holyoutlaw

Maybe it comes from having grown up during the relatively apocalyptic 1960s, with the Viet Nam war, numerous assassinations, riots every summer, and our first cultural awareness of the limits to growth and ecological decay. Or maybe it comes from having read The Population Bomb at an impressionable 11 years old.

But for whatever reason, I’ve always had little or no sense of the future. I’ve never been good at multi-year plans, like saving to own a home or for retirement.

So it was that at 54, when I planted my first tree as part of a master forester class, that I first had a genuine sense of the future, that I had done something that would definitely leave the world a little better off than I found it. (Well, to be honest, the tree I planted has most likely been eaten by mountain beavers, but work with me here.)

This action helped me understand the truth behind the saying that we don’t inherit the world from our ancestors, we borrow it from our children. This isn’t just a clever turn of phrase, but I think demonstrates the very real nature of succession and life on the planet.

In the act of planting that tree, I felt like I had paid on the loan of the planet from the future.

Note: I’m going to be asking myself “why restoration?” periodically, and trying to come up with different answers, as I prepare for the senior symposium for Antioch U.

Mirrored from Nature Intrudes. Please comment over there.

Yesterday a friend read to me from The View from the Center of the Universe: Discovering Our Extraordinary Place in the Cosmos, which triggered some thoughts about connectedness.

Every culture has an origin story, and ours currently is the big bang theory. This works because it does the best job of making predictions we can double check with observations. It also provides the best questions and challenges for further examination. At some point, we’ll learn enough that the Big Bang Theory will be as obsolete as the phlogiston theory.

A big problem with this story, however, is that it disconnects the average person from the universe. The authors of the book say that this disconnection is because the big bang theory reveals our role in the universe to be so insignificant.

In addition to attempting to rationalize the world and establish social norms, older origin myths connected believers in the myth to the world around them. In the case of Coastal Salish cultures, the connection was very personal. The plants and animals were their cousins, and sometimes the very rocks and trees had once been people (the Western red-cedar, for instance, was created in honor of someone who was helpful to everyone).

I think we are also disconnected from place. The archetypal story is someone who goes from their house into their garage, drives alone to work, parks underground and takes the elevator up to their office. If the cafeteria is in the building, they might not experience “the outside” at all. This leads to a loss of sense of place; that is, you don’t inhabit your surroundings because you’re never in contact with them. You’re a resident in a house, but that house could be anywhere — and if you’re upwardly mobile enough, that house will change every ten years or so.

And while at work, this person is disconnected from their labor. If they’re in an office, the work is nothing but pixels, or paper to be filed. If they’re in a factory, the work comes to them on an assembly line and moves along. They might not ever see the entire product. Workers today are not as connected to their work as craftsmen were to their work, or farmers to their fields (for that matter, even monocrop agribusiness farmers are not connected to their fields).

This disconnectedness — from our universe, from our labor, from our place — leads to the spiritual failing that the authors try to address. The spiritual failing is not just turning away from “the church”, because so many of the USian churches are themselves spiritually bereft. I see the spiritual failing as being a disconnection from the numinal world, the transcendent wholly other that both fascinates and compels.

Reestablishing that spiritual connection is an essential step in healing the earth.

Mirrored from Nature Intrudes. Please comment over there.

(Note: This is also the “About” page, but I thought I’d post it here as well.)

I used to cling tightly to a chimeric vision of nature as something pure and somehow prehuman and to the idea that anything human-made removed a place from its natural status. But I have come to understand nature differently. Surely there is a continuum from a pure, undefiled wilderness to a trammeled concrete industrial area. But there is no place, we now know, as the relentlessly global impacts of climate change become increasingly understood, that humans have left untouched; and there is not place that the wild does not, in some small way, proclaim itself.
— Lyanda Lynn Haupt, Crow Planet: Essential Wisdom from the Urban Wilderness

This book — and the above quote as much as any other passage — changed my life. I’ve long thought the city was better than most people think it. I was never one to feel I had to get away, that the city was bad. We can’t all abandon the city for a mountainside slice of nature; if the world is going to be healed, it’s going to start here, in the city.

The idea of a continuum between nature and the built environment resonated strongly with me; with those words, Haupt had articulated thoughts that had been forming below my consciousness. In a short period of time, I also found William Cronon’s The Trouble with Wilderness, which briefly explained the evolution of the whole concept of wilderness and how it came to be seen as a thing so separate from our daily experience. Then I also found Flight Maps: Adventures with Nature in Modern America by Jennifer Price, which also looked at the irony of thinking of a national park as “nature” with its ADA accessible trails and signage, or finding “nature” at the mall.

