Songs of Life

August 20, 2010 – 7:25 PM

One summer, I rode my bike down a country road, which was lined by assorted levels of development. For five minutes I was zooming by green carpets of lawn, artful landscaping and blacktop driveways, the next five took me past the wild meadows which were left. It was as though someone was standing beside my ear with an on-off switch. Home sites: silence. Meadow: cacophony of insect sounds, bellowing into the air of my passage.

There is a deafening message in that silence of the home sites. It isn’t the silence of the Grand Canyon, where the quiet is so vast that it is a tangible part of the terrain. This is a silence of lack. It’s the silence of the wrong noise; car exhausts, garbage trucks, the occasional bulldozer or hammer. It’s the silence of removal: removal of enough of the ecological cycle to have obliterated it; spaces of true emptiness. It was as though I was speeding past a painting, or a photo. Not a place on earth, and no longer real. Some of these home sites were very pretty. But they were not beautiful. They served as the habitation of several mammals, who may or may not have been at home. But other than that, they did not hold life.

I don’t mean to be so black-and-white about it. Of course some of these yards have a young oak in them, with some caterpillars sequestered in the leaves. Moths may appear; a few loud summer insects may make themselves heard. But on that day of summer, on that bike ride, it was black and white. Birds may pass through. But they are beggars in this landscape. They must go elsewhere for their sustenance.

Indeed Sprawl is a bad thing and good land-use planning would help to maintain some kind of network of biodiversity on the land, but that’s not what this is about. I’m writing this because I know that those green-carpeted, landscaped outposts of emptiness don’t have to be. The removal of ecology certainly takes place under the footprint of the home and driveway, but can’t the rest be part of an ecology, rather than entirely obliterating it? Do we have to shut out the web of life and its riotous music?

And how (you may ask) does this relate to land trusts? Two ways: First, our mission cannot succeed without concomitant education. Why protect something you don’t understand? Are the owners of those quiet yards going to donate for insect habitat? Do they understand how dependent we all are on the contents of a meadow? Why help protect something you haven’t experienced enough to care about? We have work to do. And Second, remember those landowners who called with their 3 or 5 acre parcels, that they wanted to protect, because they love their little piece of ground? Remember how hard it was to tell them that their property wasn’t special enough to preserve? Not enough conservation value? Not enough public benefit? Not enough resources to spend the staff time on? Here is the alternative for those landowners who care so much about their little spot on earth. We can show them how to make the insects sing.

By Sally Zaino | Posted in Uncategorized | Comments (1)

the pushmi-pullyu of pennsylvania land policy

August 10, 2010 – 4:15 PM

So on Sunday we were in Beaverland in Snyder County, first at an Orthodox house-church service in Beavertown where our oldest Nick afterward gave a rendition of the story of Joseph during coffee hour dressed in a coat of many colors he had made at Bible camp–and including a conversation with the kids about whether Mr. and Mrs. Beaver of Narnia had ever lived along Beaver Creek–then down the road to the Beaver fairgrounds to catch the youth rodeo in Beaver Springs.

Our rodeo visit began as a an alternative to Union County’s West End Fair, which we had missed the day before due to a swimming trip to Halfway Dam. It turned into a fascinating glimpse of the local rodeo scene. Daredevil girls and boys rode horses super fast around barrels and then tied up goats as part of the competitions we saw, all bathed with country music, folksy p.a. announcers and 4H-served food. We had moved from a scene of kids in biblical gear from deserts of the East to kids all around us attired as cowgirls and cowboys.

While there I noticed someone’s copy of the Sunday Patriot-News. Old addictions to newspapers die hard for me, and I ended up in the back of the stands for a few minutes reading the front-page story about “forced pooling” (sometimes apparently also called “conservation pooling” by proponents) as it relates to Marcellus Shale drilling. The story was juxtaposed with a great in-depth look at the growth of Amish communities in the lower Susquehanna Valley on the same front page.

The whole concept of “forced pooling” just seems to me another portent of how far we’ve moved into a kind of la-la land much less real than Narnia when it comes to dealing with the earth. Most of you are probably more familiar with the idea than I am, but essentially it is (as the article stated) eminent domain for corporations. Basically, it would allow gas companies to extract shale gas from under your property using horizontal drilling/fracking even if you don’t agree–but you would get a check and other landowners would be happy, so this is ok. So much for American notions of private property rights–and however problematic those have been for the environment, this makes it worse.

The environmental organization Penn Future had its president quoted in the article as saying that this might not be such a bad idea, since with certain regulations it could allow for fewer surface drilling operations and less disturbance to the landscape, though other environmentalists weighed in expressing opposition.

It is to my mind a terrible idea that runs counter to basic traditions of land stewardship among communities throughout our region, including Snyder County’s Beaverland, which need to be nurtured rather than erased. It seems as un-American as the gas-drilling contracts that prevent people from talking about their experiences with the gas companies, and all with the implicit support  of our state and federal systems. I voice this critique not so much even from just an environmental standpoint as someone interested in trying to ground philosophy in place (i.e. ethics). We really need such grounding in our dealing with land issues today, which are more tangled than ever, and “forced pooling” will be one more tangle in the ever-expanding knot.

When I went with a student recently to meet with leaders of the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) Confederacy, we heard much about the “discovery” principle of law that has dominated Euroamerican dealings with both native peoples and the environment. Basically it’s a doctrine, supported both by the colonializing military expeditions from Europe in the “age of discovery” and an early modern papal bull, that land that is “discovered” (read objectified) becomes the property of the owner.

