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GREEN PARADISE LOST |
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13. Moving with the Natural Grain of Life Now I must begin again. I must begin with a new woman, with the one who goes to the Nursing Home. It is evening and I have the lonesome feeling that I am far from home, but I do not know where home is. • • • Here there is no support. There is nothing I can do but survive. The time is at the turning. Evening is turning into night. The arc of the sky is filled with great bands of sunset. Birds are flying high. It is a lonely time for me. I feel lost and faraway from home. But where is home? I have never found it. • • • So after the supper had been cleared away, I stepped out into the night. My night. It was black night and the stars were my stars, I was alone with them. It was so still, the only sound was the tide coming, coming in, coming in. It was a pulse. It was there, it never stopped. It said be still and know that I am here. The timing of the pulse was the timing of my pulse. So I am the child of the tide. [1] Living Lightly on the Earth A child of the tide will be sensitive to the pulse of natural cycles and to the flow or lay of the land. We have few examples of this in our present way of operating. But what this would mean for our living with the sea and dunes and sandbars and shallow bay of the New Jersey Shore is described by the landscape architect Ian McHarg in Design with Nature. ... The sand dune is a very recent formation [geologically]. It will change its configuration in response to autumn hurricanes and winter storms and will sometimes be breached.... The New Jersey Shore ... is continuously involved in a contest with the sea; its shape is dynamic. [2] McHarg points out that the relative stability of the dunes and the string of coastal islands they form is dependent for that stability upon vegetation -- reeds, sea grasses, certain shrubs and trees -- which anchor the sand against the actions of waves and wind. He then goes on to analyze from an ecologist's viewpoint what each of the several rows of dunes formed by the action of waves and wind provides for the shoreline's stability, what their tolerances and vulnerabilities are, and precisely how humans must design their human activities to fit within such natural tolerances -- or upset that stability of the dunes. We now have the broad outlines of an ecological analysis and a planning prescription based upon this understanding. A spinal road could constitute a barrier dune and be located in the backdune area. It could contain all utilities, water, sewer, telephone and electricity and would be the guardian defense against backflooding. At the widest points of the backdune, settlement could be located in communities. Development would be excluded from the vulnerable, narrow sections of the sandbar. The bayshore [facing the mainland] would, in principle, be left inviolate. The beach [facing the ocean] would be available for the most intensive recreational use, but without building. Approaches to it would be by bridges [inland from the ocean beach] across the dunes, which would be prohibited to use. Limited development would be permitted in the trough, determined by groundwater withdrawals and the effect upon vegetation. [3] McHarg points to Holland, which in order to reclaim land below sea level does adapt its human settlements to the shapes and needs of its shoreline. The dune grass, hero of Holland, is an astonishingly hardy plant, thriving in the most inhospitable of environments. Alas, it is incapable of surmounting the final crucial test of man. In the Netherlands, the vulnerability of dune grasses to trampling is so well understood, that dunes are denied to public access; only licensed naturalists are permitted to walk on them.... If you would have dunes protect you, and the dunes are stabilized by grasses, and these cannot tolerate man, then survival and the public interest is well served by protecting the grasses. But in New Jersey they are totally unprotected. Indeed nowhere along our entire eastern seaboard are they even recognized as valuable! [4] In everything -- from farming to building human settlements -- human activity must conform itself, McHarg says, to the "lay of the land" and its natural cycles and processes. For ultimately human productivity can only be sustained over time by a partnership with natural productivity. The farmer is the prototype. He prospers only insofar as he understands the land and by his management maintains its bounty. So too with the man who builds. If he is perceptive to the processes of nature, to materials and to forms, his creations will be appropriate to the place; they will satisfy the needs of social process and shelter, be expressive and endure. As indeed they have, in the hill towns of Italy, the island architecture of Greece, the medieval communities of France and the Low Countries and, not least, the villages of England and New England. [5] When the child of the tide can claim the natural processes as part of herself, himself, we will be sensitive out of kinship and caring, not out of "responsibility" and "duty." We will be like sailors and those who design their boats and their sails, attentive to how the wind blows, how the waves move, and how the tides run, in order to know how best to sail with the boat, with the sails, and with the elements. As a Hand Slips into a Glove "Ecological reconnaissance" has been suggested as a practical way to make sure human developments fit appropriately within natural systems. Dr. Beatrice Willard, who made the suggestion, has had extensive experience as a field ecologist, in