used these places poorly, but also some well, with great care, with love, with slowly growing knowledge and understanding.

We need an expanded nativeness, a flourishing of people committed to place in the deepest possible ways. Indeed, I believe that our survival depends on this: we can no longer keep moving on. We must decide, at last, to settle, to become as much at home as the black-capped chickadee and the red squirrel; to make the best of what is at hand. The first standard of our success must be the health of the land. No true native, by his actions, leaves the land in worse condition at the end of his life than at the beginning, for all lives, whether in the city or in the country, ultimately derive their good health from the good health of the land. (And no true native, loving deeply her own home, willingly or happily makes choices that harm the homes of others.) We will not achieve this in one generation, or several; it is a project of centuries, but we must get started.

Vermont, with relatively few people, with small cities and much of the population living in rural areas, with a strong attachment to a small-scale agriculture, with abundant resources for self- reliance, is a good place to begin to craft this new nativeness. It will be difficult, because people everywhere have become very nearly locked into an economic system that (thanks to inexpensive petroleum) supplies local needs with stuff brought in from around the globe. But there are numerous examples around this state of Vermonters figuring out how to do things differently. Vermonters getting local fresh vegetables onto the tables of our citizens. Vermonters learning how to milk sheep and make exquisite cheeses. Vermonters turning wood from our forests, and wool from our pastures, and wind from our ridgelines into what we need to thrive. It is continuously

inspiring and energizing. What I see in Vermont is a drive everywhere toward a renewed, invigorated nativeness that respects and draws on the good knowledge, traditions, and connectedness of the people whose family names are on the headstones, combining that with the energies of those who are just now establishing homes here.

My wife and I bought our place, 87 acres on the Wild Branch River, in 1999, just a few days after our first child was born in Burlington. Slowly we are coming to know it. We have planted more than 300 fruit trees, bushes, vines and canes, learning the nature of our soil by digging holes for them each spring. We ate our first own apples last year. more of them are flowering this spring. We expect the grapes to bear this summer. The currants, gooseberries, blueberries and raspberries are fruitful. We are learning which varieties do well here, which don’t. . . .

Our vegetable gardens are well established and fertile, enriched by the manure given back to us by the neighboring dairy farmer who hays our fields. We save our vegetable seeds for the next season and replant our garlic and potatoes from year to year. The asparagus and rhubarb are flourishing. We cut some of our own fireweed. The rest we buy from our neighbor, Andy Moffat. His family has lived on this road since the 1930s. There are now four houses, three for family and one with renters. The business is Christmas trees, with a side of firewood and sometimes of syrup. Working to unload several cords of wood at our woodshed from Andy’s truck, we’ve learned the unrecorded history of our area. . . .

Food is always on people’s minds, and in Vermont the activity aimed at growing our own seems almost hyperactive. The event calendars sent out by the UVM Center for Sustainable Agriculture and NOFA-Vermont are stuffed: grazing seminars, dairy goat nutrition, cheesemaking, on farm composting, soil ecology, northern Vermont slaughterhouse feasibility, direct marketing of farm-raised meats, organic vegetable seed production and on and on.

In Westfield, Butterworks Farm, owned by the Lazor family produces from its dairy herd its incomparable yogurt, sold around the state, as well as grains, dry beans, sunflower oil and other products, in a

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nearly closed system with almost no purchased inputs, while building the health of the soil; they, and many other farmers looking for new possibilities, are showing that we can supply more of own food than we have thought we could.

To the degree that we depend on resources or finished products brought in from outside our region, we are not native. Can one truly be a native Vermonter (Coloradan, Michigander, North Dakotan) if most everything one needs—food, clothing, building materials, tools, energy and so on—comes from somewhere else? If being native to a place means anything, it must include making one’s life from the resources of that place—and doing so in a way that does not degrade that place, that does not make it possible for our children and grandchildren also to make native lives. But we have moved so far from local and regional self-reliance that this is a very difficult business.

For the past sixteen months, as part of developing a new course for Sterling College, where I teach, I’ve been slowly making clothes. Garments straight from the soil of Vermont, from this ground that I love—from pastures, forests, roadsides, overgrown fields. I have washed, carded, spun, knitted, woven and felted wool from Craftsbury sheep. I’m working with local llama fiber, alpaca and mohair. I’ve gathered milkweed, dogbane, and nettle to experiment with the beautiful and strong fibers found in the stalks of those plants, and have grown flax. I have tanned the hides of deer and stillborn calves to make buckskin clothing and leather for shoes. We could do much more here to supply one of the most basic human needs—clothing—from local resources. This has become very nearly a thing of the past: our clothes are made of cotton, wool, silk, leather, nylon, polyester, acrylic, whatever, grown/raised/extracted, and processed, assembled we know not where or by whom, with unaccountable environmental and social costs. Could we change this just a little bit? Would it make some sense? . . . What would it take? Would there be rewards that we must now re-imagine?

  

A new nativeness must also take delight in and continually expand our understanding of the wild creatures with which we share this place. The citizenry of the woods and the fields; the lakes, ponds and rivers; the marshes and swamps and bogs; the alpine summits. Being able to recognize the field marks and songs of many of Vermont’s two to three hundred species of birds, for example, enriches every walk and enriches life, brings more meaning and sense to what one sees and hears every day. It brings more beauty into one’s life, blurriness resolving into individual creatures whose ways of living one can gradually come to know, to admire, and to cherish.

After decades of studying birds and plants, I have undertaken to become more acquainted with insects. In the past few years, outstanding guides have been published for a few groups. More than 130 kinds of dragonflies and damselflies here? Who would have guessed! They’ve flown back and forth past me for years and I’ve never taken a close look. And the butterflies! How easy it is to overlook all but the most obvious, the morning cloaks, the swallowtails, the monarchs, the white admirals. But down there in the grasses and the weeds are the dozen of kinds of skippers, doing whatever it is skippers do, I don’t know, but I want to find out. What a richness there is, how endless the pleasure of discovery, and how satisfying to come to understand better who else lives here.

We must craft our native hearts and native minds. Hearts and minds that can learn how to carefully and properly shape to our use the land and resources of Vermont, that find deep pleasure in making here a lasting human culture that also embraces the lives of the non-human, and that understands, too when wildness ought to be left alone. And we must allow ourselves in turn to be changed by this place, as all native creatures are changed and shaped by their places, as over generations they adapt and become embodiments of their places. We must, literally, incorporate lush fields, fertile river bottomlands, windy lakeshores, tumbling rocky streams and green mountains. Otherwise, in the end, we are all just visitors.

— This article appeared in Vermont Commons, July, 2005. Jeff Bickart is a faculty member at Sterling College. He lives with his family on their farm in Craftsbury, Vt, and grows tree fruits and small fruits commercially.

For people, complete

nativeness is earned. . .

it must be renewed,

revitalized, and

strengthened with every

generation.

People already sense, in some way, that they live in geographic regions comprising natural systems, of water, air and land. Now they are becoming aware of them, and seeing if we are overstressing these systems and rhythms. At the scale of the bioregion, people can understand the flow of natural systems, whereas at the global, or nation- al, levels, the mind boggles. The systems are so varied, the climates so different. But the bioregion is something that people do understand.

So you have the region, and that’s the right scale; and you have the sense of systems, that’s the right philosophy. If you put the two of them together, you get ecological consciousness.

— Kirkpatrick Sale, from an interview in The New Catalyst, Spring 1987.

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excerpts from gardening at the seam

By Judith Larner Lowry

Once I spent some time at a hot springs in Mendocino County, whose accommodations included a “cool pool” for swimming, built by damming the creek on three sides with poured concrete. The fourth side of the pool was formed by the rocky base of a hill, along which flowed the creek. On the hillside, native clarkias cast a pink net through the grasses.

When, after swimming my laps, I came to pull myself up and out of the pool, I found that one hand was on concrete

and one hand on native rock. Regarding the seam between the two materials, it occurred to me that this was the place where I have come to garden. At the seam between the wild and the cultivated, where they merge and mingle, the

shape of one giving shape to the other. Moving ten years ago to this small coastal town,

I was entranced by the constant glimpses of ocean all over town and by the miles of protected land that surround us. My first walks into that land revealed the beauty of the coastal scrub plant community. Low mounding shrubs and subshrubs of all kinds of greens, grays, and gray-greens made a rich foliar tapestry, punctuated in spring and summer with the oranges, reds, blues, and golds of coastal wildflowers and flowering shrubs. I couldn’t look enough. Yet, when I visited the gardens of my town, these local plants were conspicuous for their absence, as was any conversation about them. I came to see that I lived in a uniquely protected location that reflected little of the vast surrounding riches. Without quite knowing what I was doing, I began to try to work myself into this place through gardening with these plants. . . .

So I began my own garden, juggling its creation with trips into the nearby wildlands, for seed collecting, and for idea collecting. I never drew a plan but depended on visions, gained through explorations of the surrounding wildlands. I haven’t been tied to these visions but have kept open to surprises; indeed, I have come to see surprises as the highest kind of gardening experience. Gardening with our local flora has allowed me to study and live with the plants in such a way that I have discovered qualities of which I was previously unaware.

Take coyote bush, for example. On my piece of land, the only species from the coastal scrub plant community was coyote bush, which is often removed when a garden is made. We left islands of coyote bush, good places for mysterious rustlings from wildlife in the early morning. As I talked to people about coyote bush, information began to emerge. It turned out that there were more coyote bush appreciators than I had thought. What had begun as a

lonely conversation expanded to include many talkers, and eventually a loose association formed, dedicated to protecting and restoring habitat in our town. At first jokingly and then as a matter of course, we called ourselves “Friends of the Coyote Bush.”

We learned that coyote bush is an indispensable source of nectar in the autumn, when little else provides it. Hundreds of insects take advantage of its nectar, including Paradejeania rutilloides, an insect critical for the control of insect pests on agricultural crops. The soil under coyote bush is rich, good for growing vegetables or for sheltering native herbaceous plants like checkerbloom or brodiaea. Its distinctive honeyed fragrance in the fall and winter locates me in this place. Some birds live their whole lives in coyote bush, finding there all they need for perching, nesting, breeding, eating, and resting. Coyote bush is enough for them. We pondered the mysteries of its many forms, from the graceful mounds, like clouds on a hillside, to the low-growing, ground-hugging form, to those individuals that unaccountably shoot up to tree size. As

we learned more, my friend Lea said, “It’s hard to remember that once I thought coyote bush was just . . . coyote bush.”

What came to me slowly was a vision of my home nestled into the intricate earth, surrounded by those trees, shrubs, grasses, and wildflowers that at one time graced it, and surrounded also by those birds, insects, rodents, and mammals that have slept in, eaten off, hidden in, bred in, and otherwise hung out in these plants for the last ten thousand years. The white-crowned sparrow, famous for its

different dialects, has a clear, sweet whistle heard only in the area reaching from my town to a lake three miles away. The California poppy occurs in a lemon-yellow rather than a crayon-orange variety along our coast. Home was becoming more particularly defined, more specific, more tied to the details of smell,

color, and form, as we searched out the clues and looked at the pieces.

While the land around my house, and in my town in general, can no longer be called pristine, the kind of gardening I have become interested in appears at the place where my plant choices and the general direction of the wild landscape meet, where I can work to locate myself and my garden in the ongoing evolution of life forms as they have become evident in this post-Pleistocene era, on this marine terrace, at the edge of this sea. I am increasingly eased by my association with these plants. Collecting,

cleaning, and sowing their seeds, planting and transplanting them as young plants, collecting seeds from them in turn, all create a long intimacy somewhat reminiscent of, though not

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It occurred to me

that this was the

place where I have

come to garden.

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nearly as rich as, the complicated, layered involvement of the native Californians who used and continue to use them.

  

Twice a year, a Pomo Indian named Milton “Bun” Lucas puts a chair between the two elderberry bushes in the garden. From there, he directs us, as we scurry about cutting shoots from the elderberry for him to turn into carved clapper sticks and flutes (musical instruments used by many California tribes). Our cutting goals include fostering those stems that next year will be the right width for a clapper stick or flute. Gardening can be an anxious pastime, as the demands of weeding, watering, fertilizing, and pruning accrue. I have never experienced such peaceful gardening moments as when we plan for next year’s “music bush” harvest. “Cut here,” says Bun, “And cut here.”

Basketry materials are not as available to native Californian basketmakers as they were in the past. Basketgrass, used by a number of Californian tribes, is hard to find and often not of suitable quality. At the same time, this grass has become extremely popular in landscaping. A large, fine textured handsome grass easily grown horticulturally, it is being planted by thousands throughout California and seems to be adaptable to many conditions; there is no reason for indigenous basketmakers to go without. This fall, I was able to offer sheaves of its beautiful pale seed stalks to a Yowlumni basketmaker.

I have talked with other indigenous Californians about plants they used to see but no longer can find, plants of cultural importance to their tribe. There is a plant gathered for its root, an elusive mention of a grass with seeds as large as wheat, a variety of wild tobacco no one has seen for a while. All these could be found and brought into the native garden. Recent anthropological theories about Indian land management indicate that, to the indigenous people of California, there is no “wilderness,” but that human activities have always transformed the landscape. The distinction between the garden and the wild blurs further. The seam shifts, cracks in some places, holds more closely in others.

I have become a patron of used book stores, looking for the odd find that may illuminate some hitherto unknown aspect of this kind of landscape and these plants, of previous human interactions with them and reactions to them. The coastal plants, except perhaps the redwoods, have no John Muir. They are largely unsung. Easily removed for development or ranching, of little evident economic value, they are the underdog of plant communities. I think of myself as becoming of them. I am “of the coastal scrub.”

For this kind of garden, plant lists are not taken from charts in glossy garden books. Ideas for plantings come from local floras, from hikes with naturalists into nearby undisturbed areas,

from visits to botanic gardens, from the recollections of old- timers, and from the oral histories stored in our museums and libraries. They come from the diaries of early Spanish explorers, from the journals of wives of doctors living in gold-mining communities, or from the casual asides of English tourists.

This garden isn’t the wild, but it looks to, and is in conversation with, the wild. It backs on, and is backed up by, natural systems. The goal is that the quail in the vacant lot next to us will find in our arranged mosaic of coastal prairie, coastal scrub, and wildflower fields the forbs they need for greens, the seeds they need for protein when nesting, and the habitat structure for shelter and protection in our shrubs. The ubiquitous subclover, a plant widely sown for forage, will not be found in our garden, as it is in nearby lots, since it is now known that this plant contains chemicals that inhibit reproduction in quail. Nor will the naturalizing pyracantha, for though its berries may seem to make birds amusingly inebriated, they actually set them at risk for predation and interfere with the activities necessary for their survival. Instead, we plant

toyon, the shrub for which Hollywood was named with its bright hollylike berries at Christmas time.

With plantings of toyon, we have joined the great feeding schedule, whereby food is available at the right time for the right creature. In early summer, the buckeye blooms, sometimes for three months. Its great pendant blossoms attract the insects that nourish the protein-hungry nesting birds. Even birds that are usually vegetarian often require animal food while nesting. In mid-summer, the annual and perennial seed crops come in, bee plant, poppy, miner’s lettuce, clarkia. By early fall, the native honeysuckle drapes succulent red berries on trees and shrubs.

Mid-fall brings the acorn and hazel harvests, and late fall sees the ripening of the madrone and

toyon berries, while the coyote bush pumps out the nectar. The arrival of the rufous humming-bird is tied to the blooming of the flowering currant in January and February. Some might say it is not truly

representative of the fine art of gardening to use local natives, to use natural models. But choices have been made, plants have been arranged, an aesthetic has been developed. It embraces all I know, all I hope to know, and all I wish I knew

about this set of ancient processes and associations. Some have said it is the way of a lazy gardener, but I find that horticultural challenges are many.