We’ve dealt with the effects of that for a long time throughout the Western Hemisphere, and in particular in the resource-extraction boom-and-bust cycles of the Susquehanna region. In fact, the whole notion of “forced pooling” is a direct descendant: Those doing the drilling are “discovering” the resources and therefore own them in effect (or the right to use them) far beneath the earth. In today’s global economy, it’s no longer the papacy that justifies this, but technology. Whoever has the superior technology is the superior claimant to use of the resource. (Let’s put aside for the moment, too, international studies that in recent times have indicated that regions that base their economies on resource extraction experience a decline in quality of life.)

The Native American notion of the land itself and its “resources” having rights, taking into consideration the perspective of the “seventh generation” into the future,  is totally absent from this picture. As suggested above, the mantle of the church-as-state (a legacy of the fall of Rome in the Western Mediterranean) has passed to the corporation and the government together in our legal system, as the successor-beneficiaries to the “discovery” principle of ownership. The problem, as Wendell Berry has pointed out, is that corporations (whether state, governmental or non-profit) don’t have any sense of mortality or human relationships in and of themselves. They are self-expanding and in their own terms insatiably immortal (though not of course really so). Yet they legally are considered persons as much or more than human beings.

Ironically, all this is very much in contrast with actual biblical notions of land expressed in Leviticus 25: “..in the seventh year there shall be a Sabbath rest for the land….The land shall not be sold in perpetuity, for the land is Mine.” Not only is there a sabbatical for the land, but also provision for return of land within the tribal community networks, forgiveness of debts, prohibition of usury, and ban on work during one-seventh of the week.  In fact, the kind of emerging legal landscape with its 24-7 exploitation system we have today can be classified as a kind of idolatry in biblical terms, when idolatry is considered as a kind of objectification related to demonization of the other, as discussed in an earlier post. To worship a “demon” is to take on the properties of demonization, which reduces the “other” to a mere object, whether that other is another person or an ecosystem, a landscape or the earth.

America inherited from its still-thriving but sore oppressed native cultures a bountiful land, and plenty of it in relation to our population, which is still our great strength amid our deindustrialization, relative to the rest of the world. But the adjustment from native ways of land management to Euroamerican colonialism and the slow process of trying to “become native” as a larger culture (given the examples of indigenous peoples and our own earlier traditions) has been often violent and fitful at best. Private ownership by extended families who care about the land provides one echo of biblical principles trumping capitalist exploitation of the environment. Land conservancies are another. Henry George’s single-tax movement was an effort in earlier America to recognize the earth as something greater than individual owners without tipping toward a dictatorship claiming to stand in for the earth, and in some ways stood as precursor to notions of ecological tax reform today that w9uld base government revenues on taxes on pollution and non-sustainability while rewarding sustainable stewardship. Likewise the eco-anarchism and eco-libertarianism of Edward Abbey and David Foreman, and the mystical Christian “anarchy plus unconstitutional monarchy” of Tolkien also discussed in an earlier post,  provide examples of efforts in the Anglo-American tradition to work through applications of both “native” and biblical traditions to modern Western notions of property ownership. The “cowboy” culture and 4-H folks at the Snyder County junior rodeo reflect too efforts within our traditions to develop a non-violent relationship with the land, the kinds of traditions that developments such as “forced pooling” seek to erase.

In all this the juxtaposition of the stories about expanded Amish land ownership in the Susquehanna Valley and “forced pooling” on the front page of Sunday’s Patriot-News was  not so coincidental. The Amish in their voluntary traditional pooling of  “people capital” through extended family networks echo biblical notions of stewardship (however imperfectly in their environmental practices) that begin to meld in certain respects with native notions of land management already referenced. Yet what we again still  woefully lack, going beyond mere stewardship and management of land,  is an active practice of ecopoetics deep within our culture,  strong and practical enough to stand up to the lure of our modern fantasy world in exposing the idolatry of both technocracy (socialist or capitalist) and the  virtual reality of the “almighty dollar.” It’s percolating around us, though. Deeper than Marcellus drilling and as close as our backyard gardens, from Narnia to Snyder County, the renewal of all our deep-rooted relations with nature, older than the hills, will (in one way or another) surprise those who underestimate its power to their peril.

By alfks | Posted in Uncategorized | Comments (0)

Emotions—Your Connection to the Land

August 4, 2010 – 2:03 PM

Landowners interested in conserving their properties do so for various reasons.  Some are logical—the land is adjacent to a state park, state forest, game lands, or other existing open space, so why not add to it?  Some are financial—the tax benefits are helpful to the landowner’s financial position.  Finally, some are emotional, even visceral—“my family has been here for generations and I love this land.  It would tear me apart to see this developed.”  In past issues of The Horizon many of you have read about the financial benefits that may exist for landowners who choose to conserve their property.  In this issue, however, I want to touch on the emotional side of the process.

Over the past 15 years NBLT has met with many families who come from the same mold—they love their land, they love their land, and they love their land.  I set out to discover what some of them have to say about the process of protecting something they love so dearly.

Most recently, Gene and Betsy Pelletier signed a conservation easement on their 13-acre property in Bradford County. Here is what they have to say about the process and working with us:

Once we sent our e-mail expressing our interest in conserving our property, the NBLT response was almost immediate.  Rick Koval was there for us every step of the way, always supportive and very responsive to our needs.  We found the process to be straightforward, seamless and enlightening, especially the flora and fauna inventory.  It was a pleasure to work with all the knowledgeable, professional and dedicated members of the NBLT staff who generously shared their knowledge and experience with us to achieve a positive outcome.

