Editors Note:
~
river
At dusk, the summer air is warm honey amber, heavy with heat. Golden-red light illuminates the tips of pine trees that line the shores and reflect form on the surface of silent water. As light fades, sounds change. Flutters and scurrying steps. A small toad pads across the walkway, barely visible.
We’re three days into our annual trip back to Northwestern Wisconsin to stay with extended family by the river. I need a break from the heat and family chatter. I slip out of the lodge, unobserved.
Deep blue night spreads over the lingering twilight and my body holds the heat of how I was just cooking dinner for many people in the airless kitchen of the old lodge and how, before I left, I cuddled with my daughter as I put her to sleep.
When I arrive at the river bank, the water’s surface reflects the sky far above the tall red and white pine trees lining the shores—a sky which still holds a glint of the day’s light. Stepping in, the cold of the river takes my breath away. In the gathering darkness, my feet touch the fine sand of the river bottom. The water’s surface darkens into a mirror with silvery faint windows of dusk-light. Soon the darkness has eclipsed river and sky, and nothing is visible in the water around me. All at once I’m in it, immersed in the cold, spring-fed waters which have flowed into the Great Lake since the last Ice Age. I drift gently in the ancient current. The cold of the water is silky and living. I move in water I can’t see through. The current pulls me along. I float. I flow. I trust. I am reborn in this ancient cold flux again and again.
Wet and refreshed, I step from the river onto shore. The black night sparkles with fireflies. The sky shines with stars, dusted with the trail of the Milky Way, millions and billions of stars scattered like the dust of shattered crystals; like flecks of gold on ebony. Slight, intermittent sounds punctuate the nighttime silence ~ a flutter of wings, a tenuous movement of a branch, a rustle in the brush, a gentle murmur of water.
My enjoyment of the night is marred only by my deep-seeded knowledge that my experience isn’t widely shared. Most streams and waterways in the world today are simply too polluted to offer this sense of refreshment. Of course some chemicals and toxins taint this water, as they do the water, air and earth everywhere. But compared to most streams in the world today, this one is relatively pure. I need not rinse off after a night dip. I need not fear that hidden chemicals are leaching into me, chemicals which will eventually make me sick.
I think about what it must be like to live in the hot arid communities of Mexico, Africa, or even certain regions of the U.S., where the only streams to cool in consist mainly of agricultural and industrial effluent. How mothers there must feel when their children want to shed the intense heat by immersing in toxin-soaked waters. How they must feel after birth when they need clean water to wash their newborns and their own sweaty and birth-torn bodies. Sitting on the dark riverbank wrapped in a towel, I ponder how much of the earth’s remaining capital we will plunder to satisfy our ever-expanding material appetite; our ever-expanding desire for economic growth and convenience. I am truly privileged to be able to immerse in this pristine stream. But clean water—for bathing, drinking, washing, and growing food—should be a basic human right—not a privilege for the minority.
I want to fill with these river sounds, this North Woods silence, so that I can take them with me. So that when I am far away from this place; when I am locked in a grid of traffic or surrounded by leaf blowers and jack hammers; bull dozers and car alarms; and all of the pervasive noise of our world, I can travel in my mind’s eye, in my heart-space, back to these banks, back to these flowing waters and this green land. Glimmers of these cool river waters and rich tangled shorelines will fortify me and help carry me through modern life. I can recall in moments of stillness the lake upriver at sunset yesterday—an open basin of spilled colors, with clouds of cotton above drenched in rich, bright dyes; the palette shifting, evolving each moment; all the colors liquid when meeting water, spilling, dripping into one another and the open pool of black lake. A kaleidoscope of painted, pulsing, living colors.