For example, I want to establish a stand of Indian paintbrush

The coastal plants, except perhaps the

redwoods, have no John Muir. They are largely

unsung. Easily removed for

development or ranching, of little

evident economic value, they are the underdog of plant communities. I think of myself as

becoming of them. I am “of the coastal scrub.”

here, which probably grew here once but has so far not survived in my garden. Appearing in the radiant palette of apricot, scarlet, and yellow, it hosts a particular kind of aphid-eating mite. This mite lives in the flower, where it eats nectar, until a hummingbird comes along to share the nectar. At this moment, the mite runs up the hummingbird’s beak and into its nostril, where it sits tight while the hummingbird flies down to Baja. As the hummingbird approaches a nectar-producing plant, the mite gets ready, rears up, and races from the nostril, down the beak, and into the flower. Since it must run so quickly, it is estimated that this creature is as fast as the fastest animal on earth, the cheetah. By establishing this flower in the garden, with its as yet elusive cultural requirements, I may be facilitating this mind-boggling nasal journey.

Some might call it xenophobic to remove or exclude nonnative plants. The fact is, on all but one side of us where coastal scrub still exists, our garden stands out startlingly from the surrounding vacant lots, filled as they are with escaped exotic plants like eucalyptus, pampas grass, passion flower vine, German ivy, and French broom. Here the native plants have become the exotics. I can justify my gardening choices with data on habitat for songbirds, butterflies, insects, voles, and lizards, with quotes from scientific journals and studies. And knowledge of the qualities of these plants seems to fill some of that cavity of longing for knowledgeable connection with our tribe, both human and other, that some of us carry around like an empty burden basket. But the truth is, some of the creatures we long to see around us may not come here at all, so isolated are we in this diminished habitat.

And too, those who say that this way of working with plants isn’t really gardening might be right. Maybe my piece of land is neither the wildlands nor a garden, and maybe the activities involved aren’t really gardening at all but more like inserting yourself into the long dream of this solemn, fogbound, silvered land. Though protecting, enhancing, and bringing close the coastal shrub and other native plant communities has become my business, though life is punctuated by phone calls and seed orders and scheduling, at the back somewhere always is the color of the litter made by wax myrtle leaves, and the smell of coyote bush in the rain.

— This article appeared in Orion, Summer 1994. Judith Larner Lowry has been proprietor of Larner Seeds, a company specializing in California native plants, for the last

seventeen years. She is the author of The Landscaping Ideas of Jays.

there’s no specialization like home: making a career out

of the place you live By John K. Bullard

There is no doubt about the importance of places. But are places so important that a person can specialize in them? Or, to put the question another way, can a person create a profession — and a career — based on a single place?

This question was the subject of a thesis I submitted at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1974 in pursuit of master’s degrees in architecture and city planning. And it remains the subject of my professional life in my particular place — my city of New Bedford, Massachusetts, a working-class, mostly Portuguese seaport of 100,000 people, the city in which I was born.

The major influence in my decision to specialize in a specific place was my very strong attachment to New Bedford. In his provocative book Rules for Radicals, Saul Alinsky advised middle- class activists, “We must begin from where we are if we are to build power for change.” I feel a connection to New Bedford that is infinitely more powerful than any I feel to any other place because it comes from my family, my history, my heart, and my gut, not just from my head.

As professions — including urban design and planning — become more specialized, and as long-distance communications and travel become so much easier, people have fewer opportunities to put down roots. Professional schools are creating nothing but Paladins — “Have Gun, Will Travel.” I wanted to stay in one place so that I could really learn how it worked and who made it work. I realized if New Bedford was to be the constant in my career, then my profession would have to change from time to time. If I were to specialize in a place, I could not specialize in anything else.

My first efforts in New Bedford focused on a problem that was not the most difficult to solve (another suggestion of Alinsky’s) but still needed to be addressed: revitalizing the waterfront historic district. In my MIT thesis I developed a citizen- oriented revitalization plan. I then tested my own thesis, working with three non-profit community organizations for 11 years. Those three groups, with considerable support from city government, transformed the historic center of this world-famous whaling port from a dilapidated 15-block civic embarrassment into a thriving area. The district simultaneously serves as a working support base for the nation’s most productive fishing fleet and attracts visitors because its historic character has been preserved in a first-rate manner.

My task was to elicit a vision for the waterfront — one shared by the people involved in this community and by city government. I spent a lot of time asking people, “What do you want to be?” Too often they responded by offering comparisons: “We want to be like Newport” or “We want to be like Nantucket or Boston.” It took deeper digging to find a vision that was rooted in New Bedford.

As the successful revitalization gained attention (my thesis adviser had said it was impracticable and would not work!),

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people said to me, “You must be a preservationist. Where are you going after you finish with New Bedford?”

Revitalization is something that never starts or ends; it is a continuing process. But when we had reached a certain level of success — having restored major buildings and established that our working waterfront could coexist with historic preservation — it seemed that the time had come for me to move on. My “profession” as “preservationist” had to change, and it did. A good and popular mayor had retired to assume a judgeship, and people in the city said they wanted me to do for all of New Bedford what had happened in the historic district. So I became a “politician” and was elected mayor of New Bedford in 1985.

The history that I learn now as mayor seems mostly to concern sewer lines, and the preservation in which I am involved is the struggle to save the lives of children who live in an atmosphere clouded by drugs, violence, AIDS, and economic hardship.

People now say to me: “Oh, you’re a politician! What are you going to do after you finish with New Bedford?”

I don’t know how, or when, my profession will change again, but I know it will. There are all kinds of professions in which I could work toward my goal: making my city — New Bedford — a better place.

The rewards of staying in one place and making it a career are immense. One sees every day the improvements for which one has been responsible. There is a connection to time, place, and people that serves as an anchor in an uncertain world.

If small cities are to survive, and thrive, more people must choose this path. We do not really need any more architects or planners in Boston or San Francisco or even in Cambridge. But New Bedford, Fall River, Lawrence, Chelsea, Brockton — all in Massachusetts — and the hundreds of other small and poor cities in America are in desperate need. A single committed person willing to stay and become part of such a community is more important and has a greater positive impact than a hundred hired guns.

We need people to choose this path. Cities such as these can fail without causing the national concern that is expressed over the tribulations of New York or Detroit. Small cities and towns can vanish without a whimper, except, of course, from the people who live in them.

The question we ought to ask is not whether a person can make a career of a single place. People can, and it is imperative that they do so. The question should be: What are the professions and the schools doing to encourage young people to do this?

— This article appeared in Places: A Quarterly Journal of Environmental Design, Fall 1991. Author John K. Bullard is no longer mayor of New Bedford. He is currently

serving as President of the Sea Education Association at Woods Hole .

excerpts from reWeaving our soul connection With food By Paul Conrad from Reflections, Summer 1995

Chances are, if you look far enough down your family tree, you’ll find a farmer. In a time when only a few of us make our living directly from the land, it’s easy to lose sight of the fact that

most of humanity, throughout most of history, lived in agrarian or hunter-gatherer societies.

In older times, much of our lives centered around growing, gathering, storing and preparing food. We had an intimate and immediate concern for the natural world since a failed crop, a poor hunt, or a scarcity of foraged foods could mean suffering and starvation. We gathered together and made rituals around planting and harvesting. We prayed to gods and goddesses who granted or withheld their bounty. We created community around sharing the labor of producing our food and sharing the fruits of that labor.

Over the past few generations, this natural recipe for community has, for most of us, been watered down from a rich stew to the thinnest of broths. We can still taste it when we gather together to savor food and fellowship on special occasions: holiday family dinners, potluck socials, festive meals prepared for close friends. But for the most part, we have become what essayist Wendell Berry calls “industrial eaters.” Where our ancestors were active players in what he refers to as “the annual drama of the food economy,” we have become passive consumers of the output of an enormous global food industry.

A trip to the supermarket gives ample evidence of the power and efficiency of this industry. We face an abundance of food, a wealth of choices, and a surfeit of temptations to indulge our appetites. But as we fill our bodies with more varieties of food than our ancestors could have imagined, we run the risk of starving our souls. In forgetting where our food comes from, we are losing a fundamental connection with natural and human processes that have sustained us throughout history.

There are ways to reweave that soul-connection with food by re-establishing relationships with the people who actually produce it, right in our own communities. Below are some ways you can tap into the local food economy by partronizing the smallscale growers who sell their crops directly to the public. Many of these growers farm organically and work hard to maintain the health and fertility of their land. By supporting them you will not only find some of the healthiest, best tasting

food available, you’ll help our region rebuild a strong and sustainable agricultural base.

Farmers Markets are a great way to turn grocery shopping into a fun weekend outing. You’ll get a chance to meet the farmers and buy fruits and vegetables still glistening with dew from

being picked fresh that morning. . . . Some . . . limit their offerings to fresh produce and other products straight from the garden. Others offer prepared foods like baked goods, cheeses and sausages, and products from local crafts people. . . .

U-Picks let you get a taste of life on the farm by harvesting your own crops. U-Picks can be real money-savers, especially if you have a big freezer or want to try making pickles or preserves. (Putting Food By by Ruth Hertzberg, Beatrice Vaughn and Janet Greene, will tell you just about everything you need to know about food preservation.)

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For those who have never harvested fruits or vegetables before, David Brown of Mustard Seed Farms advises that there is no such thing as a stupid question. A few minutes spent with the farmer, learning how to tell what’s ripe and the proper way to pick it can save you wasted effort and prevent damage to delicate plants. Brown also advises calling ahead to make sure the crop you want is in season.

community Supported agriculture makes you a partner with your local farmer. . . . As a member of a CSA farm, you pay a set price for a share of the farm’s produce. Most CSAs grow a wide variety of vegetables and herbs. Some offer fruit, flowers, eggs and other farm products. Each week during the growing season members receive an assortment of produce with a selection that varies according to which crops are ripe at the time. For most CSAs, the growing season lasts from 20-30 weeks. . . .

Will Newman, who founded Oregon’s first CSA, believes that these membership farms provide one of the best ways to reestablish the connection between food and community. Like many CSAs, Natural Harvest Farm, run by Will Newman and Susan Clark, offers plenty of opportunities for members to connect around work and play. There are regular farm tours, monthly work days where members can come out to the farm to help with farm chores, and an annual harvest festival where farmers and members gather to celebrate the finish of another successful season.

grow Your Own. This is perhaps the most intimate way to reconnect with the food chain. Vegetable gardening can be immensely satisfying, and nothing else tastes quite as fresh and sweet as a tomato or a handful of sugar snap peas eaten straight off the vine. . . . Even if you live in an apartment with no growing space, your city or town may have a community garden program where you can rent a garden plot for a very nominal fee.

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a valley like this By William Stafford

Sometimes you look at an empty valley like this, and suddenly the air is filled with snow. That is the way the whole world happened— there was nothing, and the. . .

But may be some time you will look out and even the mountains are gone, the world become nothing again. What can a person do to help bring back the world?

We have to watch it and then look at each other. Together we hold it close and carefully save it, like a bubble that can disappear if we don’t watch out.

Please think about this as you go on. Breathe on the world. Hold out your hands to it. When morning and evenings roll along, watch how they open and close, how they invite you to the long party that your life is.

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Mapping your place

Goals of the session • To understand how mapping can give you a new sense

of place.

BackGround Mapping is an exceptional tool for a budding bioregionalist.

In contrast to a typical map showing political subdivisions and roads, a bioregional map delineates regions based on watersheds, climate, plant types, and human culture, helping people understand their surroundings. Local groups can make maps with many themes: native settlements before European contact; location of rivers, streams, and wetlands, including those which may have been filled or paved over; present and proposed green spaces; wildlife sightings; and the location of alternative energy sources.

Gene Marshall, in “Mapping the Biosphere,” says many of our political subdivisions have little meaning to us. For example, Hawaii, although part of the United States, is farther from our “home” experience than British Columbia. He suggests

that we identify our place and how it relates to the continent by starting with our neighborhood and moving out in larger concentric circles. As you read the essay, you may fill in your own examples.

Jan DeBlieu, in “Mapping the Sacred Places,” writes about personal mapmaking, using symbols to mark places of significance to us.

“Raise the Grates!” is included as a case study. East Bay Citizens for Creek Restoration felt it was important to map Berkeley’s ten creeks, even though they had been paved over, to reestablish residents’ connection to the watershed.

facilitator’s Guide As facilitator, you will lead the group in the mapping exercise.

See the guide in Appendix C. Bring drawing paper and an assortment of colored markers, colored pencils, or crayons for participants (the more colors the better). Be sure to save at least 20 minutes at the end of the session for discussion.

Note for facilitator: The script for the mapping exercise is in Appendix C-1.

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PuttinG it into Practice

• Imagine that someone is coming to visit you from a distant place. Provide written directions to your house without referring to any streets, buildings, or other human artifacts.

• Think of the neighborhood in which you live. With a friend or family member(s), make a map of your neighborhood, highlighting a natural characteristic of interest to the group.

• What is your watershed address? Determine where you live in relation to the nearest water body. (Use a map if necessary.) For example, “My address is 300 feet northeast of the upper reaches of Sylvan Creek, which flows into the Tualatin, the Willamette, the Columbia, and the Pacific Ocean.”

further readinG “Mapping the Biosphere” is taken from Boundaries of Home:

Mapping for Local Empowerment, edited by Doug Aberley. Aberley has done extensive work in defining and mapping his local bioregion in Northwest British Columbia. The book is considered a primer for community activists.

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Programs of NWEI are offered by a large team of volunteers supported by a small staff. Most volunteers were participants in courses. Please call

NWEI at (503) 227-2807 or visit our website at www.nwei.org.

NWEI offers programs, including this course, as a service to participants. Financial support comes from individuals who agree with NWEI’s approach. Membership

information can be found at the end of the course book.

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Mapping the Biosphere By Gene Marshall from Boundaries of Home

edited by Doug Aberley

Defining your bioregion is often a task that, like peeling an onion, reveals more and more layers before you get to the heart of the matter. Gene Marshall, who has been active in the bioregional movement on local and continental levels for many years, gives an idea of the attractive complexity of bioregional mapping.

Let us just meditate for a moment on the chaos of geographical “districts” we are asked to work with in contemporary society. First of all, in the United States we have the nation as a whole, states, counties and city limits. On top of these, we have state legislative districts, national congressional districts, judicial districts, and perhaps city districts. We have postal zip-code districts and telephone area-code districts and water control districts, and on and on. Few, if any of us, are clear about the boundaries of all these districts. They nevertheless chart and shape our lives. Some of them are gerrymandered and re-gerrymandered into ridiculous patterns. Most of them are personally meaningless to us.

We are usually told by our parents, schools, politicians and television sets to have patriotic feelings for our nation, but what does that actually mean? Certainly, I relate to some of the geography of the United States more passionately than to any part of Canada or Mexico. Part of the U.S. geography is familiar to me and has the emotional power of being my home. Yet, Hawaii and Alaska are farther from my “home” experience than Canada or Mexico. Some of my dear friends are Canadian and Mexican citizens. Some of my worst enemies are U.S. citizens. Why must I be willing to go to war for the U.S., fight for the U.S. industrial success, and shout loudly for athletic teams that hail from a U.S. place!? Why is my home defined by the boundaries of the United States?

I also live within another arbitrarily drawn set of boundaries called “Texas.” State patriotism is emphasized here, but I don’t actually relate to people living in Houston and El Paso more closely than I do to the people in Oklahoma, only ten miles from where I live. I certainly feel no less at home when I cross the Oklahoma border. It is clear to me that our customary geographical sensibilities and loyalties are in a fuzzy chaos of fragmentary and shallow meanings.

Furthermore, the basic philosophy behind the determination of this maze of geographical districts is antithetical to the society I am envisioning for the future. These “districts” have been set with narrow human purposes in mind: human property rights, human exploitation rights, human political control, human supervision of nature and other humans — these are the motifs that underlie our continued use of these districts.

If we shift our overall imagination from controlling nature to cooperating with nature, other modes of drawing our geographical districts emerge. Recognizing this has been a central gift of the bioregional movement. Efforts have been made in this movement to notice how the planet and all its species of life have already arranged themselves before humans superimposed their districts. Some of the astronauts, speaking in favor of peace, commented that national boarders cannot be seen from outer space. Truly that is a basic insight: the

biosphere is one interconnected whole. Suppose we begin to look for contiguous parts of this whole: parts whose boundaries are determined by common features of climate, vegetation, fauna, soils, altitude and other geological features. Nature- bonding tribes of humans arranged themselves in harmony with these natural features. Clearly, modern civilizations have ignored them to the point of destroying not only the outward riches of nature itself, but also the meaningfulness of nature- relationships for human beings.

