Listen to the

Land

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Listen to the

Land

Conservation
Conversations

Dennis Boyer

terrace books

a trade imprint of the university of wisconsin press

terrace books
A trade imprint of the University of Wisconsin Press
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Madison, Wisconsin 53711-2059
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5 4 3 2 1
Printed in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Boyer, Dennis.
Listen to the land : conservation conversations / Dennis Boyer.
p. cm.
isbn 978-0-299-22564-3 (pbk. : alk. paper)isbn 978-0-299-22563-6 (e-book)
1. Conservation of natural resourcesMiddle WestCitizen participation
Anecdotes. 2. EnvironmentalismMiddle WestCitizen participation
Anecdotes. I. Title.
s932.m4369 2009
333.720978dc22
2008038485

in memory of

Walt Bresette

Contents

Beforeword / ix

Sp r i n g i n t h e Ea s t
The Power of Stories / 3
Geezer Wisdom / 7
Ice Ages / 11
Caboose with a View / 14
Fishermans Eyes / 18
Making Do / 22
Popple Cop / 25
The Land Listener / 29
Farm Fights / 32
The Quiet in the Land / 36
The Log House / 40
The Old Ways / 44

Su m m e r i n t h e So u t h
Warriors Path / 51
A Mound with a View / 55
Making Sparks Fly / 59
Rolling on a River / 62
After the Land-Use Dispute / 66
All Creatures Great and Small / 71
In the Arms of the Mother / 75

Looking Out for the Neighbors / 79

Seedkeeper / 83
View from the Joint / 87
In for the Long Haul / 91
Laughter in the Land / 95

Au t u m n i n t h e W e s t
Eco-Wizardry / 101
Places of Power / 105
Pull of the Big Lakes / 109
Living in the Trees / 113
City Sticker / 117
Farm Warrior / 120
Reeducation Camp / 124
Stalker Stillness / 128
Take a Hike / 132
In Defense of Neighborhoods / 136
Business on the Land / 140
New Kid in Town / 144

Winter in the North

Remembering / 151
Environmental Conversation / 155
Creations Pantry / 159
Making Your Vote Count / 163
Tapped In / 167
On the Pot / 171
Stars in the Eyes / 174
New Ears / 179
Team Green / 182
Joy from the World / 186
Grandpops Treehouse / 190
Hurley Burley / 193

Beforeword
(the stuff in front of the other stuff )

No, I wont be naming many names here. That may seem a curious move
for someone with a dubious reputation for exhaustive acknowledgments
and personal asides in my various introductions, forewords, afterwords,
prologues, epilogues, and midlogues. Not that Im a name-dropper necessarily. Im more of a name-thrower, with a fondness for skipping them like
stones across the smooth surface of the printed page or hanging them like
a Frisbee in the air of my narrative.
This collection is dierent from my usual approach to the legends and
lore of the Midwest. Most of my past tales, be they fogged by time or inspired by whimsy, originated with real live sources. Here there are sources
who served as models, but my intent is not to write biographical proles.
Rather, I want to capture archetypes of the various types of environmental consciousness I have encountered among my many contacts over the
years. These are not eld notes from interviews; these are impressionistic
glimpses at ecological thinking in action.
On the other hand, those familiar with environmental concerns in the
neck of the woods of the upper Mississippi Valley, over to Lake Michigan, and up to the southern rim of our maple leaf neighbors may think
they recognize some eco-players from our local dramas. This is really
beside the point, since were dealing with the mythic quality of the human
spirit here.
The collection represents my attempt to present a range of environmental thinking in a way that emphasizes the narrative of our relationship
with the land. It is motivated by a concern that conservation conversation
has become over-partisanized and thus not only loses the synergy of diversity but shrinks back from its overarching role of connecting the human
ix

Beforeword

family to the Earth to become mere interest-group fodder. It is our beliefs

and values about the land relationship that interest me, not the human
idiosyncrasies or partisan agendas.
That is why I respectfully use the term myth, suggesting the enduring
parts of the human story that transmit our oldest encoded information,
not myth as shorthand for superstitions or baseless beliefs. The accounts
here are framed to capture the mythic quality that resides in all of us.
The collection is organized seasonally, in deference to the Native perspective of the wheel of the year as metaphor for human growth. It also
roughly mirrors the sequence and stages of my own acquaintance with the
possibilities represented by the personalities encountered over the years.
These stories might have languished in my les had it not been for the
encouragement of three dear friends: Mary Devitt, Andrea Dearlove, and
Carla Shedivy. Two other friends, Jeannine Wahlquist and Adolf Gundersen, helped keep me attuned to the diverse voices of this collection. Finally,
University of Wisconsin Press editor Raphael Kadushin kept faith with the
project until the last i was dotted and t crossed. Thanks to you all!
Similar eorts in other parts of the world would likely yield some different material. I fully realize that there are many more unique perspectives
out there (and I have clearly omitted anti-environmental thinking and
attitudes that suggest a lack of thinking at all). But that is my point. Treasure your stories of the land as you treasure the land itself. Then tell and
preserve those stories; this can be the beginning of a conversation we
might all benet from. And learn to listen.
De n n i s B o y e r
Spring Equinox 2008

Spring in the East

The Power of Stories

Some still talk about a fellow called the Chubby Chippewa of Red Cli. No
one knows whether all the stories of him are true or if they are related to the
same person, but they keep popping in and out of almost every account concerning land-related slugfests that my crowd found itself in during the 1980s
and 1990s. He showed us how defense of the Earth amounted to the Warriors
Path, taught us Earth-connection as the Sorcerers Craft, and also initiated
many of us into Earthtales as the transmission device for ecological wisdom.
Those who tell, write, or record stories often go through an evolution that
deepens their relationship to storycraft. We might start out with pure entertainment or straightforward education. Our writings might encapsulate accumulated folk wisdom or spiritual insights. The tales might include warnings
or admonishments. Our best stories might even have the capacity to heal. The
Chubby Chippewa of Red Cli felt that a really good story could do all of that
and, perhaps, even some transformative things.
He often came onto European American turf, as it were, to give those lessons. It was said that he once spoke to a packed house at the Madeline Island
Historical Museum. It was an upscale crowd, the parking lot had more than
its share of BMWs and Volvos. The crowd was drawn to hear about the environmental traditions of the Lake Superior Ojibwe. For most in the audience,
it was their rst encounter with a real live Native American.
He was his usual self: warm and inclusive. Though an environmental radical in many ways, he was also a crowd pleaser. One of his rst moves was
to adopt the entire audience into his tribe. He quickly pointed out to delightful laughter that this status conferred only the obligation to defend the area
protected by Ojibwe treaties and entitled none present to casino proceeds or
court-ordered shares of sh.
3

Sp r i n g i n t h e Ea s t

He soon had the audience eating out of this hand. He congratulated them
on their recycling eorts and generally convinced them that they were coming
around to an environmental outlook based on Native ancestral wisdom. He
spoke for over an hour and said many things that stuck with dierent people
in dierent ways. Heres what most heard.
To understand how my people feel about the Earth you must understand
our stories. How we feel about this place comes right out of our stories.
How we think of ourselves in this place comes right out of those stories.
Our stories are very, very old. Some go right back to the Creation.
A lot of our story is about how we got here. I dont mean this area
generally, but right here on Madeline Island. This was the place we were
looking for, our promised land, our El Dorado, our holy grail. This place
was described in great detail in the ancient prophecy that guided us here
from the East. We were part of the Algonquin people who lived along the
Atlantic Ocean. My people probably lived for thousands of years in Nova
Scotia or that neighborhood.
Some of the Old Ones said that it became crowded in that neighborhood. Others said that food was scarce and that sh and game were wiped
out. But the prophecies came to the people, and they know they had to
move. The main prophecy told them to look until they found food on
water and until they found an island shaped just like this one we are
on tonight.
It was a long journey of many generations. It took hundreds, if not
thousands, of years. Our people followed the St. Lawrence River and
explored in and around the lower Great Lakes. They spent time in many
places along the way because they were tired and some of them wanted
to quit. Some would say, Hey, we found an island sort of like the one
in the prophecy. So some wanted to stop at Lake Ontario already. But
there were elders who would eventually remind them that they had not yet
reached the food that grows on water.
So on to Lake Erie, Lake Huron, and Lake Michigan. In each place
there were always some who said, Weve gone far enough, this must be
the place. But the elders kept reminding them about the food on water
and the special island. This was so even though the elders were now the
grandsons of the grandsons of the elders who had heard the original
prophecy. All along the way, our people encountered other people and got

The Power of Stories

along with some and didnt get along with others. Some say that parts of
the Ojibwe even split o or missed their target and formed many tribes
of Canada, the West, and the Southwest.
Well, eventually, we found just the right spot, right here on Madeline
Island. And in the smaller lakes around Lake Superior we found the food
that grows on water: wild rice. The stories of the long journey were told
again and again, and through the retelling our land here became sacred to
us, part of who we were as people. How can you not care for land that is
a gift from the Creator?
And so we lived here for hundreds if not thousands of more years.
Sometimes we struggled with neighbors, and sometimes the rice crop was
not as good as it might have been. But life was good in general. Then
along come some white guys with long curly hair and with a ag with lilies
on it. They told us that we were now part of France. We humored them,
sold them some furs, and basically things stayed the same.
So it went for many generations under the lily ag, the Ojibwe drawing life from the Lake Superior region. Then some white guys in red coats
sailed over the horizon in a ship under a ag with crazy angled stripes.
They told us that we were now part of England, and by the way, forget
about those French. Not much changed. Well, actually, furs were getting
scarcer. But we humored them and even fought as their allies against some
upstarts called Americans.
Imagine our surprise, when after a couple of generations of being English, another ship sailed over the horizon with a ag called the stars and
stripes. Gosh darn it, now we were Americans. But nothing much changed.
At least at rst. Our main relationship was not with the political powers;
it was with the land and the lake. Our stories about the land and the lake
got us through dicult times. We just had to add new chapters to account
for the French, the English, and the Americans.
This is why we are capable of great environmental action here. You
know, I think we should take the lead in a pressing environmental problem. I think Ive convinced myself that we should put the nuclear waste
repository in this area. Yes, doesnt that make sense? Wed only have to
displace a few tourist facilities, and wed be doing the Stars and Stripes
a favor.
They seem to keep making this waste. Its got to go somewhere. The
darn stu is deadly for tens of thousands of years, and that complicates

Sp r i n g i n t h e Ea s t

things. Thats why you need to let us handle it. Those white political institutions dont have the staying power or the stories that we Lake Superior
Ojibwe have. We kept our stories and our prophecies all during our long
journey here. We kept our sense of balance with the land and the lake all
through the time of the lily ag, the crazy line ag, and the Stars and
Stripes. Even when our American brothers gave us our tiny reservation in
exchange for the millions of acres they thought we werent using.
But well outlast all that stu because we have powerful stories. So send
that nuke waste up our way; thousands of years after the U.S. government has rusted away, there will be Ojibwe elders who tell our stories
about our love of the land and the lake. The stories will be more powerful
and more necessary than ever. There will be chapters about an evil force,
a foolish poison that man unleashed on this Earth. And those elders will
tell the children about how the Ojibwe helped put the evil monster to
sleep and locked it under a stone door. And so the powerful stories will tell
the young which stone doors on which hillsides should not be disturbed.
That, my adopted Ojibwe friends, is the power of our stories.

Geezer Wisdom

Almost every journey toward knowledge starts with an encounter with elders
who cross our paths. Sometimes this involves formal mentoring or structured
apprenticeship. Sometimes relationships with the keepers of ancient signs and
passwords ow from blood ties or deep communal roots. But sometimes one
stumbles into initiation, and a collection of variables simply causes those with
experience to open their hearts to a stranger.
Such good fortune can launch one into meditations on human interactions
with the natural environment. You might not be totally lacking in perspective
on such matters, but many of us are far more preoccupied with the day-to-day
struggles of our lives. The very people who are inclined to give us a practical
leg up out of our personal dramas might turn out to be the ones capable of getting us thinking about the weight of the human footprint on our Earth.
Happy accidents characterize many a learning curve, but then again, Ive
been among cheerfully optimistic types who manage to glean lessons from war,
arrests, and close encounters with lightning and tornados. Perhaps no random
happenstance stuck with me as much as the account of a uke hitchhiking lift
given by an aging bohemian, who turned out to be the head of a large publicemployee union in Wisconsin. He pulled over his large station wagon, a vehicle
approximating a dumpster full of shing equipment on wheels, to pick up the
hitchhiker who was just passing through the Midwest. The encounter triggered
a Wisconsin sojourn for the hitchhikernow rounding out its third decade,
with a few forays to Georgian Bay, the Boundary Waters, and Michigan dune
country thrown in for good measure.
Like a biblical list of begats, the ride generated a lineage of contacts,
acquaintances, and associations. Indeed, the hitchhiker ended up employed by
the drivers organization in a temporary job that lasted over twenty years.
7

Sp r i n g i n t h e Ea s t

The driver opened that world to him by detouring the ride into the world of
his best friend, a prominent attorney and political xer. The lawyer, in turn,
introduced the hitchhiker to an entire circle of government and business insiders who gathered at his retreat on the edge of Aldo Leopolds beloved Sand
County.
This retreat was pretty much a male domain. The rambling old farmhouse
had not seen any concerted tidying eort since the third term of Franklin
Roosevelt. Still, the lawyer and his cohorts brought dignity and gravity to the
unhygienic hunting shack. A young man in the mood to listen could learn
many things there: how to ush grouse from fence rows on windy days, how
to tie ies for the late hatches, and how to grease the stomach lining before a
generous tumbler serving of Korbel. The knowledge was truly eclectic and in
the lawyers circle there were teachers aplenty.
But it was the lawyer himself who held forth with the greater weight of
authority. At a battered farmhouse kitchen table where U.S. Senators might
share brandy with tow truck drivers, the thoughtful and well-spoken remarks
from the lawyer would stop a tirade or verbal fools errand. He really thought
there was a foolproof way to test propositions regarding the land. He sure convinced many at that table.
The old conservation geezers had it right about the power of observation
to correct any fool notions we might get about nature. A fellow might
otherwise go o on tangents derived from sentimentality or condence
in theories. Better to depend on the accredited senses and any extra ones
you can muster and sharpen.
This is where geezers have the edge. Sure, their senses may be dulled in
terms of acuity. But the passage of time, when linked to habits of close
observation, helps them sense whats really going on. The young man experiences sensory clutter and nds little more than pleasure or annoyance
in it. It is the experience of cumulative years that hones discernment in
those paying attention.
Its true enough that age itself is no guarantor of sharpened perception.
Some people are locked into their sensory patterns at an early age and
never challenge them. Maybe they are frail beings that need the security
of rigid and reliable ways of experiencing the world. They may depend
on fossilized outlooks to control their commercial, political, and religious
interactions with others. In fact, you could say that much of what passes

Geezer Wisdom

for modern society depends on a collective agreement on what is real,

never mind what nature is serving up in the form of lessons.
Still, longevity does give you a ghting chance at nding out that conventional wisdom is often peddled by someone with an agenda. Just managing to hang around a long time increases the odds that youll bump your
head hard enough or run a fever high enough to give you a glimpse of an
order outside the usual assumptions.
Part of the geezer advantage resides in repeated viewings of the passing
seasons. Old guys from the Stone Age up to Aldo Leopold gured out how
much raw information there is just in watching and knowing the annual
cycle of the place you dwell. Thats why the keepers of early calendars and
almanacs operated in the spiritual niche, performing sacred functions.
Another part of the geezer advantage comes from knowing our geezer
forbears. This, too, is a learning habit as old as the Stone Age. Even a lifetime of watching nature unfold through the seasons might not acquaint
an individual with the hundred-year storm or the millennial volcano eruption. That is the function of oral traditions from the clan res of long
ago to the dusty connes of surroundings such as these. In these places,
old men pass on what they have learned. There, in the company of their
peers, a geezer can regale the youngsters with accumulated knowledge.
The discerning youngster learns to watch the facial expressions of the
other geezers, which either vouch for the veracity of a story through silent
nods of the head or call it into question by averted eyes. Only after a lifetime of experience with nature and geezer stories will a fellow know if he
was given information or wisdom. Only after decades of those campre
seminars will he understand that there is a dierence between information
and wisdom.
Now, connect this back to nature and you have the key to understanding conservation, environmentalism, and the land ethic in a deep and profound way. See, these geezers are not just teachers; they are students too.
If youre really trying to get a handle on what Mother Nature is doing,
youre a student up to and including your last breath. Every genuinely dirtconnected geezer will tell you that the land itself is that ultimate teacher.
Those who feel like aliens on their own planet are baed about how
rocks, pond scum, and ice in your whiskers could teach you diddly-squat.
Apt word, aliens, to describe those alienated from the very processes that
sustain life. Their ranks dont just include untutored simpletons. Great

10

Sp r i n g i n t h e Ea s t

Muirs Ghost, no! Alienation of this type aicts every class and walk of
life, all those suering the delusion that bigger and fancier shacks and
high-speed gasoline buggies mean that homo sapiens must run the show.
What hubris!
The learning is there for the taking by all those open to it. Nature is
generous: It oers lessons in forms suited to every learning style. If youre
strongly visual, there is much to see. If youre a hands-on type, there is
plenty of tactile stu to squeeze. But I think most true geezers are storytellers at heart and thus have a predilection for listening.
This is semantics in a way, but it conceptualizes how learning about
nature happens. No matter how you tune into the Earth, it will happen
in a multisensory way. A good listener will hear through the soles of his
feet and with his eyes in addition to his ears. Listening to the Earth is an
art form that can change your life. If you get really good at it, you will even
hear the nothing between sounds and nd meaning in that.
When you can hear an owl hunt by starlight, then you will know where
the eld mice live. If you pick up the predawn rustling in the cattails
you will eventually distinguish between the muskrat going home and the
ducks rst stirrings. You can even listen to a prairieits swaying grasses,
its insect hums, and chirping birdsand gauge its health and what might
be missing in its restoration.
So my advice to all young fellows, gals too, is to nd a way that suits
you to pick up natures lessons. But for my money the best and easiest way
is to simply listen to the geezers talk about the land.

Ice Ages

Newcomers to the Upper Midwest soon notice the large number of activities
involving frozen water in one way or another. If one can overcome natural
reservations about frigid conditions, new worlds of recreation and social interaction await those properly clothed or fortied. Clothing may range from
industrial-style insulated coveralls, to the latest synthetic garb sold by outtters,
to the birthday suit betting midwinter skinny-dipping. Fortication usually
involves psychological preparations and/or alcoholic beverages.
One newcomer had it explained to him during his rst Midwest winter in
a totally unfamiliar setting in Columbia County, Wisconsin. It was his rst
winter on the Milwaukee Road, a railroad winter of ngertips cold-seared on
frigid steel in the Portage Rail Yard. A neighbor, the local realtor, saw that
the newcomers Appalachian three-month winter outlook was in need of serious modication. So the realtor took the newcomer in hand and provided
him a gentlemanly introduction to Midwest wintersa trip to the local curling rink.
Very few people outside the North Country know what curling is. Some
may have a vague notion that its a sport where stones with handles are
pushed across ice while some fools run alongside with brooms. Well, tonight youll learn that there is more technique to it than that. But hopefully youll learn that curling stands for much more and connects us to an
almost forgotten past.
Curling is pretty much a Northern European and North American
snow-belt sport. I think its fair to note that its played mostly by paleskinned people, though Ive known some darker Scots and a few Ojibwe
to indulge. I think at its core, especially as is practiced in Wisconsin,
11

12

Sp r i n g i n t h e Ea s t

Minnesota, and the Upper Peninsula, curling is about a relationship with

winter and cold.
Where you hail from, winter is a thing to be retreated from, a short
interval when one can hole up in smug comfort around a re until the
thaw. Thats the brief winter of the genuinely temperate zones. In these
parts its dierent. Our winter is so long that it must be embraced. Otherwise we would go crazy and fall victim to the most homicidal forms of
cabin fever. So we must grab winter in a bear hug and squeeze it as hard
as it squeezes us.
This means that in this part of the country were prone to some strange
behaviors and activities this time of year. Some of us have convinced ourselves that were truly invigorated by snow, cold, and ice. Others are more
honest with themselves and recognize it as a hereditary form of deance.
Show me the North Dakotan or Albertan who would ever concede that a
horric winter ever got the better of them. More likely, they will stand
bowed, but unbroken, and yell into the north wind, Is that all you got,
Old Man?
So whats curlings place in all this? The answer is in the remote past,
back in the time when our ancestors hunted great wooly beasts at the foot
of the glaciers. A certain outlook was forged in that Ice Age. Maybe it was
arrogance, but maybe it was just a zestfulness that comes from managing
to be at the top of the food chain on most days. It was a step away from
the remote ancestral berry-picking and nut-gathering.
Anyway, its my belief that you can trace curling right back to that time.
Its a type of statement. Its a declaration that we people of the North may
have been pushed out of fairer climes, and we may have lost our birthright
to run around in loin cloths year round, but darn dang it, we can take anything Old Man Winter can dish out, you betcha.
Naturally it is not a straight line from the Ice Age to curling. A lot had
to happen along the way. We pale races had to learn to skip across ice
oes and invent all manner of cold weather sports. Someone had to slide
down the front of a steep glacier on a sti hide for the rst time. Someone had to invent the game of kicking frozen mammoth testicles across
the wide ice of a bay.
Ive always had a hunch that curling started that way and then evolved.
After the mammoths were gone you had to resort to stones. You couldnt
really kick those, so you slid them. Eventually you ended up with modern

Ice Ages

13

curlings polished granite stones with handles, pushed toward the target
house at the other end of the ice while your companions skillfully broom
the ice to guide the stone toward the objective.
Then, having gotten those rudimentary steps out of the way, we were
able to embellish and hybridize our winter play. Before you know it, we
had ice-shing, hockey, iceboats, car racing on ice, cross-country skiing on
lakes, nude polar bear plunges through holes in the ice after sweaty saunas,
and what passes for football on Lambeaus tundra. Curling is just the most
highly rened expression of such things.
Civilized portions of the pale-skinned races make their ice indoors and
equip the quarters with amenities such as beer, brandy, and plush chairs for
our ample behinds. This is how we demonstrate our ingenuity and hardiness. We bring winter inside and make it convenient, if not comfortable.
It really is the most genteel glorication of winter and is as compact a condensation of a winter activity as mans brain can design.
Yes, but, youre saying, what purpose does all this activity serve? Well,
u-da, do not minimize its importance as a link to our forbears. But make
no mistake about it; this activity sums up our modern relationship with
winter. Its our way of having a winter even if the current one doesnt
amount to much.
Thats the key to understanding us. We feel cheated if we get no winter
or just a little teaser. It happens now and then. Talk to old-timers in these
parts and youll see that they mark time by butt-kicking winters. Youll
rarely hear about a long-ago hundred-degree July, even if it harvested a
crop of farmhands and invalids. Youll never hear about a spring with a profusion of daodils or an autumn bountiful with hazelnuts. No, its winter
that marks the passages in these parts. Winters of more than hundred
inches of snow. Winters of two, three, and four weeks at twenty below
zero. Winters that make tree bark explode from cold and leave dead bachelor farmers sti as boards until town road crews can open their dirt lanes.
Curling is the perfect yoga during which to meditate on such winters.
While curling you can contemplate the land sleeping under a snowy coat.
Curling keeps us limber and content until the short urry of shing, gardening, hunting, and boating comes round again. In these parts, its the
land that sleeps the long sleep. Curling is what we do while waiting for it
to wake up.