I will also remember when far from here, finally launching onto the water last week after hours of intense storms had rocked the old lodge and shook the huge pine trees surrounding it. At last the lightning retreated, and the rain eased. I paddled upriver into the mist. White clouds rose up and hung upon the water’s surface. They parted for me as I slipped silently through, as if entering Avalon, the legendary Apple Island of Arthurian lore where supernatural beings were said to reside and where the earth willingly yielded fruit and grain with no labor required by people; a land of beauty and magic where old powers reigned and where otherwise fatal wounds could be healed. Avalon was said to have been shrouded in mist, which hid it from most mortal eyes and kept it inaccessible. On certain fortuitous occasions, though, the veil of mist would be lifted and lucky beings could slip by boat into Avalon. My kayak glided effortlessly through the water while thunder rumbled in the distance. Puffy white clouds floated on the river, seeming otherworldly and accentuating the cobalt greys and black of the water and sky and the greens of the trees and shrubs lining the shores.
If we ruin and destroy every last natural place on the earth, if we frack it all and extract every drop of natural gas; if we mine every last bit of gold, copper, and coal; if we suck up every last drop of oil dredged deep in the ocean floor, leaving a wake of poison and destruction behind us, then what kind of species will we have become? And what will we be left with? Sometimes dark images float through my mind of a solely human-configured world; an urban-scape of glass and steel sky scrapers, of televisions, computers, technology, and machines, with pesticide-drenched industrial mono-crops subjugating any remaining open space. A world mined, fracked, poisoned, and clearcut. An impoverished world bereft of song birds and wild creatures. A world stripped of biodiversity. I don’t want to live in that world. And I don’t want my daughter to inherit it. And yet, by many realistic counts, as our imprint steadily spreads around the earth, that is where we are heading.
ravishing the sacred groves
Since the earliest times of human life on earth, ancient peoples believed that holy powers communicated with them at special places, almost always in nature. The Buddha attained enlightenment under a bodhi tree. Jesus retreated to the olive grove, Gethsemane, to commune with God and receive his messages. Animistic cultures view the land and waters as the dwelling place of the spirits and gods. They believe that these spirits communicate with them through natural phenomena—wind rustling in the trees, a brook murmuring over rocks, thunder breaking a breathless green sky.
Many of humankind’s most treasured utterances have occurred in natural places. Even in Western tradition, God spoke to Moses from a burning bush alongside a wilderness area, telling him how to lead his people out of bondage in Egypt to the land of milk and honey. And God issued his Ten Commandments to the people through Moses in the wilderness desert of Sinai. In ancient Greece, oracles were whispered to people in caves, and across Europe people attributed the powers of prophesy to special pools. Spirits spoke through trees, plants, rocks, and waters. As we raze mountain tops for coal, mine sacred headwaters for gold and copper, and dam cherished waterfalls for energy, we destroy the temples where sacred words were uttered; where holy laws given; where oracles relayed.
the treasures in the grove
Back in the Pacific Northwest, we’re cramming in our last camping trip of the year before school starts for our daughter next week. We’ve set up camp by the shore of the Ohanapecosh River in Mt Rainier National Park, Washington. Despite the energy and work required to get to places like this—the packing and organizing, slogging two slow hours through Portland traffic, arriving and setting up camp in the pitch black—despite it all, I love coming to places like this. There is just something about wilderness areas that remakes me, brings me back to life, to my center. There is something about the tall evergreen trees with sunlight seeping greenly-gold through their lacy branches; something about the clean mountain blue of the glacier-fed Ohanapecosh that stills me and strikes me with awe.
The many people who flock to these national parks and forests attest to the fact that I am not alone in my love of these natural areas. These places are our national treasures—what makes me proud to be American. We have the great fortune, as a country, of following people who had incredible foresight and sense and who fought to preserve vast tracts of wilderness areas from development.
As a nation, we are at a point of decision about these natural treasures, these places of profound beauty. Will we cede to the interest of the few wealthy and powerful fossil-fuel utility and mining companies who wish to exploit and desecrate these wilderness areas? Fracking companies that plan to poison waters and leave toxic pools, soil, and dust behind, with no remediation for those whose health and properties are affected. The Obama Administration is currently (Nov 22, 2013) considering allowing fracking within national forest land, adjacent to national parks and across millions of acres of public land. And conservative and Tea Party members of Congress repeatedly advocate selling off public lands and mining and drilling within and close to national parks and other public lands. Three of the major presidential candidates in the 2012 election called for selling off public lands.