Mapping the biosphere can be a first step, then, in strategic practice because it concretely embodies a crucial shift in our sensibilities from human-centered to nature-centered evaluations in our overall attitude toward nature — a shift from competition to cooperation, from conflict to harmony, from separation to partnership. It is also a meditative exercise that can be done now by each aware person. Agreeing with other aware persons about your proposed geographical boundaries may take years of working together. That does not matter. My need now is for my own “sense of place” which depends not simply on discovering my own neighborhood, community or local region, but upon seeing the relationship of my own local places to every other place on the planet. I need a sense of my whole planet, of my continent, and the major sub-parts of my continent in order to see how my local places are parts of these wider regions of natural life and human living.

Some day our political institutions and our economic institutions need to be brought into line with our new geographical sensibilities. But that is not the first step; it comes much later. We have to look forward to at least several decades of transition time during which we will have to live in two worlds: (1) the present political world of nations and states and counties (and other such districts) constructed to define who can exploit what part of the planet, and (2) the coming political world of federated life- regions. Mapping the biosphere is a preparation for that coming day; nevertheless, for right now, as an exercise it enables each individual person to act upon that grand long-range vision. It is also a deeply spiritual act that goes to the heart of our attitudes and values. The way we conceive our geography expresses who we are and defines how we are assuming responsibility for all that surrounds us. This deeply personal level of mapping has primary importance. We cannot turn our mapping task to some professional geographer. Maps which are superimposed upon us from “higher authorities” or “scientific theorists” mean nothing to us personally unless data from such sources resonate with our personally-felt sense of place.

So step one is a challenge to the individual person to discover a fresh sense of place. This seemingly innocent shift in individual imagination is a radical, revolutionary step. It leads to a demystification of our deeply-embedded national mythologies. When life-regions become “my home,” the nation immediately ceases to be “my home” and becomes instead a set of institutions. Speaking as a U.S. citizen, the U.S. ceases to be “my home” and becomes a network of institutions centered in Washington, D.C. and fanning out to 50 state capitals and thousands of county seats. The U.S. is also various “federal” institutions accountable directly to Washington D.C. and scattered across all 50 states and the whole world. This maze of institutions is the United States. I have to live with them and deal with them; they are part of where

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I live. But once I have made my interior shift in imagination, these U.S. institutions are no longer mythologized for me as “my home.” Please listen to the feel of this very carefully: the United States is no longer my home. The United States no longer means to me “a people” or “a home” of any sort for anyone. The United States, on this side of “Mapping the Biosphere,” is simply a maze of institutions.

So, looking with fresh eyes from this new sense of home, I can observe the U.S. maze of institutions objectively. Are any of them any good for anything? Can any of them be used to do good? Are some of them capable of being phased out right away? Are some of them capable of being transformed into something useful that lasts a thousand years? Are some of them useful for the next hundred years of transition and then disposable? Once we have mapped the biosphere, our responses to such questions can be rendered in a simple, practical manner, unpolluted by the national mythologies we have been trained in since infancy.

The essential simplicity of visualizing a new sense of place can be illustrated by a ritual that I have conducted as part of a number of speeches. I ask the audience to stand up, imagine that they are standing, right below their feet, on their county, on the state of Texas, on the nation of the United States. “Now we are going to leap in the air, leaping out of this county, out of Texas, out of United States. When we come back down to the ground we are going to land on this bioregion, on this continent, on this planet. With this leap you have begun the complex task of reinhabiting the planet; you have joined the bioregional movement.”

This leap needs some fleshing out. What exactly is my bioregion? How is it related to my continent? What do we mean by communities and neighborhoods, and which ones comprise my bioregion? So, still focusing on a shift in the imagination of the individual person, I want to expand upon this shift. I want to challenge each individual leaper to do some mapping. This challenge is summarized in the accompanying chart which you can adopt for your own use:

The number and names of categories along the left side of the chart can be changed. The definitions of these geographical scales can be altered. However, for me, this is a good chart and a place to begin. I will explain more carefully what each of these categories mean to me:

My neighborhood means the most local place in which I live. It could be a few square miles; it could be a few square

blocks. It could contain 200 people in a rural valley or a small creek watershed; it could contain 500-1,000 people in a very small urban space.

My community is larger: 5,000 to 20,000 people may live there. Again rural places will be less populous, urban places may be more populous. Community, as well as neighborhood, does not mean humans only, but rocks and water and vegetation and all local forms of animal life. Some communities are now vastly overpopulated with human beings. A community in an urban setting would likely be small enough to walk easily to every part of it. A more rural community might be larger, like most of a county.

My local Bioregion is a collection of communities within some meaningful boundaries determined by the factors of basic land topography, watersheds, flora and fauna habitats, altitudes, rainfalls, temperatures, and other such factors.

One of the important human factors defining a local bioregion is the principle that it should be large enough to be relatively self-sustaining. A community or a neighborhood may be quite dependent on other communities and neighborhoods for many of the necessities and cultural enrichments of life. A local bioregion may also have imports and exports of all sorts to and from all parts of the planet; nevertheless, a local region, when fully transformed in the next millennium, should be able to be relatively capable of feeding itself, caring for its own natural systems, clothing and housing its humans, living a full, well- rounded life with minimal dependence on other regions.

My Sub-Biome means the next larger life-region. It is a nesting together of perhaps 20 local bioregions. My local bioregion is about 100 miles north to south and 120 miles east to west, whereas my sub-biome, it seems to me, extends from the northern border of Red River watershed to the Gulf of Mexico on the south, and the western and eastern borders are determined by the borders of that banana-shaped strip of grasslands which extends from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico.

My Biome is that entire grasslands which I am calling the Great Prairie. The term “biome” I have taken from the excellent mapping work done by a United Nations office (the Man And the Biosphere Secretariat, Division of Ecological Sciences, UNESCO) which produced a map of all the large natural regions of the planet that they called biomes. This map has a degree of acceptance across the world and is, at least, a good way for each of us to begin our life-long task of defining what large sub-part of our continent we live within.

My continent is quite clear to me. I see myself living on what some call North America, but I am using the name “Turtle Island” in honor of this continent’s ancient residents. In my definition of it, this continent includes Costa Rica but not Panama; Alaska but not Asia; Greenland but no Iceland; and the northernmost Caribbean Islands. Clearly these decisions are somewhat arbitrary and other persons on Turtle Island may decide differently about what Turtle Island includes. Nevertheless, this is my map, remember — my meditation on where I live.

My planet is the clearest category of all. I simply mean the entire biosphere, its undergirding rock and metal ball, and its surrounding atmosphere.

These geographical delineations are important to me because they chart my circles of responsibility. It is as if I am standing in the center of several concentric circles. Immediately

general geographic categories

My Neighborhood

My Community

My Local Bioregion

My sub-Biome

My Biome

My Continent

My Planet

My own exaMples

Timber Creek Watershed

Bois d’Arc Creek Watershed

Red River Flats

Southern Great Prairie

The Great Prairie

Turtle Island

Earth

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around me is my own domestic home, the next larger circle is my neighborhood, and so on, out to the largest circle, my planet. The full meaning of the word “home” is all these circles. I stand at one point in space which is inside all these circles. Choosing clearly what each of these circles includes enables me to explain to myself where I am and how to focus the various aspects of my work. Take my sub-biome, for example. I am actively related to activities throughout this geographical scope. Though I know people throughout the continent and the planet, I work most frequently with people in my sub-biome. I identify with this larger home in some important ways. I assume responsibility for this area in ways I do not assume responsibility for any other “sub-biome” on the planet. While I am convinced that I must now focus my energies on empowering my own neighborhood and community, I also feel responsible for inspiring and aiding every neighborhood and community in my sub-biome. I meet quarterly with people from two or three adjacent bioregions in my sub-biome. When we come together, we see ourselves as a group of servant-leaders who return home to various neighborhoods and communities where we devote ourselves to planning and creating local empowerment.

Mapping the biosphere charts your identity with, and responsibility for, the whole Earth of which you are one glorious part. It is the first step toward shifting the center of political gravity from the nation and its moneyed élites to more local circles of responsibility.

— Gene Marshall recently co-authored The Reign of Reality with his wife, Joyce

Marshall.

excerpts froM Mapping the sacred places

By Jan DeBlieu

I once drew a map to my home on the North Carolina Outer Banks for a friend who wanted to visit. I was new then on Hatteras Island, new to the salt-scorched landscape and interlocking planes of earth, sea, and sky. I felt newly awakened as well, as if I had spent the previous years with my eyes and my thoughts half-lidded. Every day I set aside time to explore unfamiliar terrain and wonder at the great schools of fish, the falcons, and sea birds that migrated past the island with the tug of seasonal currents.

Since there was not much to show on my map — just a single road beelining down a skinny arm of sand — I decorated it with my favorite landmarks. On the north end I put three arches covered with a mane of vertical lines; these were the grassy, camel- hump dunes that fronted the ocean. Halfway to my house I drew

a tuxedoed heron with hot-pink legs; this marked the marshy flats where I had stumbled on a group of black-necked stilts and the messy stacks of twigs they use as nests. Last I drew a stick-figure crustacean waving a flag on a nearby beach. I went to that beach often to watch ghost crabs skirmishing, shoving each other with round, pearly claws as if locked in mortal combat. Next to the figure I penciled in “Ghost Crab Acres.”

I meant the map to be comical, but also to honor places on Hatteras where I had witnessed something important or particularly beautiful. I am not much of an illustrator, and the map looked like something a first-grader might have drawn. My friend called a few days after she received it. “Are these

amusement parks or something?” she asked. I realized sheepishly that the connection I felt to each landmark was too personal, too powerful to be explained by a simple drawing.

Now I wish I had kept that map for myself, or made another. I wish I had drawn a new map with equally foolish figures for

each of my 15 years on these islands. Put together, they would compose a running chronicle of the places I have held dear here, a mental history of my courtship with the land.

I am more insular these days, too caught up in the eddies of

family life to do much. While I’m still curious about the natural forces that play across the islands, I no longer have the same white-hot drive to observe and learn. I live on a pine-sheltered ridge on Roanoke Island, out of sight of the ever-shifting horizons. The latest atlas of my world would mark hideaways in the dunes and marshes, but also the houses of close friends, the bookstore in nearby Manteo, and the grassy field where I take my young son to romp.

We map, each of us, mentally and physically, every day of our lives. We map to keep ourselves oriented, and to keep ourselves sane. “The very word lost in our language means much more than simple geographical uncertainty,” the urban planner Kevin Lynch once wrote. “It carries overtones of utter disaster . . . . Let the mishap of disorientation occur, and the sense of anxiety and even terror that accompanies it reveals to us how closely it is linked to our sense of balance and well-being.” And we map the places we love in much more detail than the places we dislike. “The sweet sense of home is strongest,” Lynch wrote, “when home is not only familiar but distinctive as well.

  

It is in the imagination, I think, that the art of mapping reaches its apex.

In 1960 Kevin Lynch published a book entitled The Image of the City that describes a study by Lynch and several colleagues on the perceptions of people living in Boston, Los Angeles, and

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Jersey City. Lynch found that residents of each city drew maps with common features, such as main highways and government buildings, and that they would go out of their way to pass parks and green areas. Beyond that, the maps were highly idiosyncratic. From the mapping exercise and a series of interviews, Lynch concluded that even lifelong urban residents are not able to absorb all the images with which cities are so thickly piled. To give order to such a chaotic world, they choose a few important sights and use them as navigational posts.

If Lynch had taken time to look beyond the visual dissonance of city centers, I am convinced he would have found a similar filtering reflex among rural people. The capacity of the human mind is too limited to take in every detail of the landscape, be it town or country. We simply can’t process the images by which we are besieged. And so we map, making note of what sights we deem, in a glance, to be vital.

“Visitor and native focus on very different aspects of the environment,” writes the geographer Yi-Fu Tuan. The visitor’s on-the-spot mapmaking “is often a matter of using his eyes to compose pictures.” In contract, Tuan writes, the lifelong resident moves through her environs with a shrewd and prejudiced eye. She knows which routes will clog with afternoon traffic and which neighborhoods harbor muggers or snarling, unchained dogs.

Shortly after I moved to Hatteras I got a taste of how limited was my own vision of the island compared to that of a native. One day I took a walk to the shore of Pamlico Sound by way of a road through a small neighborhood. On my way home a fisherman stopped me to chat. “You interested in that land down there?” he asked, nodding toward the sound where a vacant lot was posted with a FOR SALE sign.

I shook my head. We hadn’t yet saved the money for property.

“It’s a nice, high piece,” the fisherman said. “Not too many left like that. You might ought to take a close look.”

As he drove off I stared toward the lot in question. It had struck me as no different from the surrounding properties, many of which were too wet for septic tanks. Momentary paranoia set in: Was the fisherman making fun of me? Trying to sell me a bill of goods? I walked back to the lot and noticed for the first time the gradual rise in the road, the dome in the land, the absence of the marsh plants that dotted adjacent sites. By island standards it was a veritable bluff, if not quite a mountain. How long would I have to live on Hatteras, I wondered, before I could discern all the subtleties of its spread?

I know now that my mental map of Hatteras will always be less richly detailed than that of a true islander, because I lack the islander’s cultural ties to the land. Certain places there became sacred to me because of a few elucidating,

extraordinary brushes I had with the natural world. But if I had grown up on Hatteras, my list of sacred places might include the Rodanthe Community Center, or a historic lifesaving station where my grandfather served, or a beach where the annual town picnic is held. In strong, stable communities, residents develop traditions that consecrate certain sites, not just grand public parks or monuments, but meeting places that tend to be, in the words of the landscape architect Randolph Hester, “dilapidated, familiar, homey, and homely.”

Twenty years ago Hester conducted a study of the precious communal places — what he called the sacred structure — of Manteo, a town on Roanoke Island near my home. Until the 1960s Manteo was the most important town on the Outer

Banks. As the county seat, it held administrative offices and a large courthouse; as the primary trade center, it held grocery and variety stores, family restaurants,

and a commercial wharf on Roanoke Sound. All that changed, however, as the banks evolved from an enclave of fishing villages into a seaside resort. By

1980 several of the most important businesses h a d moved to the growing oceanfront town of Nags Head, and the Manteo waterfront was lined with vacant buildings.

Hester was then a professor at North Carolina State University in Raleigh. He had long been interested in the subconscious attachments people form to places. A few years before, while redesigning a day care center in Cambridge, Massachusetts, he had used an unconventional tactic to probe his clients’ feelings. “The center was in a beautiful old Victorian building, nice but really funky,” he said. “Everyone liked it. Before I drew up a design I did a standard survey with parents and teachers to find out what their values were and what kinds of activities they’d like to see in the center.”

The survey indicated that the clients wanted a bright, state- of-the-art facility, “the kind of place you’d find in the suburbs,” he said. “To achieve that, we would have had to raze the building. I was shocked.”

Acting on a hunch, he approached a few parents and teachers and asked if they would repeat the survey under hypnosis. They agreed — and gave entirely different answers. “The single most important thing was, they wanted to plant a tree outside that would be big enough for kids to climb,” Hester said. “And they wanted some sort of natural area, like a creek, where kids could explore and chase butterflies.” He drew up two designs, one based

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on each survey. The parents and teachers voted overwhelmingly to accept the plan that left the building little changed and created natural play areas outside.

“I don’t pretend to know what that means,” Hester said. “But a psychologist friend of mine believes that people have all kinds of subconscious desires that they can’t articulate. When they’re presented with an option that honors those desires, that’s the option they choose.”

  

Manteo is beloved by my neighbors, who have lived here all their lives, and who will never live anywhere else. They hold in their minds a nostalgic map of past experience overlaid by the pragmatic map of the present. One shades the other. Neither dominates.

“Making an actual, physical map of something you feel in your heart can be quite a powerful experience,” Randolph Hester told me, wistfully. And so I draw maps when I should be working, seeking to tap that power. Seeking to keep my bearings in a shifting world. I watch a flock of grackles invade the pines in my yard, and I dream of Hatteras Island. As soon as I moved from there, the sharp images I held of that landscape began to fade. Through the years, many of the places I loved have been taken from me. The beach I called Ghost Crab Acres was sandbagged to slow erosion. The salt flats I nicknamed Stilt Field were flooded to attract ducks. An overgrown road where I went to spy on night herons was sternly marked with NO TRESPASSING signs. Yet I map with those spots still prominent in my mind.