John and Kathryn Kuryloski of Columbia County completed their 54-acre conservation easement with us late in 2008.  They say:

We thought we knew our property, but in the process of conserving our land with NBLT, we gained increased insight and appreciation of the ecosystem we call home and for this we give special thanks to Rick Koval for his expertise and enthusiasm.  We have also gained great satisfaction and pleasure in becoming part of the NBLT community of like-minded conservationists.

Families who came to us early in our existence were elated to discover us and our work.  Conserving land in the 1990s and early into the next decade was very new to our region and viewed by some to be a bit extreme, very unconventional.  For a few brave souls, this was exactly what they had in mind.  Take for instance Betty Davies of Mehoopany in Wyoming County who, shortly after her 80th birthday in 1998, signed her conservation easement assuring that her 37 acres would remain unspoiled even after she was gone.  She still lives alongside Mehoopany Creek, in a log home she and her late husband, Carlton, built decades ago with trees cut from their own land.  Pines tower over the house, and rock ledges across the creek overhang a summertime swimming hole.  Betty could not bear the thought that a future owner might destroy the place that meant so much to her family:

I have always loved the out-of-doors and the land, and I didn’t want anybody who bought my property after I was gone to come in and cut down these beautiful trees…just to make money.  Money is not the important thing.  I was interested in the land and in the beauty of the land, and the peace that there is here.

In 1996, Ed and Amber Zygmunt of Susquehanna County purchased 50 acres of rolling land in Auburn Township that had been farmed for over 100 years.  They refurbished the old farmhouse into a cozy home and began making the surrounding property just as welcoming to wildlife.  Lawns were replaced with perennial flowerbeds that attracted butterflies, bees, and hummingbirds.  New stone walls, ponds and shrubs provided shelter and food for many wild creatures.  Tree plantings and an enlarged wetland diverted muddy storm water runoff away from a stream that flows into the Susquehanna River, keeping the stream clean and recharging the ground water supply.  Amber and Ed are not farmers themselves—both have office jobs—but they wanted their land to continue to be put to productive use, so they arranged to have a neighboring farmer use it to grow feed for his dairy cattle.

The Zygmunts worked in partnership with other environmental organizations such as Ducks Unlimited, the Chesapeake Bay Foundation and the Pennsylvania Bureau of Forestry.  But the thought of all of their work being destroyed by a future owner troubled the couple.

They came to NBLT in 1999 to conserve their land.  Here is what they have to say:

We wanted to preserve it, not only for our generation, but also our grandchildren’s generation.  The questions the Land Trust had in their paperwork made you really consider a whole lot of things.  They made it really easy…when it came right down to it; it really was a very simple process…. Working with the staff and volunteers of the North Branch Land Trust to draft our conservation easement was like putting together a puzzle.  When the last piece was finally in place, we knew we created something beautiful that could never be taken apart.

Conservation easement donor Gerard Kipp came to us by way of his father, Joe, who originally contacted us in the late ’90s.  Joe left the land to Gerard, who signed his easement document in 2003.  The process and completion of the project was a very emotional one for Gerard:

We seem to be dreamers and storytellers, those of us who donate conservation easements.  To those who want to find the courage to ‘Sign the line,’ I offer this simple advice: ‘Think of yourself as an artist of the land.  Stay true to your colors and style, and the rest will fall into place.’

I close out this writing with two things to keep in mind.  The first is to understand that what these and all the other conservation easement donors have done may not be for you.  Conserving your property is a commitment in perpetuity.  The second is that many of us can only explain the desire to conserve land because we have a spiritual connection to it—the wonder, the awe of it, a gift to us from our creator.  This thought is expressed in a poem written by Gerard Kipp:

There is uniqueness here,

it is the scent on the wind, cinnamon spice,

and the sight of fens unspoiled.

A fire burns in our hearts for connection,

a connection of our souls to a place, and a purpose,

and we must rise above the estimate of ownership.

There is uniqueness here,

and we shall preserve it.

Linda Thoma

North Branch Land Trust

By thomal | Posted in Uncategorized | Comments (0)

Kids, McKibben and Climate Change

August 4, 2010 – 1:28 PM

This group of cheerful children had something to say about land protection as they performed to the Woody Guthrie tune, “This Land is Your Land” by singing, “This land is our land. It’s not a gasland. Think of our future. It’s all in our hands. From the Delaware River, to the Catskill forests, we need our land to be drill-free.”

The performance occurred at the second annual Catskill Mountainkeeper Barnfest in Roscoe, NY, on July 31 where acclaimed author and international organizer on climate change, Bill McKibben, spoke. “We have to take on the fossil fuel industry, the most profitable industry there ever was,” said McKibben.

Barnfest is a celebration of life in the Catskills and an opportunity to increase awareness of issues related to natural gas exploration while raising funds in support of Catskill Mountainkeeper’s ongoing work.

McKibben stressed the importance of addressing Marcellus Shale development in terms of its relationship to the global issue of climate change. “We need to be clear about what it is we’re fighting and what is at the root of it,” he said. “We will not win this battle until we come to terms with the fact that fossil fuel is quickly destroying the planet.”

To further his message, McKibben’s group 350.org is hosting a Global Work Party on 10/10/10. To date, 1,055 actions in 118 countries are scheduled. Visit www.350.org for more information.

In related news, in response to a clear lack of Republican support, House Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nevada) announced this week that he will not introduce S. 3663, also known as the Clean Energy Jobs and Oil Company Accountability Act of 2010. Instead the bill will flounder until after the Senate’s August recess.

