to describe it.
Standing amid a swarm of mosquitoes, my flyfisher neighbor in Maine addresses the principle of interconnectedness even more simply: “You can’t have the fish without the bugs.”
Quarry, New Haven, Vermont. Photograph by Erik Borg.
FARMSTORIES [1994]
We left the farm when I was twelve. I don’t remember the details of departure. There must have been weeks of packing and a moving van. There was a huge barn sale, I am told, and good-byes to friends and neighbors. I don’t remember anything. I don’t remember what happened to the thirteen cats who lived in the outbuildings and supervised the field mice or who took or killed the last of the grumpy laying hens whose eggs I had so diligently gathered through the years. I don’t remember the day that Rosebud, our five-gaited mare was driven away in the horse trailer or whether I kissed my best friend Cindy good-bye and promised to write and be friends forever. I don’t remember emptying my bedroom closet of its pile of discarded dolls, seeming angry or sad about no longer being loved; whether Huffer Puffer, our very stupid but lovable cocker spaniel was returned to his original owners; or who took the trunks of grandmother’s white dresses and linens that my mother had so carefully saved to pass on to her girls.
I don’t remember anything about the move except arriving at our new house on Park Place and sleeping in the same familiar bed. I vaguely remember arriving; meeting Judy, my new best friend; taking Traveler, our collie, for his first walk on a leash to the park at the end of the street. But I don’t remember saying good-bye to the fields, to the luscious cherry tree, which gave us fruit for jam, or to the garden where my mother grew zinnias and I came to know the fecund smell of overripe tomatoes. There was no farewell to the pump house where we stored our tadpoles; the deep cistern that we were not to fall into; the giant elm tree where the cicadas left their shells; the willow tree, which was our dollhouse; the outdoor stone fireplace where I prepared flower-petal soup for of all my imaginary children. Or the long flat view, which showed the horizon, and the houses of all of our friends and neighbors; and the line of dust warning that a car ten miles off was coming our way. I don’t remember saying good-bye to any of this, and it is with me still.
Read aloud, or write and read your own story about home.
Attitudes
The failure to develop ecological literacy is a sin of omission and of commission. Not only are we failing to teach the basics about the earth and how it works, but we are in fact teaching a large amount of stuff that is simply wrong.
—David Orr, Ecological Literacy
Our attitudes inform our actions; the way we think affects what we do. One prominent view in Western culture is that nature is a “thing,” an object with utilitarian value to be bought and to be sold. With this consumerist focus, we may consider the empty field, the lake, or the mountaintop to be property, a storehouse of resources, or a challenging landscape to conquer or control.
Another view offers a radical alternative: that nature has intrinsic value in and of itself. We can experience the world around us as an organic living thing. It is not object but subject. It has interiority, subjectivity. It has something to teach us, and it inspires respect. When we have this attitude, the natural world can evoke awe and astonishment, stimulating connection to the sacred, integrative forces of life.
The same attitudinal values are prevalent about the body. One predominant view, perpetuated by our educational and medical habits, is that the body is an object, a machine to be repaired when it breaks down. It is our property to do with as we please. It is a resource to get us from here to there, a commodity to help us get what we want, a storehouse of resources, a challenge to control, to conquer or overcome.
Hayloft, painting by Philip Buller. Watercolor on paper, 22 in. × 33 in. Collection of J. Slovinsky.
VIEWS
Many students want to “gain control” over their bodies. I have to remind them that this is not our goal. The task is to learn to listen to the intelligence of our home. When we value what the body has to tell us, we create a dialogue with our senses. The same is true for the earth. The task is to develop a relationship with the details and cycles of life around us. In this way, we are participants in a larger story. Control limits possibilities; dialogue invites surprise.
A young psychology major wrote of her childhood close to forests and rivers and her years of caretaking the land. Then she said, “You know, I treat the environment much better than I treat myself.” An athlete remarked, “This is a new experience for me; I’ve been abusing my body all of my life.” A student from Manhattan said, “I realize that I am most comfortable in rural Middlebury when I am near the highway. I need to hear traffic to fall asleep.” As we listen to our bodies, we hear the stories of our lives.
The only time my life has been threatened was when living at a wildlife sanctuary. In that protective environment, our bluebird boxes were regularly smashed, and my husband was chased by men with baseball bats because of our assumed role in restricting land use. One young man in particular considered any “environmentalist” fair game for harassment. On my afternoon walk in the neighboring countryside, he would drive his pickup truck as close as he could, making me jump off the road. After a few weeks of intimidation, I decided to stand my ground. As he sped in my direction, I stood in the middle of the road, waving both arms for him to stop so that we could talk face to face. I leapt to the side just as he rushed past. I could have died. Being considered a spokesperson for the earth puts your life on the line; not speaking up threatens life as well.
Our neighbor tells of visiting a professor of ornithology for help in identifying a bird. The teacher responded, “Wouldn’t you also like to know something about how it lives its life?” A bell went off in his mind: there is more to identification than naming. It’s the matrix of relationships with the world that gives us insight into another species, not just its label.
The radical alternative in body attitude would be that the body has intrinsic value in itself. It has interiority, subjectivity. It has much to teach us if we learn to listen. We can consider that we are part of a vast interconnected system, rather than separate from the world around us. We are nature too.
As we recognize our interconnectedness with the rest of the earth, we begin to see the world from a relational perspective, supported by our context rather than in isolation or at odds with it. We experience the air, the water, the soil, the animals, the people around us, and our own bodies as familiar. In this view, both body and earth are home.
Underlying the environmental crisis is a crisis of attitude. We are coming to the end of our nonrenewable resources, such as fossil fuels. We are also coming to the end of renewable ones, such as clean water, clean air, and healthy soil. This is true of the body as well. We can no longer count on resiliency in our structure: our bodies are too busy recovering, attempting to filter internal as well as external toxins. Yet we can consciously cleanse our systems and balance our energy, just as we can protect the resources around us. Our attitudes toward our bodies have everything to do with the health of the earth.
As we open our senses and attend to the earth, we encounter grief. Emotional memory is encoded since childhood, associated with specific terrain: the beach explored on family vacations, the tree