I map in concentric circles, my Roanoke Island home at the center. I place the barrier islands, eight miles to the east, an inch from my own bedroom, closer than the grocery store and jail that are just down the road. When I visit Hatteras, I tip my heart to the camel-hump dunes, the flooded marsh, the sandy ruts that lead to Pamlico Sound. Driving by, you would not know they held anything special at all.

— This article appeared in Orion, Spring 1994. Jan De Blieu is the author of several books

about people and nature, including Meant to Be Wild and Wind.

raise the grates! By Sabrina Merlo

Around six years ago, some “freak Berkeleyites” known as the East Bay Citizens for Creek Restoration (EBCCR) started painting stencils of “creek critters” on the streets and sidewalks. They were doing this to raise awareness about Berkeley’s culverted creeks, creeks that have been re-routed out of sight into underground municipal storm drain tunnels.

As EBCCR projects coordinator and landscape architect Michael Thilgen puts it, “Where there’s a storm drain, you can bet there’s a creek nearby!”

This is an abrupt realization for the urban dweller: somewhere down those black holes guarded by heavy grates, a once-gurgling sweet creek now has the dark purpose of efficiently rushing our road run-off and pollutants through underground concrete channels, usually emptying into the San Francisco Bay. Storm

drain grates are what’s left of the city dweller’s visual connection to his or her watershed.

It’s a scary sign, for fresh water is truly our universal cultural thread. Its place is the original meeting ground: witness San Francisco’s Mission Dolores, built in the 1700’s suspiciously near Islais Creek (now culverted), or the Native American grinding stones on the banks of Cerrito Creek (still above ground), in the shadow of Albany Hill.

“Culverting actually began in late 1800’s, around the turn of the century,” explains East Bay Citizens for Creek Restoration founder, John Steere. “Creeks’ meanderings did not fit well into the straight line of real estate. They represented land that could be reclaimed for ‘higher uses.’ Sanitation became an important issue also; there was a creek in Oakland called Typhoid Creek. . . . They were seen as conveyors of disease.”

Our technology and priorities are still evolving; now we are restoring creeks instead of culverting them. A number of restoration projects in the Bay Area have even gone so far as pulling portions of culverted creeks back above ground — a process commonly known as “daylighting.” Some of Strawberry Creek in west Berkeley was restored to above-ground flow in 1982. Wolfe-Mason Associates, designers of the Strawberry Creek project, have submitted a proposal to “daylight” the part of Berkeley’s Blackberry Creek that runs through Thousand Oaks School. Other pending “daylighting” projects include Codornices Creek near the Berkeley/Albany border and a portion of Strawberry Creek in downtown Berkeley. Making a regular habit of pulling creeks out of culverts, however, is obviously quite a technical hurdle since most culverted creeks run under heavily built-up urbanized areas.

More common are creek restoration projects focusing on already above-ground creeks. Erosion control, clean-up, water- quality monitoring and revegetation are all activities that, with a little training, can be accomplished through community effort. Eighty people convened recently on San Francisquito Creek in Palo Alto and filled eleven dump trucks with old mattresses, engine blocks, a diamond ring (!), condoms, etc. Planting, crib wall construction (a habitat-friendly erosion control technique), and storm drain stenciling were also a part of the work day. Ongoing volunteer efforts include a biological inventory project and water quality testing.

“San Francisquito Creek is a rare riparian and wildlife corridor that runs pretty much uninterrupted from the foothills all the way to the Bay,” explains Peter Drekmeier of Bay Area Action. “Our workdays are a way of bringing the open space concept down here to where the people are.”

Creek restoration is going on everywhere: Richmond, Alviso, Pinole, San Francisco, Sonoma, to name just a few places. . . . And raise your grate, even if it’s only just to peek inside.

— This article appeared in from Green City Calendar, June-August 1994. Sabrina

Merlo is now the Regional Advocacy Director for Bay Area Bicycle Coalition.

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Building local community

Goals of the session • To consider the relationship of community and “living

in place.” • To explore ways to build community.

BackGround Most people wish to be part of a community, although

the meaning of community varies from person to person. In less mobile times, a person might live her or his entire life in a community or neighborhood without seriously considering alternatives. In a mobile society, where time is scarce and people

have many options, becoming an integral part of a community may be difficult. The desire for individual freedom may conflict with the yearning for community.

Living in place involves a conscious commitment to the human community and the larger natural community of your place. The authors would say this commitment brings tremendous freedom and rewards.

Scott Russell Sanders, in “The Web of Life,” contrasts our society’s desire to be free from constraints with our tradition of joining groups for the common good. He suggests that we reclaim the habit of looking after our neighbors.

Community is a dynamic whole that emerges when a group of people: • participate in common practices; • depend upon one another; •

make decisions together; • identify themselves as part of something larger than the sum of their individual relationships; • commit them-

selves for the long term to their own, one another’s, and the group’s well-being.

— Carolyn Shaffer and KriStin anundSen

Even the dream of a “global community” is misplaced, a contradiction in terms; from a sociological perspective

community has always implied face-to-face association and a whole life lived in common in a place.

— david MCCloSKey

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This course book was prepared by a team of volunteers of the Northwest Earth Institute who surveyed the literature for appropriate readings. If you know of a reading that might be incorporated in the next edition, please remember to

mention it on the evaluation form or send a copy to NWEI, 317 SW Alder, Suite 1050, Portland, OR 97204.

In “Home is Other People,” Mary Pipher echoes this theme. She stresses the importance of personal ties in communities and how these connections naturally lead to a sense of moral accountability.

Other readings provide practical accounts of neighbors meeting a local need, a cohousing community with an architectural design promoting community and sustainability, and finally, work groups that share home enhancement tasks.

PossiBle discussion Questions 1. In your life, is there a difference between a social group and a community?

2. The authors make a distinction between (a) a community based in the place you live and (b) a community based on workplace relationships, shared interests, religious beliefs, etc. Give examples of both from your life. In your experience, was there a qualitative difference in a place-based community?

3. Sanders speak s of a sense of freedom that comes with anonymity and the ability to move on. Do you feel tension between a yearning for community and a yearning for individual freedom?

4. Have you ever been part of a community where the community values or peer pressure “kept you in line?” If so, was that a positive or a negative in your experience?

5. In your life, has technology enhanced your feeling of community or contributed to a feeling of isolation? What are some specifics?

6. As you completed these readings, did you have any particularly positive or negative reactions?

7. Sanders speaks of joining in common labor to meet local needs. What is one need in your community that could use your help?

8. Have you been a part of a community where you felt responsibility for an individual, not because you liked or had something personally in common with that person, but simply because you were both part of the community? Describe.

PuttinG it into Practice • The next time you need gifts for others, try to give

homemade treasures, or buy from a local crafts person or from a local business.

• Share more with your neighbors: babysitting, tools, meals, carpooling. • Organize a project with your neighbors: rent a chipper

together, pool your unused household hazardous wastes to deliver to the proper disposal site, have a home eco-party.

• Participate in seasonal celebrations where you live, or start your own. • Do you have a desire to live in closer cooperation with

a group of people? Locate a cohousing group or a planned community in your area for more information.

• Host a social gathering that brings neighbors together: a monthly or weekly soup night or potluck. See what possibilities emerge when you bring your neighbors together.

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( E a c h M e m b e r A n s w e r s )

How would you describe your primary community of supportive individuals? Does it satisfy whatever desire you may have for community?

If not, what is missing?

CirCle Question

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the Web of life By Scott Russell Sanders

Bloomington, Indiana, offers something that the Internet can’t.

A woman who recently moved from Los Angeles to Bloomington, Indiana, told me that she would not be able to stay here long, because she was already beginning to recognize people in the grocery stores, on the sidewalks, in the library. Being surrounded by familiar faces made her nervous, after years in a city where she could range about anonymously. Every traveler knows the sense of liberation that comes from journeying to a place where nobody expects anything of you. Everyone who has gone to college knows the exhilaration of slipping away from the watchful eyes of Mom and Dad. We all need seasons of withdrawal from responsibility. But if we make a career of being unaccountable, we have lost something essential to our humanity, and we may well become a burden or a threat to those around us.

Ever since the eclipse of our native cultures, the dominant American view has been that we should cultivate the self rather than the community; that we should look to the individual as the source of hope and the center of value, while expecting hindrance and harm from society. We have understood freedom for the most part negatively rather than positively, as release from constraints rather than as a condition for making a decent life in common. Hands off, we say; give me elbow room; good fences make good neighbors; my home is my castle; don’t tread on me. I’m looking out for number one, we say; I’m doing my own thing. We have a Bill of Rights, which protects each of us from a bullying society, but no Bill of Responsibilities, which would oblige us to answer the needs of others.

What other view could have emerged from our history? The

first Europeans to reach America were daredevils and treasure seekers, as were most of those who mapped the interior. Many colonists were renegades of one stripe or another, some of them religious nonconformists, some political rebels, more than a few of them fugitives from the law. The trappers, hunters, traders, and freebooters who pushed the frontier westward seldom recognized any authority beyond the reach of their own hands. Coast to coast, our land has been settled and our cities have been filled by generations of immigrants more intent on leaving behind old tyrannies than on seeking new social bonds.

The cult of the individual shows up everywhere in American lore, which celebrates drifters, rebels, and loners while pitying or reviling the pillars of the community. The backwoods explorers like Daniel Boone, the riverboat rowdy like Mike Fink, the lumberjack, the prospector, the rambler and gambler, the daring crook like Jesse James or the resourceful killer like Billy the Kid,

along with countless lonesome cowboys, all wander, unattached, through the great spaces of our imagination.

Fortunately, while our tradition is heavily tilted in favor of private life, we also inherit a tradition of caring for the community. Writing about what he had seen in the 1830s, Alexis de Tocqueville judged Americans to be avaricious, self-serving, and aggressive; but he was also amazed by our eagerness to form clubs, to raise barns or town halls, to join together in one cause or another: “In no country in the world,” he wrote, “do the citizens make such exertions for the common weal. I know of no people who have established schools so numerous and efficacious, places of public worship better suited to the wants of the inhabitants, or roads kept in better repair.”

Today we might revise Tocqueville’s estimate of our schools or roads, but we can still see all around us the fruits of that concern for the common weal — the libraries, museums, courthouses, hospitals, orphanages, universities, parks, on and on. No matter where we live, our home places have also benefited from the Granges and unions, the volunteer fire brigades, the art guilds and garden clubs, the charities, food kitchens, homeless shelters, soccer and baseball teams, the Scouts and 4-H, the Girls and Boys Clubs, the Lions and Elks and Rotarians, the countless gatherings of people who saw a need and responded to it.

This history of local care hardly ever makes it into our literature, for it is less glamorous than rebellion, yet it is a crucial part of our heritage. Any of us could cite examples of people who dug in and joined with others to make our home places better places. Women and men who invest themselves in their communities, fighting for good schools or green spaces, paying attention to where they are, seem to me as worthy of celebration as those adventurous loners who keep drifting on, prospecting for pleasure.

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The words community, communion, and communicate all derive from common, and the two syllables of common grow from separate roots, the first meaning “together” or “next to,” the second having to do with barter or exchange. Embodied in that word is a sense of our shared life as one of giving and receiving — music, touch, ideas, recipes, stories, medicine, tools, the whole range of artifacts and talents. After 25 years with my wife, Ruth, that is how I have come to understand marriage, as a constant exchange of labor and love. We do not calculate who gives how much; if we had to, the marriage would be in trouble. Looking outward from this community of two, I see my life embedded in ever larger exchanges — those of family and friendship, neighborhood and city, countryside and country — and on every scale there is giving and receiving, calling and answering.

Many people shy away from community out of a fear that it may become suffocating, confining, even vicious; and of course it may, if it grows rigid or exclusive. A healthy community is dynamic, stirred up by the energies of those who already belong, open to new members and fresh influences, kept in motion by the constant bartering of gifts. It is fashionable just now to speak of this open quality as “tolerance,” but that word sounds too grudging to me — as though, to avoid strife, we must grit our teeth and ignore whatever is strange to us. The community I desire is not grudging; it is exuberant, joyful, grounded in affection, pleasure, and mutual aid. Such a community arises not from duty or money but from the free interchange of people who share a place, share work and food, sorrows and hope. Taking part in the common life means dwelling in a web of relationships, the many threads tugging at you while also holding you upright.

I have told elsewhere the story of a man who lived in the Ohio township where I grew up, a builder who refused to join the volunteer fire department. Why should he join, when his house was brick, properly wired, fitted out with new appliances? Well, one day that house caught fire. His wife dialed the emergency number, the siren wailed, and pretty soon the volunteer firemen, my father among them, showed up with the pumper truck. But they held back on the hoses, asking the builder if he still saw no reason to join, and the builder said he could see a pretty good reason to join right there and then, and the volunteers let the water loose.

I have also told before the story of a family from that township whose house burned down. The local people sheltered the family, then built them a new house. This was a poor township. But nobody thought to call in the government or apply to a foundation. These were neighbors in a fix, and so you helped them, just as you would harvest corn for an ailing farmer or pull a flailing child from the creek or put your arm around a weeping friend.

My daughter Eva and I recently went to a concert in Bloomington’s newly opened arts center. The old limestone building had once been the town hall, then a fire station and jail, then for several years an abandoned shell. Volunteers bought the building from the city for a dollar and renovated it with materials, labor, and money donated by local people. Now we have a handsome facility that is in constant use for pottery classes,

theater productions, puppet shows, art exhibits, poetry readings, and every manner of musical event.

The music Eva and I heard was Hymnody of Earth, for hammer dulcimer, percussion, and children’s choir. Composed by our next-door neighbor Malcolm Dalglish and featuring lyrics by our Ohio Valley neighbor Wendell Berry, it was performed that night by Malcolm, percussionist Glen Velez, and the Bloomington Youth Chorus. As I sat there with Eva in a sellout

crowd — about a third of whom I knew by name, another third by face — I listened to music that had been elaborated within earshot of my house, and I heard my friend play his instrument, and I watched those children’s faces shining with the colors of the human spectrum, and I felt the restored building clasping us like the cupped hands of our community. I knew once more that I was in the right place, a place created and filled and inspired by our lives together.

I am not harking back to some idyllic past, like the one embalmed in the Saturday

Evening Post covers by Norman Rockwell or the prints of Currier and Ives. The past was never golden. As a people, we still need to unlearn some of the bad habits we formed during the long period of settlement. One good habit we might reclaim, however, is looking after those who live nearby. For much of our history, neighbors have kept one another going, kept one another sane. Still today, in town and country, in apartment buildings and barrios, even in suburban estates, you are certain to lead a narrower life without the steady presence of neighbors. It is neither quaint nor sentimental to advocate neighborliness; it is far more sentimental to suggest that we can do without such mutual aid.

Even Emerson, preaching self-reliance, knew the necessity of neighbors. He lived in a village, gave and received help, and delivered his essays as lectures for fellow citizens whom he hoped to sway. He could have left his ideas in his journals, where they first took shape, but he knew those ideas would only have effect when they were shared. I like to think he would have agreed with the Lakota shaman Black Elk, who said, “A man who has a vision is not able to use the power of it until after he has performed the vision on earth for the people to see.” If you visit Emerson’s house in Concord, you will find leather buckets hanging near the door, for he belonged to the village fire brigade, and even in the seclusion of his study, in the depths of thought, he kept his ears open for the alarm bell.

We should not have to wait until our houses are burning before we see the wisdom of facing our local needs by joining in common work. We should not have to wait until gunfire breaks out in our schools, rashes break out on our skin, dead fish float in our streams, or beggars sleep on our streets before we act on behalf of the community. On a crowded planet, we had better learn how to live well together, or we will live miserably apart.

— Excerpted with permission from The Georgia Review (Spring 1994). Subscriptions: $18/yr. (4 issues) from University of Georgia, Athens, GA 30602. Back issues: $7 from same address. This essay also appears in Writing From the Center, published by Indiana

University.

