The Trumpeter - Journal of Ecosophy (Athabasca University)

Wittbecker, Alan

Varieties of Interactions in Nature

Sweeney, Sandra

The Trumpeter (1998) 
ISSN: 0832 6193 
Village Contemplations 
Sandra Sweeney  
Introduction 
It is the fifth day of my journey. I am in Bukovina, northern Romania, squatting on a 
crumbling concrete milestone along a road with no name, shaking my ballpoint 
thermometer style, eking out the last of the ink, memorizing my own words for later 
transcription. Through a cloud of dust, the wake of a speeding Mercedes, I look back the 
way I have come and think about the villages. 
The Villages 
In the villages the houses are beautifully cut from wood taken from surrounding forests. 
Shingles and shakes, branches and boughs, a universal complexity of interlocking 
geometric designs. No window is without flowers, great clusters of blossoms shining 
forth, neighbours to those nodding gaily in the sunlight unaware of their separation by 
panes of glass. 
Little clusters of houses direct the eye to distinctive patches of field, in turn, lined with 
wooden fences, posts attached in twos, jogging comfortably along the land's natural 
contour, and rising above the wooden hemline the forest's greens, vertical stretches of 
light and dark drawing the eye higher and higher until all is lost in a wash of faded blue. 
Everywhere there is the finely crafted movement of line. The contrast comes at the edge; 
be it forest, field or yard. The singsong trickle of water flows in tiny creeks, burbling 
brooks and washes delicately against the banks of the Moldova as it flows beneath the 
bridge in Voronets. 
At the river's edge cows bend their knees deeply and slip freely into the cool waters to 
emerge dripping and refreshed on the opposite bank. In slow step the shepherds walk 
amongst their charges. They have all day to let their thoughts flower in their minds, to 
take on a breadth and longevity that seems unthinkable in the city. 
The cows pick their way through the forest trail and suddenly disappear from sight across 
the way, the only evidence of their having passed the tolling of their bells. I am reminded 
of my grandmother telling me that every time I heard a bell peal an angel was present. I 
thought that those cows must somehow be angels and wondered who would believe me. 
Golden haystacks in the fields take on the wild and massive shapes of mastodons whose 
long spindly elephant hair flickers in the sunlight and ripples in the breeze. I can hear in 
the wind the rush of grass rising from their coats and then brushing smoothly back. 
The bellowing of cattle, the whinnying of horses, the bleating of lambs. Everywhere there 
is the sound of life growing in the sunlight and yearning toward self expression, finding it 
in the music of voice. 
The clip-clop of horses' hooves drums against the moist earth. Wood beats against wood 
in clear calm rhythms, a kind of hollow translucent sound diffused into and absorbed by 
the soft vegetation: come to mass. come to meal. come to worship. come. 
There is reciprocity here, in the woman who unbidden, hands me delicious juicy apples, 
round orbs of fat fruit passed over the fence from her orchard, wrinkles tilled into her 
leathery warm hands, rich and aged against my own. There is a mutuality shared between 
the draught animals and the farmers, in the curled french stitch of buttercup blossoms 
embroidered onto the neck collars of the cows, the flash of red tassel swinging alongside 
the horses' ears, the brightly cross-stitched flowers and trees that surround are 
miniaturized and worn by those within, creating worlds within worlds. 
Slivers, shives and shavings. The ring of the blacksmith's hammer. 
The quiet village landscape ushers me back to a time that seems to have taken place not 
so long ago, yet in comparison to the industrial world is far flung and the scene before me 
arises as if from some distant past. It is here in such agricultural communities that I 
suppose social processes and ecosystem processes exist in a truer tenure, the 
philosophical connotations of the landscape integrated through right and responsibility 
creating that tenure of harmony for which the industrial world quests. 
The integrative element is the landscape and the people's life on the land; hence the 
German word for peasant is land bauer, the French, paysan, man of the earth, man of the 
land. Here the whole human meets the whole environment in a subjectivity-objectivity in 
which utility aspires to beauty. Erazim Kohak, a Czech philosopher, believes that things 
decorated with life's images and made beautiful bring the eternal into time. Perhaps, that 
is why the villages offer us, the travellers, the impression of timelessness. 
Here is a nature that houses the boundless and a culture that responds with appreciation, 
the inspiration of the ordinary. Yet, according to landscape ecologists the culture-nature 
discourse is dialectic: to reattach the two ends of a continuum, to reorganize and attempt 
to resolve both the content and context of our endeavours. 
Having said that, the dualisms that we can see in our own construct of landscape also 
carry the stigma of superiority wherein human culture dominates nature, humans 
dominate animals, self dominates other, and where a narrowly defined process of 
reasoning not only dominates emotion, but all other ways of perceiving. Nature is either 
the enemy or something to be protected. In both cases it is viewed as Other divorced from 
human cognition and society. 
Our Western desire to forge firm boundaries between wilderness and civilization, a 
perfect God and an imperfect nature, areas slated for resource extraction and protected 
areas, engenders a way of mentally constructing landscape that prohibits relativism. By 
that I mean we are unable or at the very least unwilling to move freely from one system 
of thought to another, so that wilderness and civilization must exist separate from one 
another, that God is a civilizing force and, therefore, an idea that cannot dwell implicitly 
in nature, and that protected areas become witches' gardens in a much larger exploited 
landscape. 
I wonder if our own cultural landscape with its twin desire for control through active 
"rational" management isn't one of the ways in which we have formally attempted to 
direct the evolving image of the noble savage that simultaneously allows us to legitimize 
our adoption of a cryogenic view of the Other, be they Aboriginal hunter-gatherers or, as 
in this case, peasant farmers. This self-selecting determination of boundaries forces 
peasants into an either or position in which they are either "civilized" and "modernized" 
according to our view of civilization and progress, or are relegated to backwoods pockets 
of poverty and in this way are disallowed full and active participation in our decision-
making processes. 
Mightn't we prepare our own mental construction of a cultural/environmental landscape 
to accept the peasant view of cultural landscape as a stage upon which life continues to 
unfold both in an evolutionary, adaptive, physical process and, perhaps more importantly, 
as one in which a human oriented value system dwells a priori and cannot be considered 
out of place? 
There is no mistaking the sense of pride and dignity these people hold about themselves 
like a sacred robe. Unlike us, the people in the villages appear to be participants in the 
landscape, shareholders in its health, settled in its complexity, and therefore I think 
displaying a sense of the simple that derives from their comfort in their surroundings. 
Life appears full as it is, without the trappings of the externally constructed fantasy or 
fiction on which we have embarked, hoping to be rejuvenated, filled with experiences, 
and carrying a new lease on our own lives upon return. Saddened, I realize that the people 
we meet don't appear to have to travel anywhere to find their sense of belonging. 
Leaving another village I mourn the sense of the remote. Flip-flop. Remote sensing. 
Whirling like a satellite through distant regions, mapping things with the mind's eye, 
noting impressions, photographing things and people, through my own special lenses 
recreating the villages as a western environmentalist paradise. Leaving behind the urban 
world and wandering through the villages is like coming out of some horrible dystopia in 
which pollution and toxic death rule only to enter a completely different world, one in 
which literally taking a breath of fresh air amidst the poplar and linden lined roads is a 
joyous discovery. Listening to the polyharmonious bees dancing among the apple trees 
that have been planted everywhere throughout the countryside who could help but be 
drawn to the peace and quiet? 
I think of the opening verses to the poem High Flight: 
O, I have slipped the surly bonds of earth/ And danced the skies on 
laughter - silvered wings/ Of sun - split clouds-and done a hundred things. 
Such a wonderful sense of freedom envelops me. Yet I can't help wondering if this isn't 
the tantalizing lure of solace Hooks refers to: her continuum of primitivism. The burden 
of the machine stamped so indelibly on one's psyche, the metronomic grind of isolation, 
the unconscious forfeiture of genuine harmony lamented in the controlled panic of 
periodic get-aways, the perilous celebration of escape and the hazard of re-entry. 
Certainly one travels to gain experience, but from what type of experience does one flee? 
The anguish of searching for oneself as an authentic cultural subject? Starving for life-
sustaining alternatives one consumes the image of the Other, in this case our own 
historical selves. 
Oh, I do hope I remember everything. 
References 
Hooks, Bell. 1992. Black Looks: Race and Representation. Boston, MA: South End 
Press, p. 25. 
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Village Contemplations