Caboose with a View

A great many blue-collar workers consider themselves outdoorsmen. This is especially true of those who do the greater part of their work outside of industrial
buildings. Construction workers, utility linemen, and public works employees
all contribute generously to the ranks of the hook-and-bullet constituencies.
Some from these vocations even think of themselves as conservationists.
Though that was perhaps more common a generation ago, in the days before
the equipment dwarfed the activities themselves. Back before speed, horsepower, and repower became the mainstream outdoor mantra.
Such blue-collar outdoor stalwarts were steeped in traditions as hallowed as
knights of yore. Many were blessed with multigenerational legacies connected
to hunting lodges, shing shacks, lakeside resorts, wooden waterfowl skis,
and handcrafted canoes on hidden owages. They started such pursuits under
the wings of grandfathers and great-uncles and ended their outdoor days with
grandchildren and nephews in tow. Often these activities were the basic glue
for extended families, neighborhoods, and workplace communities.
Among these sorts there was often a deep connection with some identiable
place or places. The setting for deer hunting was often a constant, as was the
lake of fabled monster muskies, and as were trail loops leading to hidden glades
and grottoes where contemplation of creation owed as naturally as spring
water. These places were often enshrined in the multigenerational legacies of
families and communal circles. While this sense of place, perhaps even sacredness of place, generated protective sentiments toward these spots, these types of
workers were often unable to view the environment on a regional or systems
basis. Thats why someone could think them susceptible to the environmental
denial pushed by many of their employers. If it happened in the next lake down
the chain or over the next ridge, well, then maybe it wasnt a problem.
14

Caboose with a View

15

Lets face it, in a society where shortsightedness usually teams up with the
short term and the bottom line, there has long been a lack of those seeing the
big picture. But our neck of the woods has been fortunate to always possess a
cranky and vocal few. One Portage railroad worker claimed that he found one
in the person of a freight conductor from La Crosse.
Sitting back here in the caboose has its advantages, in addition to not having to share engine cab space with some cabbage-eating engineer. During
the trip I can see plenty of whats going on in the countryside. Thats the
thing about trains; we pass through the places normally out of sight,
boonies and blighted industrial areas. From back here you can see that a lot
of what passes for environmental protection is aesthetics or even cosmetics.
So from where Im sitting theres a lot of political hogwash in what were
told about whats getting better or whats protected. Its like so much other
nonsense that business and government dish out. Just feel-good distraction, as in Look at the pretty stu we planted in the park, never mind
that man strip-mining behind the curtain.
Thirty-some years looking out the caboose window puts you past the
sucker game and the carnie barkers. The paper and timber industries like
to stick their signs along the road that brag up their managed forest. And
there they are, by pretty plantation rows straight as arrows. Then come
back with me to where the railroad tracks run through their pulp farms,
and it looks like a Belgian woods after the Battle of the Bulgeclear-cut
and skidder ruts big enough to swallow a Buick.
Or take mining. Modern management puts a nicely landscaped security station out near the highway. Everything visible to the public looks
antiseptic. But ride along with the ore cars down to the pit and youll see
green and yellow creek water so toxic that itll kill a skimmer bug on the
rst step. Hell, those are the new mines operating under more recent regulations. The old ones, from the lead down Galena way to the copper of
the Upper Peninsula, can spew poisons for a century after theyre done.
Then look in the cities! I catch an eyeful going in and out of every
big rail yard. Ive seen factories and foundries oozing gunk out of pipes
that could turn a mudpuppy into Godzilla. Ive seen old industrial neighborhoods where the poor are stuck with the aftermath of lead, benzene,
metal-plating solvents, and just about every cocktail the DuPonts can
dream up. You cant grow a safe tomato in most of those places. No doubt

16

Sp r i n g i n t h e Ea s t

about it, if theres anywhere were more willing to abuse than our wild
places, its the spots where our poor live.
Not only do those places poison people and shorten their lives, they cut
people o from almost any contact with nature. No space for gardens, the
parks are unsafe, and the playgrounds arent kept up. I ride by those neighborhoods and see abandoned cars and crumbling houses owned by absentee landlords. What a way to treat people, and what a way to treat land.
The view from the caboose window doesnt allow you the foolishness
of believing that a problem is limited to a place or two. At least thats what
riding around has taught me. You get to see how the health of one place
is connected to the health of other places. You learn that there really is no
place exempt from problems, no place to hide from the messes mankind
can create.
Rail work is like that. It really was the rst craft that operated on the
clock and still looked over the horizons. That lets you compare places
within the same timeframe. So you get snapshots that can be ipped like
animated cartoon frames. You can see yourself moving through the scenes
and gain a sense of whats the same in the frames and whats dierent.
Thats part of the trap of the human brain. We have to put ourselves
in the picture to make it matter. If the cartoon is about Mars, its hard
to care about the planet cracking up. But if the plague of locusts and a
shitstorm are blowing up the line headed toward your shack, then it just
might catch your attention. And it just might get you to think about
whats happening to the place you passed through last week. Thats about
all you can expect in terms of generalization from the current human
brain. Maybe when were more highly evolved well be able to suck food
paste in our high-rise cubicles and fret about the Big Horn Mountains
or Everglades. But that day is not here yet. We need to see these places
to value them, see ourselves in those places, and feel the mud between
our toes.
Thats why I think its important that the youngsters throw on those
backpacks and hit the road, especially the back road. The more they see,
the more they will understand how it ts together. If I were emperor for
a day or two, Id send every farm kid to the poor city neighborhood and
every city kid to some hardscrabble ranch. Then they might gure out
how we need to take care of both. They might gure out that taking a
whiz in the crick is a hostile gesture toward the neighbor downstream.

Caboose with a View

17

I may sound like Ive got trains on the brain, but the whole deal is a
lot like a train. I mean us on Earth, a big, old rickety freight. Over a hundred cars running without the maintenance they deserve. The main similarity is the brake system. Few know it, but the brakes on a train run the
whole distance of the train and they need to work on most of the cars if
you want to run safe. Thats like the water and air on Earth. Get enough
places where theyre fouled, and youre just running downgrade without
brakes.
Thats what an old conductor sees from the caboose window. Its a view
with plenty of advantages. But I have to admit that what Im seeing is
bothering me more every year.

Fishermans Eyes

Conservation thought owes much to the legacy of outdoors enthusiasts who educated the urban public about natural resources issues. Fishermen of the latenineteenth century and the rst half of the twentieth are due a generous share
of this credit. Among their number were large numbers of captains of industry
and well-placed gentlemen with the credentials and social standing for noted
advocacy. Still, there have always been apostles of shing from more humble
origins.
These rod-wielding populists have been just as inuential in the formation
of public attitudes about their sport and the resources on which the sport depends. Stories of the friendly neighbor are just more accessible than accounts
of the travels of the well-heeled banker (and his guide) in remote portions of
Canada. Our neighbors shake us out of wilderness romanticism and make us
think about local features of nature, be they well-attended-to parks or neglected
creeks beneath crumbling bridges.
Regular-guy shermen are excellent ambassadors for the sport because they
are just like us, just more sh-obsessed. We see them rush home from work
and throw tackle into beat-up station wagons. We hear of their adventures over
beers at backyard cookouts. We note their humor and self-deprecation with
fondness. We sense their love of treasured memories of the shing life.
This is the story of a shing hero. At least he is a hero to some. He is not the
best sherman. He hasnt caught enormous amounts of sh. He hasnt caught
really big sh. He isnt even high up the shing hierarchy of the area around
Stillwater, Minnesota. He just has more fun shing, talking shing, and planning shing than any human anyone has known. Along the way hes also
noticed a thing or two about those lakes and streams.
18

Fishermans Eyes

19

Like many linewetters, I got hooked as a kid. Thats when it can really
get in your blood. If you sneak away for a quick half-hour morning shing trip in Grandpas pasture and suddenly notice that the day has passed
and the sun is going down, then Id say youre hooked. If you can hold
a rod in your hands for hours while watching the clouds and the birds
and be brought back to consciousness through a nibble on your line, then
youre denitely hooked.
Fishing is not just about sh. Ive actually had some great shing trips
interrupted by sh. I call the sh my worthy adversaries. They just dont
repay one the same level of respect as you might expect from a human
opponent, say an enemy combatant.
I dont satisfy any category of shing purist. Im a jack-of-all-tackle,
master of none. Ive surprised duers by shing country-club ponds with
a cane poll. Ive deep-sea shed and caught ugly things that had to be
winched up. Paid my dues with ice tip-ups, y rods, spinning rigs, baitcasting, and hand-lines. I think Ive used every hook-and-line method
there is to be cursed over. Even catch sh with them now and then.
Ive been humbled in the extreme by sh. I say that without bitterness.
It is a source of great learning and an antidote to arrogance. The thing
with the biggest brain does not always prevail, especially if the brain is not
fully engaged in the task at hand.
Maybe thats why hunger sharpens shing skills, though it dulls the
artistic portion of the pursuit. After all, appetite and notions of eciency
lead you quickly to notions of traps, high voltage, or explosives. Some
shing types would take exception to such methods. I keep an open mind.
I never got to go to college. Kids came too quickly. But shing has
been an education for me. Ive learned about hydrology and limnology.
Ive seen the run-o problems. Ive helped farmers deal with stream-bank
issues. Ive even gotten lathered up in pubic meetings on acid rain.
Fish are another type of miners canary. If they cant thrive and reproduce, were probably doing something wrong. If we cant feed them to children, pregnant women, and breastfeeding mothers, weve gone way too
far. But for me its more than environmental science. Its all about keeping some simple boyhood pleasures in this middle-aged life. Foolish as it
sounds, I still thrill to outmaneuver a bull on the way to a pasture stream.
Theres fun in nding the hole in a fence around a private body of water
while the owners are in Chicago. Heck, Im still proud about stringers full

20

Sp r i n g i n t h e Ea s t

of fat bluegills. Those are all twelve-year-old things, and Im quite comfortable with them. My life is a lot richer for them.
Then, of course, there are the shmany classes of tormentors and
teasers. I feel like I have very specic types of relationships with specic
species. In some cases I have had specic relationships with individual
sh. Most of these cases are too sad and pathetic to relate. Thereve been
a few triumphs, but their sparseness calls attention to the other side of the
equation.
Start with troutthe most beautiful of sh, which often lives in the
most beautiful of placesusually where Im most likely to tangle my line
in a tree or slip in the crick. Love of trout is an environmental eye-opener.
My wife also says love of trout is a major source of marital problems.
Then theres walleye, an unattractive but delectable sh. Theyre the
best frying sh I know of. But they have the weirdest eyes. Their eyes
sometimes make me feel guilty. They look like someone put drugs in the
water. Theyre stoned, and I want to be out there shing for them.
Muskies! Are there still such sh? Its been years since I actually caught
one. I think my muskie catching is on the schedule of one of the slowest comets. So its an open question whether Ill live long enough to
catch another one. What can you say about a sh that looks like a Soviet
submarine?
Finally, northern pike or just plain northerns, the dinosaur of sh,
rounds out my frustrating foursome. I catch one occasionally, but never
escape unscratched. Theyre crocodile sh, really just a life-support system
for nasty teeth. When he deals with the aftermath of my northern encounters, my doctor thinks I play with alligators. He advises that I give up the
notion of playing guitar, with the way my ngers have been modied.
Sure there are bass and catsh. Those are breeds that take pity on me
and allow me to take home some of their stupider cousins. I always feel
like I did back at those parties when I had to dance with my sister. But, as
they say, the worst day shing is better than the best day of anything else.
Thats what I call the healing side of shing. Theres a part that can restore your soul. Fishing can erase a day of dealing with a meathead boss.
It can bring down high blood pressure and your need for sleeping medication. It takes the sting o your daughters totaling of your new car.
When the wife says the in-laws are coming to visit, you can just go shing again.

Fishermans Eyes

21

We need more leaders who sh. I dont mean politicians who pose with
sh. No, I mean individuals who spend quiet hours by water taking it all
in. They could clear their heads and solve some problems if they did that.
Id have more condence in those guys and gals if I could look them in
the eyes and see the eyes of shing people. Then Id know theyd see nature
in a way that matters. Not just the sh, but the ducks on the lake and the
eagles over the river. Theyd know how it ts together and how the towns
and people are shaped by their proximity to water. And if you saw shing
experience in those eyes, you would know those people had been put in
their place a time or two.

Making Do

Raw materials conservation is a growing part of the ecological outlook. It usually concedes that there will be some level of extractive activity but hopes to
minimize it through improved practices. Combined with industrial-scale recycling and adaptive uses of waste products, the scope of recovery has advanced
far in the last few decades.
Still, there are too many things buried in landlls and too many abandoned
manufactured products dotting our vacant lots and byways. Often these eyesores are rusting hulks of equipment that became outdated or simply gave up
the ghost. One looks at them and fears that they may be the only things still in
evidence in a thousand years.
Living in the Driftless Region puts one in touch with those who see abandoned behemoths as challenges. In part its because the hill farms stingy yields
tend to make their occupants economy minded. In part its because stubborn
and innovative types are drawn to this topography. Anything that isnt functioning is a challenge.
A neighbor told me about his purchase of an old New Idea sickle bar mower
o a front yard in Dyersville, Iowa. It was a slick piece of recovery work assembled from at least a half dozen defunct mowers. It had many custom features
too. It was just the ticket for his Allis Chalmers WC and the neighbors Ford
8N. He had further customized it for easy adjustment without dismount.
But my neighbor was not content to be the envy of the old farmers he
encountered at the Field of Dreams and on the Cassville Ferry as he hauled it
back to Wisconsin. He didnt go down the road only with recovered machinery; he brought back the story that the Iowa machinery seller told him as a
bonus.
22

Making Do

23

Im not in a position to do anything about the redwoods or chemical plants

in foreign countries. I cant even get my kids to save aluminum cans. But
I can do something about salvaging the things that are already made so
that we can go a little bit lighter on the land.
I might be the only welder/metalworker/environmentalist in this area.
But Ive traveled the back roads of Iowa, Missouri, Kansas, and Nebraska
and Ive met dozens of others who deserve the name but are probably
embarrassed by it. Theres probably some over your way too, but Wisconsin seems picked clean of good parts.
Fixing stu up and getting the maximum use of stu seems like an ethical obligation to me. Maybe its my religion? My wife would probably
think so, since Im not fond of re, brimstone, and the slim results of
her church. Anyway, its the Golden Rule and Eleventh Commandment
to me.
By obligation, I mean what we owe ourselves and others. Its what we
owe old Earth pocked with mines and lled with stumps. Its what we owe
the generations past who sweated their butts o in forges, mills, and
foundries to make that equipment that we leave in the mud behind the
pigpen. We owe it to those fellows who load the trucks to haul that stu
across the country so that we could feed and clothe the world. We owe it
to the good old boys and rubes right o the boat who took a chance with
their hard-earned money and bought a piece of a dream.
Progress was even more of a religion in those days than it is now. Those
old fellows stepped right to the rail and took communion. The bloom is
o that rose now. Most families progressed right out of farming. Most
equipment factory workers progressed right out of there too. So now you
have fellows like me who progress through regress. Regress by going back
and xing things.
It just bothers me something terrible when I see an old hay loader in a
sagging machine shed. Ive never seen one yet that I cant get working again.
Same with grain binds, corn pickers, manure spreaders, and old tractors.
I like the challenge, and it pleases me to no end when I see a restored piece
purring along in a eld.
The thing about this stu is that it was really built to last. Take this new
stu and sit it in a damp meadow for fty years, and see if Moses himself
could get it going again. It just wont happen. Whats old now will still be
in better shape. Thats what people will have to fall back on in a pinch.

24

Sp r i n g i n t h e Ea s t

Dont get me wrongI understand modern farming and modern

machinery. Its the top dog for now, and I dont see that changing much.
It certainly cant be beat for the big scale that things are worked on today.
You cant grain-farm in America the old way.
But I think there will always be pockets where reclaimed equipment
will serve a purpose. I know plenty of fellows with a little ground that
cant aord the new stu. Then there are the tight spots, hilly spots, and
wet spots that wont accommodate the new monsters. I see a need to have
stu that you can switch back and forth between horse-drawn and tractorpulled. Theres even a market for stu pulled out only on eld days and
historic reenactments.
Why stop with tractors and hay loaders? What about typewriters and
calculators? Have we gotten all we can get out of those thousands of
machines collecting dust? I refurnished an old icebox in one fellows Mississippi River cottage and had the rst ice-chilled beer out of it. My buddy
had me help him convert an old windmill tower into a pedestal for his
satellite dish. Theres no end to how stu can be put to use or how the life
of stu can be extended.
Theres just something fundamentally wrong with throwing things away,
even the junky stu that is not meant to last. Up the road, theyre turning utility poles into fence posts. In Nebraska I met a family that made a
whole business out of converting the beds and rear axels of pickups into
trailers. Everybodys seen one-of-a-kind versions of this. These folks had
an assembly line for it, using trucks with smashed-in front ends.
The next thing we need to do is network with the ideas of making do
with old stu. The high-tech guys have their Web sites and ways of communicating and swapping information. No reason we cant do that with
these adaptations and recycling innovations. No reason why we cant spread
the techniques and information around. Not only could we pass on our
little tricks, we could learn from some masters elsewhere. I hear that the
backyard junk-masters of Cuba, Vietnam, and Iraq could teach us a thing
or two. There are even whispered legends of strange hybrid machines conjured up in Australias Outback.
Its all about independence. When youve just got to have that brand
new thing, the corporate boys got you hooked. Theyve got you buying
sizzle, not steak. It just makes me feel good that I can get by quite nicely
on my sweat, muscle, and ingenuity. Thats the real American Way.

Popple Cop

Understatement of the obvious allows us to characterize our feelings about

conservation law enforcement as a classic love-hate relationship. Few groups
personify the objects of those conicted feelings as fully as Wisconsins Conservation Wardensnot that the wardens of neighboring states paddle smooth
waters and not that their U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service brethren manage to
remain dry in the storms of controversy.
For all that, something about Wisconsins contentious resource conicts and
the Badger States gene pool of talented pilferers of fur, feather, and n have
made for enduring feuds and impressive lore. My personal association with
this stalwart law-enforcement group spans over two decades of working for
the labor union that represents them. During that time, I have had occasion,
formally and informally, to learn of their triumphs and travails. In the departments archives, I learned of attempts on wardens lives, their almost improbable occupational disabilities, and their commendable service. From time
spent with them in taverns, at marinas, and in backwoods shacks, I learned
more about their commitment to conservation, their compassion, and their
condence.
Who to write of, which accounts to relate, and what tone to strike? Those
were the major questions facing me as I sifted material that ranged from folklore to court transcripts. In the end I settled on this piece of lore, not only on
account of congeniality and fond acquaintance with a number of wardens
who could ll these boots, but because this story is, for me, the bridge between
those fabled wardens of yore and the new breed of technically savvy enforcers.
Lets just assume this individual retired not long ago and resumed his own outdoors pursuits in Bayeld County.
25

26

Sp r i n g i n t h e Ea s t

Never seen a warden who didnt recognize from day one that were not
universally liked. Lot of hatred, lot of resentment gets thrown our way.
Were not looking for love; respect is about as good as it gets. You learn
over time that you want to handle yourself in a way that puts in the minds
of the good old boys that it is entirely plausible that you might pinch
them. As in catch them.
Weve never had the coverage youd want in order to do a bang-up job.
And it gets thinner all the time as the politicians play games with naturalresource issues and balance their wacky budget shortfalls on the backs of
frontline employees. But to hear our critics talk, youd think there was a
warden behind every tree and that they all had a sixth sense about sning
out violations. Thats an impression I did nothing to discourage in my
time of over thirty years.
Throw a rock in Wisconsin, and youll hit somebody who says they care
about our resources. Everybody says they love the wildlife. Everybody says
theyre environmentalists. Talk is cheap. Wardens have to go beyond that
kind of talk. They have to feel strongly enough about the conservation
ethic to put life and limb on the line.
More than that, they have to believe in the process by which we develop
our laws, rules, and policies. They have got to believe in the basic equity
and scientic foundation of the rules. That doesnt mean they believe the
rules are perfect, but it does mean that they accept that the rules represent
the best understanding and best political outcome that can be achieved at
a point in time. In my day thats how we looked at it. We had to believe
it; we put ourselves on the line for it.
Its tougher on these new wardens. Theres a disrespect in the process
that has crept in right at the highest levels. Just like our political process
in general has been corrupted by big money, partisanship, and pandering
to yahoos, so has resource policy strayed from the safeguards and professionalism we once built into them. Thats a tougher situation for wardens,
tougher in the practical sense of day-to-day enforcement, and tougher on
the sense of faith and belief in the process itself.
A wardens sense of faith and belief has to be intact to justify the tough
love that permits rigorous conservation law enforcement. Love of the resources, love of the general publics interest in the resources, and, hell,
even love of the knuckleheads who break the law. We just have to believe
that the bitter medicine were pouring down their scrawny throats is good
for what ails them, good for what ails the resources.