By Krista Gromalski | Posted in Climate Change, Conservation Challenges, Conservation Solutions, Oil & Gas | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments (0)

Amos Funk Remembered

August 3, 2010 – 5:55 PM

Written By Ambassador Marilyn Ware*

I’ve found that springtime is a good time to do my annual “Amos Funk inventory”.  I’ve done it secretly for years, ever since I met Amos about thirty years ago.  There is something special about seeing the farms and fields turn toward green, then move to a rich brown, upon tilling. The idea that farming, and the culture of the family farm would exist in perpetuity never would have succeeded had it not been for Amos and his sense of stewardship.

Not one to ever let life pass him by, Amos soared as an athlete in his early years. He set a state pole-vaulting record for instance. Little could he have guessed that he would, metaphorically, vault even higher in another arena later in life. That athletic event turned out to be symbolic of the kind of challenge that he seemed to like best.  And saving our soils and way of life vaulted him onto the state and national scene.  He was a true visionary; he became interested in soil conservation in the 1930s, long before others understood the long term consequences of ignoring this invaluable raw material. As a result, he went on to become a charter member of the Lancaster County Conservation District which he served on for more than 40 years. During the 1960s and 70s he advocated agricultural preservation to local audiences, but to no avail.

Generations will benefit from his tenacity. We were so fortunate to have had that oft- impatient, futuristic conservationist and dedicated steward among us. He was certainly not ambivalent. While Amos mellowed as the movement finally became all encompassing, he admitted to me that his zeal was occasionally excessive. With a smile, he recounted the times that his beloved wife Esta took hold of his jacket and gave it a tug while he was adamantly “selling” agricultural land conservation at meetings. That signal meant that it was time for him to sit down. And sit he did, but not without noting that he needed to contact the skeptics and opponents whom he had not quite convinced that night.

The work of preserving Lancaster County’s prime soils, the culture of farming and the county’s farm economy is a task that he relished.  He was a true visionary.  Although I can’t directly attribute each of the 1,098 now preserved farms to Amos’ vision, persistence and sometimes scrappy nature, he surely has been our primary mover and shaker over the years. And I think of him even more now that he is gone from us.  I know there were times that he thought we would never succeed.  Many of us shared those discouraging periods and turned to one another – most often to Amos – for encouragement. Today that seems a long time ago. But there is good news about our future here.   We now contribute to a momentum that has critical mass.  All townships now have agricultural security areas, and as part of a municipal outreach program, Lancaster Farmland Trust staff serves on agricultural advisory committees in Penn, West Lampeter, and Caernarvon Townships. Efforts continue to extend the reach of preservation by partnering with local municipalities to leverage preservation dollars and help ensure that agriculture remains viable in Lancaster County.

Now tens of thousands of us are dedicated to the same mission thanks to the activism and stewardship which Amos preached and embodied.  The current picture – 86,556 acres –  reflects the vision that Lancaster County farmers, citizens, realtors, builders, businesses, academics, philanthropists and government leaders at all levels have worked in unison to realize over the past twenty plus years.  When I see the beginning of the spring field work, I suspect that Amos is looking down on us thinking that we have succeeded… And, as a second thought, he might gently chide us to pick up the pace. We will.

Originally printed in Open Views, a publication of the Lancaster Farmland Trust. Reprinted with permission.

Editors Note: Amos Funk was awarded the Lifetime Conservation Leadership Award by the Pennsylvania Land Trust Association in 2010 (read more).

By conserveland | Posted in Uncategorized | Comments (0)

Marcellus Shale Drillers in Pennsylvania Amass 1435 Violations in 2.5 Years

August 2, 2010 – 1:02 PM

952 Identified as Most Likely to Harm the Environment

The Pennsylvania Land Trust Association has reviewed environmental violations accrued by Marcellus Shale drillers working in Pennsylvania between January 2008 and June 25, 2010.  The records were obtained via a Right to Know Request made to the PA Department of Environmental Protection (DEP). 

DEP records show a total of 1435 violations of state Oil and Gas Laws due to gas drilling or other earth disturbance activities related to natural gas extraction from the Marcellus Shale in this 2.5-year period.  The Association identified 952 violations as having or likely to have an impact on the environment.  483 were identified as likely being an administrative or safety violation and not likely to have the potential to negatively impact the environment.

The report breaks the violations down by type. For example, of the 952 violations:

  • 268 involve improper construction of waste water impoundments
  • 10 involve improper well casing
  • 154 involve discharge of industrial waste
  • 16 involve improper blowout prevention

The report lists the 25 companies with the most violations as well as the 25 companies with the highest average number of violations per well driller.

View the entire report at conserveland.org/violationsrpt.

By dothemountain | Posted in Oil & Gas | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments (0)

Kayaking Middle-earth

August 2, 2010 – 6:03 AM

” ‘…Do we walk in legends or on the green earth in the daylight?’
‘A man may do both,’ said Aragorn. ‘For not we but those who come after us will make the legends of our time. The green earth, say you? That is a mighty matter of legend, though you tread it under the light of day!’ “    –Tolkien, The Two Towers


A pair of bald eagles perched in a pine tree on the banks of the North Branch of the Susquehanna below Wyalusing as we floated past, two of eight of the majestic birds seen on our short paddle along a verdant stretch of river with hosts Dave and Melody Buck of Endless Mountain Outfitters and a group of their friends last week.

The eagles soared near us in the long lingering daylight, floating in the air as we floated on the water, leafy woods around and between, all of us immersed in the seemingly endless sunset of those Endless Mountains–a scene worthy of Spenser’s river stanzas from The Faerie Queene.

In an area of the Susquehanna shaken by Marcellus Shale gas-company water trucks and the prospect of fracking around and beneath it, the pair of eagles in the pine tree embodied simultaneously the resilience of nature, a real living America beyond politics, and even something more—a kind of ecological iconography or living symbolism sometimes labeled “fantasy” but more real than all our modern abstractions, or what environmental philosophers call ecopoetics.