Trocco, Frank

The Trumpeter (1998) 
ISSN: 0832 6193 
The Architecture of Community: A Makah 
Longhouse 
Frank Trocco  
In the late '80s, I worked with environmental education students in a field studies 
program. We were in southern California studying ecology and cultural history, and many 
of us were interested in the historical and contemporary relationship between indigenous 
peoples and Euro-Americans, especially the interaction between Natives and Christian 
missionaries. At a seminar, one of the students held up a contemporary map of southern 
California and we all marvelled at the many tiny Native reservations that dotted the 
desert. What had been the relationship of these diverse cultures with the European 
immigrants? 
We called a mission asking if we could talk to a missionary about his or her work with 
Native Americans, and a time was arranged for our visit later in the week. I remember the 
scene quite distinctly. We were shown into a large meeting room and twenty-three of us 
sat around an enormous wooden table. Finally, the priest arrived. He was a "Grey Robe," 
a Franciscan, and, somewhat whimsically, I thought he looked strikingly like friar Tuck - 
including the bald pate. We began asking questions, and it wasn't long before we found 
ourselves not very happy with his answers. 
He explained to us how, yes, the missionaries had come into this area of the continent to 
convert the Natives to Christianity, but it was both acceptable and necessary work as the 
indigenous people "really didn't have much of a religion anyway." 
As we had spent more than a month studying Native American beliefs and culture, this 
argument didn't meet a receptive audience. Pointing out all the different tribes we noticed 
on the map, one student said, "But, didn't the Natives have thriving, ongoing cultures at 
the time the Europeans arrived here?" 
"Oh no," he assured us, "they didn't have much culturally, religiously, or much of 
anything else. In fact, they were barely surviving in their desert shanties, living under a 
few branches that they gathered together for shelter. They readily came to the mission for 
help once it was open." 
In fact, Natives across North America willingly came to churches and missions, mostly 
for the food, jewelry, metal utensils and weapons that they offered. (This incentive is still 
being used today. At some churches on the Navajo reservation, participants receive food 
coupons for attending Sunday mass.) When they didn't come willingly, however, Natives 
were forced to come at gunpoint. Many mission churches in the southwest were built with 
the grief and blood of Native populations. 
As we sat in that room, listening to the good friar, I had the distinct impression of my 
Frank Trocco was an expedition guide and director with the 
National Audubon Society Expedition Institute for thirty- eight 
semesters. Currently working on a PhD in the Social Studies of 
Science, he teaches science at Lesley College, MA, and 
Vermont College, VT  
students hopelessly gripping the table, digging into it with their fingers, in an effort to 
gain composure. They were using extreme self-control. The night before, we'd had a long 
discussion about being polite and decent to this man of the cloth, regardless of what he 
said. 
The prerogative of a travelling EE program is to move, so, heading north, we found 
ourselves weeks later on the Makah Indian Reservation, west of Seattle, Washington. The 
village occupies its original location near Cape Flattery, the furthest western point in the 
lower states. There is a museum there that has a reconstructed longhouse on display. 
Hundreds of these dwellings, stretching many miles, used to be aligned along the beaches 
of the northwest coast. The people that lived in the numerous communities along the 
ocean made their livelihood through whaling, sealing and salmon fishing. 
One afternoon I walked alone into the longhouse. It was dark and large (maybe 20' x 
100'), you could hear the sound of the surf, and it was divvied up with waist-high dividers 
into family units (about 8' x 12'), each with its own fire ring. 
I stood there and thought to myself how remarkable it must have been living in such a 
place with seven to eight families, including the old and young: cooking, singing, talking, 
crying, playing, fighting, screaming, lovemaking - all going on in one combined, but 
culturally tolerable, cacophony. I couldn't imagine the attributes of interdependence, 
tolerance, co-creation, and cooperation that must have existed for people to live in this 
way, even though it is unlikely that they had anything approaching this kind of 
vocabulary to describe it. Oddly, westerners have the vocabulary, but not the 
interpersonal know-how to live this way. For years, the image of the Makah longhouse 
was the metaphor that I used whenever I needed to illustrate an idealization of the 
complexities of community. 
Why had these folks, with all the possible choices they had, designed their community, 
living space, and social system in this way, each one sinuously intermingled with the 
other? Curiously, this is also the part of the world where the potlatch (i.e., an elaborate, 
ritualized give-away) was developed to a high degree, with families giving away all they 
had to the other members of their community, even to people from other tribes. Was this 
style of altruism and interdependence merely an arbitrary cultural construction? What 
could have been their model for such an interconnected social system? 
How we see ourselves is tied to the kind of picture that our culture paints for us. In 
contrast to most historical and indigenous peoples, many of us go through our lives 
isolated. We may have close family ties, and many friends, but our connection to a larger 
community is often abstract. We live in a particular geographic area; in a certain town; in 
a neighbourhood; and, on a specific street. But do we feel a part of any of those places? 
Do we feel supported and in contact with our most immediate neighbours? Usually not. 
All too often we live in a community of strangers. 
This is quite different from the experience of aboriginal cultures, as well as the ancestors 
of Euro-Americans. Nestled in the arms of one's extended family, there is always, except 
in the case of roaming hunters and gathers living on the most extreme lands, a larger 
community that one is constantly in contact with. Twentieth-century humans are so 
accustomed to the immense and faceless institutions of school, television, business, and 
church mediating their lives that it's incomprehensible that it is possible to know everyone 
there is to know. It's possible to live so that the community which surrounds you is not 
made up of nameless, and mostly distant, faces, but individuals who help each other, 
interact with each other, and work alongside each other, but, of course, don't always get 
along with each other. This is not an idyllic picture, merely different from the one most of 
us are used to. It is an alternative to the world that Euro- Americans have created. 
Remarkably, society at this level of collaboration is not completely extinct, even in some 
non- Native cultures. 
The same environmental education group that visited the friar in southern California, and 
the Makah Reservation in Washington, had, earlier in the year, travelled to Lancaster, 
Pennsylvania to work on the farm of an Old Order Mennonite farmer. The Mennonites 
came from Germany in the seventeenth century and have remained frozen in time to the 
habits and lifeways of their ancestors. In the American culture of dynamic and rapid 
change this is more than remarkable. 
Although between the Mennonites, and a companion religion the Amish, there are many 
different sects that make generalizations impossible, collectively these folks shun all the 
wondrous accoutrements that most Americans slave away their lives to enjoy. With many 
variations in style: they use a horse and buggy for transportation; they do not use 
electricity; they do not have telephones, TVs, or radios in their homes; they heat with 
wood and coal; and, they use horses and mules to pull their farm equipment. Some carry 
pocket watches instead of wristwatches (a sign of the modern world), wear suspenders 
instead of belts (a new and unacceptable way to hold up your pants), use hooks instead of 
buttons (originally worn only by the military), and encourage their young people to court 
in the old-fashioned parlour. They are a glimpse at a forgotten way of being. 
During our stay the farmer asked us if we wanted to visit an Amish farm where a barn 
had burned down and a new one was under construction. Two weeks earlier the enormous 
barn, full of cows, hay, a team of horses, equipment, and the family cat, had burned to the 
ground and everything was lost. The family didn't have a telephone, but before the 
embers had stopped smoking people began arriving. The women took over the kitchen, 
bringing large quantities of food. The men, carrying tools from home, went to the barn 
site and began clearing away the burned debris. In a day or two lumber started arriving. 
On the day we visited the site, the frame was up and there were dozens of men, in black 
trousers, broad-rimmed hats, and white shirts, climbing all over the structure. I noted that 
while the barn's future owner showed us around, the Mennonite farmer who brought us 
immediately left our group and joined the workforce. Within a month of our visit the 
family had a new barn, equipment, hay, cows, horses - and a cat. All of this, plus the food 
to feed the workers and everyone's labour, was donated by community members. Once 
again, all of this happened without the family making a single telephone call. The Amish 
and Mennonites don't have insurance policies. At least, not the same kind that their 
"English" neighbours (as they call them) are dependent on. 
Are we really the individuals that we think we are? If your community can be described 
as this Amish one, are you an individual or are you a community member? A robin, a 
mosquito, and a bear are all unquestionably a part of the ecosystem that surrounds them. 
They hardly exist as real entities outside of their environment, as many people experience 
when visiting these creatures in a zoo or seeing them in a cage. Few doubt the importance 
of placing wild creatures within their natural community. They have a mutually 
dependent relationship with their environment. Even plants have recently been found to 
be sharing carbon between their roots, in symbiotic exchange between different species. It 
may be that the social institutions and technologies that insulate and isolate us from the 
larger community we live in offer us an extremely limited arrangement. If only we could 
visualize our individuality in a different way, perhaps we would all have full barns. 
Soon after our visit to the Makah village we had the opportunity of watching a salmon 
run on the Hoh river, which runs down from the Olympic Mountains. It's an amazing 
experience watching these huge fish struggle upstream against the shallows and currents. 
They finally make it to their original birthplace, mate, lay eggs and die. Millions of fish, 
thousands of tons of fish flesh, left to rot. Well, not quite. The salmon provide an untold 
bounty for the bears, weasels, eagles, mice, micro-organisms and other predators who 
dine on their sacrifice. As I watched this marvellous natural potlatch take place, I realized 
that I was experiencing the Makah's model of community.
All of a sudden it was so obvious. The Makah's ancient ancestors watched for centuries as 
these noble fish gave their lives time and again, first for their young and then for the 
animals of the forest, hundreds of miles inland from their lives in the ocean. What an 
example of communal interchange, of co-dependence between bioregions, of self- 
sacrifice. With intimate acquaintance, the Makahs learned to mimic their perception of 
the salmon's offering. As with the Amish barn raisers on the other side of the continent, 
nothing was more important than family, community and giving all you had for the 
common good. The salmon's great give-away became a profound ecological lesson built 
into the Makah's psyche, and the structure of the longhouse. It was a lesson as complex as 
any postgraduate study in ecological systems analysis - although, they could not have 
explained it to the good friar. 
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The Architecture of Community: A Makah Longhouse