addition to serving in the Executive Office of the President on the prestigious three-member Council on Environmental Quality. She writes: I spent a day of ecological reconnaissance of the alpine tundra with the design engineer, locating for him within the route of a proposed high-tension line both the transient, unstable life-systems and the permanent, mature ones. By doing this the engineer was able to locate transmission-line towers so as to avoid the mature stands, some of which are several thousand years old, judging from the depth of soil accumulated. Without this knowledge, the engineer would have eradicated thousands of years of tundra development with a few hours work, for he had proposed a tower for the center of one of these old stands. So it is with all development.... With prior ecological investigation, design and development can be planned so as to maintain game migration routes, fisheries, winter grazing grounds, grass beds, striped bass spawning areas, zones of seismic activity, mature old stands of vegetation, marshes, woods, prairies, and other habitats for rare plants and animals.... [All this] can be done best and cheapest when a comprehensive plan is developed in the earliest stages. It is much more difficult, for example, to accomplish habitat rebuilding or restoration of a species' population after construction on the project has begun. But it may be relatively simple to work around a segment of habitat which should be saved.... Actions can harmonize with ecosystems, as a skilled hand slips adroitly, gently, smoothly into a glove, with little or no disruption of either the hand or the glove. [6] In the past, however, we have been too preoccupied with our anthropocentric pretensions to bother even to observe the way the natural systems worked. Although a few specialists may have studied these things, we have arranged our major and minor human systems across the grain of the way nature works. Our use of water to flush away human wastes is a classic example. Even a casual look at organic matter decaying to enrich the soil would have shown us that organic wastes should be returned to the earth to decay and enrich it. Yet we are now stuck with stupid arrangements and massive capital investments in flushing our toilets into sewers, rivers and oceans -- and still further great investments in vast sewage treatment facilities to clean water which shouldn't have been dirtied in the first place. Meanwhile, back on the farm and in our gardens the soil is stripped of nutrients which never come back as wastes, and we restore the soil with chemical fertilizers made from precious (and also depleting) natural gas. This availability of artificial fertilizers has led farmers to using more than the crops can absorb; the cash crops never lack for fertilizer and grow like crazy, but the excess is washed -- you guessed it -- into rivers and lakes by rains, threatening our waters with a new hazard, "eutrophication" or so many nutrients that water grasses (like the cash crops) grow like crazy and clog our waterways, ponds and lakes. [7] It is all very senseless and unperceptive of the natural grain of life. It tells us a great deal about the arrogant rationality of the human animal, that we created such arbitrary human systems without any attempt to fit them into the vast natural systems -- of which we are a part, even though we thought we were above. The truth is that whether it is a sewerage system or an industrial production line, men have created arbitrary and linear systems in vast conceptual disregard of the fact that the world is based upon circular flows and functions in vast systems of recycling. The straight lines and single-mindedness of linear systems do not fit into such circles; they disrupt them. Nature Magnifies Well-Designed Systems Our task as architects of the future is to redesign and restructure our linear human systems until they are congruent with natural systems, until they do recycle. Beyond this we might even be clever enough, as Howard T. Odum suggests, to design human systems so well that we help natural systems work for us, thus magnifying our efforts. [8] Let me illustrate this. I was in church one Sunday morning when the sun poured thorough a stained glass window in such a way that the whole window shimmered and danced with colors which had come alive in the power of the sun. The other stained glass windows in the church were dark and almost black. I suddenly realized that the stained glass windows were designed so that without the natural power of the sun they were nothing. But when the sun came through at just the right angle and time of day and year, the sun joined with that colored glass to do what no colored glass could do on its own. We must do this too. We must be humble enough and kindred enough with natural systems of which we are a part to design our human systems so responsively, so sensitively, that we do with nature what we cannot do alone -- shine, shimmer and dance in a healthy symbiosis of those who together enjoy the goodness of creation. John Todd and the New Alchemy Institute in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, have developed a number of such ways natural and human systems can work together. The waste of one part becomes food for another, and it all takes place in a naturally powered, symbiotically integrated and cascading and multiplying way. [9] John Todd describes how he first learned to do this: It occurred to me that here I'd been in university since 1957, thirteen or fourteen years in academia -- and many of these students had been in almost as long as I had -- and we simply weren't trained in sensitive stewardship. We