Popple Cop

27

That doesnt mean the medicine is a xed prescription. A good warden

knows that this is all a work in progress, knows that scientic knowledge
evolves. But thats the evolution wardens are content to let work out, not
the barter of who bought o whom. For decades, we had a grudging consensus that produced sound policy. Then, starting in the late 1980s, we
abandoned the professional consensus model for one of top-down control
and responsiveness. Guess that leaves a lot depending on who and what
the process is responding to. Right now it looks like it is responding to
two-bit hacks, prima donnas, moral pygmies, and megalomaniacs with no
sense of shame.
What a dilemma for wardens! Wardens need and want to be above all
that. And they sure as hell will try; its just how theyre made. Still, its the
old slippery slope, the old greased pole. A warden just hates to think that
his ethics and honor are compromised. Just hates to think that anyone
would think that hes anything but the straightest of arrow.
How do we get the next generation to do the job if citizens get the idea
that were on the same level as law enforcement in Cowpie Holler? You
know, the law that winks at moonshining and brothels. Thats why we
have statewide resource protection. Leave that job to locals, and pretty
soon you got dierent rules for buddies, brothers-in-law, and the big sh
in the village pond. Thats what wardens prevent, much to the delight of
true lovers of the resources and to the chagrin of the cowboys and potlickers who think its theirs personally, not ours as community.
Its scary to think that we might be forgetting this one lesson in community that I thought we mastered. If the lessons of the old-timers, the
Aldo Leopolds, and the Giord Pinchots go by the boards then were looking at more extinction and more shootouts over carcasses. Id hoped we
were past that. Maybe not.
People gotta give us something to work with. We start with that love
of the outdoors, that awe of wild things, and that respect for the rules that
are mans best attempt to keep order in that natural kingdom that we have
reordered over time. There have always been candidates for such work. I
think therell always be those undeterred by stakeouts of lying in swamps
all night or tracking dumb poachers through snowdrifts at twenty below
zero. Will we be able to hold them through thirty-year careers if society
doesnt hold up the other end of the deal?
Thats no small matter in resources protection. That youthful enthusiasm in the warden force needs to be balanced with veteran enforcement

28

Sp r i n g i n t h e Ea s t

experience. That comes with the time of sucient duration to learn all
the poacher tricks, the local wildlife patterns, the terrain, and to build up
an army of informants. You only keep people that long if they feel that the
system is watching their back. When the entity they work for is part of
the problem, I doubt well keep them.
Wardens dont mind the name-calling. Ive heard things like jack-pine
sheris, bear-turd patrol, and walleye police. One of my drunken snitches
used to call me a popple cop, referring to the many hours I spent in the
paper companies aspen lands.
Being mocked, despised, and scorned is nothing to a warden if the system is working. Wardens have paid their dues in blood to make it work.
Wardens have taken axes to the head. Theyve been tied up and dumped
o shing boats. Theyve been assaulted, beat up in taverns, and stabbed.
Theyve had their cars sabotaged and rebombed. Theyve been pushed
o railroad trestles and thrown o bridges. Theyve taken multiple 30-30
bullets and crawled back home.
But, hell, I guess there was once one warden who survived all that. And,
damn it, there were those who didnt survive. Goes with the job. Just give
them a system that makes the risk worth it. Just try to do that!

The Land Listener

One can appreciate a good story without being a particularly good listener.
It seems, somehow, that there is a distinction between the relatively common
occurrence of being moved by a well-crafted story and the ability to hear
momentous things in everyday conversation. Collectors of tales must, of course,
have such skills if they hope to catch elusive stories and stories of power, especially when those stories ow from the Earth through a human being.
Such attunement didnt come naturally to this writer. What can one say when
one is primarily visual and lapses into failing eyesight? And what of attempts
to develop auditory discernment when ones hearing is ebbing away as well?
The inrmities call for some miracles and some measure of coaching. Some
of our best contemporary environmental writers credit mentors. Perhaps it is
not surprising that more than a few credit a fellow who has grown mythically
since the 1990s. They cast him as a well-known and beloved author, storyteller,
and radio host. More than a few call him the best Midwest storyteller on
Nature and the human place in it. Was he possessed of the wisdom they attribute to him? Did all actually gain an audience with him? Those questions cannot be answered, but his imprint is undeniable.
One writer friend claimed his adventures began with the rather silly
notion of putting together a book and a chance referral to the legendary outdoors wordsmith. He said the old writer seemed to take measure of him and
squinted to determine that, indeed, the book bug had bitten and spread its
infection. Those facts established, the old writer proceeded to conduct perhaps
the most compact and ecient writers clinic in the annals of the craft.
We wont reveal all the secrets of the mentors afternoon seminar in the odd
setting of a tavern on the edge of a city golf course; there are trade secrets that
you dont get until youre admitted to the guild. You might get them when you
29

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Sp r i n g i n t h e Ea s t

buy an older writer a beer in his favorite bar and hoist a glass to honor the
memories of people such as these.
Pay close attention. I can run you through technique, publishing follies,
and market gambling later. The rst order of business is mining the story
vein, nding the raw product. Heres what I do: I listen.
Thats right. Listen. Listen closely. Listen to the solitary voice in the
night. Listen to the banter of crowds. Listen to wise ones and fools. Listen to tree bark growing. Listen to springs gurgling. Listen to your own
thoughts. Listen, most of all, to your own heartbeat.
Yes, imagination counts for something. Yes, you need a palette of many
colors and moods. But if you want to draw readers in, you need tempo and
rhythm. You need to understand how people speak in the private worlds
outside of ocial pronouncements and sound bites. Master the meter of
that vernacular narrative.
Find the place that keys your listening. Thats the spot with just the right
combination to trigger your own right brainleft brain integration. Thats
the habitat where even new and strange voices and opinions will seem
familiar. Thats the locale where all the perplexing stu sorts itself out.
Now, in Wisconsin and adjacent environs, about half the time that setting will be a tavern. Its just a law of geophysics. Undoubtedly, that has
something to do with the latitude and the majoritys Northern European
ancestry. I think the magic has less to do with lubricating beverages than
one might think. By communal consent, taverns are often sanctied space.
Thus we allow certain things to be said and done in these places in a relatively unfettered way.
The tavern works well for the social interplay that reveals how the
human species thinks, on matters small or large, industrial or ecological.
My mind is often o in such a place with familiar personalities who are
always engaged in discussion of the issues of the day.
The solitary or internal dialog usually calls for another setting. Every
child of the Earth must nd his or her own spot for this conversation.
For me it is usually in a canoe, cutting the ripples with determined prow
and stealthily dipping the paddles for almost silent strokes. That gets my
juices owing for pondering Creations business. You must use your own
divining rod to identify your venues. It can be a bait shop or a hunting
shack. Maybe an uncles farmhouse porch or a service buddys basement.

The Land Listener

31

The point is to listen so well in a space that it simply starts talking to

you long-distance. That way you will hear the conversation even when
youre not there. Then youll be able to anticipate future conversations
and retrieve long past ones. You want to be able to tell the stories of those
who value their outdoor relationships and experiences? Its simple. Just
listen.

Farm Fights

Much of how we in the Midwest feel about environmental and land-use questions comes not from conventional natural-resources thinking but rather from
the imprint of agriculture on us. While we in the Great Middle do not have
the sense (or illusion) of having tamed a wild place that exists in parts farther
west, there is still an attitude of having gentled the land a bit in the process
of putting it to human use. In these quarters, the concept of stewardship is
strong.
There is, however, much disagreement over what constitutes good stewardship and just how much human preferences and convenience ts into this
equation. The struggle over the future forms of American agriculture was, perhaps, launched when compassionate Native Americans instructed pilgrims in
the ways of North American crops. But the main battleground of this struggle
has been and will remain the Great Middle of North America.
This tussle is not just about technology and price structures. It is about
patterns of land use and sprawl. It is about the collapse of small villages. It is
about the viability of community infrastructure related to agriculture. Foremost, it is about how rural people will live.
When I rst met farm hell-raisers in the early 1980s it was in context of
ghting farm foreclosures. In the many sad encounters that unfolded in those
times, there were stalwart defenders and steadfast comforters of rural families
in distress. These voices rang out many times with the slogan NO SALE ! but
never in anger. For many farm activists, these words were a righteous proclamation and oath that they labored mightily to uphold. They saw the family
farm as an integral part of our Midwest ecosystem and felt that an injury to
one was an injury to all.
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33

Here is a story based on an account of a farm hell-raiser. It was related with

quiet resolve to a gathering collection of rural folk before a sheri s sale on the
courthouse steps in Menomonee, Wisconsin.
Farming, done right, is part of a good environmental balance. Sure, there
are places that should have never been farmed. But for most places its a
matter of how best to farm and how people t in the picture.
Theres no denying that we have altered the landscape to produce food
and ber. Until recently, it was a slowly evolving process that had a way
of naturally adjusting for mistakes. There might be localized famines and
ruination of land, but there was no threat to the entire species. Now were
at precisely that point. We now have agrotechnologies that are the equivalent of weapons of mass destruction.
There are now threats on an unprecedented scale. We can now destroy
entire ecosystems in a few years, instead of centuries. Investment and marketing decisions made in Zurich or London or New York can clear-cut a
rainforest, put Iowa beef farmers below protability, close a packing plant,
and end up forcing the closure of churches, schools, and hardware stores.
The same decision can spell extinction for species, drive Native peoples
into urban squalor, toxify an ecosystem, destroy an aquifer, and reduce the
overall carrying capacity and livability of the planet. Not a bad days work
for those looking to mass-produce burgers a nickel cheaper.
Some say Im pissing in the wind when I call for turning farmers into
farm ghters. While rugged individualism runs strong in the countryside,
the accompanying traits of love of solitude and minding ones own business seldom are the stu of strong advocacy and collective action. Ive
heard that in many of the big wars they found that many farm boys were
killed without ring a shot from their own weapons; they just didnt have
cruelty in them.
Thats why I try to get them to see ghting in a dierent sense. Just
like you had to convince a soldier farm boy that he had to hold back the
threat to protect his loved ones, you need to convince todays farmers that
there is more at stake than their bottom line. They need to see themselves
as part of something bigger, part of a chain of people and institutions in
a healthy environment. It seems to put more re in their belly when they
can get outraged over what is happening to their families, communities,
and the local ecosystems.

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Sp r i n g i n t h e Ea s t

It seems to me that we need to get rural people to see that there are
competing visions of what will happen to the countryside and that the one
that they are part of is worth ghting for. There is the corporate farm
vision of technology and massive scale. There is the integrative vision of
small-scale, organic, rotational grazing, no-till, and specialty crops. Theres
a place for us all in the second vision, but our children and grandchildren
are o the land in the rst vision.
We need to convince farmers that this second vision is worth ghting
for.
A lot of the trouble revolves around just what ghting means. Im a
hell-raiser by birth and come by it naturally on both sides of the family.
Lots of Irish and Scots blood. But you can see its not easy to get people
to put themselves in a situation where confrontation is a possibility. Only
a few would think that standing up is good at the end of the day if you
end the day in handcus. Fewer still will take a whack on the head to
stand up for a neighbor. Weve got to change this!
I think we need to look to Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. to give
rural people a sense of how we might go about protecting what is important. We need to explain civil disobedience and resistance in a way that
speaks to rural people. We need to tell our stories of the populists, the
farmer-labor coalitions, and anti-foreclosure movements. We need build
ghters out of small acts, taking a neighbors cattle into our pasture so that
the farm credit people cant seize them, or getting his crops in on time to
meet a note. The seeds for this need to sprout right in normal community
stu. Thats why I approach my neighbors at pig roasts and church dinners.
We need to always reach out. Dont let anyone feel alone. Thats how
they pick us o one at a time. They make us feel like incompetent businesspeople. They want to press the line that the changes we see are the result of our failure, not their stacking of the deck. If you can convince just
one farmer to get angry at this lie, you are on your way as a farm ghter.
Get them questioning and keep them questioning.
Its especially good to get them questioning the lies theyve been told
that divide them from potential allies. The Big Boys who run the show
love to shovel manure on farmers and get them mad at city people, environmentalists, unions, and minorities and pull just about any other distraction that will serve to conceal them pulling our shorts right out of our
overalls. Pity is, we often fall for it. We have not built the bridges we need

Farm Fights

35

to or learned from those who have often had more experience at ghting
the Big Boys.
So Im here to tell you that one of the best ways to get ready for our
ght is to talk to that lady with the Save the Whales bumper sticker.
Bring a bushel of apples into a food pantry in town. Get some urban kids
out to visit your farm. Make sure you spend some time with those people
who want to hunt your woods and sh your creek.
When you got them interested and have made the connections, keep
them up to date on whats happening that will impact the environment,
public health, wildlife habitat, and community vitality. Just like Tom Sawyer
whitewashing the fence, youve got to make others feel the fun of being a
farm ghter.

The Quiet in the Land

The Amish, ethnic German pacist Protestants, and other Anabaptists still moving west from strongholds in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Indiana have been in
North America since colonial times, some with families traceable to William
Penns settlement programs for religious dissenters. Their long pedigree has done
little to foster understanding of such groups by the broader culture. They are
by turns admired, mocked, and patronized.
Amish and other Old Order groups concern themselves little with our perceptions about them. They see our world as corrupted and corrupting. They ask
little from us except freedom to pursue their way of life. They are content with
a world of family and church.
Outsiders generally assume that Amish are instinctual environmentalists. At
some levels they are; their long-established farming practices provide a foundation for sustainable agriculture. But the picture is more complicated than
that. They are usually gentle with the land, but on occasion stubbornly cling
to unsound practices because of cost considerations or resistance to regulation.
The Amish almost never participate in broader political or communityorganizing eorts, even when they might benet from doing so. This has frustrated generations of abolitionists, rural populists, and social activists who saw
them as potential allies. It has caused socially attuned observers to give such
groups the appellation of the quiet in the land. It is not an entirely friendly
label, betraying some frustration with those who hold strong values but see little need to engage them in a community context.
One exception to this passive approach was the Amish objection to expansion
of the militarys Central Wisconsin bombing range. This put them in the same
corner as the Ho-Chunk Nation, tourism interests, mainstream environmentalists, and peace activists. Their position paper made for interesting reading. It
36

The Quiet in the Land

37

outlined their Bible-based opposition to war and their desire for a life removed
from contention. Still the reader came away with the impression that their
biggest concern was that low-lying bombers would spook horses.
The explanation below, overheard and pieced together from conversation at a
Hillsboro, Wisconsin, farm sale, gives us a glimpse into a dierent worldview.
There is no Amish position on most things. There is no Amish pope or
chairman. We are a loosely connected group of settlements with shared religious beliefs and values. How those beliefs and values are carried out can
be dierent in dierent places.
The people and the local bishops work out what dierent things might
be allowed. If someone feels strongly about doing a certain thing, he just
might move to a settlement that allows it. If a settlement does something
that goes too far for other settlements, then it might be out of fellowship
with the rest of us. That happens and has even caused splits and started
new groups.
People ask me all the time where these rules come from. There is no one
expert to answer such a question. People look at us and see a group that
does not change. Yet we have changed much in my lifetimeit is how we
change and how fast we change that might fool them.
Based on what I have seen in my fty years of life, I would point to
three things that shape what we do. Understand that this is just me talking. A church bishop might think dierently. Someone in an Iowa settlement might see it another way.
I think that we have three things to go on. First, the Bible, then what
is good in nature, and, nally, what works for the settlement. Sometimes
all of this is considered at the same time, and people in the settlement can
come to the same feeling for dierent reasons.
The Bible is the most important for us. But others are always surprised
how few things it covers for us. It does not say anything about telephones,
cars, how to farm, or which doctor to deal with. So you can look there for
guidance on what is right and what is wrong, but God leaves it to us to
decide what day to put the corn in.
Nature is the guide on many things. We must pay attention to how
things work where we live. Even we Amish can miss important things if
we do not pay attention. One fellow moved up here from the South and
said, I always plant so-and-so. That does not always work. You must pay

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attention to what kind of ground you have, what the rain situation is, how
hard the winters are, and so forth. So much of what we do is just plain
common sense. As my father said though, we would be better o if common sense was a bit more common.
The settlement also helps decide what is proper. We do this in a dierent way than you might think; it is a little hard to explain. We do not vote
in any way you would recognize. We rarely even have a meeting about
such things. If there is a meeting, it probably means there has been more
fuss than we care for.
Now our bishops actually get to decide the settlement rules. But a
bishop who makes too many decisions in a direction people do not want
to go will soon have an empty settlement. So bishops must do as much listening as they do talking. Since our bishops are farmers like the rest of us,
they already know what is going on.
I guess we are always talking about little changes all the time. It just
takes a while to work out. Men will talk at the feed mill or the sale barn.
You might visit in another settlement and see how they tried something
dierent. Women might come up with something while canning together.
Even the young people might come up with something that works better
in the school.
In the end, all those beliefs and reasons must be good for the group.
Most of what we decide not to do does not have anything to do with
sin or right or wrong. It has to do with whether it keeps us together and
whether most of our young people stay with us. Much of what we do that
seems old-fashioned, we do because it makes us work together. This means
shared labor, a role for people of all ages, and neighbors helping neighbors.
If we did not follow that rule, we soon would be like everybody else. It
is not the machinery or the electricity that makes the dierence. I have
seen settlements in other parts of the country with dry planting seasons
that must get the seeds in the ground quick. They allow steel-wheel tractors for that and do everything else by hand and with horses.
Another thing that is not understood about us is that we move. Many
people think that we stay in one place forever. As my children move away
to start other farms, some will ask me if they do not feel connected to the
land. We do, we feel connected to Gods land no matter where we are.
It is our way of life on the land that makes the dierence. It might
sound too proud to say that we help the land become what it is supposed

The Quiet in the Land

39

to be. I have seen non-Amish angry because we coaxed crops out of the
ground they had trouble with. Many do not like it if we make a living
where they could not.
Part of the problem comes down to what they expected out of the land.
If you expect a rich mans life, you probably will be disappointed. If you
expect a good life for your family and a place where your church community can grow, that is a little easier to see happening. You cannot ght the
land; you have to work with it and trust in God.

The Log House

One must have a hefty mixture of luck and opportunity to harvest the blessings
of diverse voices and lessons concerning the land. Some encounters seem like
destiny, others like pure accident. But some voices seem like they were always
there, and you cant place them in a chronology of growth of consciousness.
Perhaps those voices are more dicult to place in any linear scheme because
they speak to us deeply. Perhaps they echo some part of our own voices that
we werent paying close enough attention to. Perhaps such a voice is part of a
deeper collective voice that has claim on our souls.
In this collection, other voices speak on behalf of the joys of simplicity and
connection to place. Ones ability to hear and connect with such voices might
be traceable to inuential voices of not fully understood kinship. Many anities and alliances arise from anothers ability to articulate things we cannot
nd words for, yet feel deeply. If we are fortunate, a few of these contacts might
blossom into deeper brotherhood or sisterhood.
It is possible to have kin of and in the land. They may not always be on the
same page as each other. They can nevertheless be important teachers in almost
every aspect of the relationship between humans and Nature. Number yourself
among the fortunate if you have those who challenge you and the dominant
society. Here is a representative lesson gleaned from homesteaders in the woods
of Lincoln County, Wisconsin.
Theres something about old-time homesteading, self-provisioning, and
voluntary simplicity that opens up a world of possibilities. In a life of
labor on the land for a modest living, there is an opportunity to move past
our desires for commercial entertainment and stimulation. We learn that
40

The Log House

41

neighbors and networks can ll these desires. There can even be learning
in those relationships.
I have read quite a bit about such things. I have written my share,
helped put out the old North Country Anvil. My correspondents have
ranged from Wendell Berry to Howard Zinn (guess Im missing an A).
Ive conferenced and convened with various greens, bioregionalists, smallis-beautiful advocates, sustainable-agriculture types, redneck loggers, and
assorted woods hippies. There is a rich diversity of views out there, much
good information, and much opportunity for synergy.
Yet, I most treasure the more quiet moments of hospitality received
and given in the humble surroundings that most of us call home. The real
lessons of the good and simple life on this planet can be had in a multitude of places. Ive had them in lakeside cottages, old stone farmhouses,
and inner-city apartments. Thats the place we work out the relationships
we have with each other and our roles as dwellers in a place.
In my case it is the Log House. The Log House is more than just the
place I nd my pillow at night. It is the center of my life and an intersection of other lives. It is a focal point for many stories.
The story begins with its location, in the woods of the farm my father
pried loose from the stumps and stones of the New Wood River country.
So theres the family legacy of sweat and toil, but also the childhood memories of seasons passing and unfolding life. It has birthed many a dream of
what could be in the countryside. Dreams that I sometimes share with my
father. Dreams that sometimes bring laughter and sometimes tears.
The structure itself is a story. The Log House replaced a nearby cottage
that succumbed to age and poor foundations. The Log House is a hundredyear-old tamarack building taken down miles away. There are stories in
those logs and their journey. There are stories in the help of friends on
this project. There are even stories in the hand-dug hole for the cellar and
the glacial rocks Dad and I mortared together for walls and a chimney.
So you fool around, bang your thumb with a hammer, watch some ungraceful helpers threaten life and limb, cobble here, and innovate there.
Then youve got yourself a house and the makings of a home. It starts to
be a home when it ts you and its place like an old shoe. When you have
trouble imagining yourself dwelling in another place, its home. When
every jar of garden bounty and every stick of cookstove kindling are in
the place they need to be, its home. When you know tomorrows weather

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by the curl of the chimney smoke or the whistle of wind in the eaves,
its home.
But others help dene home for you too. You can just about get your
ll of roof patching, foundation cracks, and thousands of other things
that go with the handmade house. Then visitors will arrive, and you get
to see it with new eyes. If you see cares melt away from a fretful face, you
know youve made a decent retreat. If they settle into nooks and fall asleep
reading, you have captured peace. If they are grinning with a big northern
pike fresh-caught for lunch, youve allowed them to connect. If they come
back from their morning walks with excited chatter about a black bear and
beavers, youve given them a gift.
Better yet is when they settle in after a few days and dont even notice
it. Their appetites grow, and they forget they dont usually eat hearty
breakfasts with several slabs of fresh-baked bread. They get limber and
dont mind splitting a face-cord of rewood. Suddenly they dont need
to worry anymore, and a ve-mile walk or a ten-mile canoe trip is not a
big deal. If they just fall into the patterns of a house in the woods without even thinking about it, well, you might just have shifted how they see
living or what living could be.
Then theres the potential that goes with all this. If you are sitting
with your guests in the evening, just listening to wood pop and crackle
in the stove and wolves in the distance, you should get some local visitors.
It works out best if those at the door look like redneck loggers or hermit
hemp lovers. Theyll come in and surprise your guests because, despite
scruy looks, theyll have lives of reading by kerosene lamp and years of
silent contemplation to share. In this transaction your guests will get a
glimpse of a network of houses in the woods and armation that there are
those without PhDs who have thought deeply about life on this Earth and
its ecological implications.
Ive been told by guests that these conversations by the woodstove have
added to their perspectives and have given them something to think about
back in the city. These thoughts include the big stu, the taking care of
breathing and nutrition on Spaceship Earth. But just as important are the
small things, the shared labor and community gardening. There is much
of the pace and feel of the country that can be lived in the city.
Anyway, these visits and encounters make the Log House feel like a
home for more than my family and myself. Its not perfect, but it speaks

The Log House

43

to something very basic in those who want to live on the land. We can feel
something in such a place, a bit of Thoreau and a bit of Whole Earth Catalog. In such a place, we can work out the tangle of myths and archetypes
that we have about the simple life. We can balance the romantic notions
with sweat and callus equity. We can temper the deceptions of rugged individualism with the gentle lessons of cooperative economics.
Such homes are the essential unit in an ecologically functional culture.
They are the building block. When you see and participate with those engaged in simple living, you can see greater potential. You start asking what
if questions.
What if the countryside were reinvigorated by networks of those devoted to low impact on the environment? What if such people built cooperative communities that altered the way we teach our young and govern
ourselves? What if people stopped assuming that bigger is better and that
centralization is inevitable?
One thing that seems to work better in a house in the woods is the old
sense of possibilities. No doubt about it, there is bad stu happening and
situations that look grim. But a place like the Log House gives me room
for some detachment from the engineered crises of the political elites and
the avor-of-the-day remedies of the professional activists. Maybe its not
for everybody, but it is my refuge and inspiration.