Stevens, Alec

The Trumpeter (1998) 
ISSN: 0832 6193 
Rachel Carson: the Life of the author of Silent 
Spring:  
A Book Review 
Alec Stevens  
pp 485, Henry Holt, 1997 (per A. R. Stevens) 
Rachel Carson can be considered the originator of the modern environmental movement. 
Born in poverty in 1907, she worked hard for everything she ever had in life. Her father 
died early, and her mother Maria struggled to raise three children who often had barely 
enough to eat. Rachel displayed an early interest in nature and her search for knowledge 
led to a scholarship to the Pennsylvania College for Women, a second-rate school where 
two teachers befriended and inspired her: Grace Croft in writing and Mary Skinker in 
biology. 
At first, Rachel aimed for a career in writing, but as she became increasingly influenced 
by Skinker, she leaned toward biology. The two interests shaped her life. After PCW, 
again on scholarship and with hardly enough money for adequate clothing, Rachel 
attended Johns Hopkins and earned a master's degree in biology. With no money to 
continue toward a PhD, her formal education ended. Skinker encouraged Rachel to look 
for a summer job at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, MA. After a 
lifetime of attraction to the sea, she was finally able to live and study by it. 
While seeking paid employment following her withdrawal from Johns Hopkins, Rachel 
found a two-year teaching position at the University of Maryland Dental and Pharmacy 
School. In 1936 she passed an examination and was appointed junior aquatic biologist in 
the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries, largely to write teaching pamphlets. Rachel's career as a 
government scientist lasted more than fifteen years until financial success from her books 
enabled her to resign. During this time she published numerous essays and articles for 
popular magazines, always on nature, and began to receive recognition as a writer of 
ability. 
Meanwhile, Rachel's personal life was strained. Her brother was a mean-spirited man, 
never loving or caring for her or the others. Rachel provided the only support to their 
mother. Her sister died of cancer, leaving two daughters to be cared for by Rachel. One 
niece bore a son, Roger, then she, too, died of cancer, leaving the boy to be raised by 
Rachel. 
After she bought shore property on the coast of Maine, Rachel developed a close personal 
relationship with Dorothy Freeman, a married woman eight years her senior. Their quoted 
letters suggest they were lovers. Her other closest friends were Marie Rodell, her agent, 
and Paul Brooks, her ultimate editor at Houghton-Mifflin. 
Rachel's first full length book, entitled Under the Sea-Wind, was published November 
1941. It described the life of creatures of the sea and shore and was praised by William 
Beebe for its "lyrical beauty and faultless science." Despite outstanding reviews, book 
sales suffered from the bombing of Pearl Harbor and the entry of the U.S. into World War 
II one month later. Only 2,000 copies were sold.
Rachel was disappointed for several reasons, not the least being her desperate need for 
money. Still supporting herself chiefly by her government job, she lived frugally and did 
her best to care for her aging mother and the small boy left her by her niece. While 
continuing to write short articles for magazines, Rachel began gathering material for her 
next major book published in 1951 entitled The Sea Around Us. A far more complete 
study of marine life and its integration with the rest of nature, she decided to send an 
early sample to William Shawn, editor of the New Yorker. His enthusiasm led to 
publication first in abstract in the magazine, and soon thereafter in book form. 
The public and scientific acceptance of the book surprised Rachel. It climbed rapidly to 
the top of the New York Times best seller list where it remained for several months. 
Reviewers were ecstatic. Readers Digest asked to publish an abridged edition. It won the 
National Book Award, the Burroughs Medal for excellence in nature writing, and was 
proclaimed by the New York Times as "outstanding book of 1951." More than 250,000 
copies were sold by the end of the year. Rachel was finally on a sound financial footing 
and at a peak in her career. 
There was so much publicity that Rachel became weary of the constant demands on her 
time, especially the countless invitations to speak and to receive honors. One man wrote 
to a newspaper saying he was sure "Rachel Carson" was a pseudonym for a male writer, 
for no woman could do such a job. A fellow scientist who met her for the first time said 
he had expected "a large and forbidding woman." In reality, Rachel stood 5' 4", weighed 
115 lbs., and was described as very attractive. 
There was great pressure to write more and she began gathering material for a book on 
shore birds and animals, much of it from the Maine coast near her house. The book 
appeared in 1955, entitled The Edge of the Sea. This time, William Shawn requested 
permission to publish it first in the New Yorker, which pleased Rachel as the publicity 
engendered seemed to enhance the sale of the book. Again, there was success and good 
ratings on the best seller lists, although not as high as for The Sea Around Us. 
Soon after The Edge of the Sea, Rachel began writing her ultimate masterpiece, Silent 
Spring. While working on this book she discovered a lump in her breast. After a biopsy 
she asked if it was cancer and was told it was not, a lie on the part of the surgeon, never 
forgiven by the patient. She was treated by a radical mastectomy followed by radiation, 
and suffered side effects that slowed her writing. Her cancer spread progressively to 
lymph nodes, bones and her liver, resulting in more radiation and hormone treatment. 
Though in pain much of the time, she doggedly persisted in writing, disguising the illness 
from all but her most intimate friends, describing her disability as "arthritis." 
Silent Spring, published in the New Yorker and by Houghton-Mifflin in 1962, is a 
description of man's attempts to control nature. The emphasis is on chemical pesticides 
and herbicides, their failure to control insects because of adaptation of the latter, and the 
terrible side effects on both the health of the environment and mankind. 
The effects of the book on the public (and on Congress) were maximal. Public health 
laws changed. While suffering from advanced cancer that caused her death in 1964, 
Rachel, showered by honors and fame, was recognized as the greatest science writer 
alive. The pesticide industry tried to belittle her work, but unsuccessfully. This biography 
is very well executed, a portrait of a great human being as scientist-writer-crusader, 
working in the face of enormous odds in family and health. 
Rachel's final words in Silent Spring: 
"The control of nature" is a phrase conceived in arrogance, born of the 
Neanderthal age of biology and philosophy, when it was supposed that 
nature exists for the convenience of man. The concepts and practices of 
applied entomology for the most part date from that Stone Age of science. 
It is our alarming misfortune that so primitive a science has armed itself 
with the most modern and terrible weapons, and that in turning them 
against the insects it has also turned them against the earth. 
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Rachel Carson: the life of the author of Silent Spring: A Book Review