At that moment, though, the eagles in the pine tree reminded me most of a striking encounter earlier in the week, in the unassuming house that is the Communications Office for the Onondaga Nation near Syracuse. There Bucknell student Brendan Wills and I had met with Tadodaho Sid Hill, the spiritual leader and president of the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) Confederacy, and other notables (Joe Heath, Haudenosaunee attorney in an innovative ecological lawsuit claiming restoration of Lake Onondaga and surrounding areas in lieu of stolen land rights, Haudenosaunee Environmental Task Force member and Onondaga clan mother Jeanne Shenandoah, and environmental/community organizer Lindsay Speer.)

And here for me was the connection with the eagles in the pine tree: The Haudenosaunee believe in a cosmic white pine tree of peace. The symbol parallels in many respects the Norse Yggdrasil, early Irish sacred trees, J.R.R. Tolkien’s tree mythology and the biblical Tree of Life. The eagle too plays a significant role in the symbolology of many indigenous cultures, including both American and Celtic, in Tolkien’s Middle-earth, and in patristic Christianity. Sheltered by the archetypal pine tree that also is real, the Haudenosaunee form of conciliar government helped inspire the American Constitution. They believe that their ethical perspective, taking into account the effects of human acts on the “seventh generation” beyond us, will help the world in its current hour of environmental peril. To them the Susquehanna River is sacred and primordial, echoing the views of some geologists that it may indeed be the oldest surviving river in the world, as known to science today.

The Haudenosaunee leaders discussed with us native views of the rights of the land, of the trees, of the animals. They told of these rights in the context of the environmental threats they see to both the Finger Lakes and to the Susquehanna Valley from Marcellus Shale gas-drilling, and more generally from a modern technological worldview that philosopher Bruce Foltz has summed up in the phrase  “nature as a gas station”—in which natural landscape becomes more and more a fantasy object of desire in terms of resource-extraction or tourist consumption, and less an experience of mystery on its own ecopoetic terms.

Back on our kayak trip, amid the Endless Mountains not far from Worlds End on the edge of what forester C.E. Brennan has mapped as the Big Woods, watching bald eagles amid beautiful scenery seemed worlds and ages away from “normal” modern life. We floated on in what paradoxically for our larger culture would seem a fantasy, but one more real than the “real” virtual Matrix in which we usually interact with the earth today.

“That says it all,” said Dave Buck, after having pointed out the eagles in the pine tree to us with his paddle.

“This is the real Middle-earth,” said Joan Cashin, former Wyalusing mayor and FOB (friend of the Bucks).

Now, in a meaningful coincidence, on the two-hour drive from the West Branch to Wyalusing, paralleling an historic Indian trail, I had inflicted tapes from J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Silmarillion on my traveling companions, who included Bucknell Writers Institute researcher Stephanie Quinn  (tapes subsequently left safely in Dave Buck’s hands). Listening to Tolkien’s elvish fantasy history of earth before the last Ice Age, we had heard the creation story of the Elves, and their love of water as a basic sparkling connection of life,  of the gods’ love for trees, the powerful cosmic trees, and the creation of the Ents as tree-shepherds. The name of Tolkien’s fantasy world, Middle-earth, is an ancient Norse name for our earth being in the middle of the cosmos and centrally connected to its varied realms. Being there on the North Branch, and passing the eagles in the pine tree also made that story seem to come to light in vivid colors, as if it had passed out of Pleasantville’s black-and-white spectrum into one of Tolkien’s own color illustrations.

In my summer evening class on Fantasy and Nature, which had just wrapped up the week before, we had read and talked a lot about how the modern technological view of the world, the supposed reality of scientific metaphysics, can end up being the most deceptive fantasy today in objectifying the earth—evident in environmental disasters from the Gulf oil spill to contamination of ground water in Dimock, PA. It’s not that science itself is necessarily ill-attuned to a more ecopoetic view of life and nature (one poetic not in an ethereal way, but in  a very grounded everyday immersion in an experiential meaningful dynamic of nature as mystery). On the contrary, as an example, a recent article in Seed magazine described physics researchers in Vienna working on the question of whether we create the world by looking at it. It’s a problem when it turns the world into a technological being.

The morning after the kayaking, while still in Wyalusing, a talk there by my colleague Katie Faull helped crystallize this issue for me further. Speaking of her National Endowment for the Humanities-sponsored research on the Moravian Christians and on their relation to American Indians in the Susquehanna Valley in the eighteenth century, she observed that the two cultures shared overlapping interests in and practice of medicinal herbs, which provided a common ground for their cultural exchange. This in turn distinguished them from what has become the predominant Anglo-American practice of medicine derived from the “Edinburgh school,” with its focus on nervous and pulmonary systems. The difference (as I interpreted it) lay between what Deleuze and Guattari called “minor” (non-totalizing) and “major” (hegemonic) science. It’s not that one system is wrong or the other right. But they involve different approaches to the natural world, and not coincidentally to native cultures, with “major science” lending itself more easily to colonialist approaches that tip reality and fantasy upside down.

That distinction is part of what secular environmental theorists such as Evan Thompson of Toronto and Timothy Ingold of Aberdeen see as the problem with Western science extending itself into a metaphysical Matrix today, including its core of (following Ingold) cognitive science, “genocentric” Neo-Darwinism, and materialistic cultural theory. A technological worldview has come to dominate even environmental studies, in which the very notion of ecosystem tends to reduce our view of the natural world to an objectified system whose inputs and outputs can be manipulated to balance with the needs of human power elites and global consumerism. We are left with the alarming prospect of a global technocracy that transcends in power any supposed divide between socialism and capitalism and potentially any humanity, as certain writers in recent decades from E.F. Schumacher to Alexander Solzhenitsyn to Wendell Berry have warned.