Taking part in the common life means dwelling in a web of relationships, the many threads tugging at

you while also holding you upright.

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hoMe iS other PeoPle By Mary Pipher

Joy Harjo wrote, “As long as there is respect and acknowledgment of connections, things continue working. When that stops we all die.”

Home doesn’t have to be where you were born or grew up. It doesn’t have to be a small town; it can be a suburb, a city, or a remote corner of the country. But it does have to be a real place that you have committed to over time. It has to be a place where you have friends and know the names of many people you meet. You know who is kind and honest, who lies, betrays, or fools around. Home is where people care if you have a speeding ticket or a fever. It’s where people ask about your grandbaby and your day lilies and know your favorite kind of pie. It’s where when you sit down to talk you don’t have to discuss Tom Hanks or Benecio del Toro. You have real people in common.

In true communities, conversation is often, “Did you know he was John’s son-in-law?” Or, “Is she related to the Carsten family?” “Did you know they bought the old Walinshinsky place?” Or “Did you know Jane and Betsy were schoolmates?” There is pleasure in just acknowledging each other, in nodding on the street and chatting in the cafes and grocery stores. To move away from a true home is to move away from life. I don’t think we begin to acknowledge and understand how much we have lost.

Yet, the great irony is that people move away from home all the time. Every year our young adults head for the mountains, the Sunbelt, or the coasts. Many leave of necessity, especially from farming communities where there is no longer much work. But many leave because the grass looks greener in San Francisco, Phoenix, or Missoula. Likewise older citizens are encouraged by advertisers to move to retirement areas in more beautiful places far from home. When they get there, they are often alone. As Greg Brown said, “You can’t drink a cup of coffee with the landscape.”

I know a family who moved back to New York City after September 11. The wife told me, “That is where our people are. We need to be with them.” A gay couple I know have inspired many of their friends to move to the outskirts of Omaha. They come there not for Big Red football or the steaks, but for the camaraderie and mutual support of their long-term buddies. I know a couple whose son and daughter- in-law lived in California. When the daughter-in-law became pregnant, they wrote the couple a “letter of invitation.” They didn’t want to pressure their son or his wife to return to Nebraska but they wanted them to know how welcome they would be. They wanted to remind the young family about what was good in our state. In the letter, they mentioned the safety, the ease of travel, the low cost of living, the wide- open spaces, and the good educational system. They wrote about the love they would give a grandchild and the ways

the family could help each other if they shared a community. Much to the joy of the parents, the children decided to come home.

Communities are real places, chosen as objects of love, with particular landscapes, sounds, and smells and particular people who live there. Communities are about accountability, about what we can and should do for each other. People who live together have something that is fragile and easily destroyed by a lack of civility. Behavior matters. Protocol is important. Relationships are not disposable. People are careful what they say in real communities because they will live with their words until they die of old age.

Connections have a way of making us morally accountable. At a most basic level we behave better with people and places we will see again and again. Some of the worst behaviors in America occur in airports and on interstates, places where we move among strangers. Over the Internet, people can be deleted the second they become annoying or tiresome. Names aren’t necessarily even real names. One never need see or talk to anyone again.

Responsibility is directly related to scale. The smaller the group, the stronger each member’s sense of duty. Morality is learned by children from real people who are with them every day. They learn that their actions affect other people and they learn that their

own lives will go better if they behave well. It is a simple thing, to be in a place where good behavior is rewarded and bad is punished. In that sense all morality, like all politics, is local. The further we are from home, from our people, the less likely we are to see a strong connection between our own behavior and its consequences. There is no accountability in a global village except a ledger sheet. And money is not morality.

Strong communities also treasure and maintain the special names, stories, and history that define particular places. Bill Holm wrote, “We stand on the shoulders of our ancestors no matter how many machines we invent. Only

our memory and our metaphors carry us forward, not our money, our gadgets, or our opinions.” Names, stories, and history are intertwined. We cannot love what we cannot name. One of the best ways to instill community is to teach names – of local people, birds, plants, rivers, and sacred sites. Communities are much enriched by local history books. Older people who are, in a sense, living history books, greatly benefit a community by telling stories to its children. Yellow Springs, Ohio, had an environmental mentor program in which an older person was paired with a young person. The pair walked around town and talked about the town’s stories and how the place used to be.

We owe a great deal to people who came before us and to what Paul Tillich called “the structure of grace in history.” Communities need ways of sharing stories. This is one of the most primal experiences of humans, to be together telling stories of the day. To be a member of a community is to have

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a voice and a face in that community. One must be a part of the legends, the colorful characters and the heroes who help define a place.

Story sharing and face-to-face interactions are greatly facilitated by design. Community occurs where there are public spaces – sidewalks, bike trails, parks, outdoor markets, and festivals. Ray Oldenberg wrote in The Great Good Place, there are three essential places – where we live, where we work, and where we gather together for conviviality. Those communal places are needed now more than ever.

Diversity in community is as healthy as diversity in any ecosystem. Without diversity in age, ethnicity, and ideas, we don’t have communities; we have lifestyle enclaves. Community does not mean “free of conflict.” It’s inevitable and even healthy to have great differences. Even conflict can lead to closeness. As Dennis Schmitz wrote, “Humans wrestle with each other, and sometimes that wrestling turns into embracing.”

A strong community will include people of different ages, ethnic backgrounds, socioeconomic status, and interests. Community, communication, and communion all come from the same word, meaning together and next to. Embedded in the word is the concept of shared place.

— This essay appeared in Sustainable Planet: Solutions for the Twenty-First Century,

edited by Juliet B. Schor and Betsy Taylor.

CoMMunity-baSed reStoration By Christine Schneider

Restoration is a way for people to develop a relationship with the land. A restored open space becomes a community resource and provides an invaluable opportunity for people to observe the habitat in its natural state. Open spaces can become the focal point of the community, bringing it together and drawing people out from their isolation.

But how does a community organize around an open space? One example of a community-based restoration effort can be seen at Brooks Park in San Francisco’s Oceanview neighborhood. This open hillside with its rocky outcrops is home to a variety of birds such as kestrels, swallows and chickadees. Native grassland covers some of the site, with a coastal scrub plant community on the slopes. In the springtime, the park is covered with native wildflowers.

The property was originally the home of a family named Brooks. In the 1970’s the city’s Recreation and Parks’ Open Space Committee acquired the three acres of land, but over the years the property fell into a state of disrepair, and vandalism took its toll. The area came to be used by drug dealers and was viewed by the community as a "creepy place." Only a few residents ventured into the park, mostly to walk their dogs.

The neighborhood is predominately African-American, with an increasing influx of Asian immigrants. This densely populated area has many families and retired couples as well as college students from nearby City College and San Francisco State. A majority of children are being raised by grandparents and/or single parents.

Despite its unsavory appearance, neighborhood residents thought Brooks Park was a remarkable piece of open space. They met to devise ways to help realize the potential of the park. After compiling a list of names and addresses of the people living on the blocks surrounding the site, these local residents started the 400 Ramsell Block Club and persuaded other neighbors to take daily or biweekly walks up to the top of the park. They also convinced the current owner of the land, the San Francisco Unified School District, to lock the gates at night and on weekends. These simple actions brought about an immediate improvement. The gates stopped access by drug dealers and 90 percent of the undesirable park users left.

Neighbors had community picnics and work parties to clean up graffiti, pick up trash and shards of glass, and pull exotic plants. They worked with existing community groups and contacted the city’s Recreation and Park Department and the local chapter of the California Native Plant Society (CNPS) for assistance. With funding from the city’s Open Space Committee, the neighbors and the San Francisco League of Urban Gardeners (SLUG) built a community garden and arbor on the north side of the park in 1992. The groups have also sponsored community workshops about native habitats and community gardens. Some of the new Asian immigrants to the neighborhood have garden plots and now practice Tai Chi in the park. Through community support and restoration, Brooks Park has become an open space jewel.

Habitat restoration requires knowledge of how ecosystems interact, and is vastly different from general landscape maintenance and ornamental gardening. Many jurisdictions do not understand the threat to habitat that exotic plants in degraded open spaces pose. But with community support, open spaces such as Brooks Park can be restored.

Species such as eucalyptus, french and scotch broom, pampas grass, cotoneaster, pyracantha, and german ivy are on the most- wanted list of invasive exotic plants in California. These plants pioneer into the fabric of native plant communities. Usually establishing themselves as a monoculture, they choke, shade, or otherwise outperform the native plants, leaving desolation where there was once a rich native habitat. Many of these exotic plants are annuals, and with their thirsty surface roots deplete available soil moisture so that the native perennial bunchgrasses with their log taproots dry out and die of thirst.

The threat from exotic species is especially prevalent in open spaces adjacent to human development in what is called the "urban-wildland edge." To ensure that these open spaces at the ‘edge’ are restored or retain their important

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value as habitat, the people and communities that surround the open spaces need to be involved. People need to know what a native habitat is. Only then will they know how to save it.

Cleaning up areas that have been degraded by exotics, trash and erosion increases the value of the open space as a habitat for native plants and animals. The community benefits too, because the restoration of these open spaces and the replanting of the native plants can expand the communities’ knowledge of natural history. By participating in these activities, people can understand their complex interrelationship with the land, learn techniques that sustain the land, and even gain valuable, transferable employment skills such as tree and shrub planting, slope stabilization and erosion control.

Once restored, open spaces need careful monitoring, weeding and watering. Many exotic plants will easily resurface. These species are widespread, highly adaptable and tolerate a wide range of conditions. Many of them originated in similar climates and have no local disease or pest problems. Because of this ongoing threat to native habitats, we need to provide a new kind of long-range stewardship.

How can you get involved in community open space restoration? Take a walk. Find out who owns the open spaces in your neighborhood. Contact the local Native Plant Society (this group has chapters all over California, and similar naturalist groups exist in other states) and arrange for a special interpretive walk. Find out what is growing in these open spaces and identify which plants are exotic, which are native and what plant communities are represented. Contact the biology departments of the local universities and museums in your area and have students or professors talk to your group. Get to know your neighbors better. Organize your neighborhood around picnics. Have a big picnic at your favorite neighborhood open space, and then have clean- up days. Recognize the natural value of the land and work to save it.

— This article appeared in The Urban Ecologist, Winter 1994. Landscape architect Christine Schneider is a partner with Integrated Landscapes and a member of the San

Francisco Recreation and Park Department’s Open Space Advisory Committee.

a WaterShed runS through you By Freeman House

If you are hip-deep in a cold, rising river on a winter night, attempting to net a 30-pound chinook salmon, and your goal is to bring the fish and its burden of eggs out of the water alive, your concentration becomes marvelously focused. The world of worries beyond the pool in which your work fades away, might never have existed. And you may feel as intensely alive as you did when you were eight years old. When the memory was fresher, I wrote this:

“To enter the river and attempt to bring this strong creature out of its own medium alive and uninjured is an opportunity to experience a momentary parity between human and salmon, mediated by slippery rocks and swift currents. Vivid experiences between species can put a crack in the resilient veneer of the per- ception of human dominance over other creatures. Information

then begins to flow in both directions, and we gain the ability to learn from salmon, from the landscape itself.”

When my wife and I became propertied people near north- ern California’s Mattole River a quarter century ago, some large part of my motivation for moving was to join my neighbors in an effort to sustain and preserve one of the last half-dozen geneti- cally native Chinook salmon runs in northern California. Earlier, I had spent a few years as a commercial salmon fisherman and had become enamored of the drama of the various species’ great thousand-mile tours of the Pacific, always to return to their home rivers to reproduce. At the same time I had learned of the devas- tation being wrought by industrial fishing and the steady degrada- tion of the fishes’ watershed homes. I left that work feeling much as I imagine some of the last buffalo hunters must have felt.

Our first efforts in our new home river were aimed at increas- ing the survival rate of the eggs that had been deposited for mil- lennia by our native Chinook salmon. So much bare soil had been exposed by the timber boom of the 1950s and 1960s that when two “hundred-year” storms hit, one in 1955 and the other in 1964, the nature of the river was completely changed. What had been a stable, deeply channeled, well-shaded watercourse some 65 miles long was transformed into a shallow, braided, overheated stream devoid of clean spawning gravels and deep, cold rearing pools. Salmon need clean, cold water even more than we humans do, and they need an ample supply of clean gravels. If the gravels are cemented with silt, oxygen can’t reach the fertilized eggs and the eggs suffocate. Without pools deep enough to remain cool through hot summers, the juvenile fish die. Since 1964, the number of returning spawners had declined precipitously.

Our early efforts were encouraging. Capturing a few wild fish each year and depositing their hand-fertilized eggs in tiny backyard incubators tended by residents resulted in an 80 to 9- percent egg-to-fry survival rate compared to perhaps 10 to 15 percent in the damaged river.

Despite this success, we knew this was no enduring solution. The degraded river system was going to take generations to repair itself and that would happen only if the land management prac- tices that had caused the damage were transformed into methods more benign. If we were not to build ourselves, with our inevita- ble capacity for human error, into a natural system of reproduc- tion that had function perfectly for thousands of years, we would need to expand our goals. We needed to invent rehabilitation projects that would hasten the recovery of the river.

Along with most of my neighbors, I’m one of the dwindling few who take their household water directly from the Earth by tapping into a nearby spring. Each time I take a drink, I think, “If water’s not sacred, what is?” Our watershed runs through us. If we were to rehabilitate our watershed, we would need to con- vince our neighboring landowners and residents that the water- shed not only ran through their individual bodies, but through the well-being of our common community. Each one of us was going to need to examine his or her daily activities and evaluate how they contributed to good watership citizenship.

Watershed citizenshiP A watershed is a simple construct. Since water runs down-

hill, every drop that falls down one side of a hill or ridge or

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another and gathers into swales, creeks, and sub-drainages that eventually combine into a river system that gives the watershed its name. Most every person, urban or rural, consciously or unconsciously, has some visceral experience of their watershed each day—through glimpses of waterways or ridge lines that sur- round and infuse their local places. Yet in the early 1980s, when we began our effort, the word either didn’t exist, or was used incorrectly, an many people’s vocabularies. When I talked to groups of college students who occasionally toured our facilities, I would always begin by asking how many of them knew what a watershed is. Few of them raised their hands.

Twenty-some years later, everyone n my tiny watershed knows they’re part of it, and it’s difficult to find a drainage (at lest on the West Coast) that isn’t home to a watershed council. Why this relatively rapid development?

In those same 20 years, global environmental alarms have risen to a high-pitch scream. So has our anxiety about our seem- ing powerlessness to do much as individuals about our seeming powerlessness to do much as individuals about things like global over-heating, ozone depletion, the health of the oceans, and on and on.

A whole lot of people seem to have come to a similar conclu- sion at the same time: if global problems seem too large for most people to grapple with, it is within our reach to take responsibility for our home places. Clean water is a good organizing principle, and so are native salmon. A watershed of certain size offers a reasonable scale of endeavor that’s a good fit for human visceral and mental capabilities.

Watershed councils are organized toward a variety of ends—ecological restoration, conservation and preservation of lands, development of sustainable resource management strate- gies, environmental education—usually in combination. Most create situations that get neighbors, often with conflicting ideolo- gies, working together toward a common goal… Such situations create an accelerated learning environment: residents are not only directly exposed to the lessons of their home ecologies, but they find themselves learning from each other.

Do this long enough and you may find yourself and your community edging forward toward a 21st century model of the way we

humans have lived for 99 percent of our time on Earth—in intimate and very practical relation to a place large

enough to feed us and small enough to understand inti- mately the actual dimensions of our interactive function.

a “green” arChiteCt fallS in love . . . With frogSong CohouSing

By Joseph F. Kennedy

When I first visited FrogSong Cohousing community in the town of Cotati in Sonoma County, California, I immediately felt at home; but it was a way of being “at home” that I had not experienced for a long time – if ever. I’m an architect who specializes in natural building techniques and village development, and FrogSong resident Elisa Graf had invited me to speak to community members about my work in natural building and ecological design. So I experienced FrogSong community with a village design perspective. My first impression was how comfortable Elisa’s and her husband Lars’ small but well-designed townhouse seemed. As Elisa showed me through the house with her kids all around, I sensed the family intimacy, commitment to place, and a calm but lively atmosphere. This impression stayed with me in my further explorations of this village-like community.