I first encountered Haupt’s writing in a class at Antioch University, “Birds in the Imagination and the Field.” I liked the essay we read well enough to get Crow Planet from the library — and soon enough to buy it. Every word about seeing nature in our day to day lives resonated with me.

I liked the Birds class so much that I signed up for another Environmental class — “Nature Awareness Skills.” One exercise we did was find a sit spot — an easily accessible but remote location. We were to go there several times a week, at different times of the day. I selected North Beach Park, a nature area a two miles north of my house.

North Beach Park was sadly neglected at that point. It had all the markers of the urban wetland: Tires, rusting machines, weeds, litter from partiers. I’d visited it several times before on photographic expeditions, and grew especially fond of it during the sit spot exercise.

Though surrounded by the city, it was densely wooded and isolated enough that within a couple hundred feet of the entrance, the noises of the city were replaced by the wind in the trees, the bird song, the sound of the stream.

After doing the sit spot exercise, I wanted to find out more about North Beach Park. I wrote to an email dug up from a three year old flyer. The email got forwarded around the parks department, more names accumulating on the CC list with every exchange. At first they thought I wanted them to come and clean up the park — obviously, from its state, a low priority task for an already overstretched parks department, with many larger and more popular parks to worry about. When I said something about wanting to do an Earth Day clean up in the park, they pounced.

The more I learned about North Beach Park in particular and urban forestry and stewardship in general, the more fascinated I became by the problem. What does it mean to become a steward for the urban forest? Who does this work? Why? What are the rewards for the work? How can you make a plan for fifty and more years — especially since I’d avoided, into my own 50s, making plans for more than two or three years into the future, if that.

These questions and others, and the experiences of working in the park, drove my education at Antioch. I hope to continue to explore these ideas here, using the tools of writing and photography; with reading books and essays on the subjects of restoration; and with the practical experience of getting my hands dirty and shoes muddy.

Mirrored from Nature Intrudes. Please comment over there.

While I’m working my way through Richard Avedon: Photographs 1946 2004, I thought I’d look at these two portraits of Bob Dylan by Avedon.

The first was taken on November 4, 1963. It’s one week after Dylan’s first performance outside the Village, where he first sang “The Times They Are A-Changin’” in front of an audience. The location is 132nd St, with the Harlem River and the Park Avenue (Metro North) railroad bridge in the background.

Bob Dylan, Musician, 132nd and FDR Drive, Harlem, New York, November 4, 1963

The pose is casual, the slightly upturned face and barest hint of a Mona Lisa smile show an openness of character. He’s wearing a flannel shirt, blue jeans, and workingman’s boots. There’s a pen in his pocket. The guitar case is beaten up, the background is industrial, literally gritty. He looks young, but not naive; open to experience, and ready to meet it. The clothes, location, beat-up guitar case are all markers of his background. He could be just in from Minnesota.

The second was taken just sixteen months later. It was between the finished production and the release of Bringing It All Back Home, his first record that included a rock band on some tracks. There are of course a lot of differences, but first I want to point out the similarity of pose: Hands in pockets, right knee slightly bent, weight on left foot.

Bob Dylan, Musician, Central Park, New York, February 10, 1965

The first difference I noticed was the clothes. They’re no longer working man’s clothes. The boots are pointy-toed, the pants straight leg. He’s wearing a suede coat. There’s no sign of a pen or guitar. And of course there’s the difference in location, striking even if you know little or nothing about the socioeconomic geography of New York. The overall picture is much darker, and the light is behind Dylan, not above him.

Here, the gaze is more direct. The angle of the head and the light cast the eyes in shadow, making them look hooded, guarded. The eyes are slightly heavier, and the lips, barely turned up in the first photo, are now barely turned down. “The Times They Are A-Changin’” has become the anthem of his generation. Instead of looking openly to the future, he’s practically glaring at it. He bears the weight of his experience in the intervening months, and he knows a lot more is coming.

This shows how much you can see in just the surface of a good portrait. I think the very slight difference in poses say a lot about the large difference in Dylan’s life and status between one photo and the next.

(A brief note: I’ve been looking at the pictures in the book, which are very large and well reproduced.)

Mirrored from Nature Intrudes. Please comment over there.