Two questions:
How have we failed to make environmental issues a populist cause?
How do we galvanize the public will on behalf of the earth?
Terry Tempest Williams opened her talk last Friday night with these questions for her audience.
Speak the name Terry Tempest Williams in environmental or nature writing circles and immediately there is an "ah, yes" of recognition …and love. There is hardly a conference held concerning wilderness which does not invite her to speak. Little wonder, for Terry has a deep and abiding passion for little-traveled canyons and coyotes and birds and all the wild places in danger of losing their wildness. And she translates that passion into evocative and lyrical prose.
Her name is synonymous with writing from the heart for the land. Friday night, Terry was the guest speaker for the Center for the American West at the University of Colorado at Boulder. I experienced the quality of her passion for the land and its native inhabitants as she shared her thoughts with an audience of over five hundred people.
She asked the two questions of us, not because she had the answers, but because she wanted us to think about our answers to them.
A few years ago, Terry and her husband moved from Salt Lake City, Utah, to a small town in southeastern Utah. She described the first meeting they attended in her new home town as horrible: opposing factions with no interest in reaching common agreement. That was how it operated until a particular piece of open land was bought for housing development. Then, the people found a common bond in their love for their experience of that land as open space in their valley. Its protection was of greater importance than their heretofore enmity toward each other, and they have been able to develop this common ground in the community.
Place. Where you are. Where you have been. In Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place (1991, Vintage Books), Terry writes:
The [Bear River National Migratory] Bird Refuge has remained a constant. It is a landscape so familiar to me, there have been times I have felt a species long before I saw it…The birds and I share a natural history. It is a matter of rootedness, of living inside a place for so long that the mind and imagination fuse.
Refuge is the book which Terry wrote of her mother's and grandmother's dying from cancer. And her other grandmother and four aunts have also died from cancer, with two other aunts undergoing cancer treatment and still living when the book was published. Refuge is also the story of the rising level of the Great Salt Lake in Utah and its complete flooding of the Bear River Bird Refuge during the year of her mother's dying. The two stories are woven together as Terry describes the loss in each.
A year after her mother's death, she describes to her father a dream she has in which she sees a bright flash of light in the night over the desert, and he explains that she really did see it. In 1957 the family was driving from California to Utah, returning to live there, and felt and heard an explosion:
We pulled over and suddenly, rising from the desert floor, we saw it, clearly, this golden-stemmed cloud, the mushroom. The sky seemed to vibrate with an eerie pink glow. Within a few minutes, a light ash was raining on the car…It was at this moment that I realized the deceit I had been living under. Children growing up in the American Southwest, drinking milk from contaminated cows, even from the contaminated breasts of their mothers, my mother—members, years later, of the Clan of One-Breasted Women.
Utah was not a safe place to live in during the 50s and 60s. It is yet another story of government secrecy and cover-up in the name of national security, where people were not given the choice not to be "downwinders," but instead became the victims of an environmental catastrophe perpetuated by the federal government.
At the Friday night talk, Terry reminded us that the history of North America is one of massive destruction…of the land, of the water, of the soil, of the wildlife, and that we are, for the most part, in total denial of how badly the earth has been poisoned.
So, to repeat the questions, which are relevant around the world:
How have we failed to make environmental issues a populist cause?
How do we galvanize the public will on behalf of the earth?
In numerous polls taken of the American people, more often than not, concern for our natural environment and its good health ranks fairly high. So, why does that not get translated into full protection of our natural resources and prevention of toxic catastrophes?
The answer: Greed … and … narrow-mindedness … and … outright stupidity … and let us not forget our own demands for a life of ease and cheap food.
I expect that each reader knows of an ecological catastrophe within the boundaries of their sense of place. The question is: why do more continue to happen? Why haven't we enforced the idea of "first, do no harm" when it comes to the chemicals that are constantly spewing into the air and water and soil, intentionally and as by-products?
Orion Magazine's latest issue is entitled "Trashed." The editorial noted that the United States' election campaigns of the two major parties have been silent on the subject of the "issues that will determine the survival of nature and humanity" and then asks if we would be ready to "redesign our social, economic, and political institutions to conform to our beliefs" of desiring to live in ecological and environmental integrity and then "live with the drastic changes we know in our hearts will be required?"
This is a depressing topic, no doubt about it. In fact, I don't even want to continue, so I'm putting in several urls, and if you are interested in reading further, visit them:
Rachel's Environmental Pages : Particularly #704-707
Orion Magazine : Orion doesn't put its stories on-line, but please read about it.
Worldwatch Institute : An organization that has been monitoring the world's environmental health for at least a couple of decades
Donella Meadows' columns : Meadows co-authored Limits to Growth, Beyond The Limits: Confronting Global Collapse, Envisioning a Sustainable Future, and Global Citizen.(Sometimes this page is quirky and slow in coming up, so be patient, and try again. Her pieces are always interesting, particularly her May 4, 2000 on "Give Me Feedback" re her new gas/electric hybrid car.)
I have perhaps sidetracked from my desire to talk about the beauty of Terry Tempest William's writing, which was my original thought in starting this column. But I think I have gone in the direction that needed going in.
I have a comment that may offend a myriad of people: every year when the "Race for the [Breast Cancer] Cure" comes around, I feel like taking a sign and asking, where is the race for prevention of cancers? Where is the race for removing toxins from our environment? Where is the race to curtail the use of chemicals, particularly chlorine-based chemicals?
By the way, if you haven't read Silent Spring by Rachel Carson and Living Downstream by Sandra Steingraber, I encourage you to do so. Particularly after the knee-jerk response of aerial spraying of huge areas to kill mosquitoes that might have West Nile virus. And the latest report on rotenone, a supposedly benign to human pesticide, which has now been proven to be a cancer-causing agent. (I wrote about Living Downstream in the November 1997 Skyearth Letters column.)
Truly,
Cherie
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