Lago, Don

The Trumpeter (1998) 
ISSN: 0832 6193 
Terra Incognita 
Don Lago  
Monument Valley 
Every landscape has a story to tell. 
The red rock spires and mesas of Monument Valley know much about water. At first 
glance you wouldn't think so, for there is no water here. But this desert rock knows much 
about oceans. Oceans of 250 million years ago. Oceans that advanced and retreated 
across the land. Oceans filling with sediment from distant mountains. Oceans filled with 
life. The spires and mesas know something about the origin of humans. 
Yet when people come to Monument Valley, they usually see a different story. They see 
a team of horses pulling a stagecoach, tiny amidst the spires. They see the passengers 
clutching their guns, fearful of Indian attack. They see a grand horizon glowing not only 
with sunset, but with freedom and opportunity. They see a drama in which freedom and 
opportunity can be won only by the tough and brave, who must triumph over wildness, 
the wildness of the land, the wildness of the Indians who embodied the wildness of the 
land, and the wildness of the whites who would abuse that freedom for unfair gain over 
other whites. The red rock spires and mesas are simply the stage on which this drama is 
enacted. 
It was this drama, this dream of opportunity, that sent Harry Goulding heading west in 
1938. He owned the trading post in Monument Valley and was barely enduring the great 
depression. He believed his poverty would end if he could get tourists to discover 
Monument Valley, which was far from railways or highways. He took his meager savings 
and his photos of Monument Valley and drove to Hollywood. Against many closed doors 
he persisted until he grabbed the attention of director John Ford. Before long, Ford was 
filming Stagecoach in Monument Valley. Though the movie depicted a long journey 
across the West, Ford was actually sending the stagecoach in circles, casting the spires 
from different angles. Moviegoers were left thinking the whole West looked like 
Monument Valley. As many more westerns were filmed there, Monument Valley came to 
epitomize the West. Since the West itself epitomized a national mythology, Monument 
Valley became a symbol of that mythology. 
Perhaps every tribe and nation has a story that distinguishes it from others. Often that 
story is associated with a particular landscape. We can't think of the ancient Egyptians or 
their religion without thinking of the Nile. The ancient Greeks are indissoluble from 
images of Olympic gods and Aegean voyages. 
For several centuries, no national mythology has fascinated the world as much as the 
American mythology. After dozens of generations in which feudalism had seemed the 
inevitable fate of European peasants, America allowed them to dream of alternatives. 
America was exciting because it had no past to limit the future. Yet societies need a 
shared past to define and unite them. Americans shared only the grandeur of their 
landscape, and their quest to pioneer it. Without pyramids or palaces to serve as symbols 
of national grandeur, we enlisted our natural wonders. Without a mythology or long 
history to give us identity, we enlisted our brief pioneering history, making demigods 
from those who broke a new trail or shot the biggest game. These two elements of 
national identity were most satisfying when they could be combined into images of 
pioneers in the grandest landscapes. Far more Americans found prosperity plowing farms 
in the Ohio Valley than herding cows in the Southwest, yet it is the image of the cowboy 
beneath a mesa or mountain that fascinates Americans. When the frontier had turned into 
suburban Los Angeles and our mythology of limitless mobility seemed to be mocking us, 
we clung to this image more fiercely than ever, or tried to transform it into an astronaut 
conquering a desert moon. 
Monument Valley is but one nub of the Colorado Plateau, which is perhaps the most 
extraordinary geological realm on Earth. Nowhere else has a sedimentary record so large 
in area and time been so well preserved and then carved into amazing shapes. The 
Colorado Plateau itself is but one section of the most geologically diverse region on 
Earth, which very recently has become the western part of a nation. Compared to rock, 
nations do not endure long. Some nations appear and disappear in the span of a single 
human lifetime. A nation that manages to endure a thousand years is considered ancient. 
It is ironic that the youngest of nations should enact its national story on the oldest of 
geological stages. It is a measure of the power of national stories that a few decades of 
human activity should so thoroughly outweigh hundreds of millions of years of geologic 
activity in defining a landscape. The very names of the landmarks are those of pioneer 
heroes. In Monument Valley, Mitchell Butte and Merrick Butte immortalize two 
prospectors who were killed by Indians. Throughout the West, names of mountains and 
valley and rivers invoke not themselves but humans who had viewed them only as foes or 
sources of wealth. At Mount Rushmore, the ultimate fusion/confusion of national and 
geological stories, the people and the granite stare at one another in mutual unrecognition. 
Little boys in east-coast cities already know the national myth like an unconscious 
archetype and dream of galloping into sunset amongst red rock skyscrapers. 
Sedona 
The mesas and canyons around Sedona know much about time. They know of the time 
that erodes mountain ranges and piles up sand grain by grain into thousands of feet of 
rock, only to erode that rock away grain by grain. They know about the earth forces that 
open up faults and lift up plateaus and pour out lava. They know how to stand quietly as 
the life upon them frets and vanishes. They have watched innumerable generations of 
birds and reptiles and mammals come and go. They have watched as whole species 
evolved and disappeared. 
But many of the people you find roaming the Sedona mesas and canyons experience 
something else. One person stands in a trance, receiving messages from a native 
American shaman who lived here a thousand years ago. Someone else stares into the sky, 
receiving messages from extraterrestrial hovering over the mesa in a flying saucer. Still 
someone else, in the enhancing psychic energy flowing from the rock, is suddenly 
remembering that in a previous life he was a high priest in Atlantis. Another person feels 
herself being cured of a terminal illness. Yet another person is holding out her giant 
quartz crystal to charge it with psychic energy to take home. Someone else feels himself 
shifting into the higher vibrational energy plane where the spirits live. Yet another person 
feels the astrological currents strengthening as Earth prepares to enter the Age of 
Aquarius. A small circle of people repeat a chant to encourage the complete 
transformation of global society, the imminence of which is signaled by headlines about 
earthquakes, floods, and volcanic eruptions. 
There is nothing new about humans finding power in the earth. For most of human 
history, it was the earth and its varied spirits that created us, sustained our lives, or 
punished us for misbehaviour. But when we created monotheistic gods, we stripped the 
earth of its magic and left it God's material creation. Earth became a mere stage for a 
moral drama soon to be completed, allowing earth to be discarded. Ironically, stripping 
the earth of magic encouraged the scientific worldview, which eventually undermined 
confidence in the monotheistic god. Science returned credit for our creation to the earth 
and the cosmos, to forces more ancient, strange, and creative than those any tribal shaman 
had imagined. Yet science gave those forces no authority to grant humans meaning or 
moral directives. As science encroached upon the authority of God, the Romantics 
responded by locating God's authority in nature, particularly in sublime landscapes. If 
nature was approached with emotional rapport rather than rationality, God would be felt. 
These intellectual currents converged on the red rocks of Sedona. It could have been 
elsewhere, but this was a suitably sublime landscape, and someone happened to report 
feeling energy coming out of the rocks. Soon, pilgrims were coming from all over the 
world to experience the vortexes, which gained authenticity by sounding just like the 
strange, vague energies described by physics. The pilgrims shared, if only vaguely, the 
same project of restoring to the earth the authority of creation. But their specific agendas 
varied wildly. Some wanted to live in a native American universe, some in the universes 
of eastern religions, and some in a universe of wise extraterrestrials. Most wanted the 
earth to give them detailed, personalized instructions on how to live. Many pilgrims had 
apocalyptic visions of the earth as an old testament god inflicting floods on unbelievers. 
Perhaps, in an age of ecological crisis, it is good that we learn respect for the earth. 
Certainly the earth has power. But perhaps to do justice to the earth as our creator, we 
need to believe in the slow eons in which sand grains turned into mesas, and in which 
billions of days of living turned into new forms of life. Perhaps to do justice to the 
possibility of extinction, we need to believe that the mesas stood there watching, in utter 
indifference, as species had their day of egotism and then vanished forever. 
Grand Canyon 
Grand Canyon knows much about creation. It knows that human faces are but the latest 
face of the creative powers that have appeared as millions of animal faces and plant 
bodies and clouds and rivers and rocks, and before that, as nebulae and stars. The canyon 
rocks can tell all about the flowing of mountains and rivers and oceans and life into this 
moment when they have paused, perhaps to linger, as the first face that can show 
recognition of that changing story. 
But the canyon's story is difficult for people to recognize. Visitors on the rim have trouble 
just judging the canyon's physical scale. The first whites to discover the canyon supposed 
that the Colorado River was a creek a few feet wide. Today's visitors debate whether a 
line they can see in the canyon is a road or a foot trail. Confronted by the canyon's 
unapproachable depths and shapes, visitors are delighted to discover something with a 
familiar human scale. They spot the footbridge across the river. They spot the buildings at 
Phantom Ranch and study them a long while. They study a raft on the river, and a 
helicopter in the air. They take photos not to prove the canyon, but the bridge or raft. 
They find these objects reassuring, not because they provide a measuring stick to the true 
scale of the canyon, but because they prove the canyon has a human presence and 
meaning. The canyon depths do not threaten human significance, but prove we can go 
anywhere we please. 
At night, above the canyon, looms another landscape that has not been seen for itself. The 
stars have been forced to pose as familiar personalities and objects, a religious landscape 
we still see thousands of years after the deaths of the civilizations that inscribed in the 
constellations their story of creation. Compared to the ancient Babylonians or Egyptians 
or Greeks, America is a very young civilization. Until recently we have been too 
preoccupied with settling the land to worry about interpreting it. Americans don't need to 
impose a creation story on the sky, for we have been given a landscape that proclaims it 
beautifully. 
Perhaps it is a sign of our maturing that we have moved from seeing the land the way 
cowboys saw it a hundred years ago to seeing it the way native Americans saw it three 
hundred years ago. We are at least seeing beyond our national story. But perhaps to do 
justice to the land, we need to see it the way the rocks saw it millions of years ago. 
Perhaps to do justice to ourselves, we need to see ourselves the way the Grand Canyon 
would see us. 
Copyright retained by author(s)  
Click here to return to the contents page.