Places with power lines, mines and energy extraction projects just aren’t the same as wilderness areas left alone by people. When I am canoeing or hiking and have to paddle or walk under a power line, my experience is lessened. I am pulled out of the more-than-human realm and thrust back into the human world. In Eugene, Oregon, where I live, I go sometimes to a park called Mt. Pisgah. The Coastal Fork of the Willamette River runs along one side of the park, while the summit provides a 1500 foot ascent and distant views of the surrounding valleys. Trails wind through incense cedar forests and water ponds. This place offers beauty and respite. But I inevitably end up feeling claustrophobic when hiking there because two major power lines bisect the park. I hate walking under these power lines. A curious and disconcerting buzz continually emanates from them, and I can’t help imagining the health impact of the electromagnetic waves it emits. The only way to avoid the lines is to traverse back and forth, up and down the mountain across small stretches. I am grateful for Mt. Pisgah, but without power lines it would be spectacular.
Companies often claim that their energy and mining projects won’t actually harm or disturb the landscape or wildlife of a region. That migrating birds and animals can pass unhindered through these toxified landscapes and that people won’t be affected either. Yet the inescapable reality is that toxic chemicals poison and destroy. To poison the land and water is to destroy the very fabric of life for the creatures of a given place. The June, 2013 issue of Patagonia features a photo of a fracking site across the field from an elementary school in Erie, Colorado. Sixty percent of the chemicals used in fracking can harm the brain and nervous system, the article reports, while forty percent are known endocrine disruptors, and thirty percent are developmental toxicants. Toxic water from the fracking process cools in open air pits. Once the water has evaporated, the remaining toxic soil and dust blow whichever way the wind does. A shudder ran down my spine as I read this article and peered at the haunting picture, remembering how we had considered moving to that precise part of Colorado five years ago. Would there also have been a fracking site adjacent to my daughter’s elementary school, had we moved there?
ecopsychology and Thneeds
Ecopsychologists assert that human illnesses result from damaged relationships with the greater whole and more-than-human worlds. The archetypal psychologist James Hillman explains that from an ecopsychological perspective, the health of the planet and the health of people are integrally intertwined; human psychological disturbances cannot be studied or healed apart from the planet. From an ecopsychological perspective, toxic tailing pools, radiation-tainted water escaping from nuclear plants, mountain tops blown up for mining, explosions at chemical factories, and all of the pervasive environmental disasters to which we have become so inured, reveal as much about our psychological state of being as a species, as they do about our inability to manage these disasters on a pragmatic level. Healing our psyches requires not only attention to our inner realm, but also to our environment. We cannot be fully healed until we realize that we are inextricably intertwined with everything around us and that to tend our selves, we must also tend the larger whole.
One of my favorite books to read to my daughter is Dr. Seuss’s, The Lorax. Providing a metaphor for our contemporary relationship with nature and the earth, The Lorax tells a story of a fantasy land with clean air and water; a green land covered in multi-colored truffula trees inhabited by fabulous animals. But the Once-ler begins to chop down truffala trees to start a business making Thneeds. The Lorax visits the Once-ler, telling him he speaks for the trees and imploring him to stop cutting down the trees and stop making Thneeds. But the Once-ler continues, and his zeal for profit grows, while the air becomes thick with smog and the waters brown and polluted. Crazy with greed and in a frenzy to increase profit, the Once-ler cuts down the very last of the truffala trees. At last, he is forced to shut down his business because there are no more truffala trees, and what is left of a land once beautiful, is ruin and desolation.
The Lorax and the animals leave that ruined land, but a pile of stones remain behind with the word “Unless” written at their base. The Lorax ends with the person hearing the story receiving the very last remaining seed of the truffala tree and the message that things won’t get better unless someone cares a whole lot. I read the Lorax to my daughter, with its terrible warning of “unless,” and I wonder if I am doing enough to help us avert this future; what is my unless?