I liked the site plan: 30 mostly two-story townhouses in two rows with pleasant patios facing into a common green between them, with several different well-defined outdoor areas. Designed by cohousing architects Chuck Durrett and Kathryn McCamant of the CoHousing Company, FrogSong’s buildings have variegated facades with vibrant shades of yellow, red, and green. A convenient yet unobtrusive parking area with carports flanks the common house and a community workshop space.

During the first evening, I joined FrogSong members for a delicious convivial meal in their spacious common house, which includes the community dining/living area, a children’s playroom, two guest rooms, and an outdoor play area directly adjacent to it which is well used by the community kids.

As I wandered throughout the common house, I watched residents coming in and out to check their mail and do small errands, and kids running around on the common green. I enjoyed meeting some of the pioneers of the community and hearing about everyday life and the joys and challenges of creating and living in a cohousing community.

During some moments alone walking around the property, I found myself studying various visible aspects of community culture, such as a small informal book library with current and interesting titles, the bulletin board posting workshare opportunities and events of interest to the community, and kids interacting in positive ways with their parents. Here was a civil, joyous community setting of utter normalcy. I found myself wishing that such community situations were typical.

FrogSong is a stellar example of bottom-up planning, where sophisticated decision-making techniques, paired with commitment and hard work, result in a beautiful space that reflects the needs of all residents. The initial explorations for this project began in 1996 and, as is usual

for many cohousing communities, is a story of meetings and searches, committees, members dropping out, and new

ones coming in. As most residents told me, cohousing is a self-selecting process, and those who could engage in the long and often intense process are a special breed, skilled at compromise, persistence, and a commitment to vision. The long search finally came to an end with the purchase of this property.

FrogSong is on the southern edge of the main village of Cotati, and because it has retail shop space, provides a commercial anchor along Old Redwood Highway. The cohousing community was developed at the same time as several other non-cohousing residential developments in the area, along with a senior residential complex.

The intelligent design of this community is due to the foresight and determination of the residents, ably assisted by the designer/developers at the CoHousing Company. FrogSong is home to activists, owners of small businesses, teachers, and staff at Sonoma State University, and others who commute to jobs throughout the Bay area. All decisions are made by consensus which Elisa told me has really helped make the group cohesive and successful. FrogSong is very much a family-oriented place, with kids ranging from newborns to 12-year olds, and more on the way. Several single women at FrogSong have adopted children, which I was told they would never have done if not for the support of the larger community. The sense of community is palpable and I get the impression it’s deeply appreciated by all who live there.

From my ecological design perspective, FrogSong residents made every effort to follow ecological principles, from efficient small houses made of ecologically sound materials whenever possible, to shared walls between units for energy savings, and prewiring and preplumbing the houses for solar technologies in the future, when residents can afford solar hot water and off-grid power. The biggest barrier to using more ecological materials (such as sea grass for rugs) was the litigation insurance required by building subcontractors to protect against the kinds of legal suits that have become common in residential housing projects, though not in cohousing specifically. (This subcontractor-initiated legal climate has made developing cohousing projects like FrogSong much more difficult and expensive than they might otherwise be). FrogSong’s grounds are landscaped according

to permaculture principles, with rainwater funneled to swales that feed a local wetland. The landscape is still immature, and it will be a number of years before the growing trees provide enclosure and privacy in the common areas.

On my second visit to the community, I bumped into Elisa’s son Sebastian, who proceeded to take me to his house through the rough- and-ready shortcut the kids had made across the property. It was great to get a kid’s-eye view of the still somewhat undeveloped “village green.” I later heard plans for a hot tub on the site and know that this area will be developed more as residents settle into a community that really has only been up and running for 18 months. I again was welcomed to dinner by Elisa, and joined by other FrogSong residents Heather and Patrick Picard and David Ergo, who answered my questions candidly and thoughtfully. Chatting over pasta and wine, I heard how FrogSong has made these community members’ lives physically easier, more sustainable, and more socially rich. Several of them mentioned that most of their social needs were met within the community. Indeed some felt there was sometimes too much social contact, with lack of privacy a minor complaint. But what they emphasized was that at FrogSong no one is ever lonely and help is always at hand. Heather said it wasn’t uncommon for her to go to the common laundry facility and find that some kind anonymous soul had folded her laundry for her. Others gladly help to bring groceries upstairs. They all emphasized that this habitual helping quality was one of the special pleasures of living at FrogSong.

My hosts often spoke of how congenial the children have become as a group. I could sense their contentment as they described the secure and supportive environment they had been able to create for their children. FrogSong is indeed a paradise for kids, with safe places to run around and play, wild landscapes outside their back door, their own play spaces inside and out, and plenty of friends and trusted adults at all times. According to the parents, the only trouble is tracking them down from their various “homes” and having some family time together! They even mentioned how everyone’s pets seem to be affected by the atmosphere at FrogSong. One resident observed that even with 20 cats on the property she hadn’t seen any catfights. And the dogs didn’t cause problems, the said, but instead formed an amiable pack that patrols the area, providing excellent security in this downtown location.

Our conversation turned to the challenges of integrating commercial retail shops into the cohousing project, which was required by the City of Cotati, since the city plan called

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for business development there. After some resistance, FrogSong residents decided to develop a block of commercial spaces to be controlled by the community itself. They didn’t rent to franchises, however, but to owners of local businesses, and will apply all rental profits to further developments of the community. Now the stores are a welcome addition: all the kids get their haircuts at the hairdresser’s salon, and a small business copy shop is much appreciated by residents who work out of their homes. One of the office spaces is shared by several of the independently employed cohousing residents – quite a short commute! In my experience, the presence of a commercial aspect greatly enlivens the place, and provides a replicable model for similar cohousing developments.

From my perspective as an architect recently introduced to this successful and beautiful example of sane living through this project, the residents and developers of FrogSong have much to be proud of. While some local developer-driven cohousing projects are using a “build it and they will come” approach, this strategy will not, as Kathryn McCamant assured me, result in a project as stunning as FrogSong. I hope that other cohousing groups will be inspired by this community’s success.

— This article appeared in Communities Magazine, Summer 2005. Joseph F. Kennedy is co-editor of The Art of Natural Building along with Michael Smith

and Catherine Wanek.

helP grouPS By Steve Whitson

Building community is not as easy as it once was. With our fast paced lives, isolating forms of transportation and the prevalence of passive entertainment we have less opportunity to share our lives with others. We have become dependent on the help of paid service providers and manufacturers. Many of these providers are far removed from us either geographically or ideologically. In addition, this process promotes a dependance on money. Without money, how would I go to the movies, fix my house, or buy a table?

When I think about the most satisfying events in life, they are almost always experiences where there was no paid provider involved. A party at a friend’s home, a conversation with a neighbor, or working with a group toward a common goal, consistently beats trying to satisfy our needs with money.

As we work to become more regionally and financially independent, there is much we can do to reduce our consumption and the reliance on paid service providers. One option is a help group. This is a group of people who come together monthly at a member’s house to help with their building and repair needs. The group goes to a different member’s house each month and tackles a list of tasks generated by the host. Our group has been meeting for over six years. We meet at 2:00 on a Saturday or Sunday afternoon and work until 5:00. We try to work in groups of two or more to promote community.

Once we clean up, we share a vegetarian potluck dinner, talk about the day’s accomplishments and enjoy each other’s company. We then pick a date for our next meeting that works for the largest number of us. A few days before that date, the month’s host calls us to discuss the upcoming tasks, provide a list of tools needed and plan the dinner. The help group provides a good opportunity to share tools, educate each other, promote a sense of community and help the environment. Our group has purchased some tools together, providing us with better equipment without the waste of each household buying their own. We have repaired many items which would have been otherwise thrown into the recycling or trash, thus reducing the need for more consumption. We recently built a compost bin, painted a room with environmentally friendly paint, and cleaned windows with vinegar and water. As one of us learns something new about keeping up their home we are able to share it with others and provide hands-on training.

Although the productive and ecological benefits of our help group are substantial, the satisfaction of working with a group of friends to accomplish something of benefit to one of our members is enormous. It is easy to understand why the barn- raising of days past was so popular, once you experience the multiple benefits of a help group.

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What are your neighborhood ConneCtionS?

To what extent are you “at home” in your neighborhood? What ties do you have to your neighbors? To neighborhood groups? Are there resources you contribute to or can call upon when needed? In a sense, the answers reflect your stake in your community. The following questions are a way of assessing your neighborhood connections. They are intended to be thought-provoking, not definitive. You don’t need to share your worksheet with anyone.

• Do you know your next-door neighbors by name? Yes_____ No_____

• Have you ever invited a neighbor in for coffee or a social event? Yes_____ No_____

• Have you done chores for a neighbor (e.g., pet care, mail pickup) or helped a neighbor in need (taken over a dinner, driven to an appointment)?

Yes_____ No_____

• Do you sometimes just go for a walk in your neighborhood? Yes_____ No_____

• Do you borrow or loan tools or equipment with neighbors, share a newspaper or magazine subscription, work in each other’s gardens?

Yes_____ No_____

• Do you ever carpool with a neighbor? Yes_____ No_____

• Have you ever organized a neighborhood picnic, block party, or similar get-together? Yes_____ No_____

• Are you a Block Home or part of a Neighborhood Watch? Yes_____ No_____

• Do you attend local PTA or school advisory committee meetings or attend school functions (plays, concerts, sports events)? Yes_____ No_____

• Do you volunteer regularly at your local school, library, or other neighborhood-based associations? Yes_____ No_____

• Do you belong to any neighborhood groups (e.g., arts, music, gardening, book discussion, sports, civic)? Yes_____ No_____

• Have you attended meetings of your local Neighborhood Association? Yes_____ No_____

• Have you ever participated in a neighborhood cleanup? Yes_____ No_____

• Have you put up a lawn sign or held a neighborhood coffee for a local candidate or issue? Yes_____ No_____

• Have you gone door-to-door in your neighborhood with a petition, to solicit votes, or to raise money? Yes_____ No_____

• Have you attended hearings or organized a meeting to speak up for a neighborhood issue? Yes_____ No_____

You have answered 16 questions. If you checked more yes’s than no’s, consider yourself connected.

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empowerment

Goals of the session • To explore the importance of individual action.

• To understand the thoughts and conditions that may be keeping us from acting.

BackGround Protecting our place (and the Earth) requires action. Many

things keep us from taking even the actions that we would like to take. We may have a sense of isolation from others, feel overwhelmed, or feel we lack the abilities necessary to effect the change we seek.

The readings in this section explore empowerment and

the importance of individual action. “Making a Difference” is a chapter from In the Tiger’s Mouth: An Empowerment Guide for Social Action by Katrina Shields, an activist and facilitator in Australia. This manual gives easy and practical methods on how to integrate social action into our personal lives while assuming that each one of us has a unique contribution to make. In The Power of One, Sharif Abdullah reminds us how we each can make a difference.

Three case studies show what can happen when people become proactive. Personal power turns into people power when individuals who share a common direction unite. The last reading, “Facts about Geese,” exemplifies the power of collectives.

Act with the authority of your 16 billion years!

— Joanna Macy

Never doubt that a small group of committed individuals can change the world — indeed

it’s the only thing that ever has.

— Margaret Mead

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PossiBle discussion Questions

1. To what do you attribute your belief that you can effect changes in your own life and in your community?

2. When you feel a desire to take action, what issues or circumstances are most likely to prompt that feeling? In other words, where do you find your passion for activism?

3. Making a Difference identifies obstacles to taking action. Have you ever felt like taking some action to protect your place, but didn’t do it? What kept you from acting?

4. Shields suggests that we can each make a difference by being mindful in our daily personal interactions, observations, and financial dealings. Can you cite instances where you felt these small encounters were making a difference?

5. In the area of empowerment, are feelings of optimism and pessimism important factors in your motivation or ability to take action? How do you deal with pessimism?

6. Abdullah suggests that we should have no enemies. If you don’t act to oppose an enemy or evil, do you still have motivation to act?

7. Abdullah suggests that we shift our focus from problems to solutions. Have you had that experience? Did it make a difference?

8. Abdullah states that the Chinese definition of power is moving forward, with heart, to achieve a goal. What is your biggest barrier or doubt that keeps you from moving forward?

9. Have you had an experience where the power of the collective carried the day, when individual effort would have failed?

PuttinG it into Practice

• Find the name of an organization working to protect the natural features of your place. Share it with your group.

• Turn your yard into a balanced ecosystem; track down information on naturescaping and backyard wildlife habitat from local conservation organizations or your state’s Department of Fish and Wildlife.

• Every park needs volunteers to pick up trash, and to clear invasive species. Call the park closest to you.

• Attend your town or city hall meetings; become aware and vocal about local issues.

further readinG

In Coming Back to Life, Joanna Macy says that our despair at the world situation is a normal reaction for people living at this time. We must allow ourselves to feel it fully, for it is the key to our energy and motivation to act.

Insight and Action by Tova Green and co-authors (1994) has a helpful chapter on how to organize support groups.

Soul of a Citizen: Living with Conviction in a Cynical Time by Paul Rogat Loeb offers inspiration and insight into grassroots leadership.

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( E a c h M e m b e r A n s w e r s )

Remember a time when you took action and made a difference. What happened? How did you feel about it?

Please complete the evaluation form and return it to the NWEI volunteer or your class coordinator at the final meeting. Thank you.

NWEI volunteers and support staff invite you to become a member and support our continuing outreach. A membership form is included on the last page.

put their names and phone numbers on the back of the form. Thank you.

CirCle Question

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Making a difference From In the Tiger’s Mouth by Katrina Shields

I heard a story recently of a young Irish woman, less than twenty, with no political background, who worked at a check- out counter in a large supermarket in Dublin. She was aware of the apartheid regime in South Africa, and the fact that the black people there had called on consumers not to buy South African products. Because her store carried South African fruit she decided to refuse to sell it. At work she rang up all the other goods but not the products from South Africa. Customers complained, managers came. She was fired. By the end of the day all the women in the store were refusing to sell South African fruit.

The strife escalated, with threats of mass stand-downs and workers in other supermarkets coming out in support of the women who refused to sell the racist fruit. The issue was covered in the press and on television and many people in Ireland learnt about the real cost of cheap apartheid fruit. Eventually the company agreed to stop selling South African fruit, the young woman got her job back and in the process, the whole community

had learnt about the power of one person’s commitment to act in solidarity with those who are oppressed.

The essential changes will require a lot of individuals taking action on many levels; but to do so requires a belief that you as an individual, and the individuals around you,

can make a difference. We see from this example that “people power” grows from a base of individual empowerment.

We may have to face this obstacle of powerlessness, in many guises, over and over again. We may say “But what can I do? I haven’t got what it takes.” “I am not a real . . . (activist, environmentalist, political person, feminist, peace worker etc.).” As Kevin McVeigh, the former US Interhelp Coordinator, points out: “The denial of power is as endemic to our culture as the denial of feelings.”

It is the idea of powerlessness which is the obstacle, rather than actual powerlessness. When we find ways to disperse or overcome this belief in powerlessness, coupled with motivation from a clear perception of the danger we are in, we can act in creative and life- enhancing ways. We generally don’t need to be told what to do — we tend to figure it out quite quickly, guided by our inner sense, if we are willing to listen to it.

Developing this sense of empowerment is to discover our capacity to bring about outer, and inner, change. Inner change entails purposefully transforming our habitual responses to life. It also implies accepting personal responsibility. Acting on our own and others’ behalf, we may protest and refuse to cooperate with things we know to be detrimental; or we may

investigate and develop alternatives. Personal empowerment is infectious. It has the effect of helping others see new things as possible and inspiring them to act on that insight.

To reclaim our power we need to examine our beliefs about power. It is a very misused concept, which is currently being questioned and redefined by many groups, including the women’s movement and ecological thinkers.

Personal power leading to people power can be contrasted with what we generally think of when we hear the term “power” — that is, power which is conferred through structural power or “power over.” These forms of power give the ones at the top the right and/or might to force others to do what they want them to do. This is not the case with personal or people power, which is much more fluid, synergistic, cooperative and indirect.

So if we potentially have personal power, why is it that we often have trouble expressing it?