The Old Ways

Much has been said, not all of it friendly, about those among us who yearn
for the simpler ways of the days past. The critics of such yearnings are quick
to point out the disease and grinding labor of the good old days. The whole
dispute is often painted as a holy war between the forces of modernism and
reaction. The road to this philosophical fray is strewn with the wreckage of
social conict over global trade, human rights, environmental protection, and
religious belief. Its not tidy terrain, and its components are uid enough to
allow high-tech industry and indigenous people to be temporarily allied on one
issue and American conservatives and liberation theologians on another.
Even when united on a course of action, those on either side of the nostalgia divide may nd themselves with a multitude of motivations and agendas.
The golden past, after all, is an elastic thing selectively remembered according
to the needs of those touting it. The same impulse that elevates the memory of
Jeersonianism can neglect to recognize human bondage and eradication of
natives associated with its ascendancy.
While I was to meet a fair number of Midwest folks prepared to instruct me
in the ways of simple living, the missionary zeal of many simplicity advocates was
somewhat daunting. Some, if allowed to be dictator for a day, might have produced something similar to Pol Pots Cambodia. Others possessed Rube Goldbergian technological notions as absurd as Chairman Maos backyard steel furnaces.
I hasten to add that I met many kind and non-authoritarian disciples of
scaling down and scaling back. They are scattered throughout Iowa, Minnesota, and Wisconsin, and they often are the backbone of local grassroots ecology
networks. They often struggle, however, to shape a vision drawn out of a past
they did not experience. Few have any memory of how community functioned
before mass culture.
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The Old Ways

45

It seems more useful to consult a bridge to that past, if not a human time capsule. I consider myself lucky to have shared the truck cab with several such sources
on draft horse forays throughout Wisconsin and into Illinois, Missouri, Iowa,
and Minnesota. The earthy information relayed on such rides could ll a book.
But heres a sample that captures a night ride on the way to Waukon, Iowa.
I dont know what the fuss is about living with the old ways. You can call
it fancy words like sustainable or dress it up like its rebellion of some
kind. But the way I see it, you either know how the human critter is supposed to work, or you dont. If you need to put a label on it, I prefer to
call it plain living. I guess you could call plain living a statement of sorts,
with the emphasis on living in a way that puts you right in the middle of
every piece of your own survival.
The reason I like the old ways is because they keep you honest, force
you to recognize that we come from good honest dirt and will go back to
it. This is where self-reliance is born and bred. Those who can shift for
themselves have a leg up in the survival game. Thats the opposite of highly
evolved modern people; theyre totally dependent on technologies they
themselves cannot operate and on raw materials from far away. They like
to zip around and think of themselves as independent, but theyre highly
dependent. They dont know turnip seed from jellybeans. When the lights
go out, they wet their pants.
Well, live and let live, I say. Or live and let the other dingleberry die, as
the case might be. But dont look for a lot of approval for living with the
old ways. In fact, youre better o doing it on the sly. Our family has been
doing that since the seventeenth century in the Hudson Valley in New
York. Every couple generations we just moved a little further west to nd
a pocket out of the way of progress. I was born down in the Illinois atland, but it got so you couldnt fart down there without government intervention. So up to southwest Wisconsin I come. One step, for now, ahead
of the big green pickle machine that they call agribusiness.
You cant ght agribusiness and government; you need to ignore them.
Satans Peckerheads is what my Old Man always called them. You dont
want to bend over for them; just move on when they decide to improve
or reform your neighborhood. Just move on to the next piece of ignored
and marginal piece of ground. Thats the key to living with the old ways;
you can make it work where the big green pickle machine wont go.

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Then you got to gure out how you want to go about it. There are
old ways and then there are old ways. Were not all cut out to live like Old
Order Amish. For my part, I like a mix of technologies. I got my fortyyear-old tractor, a Minneapolis Moline U. I plow my corn and oat ground
with that. But I like to cut hay and cornbind and grainbind with a good
team of Belgians. Ill use a chainsaw when theres a big old tree that needs
to be dropped. But for bucking up rewood Ill run the belt from the U to
the buzz saw or, if theres a young back around, get out the two-man crosscut saw. Im more modern than the Old Man. He didnt care for electric.
But I like my reading light and refrigerator. Ill just skip the telephone, to
keep it quiet back on my lane.
The point of the old ways is to not get ahead of yourself. Dont do
things that you and your piece of ground cant handle. Thats what happens to some of these clodhoppers, they get caught up in the latest stu
and over-borrow and work like dogs. Next, theyre full of stress and the
bank is greasing their hole for one more hootenanny. Finally the poor
buggers are run out the countryside, yelling like cats dragging their balls
across a hot skillet.
Youre going to hear some people say that the old ways are nothing but
backbreaking hard work. Theres some sweat involved, this is true. I dont
deny that you need some degree of piss and vinegar to take on this life.
Youll soon know whether youve got the spunk for it. The thing is, I nd
that Im more of my own man on this old-time schedule than my neighbors are, with all the latest doodads. Theyre always xing something, worried about something, or applying for more credit. I know what it takes to
get by, and I choose not to get overextended. Like the Old Man said, Dont
stick your thing through the knothole unless you got some to spare.
You got to nd the thing that you can build your piece of the old ways
around. None of the old-timers were good at everything; they just knew
enough to get by at everything. But the real satisfaction of the old ways
comes with having something that you connect with. Maybe you can
grow apples and make cider. Maybe you can run the tidiest ock of sheep
in four counties. Maybe you can wood carve with the best of them. The
things is to nd that thing that tickles your fancy, the thing that just
thinking about will bring a smile to your face.
For me that thing is horses. Horses are in my blood. The Old Man said
our people were cavalrymen in four American Wars. We had kin who were

The Old Ways

47

blacksmiths, wagon-makers, wheelwrights, and teamsters. For my money,

the domestication and training of horses will always be the most signicant human achievement. I dont care if we do go to the stars, the rst step
in the human journey started on a horse. Horse apples to those who say
otherwise.
Draft horses are the supreme culmination of the equine beast. Their
power is a joy to behold and a pleasure to work. Those who have not held
the reins on a team of twenty-two-hundred-pound-apiece animals have
no idea of the potential there. They can do what machines cant. You can
work clay ground without packing it. You can work right turns in small
elds. And you can pull logs out of our Driftless woods and leave the land
intact.
Thats one good standard in which to judge the old ways. Its like the
ancient rule of medicinerst do no harm. Thats how I look at it. If a
new way is easy on people and the land, then, hell, consider it. But if
it scars the land past your own lifetime, puts your neighbor out of work,
and requires a huge army of thugs to nail down your raw materials, well,
buster, youre pissing on the wrong re plug. Same with an old way, if new
information or methods come to light, then go with the thing thats more
gentle on your ground and your neighbors.
Im as individualistic as anybody youre going to meet toward the closing of the twentieth century. But I dont subscribe to the philosophy that
my wants trump your needs. Im of a mind that any act against the air
your neighbor breathes or the water he drinks is an act of war. But we live
in a time of little brains and even littler balls. So most people, instead of
getting a strong piece of rope and taking care of those who are poisoning
us, keep all that anger inside until someone cuts them o in a trac jam
that they have to be nuts to be in the rst place. If such behavior isnt proof
that theres something in the water, I dont know what is.
You got to just pull back from all that stu. Dont waste time on stu
meant to whip you up against other people. Theres no surer bet that you,
your ground, and your neighbors are in for a gouging than to hear some
fancy-pants tell you that somebody else is causing a problem. If somebody
in Timbuktu is praying to the god of cats and interbreeding with spider
monkeys, the fancy-pants will get you all worked up about it. Meanwhile
their arms are elbow-deep in your wallet and your shorts. But damn if we
havent turned into a society where cow pies ll the space between most

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ears. Instead of taking care of their own ground and their own kin and
neighborhoods, theyd just as soon put a check in the mail to one of those
windbag fancy-pants.
All you can do is try to stay out of their way. So if you really want to
live the old ways, stay loose and ready to move. And stay on the lookout
for new ground where there are not so many people in your hair or down
your asscrack.

Summer in the South

Warriors Path

Commitment and combativeness were frequently encountered among those defending the land and waters of our region in those robust times of the late 1980s.
It was a time when Earth First! and other direct-action ecological defense
groups started to make their presence known around the Upper Great Lakes
and Mississippi headwaters. It was a time when environmental activist gatherings, at least those held outside the oce suites of the mainstream groups
based in Madison, started to percolate with talk of civil disobedience and tactics with even more explosive impact.
Some of the talk was just hot air leaking out of easily punctured balloons.
Some of the blather was nothing more than the pose of those wishing to polish
their radical credentials. Some of the chatter issued from the mouths of those
with minds so muddled that they truly constituted a threat to themselves. And
some of the babble issued from those consciously engaging in guerrilla theater.
It was my perception that much of the talk remained simply that, with little
follow-up or follow-through. It was also my impression that those willing to act
on direct-action impulses were also the least likely to talk about it. Like most
special forces, this cadre of eco-defenders was willing to live in the shadows
and act individually or in small cohesive groups.
One cheerful exception was our Objibwe friend from Red Cli. Suce it to
say that he cut a wide swath through the environmental politics and community activism of his time. But one of his most notable contributions to evolving
eco-defense sensibilities was his concept of responsible direct action. Like most
of his political style, his notion of eco-defense was an amalgam of contemporary marketing technique and traditional Ojibwe values.
Being on the Warriors Path is a lot dierent than being on the warpath. The
Warriors Path is about learning self-control, developing self-knowledge,
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and balancing action with contemplation. Its a spiritual journey that must
come from a deep spot within the soul. It has nothing to do with a warpath that is reactive, vengeful, and in the grip of the emotion of the
moment.
The Warriors Path is an old tradition that was shared by every preindustrial culture in which some segment of people sought to better understand themselves and Creation. So you dont have to be a Native, you dont
have to be male, you dont have to have rippling muscles, and you dont
even have to own a .30-30. All you need is the desire to transform your
heart to the heart of a warrior. You can be a ninety-pound woman with
arms like limp spaghetti or be on a motorized wheelchair and still be a
warrior.
Its true that you can nd the idealized or romanticized version of the
warrior in many Native American tribes. But thats also true if you stop
in at many American Legion posts. Theres the so-called glory of war and
many people itching for a ght. Thats not what the true traditional warrior was about.
The true warrior was always about defense, not aggression. Such a warrior was about restoration of balance, not scorched-earth policies. A warrior
out of the old tribal way stood to defend his family, clan, and village, not
to take furs or oil from others. Such a warrior oered his life out of love,
not anger or deance.
It is in love that the true warrior nds his motivation and understanding. I dont mean as some dizzy-headed ower-plucker. I mean love as zest
for life and openness to everything in Creation. Such a warrior has a deep
and abiding relationship with Nature. Nature is his ally and companion,
not an obstacle to be overcome.
Those on the Warriors Path are guided by watching and listening to
Nature. Thats where you nd lessons of survival. Thats where you nd
lessons in camouage. Thats where you learn how to move through the
environment. You learn your kinship in these maneuvers, how close you
actually are to the trees and the rocks.
Thats why shape-shifting comes naturally to the spiritual warrior. You
might think of it as the territory of wizards capable of physically assuming the form of owls or coyotes. But most of us lack the rareed talents
needed for such maneuvers. It is, though, within the reach of us to defend
the Earth by the assumption of other guises and identities. It is a useful

Warriors Path

53

skill to be able to move through an unfriendly human setting and not

bring undue attention to ones self. Native Americans get more practice at
these techniques than many white people. We have more occasions to be
seen as old, inrm, or intoxicated rather than as someone plotting their
next move.
Sometimes Im asked about how a person goes from victim to warrior.
Well, Ive mentioned love, all-encompassing love of the Earth and all
things in life. Thats the start, but then you must use that love as a tool of
conquest. This is where the confusion about warriors comes in, for being
a warrior is about conquest. Its just not about conquest of territory or
people; this conquest begins inside and works toward the outside. The
internal conquest is the basis for everything that follows.
First you conquer your own fear. That does not mean you oer your
life up in some giddy euphoria. You simply make friends with your fear
and tell him to step aside. Then you conquer your hate. You strive for
purity and detachment, making sure youre in a good space from which
to take action. Finally, you conquer greed. This means the destruction of
attachments to things, status, and all the stu were told is necessary for a
meaningful modern life. Such a warrior only needs food, oxygen, and water
and will place high value on those things. Value enough to risk everything
for them.
Conquest of fear, hate, and greed inside of ones self prepares the way
for thoughtful defense of the Earth. Not that anyone achieves perfection
in these conquests, since these enemies will keep sending raiding parties
to test you. But an earnest striving toward the internal conquest enables
right action, guided action that takes its cues from natural systems. This
means seeking the wisdom of Creation to guide action and then taking responsibility for that action. Its not a foolproof system to avoid ends-versusmeans tangles, but it gets you asking the right questions and makes you
less likely to rationalize impulses to strike out. I mean, can you imagine
a warrior schooled in such an approach using an herbicide or biological
weapon to accomplish his task?
This is why one on the Warriors Path in dedication to defense of the
Earth thinks not of destruction or violence. Those things are distinguished
from forceful action, which stops destruction and thwarts violence. Such an
approach calls for creativity and focus on a high order. It also means you
must deter the spasm of lashing out. What you do must be thoughtful

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and provoke thought. Even if it remains a faceless and unattributed act, it

should provide clear evidence of the great love that motivated it.
If you cant be sure if your planned actions are up to these standards,
then you might want to put them o. At minimum, doubts on your part
are good reason not to bring anyone else in on it. There are ways the
warrior cultivates intuition and inner-knowing that helps clarify direction
and appropriate action. That type of knowledge is also part of the Warriors Path.
I cant tell anyone here what they should do. But since Ive been asked
how a warrior proceeds I have given you my answer. Whatever you do,
make sure it comes from love. Take responsibility for it in your own heart
even if done in necessary stealth. And always keep an eye and an ear on
Nature to get the lessons and guidance you need.

A Mound with a View

There are those among us who sometimes think that true connection with
Nature is facilitated by the adventurous life. This school of thought places a
premium on rigors undertaken in search of wild places. But such impulses
probably ow from the no pain, no gain outlook that places devotees on a
higher plane than more cautious mortals.
Its likely that some of us require these triggers in our knothead phase in
order to open up to beauty and meaning. Others get hooked on the rush and
the thrills and never see or experience anything. Then there are those who lead
relatively quiet lives and come to beauty and meaning without all the fuss.
One such quiet approach that has worked for millennia is the monastic life
in varied forms. Peace inevitably brings all but the most frenzied of minds to
connection with Nature. For the devout, it can happen prayerfully. For those
of dierent spiritual bent it can happen by meditation. Even those of overpowering intellect benet from the room for contemplation that exists in such
communities.
It is true that occasionally such communities come under the sway of mesmerizing and rigid despots. But it seems far more common that such places
generate gentle theologies, provide structure in which teachings might be studied and appreciated, and grant haven to those who seek it.
This last function was no small matter in the holocaust of the Inquisition.
Nonconformity, quirky behavior, and sacred views of Nature survived more
readily in sleepy orders far from the insanity of civil and ecclesiastical thugs.
Thus, a Hildegard von Bingen revered in one setting and timeframe could
have easily been consigned to ames in another.
Hopefully were in a more mellow era at present, and sanctuary needs are
less pressing. Still, those who intentionally skip the hustle, bustle, and hassle
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nd their way to Earth-caring and soul-tending. We have one such community in the southern reaches of Grant County, Wisconsin. Its a unique collection of individual Catholic Sisters with diverse understandings of the nexus
between spirituality and Earth connection. Sustainable agriculture and ecology meetings in the tri-state area often relied on the clear and calm voice of a
Farm Sister who sounded something like this.
So many connections are made through this community. That is a lesson
of Nature in itself. The natural world has few things in isolation of one
another. Theres interdependence and mutual learning. Look closely and
theres a web of tiny relationships in the natural world that make things
rich and productive. Its the same thing here.
Its easy to think of us being away from things here. We are separate
in some minor respects, and yet there are so many threads connecting us
to the wider world. There are the lines of connection to all the institutions
our retired Sisters served. There are the parishes of this region. There are
the various ministries we relate to. And there are linkages to other communities of faith.
Were in an auspicious place to realize such interconnections. Sinsinawa
Mound is a beautiful spot with a wonderful view of the area. So you can
visually see how the towns, farms, elds, and woodlots t together. You can
also see that while were in a tri-state area, close to two political boundaries, that there are no lines painted on the ground.
Thats an important point to the people we relate to in our various
networks. It helps remind us that there is unity in the natural system even
when it is divided up in articial political jurisdictions. It helps us understand that we in this spot have more in common with our Iowa and Illinois
neighbors than any of us have with those controlling unnatural systems in
Madison, Springeld, and Des Moines.
The fallacies of articial boundaries become more apparent when the
fringes are so far from political centers that the disconnect and neglect
are brought into sharp relief. Thats the signal for those of us out on the
fringes to be more self-reliant, to utilize the networks available to us, and
look to what models are available directly from Creation.
Its a world where neighbors and relationships matter more than formal
arrangements. The lessons are right there in the ways of living that have
long been practiced and preserved in rural communities. You buy local.

A Mound with a View

57

You listen to local wisdom about what works. You honor the experience
of those who have gone before. You value every member and every part for
what they can contribute.
Community makes this possible by a supportive system that gives us
gentle reminders, schedules, and observances. Life is balanced through
work, worship, and celebration. Theres a rhythm to all this that keeps
us mindful of Earth cycles. The supportive system also gentles our lives
through shared work and shared resources. Spiritual depth and Earth connection are made easier when life is not continual drudgery. This is something the individualist purists sometimes miss out on. Properly structured,
community life can give one more solitary time.
Then there are the overlapping communities. For us thats not only
our Methodist and Lutheran neighbors in their congregations. It includes
the cooperatives, the locally controlled nance people, the various civic
and fraternal groups, and the various charitable associations and support
groups. Its the whole range of those who can be called upon for solutions.
Dont get me wrong, theres more to it than just technical assistance in
starting up business arrangements, holding fundraising dinners, and giving
sound agricultural advice. No, the same people who do those things are
also the core of emotional and spiritual support in this life of rural stewardship. Most bring faith to those tasks, and those who dont speak the
language of faith at least bring connection.
We have a visitor, a Methodist layperson who lives over in Iowa, who
kind of exemplies this broad sense of caring for rural land and rural
people. Hes a businessman who raises some beef. In nearly ten years of
visiting our conferences and retreats we have seen only his thoughtful side
and his attention to those dispensing information. But we learn indirectly
from pastors, extension agents, farm advocates, and social workers that
this quiet man has found ways to implement his faith in almost every
aspect of rural life.
He loans equipment to young neighbors. He bought a headstone and
burial plot for a cancer-stricken child of a poor family. He helped a group
of local farmers get a sustainable agriculture grant. He arranged for a preservation group to purchase a conservation easement on a heavily eroded
farm owned by an elderly and frail couple and then organized a local
sportsmens group to do remedial work on gullies and stream banks. Not
a single beneciary of his acts was a member of his church, but they all

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belonged to one of his overlapping communities. We can be honored to

say that he met some of the people who facilitated his good works here.
Still, he honors us with this attendance and living witness.
Several of us discovered a similar member of our overlapping communities when we attended the memorial service of a woman we know from
quilting events in the tri-state area. She was a childless widow and retired
Lutheran Social Services caseworker. We learned more about her in those
few hours than we had in years of knowing her from quilt exhibitions.
It turned out she was involved in many ways in the arts. She had inherited money and had endowed art scholarships for rural students. She
helped organize trips for farm kids to city museums and galleries. She did
the same to get urban kids out in the country. In addition, she had an
impressive record of focusing arts-community attention on rural culture
and natural beauty. It says a lot about a person when their memorial service brings together hundreds of people who never met each other before.
Its a joy to discover youre a part of overlapping communities that you
didnt even know existed.
Thats whats so nice about our view from the Mound. So much constant connection, but every morning brings a fresh look and a new sight.