Terra Incognita

Hoerr, Winfried

A New Look at Evolution: Modernity and Living Respectfully with Nature

Kroll, Andrew J.

A Day on the Florida

Devall, Bill

Trumpeter (1997)
ISSN: 0832-6193
Book Review: The Lost Gospel of the Earth: A Call for
Renewing Nature, Spirit, and Politics
Bill Devall
Trumpeter
Book Review: The Lost Gospel of the Earth: A Call for Renewing Nature,
Spirit, and Politics 2
The Lost Gospel of the Earth: A Call for Renewing Nature, Spirit, and Politics.
Tom Hayden, with introduction by Thomas Berry.
San Francisco. Sierra Club Books. 1996.
Tom Hayden (Democrat from Santa Monica) is a sitting politician (California
State Senator) who joins the small number of politicians who have published
their analysis of our cultural malaise and their visions for the 21st century.
However, Hayden’s book is more than an academic exercise, more than rhetoric
designed to manipulate the electorate. Hayden presents an articulate call to all
citizens to embrace the ”lost gospel” of respect for the Earth as the basis for a
new ”spiritual politics.”
Hayden has been a political activist since the early 1960s. He was one of the
authors of the Port Huron Statement, a defining manifesto of the ”youth revolt”
of the 1960s. He was a peace advocate during the Vietnam War and a leader
in progressive political movements during the 1970s. The idea for this book, he
says, arose in 1990 ”...from the despair I felt on the twentieth anniversary of
Earth Day....I began a quest to understand the religious and cultural origins of
our environmental attitudes.”(p13) He engaged in a process of deep questioning,
examining his own actions. This is the process that Arne Naess says is the
foundation for articulating our own ecosophies.
Hayden sought out some of the best teachers in his quest including Joanna
Macy, Joan Halifax, Thomas Berry, and Thich Nhat Hanh. With his current
wife, a Canadian, he visited ancient forests of British Columbia as well as ex-
plored his own Celtic roots in Ireland. Hayden connects his personal history
with the larger, collective task of re-discovering the ”lost gospel” of Earth wis-
dom. He understands the yearning of many people who ”live across the Divide
from nature.” ”In politics...” he writes,”I run for office as an individual, a task
that requires projecting the Self and its various accomplishments in exaggerated
ways. On a more basic level, I feel my physical and emotional Self as an au-
tonomous entity. By contrast, it is difficult to feel aware of being in the universe.
For many years I was never aware at all. In pursuing what I thought to be life,
I forgot air, water, earth, and fire... Most of us do.”(p18)
Hayden is aware of the ”default of organized religion.” Most organized religions
buy into economic growth, anthropocentric doctrines of modernity. However,
Hayden reports on the search for the ”lost gospel” in Judeo-Christian tradition,
native American traditions and in Buddhism. There is no discussion of Islam
or Hinduism.
Hayden engaged in dialogue with students at Santa Monica City College in a
course he taught on eco-theology, and has succeeded in articulating the results
Copyright 1999 Trumpeter
Book Review: The Lost Gospel of the Earth: A Call for Renewing Nature,
Spirit, and Politics 3
of his research clearly and concisely.
In his concluding chapter, ”The Lost Gospel, Environmentalism, and Politics”,
he calls for a new politics based on ecosophy. Although Hayden never uses
the phrase ”deep ecology” or ”ecosophy” in his book, he clearly articulates
his argument in the context of the deep, long-range ecology movement. He is
critical of reform environmentalism and interest group politics. He recognizes
that many people are reluctant to discuss spiritual matters in the context of
politics, but he argues that if environmentalists ignore spiritual politics then,
by default, the Christian right will monopolize the definition of spiritual politics
for their own political agenda.
”Many environmentalists,” he argues, ”seem to fear that they will be scorned
or laughed at if they reveal their genuine feelings. But it is unhealthy and
self-defeating in politics as well as life to closet one’s feelings. It is impossible
to challenge the anti-environmental values of our time without expressing an
alternative set of values.” (p231)
In assessing the valuable contribution that Hayden has made to political dis-
course, it is useful to compare his work with that of other politicians who articu-
late a new politics for the 21st century, including books by President Bill Clinton
(who continues to advocate building information superhighways and building a
bridge to the 21st century ), Vice-President Al Gore, Jr. (Earth in the Balance),
and Representative Newt Gingrich (Restoring American Civilization).
Bill Clinton (Between Hope and History: Meeting America’s Challenges for the
21st Century, New York, Random House, 1996) devotes ten pages in his book
to environmental rhetoric (p. 99- 110). He says ”I have never believed we had
to choose between either a clean and safe environment or a growing economy.”
(105). ”Maintaining and enhancing our environment, passing on a clean planet
to future generations, is a sacred obligation of citizenship and perhaps our ulti-
mate responsibility.” (111) Clinton’s rhetoric is explicitly anthropocentric and
his use of the phrase ”our environment” indicates a subtext of resourcism. Clin-
ton’s strategy includes ”partnerships” with corporations, including land-owning
logging corporations, to provide them with regulatory relief from requirements
of Federal environmental legislation, such as the Endangered Species Act, in
exchange for minimal protection of habitat of endangered species and minimal
restoration of corporate damaged landscapes. There is no indication in Clin-
ton’s book that he has gone through the reflective, indeed religious, experiences
expressed by Al Gore, Jr. and Tom Hayden in their books.
Hayden understands and sympathizes with the paradox faced by Al Gore, Jr.
Gore wrote Earth in the Balance during a period in his own life when he was
suffering with despair over a debilitating injury of his son. Gore explicitly ad-
dresses what Hayden calls the ”lost gospel” in Christianity and the contraction
between his own ecosophy and the demands of ”practical politics.” As a sit-
ting politician in the Clinton administration, Gore has not publicly challenged
Copyright 1999 Trumpeter
Book Review: The Lost Gospel of the Earth: A Call for Renewing Nature,
Spirit, and Politics 4
the pragmatic, compromising, interest group politics that have led to increasing
threats to basic environmental laws and policies.
Newt Gingrich (Republican from Georgia), Speaker of the House, created his
own college course and appeared on nationally broadcast talkshows and in the
halls of Congress to publicize his vision for the 21st century, Restoring American
Civilization. Gingrich’s vision of resourcism is based on corporate capitalism,
reducing government regulation of polluters, and private property rights. He
appeared on talkshows to publicize his book holding wild animals obtained from
zoos.
It is interesting that no sitting female politician has expressed her vision for
the 21st century in ecocentric terms. Leading female politicians in California
have expressly stated their support of resourcism, compromise, and corporate
domination.
As a member of the California State Assembly and Senate, Hayden has par-
ticipated in numerous public policy debates concerning forests, wetlands, and
pollution. He acknowledges that environmental policy in California is explicitly
based on resourcism. The laws of the State of California explicitly state that
forests, water, minerals, and soils will be used for the benefit of humans and for
purposes consistent with sustained economic growth in California. Hayden says
that he would like to change the name of his own State Senate committee from
Natural Resources Committee to Nature Committee but this change would not
be tolerated by his colleagues.
In conclusion, Hayden says,
When a system like the Machiavellian state smothers our souls, we
have no choice but to respond spiritually. We need a spiritual base
to sustain ourselves as human beings....The modern state and its
adherents may attempt to dominate and transcend nature, but the
effort is finally in vain. No state is greater than the state of nature.
No government can usurp the governance of nature’s laws of life and
death. No executive can be the chairman of the corporate earth. No
planner can comprehend what is larger than the mind.(p237)
As long as environmentalists play the game that defines environmentalists as just
another interest-group in the Machiavellian state, they encourage not only the
use and disposability of nature, but also the domination, use, and disposability
of human beings.
This reviewer hopes that environmentalists will respond to Hayden’s call for a
deep, ecological politics. As an environmental activist, this reviewer has seen
many environmental leaders engage in repression of any attempt to express
the ”lost gospel” in political campaigns. As has been frequently noted, many
Copyright 1999 Trumpeter
reform environmentalists speak the language of ”wise use” better than the ”wise
use” movement. Unless ecology movements reinvent themselves along the lines
envisioned by Tom Hayden, there is little hope that they will be in the vanguard
of social transformation at the beginning of the 21st century.
This book has resulted from Hayden’s quest and demonstrates the value of self-
education by a highly motivated adult learner. It also demonstrates some of the
problems in self-educated learning. Like Al Gore, Jr. who made fundamental
errors in his criticism of deep ecology in Earth in the Balance - but whose book
demonstrates that he is a supporter of the deep, long-range ecology movement,
Hayden misses some of the nuances of Christian and Buddhist teachings but
the general thrust of his argument is firmly based in the deep, long-range e-
cology movement. For example he asks ”Is Buddhism Green?”(p. 163) rather
than asking how contemporary concerns with ecology fit with the Dharma. He
cites author Stephen Mitchell, who ”once told me that, in Buddhist terms, the
environmental crisis is our generation’s koan.” (p. 182) A student who is inter-
ested in ”engaged Buddhism” might be advised to read Joanna Macy (World As
Lover, World As Self ) or Gary Snyder (The Practice of the Wild) for a better
introduction to the relevance of Buddhist teaching to our current situation.
However, Hayden has a deep, personal understanding of denial and despair and
thus is able to sympathize with many people who want to connect their spiritual
yearnings with social activism.
His search for the ”lost gospel” is an intellectual exercise begun from his personal
despair and has yielded a book highly recommended for others to read
Citation Format
Devall, Bill (1997) Book Review: The Lost Gospel of the Earth: A Call for Renewing
Nature, Spirit, and Politics Trumpeter: 14, 1. http://www.icaap.org/iuicode?6.14.1.13
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Book Review: The Lost Gospel of the Earth: A Call for Renewing Nature, Spirit, and Politics