Preserving public wilderness areas has always been a battle. From the very beginning of the movement to protect natural areas in this country, there was the same conflict we have today between those who seek to exploit, develop, and ruin such places, and those who wish to preserve them. John Muir’s language of the early 1900s in his struggle to prevent the damming of Hetch Hetchy Valley of Yosemite, could just as easily be employed in today’s conservation efforts: “That any one would try to destroy such a place seems incredible. . . The proponents of the dam scheme bring forward a lot of bad arguments to prove that the only righteous thing to do with the people’s parks is to destroy them bit by bit as they are able.” And “Nature’s sublime wonderlands . . .have always been subject to attack by despoiling gain-seekers and mischief-makers of every degree from Satan to Senators, eagerly trying to make everything immediately and selfishly commercial.” “These temple destroyers, devotees of ravaging commercialism, seem to have a perfect contempt for Nature, and, instead of lifting their eyes to the God of the mountains, lift them to the Almighty Dollar.” Over a hundred years later, we are still enmeshed in the same dynamic of conflict over the development of natural areas: protection and preservation versus exploitation and profit.
We are collectively at a point where we must decide if we want to preserve the remaining wilderness areas in this country or to mine them and extract any residual fossil fuel. I am able to function in my modern life only through periodic time spent away from the city in wilderness. [When I’m stuck in traffic and feel my life ticking away, I am sustained remembering paddling on those faraway rivers of the North or hiking through the forest along the Ohanapecosh River.] When I’m exhausted from modern life; when I’m drenched in the metal and electricity of that world and driving through a tunnel of neon-smeared flashing signs and fluorescent lights, billboards advertising endless wares and the never-ending drone of machines and human voices, I am sustained remembering paddling on those faraway rivers of the North or hiking through the forest along the Ohanapecosh River. I see through the tunnel of time bright sunlight pouring through the shallow water of my favorite river. Golden jewels float below in the coppery light: long arms of gilded-green plants sparkling and swaying in the current. Passage after passage of winding river offer a glistening palimpsest of constantly shifting green and ember-hued plants. I drift in my memory through a bright living kaleidoscope of golden-green forms ceaselessly reshaping and reforming themselves as they move with the current. Kaleidoscopes of color; of light; of water. I’m kept alive through river time.
For future generations to have these same experiences, we must insist on keeping mining, fracking and industrial and technological development out of natural areas. We must preserve what wilderness areas remain, not only from a practical perspective so those areas can perform their myriad roles in supporting healthy ecosystems—on which our lives depend—but also for our spiritual and psychological well being. Ours is the ravished and polluted world portrayed in The Lorax. May we collectively receive that last remaining seed and nourish it with clean air and clean water, becoming responsible stewards of the forest it spawns. May we protect these treasures, our last remaining wild areas, these sacred groves, so that future generations have a means to be healthy physically, spiritually, and psychologically. So people can commune with life beyond the human dimension and clear their psyches and minds. And in that state of openness and clarity that comes from quiet time in nature, receive wisdom, insight, illumination, divine messages and prophesies.
I am with Muir when he says : “Dam Hetch Hetchy! As well as dam for water-tanks the people’s cathedrals and churches, for no holier temple has ever been consecrated by the heart of man.” I want my daughter and her children and grandchildren to have untrammeled, pristine places in nature where they can find solace and regeneration and where they can recover the strength and clarity they will certainly need to cope with the world of the future, whatever it is.
Notes
The Obama Administration considering allowing fracking within National Forest Land, adjacent to National Parks and across millions of acres of public land from National Resources Defense Council alert email.
Conservative and Tea Party members of Congress repeatedly advocate selling off public lands and mining and drilling within and close to national parks and other public lands, from email from SierraRise, a division of the Sierra Club.
Three of the major presidential candidates in the 2012 election called for selling off public lands from SierraRise email. The three candidates were: Mitt Romney, Rick Santorum, and Ron Paul.
James Hillman, “A Psyche the Size of the Earth,” in Ecopsychology, Ed. Roszac, Gomes, and Kanner. San Francisco: The Sierra Club, 1995.P. xxi.
All John Muir quotes from “Hetch Hetchy Valley,” in American Earth. Ed. Bill McKibben. Washington D.C.: Library of America, 2008. Pps. 109-112.