ConserveLand Blog

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.