Fleck, Richard F.

Trumpeter (1997)
ISSN: 0832-6193
Solace of Dinosaur Ridge
Richard F. Fleck
Community College of Denver
Solace of Dinosaur Ridge 2
RICHARD FLECK is a Dean at the Community College of Den-
ver, Downtown Auraria Campus, in Denver, Colorado.
Dinosaur Ridge has become an essential and necessary place for me since our
move to Denver from a small university town on the wild and open prairies of
Wyoming. Where would I have the freedom to roam and think in the urban
sprawl of Denver? Where could I botanize and hunt for fossils? How would I
stand the heat and smog of an August afternoon? Where could I quickly get
away from people and sirens and honking automobile horns? Piled on top of
these concerns were the pressures of my deanship in an inner-city college with
uniquely gifted yet disadvantaged students and a pressured and strained faculty.
Within weeks of our arrival from Laramie, I discovered the small town of Mor-
rison nestled behind an uplifted hogback formation called the Dakota Ridge or
more fondly Dinosaur Ridge. This piece of wild land lay twenty-five minutes
from central Denver, twenty-five minutes by car to magic. I took my first stroll
along the trail following the ridge top after a heavy September frost. I breathed
the ridge’s fresh and bracing air high above the smog of the city. That first
walk along the ridge I repeated over and over again from September to April
for seven years straight. Sometimes I would go solo and sometimes with my
wife and family, but most often with my little dog Mini, a golden English cocker
spaniel with drooping ears and alert brown eyes.
This weekly ramble had become as much a ritual for me as my weekly walks
on the Laramie Plains. Summer time changed the Wyoming ritual slightly with
hikes in the alluring Snowy Range and now in the Front Range in Colorado.
The high prairies of southern Wyoming have something very much in common
with Dinosaur Ridge, namely the Laramide Orogeny. Sixty to Seventy-five mil-
lion years ago something within the Earth’s core forced prehistoric swamplands
(washed by an inland sea) upward, not fast in human terms, but if four billion
years could be transposed into one human life, the Laramide Orogeny raised the
Rockies from sea level to almost three miles above sea level during the equivalent
time of two weeks.
The high bald prairie of southern Wyoming rests at 7,200, some thousand feet
higher than the crests of Dinosaur Ridge. Inner forces of our planet are still
pushing this land upward perhaps a an eighth inch a century, not quite as
fast as the growth rate of the Himalayas half way around the globe. But the
Laramie Plains are essentially as flat as a sea bed while Dinosaur Ridge is a
high skinny ridge with downsloping Morrison Formation of grey beach rock on
its east side and bright red Dakota Formation sandstone on its west side. The
extreme north side is transected by Interstate 70. Why the name Dinosaur
Ridge? Dinosaurs galore! Buried within the Dakota sandstones are the bones
of stegosaurs, brontosaurs, and igaunadons discovered by Arthur Lakes in 1877.
Eventually ten quarries yielded many fossils for rival museums in Philadelphia,
Copyright 1999 Trumpeter
Solace of Dinosaur Ridge 3
and New Haven. Today Dinosaur Ridge is designated as a national natural
landmark with guided and self-guided tours.
I love to visit one spot on the west side of Dinosaur Ridge which exposes the
imprint of a brontosaurus made millions of years ago on an ancient muddy
shoreline. The beast’s immense weight sunk him deep into the mud. His tracks
probably filled in with algal ooze helping preserve the footprints in hardened
mud-rock. Lower down the ridge are fossilized rib and skull bones of cama-
rasaurs carried by streams and deposited in deeper mud hardened to sandstone
and exposed by erosion to present-day viewers.
On the east side of Dinosaur Ridge lies a strangely rippled rock (formerly beach)
hardened to gray sandstone and tilted at a ludicrous angle of forty-five degrees.
Within this beach rock are giant three-toed tracks of a vegetarian dinosaur
known as the iguanadon. Along side of his prints are three-toed prehistoric bird
prints of an ostrich-like dinosaur. Early morning shadows fill the tracks, clearly
revealing their deep imprint. Because the beach is no longer sand but rock and
because the beach lies at an extreme angle, it is difficult to imagine a sea level
beach with heavy, humid air and swampy vegetation.
On one occasion I had taken a quick walk along the east side of Dinosaur
Ridge at sunset before boarding a jet the next morning bound for Charleston,
South Carolina. Within hours of my arrival, I walked the Edisto Swamp trail
not far from the Georgia line with my nephew, niece and their families. The
geographic juxtaposition hit home. Here in the Edisto Swamp I breathed heavy
vaporous air while hours earlier I breathed the bracing air of the high desert.
At Edisto I marvelled at the delicate perfection of form and color of swamp
orchids, and the lush array of ferns, vine-covered southern pines, and profusion
of palmettos. On Dinosaur Ridge hours earlier wind blew through the needles of
pinyons and junipers. Deep in Edisto I smelled mud and phosphates and thick
vegetation. Up on Dinosaur I smelled dust and rock and the scent of sage. Edisto
provides a secure home for dinosaur-like alligators and other reptiles like the
cottonmouth water moccasin. Edisto became for me prehistoric, precambrian
Colorado whose oozing muds would eventually harden and be uplifted to a
multi-layered Dinosaur Ridge.
Interstate 70 cuts through Dinosaur Ridge and exposes all the layers of hardened
pre-Laramide Orogeny sand and mud. As dinosaur-like trucks and RV’s revved
their engines up I-70, Mini and I walked through a hundred million years of
time. We stared up at the cut-through formations ranging in color from gray to
black to red to brown and yellow. Even though the heavy traffic of I-70 roared
like a troop of dinosaurs, we managed to journey backwards through time.
I let myself dream of what things looked like 300 million years ago during the
early Pennsylvanian Period with its carboniferous jungles. I imagined looking
westward to see an ancient mountain range 240 million years older than the
present-day Rockies. This mountain range, like any other, had streams gushing
Copyright 1999 Trumpeter
Solace of Dinosaur Ridge 4
off its slopes depositing reddish quartz sand, silt grains and clay. I tried to
imagine these reddish deposits hardening into the red sandstone of the Foun-
tain Formation and the Red Rocks Amphitheatre of Beatles fame. But the only
beetles I envisioned were black creeping things on the muddy ooze of shorelines.
What must it have been like 140 million years ago during the Jurassic Period?