Here perhaps we see a problem with our political approaches to environmental issues such as global warming. They often lack an ecopoetics of relationship. They involve more the emergency triage of the surgery room and less the holistic approach of the herbalist, so to speak. Debates over whether or to what degree humans are responsible for global warming would be incidental if we practiced an ethos, or sense of place, infusing our community networks with the community imperative to live balanced lives in relation to each other and the earth. Also then incidental would be the establishment of globally enforced matrices by technocrats suspected rightfully of having larger carbon footprints than the average people they seek to direct. Yet the technological worldview continues to sweep us away from the development of any experiential and ecopoetic cultures of place.

This trend extends to so many aspects of our lives, great and small. Not long ago I was walking along Market Street in Lewisburg and saw through the windows of the about-to-open joint Barnes and Noble/Bucknell bookstore what seemed to be a VIP reception party celebrating the new store, which would open to the public soon after. The new store had come into being with substantial state and federal grants and incentives, enabling a rehab of the historic building that now proudly sports Union County’s first and only escalator. Now, don’t get me wrong, it’s great to welcome this gem of a bookstore with its escalator, and it has gone to a lot of trouble to reach out to the community and does attract people admirably to the old town center. But justifying the public subsidy to a private university (albeit one admirably increasing its outreach to low-income students) and a major corporate bookstore chain, in effect pushing a small local bookstore to move out of town in the process, makes the story more complex. And a reception to which the average folks in our rural area did not seem to be invited, despite their involuntary support of this venture through state funds, made me think of the phrase “escalator to nowhere” (actually the consumer-laden escalator ends on a third floor past a level of campus clothing, where a small nature book section is tucked next to business and computer books). Not to be ungrateful, but could such state funds instead for example have enabled quick completion of the public rail-to-trail project across Union County that still needs a connecting bridge or tunnel spanning Route 15, to spur a healthier and more pedestrian- and family-friendly community? (Symbolically, amid attention showered on the new escalator, the white pine “peace tree” planted by a previous Haudenosaunee Tadodaho, Leon Shenandoah, in front of the Bucknell field house, and the Seventh Generation sculpture dedicated by Iroqouis faith-keeper Oren Lyons on the Seventh Street hill on campus, continue to seem largely forgotten by most on campus and in town, although significant symbols of a friendship between our university and native peoples of our land.)

The bookstore is only a microcosmic example that I don’t mean to exaggerate, given the worth of the project in many ways (including re-use of an historic building), to which my own frequent visits provide unworthy personal testimony, and the hard work for it by many very community-minded folks. But one of the dangers of a technological worldview macroscopically is that the technocracy administering it becomes more and more removed from the land and from the living beings in it, regardless of political affiliation or ideology or good intentions. What emerges is fantasy calling itself reality and labeling the view from the ground as fantasy. Thus in the middle of our Great Recession, independent reports–apart from either tea-party or socialist agendas–have re-confirmed a mismatch between the prosperity and views of upper-echelon people in Washington, D.C., and the condition of much of the rest of the country in this masked Depression. (I am reminded by that, strangely, of Tolkien’s contrarian confession in a letter to one of his sons that he was both an anarchist and an unconstitutional monarchist, which I interpret in quasi-Green terms today as his valuing an approach to community–including the non-human–that seeks to embrace nature in a dynamic way but on its own cosmic terms, not technocratically.)

The more time I spend (accompanied by students and family) away from campus with people in the Susquehanna watershed, the more convinced I become of the obvious: Without at all romanticizing Shire-like insularities and biases (Tolkien having borrowed good and bad aspects of his Shire from reports about the Appalachian corridor of which we are a part), the personal networks of this region have a lot to offer. Lives and cultures that engage with the region can teach Americans at large much about place and more sustainable living. Instead too often many of us relative newcomer-professionals may fly around to conferences and elsewhere for work, vacations and family visits–or stay in privileged enclaves when here, interacting mainly with those who come from elsewhere without encouraging them to engage more deeply too in our watershed, all while often keeping our minds deep in a cyberspace that’s not here either. We, and I include myself, often live in the Susquehanna watershed as if in some kind of VIP lounge at O’Hare Airport on a flyover stop—a place just to pass through quickly on the way to our real work, if only pausing to make sure that a local school is ok for our kids. Our carbon footprints, I am sure, are much worse than those of most people in the area whom we often slight (hopefully unintentionally) for not being sufficiently sophisticated or progressive. (Bucknell for one has begun to address this disconnect well through its strategic plan and Environmental Center–including the Susquehanna Valley Summer Writers Institute that was the reason for the trip to the Onondaga Nation and the kayak trip with the Bucks–among other programs, but there is still a long way to go.)

The image I had of a VIP reception at the bookstore in our small community, so contrary in my mind to egalitarian small-town American traditions, stuck in my mind as I stayed shortly afterward for two nights with our 7-year-old and his Cub Scout pack at the venerable Susquehanna Valley Boy Scout get-away complex, Camp Karoondinha. Built in the 1930s, its buildings include signs with tributes to virtues such as thrift seemingly forgotten in the world outside. But the whole forested sprawling network of camps and trails on Penns Creek itself seems a land that time forgot, while having acted across generations also as a center across social classes for the kind of local interest in woodlore that helped shape the conservationism of Dave Buck and another of our kayak companions, both Eagle Scouts, and through them their band of river shepherds on the North Branch. Likewise, gathered at a Fourth of July picnic at Tall Timbers with our fellow church members from Beavertown in Snyder County, or hearing them talk about a gun raffle to benefit the volunteer fire department, catching snapping turtles, and their deeply rooted extended families, in a different way evoked networks of people who know and care about the land much more than they are given credit for by some outsiders.