Making Sparks Fly

The Great Lakes tribes have produced a whole new generation of environmentally attuned leaders and activists who have made signicant contributions to evolving ecological sensibilities in the Midwest. Most draw upon both
the Earth-attunement of their spiritual traditions and the political model of
the American Indian Movement. Many are in their forties and fties and
draw lessons from established social movements. A growing number are in
their twenties and thirties and look at things more from an antiglobalization perspective.
There were not a lot of established role models for this reawakening of tribal
activists in the 1970s and 1980s. Many of those trying to nd their roots looked
to the nineteenth century and the great chiefs. Others looked to aging keepers
of sacred practices who lived in seclusion. A few even found inspiration in
European-American methods of community organizing.
Our Objibwe friend of Red Cli introduced many of us to one of the
people of his fathers generation who inspired him. The circumstances involved
a range of treaty rights, forestry, and antimining activities from the state capitols of the Midwest to the secluded teaching lodges of drum societies in Michigans Upper Peninsula. Many remembered a Menominee elder, a World War
II marine in a wheelchair, who was comfortable in any environment but at
his best talking to the throng of boys who gathered around him and his sta of
eagle feathers.
We will pass this sta around so you each can share in its sacredness and
its power. This is called the Protect the Earth sta. It has many eagle
feathers, and each represents a path that dierent people take on the journey to knowing and loving this Earth. This sta has passed through the
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hands of many who share this respect for the Earth, and they have carried
it throughout our region to places where the Earth is under attack.
All people who respect the land have sacred stories about the eagle.
Those stories take dierent forms, and each has lessons to teach us about
this powerful creature. The eagle reminds us of strength, of soaring above,
of higher realms, of freedom, and of vision. Among Native American people, its feather is often associated with the passage into the realm of the
warrior.
But I want to tell you about the role of eagle as guardian or protector.
The eagles vision allows him to be vigilant. His circling at great height
gives him an overview of things, he sees the overall scheme of things and
notices the slightest disturbance in Nature. His strength gives him swiftness of action and lightning reexes. His connection to Spirit gives him
courage and a clear head.
We need more of you young ones to learn the lessons of Eagle the Protector. Like any type of love, you must come to your love of the Earth by
your own path. It is this love that you discover and grow along the way
that allows you to assume a role as protector. This love is what allows you
to feel that all things in Nature are your relatives. And it lets you know
that there is a place for each skill in the work of protecting the Earth.
Some of you will move away from here and live in the cities. You can
take eagle lessons into those neighborhoods. Others will go o to college
and learn things that may be of use back here. You might learn how to
better manage our precious forest or how to better take care of the Wolf
River. Others might learn how our people can better run our tribal government and plan for development. A few of you might even go o into
the military and learn the soldiers way. If you do, keep the vision of the
Wolf River and our dark, dark forests in your eagle eye. It will protect you
and help you learn the warrior skills that can serve your people when you
return.
That was my story, to go to learn to be a warrior, to learn discipline, to
conquer and understand my own heart, and then to apply all those lessons
to the tasks that the Creator and the Elders placed before me. I was always
ready for such learning, eager to test myself. Thats why they called me
Sparky. A spark jolts people into action. A spark kindles the ame that
brings light and warmth. The spark of life can be seen in the eye of the
eagle. The spark is the birth of all things.

Making Sparks Fly

61

A true protector brings spark to all things. That is the spark to do all
things well and to do them out of love for the Earth. So if your job is to
dig a ditch, bring that spark of love to the job and dig that ditch with
respect for Nature and give thanks for the opportunity to serve. If you
are asked to sit as judge over the disagreements between our people, bring
your spark of love and the eagles sharp senses to that task as well. If it
falls to you to decide matters of justice, then give justice as an eagle would
and consider the river and forests that you watch over. Know that there
is honor in digging the ditch and deciding how our ways should bind our
people.
Our Menominee stories tell us that our privileges and obligations come
from the Creator, who breathed the spark of life into all of us. We once
had the Midewin Lodge, the Four Degrees, the Eleven Bands, and the
Dream Dance to guide us in our understanding of how to become protectors. Much of that old knowledge is gone, but the Spirit of itthe
Spirit given to us by the river and forestcan still be found by those
who search with the eagles eye and light the spark of love of the Earth.
When I was a boy like all of you, I knew an old man. He was a Midewin
medicine man. As a boy he had gone as a volunteer in the American Civil
War. So he learned to be a warrior, but he learned much more about
how love of the Earth is a strong medicine, even in war. He taught me this
prayer.
That mystic power, that force that is in man himself and all living things,
comes from the Creator and goes back to him through us. That mystic
power comes only from living in a good way, by doing only what is good,
by doing good by all living things, and by doing good by the Mother Earth
which gives us breath. He who lives by doing good will be helped by the
Creator and will live in that mystic power.

So it is good that you young ones are here in this place today. Listen
to what is said about protecting the Earth. Carry that Protect the Earth
sta within your heart, and know that you are now part of the great circle
that has carried it in their hands. Go from this place in the Spirit of Eagle
the Protector. Above all, nd in each day a way to capture the spark that
Creator has sent to each of us.
It is good. A-ho.

Rolling on a River

Dwelling in the land is a concept that evokes images of terra rma. Yet here
in the conuence of heartland headwaters we are also reminded of the liquid
side of the ledger. Many among my greenish friends insist that no collection of
conservation conversations would be complete without an account of those
connected to the water.
The assignment threw me a bit. Yes, water is importantthe very stu of
life. But it ows away. The commercial sherman returns home. The grainboat crewman disappears over the horizon. The river tug captain plies the
barges but then retires to the comfort of a river town home.
All of these categories and more could easily earn a place in a collection such
as this. Many wax eloquent about the power of inland seas and the mother of
rivers that frame our territory. Others are steeped in the nuance of seasonal
rhythms of water and navigational lore. A few even can expound on hydrology and the complexity of aquatic life.
Bioregionalist friends have lured me out for gatherings along the Mississippi
at regular intervals over the last thirty years. Many were connected to the Great
River by a tie as thick as blood itself. Those gatherings were delightful occasions to share river tales of trappers, shermen, and boatmen. The river was
often thought of as a male domain. Thats why I was tickled to hear in Red
Wing, Minnesota, of a contemporary boatwoman who lived as a free spirit on
the water.
Like a lot of lives, the life I have started because I met somebody. Yes, some
guy. A guy who lived on the river in some slough over in Wisconsin. His
houseboat was rickety, but I was taken in by it at age twenty-ve, some
fteen years ago. I thought I loved him. It turned out I loved the river.
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Rolling on a River

63

There were other river guys after that, including the father of my son.
But after I learned the ropes I always kept a houseboat of my own. I just
cant imagine giving up the independence Ive found out here.
We move around a bit. This tub has been tied up in Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Iowa at various timesplus anchored at many an island,
sandbar, and inlet. Part of the mobility is just being carefree, some of it
has to do with chasing the seasonal work, and some of it has to do with
local authorities tolerance for this type of domicile.
You can wear out your welcome in some places. Now, if you have the
bucks to tie up in a pricey marina you can pretty much live in your boat
forever. But tie up at an abandoned pier, and someone from the city,
county, or state will pay you a visit. They just itch to write tickets. Anything from claims of pollution discharge to violating building codes by
running an extension cord from a nearby business out to the houseboat.
Dont get me wrong, I agree with most of the health and safety regulations. But like anyone outside the grid, you nd that some regulators
dont like alternative lifestyles and will look for technicalities on a houseboat while a hundred yards downriver some industry is pumping out stu
under cover of darkness. Some of it I take personally, at least when I get
the feeling that Im the little lady who doesnt belong out here, according to the local ocials.
Its funny, many of the same authorities had a tolerance for the geezers
and hermits who at one time lived in the riverbank shacks. Thats where
I learned my river skills many seasons ago. Now most of those old-timers
are gone. But they were ones who you went to in order to learn about
catching turtles, trapping sh, running setlines, and nding decent freshwater clams and mussels.
Some of this stu skirts the law. But the old guys always taught me
to leave something behind. The seed stock they called it. Those pursuits
never brought down warden wrath the way that waterfowl and game-sh
poaching can, anyway. The old river rats were more likely to provide tips
to wardens on that stu. Many a river warden made a decent reputation
out of leads picked up in river town taverns. In return, the old river rats
got tips from the wardens on where trapping would be hot.
Those were my initial sources for river skills. But the river itself is a big
classroom, and Ive been a constant student. Over time Ive been not just
a student of the river but of all water. Water is central, right down to the
drops, the molecules, and, in our bodies, to the cells.

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I use the river as a classroom for my son too. Hes home-schooled or,
in this case, boat-schooled. Hes learned to navigate and read charts. Hes
learned a lot of meteorology and geography. He knows the engineering
principles of the locks and the mechanics of the tugs. Hes seen the insides
of every river creature and has looked at plenty of backwater under his
microscope.
We also nd this a good environment in which to connect with our
mutt heritage. Im Jewish-Ojibwe and my sons father was pretty much
one hundred percent Norwegian. My dads line was secular blue-collar
Jews, union agitators, including a grandfather who was a Great Lakes seaman. Mothers ancestors were mostly Native, with a sprinkling of French
and Bohemian. But lovers of the water alleven the women liked to sh
and row a boat.
Its the Ojibwe in me that really pulls me toward water. I dont think it
leads naturally to a houseboat. I could be content with an independent life
on shore. But thats harder to achieve. Shoreline property is now pretty
much the domain of the government or the rich. There arent many places
where you can just squat on shoreline. For the cost of a shoreline lot in
many places, you can buy a 320-acre beef farm in Iowa.
No, the Ojibwe part of me is not about ownership. Its more a sense of
the sacred. Ojibwe women are to be guardians of the water in the spiritual
sense. There is a sanctity to water in its connection to life. Something to
be guarded, treasured, and nurtured.
We cant be thrown o from that just because the Mother of Waters
under us has been turned into a muddy ditch. Humans did it; it can
be undone. There is tremendous healing power in water. Toxins can be
ushed out, balance can be restored. Doesnt matter if its the river or the
human body.
Those of us living between the Great Lakes and the headwaters of the
Mississippi are at water central for North America. Theres spiritual power
in that and, I gather, potential economic and political power. But it puts
us in the old crosshairs of opportunity and danger. When others have
used up and poisoned their water, they will turn our direction. How we
respond in that moment will be the ultimate test.
What will the right response be in that moment? Will it be strictly a
matter of stewardship? Will there be room for teaching and compassion?
Or will it be a moment ripe for exploitation, like with those who now own

Rolling on a River

65

the oil? Well learn what type of people we are at that juncture. Well learn
about those elsewhere too. Well nd out if sunbelt greed and corporate
ethics will justify killing and enslavement for water. Take a look in the
developing countries. Some very nasty stu is done in the name of water
rights.
Im always surprised when I meet someone who doesnt understand the
magic of water. Its all right there in plain view and in our culture and stories. Theres the power of the great oods in the sacred texts. The Mother
Rivers of the continents. The mythical creatures of the deep. The legends
of Atlantis. The adventures of the mariners and voyageurs. All of these
speak to our eternal connection to water.
Then there are our ritualseverything from holy baptism to family
traditions of trips to lake or ocean shore. The water tugs on us. It tugs at
us so much that we nd ways to use it for healing. Thats what hot springs,
whirlpool baths, and even saunas are about. Even when weve transformed
it into steam, water is part of usheck, even when we use it as ice to cool
down a six-pack.
Our life out here isnt for everyone. Some of my friends from my prior
life think Im living a carnies life on a boat. A few will say that I could
make my driftwood and shore-combing crafts on land and set up a shop
in a little river town. Others say my skills at scavenging and salvaging
could be put to use on dry land.
They just dont get it. I dont want a compartmentalized life. On the
river I dont think in terms of work/non-work or play/non-play. Every
day I try to use the river as an opportunity for learning, educating my son,
loving my son and my friends, and taking the gifts of the Mother of the
Waters with gratitude and respect. Out here thats as easy as pie. Im given
something everyday, and everyday I get to give something back. I dont see
that in conventional jobs or businesses.
I always challenge people to think about their relationships. They need
to ask whether their arrangements are in balance, whether they reect
what works in the long haul, and whether they respect spiritual and physical realities. People on the grid still act like those popes who thought the
Earth was the center of Creation. Business is not the center; government
is not the center.
Water is closer to the center. We have no articial claim on water. Water
has claim on us.

After the Land-Use Dispute

Arguments over territory have a long and often bloody history among humans.
North American civil governments Anglo-Saxon roots can be traced to many
grim outcomes concerning the title to and occupation of land. It goes without
saying that these precedents often found rigorous application on the North
American frontier, especially where clashes with Native peoples developed
because of competing conceptual systems of land use.
Civilization, one hopes, has become more civilized since those dark days
of hangings from stout ropes on English oaks and scalpings in the transAppalachian fastnesses.
While the brutality of such tussles has lessened hereabouts, the turf aspects
of various ethnic cleansings and border disputes around the world tell us that
our species feels strongly about our connections to place. Humans seldom suer
interlopers lightly, if at all, and they possess psyches and memories that permit
denial and fuzzy history when it comes to the transgressions of their own group.
The rule of law has made some progress in alleviating bloodletting over such
matters. Still, dispute resolution has its limits and does not always account for
the bruised egos and sensibilities left in the wake of nominally peaceful settlements. So, even after our rejection of clan war and vigilante self-help, we are
left with the often dicult issue of healing.
Among my many incidents of good fortune during my politically active years
was the opportunity to work on the Wisconsin Assemblys resolution of reconciliation with the Sac and Fox. Arriving at the appropriate language took
some measure of shuttle diplomacy involving a number of visits to Oklahoma,
Kansas, and Iowa, where descendants of the tribes pushed out of Illinois and
Wisconsin live today. I heard many eloquent words about the trauma of the
past and the deep tie to ancestral lands. More unique were some words from
Tama, Iowa, from a circle of elders.
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After the Land-Use Dispute

67

Its a good thing that Wisconsin remembers what happened with Black
Hawk and the Sac and Fox he led during that summer long ago. Some
may think its too long ago to do any good, but I say its never late to
apologize and otherwise make amends.
Ill let others deal with the idea of reparations and remedies. Time
does make it dicult to deal with those things. But I think a discussion
like this is good if it just gets people to understand their history. Its a
good thing to ask, How did we get here? every so oftennot only how
did we get to this place but how did this situation that we take for reality
come to be.
That process opens the heart and the imagination. It not only helps
us understand the truth about what is, it helps us see what might have
been. This way you can hope and work for things that are still within your
reach. Maybe more important, we can also mourn the beautiful things
that are no more and cannot be againat least not in the same way.
A look back in time hits you in dierent ways, depending on who you
are and how youre situated. For the First Nations its a reminder of our
deep connection to Turtle Island [that is, North America]. For the European Americans it can be a time of honesty about how they came to own
the land. Examining these roots is good for all of us. That way I can admit
you did not take anything from me, and you can understand what was
taken from us all.
This whole Upper Midwest, Upper Mississippi Valley history is shaped
by deals involving land. Theyre called treaties, and theyre the foundation
of the states called Iowa, Illinois, Minnesota, and Wisconsin. Theyre the
foundation of many things relating to hunting and shing, logging, mining, and transportation. They set the patterns around which towns grew
up and farming spread across prairies.
It doesnt take a genius to see that many, if not most, of these treaties
were shady and shaky. Some had great cultural signicance, like the gathering of all the tribes in Prairie du Chien. Others were thoroughly corrupt,
like the kidnapping and extortion in St. Louis that preceded the so-called
ceding of Sac lands east of the Mississippi.
Knowing those circumstances is important, but it must go further than
a list of woes and grievances. Every time someone gets the gooey end of
the stick on a transaction involving the place they love there are hard feelings and psychological damages that linger for long times. In the end, it

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is more important what we do about those hurts later, when we all can see
them clearly without the fog of conict.
My people have a way of processing this that takes them beyond the
roles of victims. Anyone who has more than cow pies between the ears
knows that the Sac and Fox were subjected to horrible things, and the
legacy of those things is still with us. But we had something within us back
then that permits us perspective today. We had the lessons and blessings
of survival.
The elders tell a story about how one element of Sac and Fox wisdom
started in the time when they rst developed their intertribal connection.
They had been pushed around during the fur wars of the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries and had managed to anger the French. Gradually they
moved from the Upper Peninsula of Michigan and Green Bay to southwest Wisconsin and Illinois.
For the Sac and Fox people, those trials and tribulations in trying to
nd a place produced a strategy based around survival. We were encouraged to intermarry: that was meant to keep down petty conicts and bind
us closer. In war and hunting, scouting parties were mixed. This spread
risk around and brought dierent skills and traditions to the task. It nally
got to the point where families would send one or two of their children
to live with friends in another group in another village. This way, if the
French or other enemies attached, it increased the chances of survival of
someone from a family.
During our migrations and ights from enemies, we used these practices of splitting up and mixing up to advantage. The elders said that part
of the Sac would go by one route with part of the Fox and that the other
halves of each group would go together by another way. In battles fought
on the move the Sac and Fox had much skill at convincing opponents that
the whole group was in one place while most were actually slipping away.
Through these methods, the Sac and Fox came to their new lands
around that area where the Rock River meets the Mississippi. That was
our golden age. This was the place of large healthy villages, of vast cultivated elds, of hunts for bualo to the west, and of military success against
the Cherokee and Osage. It was the time when the Sac and Fox were
valued as allies and honored by the British crown. We developed alliances
with nearby Ho-Chunk and aliations with many smaller groupings of
Kickapoo, Potawatomi, and Ojibwe.

After the Land-Use Dispute

69

We lived in peace with most of our neighbors but did send warriors
against that growing threat to the east called the United States. We heard
that the United States was hungry for land. The Sac and Fox wanted to
protect their homes along the Rock. We helped eject Americans from the
fort at Prairie du Chien during the War of 1812. We thought that would
be the end of it. But then we learned that our British allies had agreed to
pull back to Canada in the peace settlement.
Gradually we saw farmers and lead miners come to our area. A few
didnt matter, but when the trickle became a ood the conicts became
more serious. They plowed up sacred lands, their cattle ate our corn, and
they even accused the great Black Hawk of hog theft.
The Sac and Fox were then pushed west into Iowa. But we were no
longer the nomadic woodland people we had been. We had become agriculturalists, shermen, and traders of lead. We had become culturally
and spiritually one with Rock Island and its surroundings. It was inevitable that we would try to come back. And perhaps just as inevitable was
the tragedy that occurred in the summer of 1832 at the Battle of Bad Axe
Massacre.
Black Hawk was asked years later about his motivation for returning to
the Rock River. He didnt talk about crooked treaties, treachery by other
tribes, or abuses from European Americans. No, it became simpler for
him over the years, less political. He answered something to the eect of
I loved my elds and the village of my people, so I fought for them.
It probably always boils down to that.
So what of the British Band of Sac and Fox of Tama, Iowa? How did
we get here? Part of the story boils down to those old survival skills. Some
of the group broke o while Black Hawk gave them cover at the Battle of
Wisconsin Heights. Some separated from the main force when it went up
the Pine River. Others actually escaped that slaughter of Bad Axe.
Those Sac who had cooperated with removal in the rst place were
pushed farther west and south. Some ended up in Kansas, and the main
group nally settled near Stroud, Oklahoma. The resisters hid in western
Iowa and eventually received recognition from the State of Iowa. You could
even say that we had the support of many of the German and Norwegian
homesteaders.
So, over the years we had to come to terms with what happened, what
we had lost. The memory is still there, but we have become part of this

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place. We have tried to be good neighbors and citizens. We have served

the United States when called to do so. We know the issues are somewhat
dierent now, but the underlying Mother Earth is still the same. It is still
the source of all things that sustain humans and still calls for the same
love, respect, and care.
Yes, people can go on after being uprooted and traumatized. The connections to the Earth can be restored, and peace can return between neighbors. After the land-use dispute, we must open minds, hearts, and spirits.
Simple, but dicult.

All Creatures Great and Small

A great deal of early conservation thinking was prompted and shaped by the
consumptive pursuits of hunting and shing. Just like horticulture and animal husbandry can shape land-based views, hunting and shing can teach
lessons of balance if one is open to learning. Yet many have moved past stalking and taking life as ways of experiencing the animal world on predator
terms.
Those close to the land nd many dierent ways to pursue relationships
with their kin of n, feather, and fur. Some of these relationships take unique
form. Others open up whole other realms of consciousness. A few make no distinctions between those creatures and themselves.
Over the years I have met many animal lovers who come to that love
through a strong environmental ethic. Ive also met a few whose general ecological sensibilities gradually brought them to a new regard for Earths creatures. Others came to their views through deeply personal relationships with
particular animals. There have even been one or two who had themselves confused with something four-legged or winged.
One subcategory of these folks that has always interested me has been veterinarians. There are, naturally, a number of outlooks within that profession.
Long rides in cramped truck cabs on triangulated trips involving draft horse
swaps, livestock sales, and emergency house calls to hobby farms put me within
earshot of a goodly number of vet expressions. This sounds like something that
kept me awake in the long triangle drive between Cashton, Wisconsin, Kalona,
Iowa, and Scales Mound, Illinois. A Doc of my acquaintance prepared me for
all these encounters with his comments on how people would evolve with animals over time.
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I was always a vet, even as a kid. It was how I viewed the world. I think I
splinted my rst dogs leg when I was about six years old. Probably taped
my rst birds wing even before that. As a child, I was always nding sick
and injured animals.
It didnt escape my notice that a goodly number of these calamities were
traceable to other boys. The BB gun is the worst thing that ever happened
to birds and small animals. Creative and cruel applications of recrackers
come in a close second. We need not even review the sicker uses of gasoline and re.
I did notice something back in my youth that I think says something
about how people treat animals, nature, and each other. As a general rule
I saw that those who acted with cruelty or disregard had been treated that
way themselves. Almost every boy I know who thought it was a good idea
to tie a lit cherry bomb to a cats tail was getting a steady diet of leather
strap at home.
The funny thing was that these were not otherwise bad boys. They usually werent troublemakers. They didnt grow up to be criminals. But few
with such a background could really work a draft horse or hunting dog.
There was just some sort of distance there, some inability to connect.
Those were the ones who as men didnt give a second thought at bulldozing the woodlots where their families hunted squirrels for generations.
They barely noticed if chemical runo killed the bluegills in a pond. They
never understood that those livestock injuries they hatedalong with my
bills for emergency treatmentwere usually preventable and traceable to
hazards they created or neglected. Then they had the nerve to call the
animals stupid.
It was assumed from rst grade that I would go to vet school, though
that was quite ambitious for a kid from a family of farmhands. Our people
lost their land in the Great Depression. But World War II came along,
and I found myself as a vets assistant with the last of the Army horse units.
Before it was over, I worked with mules and elephants in Burma. And
along the way there were plenty of GIs with adopted dogs and monkeys
and peasants with pigs and water bualo.
I learned a great deal in those remote places among tribes no one ever
heard of. It was easy to see that humans have been healing animals for
thousands of years. At vet school after the war, the professors couldnt
believe the stories I told about medicine women and witch doctors who
cured animals with plants and amulets.