I imagined not seeing I-70 anymore, and hearing the howl of meat-eating di-
nosaurs thumping through swamps and wetlands in an insufferably dank and
humid atmosphere. What happened to Colorado? The only hint of its future
existence lay in the gray and green and maroon claystone which would become
the Morrison Formation.
I imagined escaping from wretched beasts to arrive at the late Cretaceous Period
about 75 million years ago. Those frightening beasts hadn’t yet left the scene
but now a great inland sea lapped the shore with tidal ripples in the mud
covered by seaweed. The air remained heavy with no mountain breezes, just a
flat swamp with bright green-eyed iguanadons pitter-patting along the mud in
search of lush fern-like cycads. Gigantic feathered beasts flapped their awkward
wings above my head and cackled like mythological harpies. The tan, dark gray,
and black shales oozed with mud and slime. I see that Mini has stepped into a
mud puddle and once again hear the roar of I-70.
What I like most about Dinosaur Ridge is the relative peace and calm on top
of its rocky spine. Up there grow yuccas, cacti, Gambel oak, pinyon pine, Utah
juniper, sagebrush, mountain mahogany, kinnikinnik, golden banner, harebells,
and scores of other wildflowers. Sailing overhead are ravens, hawks, golden
eagles, swallows, and nearby, buzzing hummingbirds. Mini simply loves it up
there on the ridge between September and April when there are no snakes to
worry about, especially a ground-level cocker spaniel. She loves to peer over the
edge of cliffs and stare into space. All I have to say is ”go see!” and she runs
to the edge and takes it all in. She stops and listens to chickadees going chick a
dee dee dee. She eyeballs each pine squirrel scampering up a twisted tree trunk.
Even when she squats to urinate, she’s all eyes for what’s going on around her.
Yes, she’s a worthy successor to the dinosaurs of old.
At a certain narrow point on the trail’s crest, I often stop and feel the texture
of a rippled rock, rippled and uplifted from that inland sea of millions of years
ago. Algal materials covered earlier ripples to preserve their form when beaches
became buried under layers of other deposits hardened to rock. Tidal ripples
are amazing to behold millions of years later, more amazing, in a sense, than the
sarcophagus of the Emperor Charlemagne, or the Rosetta Stone. Why? Sixty
million years! Imagine finding a sixty-million year old plant in your backyard.
How can one fathom the meaning of a wilderness of time found in sixty million
years? A sand ripple is as common on the receded sea delta of the Colorado
River down in Mexico and as it was on the Great Inland Sea of ancient interior
Colorado. But sixty million years separates the two ripples. Ripples we can
understand, but time between may be impossible. Or is it? We do have that
Copyright 1999 Trumpeter
Solace of Dinosaur Ridge 5
special gift of Kantian intuition and Thoreauvian imagination. Dreams can cut
through time like lightning through clouds to illuminate an otherwise darkened
land. A stegosaur’s roar and thumping step can still be heard in the spirit’s
core. The numbers sixty, sixty million, sixty trillion do not defy the human
spirit. We can even imagine various species of dinosaurs having green flesh with
orange spots.
I remember driving up I-70 one extremely windy day to an early January con-
ference site on Lookout Mountain above Denver. Flames raced up Dinosaur
Ridge’s northeast slope. Pinyon trees blazed with sparks hopping upridge in
a spectacle of beauty and terror. The blackened vegetation below the flames
stood phantom-like in marked contrast to the whiteness of snow. Within days
Mini and I walked along that ridge top to see the damage. Mini sniffed the
air and ground full time once we arrived at darkened soil and blackened pine
branches. Even snow had become dark with black and gray ashes making for
fertile soil next spring. Not too much damage here.
One mild February weekend we had a surprise visit from my son. My wife,
Maura, and I packed a lunch for the three and a half of us (Mini included) to
take advantage of the warm pre-spring sunshine up on Dinosaur Ridge. Buds
laced the branches of bare scrub oaks and the most delicate and tiny flowers of
sandworts graced the ground at our feet like miniature dots of snow. Arriving
at a high sandstone upthrust, we stopped for lunch. The foothills of the Rockies
spread westward and upward obscuring the high Front Range. We could clearly
see that our ridge protruded skyward as an uneroded shell fragment of an outer
layer of sandstone and shales which once covered the Rocky Mountains. We
finished our lunch atop the layers of time by recollecting our own family layers
of time when Rich was a boy in Laramie with his two sisters Michelle and
Maureen. We all had a good reunion up there on the ridge. Rich now lived
in Seattle and his sisters in New York and Fort Lauderdale as spread apart as
sediment from the Rockies down prairie streams to the sea.
One crisp autumn day I hiked solo over the ridge when rustling oak leaves had
changed to bright scarlet. They rustled like prayer flags in the Himalayas. High
in the foothills across the way tongues of aspen blazed with a golden fire. Gray
clouds swooped upslope like volcanic clouds millions of years ago when tec-
tonic plates collided within the Laramide Orogeny. During our civilized state,
we humans have experienced very little volcanism. Vesuvius, Etna, Krakatoa,
Mount St. Helens are tiny firecrackers compared to the eruptions of the Yellow-
stone Caldera 600,000 years ago when our primitive continent lay blackened for
months on end. How frightening it must have been to see ranges of volcanoes
puffing and exploding red hot lava.
Snow sprinkled down from the upslope clouds and gathered in windy wisps along
my trail. A yellowjacket bee buzzed for cover among the last of the autumnal
flowers still barely in bloom. It snowed yet harder in chilling winds and the sky
darkened. It felt good to be up there; I could have easily been hundreds of miles
Copyright 1999 Trumpeter
away. It grew even colder and some leaves blew off the scrub trees. My hands
and feet grew numb, and it was time to make my descent to cares of the city
below. Chickadees along the trail chirped to bid me farewell.
Yes, I’m glad I discovered a place called Dinosaur Ridge. Up there, my urban-
encased being is truly energized and revitalized. It is a place of magic. It is a
place which allows the spirit to roam free through time and space.
Citation Format
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http://www.icaap.org/iuicode?6.14.3.5
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Solace of Dinosaur Ridge

