A Walk in the Park 11-6-03

One day, I was walking through the park,

when I realized that I didn't know what my place in nature was. Was this park connecting me with nature?

Was I natural?

Was only the wilderness natural? What is wilderness, anyway? It seemed like an important problem, an urgent one, because of how we are destroying the environment.

It seemed like, if we were connected to nature, we would be in harmony with it. But what does harmony mean to "nature"? Doesn't thinking that we are out of harmony with, or separate from nature imply that we are supernatural?

What if it is our nature to build malls and microchips, just like bees build honeycombs, ants build hills. No, we are definitely a part of nature, within it, we ARE natural beings, not divine (maybe we're aliens... maybe our methods of survival are perfect for some other environment on some distant planet, but a few humans were smuggled aboard some intergalactic yacht, some of us escaped, and spread like invader frogs or scotch broom!) not fallen from eden. Well, not exactly. What is the use of the word "nature," then, if it is all encompassing? Is it just mumbo jumbo? Advertising for the Nature Store? Sentimentality? Do the ideas of pure and separate-from-us nature and wilderness make the problem worse by putting it "out there," and making it into a pristine, inhuman thing? And if nature is everything, and we are natural, then what's wrong with what we're doing? Maybe we're just, naturally, part of the earth's cycle of creation and destruction. We're the destruction part. Clever planet. No, those are still magical solutions: things we can't know; things that make us seem more important than we are. Really, we're just a bunch of monkeys waist deep in our own shit.

So I kept walking through the park, right through the meeting of the Cronon gang, and met this groovy art-chick, Lucy Lippard. She was saying something about sense of place, community, and art. I just heard a chunk of what she was getting at, but she had some good points. One was this idea of multicenteredness. Multicenteredness is another way of looking at multiculturalism, social freedoms, and the diversity of our nation. All good things, but there are some dangers. Not only are we extrememely diverse, mobile, and "free to be," but our culture tends to emphasize these things over any real, vital, lasting connection to physical place or local history. Place is instead just a particular arrangement of malls and highways; and history is just a broad sweep of wars, presidents, and a big old story about America, land of the free. If we don't have a sense of physical place, how could we possibly connect our lives to the "natural" world around us? How can we know how to create sustainable ways of life if we can't even sustain a community? Art has something to do with it, but Lucy didn't get to that part yet.

Luckily, I met someone next who I'd say definitely has a sense of place and makes the most of it: Bob Pyle. He was way into the Willapa area and knew its history as well as its present, and he was definitely invested in its future. He knew the people who lived there, he knew the plants and animals, he knew the industry, the laws, and knew the place as poetry. Particularly, he was all about figuring out the forests. Logging practices were out of control and lacked foresight. It's not that cutting trees is bad, and loggers themselves aren't the problem. Instead, it's the shady practices at the top of the corporations and a general misunderstanding of the environment that leads to destruction and mismanagement. Somehow the values of the people buying the wood products, living in the lumber producing areas, cutting the trees, owning the land, giving the orders, and making the money were all different, and they don't work together. Preservation is possible; conservation is possible; but there's something bigger than our periodic successes that makes the problems persist. Maybe it's that jerk sasquatch.

Meanwhile, there's this whole series of signs along the path that say "Environmental History: This Way!" Apparently, Environmental History is this crazy new synthetic discipline that combines all kinds of scientific, ecological knowledge with human history. Basically, human history has gone on as if we were living in a vacuum, a process that Environmental Historians say provides us with less than half the picture of how things really happen. The basic insight is that humans effect & change the environment and the environment effects and changes humans. Though it didn't have a name until the late 20th century, the seeds of environmental history were planted in colonial America. In essays, literature, poetry and eventually in the sciences, philosophy, and sociology, thinkers eventually began to converge on environmental problems and meditate on "our place in nature." The crux was Earth Day. Or maybe it was the moon shot. Or maybe the crux was really Copernicus. The Cronon gang was definitely engaged in this new discipline, but they aren't just doing it; they are also talking a lot about how to do it, why do it, and what it is. That's typical of a new discipline; it's going through a kind of puberty: it's all awkward and nervous and self-conscious and everyone's trying to get a piece of you, man.

One of the exemplars of this new way of doing history is from our own backyard: Richard White, and he's all about local history in depth and the concept of work (and energy) as a way of organizing and describing interactions between humans and their environment. His view of the Columbia River as an "organic machine" is way cool and retains an interesting balance of the forces of history: even though I find a lot of horror in the story of the Columbia, it's hard to say, "this is wrong, this is right." To come down on these issues, to act responsibly int he future, White says we have to "come to terms" with the history of the Columbia as an Organic Machine. We can't simply find a bad guy adn go after him. We've got to understand the very complex network of needs, interests, and systems that affect the region and determine our relationship to the land. Joseph Taylor's seyance on Salmon is a prime example of digging deeper into history to better understand something that's happening today. Talk about "coming to terms"! He takes one word, "overfishing," and tries to figure out what's really going on when the salmon runs change. Apparently, he's one of the guys putting up the Environmental History signs, cause just then I caught up to a whole group of them, calling themselves the Historians of the Round Table. They were all arguing but they were trying to be nice. One of them kept flicking his zippo open and shut. Cronon was there, but his cronies weren't around.

to be continued...