All Creatures Great and Small

73

But those native vetsthough they usually treated humans toooften

related their medicine to the soul of the animal. They knew little about
the science underlying communicable disease and infection. They viewed
most problems as energy imbalance. Its funny how modern complimentary medicine has come around to this view for humans. This is behind
whats called the mind-body connection. Why would we think that animals are oblivious to environmental conditions, especially stress?
One of my favorite old-time remedies is a salve I picked up in Burma.
It was used on elephants there, but it works great on horses or cattle. I
dont dare tell you how its made, you might split a gut laughing, and I
could lose my license.
Still, thats not as strange as the native healers I met who supposedly
turned into animals after ceremonies. They said those old boys would
wander o in trances and come back with tiger scratches on them. That
they were only scratched, and not killed, supposedly proved their power.
I guess it was back then I got an idea about just how complicated the
human-animal relationship is. Like many things, most people just block
it out to make it easy to live with what theyre accustomed to. Whenever
Ive seen people who are really tuned into whats going on around them,
they also seem highly aware of their actions and the consequences. They
are aware of what dies that they may live.
Now, I love a good steak, but I am quite aware of what goes into the
raising of a steak. There are many ways that cattle can be raised, slaughtered, and processed. Everyone owes it to themselves to become familiar
with those methods and decide for themselves what they are prepared to
live with.
Then theres that whole matter of domestication. You have to wonder
if humans did any favors to animals by domesticating them. Domestication often destroys the soul of an animal. Even in beloved pets, I see behavior that is nothing short of mental illness. Of course, you can defend this
by saying family members also drive each other crazy. Maybe well eventually develop rules of human-animal relationships that more closely resemble guardianship or other arrangements among unequal parties. These will
probably x humans with appropriately higher levels of responsibility.
I see a time coming when there will be some who get quite worked up
about our responsibilities toward other living creatures. It will probably
seem as strange to many of us as the abolitionists seemed at the peak of
slavery. I dont want to overemphasize that slavery analogy, though. Slaves

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were capable of participation and choice, if allowed to develop their capacities. For nonhumans, as far as we know, its an altogether dierent thing,
and we will most likely have to remain in a stewardship position.
The slavery position does serve as an important case study in unforeseen
consequences. Freeing the slaves did not solve all their problems. Things
stayed pretty nasty for a damn long time. You could say we as a society still
havent worked it all out. And this is with our fellow humans.
So go with the idea of animal freedom and see where it leads. I dont
pretend to fully know, but maybe its something like the cows wandering
India. What about population? Destruction to property? More critters on
the highway?
Ive seen enough overgrazing in my lifetime to know that the issue
of habitat is bound to be in the mix. Those same callous knotheads we
started this conversation with just cant resist throwing fteen steers in a
ten-steer pasture. A few years later, its nothing but hard-packed clay, thistle, and the topsoil has gone down the creek.
Unchecked animal population would be like that. Say goodbye to every
wildower and tree seedling that cant take the pressure. And the coyotes
will have a eld day with the increased food supply. Then there will be the
eventual die-o and correction to populations. Lots to think about.
I dont have all the answers. Hell, all I got are a couple guesses. But I
think it just involves a little more sensitivity. Weve got to somehow apply
that bit of human wisdom from that famous abused fellow to the topic
of human-animal relations: Cant we just all get along?

In the Arms of the Mother

In the heartland, it is not dicult at all to nd those whose feelings about

Spirit are heavily entwined with their experiences of Nature. Some arrive at
such positions after (sometimes in spite of ) intensely religious upbringings.
Others, including those of a thoroughly secular bent, nd that Spirit connection creeps up on them through encounters with Nature.
One force in my own evolving sense of the human relationship to the land
has been the inuence of womens journeys to Spirit connections. Such journeys
take many forms; by the late 1980s, one heard the term ecofeminism applied
to the way many women responded to the deep ecology movement. Soon it was
connected to another new word: ecospirituality.
These labels are worn tfully, if at all, by many thought to fall within the
assumed categories. Labels, after all, tend to reduce complex personal experiences and choices to narrow denitions. Wisdom prods us to let others describe
their experiences and choices and set denitions aside.
The rst woman whom I introduced as an ecofeminist to others sternly
rebuked my indiscretion. It was not the last such warning to tread carefully in
summing others in a word. Indeed, I was for too long a stubborn sort and spent
entire weekend conferences exposing myself to chastisement. One such meeting
in Copper Harbor, Michigan, nally put it in terms that penetrated my thick
skull and hopefully opened it to other learning now that female friends had
tutored me through Introduction to the Mother 101.
Its not overly sensitive to pay close attention to words. Words are powerful and inadequate at the same time. Its always a good idea to give people
the benet of the doubt about their words, get a sense of whether theyre
actually in touch with what theyre saying, and then watch how they live
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those words. Usually one can only gauge the words of another after long
experience and hard acquaintance. But there is that rare new voice that
can at once send out words that touch the soul deeply and make the heart
sing.
Ecofeminism is not a word that touches me or brings songs to my lips.
Its a narrow and bookish term that seems inadequate to understanding
ecology or the feminine. Ecospirituality also seems inadequate, except to
imply a large collection of impulses that have some relationship to the
Earth. But where does one begin or stop with that way of looking at connection? All the religions and ways of the Spirit have some roots in the
Earth, however incomplete and muddled. And some are very muddled. So
muddled that they often harm the very things they profess to love.
Perhaps some day well have ways of Spirit that arent Earth-bound. I
suppose were working on some that might be totally mechanical or some
that might be cyber-religions. And one could be whimsical and concede
the possibility of aliens from other worlds arriving with more profound
understandings than we currently possess.
But for now, all we have are hobbled words and things we feel on this
Earth. Its my sense that ecospirituality is redundant. How could I have a
spirituality that was otherwise? How could I have a sense of ecology that
lacked the awe, love, and connection that are the foundations of spirituality? Perhaps one can, at least in the same way one can mouth the words
in a pledge of allegiance or the Lords Prayer and not feel anything for
them.
With ecofeminism, I see the same problem. Its redundant. All the principles of life that are life-arming seem feminine to me. It might have
usefulness as an academic term, something to get our panties in a wad in
a discussion group bemoaning the testosterone overdoses in Earth First! or
other heavily male environments. It seems to make more sense to speak of
ecomasculinism or industrial-masculinism or military-masculinism. Those
are narrow, though pervasive and dangerous aberrations in natural systems.
Almost all else ows from the life-arming feminine.
Even here, women must take care to observe the obvious and remain
committed to fairness. Its likely that women invented language. Men
powerful mentook over language and shaped it for purposes of power
and domination. It doesnt escape my notice that most men lack a voice
in these languages. I dont insist that a man be a feminist to consider him

In the Arms of the Mother

77

a good man. Its enoughindeed a great dealif he can be life-arming

and remain connected to the Mother.
Thats why I avoid the word-ghts and exclusionary thinking of ecofeminists. I value experience and action over denitions and consignment
of all males to the lesser realms. I know men who are very connected to the
Mother. Some of them are fairly rough appearing, burly types. If women
would think about that, they would concede that men who arrive at
that position, despite testicles and a good deal of energy to work o, have
accomplished an impressive feat.
I encourage rediscovery of the life-arming feminine and the Mother
in all people. Though I think this is the most important task in life, one
has to be open to the ways others come to this task. Nature shows us that
the Mother provides for more than one way. Diversity is the way of the
feminine. Rigid beliefs in single systems are life-negating, especially when
backed up by outlooks of power and domination. Thats why wed all be
better o if we looked more to experience, actions, and results and deemphasized denitions.
While Im at it, Id better correct any misimpressions I could create
with my own use of language. When I talk about the Mother in reference
to Earth, I am not talking guratively or metaphorically. Well, perhaps I
am speaking in multiple layers that include those concepts. But mainly
I am speaking quite directly of the Mother as the source of all life we
know.
Think about that for a minute. What sustenance or life-sustaining elements do we know of that dont originate with the Mother? What molecules or genetic components in us have been shown to originate elsewhere?
And even if this womb was seeded from afar, it takes nothing away from
the reality that wefrom single-cell organisms to blue whaleswere gestated and nurtured here. This deserves awe and respect and the reciprocity of love.
It does not mean Im a goddess-worshipper or cavorting wood nymph.
Well, perhaps I am, but those are just lifestyle trappings. The real stu of
the Mother is direct and unmediated. Its unconditional and always there
to be tapped into.
Words can be invented for these feelings if you need them. Ive never
minded the tree-hugger, though its a pejorative for some. I hug my favorite
cousins; why not hug Cousin White Pine? But one shouldnt stop there.

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Be a boulder-cuddler, a lake-lover, a marsh-mucker, a meadow-frolicker,

a mountain-maniac, and an earth-snuggler.
Its not worship in the sense of idols and totems. Its connections that
are all part of the manifold parts of the Mother; all the ways of experiencing those connections couldnt be managed in dozens of lifetimes. So dont
worry about getting jaded or running out of connections to experience.
If youre running out, if you experience that creeping boredom, youre
going about it the wrong way. Youre just working o a checklist of been
there, done that. You need new lists. Lists like been there, been that,
been there, felt that, been there, had my life totally disassembled and am
now a work in progress. If your journey hasnt changed you, you havent
been anywhere that matters.
Mother has a big sprawling maternal body. Lots of nooks and crannies
to explore. Lots of ways to return to her, even to be back inside of her. Lots
of comfort in her bosom. Lots of security when wrapped in her arms.

Looking Out for the Neighbors

The undercurrent of community, human and ecological, runs through so many

of these accounts. One could easily conclude that there is much innate wisdom
about the environmental downsides of the prevailing dog-eat-dog nastiness.
Perhaps in the quarters explored in these accounts this grim realist view is
countered by visions of what could be. Unfortunately, there are still lapses out
in the world at large. Some serious, some catastrophic.
There is a major case to be made that a broad view of the human and natural world can moderate some of the nastiness, especially if the broad view
goes beyond access to information and into acquaintance and intimacy. Such
elements of community are not easily achieved over leaps of distance and culture. Yet, some circumstances seem to demand that we develop greater skills
and broader applications if the global village is not to be ripped asunder.
A number of my teachers in this sphere had long records of working to bring
diverse peoples together on common concerns. Their work always seemed to value
human solidarity as much as issues. They were central to a unique chapter in
Wisconsin history, when a rainbow of Wisconsin residents went to the boat landings of Northern Wisconsin during the treaty-rights spearshing controversy to
look out for their Ojibwe neighbors. It was one of Wisconsins nest moments.
One could conclude that they had rather expansive views of neighborhood.
Its one that they sold me on in a series of multiracial meetings in Milwaukee.
Now I look at my north fence line and think about my Canadian neighbors
and then look at my south fence line and think of my Mexican neighbors. Better than NAFTA.
I came into this through a blend of progressive politics and bioregionalism. It seemed like a good combination for organizing work in cities with
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the poor, and with people who have common issues and dont know it.
The organizers I respect had done things that few had, things like activate
inner city neighborhoods around environmental issues.
Many environmentalists miss the boat when they fail to see the potential here. There is often an element of human exploitation connected to
environmental degradation. It doesnt take a genius to see which sectors
are aected most deeply by toxins, sanitation, and public health aspects
of environmental woes. There are bundles of environmental issues waiting
in every housing project, core neighborhood, barrio, and reservation in
this country.
It wasnt a big leap to see the potential around the treaty-rights issue.
Once the courts vindicated the rights, it was clear there would be backlash. But what was amazing was how opponents of the rights put forth a
very ugly face and allied themselves with the most reactionary elements of
American society. The organizing task for our eort became easier with
the anti-treaty forces raising placards that proclaimed Save a Walleye,
Spear an Indian and shouted slogans like Timber Nigger.
Since it was really a resource war, we had to do our homework about
the real impact on resources and the real agendas of the opponents. There
was a body of experience in other places with treaty rights where the covered resources were thriving. There was a tribal sh and wildlife agency
that had excellent material. Then there were statistics that illustrated that
the tribes never took harvests up to the levels permitted by the courts.
On the opponents side, there were transparent and ridiculous claims
and stances. It was not hard to show that much of the fuss was generated
by trophy shermen, not a moral high ground when stacked up against
food for the elders. Then there was the socioeconomic tangle of oldfashioned resort owners ghting all change, with treaty rights emerging
as one of their lesser challenges. Then there was the stink of racism that
they never showered o.
Out of this context, we non-Ojibwe took up the cause in two ways.
First, we put people physically on the boat landings as observers. Second,
we educated the broader community about the good that could come
from the treaties.
The rst endeavor had contemporary and past models to draw on. The
1980s had seen a number of similar eorts put together by the Central
American solidarity community as a counterweight to CIA-fomented civil

Looking Out for the Neighbors

81

wars and their proxy death squads. The thought was that those engaged in
dastardly deeds are restrained by attention and witnesses. But Wisconsin
had older traditions to draw on too, as in back in the nineteenth century
when Norwegian and German farmers successfully resisted the removal of
their Ho-Chunk neighbors.
Still its not a small thing to prepare large groups to undertake acts of
solidarity. Its not just a matter of scheduling and logistics. Its also a matter of psychological preparation for abuse, a matter of honoring conviction, of spearshers and witnesses alike. The mood was quite ugly and the
potential for serious violence was high. Individuals were hurt, and we were
fortunate that far worse things did not happen.
It took a lot of courage for those grandmothers, teenagers, oce workers, teachers, unionists, and green activists to go up to those boat landings.
They showed what could be done with determination and a willingness
to stand up for a neighbor, even a neighbor at a distance. For many the
rationale was simple: A deal is a deal.
A story made the rounds, I dont know if its true. Supposedly an elderly African American man came to the boat landings. He was obviously
shaken by the shouted epithets and threats. A Menominee elder, also there
in solidarity with the Ojibwe, asked him what brought him north. We
were told the reply mentioned an old Civil War era photograph of Wisconsin Indians who had fought for the Union. He was repaying an act of
solidarity.
Part of the puzzle was connected to broad civil rights traditions. Here,
the socially aware churches provide an opportunity for coalition-building.
The timing here was just right, with many people of faith awakening to
the prophetic message of human rights and stewardship. There were times
on the boat landings when protestant pastors, Catholic sisters, and Jewish activists were arm in arm facing the screaming mob. They were an
important form of witness and took important messages back to their
communities.
The pieces also fell into place about convincing the ecology community
of the importance of treaties. We made the case that they could be used
to protect the environment when state and local regulators failed to act
or were compromised by politics. We presented it as an important rst
step in building an alliance against the most aggressive of the extractive
and polluting industries. It was a solid premise, and it foreshadowed the

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tremendous support the tribes gave to various ghts against hard-rock

mining in vulnerable headwaters.
We helped paint a picture, a vision. It was a picture of a Wisconsin that
could be, and it has largely come to pass. We said tribes would be prime
protectors of the resources. We said those resources would thrive under
their management. We pointed to impressive records in sustainable forestry and local enterprise. We said the controversy would evaporate under
those conditions. We said that even spearshing would come to be viewed
as part of Wisconsins racial and ethnic tapestry. We even said that eventually spearshing would be a winter/spring transition rite equivalent with
tapping maple trees.
What also happened in the course of these eorts was a broadening from
the local to the national to the international. Many of us were invited to
talk about what we had done in other places going through similar upheavals. Before long, you had tribal elders and Wisconsin housewives
speaking to international conferences on indigenous issues and resource
management. The eort was noted by those involved in battles from the
Artic to the Amazon Basin. Our Canadian and Central American neighbors in turn taught us a few tricks.
So if youre up at Red Cli or Lac du Flambeau next summer remember those struggles. And dont forget to say hi to the neighbors.

Seedkeeper

Those of us who grew up with rural ways are not strangers to the rituals of
saving seeds from one years crop to have something to plant the next. Still, as
agriculture moves closer to an industrial model and as most families grow
unfamiliar with gardening, there is less feel for the ritual of this process and
little appreciation for its ecological signicance. The core of seed-stock preservation is noted in such folklore sayings as you dont eat your seed corn.
But there are many nuances lacking in such homespun assessments, born as
they are in sensibilities not battered by global trade and advances in genetic
science. As often happens during wanderings in our neck of the woods, one
nds advance guards of ecological wisdom in pockets of alternatively minded
folks who bridge high tech to traditional folkway gaps. There was a time when
a grouping called the Driftless Bioregional Network brought such nuanced folks
together out in the hills of northwest Illinois, northeast Iowa, southeast Minnesota, and southwest Wisconsin.
In the 1980s, their gatherings were favored spots for many of us who irted
with and nally succumbed to back-to-the-land urges. These fun conclaves
featured windmill-construction tips, fabric-weaving lessons, organic-farming
eld days, timber-frame building, herbal-remedy lore, bluegrass music jams,
skinny-dipping, and other sundry delights. These folks had a solid reputation
for imparting knowledge in a populist and entertaining way. Each gathering
produced new attendees who brought another angle to this matter of attuned
living on the land. Many kept me amazed during hours of discussion.
Several made an impression on me as they spoke about seeds at a twilight
potluck at a campre. I noted the opening remarks with only mild interest. I
hadnt thought much about seeds since those childhood days of scooping out
pumpkin guts. But some of what they said was ahead of the rest of us when it
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came to seeds. Some of what was said sounded out there nearly twenty years
ago on that farmstead near Decorah, Iowa.
Seeds are little love notes left to us by careful and caring ancestors. Seeds
are diaries kept by ancient gardeners. Seeds are the stories passed down
all the way from those rst humans who watched the cycles of the Earth
so closely that they could triangulate the connection between spirit, stars,
and plants. Seeds are the triumphant monument to that rst upright creature who learned to poke a hole in the ground with a sharpened stick and
drop in a nut or a fruit pit.
Seeds are all that and more to me. How can you not be overawed by
something that represents the pleasure of food, the beauty of the natural
world, and the magic of reproduction? Maybe more to the point, how
have we let that awe slip away from us to be lost in processing and packaging? Have we forgotten seed selection as the foundation of science and
the rst step away from nomadic existence? Have we forgotten the sacredness and blessings that seeds represented to countless millions who in the
past understood that their lives were owed to these mystical kernels?
Weve lost much of the sense of teaching that goes with seeds. There are
lessons to learn about the web of life, the food chain, and microecology
of our little niches in the world. There are lessons of bioregions and plant
communities. There is technique in seed collection and preservation. And
to properly utilize the seed, you have to begin with the basics of soil science
and horticulture. We sometimes forget that Mendel came to his beginning of genetics through the blessed pea, not through the complex human
species.
Just mastering the art of seed collection made our ancestors exercise
their brains and build that muscle. They had to learn to read the shifts and
timing of climate zones. They had to remember the sites that produced
the best specimens. They had to develop methods to store their seeds
beyond the reach of rodents and other scavengers. Even the rst glimmer
of the search for specic traits, things like hardiness and rapid maturity,
came out of the early seed gathering expeditions.
I really believe that it was these experiences, as much as the high drama
of the hunt and war, that helped people develop a sense of story and a
sense of place. What could be found in a place, what could grow well in
a place, and what did that tell you about how to live in a place? These are

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the types of issues that rooted the human story in locations. And so began
the process by which location shaped us and we shaped location.
How we have used seeds and what they represent in this struggle has
more signicance now than ever. The ongoing story of seeds is one of bioregionalism versus multinationalism, of cooperative simplicity versus dominance by a few huge institutions. The seeds themselves have lessons about
what works in the long run, if we care to listen.
All the signs point to a corporate desire to own the seeds and their secrets.
Some people think a seed can be reduced to a patent, a trademark, and a
hold on the distribution system. Thats an arrogant dream that Nature
and the seed itself will refute. Im not claiming that science cannot help
improve our seeds and the things they produce. But it cant be done by
ignoring or defying the rules by which seeds operate.
Well, actually it can be done, just not without consequences, without
Nature giving us an unpleasant lesson. Nature likes its seeds to have a respectable pool for cross-fertilization. It does not want all individuals to be
alike. The closer to that absolute uniformity we get, the more weaknesses
well see. Seeds will rebel! As they are twisted and manipulated for super
yields, massive prot, and absolute market control, I predict that things
will unravel.
But even then seeds themselves will hold the answer and grant the
healing if we let enough of the oddities, local varieties, and wild stu survive. It does survive still, you know. Check with any Amish community,
and youll nd things that theyve kept going over two hundred years during their moves from Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois. Theyre
just about the best source for the old style, open-pollinated seed corn;
the same goes in any of the old ethnic pockets that are more or less intact.
Little hollows and settlements of Scots, Bohemians, French Canadians,
you name itthey all have old timers and young upstarts who save seeds.
Its the same all over the world, from Siberia to Patagonia. At least for
now. At least until large corporate agribusiness can nd a way to move in
on them.
So many of the stories of seeds are the stories of a particular people and
a particular place. Thats why so many of us think about this bioregionally. Its a matter of human and biological community. Its about learning
lessons and passing them on. Thats the sort of thing that happens when
people are rooted in place and attentive to it.

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I not only collect seeds, I collect seed stories. The two should not be
viewed separately. Thats what were learning in our network. Thats what
separates us on the local level from those who want to control seeds from
an economic and scientic angle. The corporate types want to obliterate
the real story and replace it with marketing razzle-dazzle. Thats because
the stories of seeds reveal that there can be no current owners of seeds.
Seed stories are quite clear that the seeds were placed in trust by ancestors
for future generations.
You can judge societies by what they pass on: seeds are so clearly part
of this cultural legacy. I argue, from an ecological perspective, that seeds
are perhaps the single most important cultural legacy that exists today.
They reveal our tastes, our weaknesses, our triumphs, and even our silliness. Look at the things that seeds produce, how they tantalize the senses
and delight us in ways beyond the function of food. They help us dene
our clans or our communities. They help tell the story of our wanderings.
They can establish our lineage from Mother Earth and can even evoke the
Divine.
I was gifted such a seed by an older woman from Keshena, a Menominee elder. It was the seed of the Menominee squash. The squash represented the tribes story. It told the story of garden plots in shafts of light
in openings in deep forests. It told the story of short growing seasons and
resistance to cold nights. It told the story of winter keeper squash stored
in holes and of harvest feasts and winter treats.
Saving such seeds is something that connects me to all these stories. Tell
me yours.