Some of these traditions flow across historical divisions today in new ways amid our environmental crises. The Haudenosaunee have words of Thanksgiving that they speak to begin councils of importance. A passage in one English version states: “We give thanks to all the Waters of the world for quenching our thirst and providing us with strength. Water is life. We know its power in many forms—waterfalls and rain, mists and streams, rivers and oceans. With one mind, we send greetings and thanks…” At the end of the week after our meeting with the Haudenosaunee leaders, I was in Williamsport witnessing another water-centered rite: The reception of 10 converts into the Orthodox Christian Church through baptism and chrismation along a Susquehanna tributatary stream. A guide-leaflet for the long ceremony explained: “The water represents all of creation. The prayers speak of the manner in which the life of God must come to fill all of creation and drive away all evil. The blessed water is creation restored to its original condition: filled with the presence of God. It is into this new creation that the candidate will be immersed. He will emerge ‘a new creation’…. The word ‘baptism’ (from the Greek, ‘baptizo’) means ‘to immerse.’ The going under the water is death; the coming out of the water is resurrection.” At the end of the two-hour ceremony, presided over by Bishop Tikhon of the Poconos, amid much chanting and incense and lighting of candles, anointing by natural oil and threefold baptismal immersions, many in attendance came to tears, struck by the beauty of the ancient ritual. A river of tears, a baptism of repentance, connects human beings physically with the intertwined cosmos and spiritual world, guiding into paradise, according to Eastern church fathers. Tears of both joy and sadness, “joyful sorrow,” form a bodily connection to the rivers of the earth.

But connections between ancient cosmic traditions can be startling. On our trip to Syracuse we stopped downtown to have lunch at a Chinese restaurant near the university with Phil Arnold, a professor of religion married to an Oneida woman, whose sons are serious lacross players in the Haudenosaunee tradition. He spoke strikingly of the generations of natives who went to boarding schools such as the notorious one at Carlisle: “Their families struggled with the effects of the condemnation by Christians that they were worshiping demons.” (Paradoxically, our modern secular technological culture seems chock full of cultural demons riding one kind of greed or another that drive our ecological predicament.) The Moravians  in early encounters with natives in practice seem an exception, often showing respect for native culture, as likewise seem the Orthodox monastics of Russian Alaska. There, Fr. Michael Oleksa, who, married into a native Alaskan community, writes that the indigenous sense of spirits in all beings and non-beings–as in the inua or inue–engaged positively with Eastern Christian notions of divine energies in nature, which also relate to certain aspects of Moravian theology and practice.

What are demons anyway? Many traditional cultures define them as evil spirits that shape destructive objectification of other beings and the earth by a greedy sense of lack and desire, often causing a lack of personal growth in relation to both cosmic and human community. To demonize is to work with the demons, ironically. Our modern technocracy has in effect continued to demonize non-modern cultures, following earlier models of sectarian attacks on American Indian traditions, but now even more globally by labeling all pre-modern traditions in practice as unscientific fantasy while paying lip-service to cultural diversity. Meanwhile we now arguably infuse the earth’s environment with the modern equivalent of demonic fantasies, as Fyodor Dostoevsky expressed in his harshly satiric novel Demons, but today with a technological reach that can be hugely destructive.

In this watershed, amid the old growth hemlock of Tall Timbers and forgotten ancient oak groves in the Wyoming Valley, in wooded paths of Camp Karoondinha on Penns Creek and of the old Wyalusing Trail, and on the track of James Fenimore Cooper’s stories around the Susquehanna headwaters, and especially out on the river with its shepherds such as the Bucks, we can feel still connected both to the peace tree of the Haudenosaunee around Lake Onondago in the Finger Lakes and to the biblical Tree of Life commemorated at the Russian Orthodox Holy Trinity Monastery on the cypress marsh that some consider the ultimate source of the Susquehanna, in Jordanville, NY. On the North Branch, kayaking by those eagles in the pine tree in the real Middle-earth, we were sheltered and transfigured at twilight by such so-called cosmic fantasy dismissed today by many.

So maybe, I thought in that endless sunset on the river the other night, in the Endless Mountains near Worlds End by the Big Woods, we need a kind of environmental Justice League of America to gather such traditions of our region. They are not all the same and never will be all in accord. But in their overlapping differences they speak a potential common language–in shared community-ecological ethics resisting the technological worldview that bedevils us–to evoke living, ecopoetic landscapes. Instead of joining demons in demonizing, so to speak, perhaps together we can help illumine and energize one eco-region at a time, by doing our part as human beings to be poetic shepherds of creation in guarding the mystery that is our earth.

By alfks | Posted in Uncategorized | Comments (1)

They didn’t know any better

July 14, 2010 – 2:14 PM

When we look at the environmental abuses of the past, we often quickly absolve the perpetrators as well as the broader society of the time: “They didn’t know any better. Times were different. No-one understood.”

Ever wonder if maybe, perhaps, some people did understand and beat their heads against the wall, trying to convince others that a major problem existed, or just as important, trying to get others to care enough to do something.

It is amazing to think that the inhabitants of Easter Island – as they built their fantastic monuments – were blind to the fact that they were destroying their ecosystem, that in cutting down every tree on their island — their world — they were destroying the potential to carry on their way of life.