There are many reasons. It would be simplistic not to acknowledge that some individuals and groups have a much longer journey, against greater resistance, towards the realization of their personal power than others. Those who experience more oppression, such as women and minority groups, have many more layers of resistance to get through. These layers are both external and internal — because oppressive beliefs easily become internalized. Not only do we come to believe the oppressive attitudes and limitations and accept them as reality, but furthermore we perpetuate them by limiting others.

Past exPeriences Often the experiences we have as young people actively set

up this pattern of self-limitation. A friend, Denise Nagorka, described her insights:

“When I was growing up, I did recognize that I was experiencing things differently from the big people around me. A lot of my energy went into trying to protect myself and avoid harassment. I had no models that said: ‘If you don’t like things you can change them.’ What I realize is that inside myself that dialogue sometimes continues — I still think I’m back there, when I hear myself say: ‘Don’t stick your neck out, sit quietly, then you won’t get criticized.’”

Growing up in our culture usually does little to prepare us for responding appropriately to problems of this magnitude. Most social institutions, and the education system in particular, encourage us to conform to the existing social systems rather than think we can change them. We are taught what is acceptable to think and do. Rocking the boat, questioning authority, or upsetting established structural power relationships is definitely not encouraged! “It is impolite to disagree. The experts and powerholders know what is best for us.” “Avoid being in a situation that would bring disapproval.”

“The denial of power is as endemic to our culture as the denial

of feelings.” —kevin Mcveigh

V I I - 4 We are not encouraged to trust our perceptions, feelings and

judgments — especially if they are out of sync with the status quo. This combination of pressures is usually enough to keep us immobilized — even if we do have a queasy feeling that it isn’t right.

When we wake up to the reality of how powerlessness is drummed into us, everything begins to change. Denise continues:

“When I realized this, through talking with people, particularly in groups, I was able to start acting differently. When my daughter says: ‘I don’t like it,’ we take the time to look at options: how can this be changed? It is a bit like watching the way water flows off dirt roads; you watch the way it normally goes, then you give it a new channel to flow in.”

Feelings of powerlessness will expand or contract depending on our notion of how change happens.

chanGe Myths and Beliefs What do you tell yourself about what it would take to

change things? We are often guided by myths. If we believe that change is

initiated only by the leaders — the men, the big shots, the ones who make the rules — or only by pulling strings on high, and pushing others around, then we are not likely to feel part of it.

However, if we see considerable change happening from the bottom up — the accumulation of individuals taking action and making moment-to-moment choices — we will know that we have a role to play in it. As Fran Peavey says in her inspiring book Heart Politics: “I act on the conviction that everyone is making a difference. Just by living our lives, consuming space and resources, we are making a difference. Our choice is what kind of difference to make.”

We make a difference by exercising our consumer choice, by the quality of contact with friends and neighbors or by building vitality and integrity into our own lives, our family, and our community. As M.K. Gandhi said so simply: “Almost anything you do will seem insignificant,

but it is very important that you do it.” I can have the experience of making a

difference by starting with the nearest thing. This experience also builds confidence for larger projects such as forming groups, organizing campaigns and exercising leadership.

As a participant at an empowerment workshop put it: “At first I thought I had to completely reorganize my life, wait for the kids to grow up, get the mortgage paid off, before I could start . . . but then I saw I could just start from where I was.”

The idea of the “Hundredth Monkey” has been an important (if clichéd) guiding myth of our times. (Even if the details of the tale are inaccurate). This myth stemmed from reports of the behavior of groups of monkeys on some isolated islands, who started to wash their sweet potatoes. This was taught to the younger monkeys in the group until many of the monkeys were doing it. The story goes that at one point monkeys on a relatively

nearby, but isolated, island — monkeys who had not had contact with the first group — also began to wash their sweet potatoes.

The basic idea is that when enough people have a change of consciousness, reaching a critical mass, they can bring about a sudden change in the wider society. The momentous changes in Eastern Europe are a good example of this.

Another inspiring guiding myth is that of the ripple effect outlined in The Tao of Leadership:

“A ripple effect works because everyone influences everyone else.

Powerful people are powerful influencers. If your life works, you influence your family. If your family works, your family influences the

community. If your community works, your community influences

the nation. If your nation works, your nation influences the world.” Another motivating belief is based on the notion that where

the people lead, the leaders will follow. If enough strategic moral and popular pressure is demonstrated (at least in a democracy), then the powerholders will eventually have to adopt the line. As former US President Eisenhower once said:

“I like to believe that people, in the long run, are going to do more to promote peace than governments. Indeed, I think that people want peace so much that one of these days governments had better get out of their way and let them have it.”

This can be demonstrated over and over again to be the case with changes of policy where politicians jump in front of a strong trend of public opinion and attempt to make it look as though they are initiating the changes or had intended to all along. It can be very empowering to educate each other on how historical events that led to major changes did in fact unfold — and to validate the role of citizen-led social movements.

It is fruitful to question whether your belief system about how change happens is likely to sustain you in positive action. Relying on mainstream media for information about change can discourage personal involvement in social change because of the selective emphasis on high profile personalities or institutions and the focus on problems and disasters. It is hard to gain a perspective on individual contributions to the slow building of change, or of unspectacular but solid achievements being made.

diseMPowerinG Beliefs What is your notion of what is required of you? If you

perceive that to be responsible enough, adequate enough, you have to be a heroic activist, one who makes bold gestures against incredible obstacles, and who speaks eloquently to very large groups, then you may have trouble identifying with this. We certainly need our heroes and heroines; however it seems most of them start out quite small.

Jo Valentine, as a Green Independent member of the Federal Senate in Australia — in fact the first Senator elected on an anti- nuclear platform — described to me how she started:

“The first thing I did after the birth of my first child was to

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“Powerful people are

powerful influencers.”

—John heider

“It is individuals who change societies, who

give birth to ideas, who by standing out against the

tides of opinion, change them.” —doris Lessing

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organize a babysitting group in the neighborhood. It was a sanity saver. I had been involved in community groups before that time but this was the first thing I did from scratch by myself. I just decided — this is important. I wheeled the baby up and down the street and stopped anyone else who had a baby and asked ‘What do you do about babysitters?’ A lot of them said, ‘Oh well, we just don’t go out — we’ve got no parents around so that is just how it is.’ I’d heard of these babysitting groups before and I rang a few to find out how they worked. Then I thought, ‘Heck, if I can do that, well what next?’ So I began to take on the city council — trying to get our area declared a nuclear free zone.”

Another common disempowering belief is the tyranny of the idea of “The Expert.” Carol, a workshop participant, said:

“I was intimidated by thinking I needed to know a lot about nuclear weapons in order to speak out about them. I knew the basics — it was clearly madness! I woke up to the fact that I had been giving my consent by my silence, and my non-involvement.” This, however, should not discourage you from training and informing yourself to increase your effectiveness.

Having an exaggerated sense of awe about people in power can also be an obstacle. Richard Jones, Member of Parliament in the Upper House in NSW, told me: “The first realization must be that the Prime Minister, members of the Royal Family, the Premier — indeed anybody in public positions like that — are ordinary people, just like you and I. It’s just that they have found themselves in unusual circumstances. They don’t regard themselves as anything but ordinary. Don’t look up to them, look at them on the level. . . . It makes a big difference.”

self criticisM It is not only our perceptions of others that may need to

change — our perceptions of ourselves may need to change also. Many of us are in the habit of perpetual self-criticism, often quite unconsciously. Another foundation for empowerment is to make a commitment to stop devaluing ourselves and instead to learn to affirm ourselves and others. In counseling clients, I often observe that the idea of stopping this internal harassment initially comes as a great surprise. But once the connection is made that being criticized by others in childhood leads to learning to criticize oneself, then clients see that this is something they can take some control over. Consequently more and more focus can be put on the positives, affirming the differences we do make and the things we do well. It sounds simple, but it takes great persistence.

James Bennett-Levy described how, when he was part of a support group, they used to ask each other: “How have you changed the world today?” At first the idea seemed ridiculous, confronting or even absurd. But the effect of hearing the answers was very encouraging. . . . “I resolved a dispute with my neighbor.” “I said no thanks, I won’t use plastic bags.” “I stopped to chat and smile at the man who sold the tickets, I left him feeling good . . . . he probably smiled at the next 10 people.”

transforMinG fear Fear is the basic emotion that acts as the brake. It can be very

liberating to form a different relationship with feelings of fear: “Feel the fear but do it anyway.”

Nan Nicolson described her experience on the Terania Creek Logging Blockade: “When I was confronted with trying to get my first media interview, it was only the passion for the cause that allowed me to contemplate doing it. I was driven by the realization that the media coverage was essential and

someone had to do it. What got me over the hurdle was the knowledge that however ghastly, it would not last for ever. From that I learnt I could make a difference when I confronted my fear. Now I know how desperate TV, radio, and newspapers are for stories and how it is relatively easy to get covered when you hand the story over on a plate.”

Moya Farrell, a peace and social justice activist from Newcastle, talked about how reframing what she was experiencing made a big difference for her. “While I still feel the fear, I don’t let it stop me now. I see it as a pointer for work I need to do with myself, rather than something to make me say ‘no, I shouldn’t.’ I tell myself that this is excitement — fear and excitement are very close feelings. I breathe with it a little — it helps!”

So rather than perceiving power as something people (i.e. others) are born or blessed with, the focus can be on personal empowerment as a continual process of taking steps from where we are, taking steps to create and contribute towards how we want things to be, both inwardly and outwardly.

— Katrina Shields is a social activist and community worker in the northern rivers of New

South Wales.

excerpts froM The Power of one By Sharif M. Abdullah

authentic Power as a sPiritual Practice Cats and rats. A few years ago, I experienced a recurring

dream. In my waking life, I faced severe economic problems. The elements of the recurring dream were always the same; there was always a cat and a rat.

The rats were very detailed and very distinct. They were 3 or 4 feet high, they would sit up on their hind legs, they were well-muscled, I could see every hair on their bodies. They looked very intelligent, with questing eyes. The cats were always very lethargic, most of the time they couldn’t even stand up. They would lie in puddles on the floor. They were indistinct; I couldn’t tell head from tail.

Night after night, I would have this dream. Super- articulated rats and indistinct, weak cats. Finally, I realized what the dreams meant. The rats were my debts, the problems in my life at that time. I focused on my debts, I looked at them, I analyzed them. I would round up my bills and go through them, add them, worry over them. I dwelled on the debts; I fixated on them.

The cats were my abundance, my resources. I paid no attention to them. They were lethargic.

As soon as I realized the meaning of the dream, I asked myself: what are my assets? What is my abundance? I sat down and made a list of my spiritual, physical and financial assets. By

It is empowering to focus on the everyday heroism

of small actions.

V I I - 6 the time I finished with the list, I saw the solution to my pressing debt problem. My answer to my financial problem was right in front of me all the time. I couldn’t see it when I was pre-occupied with focusing on the problems.

The next night, I had a dream. The dream was about a beautiful black cat: huge, sleek, powerful. And, there was a little tiny mouse scurrying along the floor.

We all do this; we all tend to focus on the problems instead of the solution. And in doing this, we ignore or deny the solution, or at least deny the possibility of solution.

I sit in meetings of people who very correctly see and analyze the mega-crises. They analyze and re-analyze. They issue reports and studies. These are the same people who come up to me and (quite proudly) recite the latest military atrocity or ecological catastrophe or social travesty.

These committed individuals stare blankly when I ask them to articulate their solution. At best, their stated solution is making someone else act.

We focus on the rats while avoiding the cats because creating a solution also creates the responsibility for implementing the solution. We want someone else to do that. The Democrats want the Republicans to come up with the solution, so they can shoot at it. The blacks want the whites to come up with the solution, so they can criticize it.

Changing focus from problems to solutions, from rats to cats, takes willpower. And nothing else.

what is authentic power? . . . In Chinese, the character for “power” has three elements. One of them is forward motion; the second part is a Heart; the third part is a goal. Therefore, the Chinese definition of power is moving forward, with heart, to achieve a goal. When you have all the three elements, heart, forward motion, and a goal, you are beginning to achieve authentic power. If you do something without Heart, without Love, it lacks power. If you act without a goal, you act without power. . . .

the Power of the sPirit mobilizing the power of people. . . . Years ago, I was

touring an impacted area of Charlotte with Ron Leeper, a City Councilman. We were stopped by a resident who asked Mr. Leeper what the City was going to do about the trash in the street. He asked her, “Who put the trash there?” Startled by his question, the woman answered, “My next door neighbor.” Ron replied, “Did you ask her to stop?”

His question, while not denying the responsibility of the City to clean the streets, helped the woman to see that she was not powerless to change the situation.

  

John Woolman [was] a Quaker who lived during the 1700’s in colonial America. In reading about that period, I was shocked to find that Quakers in the early days of this country owned slaves. Mr. Woolman thought that the ownership of another human being

was a violation of religious and human decency. He went to all of the slave-holding Quakers, over the course of several decades, quietly talking, convincing, persuading. Just one man in a wagon, visiting distant farms throughout the thirteen colonies, meeting with people one at a time, going back to those who were not convinced several times. When he was finished, Quakers did not own slaves as a matter of principle. His actions helped set the stage for Quaker assistance in the Underground Railroad, the Civil Rights movement, and continuing on to this day in the American Friends Service Committee. Millions have benefited from his quiet, gentle determination. . . .

The authentic leader is forgiving. The authentic leader practices something the Tibetan Buddhist tradition of Shambala calls “drala”; above the enemy. Beyond the enemy. So far beyond the enemy that the authentic leader does not have any enemy. Like getting “beaten up” by a two year old, the authentic leader does not have an enemy because she cannot be hurt.

The authentic leader operates from the basis of “We Are One.” If we are one, I can’t have an enemy. If we all share the same problem, how can you be against me? As the organization Beyond War states, every conflict is a civil war, a war between brothers and sisters. . . . We accept Skinheads, industrial polluters, driftnet fishers

and social bigots as “the enemy.” While I do not condone their behavior, I will not separate from them, I will not make an enemy of them. I will always treat them like the Children of God that they are. And, like Gandhi and King, I will transform that person who thinks they are my enemy into my friend. There is an old saying that it’s the biggest former sinners who sing loudest in the choir. Remember that it was the anti-Jesus, Roman apologist Saul who became Paul, the evangelist. Think about the powerful allies that the polluters, the racists, the ecological rapists will make when they are transformed into friends!

  

Living within a lie. In his book “Living in Truth,” Vaclav Havel talks about our declining civilization. The society we live in is essentially a lie. We all know that it’s a lie. We continue to acquiesce in it. We act as though voting for a particular personality in Congress or going to the “right” protest rally is going to change the chaos we face. We know nothing will change; but we participate in the fraud. We act like buying the new car or latest television will make our lives better. We know this is a lie. We act like smoking the right cigarette, using the right mouthwash, or recycling our newspapers will cause us to feel fulfilled. Deep inside, we know nothing will change. But we participate in the fraud.

The person who is living within the Truth doesn’t care if others follow him. He marches to the beat of the different drummer. He does what he knows in his Heart is right. He practices and models his values at all times. He acts fearlessly in the world. He has no enemies.

Authentic leadership comes from the moral force of character, not control. It was Havel’s force of moral character that led and sustained the “Velvet Revolution.” It was simply the force of his character that led to the downfall of the

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“Nobody makes a greater mistake than he who did

nothing because he could do only a little.” —edMund Burke,

18th century statesMan

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Czechoslovakian Communist regime. What did he do? What power did he have, rolling beer barrels in a Prague brewery, or writing a four page letter once a week to his wife while in prison?

It was the moral force of King’s character that brought down American Apartheid. What did he do? What armies did he have, besides armies of bright-eyed Sunday School children or college students? What power did he have, roughed up and thrown into jail, writing a letter on scraps of paper from his cell in Birmingham, a letter which spelled the end of American Apartheid?

It was the moral force of Gandhi’s character that brought down the British Raj in India. What power did the skinny little brown man in loincloth and sandals have? Who did he control? How could his simple decision to fast stop murderous mobs of Hindus and Muslims from hacking each other to death? How could his personal opposition bring down the most powerful military force in the world?