View from the Joint

Encounters with Nature get to be habit-forming. Bumping and jostling with

ora and fauna inspires us. Smooth melding and sublime moments provide
tranquil counterpoint that track the spiritual journey to Oneness. No matter what variant or degree, we often think of these things of the natural world
in terms of interactions.
True, the city-bound naturalist may defer the encounters, and the workaholic may require reminders to recharge. Many circumstances of contemporary
life may interfere with the forays one desires, the excursions and adventures
that are part of our vision of life on Earth. How many of us are waiting for
that long summer in which to hike the Appalachian Trail, backpack in Nepal,
or climb with Inca guide to Machu Picchu? My outdoor companions tell me
it is far easier to tally the lesser numbers who harbor no such dreams.
Most of us get by with less than Discovery Channel or National Geographic
fare. The urban river with its concrete shore accommodates our canoe, and a
farming uncles small woodlot connects us to more distant forests. We grab what
we can when we can. By middle years, hopefully, we usually have an idea of
how to get our minimum requirements in this area and can get damned
cranky if the dosage is reduced or delayed.
But what of those unfortunates who do not have any opportunities? The
grim thought of the loss of contact with Nature makes some of us fear disability, poverty, and other reductions in choices and options in ways that go beyond
lifestyle and comfort. We readily see that such individual limits might call for
social remedies. Many nonprot recreational programs have this understanding at their core.
Are we missing anyone here? What of that growing segment of the population that we incarcerate for long periods of time? How is the voice of the
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land heard by one locked away from it? Here is an answer from one Wisconsin prison.
Im in for life-plus, meaning that I will be carried out of prison in a
box and driven to the veterans cemetery. Im not the only black man in
Department of Corrections custody who can say that, but Im sure as hell
not pleased to be in this situation. Whats sad is that a growing population
is coming here younger and younger, and destined to turn this shithole
into a nursing home.
Now Im the rst to admit I didnt get here by accident. I did the crime
and will do the time. I was young, stupid, and hotheaded. That, and a
fondness for dope and alcohol, put me on a collision course with The Man.
I ran with a bad bunch and looked up to some thugs who didnt give a shit
about me. If Id grown up in another place or time, maybe I wouldnt be
here. Maybe my hell-raising wouldnt a gone no further than cow-tipping
and cherry bombs in outhouses.
Its all pretty much alienation in places like this, with plenty of bad
actors. You get the occasional innocent man in here, but most of us have
done something bad, and some have done more than theyll ever account
for. But aint that true of many walking free, including them in suits?
Theres as many stories in here as there are prisoners. But they tend to
fall into two classes. First, there are those who did something damn bad
and damn stupid but have something better inside them. Then there are
those who are damn bad and damn stupid, end of story. Lets just say that
justice doesnt always sort them out very well.
Justice also doesnt account for what happens to a man inside walls, what
he loses and never gets back. The biggest loss for me is not being able to
move at will and experience the wide worldchucking a rock in a pond,
dozing under a tree in a park, or just feeling the ground under your feet.
Those and a million other things. When you lose those things, you really
lose pieces of yourself. Thats the cruel and unusual part of incarceration.
The best Ive experienced in the last twenty-four years is the movement
from one prison to another. That happened twice in that time. This last
move was seven years ago. Those are like trips to Paris. The memories
really stick with you.
Memories are the main diet in here. You start to recall details that a free
man takes for granted. That red-winged blackbird rocking on a cattail. A

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89

hawk cruising the median strip looking for mice. A stray group of owers springing out of rocks at the side of an overpass. You get two rides
in twenty-four years and you remember just about every minute of those
trips. Even the smells and sounds stay with you.
Those memories are the building blocks for the movie of the world
that you keep directing in your head. The memories provide all the background, props, and supporting characters. You even get greedy for the
memories of others. You rag on old-timers to tell you about catching a
mess of catsh or taking after rabbits with a beagle. You corner those new
young men coming in about how those ne young ladies looked on the
lake beach on a July afternoon. Pretty soon everybodys got everybody elses
memories to work with too.
I use those memories. I sure do. I learned what Grandpa once called the
old Indian tricks of the mind. Thats the word he used for anything
you did to ease boredom or pain. Like dreaming up a memory of a meal
when you were hungry and imagining every bite to the point where you
didnt think nothing of it to wipe your mouth with a napkin and give a
happy belch.
In here Ive had plenty of time to work on old Indian tricks. If I do
say so, Ive gotten damn good at them. My specialty is ying. I can settle
right into a bed, close my eyes, and take right o to those places in the
memories. Ive spent thousands of hours out of my body, ying, soaring
over water and land, and circling to places I remember from when I was
a youngster. Im still going for my round-the-world record. I have a spot
in the South Pacic that I cant seem to get across. Somebody or something brings me back every time.
But much of the time I dont go far. Plenty of times its just ne to go
back to Milwaukee; I y over the old neighborhood. I have to be careful
not to get shot, its a lot meaner than when I lived there. Then I y over the
Menominee Valley where Dad worked on the railroad until he was killed.
I usually end up down on the lake, circling the breakwater, and sometimes
going out to the lighthouse to perch like a big bird. Thats my favorite trip.
Other times I y above parts of Wisconsin and Illinois I remember
from long ago. I can y over some country before the interstate got there.
I can see migratory birds where theyve since drained the marshes. I can
hear the crack of the bat at ball elds that were eaten up by duplexes. I
can smell cut hay where the mall now stands.

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When you get real good at these old Indian tricks you can use them to
trace your family right back to the Garden of Eden. I can hover right over
Dad in the Menominee Valley. I can zip right back to Grandpa and the
old uncles back in Mississippi, visit with them down in delta country and
listen in at the old juke joints. Hell, I can go right back over to Africa and
smell the okra and greens cooking in grass huts.
So thats what a man behind bars does to stay in touch with the wide
world. Its about the only way to stay sane in here. The bullshit in a place
like this can wear you down. Some just give up. Me, I just take a little
breather and y on outta here.

In for the Long Haul

Love of the land has motivated many a citizen activist. It is always exciting
to watch the blossoming of concern and commitment in someone previously
uninvolved. It doesnt matter if the issue is a local quarry, landll, industrial
discharge, or power line. Even if it is entirely a not-in-my-backyard matter,
contacts are made and horizons are broadened.
Few can maintain intense activism over periods of decades. Life often intervenes, with the inevitable family matters that arise, the need to tend to vocations, and, ultimately, age and health issues. Often activist involvement occurs
in spurts, bursts of activity punctuated by intervals of downtime. Some can
pace themselves and others burn out.
Its relatively rare in eco-politics to see sustained intense voluntary involvement. In part, this is because the issues are complex and varied. In part, its
because the turf of eco-politics is fragmented and lends itself to specialization.
Perhaps as important a factor is the green ethics of rotation of responsibility and
positions. This latter factor plays hell with continuity in some organizations,
but it does encourage new blood and prevents the entrenchment of hierarchy.
It also does something else interesting in the organizational and citizenship
sense: it modestly employs those with considerable talents. Think about business executives periodically rotating to sales activities or production facilities.
Think about state legislators periodically returning to school boards or ward
politics. A system is enriched by core people who are familiar with many levels
and who have overcome the ego problems of over-identication with positions.
There are those who win the admiration and respect of many of the other
folks represented in this collection simply by their staying power. Imagine a
person active in intense grassroots activism for over two decades. Imagine he
has been the one other activists have called on to back eorts at the local, state,
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regional, and national level. Imagine he has been the glue of several organizations and has held numerous organizational positions, been a candidate for
oce, and remains a friend and a shoulder to lean on in the St. Croix Valley
and beyond. No matter the cause be green, greenish, or upper-case Green, one
can imagine that he usually has a hand in it.
You never know when one thing will lead to another. Ive always been interested and committed, but I dont think I expected to become this involved.
Im not sure if I can even peg a starting date on this. A lot came together
in the 1980s: the general reaction to Reagan, the Nuclear Freeze Campaign, the awful stu in Central America, and the threats to family farms.
I guess that stu got me involved more and I just havent stopped yet.
We had the ght develop over the Ladysmith mine. Then the radioactivewaste siting battle. There was Project ELF. We had the treaty-rights struggles that eventually brought me in with my St. Croix Ojibwe friends.
Then there was Tommy Thompson and the DNR deal. And dont forget
the Crandon mine, acid rain, and mercury in the sh.
There were support groups to run, demonstrations to organize, and civil
disobedience. Those Lake Superior Greens got many of us thinking. Next
there were the Upper Great Lakes Green Network, Wisconsin Greens, and
local Green chapters. I was surprised when they asked me to be a candidate for political oce.
You need to step up when youre needed; you need to think about
whether youre better situated than others to take on those tasks. And you
need to help others grow into such roles, too. Its the good old Midwest
ethic of pitching in when needed. You dont quibble if you see someone
broken down in a car in cold weather. You dont hesitate if the neighbors
livestock get loose. Youre over right away if someone in your town loses a
house to re.
Thats how I see Green politics. Thats what makes it organic and real.
Mainstream politics is getting more remote from regular people. And its
quite clear that mainstream politicians are simply in a career track. I meet
Young Dems who are already thinking about Congress while theyre scrapping over student government. And dont get me started about the fraud
of the term limits promised in the Republican Contract with America.
Theres something that doesnt feel quite right about these self-styled
Green leaders who cant be bothered to recycle, help with a river clean-up,

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93

or stu envelopes for an appeal to raise defense funds. I cant say that they
are elitist or see themselves above it all. I think they just get sucked into
the prevailing habits of traditional politics. There arent many like that
in the grassroots Midwest; our local habits and expectations work against
that. Its hard to get a big head if you must take your own stu to the town
recycling center and risk your neighbors disapproving eyes if its not properly sorted. Its hard to indulge power fantasies when youre taking your
turn stocking shelves at the food co-op.
How did we get this notion of professional politicians as a good thing?
Werent our early leaders farmers, printers, tradesmen, and merchants?
Didnt they move uidly from positions of responsibility to active citizenship and back again? We have good reason to fear those overly eager to
hold oce for extended periods of time.
We need a dierent model of involvement. Citizenship is a long-haul
thing. Be suspicious of those building their rsums and climbing the vocational ladder courtesy of our issues. Theyre just passing through, and when
they peak in political oce theyre usually primed for the even more insidious life of consultant business and lobbying.
If youre active over the long haul, youre able to build great relationships
with others who approach their politics that way. You grow with them, you
know their families, and eventually you come to the time when you see
them o from this life. Those long-haul types arent always on the podium,
so newcomers wont always spot them. They might be stang a table in
the back of the hall. They might be setting up chairs in the lunchroom.
They might be mediating between two argumentative activists out in the
hall, or they might be down at the police station troubleshooting details
for the march later in the day. Or they just might be miles away helping
an injured neighbor bring in hay. Long haul sometimes means people
before meetings.
Long-haul types are usually patient with new activists. You have to be,
or their passions could burn you out. Theres a gap there sometimes between those motivated by urgency and those committed to staying power.
You get a sense where new energy and enthusiasm can be put to good use
and where they might upset a delicate matter. You get to feel when someone is pitching in during a crisis and when someone else might make a
good understudy for long-term stu. Good Green politics needs all of this
in its place and in balance.

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But we need other things from those newly minted activists besides
their energy. We need to be heard so we can serve as the Green institutional memory. We need the space for renewal of old acquaintances and
walks in the woods. Sometimes the hearing is not as good as it used to
be. Sometimes the joints do not accommodate the marathon meeting in
cramped quarters. Sometimes mental activity is not served by late-night
conversations.
Long-haul types are by nature optimists, even when they see dire threats
to the planet. You need to be. If you thought the world was destined to
end tomorrow, it would be hard to keep plugging at it. Theres a moral
side to this, knowing that youve done your part. But there is the hopeful
part too, that there can be a long haul for everybody and everything.

Laughter in the Land

Not all lovers of the land tell their stories with idealistic fervor or stone-faced
resolve. We in the deep ecology community suer many stereotypes concerning intense advocacy, stoic lifestyles, and fuzzy romanticism. Some of this is
understandable, if not entirely deserved. We can be too serious and straightlaced at times, with humor and self-deprecation falling on our threatened species chart.
It was not this way with the old plaid conservationists of the hook-andbullet variety. They love to laugh and spin wild tales. Their guaws from travails in nature echoed from the country club lounges to the backwoods taverns.
Whats more, they did not mind being the butt of the humor. Add in their often
earthy and ribald bent, and their butts (and other parts) often were the butt
of such humor.
Such subject matter borders on politically incorrect these days. If it hangs
on at all in its former haunts, it is with the most unreconstructed of the male
species. Sad to say, it is found here in much reduced form, lacking its former
insights and articulation. One picks up the hint that the pattern is set no
longer by the raconteurs of days gone by but by crude mimicry of late-night
cable television.
Were all the poorer for this cultural erosion. There was much wisdom in
these jokes of the outdoors. Such stories had a way of making our tweed-jacket
conservationist forefathers more acceptable to both Chamber of Commerce and
union-hall audiences.
It is entirely predictable that a story collector would lament the loss of such
treasures. But a story collector also knows that story traditions often go underground and pop up in dierent ways. The idea of laughter in encounters with
nature might pop up on a barstool in a St. Paul, Minnesota, tavern. A saucy
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redhead with Native American facial features might start with that question
so many of us love to hear.
Did you hear the one about the three lost Norwegians? You know the
ones Im talking about, your old friends Ole, Lena, and Sven. Yeah, theyre
out for a picnic in the state forest so Lena can pick some owers. Well,
they get lost, dont you know.
Soon theyre wandering around foolishly, not reading the signs in the
land or noticing that theyve passed the same rock three times. They drink
all their water, and now the sun is going down. Theyre getting quite
worked up and worried.
But Ole nds a bottle in the pine needles. Its an old quart bottle of
Hamms beer. Beer of the sky-blue water turned into the sky-yellow water.
Its a dirty old bottle, but it has something in it. Svens thirsty, so he asks
Ole to pop the cap.
Out comes foam to beat the band, dont you know. The foam rises up
into a great Norskie lumberjack genie. Ole, Lena, and Sven were pretty
impressed.
U-da! the genie says.
I have been cooped up in there for a hundred years and could not even
scratch my behind. One hundred years that I have been unable to roam
this beautiful land and drink a little beer. Now I am free, and I can help
protect these woods. You know how it goes: three wishes for getting out,
so you each get a wish.
Well, Ole didnt hesitate a bit. He looked the genie square in the eye
and said, Dats simple, I want to be home on da farm.
Poof, Ole was gone. Hes back on the farm.
Next comes Lena, and she was shy because the genie reminded her of
an old boyfriend. The genie read her mind and gave her a lewd wink. It
startled her and she said, Id better get home before I get into trouble, Ole
needs help with da cows.
Poof, Lena was gone and right back at the barn.
Now, the genie turned to face Sven, who was still trying to see if he
could gather up some of the beer foam in his hat. Ole and Lena had tried
to school Sven in problem-solving, but despite their lessons about how to
make a living on the land he still had the mind of a three-year-old. He was
confused and crying.

Laughter in the Land

97

The genie was impatient. Look here, you Scandahoovian fool, I got
places to go and people to meet, roared the genie.
Old Sven trembled and squeaked, Im so lonely and scaredI wish
Ole and Lean were back her with me!
And poof, they were!
The moral of that story is let sleeping Hamms bottles lie. Or is it
dont take Sven to the woods?
I like little jokes and stories from outdoors. Its in my blood, about
half Ho-Chunk and half Jewish, with small parts of German, Bohemian,
and Swede thrown in. We call our family Winne-Bagels and hang Star
of David medicine wheels on our Christmas tree. We all love a good joke,
especially if it involves someone slipping in the creek or getting sprayed
by a skunk.
Now, to be fair, I should tell one about myself rst. Im not the only
one this has happened to, but twenty years later, it still makes my family
laugh so hard they practically need to wear diapers when they tell it. It was
one of my rst visits to the old Ho-Chunk relatives near Black River Falls,
Wisconsin. All the women went for a walk, and I asked what to do if I had
to go to the bathroom. One told me to wipe myself with a leaf.
I did. But it was poison ivy. Thats how my lifelong interest in plant
identication began.
But if you really want to hear my family howl, get them talking about
how I got my cousin to try a new type of fry bread. Rickie was the type
of kid who would eat anything, he grazed his way through the woods or a
meadow. But he didnt grow up around agriculture. So when he asked me
what this brown thing was in the pasture, I told him it was rye fry bread
and that it was really good. He didnt fall for it right away, but I told him
that Grandmother put it out here to cool. He sampled it and told me that
rye fry bread isnt as good as the regular kind.
To this day, when a vanload of us is driving down a country road and
sees a pasture or feedlot with cattle, everyone shouts, Rye fry bread!
Dont be surprised when I tell you some of my favorites are goofywhite-guy stories. These involve anything from where animals get the
upper hand on those guys, to their accidental rearm discharges, to their
chainsaw shenanigans, to things like dropping a tree through their cottage
roof or blowing a hole through the bottom of their shing boat. Theres
no end to what entertaining things a white guy can do in the woods, on a

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lake, up a ski slope, with a snowmobile, or together with some friends and
beer. You take those factors, the lay of the land, some weather, some old
hunting dogs, some livestock, some wildlife, a wild woman or two, and
the possibilities for misadventure are limitless.
Old Mother Earth has that medicine of laughter right in her. Its one
of her strongest medicines. Its the medicine of tricksters and the little
spirit people who come out of the Earth like spring water. When your
truck rolls into the water at the boat landing, theyre there. When your car
tire nds the only sharp stick on the powwow grounds, it had help. When
the soaring eagle lands his dropping on your new hairdo, the spirits are
laughing.
Were meant to laugh at those things. Its part of the master plan. Many
hard times are made easier through laughter. The Great Spirit must love
laughter in the land. Otherwise why would there be so much foolishness
to laugh at?

Autumn in the West

Eco-Wizardry

It was in the early 1980s that the activist crowd in and around the Midwest
started to hear our Ojibwe friend. He started popping up at radioactive-waste
meetings, mining forums, Rainbow Coalition events, treaty-rights debates,
and just about any public proceeding where experts and ocials oered themselves up to abuse and ridicule. He could be sharp and pointed when circumstances called for it, but he was usually good-natured and compassionate.
It was clear to anyone who watched him in action that a fair amount of
theater was involved in his brand of environmental politics. Similarly, only
minimal acquaintance was required to understand that his warm humor had
its counterpart in a serious side that deeply felt injuries to the Earth and to the
human heart. He was seen as a complex man, with an obvious soulfulness that
connected all aspects of his life.
One recurrent storyline told about him arose out of a birthday party he
threw for himself. It was an event loaded with conceptual teasesthe day
was July 4, 1985. The party was also the occasion for the founding of the Lake
Superior Green Party.
It was emblematic of his condence that he felt empowered to found a political party after reading a single work on Green politics by Charlene Spretnak.
That he knew nothing about election law or contribution reporting did not
trouble him in the slightest. Many on hand in the Bualo Arts Center at Red
Cli that day showed up simply to see if the eort would implode or turn out
to be a good party.
He surprised many of us with a party that had that old black magic that he
knew so well, that old black magic that had us in his spell.

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If you watch politics for a while, youll see that its just a form of sorcery
which is to say its a bunch of tricks, illusions, curses, and spells. You white
people dont believe its real, do you? And they call us natives primitives!
Lake Superior, now theres something real! A mama black bear rocking
your pickup truck, thats real. An eagle ying over to bless your prayer, yes,
thats real too. Things that you can touch or otherwise sense are real. Stu
that the Creator made.
Now the things we cant touch, but that can reach out and touch us,
thats magic. Magic, of course, comes in all sorts of varieties. Some are
just parlor tricks. Some of it is harmless ouija-board stu. But then theres
the juju, hoodoo, and voodoo that gets cranked up by those who dont
have our best interest at heart.
I happen to believe that there can be white magic, or red magic, in my
case, used toward good ends. This happens when a wizard is so in touch
with this world, with Nature, that he or she has a profound sense of whats
real and how to measure the levels of reality. The good wizard understands
how the senses organize reality and how our cultural outlook then acts to
achieve consensus of that reality. But the good wizard understands that
this consensus is just a system, like mathematics or language. It is a way
of dealing with Creation, but is not Creation itself.
Now the practitioner of black magic, the sorcerer, has no such reference
point. Hes either forgotten or doesnt care about the distinction between
those things that have an origin in Nature and those that are total artice.
Thats the stu that comes out of the trickiest box of tricks in the known
universe: the human mind.
Black magic comes out of the human mind and creates illusions that
place us outside of Nature. This is that sorcery that constructs rationales for
poisoning the Earth, destroying resources, and brutalizing people. Among
the illusions spun by such sorcery are ideology, economics, and politics.
Only a population totally in thrall of such magic could sit still for old men
in black judicial robes to tell us with a straight face that corporations have
rights on a par with humans and the environment.
Every white-magic wizard knows that a rock has more rights than a
corporation. A white-magic wizard never loses track of what is Creation
and what are the twisted ideas that result from human protestations over
Creations guaranteed triumph. The black sorcerer resents the fact that
Nature will win in the end and wastes his life plotting petty revenge and

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futile delaying tactics. The white sorcerer surrenders to Nature and draws
knowledge from that surrender to the inexorable triumph of Nature.
Thats why I threw myself this party, and I oer a manifesto instead of
a birthday wish. I want to light some candles, not blow them out. Im here
to tell you that politics are a necessary evil only because we have allowed
black sorcerers to hypnotize us and get away with a mass illusion. So, for
now, were stuck in the illusion of politics as a real thing.
How do we get out of that illusion, that narcotic spell, that Earthnegating curse? My only answer is a form of anti-politics politics. I dont
doubt that there will be a place for petitioning and protesting in such a
politics. It will probably need all sorts of skills and energies that are lacking in the comatose institutions that are supposed to represent us or defend
us. But, for my part, Ill be practicing my white wizardry.
A white wizard engaging in defense of the Earth moves stealthily. She
knows how to shape-shift. He knows how a few can make the sound of
thousands. They know how to hold up the mirror that reveals the blacksorcery illusion, since these illusionists are like vampires and leave no image
in it.
White wizards know how to become and how to speak for the things
they hope to defend. I can be a bear, and I can be a lake trout. Can you
become an eagle? Can your friend become an old-growth forest? Can your
brother become a mountain or a lake?
The white wizard also knows how to defeat feelings of powerlessness.
She moves outside the illusion of those in control. He pulls back the
curtain to reveal the fakery of the hired experts. They do not ll their
head with theories and debates that feed the illusion. They dive right into
the practical work and urgent threats that can be seen in the thin spots in
the illusion.
You might ask if there is a place for such people in the cold-hearted
business of politics. There better be, if we are to survive. So make room
for dreamers, dowsers, and demon-busters. We need them all. The Earth
needs them all.
I took some ack in my tribe for spending time on the Wisconsin
Nuclear Weapons Freeze Campaign. And I took some ack in activist circles for linking those antinuclear eorts to other issues and matters of the
Spirit. I was told I was not being a logical political activist. But matters of
annihilation and Earth-destruction lie outside of logic. And I dont know

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about you, but if I have a few moments notice before the big one drops,
Id rather spend it in a sweat lodge with a medicine man than at a political meeting.
So lets have our meetings now and party at our party. Before the big
one drops, before the trees drop, before the rain stops, lets practice the
ancient art of eco-wizardry.

