The Man Who Created Paradise. Gene Logsdon

      The Ohio Art Council helped fund publication of this book with state tax dollars to encourage economic growth, educational excellence, and cultural enrichment for all Ohioans.

       For

       Wallace Aiken & John Gallman

       Foreword

      Maybe we continue to need to think of Paradise, and of making Paradise, because the earth as it was given to us (as we realize from time to time) was so nearly paradisal, and we are so talented at making a Hell of it.

      Surely strip mining is the definitive sin of the industrial age. At least it is (so far) our most direct and deliberate act of Hell-making. We come to the coal-bearing slopes, rich on the surface with fertile soils and with forests. We find those soils and that forest—and all else we mean by “place”—to be in the way between us and what we want, i.e. coal, i.e. money. We therefore employ technologies more violent that earthquakes and avalanches to remove what is in the way, no matter that we destroy a greater wealth than we gain, and ruin a renewable resource for the sake of an exhaustible one. And then we foster and raise up the worst Hell of all: a mind almost inconceivably narrow, which can justify this Hell-making as a necessity, a feat of economic progress, and a human good.

      On the contrary, surely there is something wondrous and redemptive about a mind that can confront this definitive work of Hell of Earth Enterprises, Inc., and imagine the opposite story: How a member of the same species, out of his own horror at what has been done and his merely personal refusal to accept Hell as an acceptable human product, might employ the technology of destruction to begin the restoration of what has been destroyed; and how this singular effort might inspire the efforts of others to do the same thing; and how finally a whole community of people might ally themselves with the inherent goodwill of any place to heal itself and become the Paradise it once was.

      This, then is a book of two visions: one of disease, one of health. Or to put it another way, Gene Logsdon has had the generosity and the courage to allow a vision of Hell to call forth in himself its natural opposite. But can we properly dignify the story of Wally Spero by the term “vision,” or is it merely a reactionary fantasy? In my opinion, if you think this is merely a fantasy, you had better be careful. If you can look at the landscapes produced by strip mining without reacting toward some vision of the land restored, then you not only are looking at one of the versions of Hell; you are in it.

      But can somebody really or “realistically” hope to accomplish what is accomplished in this story? Well, so far as I know, we don’t yet have an example of a whole new community sprouting from the spoil banks of a strip mine. But it is possible for one inspired man and an old bulldozer to make a creditable beginning, as Gene Logsdon knows, because he has seen it, as I have myself.

       Wendell Berry

      The Man Who Created Paradise