Authentic leadership comes from the moral force of character, not control. The authentic leader is able to exercise the moral force of character in the world, whether in the checkout line in the grocery or sitting in an office or leading the masses in a demonstration. They are always interacting with people at the level of the deep knowledge of their moral energy. Being true to themselves, they are practicing and living their authenticity.

When the authentic leader speaks, her words are more than just ideas running around in her head. Compare this to George Bush, who has hired the most skillful speechwriters to make it SOUND as though he were speaking from the field of universal consciousness. When Gandhi spoke, he could speak softly, plainly, from the Heart. People HEARD him, at deep levels of consciousness. People “got it.” Vaclav Havel is a most unassuming revolutionary; cerebral, bookish, intellectual; this man led millions in demonstrations that have overturned the status quo. His voice, although very mild and quiet, moves people to act. And, although Dr. King will go down in history as one of humankind’s greatest orators, he didn’t start out that way. Green, shy and hesitant, he grew into his role over time.

The authentic leader is willing to take and share responsibility. The authentic leader doesn't blame others for his own experiences. Instead of finding someone to blame, he looks for opportunities to share responsibility, share successes and commiserate over setbacks. If his children are getting bad grades in school, he does not automatically blame the school system. He asks the question: what can all of us do, together, which will solve this situation? How can we all win?

Each of us is a spiritual being. Each of us has a spiritual practice (whether conscious or unconscious). Each of us has a moral force. Each of us can apply that moral force to solve the mega-crises of today.

the authentic leader is subversive. In a classic sense, my attempts at living an authentic life are subversive. Not in the sense of trying to bring down “The System” (I am learning to become indifferent to it), but in the sense that my decision to live an authentic life destabilizes and unsupports the “Living within a Lie” order, while supporting and nurturing “Living within the Truth.”

The etymology of the word subvert is from Latin and French: sub meaning “up from under,” vertere meaning “to turn.” A subversive act is one that turns the status quo. In these days and times, healing the pain of dysfunctional living is

a subversive act. Our actions either support the existing order,

are neutral to it, or destabilize it. When I buy General Electric light bulbs, I am

helping G.E. make nuclear bombs: once the money goes to G.E., it props up their entire system. When I purchase a sandwich from Essential Foods, I am helping organizations like Intentional Futures and the Seattle Ecology House. Therefore, my consciousness of the power of every dollar I

spend subverts the system. I ride my bicycle, as an eco-political statement, as exercise,

as primary transportation. There is a whole system of gas stations, traffic jams, parking lots, tire salesmen, road crews . . . an entire system that I unplug by climbing on my bike. If everyone travelling within five miles of home followed my example by either bicycling or taking public transportation, the auto- dependent system would collapse. Therefore, my riding a bicycle is a subversive act.

— Sharif Abdullah is a leading proponent and catalyst for inclusive social, cultural and spiritual transformation. He is director of The Commonway Institute in Portland, Oregon.

Making the connection By Susan Cerulean

Sailing from Key West to St Petersburg in 1978, environment educator Kristie Anders glimpsed the forces at work on the Florida landscape—and her future. “One morning, something gigantic took shape on the horizon,” she says. “It looked like a tower at first, then a battleship, all brightly lit.” There was nothing on nautical charts to help Anders and her friends make sense of the looming, unnatural shape where they expected wilderness. “As we drew closer, we realized it was high rises going up on Marco Island—so fast the charts couldn’t keep pace,” says Anders. “I was stunned.” Continuing north, we sailed by another little island, this one dark with green vegetation and dark in the sense of very few lights, the complete opposite of Marco. All you could see were just a few little cottages on the beach. That was my first look at Sanibel.”

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Anders felt an instant attraction to that south Florida island. Within ten years she would be one of the most persuasive proponents of balance between its natural and human forces. As education director of the Sanibel-Captiva Conservation Foundation, a nonprofit that works to preserve island resources and wildlife habitat, she has taught tens of thousands of nature lovers—residents and visitors—every year about the fragile island and the rare unique creatures who live there. But at lunch on day, Anders realized traditional conservation education wasn’t enough. She needed to engage a new and unlikely audience: realtors. “I overheard a realtor I knew talking to prospective home buyers, saying, “You don’t want that lot; its got gopher tortoises living on it.” So what’s the problem with gopher tortoises? Called “Nature’s landlords,” they did burrows up to forty feet long and, on Sanibel, one to three feet deep, which shelter a host of other critters. These tortoises and their burrows are protected by Florida law, but Sanibel’s regulations go even further than state law in protecting nature from real estate development. And that’s important to the island’s human residents: polls show that 93 percent count wildlife preservation among their highest priorities. “The truth is you can’t do just anything you want with the landscape here, even in your own back yard,” says Anders. “The City of Sanibel has developed a whole set of complex regulations to keep our island green and unique.” As the realtor at the next table warned her clients about hassles implicit in other natural features of properties, Anders was stunned to hear her community’s values expressed “with such a negative twist.” Thinking that the would-be residents at the next table weren’t getting the full picture, Kristie Anders started calculating: of some 300 realtors selling on the 12,000-acre island at that time, perhaps 30 lived there. Most of those who lived off- island were unfamiliar with the City of Sanibel, except to be frustrated by its regulations, and yet they helped form others’ first impressions of what it means to live there. Says Anders, “The question in my mind became, how well do they know what they’re offering to buyers?”

Anders now inpires and educates licensed realtors through an annual course she calls “considerations in Coastal Living.” Its mission is to give realtors a better understanding and even appreciation of the environmental conditions and regulations with in this coastal community, including its many protected species of plants and animals. Recognized as the “best new education class’ by the Florida Association of Realtors in 2001, the course has now enrolled about eighty individuals— more than a quarter of Sanibel’s realtors who have earned fourteen continuing education credits, the number Florida requires of them annually. Learning about the island’s fragile ecosystem and laws that protect it not only enhances the realtors’ respect for Sanibel, but also makes them better resources for new residents. “When [Kristie] talks, such a love for this island comes through, even down to the tiny gambusia fish in the Sanibel River that eat the mosquito larvae,” says Susan Rosica, a realtor who attended Anders’s September 2001 course. “My clients appreciate facts like this that I am now able to relay to them.” The realtor put her new knowledge to work immediately as she took prospective clients through a home on Clam Bayou, at the north end of the island. Stepping out on a deck, they spotted an enormous, twiggy nest on top of the chimney. A startled osprey—a large, brown and white bird of prey—rose from it and dove at the people below. “At first, the buyers wanted that bird gone," says Rosica. “But because [of] Kristie’s course, we were able to calm the buyers’ concerns and point them to the permit required to move the nest, if they decided to go that route. Now they appreciate living so close to the birds.” Anders’s co-teacher, realtor Jay Richter, helped her jump through the necessary hoops to get certified as an instructor for the state licensing board and share her enthusiasm for Sanibel’s wildlife. “You’d never learn how to get butterflies to come to your yard in the average real estate course—jut how to get more business," says Richter. “What Kristie and I teach is a greater sense of how things are interrelated." The resulting knowledge helps realtors gain the confidence of their clients, he maintains. “And besides, realtors are held liable for their representations of a property more and more these days,” says Richter. Given Sanibel’s restriction on property use, "this class is a good way for them to protect themselves from unnecessary lawsuits.” “At first I had some doubts about working with the realtors,” says Anders, fearing they’d consider it a waste of time. But, over and over, she gets comments on evaluations like, “I thought I knew it all, but now I see I don’t. Thanks, Kristie.” Now roundly sure of the course’s value, Anders extends her reach to new residents by giving realtors copies of a “welcome” packet for their clients that includes a one-year membership to the Sanibel-Captiva Conservation Foundation. “What does a new Sanibel resident want to know?” Anders asks rhetorically. “The answer is simple: How to get engaged. How to become part of the community. How to figure out this challenging landscape—so different from what they knew

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up north. And why the trees in their very own backyards are protected. So we offer new residents an environmental orientation program. . . . We travel around the island by trolley, looking at the natural systems and talking about land restoration strategies. I take them by boat into the estuary so they can understand our “islandness” a little better.” Anders leans forward in her chair, intent as she describes the foundation’s corps of more than 300 volunteers: “People have an innate sense of protectiveness about our wildlife, our nature—that’s nothing I’ve caused to happen.”

A desire to preserve has run high on this twelve–mile crescent of sand and shell. J.N. “Ding” Darling, a Pulitzer Prize-winning political cartoonist, was a powerful force in allowing Sanibel a better fate than its sister island, Marco. With his leadership, residents in 1945 began acquiring pockets of land for a refuge; in 1967 they succeeded in creating a national wildlife refuge named for Darling, which now protects better than half the island. By the mid-1960s, southwest Florida’s building explosion had breached the island’s tranquility, thanks to a three-mile causeway between Sanibel and the mainland that was constructed against the islanders’ wishes. Mangrove forests were leveled, wildlife habitat destroyed, and sewage dumped into the island pristine waters. Sanibel’s residents voted to incorporate themselves as a city in 1974 to control development and to preserve the island’s unique balance of humans and nature. “It really is quite extraordinary that we’ve been able to remain true to the original Sanibel plan adopted in 1976,” says Sanibel Planning Director Bruce Rogers. “I credit the high quality of our elected leadership over the years—no one runs against the plan.

“But anytime you do regulation, you have to put equal time into education, otherwise it’s never going to work,” says Rogers. “That’s why the work of the Sanibel-Captiva Conservation Foundation and the refuge are so important in carrying out our programs.”

When Anders began her work on Sanibel—first at the wildlife refuge and, since 1988, at the foundation—she’d completed a double major in marine science and outdoor education at Penn State and was well-prepared to “stand on the shoulders of the giants,” as she call Ding Darling and Sanibel’s other conservation leaders. But she credits her passion for nature to her early mentors—her grandmother and father, in particular. “We lived in central Pennsylvania, in the woods near a creek, and we were always outdoors, looking at every flower and leaf, canoeing, hiking,” says Anders. “They really got me to ask questions.”

How well Anders shares her knowledge and passion on Sanibel is impossible to quantify, even with enthusiastic course evaluations. “Ultimately, we’ll only know if we’ve succeeded when we can answer affirmatively questions like "Can Pine Island Sound (the estuary on the bay side of Sanibel) remain healthy?” she says.

Meanwhile, Anders wishes she could do more. “Every single Thursday morning, member of the realtors’ association meet for breakfast and then caravan to view all the new multiple listings,” she says. “I’d love to be on that bus, looking at the landscapes with them, pointing out where mangroves

are being trimmed legally and where they’re not, and where native plants are used in the landscape.

Just outside her office, Kristie Anders looks at an enormous satellite photo covering a wall of the foundation’s conference room. In the darkened room, Sanibel Island floats emerald, enchanting, seamless. “This is how an osprey might see it,” Anders says. “Why not do it their way and look at the big picture, the needs of the natural as well as the human-built community?”

She stares at her island, lost in through. “We think what we’re doing on Sanibel is do-able anywhere,” she says. “It doesn’t matter if your town is known as Sanibel is, for its well-kept environment. Maybe what you’ve got is a special cultural identity or a thriving downtown.” What’s important, says Anders, is telling the stories behind the unique aspects of our communities.

“All [the qualities] that set communities apart and define their sense of place are what we’re losing to ‘the blob’ of sprawl and unsustainable development,” she says. “If you want to preserve what’s special about your community, find its stories, and then share them with everyone who lives there. In my case, although I didn’t write the Sanibel story, I get to tell it.”

— Susan Cerulean writes from the Red Hills bioregion of north Florida. The Book of the Everglades, her latest anthology, was published by Milkweed Editions in July 2002.

push for change

By Ann Sihler

What is the sound of 50 push mowers clipping the grass of a major city park? We — a group of nine ecologically-minded friends who now call ourselves Push for Change — asked this Zen- like question in 1994. We answered it the next spring when we organized a “mow-in” at Portland’s famed Tom McCall Waterfront Park. After getting a permit from the city’s Parks Department, we invited the public to help us mow a section of the park to demonstrate clean, quiet lawn care.

The idea for the mow-in came about after the members of Push for Change began meeting casually to discuss environmental issues and the philosophy and practices of an ecologically sound society. Before forming as a group, each of us had decided personally that it was important to live a more sustainable lifestyle. Some of

us were professionally involved in “earth-

friendly” activities such as recycling, organic gardening, or environmental education. Others were vegetarians, frequent bicycle commuters, or garage-sale shoppers. Although the depth and type of our commitment to sustainable living varied, as a group we found ourselves much in agreement. Eventually we saw that what we really wanted was to affect the choices of people outside our own group — to have a wider, more direct influence on people than simply the example of our own behavior. We wanted to take action!

The actions we discussed ran the gamut from supporting political campaigns to what we called “reverse vandalism” — planting a tree in someone’s yard during the dead of night, for example.

Somehow we kept coming back to lawn mowers. All of us owned and enjoyed using push mowers and considered the pollution, noise, and petroleum consumption of gas-powered mowers unnecessary for the maintenance of many Portland lawns. We thought that demonstrating a clean, silent, and healthy way to care for lawns would gently remind people to reconsider their lifestyle choices.

What we didn’t expect was the fun it would be. After organizing two mow-ins, we have found push mower users to be a devoted, enthusiastic lot eager to show off their scythes and antique mowers, their brand new models, or plain ol’ garage-sale specials. Attendance almost doubled from the first year to the second, and the event expanded to include a mower maintenance clinic. Media attention also increased — exponentially, with National Public Radio’s Weekend Edition doing a spot on push mowers versus gas-powered ones. Locally, we rejected sponsorship by Portland General Electric, which was offering rebates on electric or push mowers for people trading in gas mowers.

If we had known how successful and fun an event such as the mow-in would be, we would have organized one earlier!

— Ann Sihler is editor of The Association of Oregon Recyclers' Newsletter.

facts aBout geese By Angeles Arrien from Insight and Action

Milton Olsen (the Naturalist) said it’s very

interesting that, particularly with geese, we have a lot to learn about collectives.

Fact one: As each bird flaps its wings, it creates an uplift for the birds following it. By flying in a V-formation, the whole flock adds 71 percent greater flying range than if the bird flew alone. Many indigenous cultures recognize that there’s a lot I can do by myself, there’s a lot I can do with a partner, but the power of what I can get done with a collective

is quantum. It’s a mega-step, it’s a mega movement. The lesson from this fact: people who share a common direction and sense of community can get where they’re going quicker and easier because they’re traveling on the thrust of one another. That’s a universal collective lesson.

Fact number two About Geese: Whenever a goose falls out of formation it suddenly feels the drag and resistance of trying to fly alone and quickly gets back into formation to take advantage of the lifting power of the bird immediately in front. Lesson: If we have as much sense as a goose, we will stay in formation with those who are headed where we want to go and be willing to accept their help, as well as give ours to others.

Fact number three: When the lead goose gets tired, it rotates back into the formation and another goose flies at the point position. An invaluable lesson for us to apply to all group work. It pays to take turns doing the hard tasks and sharing leadership. With people as with geese, we are interdependent on each others’ skills and capabilities and unique arrangements of gifts, talents, resources, or what indigenous societies call the “good, true, and beautiful.”

Fact number Four: The geese in formation honk from behind to encourage those in front to keep up their speed. Lesson: we need to make sure our honking from behind is encouraging. And not something else. In groups where there is greater encouragement against great odds, the production is much greater — the power of encouragement. Now, I love the word courage because it means “to stand by one’s heart, to stand by one’s core.” To encourage someone else’s core, to encourage someone else’s heart — that quality of honking.

Fact number Five: When a goose gets sick, or wounded, or shot down, two geese drop out of formation and follow it down to help and protect it. They stay with it until it is able to fly again

or dies. Then they launch out on their own with another formation or catch up with the flock. Lesson: if we have as much sense as geese, we too will stand by each other in difficult times as well as when we are strong. And I think it’s important that one of the things indigenous cultures have done for years is that they look to nature as an outer mirror of one’s own internal nature. And so as we begin to learn about collectives of animals and their patterns, perhaps we have some tools, techniques, methodologies about community and about collective work and group work.

— “Facts About Geese” is from a talk by Angeles Arrien to the Organization Development Network, 1992. Arrien is a cultural anthropologist, award-winning author, educator and consultant to many organizations and businesses.

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