It seems more likely to me, and perhaps more horrifying, that there were a bunch of Easter Islanders who were saying: “Hey, aren’t we running out of trees to build our monuments.” Or, “we should pace ourselves and plant some trees so our grandkids can build monuments too.” Or, “don’t we have enough monuments?”

By Andy Loza | Posted in Conservation Challenges | Comments (0)

Survival Tip: We Need Clean Air & Water

July 7, 2010 – 6:44 PM

Over the past century, we have seen the industrial revolution in full force as generations of workers were told to build more, consumers were told to consume more and the nation and the world conspired to grow, grow, grow despite a finite world that consists of finite resources.  The short-term gain of industrial progress has left us time and time again with long-term environmental, social and economic disasters when no considerations were given to future generations or the good of society as a whole.

Making matters worse, to fuel our industrial compulsion, we have and continue to rely on some of the dirtiest and most dangerous forms of energy – mainly fossil fuels –  because we have conceived them as the cheapest and most accessible forms of energy to harvest.

Accessible seems to be defined loosely. After all, drilling several miles into our ocean floor for oil; demolishing entire mountainsides to access coal; fracturing through 10,000 feet of layered rock using millions of gallons of water and hundreds of thousands of gallons of chemicals to harvest natural gas is hardly accessible.

And cheaper by what standards?  The impacts from fossil fuels on our environment and our communities continue to take their toll.  If these sources of energy pollute our air and water, despoil our land and devastate our communities, are they really cheaper? If they warm our planet to the point that climates are changed, weather patterns are intensified, is this progress? If they destroy the finite resources that we rely on for survival, who benefits in the long run?

There are those that believe that fossil fuels must continue to play a key role in our quest for prosperity despite their true cost.  They seem to forget what our basic survival needs really are:  clean water, clean air and safe and healthy foods.

The question is: can we sustain these basic necessities of life, without sacrificing them to what we perceive as progress?  Can we continue to grow and grow at the current rate without reaping devastating impacts on society and our natural world?

I am doubtful that we can continue on this track and live happily ever after. Though, if we start to live our lives differently, we may be able to prosper responsibly.   We must first choose smart energy solutions to fuel our sustainable lifestyles, like solar, wind, geothermal and of course, energy efficiency.

More importantly, we must drastically reduce our consumption.  The sustainability of the future means NOT building bigger, not building more – but building only what we need and reducing our need so we build less.  Prosperity for mankind means consuming less and producing less waste, and therefore, inflicting less harm to the collective society, including future generations.

This is a new definition of prosperity especially for the last two or three generations, who were told time and time again to grow, grow, grow.  We’ll need strong leadership to guide us through to prosperity, or at the very least, good survival skills.

By Nicole Faraguna | Posted in Climate Change, Conservation Challenges, Oil & Gas | Comments (0)

A presidential vision

July 2, 2010 – 4:23 PM

Wouldn’t it be cool if  a U.S. President made an inspiring call to action on conservation, environmental protection AND growth issues in a major national address, saying something along the lines of the following:

The moment has arrived to harness the vast energies and abundance of this land to the creation of a new American experience, an experience richer and deeper and more truly a reflection of the goodness and grace of the human spirit….

In the next ten years we shall increase our wealth by 50 percent. The profound question is – does this mean that we will be 50 percent richer in a real sense, 50 percent better off, 50 percent happier?….

The great question… is, … shall we make our peace with nature and begin to make reparations for the damage we have done to our air, our land and our water?

Restoring nature to its natural state is a cause beyond party and beyond factions. It has become a common cause of all the people of this country. It is a cause of particular concern to young Americans, because they more than we will reap the grim consequences of our failure to act on programs which are needed now if we are to prevent disaster later….

Clean air, clean water, open spaces — these should once again be the birthright of every American. If we act now, they can be.

We still think of air as free. But clean air is not free, and neither is clean water….

The program I shall propose to Congress will be the most comprehensive and costly program in this field ever in the nation’s history.

It is not a program for just one year. A year’s plan in this field is not plan at all. This is a time to look ahead not a year, but 5 years or 10 years — whatever time is required to do the job….

As our cities and suburbs relentlessly expand, those priceless open spaces needed for recreation areas accessible to their people are swallowed up — often forever. Unless we preserve these spaces while they are still available, we will have none to preserve. Therefore, I shall propose now financing methods for purchasing open space and parklands now, before they are lost to us….

We can no longer afford to consider air and water common property, free to be abused by anyone without regard to the consequences. Instead, we should begin now to treat them as scarce resources, which we are no more free to contaminate than we are free to throw garbage into our neighbor’s yard.

The argument is increasingly heard that a fundamental contradiction has arisen between economic growth and the quality of life, so that to have one we must forsake the other. The answer is not to abandon growth, but to redirect it…

I propose, that before these problems become insoluble, the Nation develop a national growth policy. Our purpose will be to find those means by which Federal, state and local government can influence the course of … growth so as positively to affect the quality of American life.

A U.S. President did say these words – 40 years ago. President Richard M. Nixon spoke them in his State of the Union Address of January 22, 1970. Many of the nation’s foundational environmental laws were enacted in the ensuing months.

It seems premature to compare President Obama’s rhetoric and results with Nixon’s, but I look forward to doing so in a few years time. (Who out there is looking for a PhD dissertation thesis?)

For the history buffs and policy wonks among you, I recommend reading the entire address. Nixon had more to say on environmental matters (as well as on winning a “just peace” in Vietnam, reforming the welfare system, national debt accumulated in the previous decade, etc.). The Address can be found in many locations on the web including http://www.usa-presidents.info/union/nixon-1.html.

By Andy Loza | Posted in Uncategorized | Comments (1)