didn't know anything. Science hadn't trained us to be able to answer the most fundamental questions: How do you make that piece of earth sing, and how do you make it support those that live there? Degrees in agriculture, disease ethology, ecology ... nothing! So I decided we had to figure a way. I decided each student is going to study one component of this place. You're gonna do rocks, you're gonna do earthworms, you're gonna do grasses, you're gonna do herbs, you're gonna do snails, you're gonna do wind, you're gonna do sun, you're gonna do ferns . . . fourteen components. And there's two things you're gonna do before you pass this course: one is to find out what's here and in what abundance, and the second is you're gonna teach somebody else what you've learned. Several months later ... people were camping out, living in trees, stuff like that ... and they grumbled like hell! Studying earthworms was not their idea of graduate school. But then they started to teach one another, and all of a sudden, like the scales falling from our eyes, a piece of land came alive. One of the students found a plant that only grows where there's water! So we dug down and found water! And it happened in a place where we could build a series of little dams like steps down the valley, and with the sun there, all of a sudden we had a driving wheel for the whole system. Another student found miner's lettuce, which meant we had a sort of balanced soil association, and the guy with the worms was able to collaborate. All of a sudden we had gardens, and the wind guy figured out a source of energy. And all of a sudden we were talking for the first time like we knew what we were talking about, even though we had just barely got the doors open! And here was this piece of land which was no longer an inhospitable enemy. Everywhere we were finding allies. Without knowing what was there, we never would have gotten the door open far enough to see what was inside. It was very heavy for me. There has never been any doubt for me since that time that the way to go is to be whole. Know the sun, know the plants, know the soil, know the people, know the shelter ... have them all interlaced, begin from there. [10] The person who interviewed John Todd sums up the New Alchemy experience: The essential requisite for the success of New Alchemy -- and everyone here seems to sense it -- is not money (though of course money is needed, or they will go under). It is this sense of a balanced interdependence with each other and with nature and an understanding of the delicacy of that balance. It is what John Todd calls the concept of interconnected webs. What New Alchemy provides is more than just hardware, more than just a solar-heated, wind-powered greenhouse/aquaculture complex that is inexpensive to construct, operates almost anywhere, and produces no-cost food -- in itself a unique and important gift to the world -- but a tangible way to use the environment constructively instead of destructively, a way to live in harmony with our own ecosystem, a way to use the sun and the wind and the elements to produce nourishing food. And that is alchemy. [11] Fitting human life within natural cycles is not only for future new human settlements but it appears also to be the way to wiggle past critical environmental problems created by past patterns of human settlement or by natural fluctuations in climate and precipitation. Erik Eckholm and Lester Brown write in Spreading Deserts: The Hand of Man how -- In the desert, as elsewhere, planners have much to learn from the plants, animals, and cultures that have withstood centuries of extraordinarily adverse environmental conditions. If the ecological balance historically maintained by most nomadic groups was rather wretched, predicated as it was on high human death rates, these people used the life-defying desert remarkably resourcefully. In popular mythology, nomads are often pictured as aimless wanderers. But in fact, nomadic movements nearly always harmonize with the seasonal rhythm of climate and plant life. They are geared to permit animals to find adequate forage throughout the year and to permit the regrowth of grazing lands. A return to an earlier historical age is no more desirable than likely.... Rudimentary modern medicine has trickled into the arid zones well ahead of advanced agricultural technology, helping push down death rates. Moreover, national boundaries now divide natural ecological zones artificially and restrict the traditional movements of nomadic groups, while the spread of sedentary agriculture further limits migrations.... Although many traditional nomadic practices are no longer viable, adopting some modernized version of the nomadic way of life may be the only way that those in the arid desert fringes can safely exploit these areas' protein-producing potential. Regional management schemes, in which clan leaders regulate grazing and migratory movements according to natural conditions and the advice of range specialists, represent one possibility. [12] When the Earth Is Mythed as Female As I write this, I am not at all sure male culture can muster the sensitivities necessary to do this fitting in. Let me tell you a curious story. Recently my husband and I were in Iceland for an international conference on the future of the global environment. A highlight of the bus tour of the capital city of Reykjavik was a visit to the studio of their eminent local sculptor Asmundur Sveinsson (whose sculpture of "Mother Earth" I described earlier). He has another statue "Music of the Sea," which is a woman's body, sitting down, wide open and exposed in the pelvis, with one leg back and one