Yannielli, Lee

Trumpeter (1997)
ISSN: 0832-6193
Earth, People and Poetry: The Forests of Pablo Neruda
Lee Yannielli
Trumpeter
Earth, People and Poetry: The Forests of Pablo Neruda 2
LEN YANNIELLI is a long-time environmental activist presently
engaged in an open space battle in Naugatuck, CT. He is former
president and chairman of the board of a large regional chapter
of the Audubon Society, a biology instructor at Naugatuck Valley
Community-Technical College in Waterbury, CT and the author
of several articles and a book, The Microbiology Laboratory - An
Integrated Approach, published by McGraw-Hill . 1995.
As a young boy, I remember reading that fabulous Greek myth about the sailors
being lured by a mysterious siren call. Every morning and evening this sum-
mer, I felt a similar magnetic call. But camped at the edge of an old growth
forest on the west side of Glacier National Park, Montana, it was the lure and
enchantment of the forest itself.
It was during one of those magical moments, among huge cedar trees dripping
with Spanish moss, that the words of the Noble Prize winning Chilean poet,
Pablo Neruda, drifted into my thoughts.
I always felt myself stifling as soon as I left the great forests, the
timberland that drew me back like a mother...My life is a long pil-
grimage...always returning to the woods of the south, to the forest
lost in me.
It was for this special bonding, which Neruda speaks so eloquently of, that my
wife and I decided on a camping trip among old growth forests for our family
vacation. We wanted out two boys, as well as ourselves, to attain a deeper
understanding and commitment to the fight to save our forests.
In the early 1900s, Neruda’s bonding to forests and wilderness began with ex-
periences in Temuco on the Chilean frontier. ¡POEM¿Temuco, heart of water
Heritage of foxglove: long ago your house in the wood was cradle and bell of
my song and fortress of my solitude.
He was later to end a poem about his origins with”...I come from below, from
the earth.”
Instead of leaping over most of the country, Amtrak took us westwards at ground
level. Neruda called it ”land sailing,” as his father was a ballast (gravel) train
conductor, trains were also part of Neruda’s youth. When his father’s train
would stop deep in Chilean forests to quarry rocks, the young Neruda would
explore. The brakemen and ex-prisoner, Monjie, would take him on natural
history excursions. It was Monjie who introduced Neruda to the golden carabus
beetles, birds and most memorable, the giant rauli trees. Later, he was to
rediscover wilderness by horseback.
Copyright 1999 Trumpeter
Earth, People and Poetry: The Forests of Pablo Neruda 3
He once exchanged gifts with a young neighbor he never saw. His friend left
him a small model of a sheep, past through a fence hole. Neruda gave him
what he considered of equal value to him, a huge pine cone from one of his
forest adventures. Fifty years later he would write, ”...that communion, that
revelation, that pact with the wilderness, is still part of my life.”
One evening while my children worked feverishly on a campfire as only children
can, I continued to be mesmerized by the pillow and cradle topography of the
nearby old growth forest. In my mind’s eye, Neruda’s word came to life:
The southern Andean forest is populated by huge trees set apart
from one another; giant larches and mayten trees, as well as tepa and
coniferous trees. The rauli trees have an amazing girth. I stopped
to measure one. It had the diameter of a horse. The sky overhead
can’t be seen. Below, leaves have fallen for centuries, forming a layer
of humus the hoofs of the mounts sink down into. We were passing
through one of primitive nature’s great cathedrals.
The incessant rain that contributed mightily to the growth of these great forests,
was the young Neruda’s constant companion. He called it nature’s piano and it
was to its beat he wrote his first verses. Later he would say, ”I want a rainbow
for my inkwell!”
In the early cold war year of 1948, Neruda, holding revolutionary views, was
hunted by the Videla regime of Chile. He returned to the forests he loved under
conditions he could never have predicted. He hid at a logging site run by a
reactionary, wealthy businessman, Se&#241;or Rodriguez. With deep pathos,
he witnessed a logging operation.
The saws cutting the huge logs ground out their shrill lament all
day long. First you heard the deep underground thud of the felled
tree. Every five or ten minutes the ground shuddered like a drum in
the dark at the hard impact...giant work of nature, seeded there by
the wind a thousand years before...The forest was dying. I heard its
lamentation with a heavy heart, as if I had come there to listen to
the oldest voices anyone had ever heard.
Discovered by the landowner, Neruda and he had a raucous confrontation in a
one room cabin. Fortunately, Rodriguez enjoyed Neruda’s poetry and guaran-
teed his safety. The poet made his escape over the Andes into Argentina.
Upon visiting a Blackfoot reservation on the east side of the continental divide,
I reflected on Neruda’s respectful lines dedicated to the Native People of Chile.
¡POEM¿The Araucanians turned into roots. They were stripped off leaf by leaf
until they were only a skeleton of the race, a tree already leafless; it wasn’t so
Copyright 1999 Trumpeter
Earth, People and Poetry: The Forests of Pablo Neruda 4
much the ancient suffering since they were fighting like madman, like stones, like
sacks, like angels; it was that they, the brave ones, felt themselves losing ground,
the earth giving under their feet; the blood no longer resigned in Arauco; the
kingdom of theft had arrived and we were the thieves.
With his non-exploitive outlook, Pablo Neruda was quick to empathize with
Native Peoples fighting colonialists and the Araucanians sensitive stewardship
of the land. Did Neruda foreshadow the science of Human Ecology by some
twenty years as he intertwined earth, people and poetry? In October, 1943, at
the age of thirty nine, with the emotions of his involvement in the civil war
years in Spain still fresh in his memory and World War Two raging, he visited
the Inca ruins at Macchu Picchu, high in the Andes of Peru. What Waldon
Pond was to Thoreau, what Utah’s deserts were to Edward Abbey, Macchu
Picchu was to Pablo Neruda. He came to terms with himself and the world.
¡POEM¿In the steep zone-forest and stone mist of green stars, radiant jungle-
Mantur explodes like a blinding lake or a new layer of silence. ¡POEM¿Come to
my very heart, to my dawn, up to the crowned solitudes. The dead kingdom is
still alive. ¡POEM¿And over the Sundial the sanguinary shadow of the condor
crosses like a black ship... ¡POEM¿Behold me from the depths of the earth,
labourer, weaver, silent herdsman:... Throughout the earth join all the silent
scattered lips and from the depths speak to me all night long as if I were anchored
with you, tell me everything, ¡T¿chain by chain, ¡POEM¿link by link, and step
by step. sharpen the knives that you’ve kept, put them in my breast and in my
hand, like a river of yellow lightning, like a river of buried jaguars, ¡POEM¿and
let me weep hours, days, years blind ages, stellar centuries. Give me silence,
water, hope. Give me struggle, iron, volcanoes. ¡POEM¿Cling to my body like
magnets. Hasten to my veins and to my mouth. Speak through my words and
my blood.
Listen to his choice of words as he put it years later.
Earth, people, and poetry are one and the same entity tied together
by mysterious subterranean passages. When the earth blooms, the
people breath freedom, the poets sing and show the way.
Whether it was native peoples or miners, Neruda felt the connections of the
people and mother earth, deep within the sinew of his bones. In his last con-
version with his good friend and writer, Volodia Teitelboim, he talked of the
Araucanians and their language which he considered among the most beautiful
in the world.
He disliked the artificial boundaries erected by his species. Dying of prostate
cancer in the winter of 1973, he expressed the desire to return to the great forest
in the south of Chile ”...where I could get back in touch with the earth.”
Now the people and the forests of Pablo Naruda’s beloved homeland are threat-
Copyright 1999 Trumpeter
Earth, People and Poetry: The Forests of Pablo Neruda 5
ened by the ”free trade” of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAF-
TA). The 1973 fascist coup, which resulted in the death of President Salvador
Allende and thousands of progressives, has left Chile wide open to transnational
corporations who equate trade with no people or environmental limits.
As the U.S. grassroots environmental movements take more initiatives to fight
Gingrich’s Contract on America, events in Chile are both enlightening and com-
pelling. Transnational mining companies have been able to ignore environmental
safeguards along with the unions that could fight for them. These companies
have paved the way for the transnational timber corporations. Although weak-
ened by seventeen years of military rule, Chilean unions sharply oppose any
trade agreement that lacks protection for the environment.
Pablo Neruda died just thirteen days after that 1973 military coup. The tenacity
with which the Chilean people continued to celebrate Neruda’s poetry is also
instructive. Under conditions that surely would have cost them their lives if
apprehended, people etched passages from Neruda’s writings on wooden fence
pickets surrounding the poet’s former house at Isle de Negro.
Perhaps they were inspired by the rest of ”Earth, People and Poetry” quoted
earlier.
When tyranny darkens the earth and punishes the people, the loud-
est voice is sought out and the head of the poet falls into history’s
deep well. Tyranny cuts off the head that sings, but the voice at the
bottom of the well returns to the secret springs of the earth and out
of the darkness rises up through the mouth of the people.
As grassroots environmentalists begin to enter the fray, including battles of the
national and international significance, a spiritual renewal is needed. The poetry
of Pablo Neruda can be called upon. From his earliest collection of poems, The
Invisible River, he leaves us this gem. ¡POEM¿I greet you Hope, you who comes
from afar, you flood with your song the sad hearts. You who give new wings to
old dreams...
And how did our ”touch the earth” approach fare with our children? As we
bedded down one night at our campsite, a howl, followed by a series of yelps,
could be heard in the distance. I turned to see if my older son was awake. He
was. We spoke no words. He just smiled. Thank you, brother coyote. Thank
you.
References
Belitt, Ben Pablo Neruda, Five Decades: 1925-1970. Grove Press 1974.
Copyright 1999 Trumpeter
Bennett, William J. The Book of Virtues. Simon and Schuster, 1993.
Hayes, Randall Feeding frenzy kills communities &forests - Sharks now heading
for Chile. World Rainforest Report, 1995; 12:1:2.
Neruda, Pablo El Rio Invisible-Poesia y prosa de Juventud. Barcelona Press,
1980.
Neruda, Pablo Memoirs. Penguin Books, New York, 1978.
Neruda, Pablo Still Another Day. Translated by William O’Daley. Copper
Canyon Press, 1984
Neruda, Pablo The Sea and the Bells. Translated by William O’Daley. Copper
Canyon Press, 1988.
Roman, Joseph Pablo Neruda, Hispanics of Achievement. Chelsea House Pub-
lishers, 1992.
Teitelboim, Volodia. Neruda, An Intimate Biography. University of Texas
Press, Austin, 1991.
Citation Format
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