forward. She is leaning back, her head flung back, with one arm forward and out, and the other arm back. But she is laced with ropes that cut into her knees and breasts and are strung like a musical instrument to each of her hands. I as a woman winced in pain as I looked at that statue; I could feel the vagina exposed and the breasts hurting where the ropes laced through them. When Matthias Johannessen was writing a book about Sveinsson, he asked the sculptor about this statue. "But it's a female figure," the sculptor replied, "I made her breasts like a boat. And her feet grow out of the wave which again turns into a thigh. It's all waves. And the hand is holding the strings. The music of the sea." [13] You can see here, quite unself-conscious in Asmundur Sveinsson, the deep equation of the woman and nature, the symbolization of this in the body of the woman, and the total lack of sensitivity to what is done to the body of the woman. So long as men, consciously or unconsciously symbolized natural processes as female -- and "female" means to them controlled and subordinated -- then our fitting into nature will be delayed and distorted by the male need to control and subordinate. Fascinated with the sculptor's lack of sensitivity to what was being done to the body of the woman in "Music of the Sea," I began using a postcard photograph of the statue as a litmus test or Rorschach test with some of our most perceptive male friends and colleagues. I made a startling discovery. Men do not identify with the body of that woman! Men do not sense her vaginal vulnerability in the pose of that statue, and (even more curious!) they do not feel the pain of those ropes laced into her breasts and knees. I found this surprising. And chilling for the future of the earth. Eugene Bianchi's words come to mind about what happens between a woman and a man when he rapes her: "As a subhuman, her terror and pain call forth no empathy." [14] This is for me the predicament of the earth today. The male culture which is raping her does not identify (perhaps cannot identify) with the body of the earth which he myths as feminine. And because he cannot identify with it, he cannot seem to feel the mute pain. Entering into Responsive Dialogue Women are trained by their usual life-experience to be adept at non-verbal communication. The circumstances of their mothering force them to spend years responding to the needs of children, who even after they can speak often cannot identify what it is they need. As Tolstoy wrote somewhere, "The need is cry enough!" Have men ever such training in their life experiences? Can they understand the mute cry which has no words when nonetheless it speaks? Jean Hersey in The Shape of a Year gives us in passing a number of examples of listening to non-verbal communications. She writes about the humans' need for water as well as that of plants during a drought: It's all very well as a gardener to relate closely to nature and nature's ways, but it also has a slight drawback. When rain is needed I feel sort of parched, too. Of course, on the other hand, when rain does come, we gardeners have a tremendous sense of joy and relief, and can almost feel the earth absorbing water and roots replenishing themselves. • • • What the little wren has to tell when he perches on top of a garden post in the bright sunlight is beyond words. In some way he communicates his mood of joy and ecstasy and we quicken in response to fresh green everywhere, to a warming sun, and to merely being alive at the moment and listening to a small wren. • • • When you speed along in the car what do you know of the melody of a brook? Wind in meadow grass? The humming of bees in the clover? The subtle differences of bird songs, the crackle of someone's brush fire? As you walk each of your five senses seems to sharpen. There are the smells of the countryside which you never notice behind car windows, the fragrance of wild honeysuckle and the drifting scent of pear blossoms over someone's hedge. • • • You learn a lot about people when you take them walking in the woods.... Sometimes we start out speaking of everyday affairs, and after a few minutes the pauses in the conversation grow longer. The wood itself begins to speak and we fall silent. The sounds of a stream, of the wind in the tree-tops, the whir of a startled woodcock flying off, all seem more important than what we might say. [15] To those who can so listen, so feel, so respond, living becomes a responsive dialogue. The child of the tide flow with the current of life just as the wind, flowing through my wind chime, produces the beauty of sound. May Sarton writes of this same responsive dialogue with the current of life in her existence as a person and poet: I am more aware now than I was during his life of how much Quig's friendship, his very existence even apart from our own relationship, did to help me forge out the position of these last years about my work. It is good for a professional to be reminded that his professionalism is only a husk, that the real person must remain an amateur, a lover of the work. Whatever we do well is done spontaneously for its own sake, in just the way Quig suddenly decided that he had to get up to the schoolhouse room and paint, or, equally spontaneously, had to make muffins! I am, I think, more of a poet than I was before I knew him, if to be a poet means allowing life to flow through one rather than forcing it to a mold the will has shaped; if it means learning to let the day shape the work, not the work, the day, and so live toward essence as naturally as a bird or a flower. [16] (Emphasis added.)
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