Places of Power

Interest in sacred spaces and sacred places has grown along with the availability of travel to exotic locales. Many modern pilgrims report changed perspectives after visits to ancient structures. For many, this goes beyond deepened
appreciation for the advanced skills of long-ago human ancestors. Some report
transformation and subtle spiritual energies.
A growing number of those so inclined are nding that such feelings are
evoked not just by distant monuments but are available in our own backyards.
Along with this realization has come understanding that the location of such
sites is not random. Those who came before and who were attuned to the sacred
usually picked locations based on many factors. Some are clearly cosmological,
closely following the movements of heavenly bodies and forces and events connected with the seasons. Some are connected to unseen worlds and said to draw
upon forces focused at certain points in this world.
Many of the Earth-based spiritual traditions are reconnecting with these
sacred sites. This reconnection is not without its woes, as tourism interests and
archeologists wrangle with spiritual practitioners over preservation and usage
issues. Add to that the sometimes competing local native traditions, and one
sees a recipe for conict.
We have a growing number of active citizens who are acutely aware of
these diculties and who are willing to play a role in sorting them out. Often
they are practical businesspeople who know their way around conicts in goals.
Lets focus on someone with years of work with the Ho-Chunk and the Lakota
who built deep empathy to indigenous interests and traditions. He waxes
philosophical about such things on the porch of his cottage near Black River
Falls, Wisconsin.
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We are just beginning to understand such things. Or maybe it is better

to say that we are just beginning to reacquaint ourselves with such things.
The ancients knew there was power in certain places on the Earth. But we
often have trouble sorting out the nature of their practices and knowledge.
The task is not made easier by years of governmental and church-based
interference and oppression. Vested interests have made it their job to obscure original practices under layers of disparagement and cooptation.
This makes it easier to dismiss the original practices at places of power as
superstition. Once that becomes the primary point of view, it is easy to
add layers of information that portray traditions as brutal, infantile, and
worthy of ridicule.
It is interesting that there has been so much energy put into controlling, debunking, and distorting the things associated with sacred places.
There is a secondary story here. All those who take over the places of
power of others always want to use that power, or at least peoples perceptions of it, for their own purposes. This is how the ancient mounds came
to be occupied with the temples and how the temples, in turn, were displaced by cathedrals. In some places the story even continues with monuments to commercial power or totalitarian parties.
In other places the settings are more or less preserved but cultural
authorities guard an ocial story. The ocial story almost always supports those who dominate the economic and governmental institutions.
There are often commercial arrangements and pecking orders that are
deemed essential to the status quo.
That is why those of us who know of such places in the Midwest are
quiet about them. Believe it or not, there are places of power still being
discovered. In addition, there are many things about the uses and signicance of those places still being uncovered. The riddles will not be totally
solved for some time, if at all.
I learned of these things by helping tribal people and their supporters
deal with cultural authorities. I soon learned that there is a delicate dance
to be danced about some of these sites. You must speak the language of
government in this dance, communicating about conservation and historic value. If they pick up any whi at all that a site has spiritual signicance, they are quick to react negatively. If they get the slightest hint at
all that this signicance is seen to relate to current spiritual energy, they
react viciously.

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I am not exaggerating.
The examples can be reeled o until they are tedious. I have been caught
up directly in a number of them and know of many others, through people
I trust. There are patterns here that do not amount to widespread conspiracy but are certainly suggestive of common nasty habits among ocials. I can give you a couple of depressing examples.
There is one place in central Wisconsin that introduced me to these
diculties. The place continuously yields secrets. On the most apparent
level, it has aspects of the medicine wheel, the Earth-based calendar that
helps chart the movements of the sun. That does not raise too many challenges to authority, until it builds connections to spiritual practices.
In the case of this particular site, there were adjacent development pressures that kept government insisting on the narrowest view of its nature
and geographic extent. Medicine wheels almost invariably encompass markers and features at some distance from the center. In this case, some were
close to a mile away.
It was complicated further by one tribal entity discovering evidence of
burials on the site. These were not just routine burials; they were likely
burials of priests and shamans from remote times and distant places.
Authorities went into total denial about this, partly because of how it challenges conventional archeological thought. Then came their wrath: They
slandered those involved with this eort to understand the site, called their
motives into question, cut o government funds for associated eorts, and
even launched a bizarre smear, trying to connect Native spiritual groups
with a white-power organization.
Things went from bad to worse when those authorities got their hands
on spiritual traditionalist documents that suggested that the site had
specic uses which drew on power peculiar to the site. Those familiar with
the ancient practices had reason to believe some of the more unusual
aspects of the site had to do with portals to other worlds.
Now you can take that several ways. Maybe it is a gurative matter,
with certain spots lending themselves to the solitude necessary for seekers
to explore the inner realms of their own subconscious. Perhaps it could be
seen in light of systems that hold that certain convergences of energy on
the Earth allow for our spirits to access things outside the seen world. Or
you can take it in the most direct and impressive way, that such portals are
openings to other dimensions.

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The furor around these possibilities started battles with agencies and
ocials who will remain unnamed. They brought out the heavy artillery
to counter even the possibility of such practices. They ridiculed such
things through linkages to UFOs, black helicopters, and cults. They even
found groups of Native Americans willing to denounce the ancient spiritual claims. It turned out that these friends of progress had their own
commercial interests in the area.
That same experience has been repeated in other places. So those of
us who work on such things have long-running feuds with the handful
of cultural commissars who insist on total control over the sites and their
stories. We learn from such things.
If you were to ask me how such incredible things can be attributable to
specic locations, I cannot claim to know the science of it or even whether
science is an appropriate word. All I know is that humans have long had
special feelings for such places. Even if you wipe a people out, those who
follow them often use the same places as the vanished people did.
The stories and practices can be driven underground, but they are
rarely erased. I learned that in the Yucatan, Peru, and central Mexico. The
tourist guides love to entertain visitors with scary tales of human sacrice and other brutality. They do not mention what came before those
harsh theocracies. To discover those older stories, you need to move to the
fringes. Find an old peasant, let him take you around and tell you how the
place was used before pyramids and temples. Such people will often have
explanations for what brought ancients to the place.
For those of us pulled by such places, these old ones are our allies. They
can teach many things about places of power. They can bring us not only
to windows to the past but to doors to the future. In these places, there
resides wisdom about what Earth forces are at our disposal and how using
them can help us love in an Earth-friendly way.
I have learned another important thing from these places: Do not rush
their knowledge into the public domain. We are working on another site
in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, an earthen mirror of the great pyramids near Mexico City. The old ones say that a time will come when that
place will provide many lessons. We will have to wait for the power of that
place to become clear.

Pull of the Big Lakes

Water denes so much of our region. Outdoor writers rhapsodize about creeks
and rivers. Hikers know the healing babble of springs. Minnesota trumpets its
ten thousand lakes, and Wisconsin trumps those with more, though truth tells
us that many among these tallied are potholes and mud ponds.
Humans connect with water, subconsciously know it to be the place of origin. Distance from the ocean makes water all the more important to those of
us in the Midwest. Being of the headwaters of Mississippi and St. Lawrence
connects us to the ow of things. Our portages are fabled and woven in the
fabric of mid-continent history and myth. Our goods ow to the world via the
Mississippi and the St. Lawrence.
For many among us, the Great Lakes exert an almost tidal pullunderstandable for what are in feel and size inland freshwater seas of tremendous
commercial, ecological, and emotional importance. Circumnavigate the shores
of Superior, Huron, and Michigan, and you will nd individuals absolutely
smitten by those lakes. My acquaintance with Erie and Ontario is not as great,
but I suspect some of the same feeling exists for those little sisters.
The connection is spiritual and reverent for some. Others nd peace and
aesthetic pleasure. Not a few relate to the big lakes through playful recreation.
One must also hasten to add that individuals can be found who combine all
these attitudes into a joyous package. Problem is, those blessed by such intoxication are often unable to articulate their sublime feelings.
Until I took my two preteen sons out shing on Lake Michigan I had been
reduced to deciphering far-away looks, sly smiles, and cryptic and terse observations of those who seemed closest to the big lakes. A whole world opened for
my two sons when we took them salmon shing out of Two Rivers, Wisconsin.
It was an almost perfect day, an almost scary day in that those boys experienced
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a shing day that few ever experience in a lifetime. I worried a bit about how
subsequent trips would likely not measure up. But elder wisdom was dispensed
to them that day by boat captains and marina sta. I simply eavesdropped.
You saw one face of Lake Michigan today, its smiling and abundant face.
If youre out here long enough youll see other faces too and come to
appreciate them all. I dont know if you came up in the light yesterday.
Mid-afternoon there were ten-foot waves rolling in over the tip of the
harbor breakwater. Not pure mean, but threatening in the way the Lake
can be.
The Lake is boss, you must understand that. You need to learn and
heed the commands. Like in the military, your lives could depend on it.
So you go slow if youre on your own, or listen closely if youre in the company of those with experience. The Lake itself will teach you if you know
how to pay attention. In fact, that is the rst skill you must learn in any
environment: how to pay attention.
Paying attention to the Lake is essential, since it is so unforgiving at
times. There are mistakes you dont get to come back fromonce and
youre done, permanently. So you start modest out here, learn to observe
and stay out of harms way. Good observers sharpen the senses and learn
the environment. That means annual cycles, weather, water depth, shoals,
and inlets. It means watching performance of men and equipment, learning what both can do under certain conditions and where their limits are.
When you pick up that stu, you still need to learn judgment and instinct. Judgment is taking good observations on the Lake and then making
timely decisions based on what you can see. When youve been out here
long enough, and long enough varies from person to person, then you
might make it to instinct. Thats the ultimate skill, making judgments
without sucient observation, going on what you cant see but that you
feel in your gut.
If you can master those things here, master the combination of observation, judgment, and instinct, then you have a start on living on the
water anywhere. The Lake has produced its share of those who went on to
sail from the tropics to the artic. Its produced seamen and masters, merchant marines and naval sailors, and shermen and pleasure cruisers. Boys
of the Lake have gone on to sail the Seven Seas and have come back to tell
the tales of battles, exotic lands, and scrapes with cruel waters.

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Some of us, like me, just stay here. Im just drawn to this Lake. You
couldnt pull me away with a tug. I was raised a Fox Valley boy but didnt
nd my true place until I came up as a youngster to sh here, just like
you two. Just like you two, I got up in the dark and packed my sandwich
and went down to the old docks with men who were going shing. I had
myself a good time. Nothing like the trip you two had, but good enough
to make me want to come back.
I remember that time, just as youll remember this trip. The mued
dock sounds and the sputtering boat engines. The sleeping town. Leaving
the smooth river and into the choppy channel and rounding the breakwater and watching the sweep of the distant lighthouses. Looking back at
the fading lights of shore and eastward into the coming dawn. Seeing the
dark outlines of big ore and grain ships and feeling their wakes as they
passed. Hearing the shrill call of the birds in the wind. I was lled up with
Lake sensation before I even wet a line.
I didnt just get to switch my life over here from Fond du Lac at that
stage. But I sure pretended that Lake Winnebago was a mini-Michigan.
Learned what I could on a canoe in the tributary creeks. Delivered newspapers until I saved enough for a beat up sailing dingy. Made another
Two Rivers trip almost every summer. Then, as a teenager, I nally got to
work with the old commercial shermen in Manitowoc.
No, my path didnt lead straight back to the Lake. You might even say
I resisted it in some ways. Got distracted with jobs, family, making money,
and so forth. I built up the family business into a corporation, until it got
too big for the family. When I got into middle age the business decided
it had gotten too big for me. But the Lake was waiting patiently through
all those years of summer trips and shing excursions. While I didnt have
the second home on the Lake anymore, I did have the motor home at the
marina and the boat. I discovered thats all I needed.
In a sense, thats when my life started. Stripped down to the essentials;
all the useless baggage thrown overboard. Living lean is not living mean,
its living clean.
What can a person nd in the Lake? It takes a whole life to work on
that, and if youre lucky youll nd yourself in the Lake. Not the molded,
manufactured self, but the real self of currents and storms and depth. You
can see yourself smooth as mirror and lled with sunshine. Or you can see
yourself whipped into spray and scud and icy to the bone.

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Awe and power. Thats the Lake for me. Awe that almost hurts my eyes
to look at. Awe that makes the world seem new, as if youre seeing it for
the rst time. Power that lets us know our place in the scheme of things.
Power that is timeless. Together, they make up something that is as close
to holy as I can put a nger on.
The sh are part of the charm and lure, but theres so much more. You
had a day most graybeards would envya chest full of sh, every one a
wall hanger. I imagine youll have them smoked and eat them o the grill.
They will stand as memories as long as youre sucking oxygen. But I hope
youll remember the whole day, not simply the end result. You stumbled
sleepily down to the dock this morning, not knowing what to expect. I
saw the looks on your faces as we cleared the breakwater and left the lights
behind us. Thats a rst-time experience that stays with most of us, entering the big lake in a darkness that seems big enough to swallow us. Then
the sights and sounds that follow: the sunrise, the crying gulls, the horns
of the freighters, the wake of the Manitowoc car ferry, and the zing of
that lure snapped out of the mouth of that soaring big boy that got away.
Youre part of all that now. Its in you.
Boys, the sh are out there, minus the monsters you hauled in. But
remember, theres more out here than sh. The Lake is more than just the
place where the sh live. The Lake is beautiful days like this, days of mystery and fog, and days of terrifying storm. Carry those days home with the
sh, and see if they call you back here.

Living in the Trees

Plenty of environmentalists hear the word logging and make many assumptions and moral judgments. Acquaintances with our upper Great Lakes natural history give us to know the horrible waste visited on the pinery and the
unsightly practices of paper-pulp production. Still, there is another, growing
side to this industry.
In terms of getting an education in forestry, nothing beats owning a woodlot. Our family came into ours almost twenty years ago. We soon learned that
a woods does indeed make some management demands, what with invasive
species and the various needs around a farm for rewood, windbreaks, and
privacy screening. We also learned that a lack of decision about such matters
did, in fact, constitute a decision, especially in the wake of bad decisions by
prior occupants.
In our case, the prior occupants had practiced ve generations of forestry
laissez faire. Thats understandable for a patch of ground that was mostly
prairie prior to European settlement. Conventional wisdom has it that the
scattered stands of savanna were for thousands of years managed only by re
and the grazing of large beasts. So the prior occupants might be forgiven for
letting trees sneak up on them, additional dispensation being granted on
grounds of a farm mostly unt for tillage. So, from the outset, we were faced
with a forest brought into being by human intervention and neglect.
One day a logger drove down our dirt road to ask if he could access a few
of a neighbors trees through our land. He explained that the trees just didnt
cooperate with topography and that these particular outlaws were on the
wrong side of a deep ravine. He said removal of the trees in question from the
neighbors side would make for a hard skid, a land gouging enterprise hed
just as soon avoid.
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He was a hard guy to gure at rst, given to gru pronouncements and

almost poetic descriptions of the community of trees. Appearance-wise he was
a ZZ Top version of Paul Bunyan, wiry with red hair and long beard. Though
he was quite personable, I was a tad skeptical of some of his unsolicited advice.
He made an eye-popping oer on a ridgeline stand of red oak on my side of
the fence, said the trees were maxed out. I declined out of stubbornness and
aesthetic delicacy. The very next summer, a violent storm reduced those 155year-old trees in thin soil to twisted kindling. Our family missed out on signicant cash ow, and we had a big tangle on our hands.
Lets just say that I listened more closely to those rough characters after that.
Trees are just about the most amazing things on this Earth. Loggers know
that better than anybody, if you can get them to admit it. There aint many
hard-ass, slash-em and crash-em types who are tree-huggers. Those boys
are usually fools who somehow got the idea that theres gold in the woods.
A true logger wants to keep logging, wants to log some this year, log
some next year, and come back to the same place in twenty years to cut
the ones he left behind on purpose. Whats the future of logging, if not in
continuous yield? Think it makes sense to strip-mine trees and retrain
guys like me for data entry?
Ive been at this thirty years, and Ive seen important changes. We
weeded out a lot of the hombres looking for speedy dinero. Were down
to more of a group that just plain loves being out in the woods. Some of
them would just about do it for nothing. Hell, throw in equipment loans,
insurance costs, and bad market timing, and some of us are doing it for
nothing.
One thing Ive noticed is that loggers are better listeners now. Used to
be that you just couldnt tell them a damn thingtheir way or the highway. Now they leave some breathing room for a chain of talk. They allow
for a lot of links in that chain, kinda like a town meeting where everybody
gets to say their piece and maybe something comes out of it that most can
agree on.
Loggers listen to landowners better these days. It used to be that loggers
were like 1950s barbers. You could tell them how you wanted things to
look, but you came out the other end of the grinder with a buzz cut. Now,
they work with people, explain options, and paint a picture for them so
they know what to expect.

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Whoa Nellie, look out for expectations! You got be gentle with a timber
virgin. They can be shocked when you whip out the big equipment. So you
need the foreplay of some map drawing and some visits to some other cutting sites, maybe even a talk with another woodlot owner whos been around
the blocksomeone who can tell them well slide in and out real slick.
On top of nessing and playing kissy-face with landowners, we gotta
navigate the sandbars of the whole forestry gang. We got the timber buyers and the mills. We got the layers of government and programs and
forms. We got our own groups and feuds. I try not to let on when Im
giving them a hard time, but actually I think were all doing a better job.
I think we all got it now, understand how this has got to work.
As least we mostly do in these parts. Sometimes you hear some pretty
bad stu about those boys out West. And we got a couple bad apples still
operating here in the hardwoods. But in general, were all getting on the
same page about safety, erosion control, minimizing tree damage, leaving
wildlife trees, and working to maximize timber value.
That last piece is the main story with so much of raw-material economics. The undervaluing of things from and on the Earth is what drives
over-harvesting, and over-harvesting drives down prices further. All of us
in the logging chain need to make sure all the others get fair prices. Thats
why we need more wood-products industry right in this area; we need the
value-added portion of wood products close to home. Theres something
wrong when raw logs are going to Japan and coming back here as nished
products.
Theres a general tendency to treat those of us in logging like we were
dumber than stumps. But you dont nd many without specialized training anymore. Id say it takes about ve years of all-around experience to
make a decent logger, and then only if hes got good teachers. Five years
is a long time in logging. Youre doing good if you can work ve years
without a major bang up like a smashed leg or a bad back.
Now its true that the logging labor pool aint too dainty. It aint easy for
small operators like me to nd good help. Well, nding them aint as hard
as keeping them. Keeping them out of jail is another problem. Its a rough
crowd, but a good-hearted crowd. I had one muscle-head who dumped a
new skidder over cause he didnt want to run over a turtle. Same night he
goes into a tavern and cracks open three peckerheads. That was probation
revocation for him.

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But that wasnt the rst time on stu like that. Best man I ever had in
the woods was like ten dierent Peterson eld guides, could catch sh
with his hands, knew every plant from Hudson Bay to the Rio Grande,
and would climb an eighty-foot tree to put a baby bird back in a nest. Too
bad there was a Minnesota fugitive warrant out on him.
Then Ive had the binge drinkers. Hate to pay those boys, cause they
disappear until they spend it all. Whoa Nellie, I even got problems with
bush studs who disappear on me if ice-shing is good. Then you got girlfriend problems, child support problems, old trucks that break down, and
cases of the clap.
Somehow, we get down and get the job done. Somehow, the results
turn out better than you might think. These same roughnecks will know
where to put down a trail waterbar to slow runo. Theyll go around a
stand of young ash to give it a start. And theyll be careful not to drop tops
in the trout steam.
Theyre like me. The woods is where theyd rather be. Theyre not going
to mess with that. Were living with the trees, were living in the trees, and
were living o the trees. Thats a lot of living, and Ill stay that way until
Im planted under a tree.

City Sticker

Railroad work brought me in contact with many Wisconsin landscapes and

individuals with dierent relationships to their habitats. Much of this initial
exposure came in the time when foul economic winds turned the snow belt into
the rust belt. Many Midwest cities with strong reputations as machine shops
for the world found themselves struggling to survive. The struggle involved not
only eroding economic infrastructure and tax base, it often was a matter of
out-migration of working families whose ancestors had settled the factory
neighborhoods in the early waves of industrialization.
Unlike the gradual transformation of the older cities of the East, abandonment came abruptly to some Midwest cities. There was little initial suburban
movement immediately after World War II. Many such cities remained fairly
healthy until the late 1970s and early 1980s, when shifts in the global economy
stilled the prosperous hum of machine shops.
Hard economic times speeded white ight from these cities. Neighborhoods in many of these cities became thoroughly segregated. It was often a short
transition from trim blue-collar home ownership to absentee landlords and
crack houses. It might take only a few years to go from lively buzz to desolation in the neighborhood adjoining a closed manufacturing plant.
In some communities, white ight was followed by middle-class African
Americans leaving the old neighborhoods. But there were exceptions. Milwaukee had hardy little knots of 1960s activists who stuck it out. Some even moved
back from cushier, but more sterile, spots to the places of their youth. Some were
former community organizers, some were natural entrepreneurs, and some
were former Black Panthers. As they mellowed into middle age, the competitive hustle and militancy of class and race gave way to a notion of responsibility for community space.
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Weve all heard of the stereotype of the soft and coddled urban dweller, the
man buered from his environment by conveniences and technology. We
call him the city slicker and mock him. But outside of a few gentried
enclaves, this stereotype paints an entirely false view of the conditions of
urban life. Its certainly not the prole of the type of person who will bring
back our neighborhoods.
No, in my community and other places besieged by economic rot, ocial neglect, and thuggish lawlessness, we need a more determined type of
person. We need a more vigilant and proactive type of urban dweller. We
need people willing to stand up for values, willing to provide role models
and mentoring to youth, and willing to ght to maintain community and
even resuscitate it. We need a type I call the city sticker.
This means sticking with the place you know and love. It means getting
back to that place that is insinuated into your heart and soul. You dont
cut-and-run on it without a ght. You stay for yourself and on behalf of
those who cant run.
I have friends who made it out to the suburbs. Some moved for jobs,
and others moved for the sake of their kids. There are lots of reasons,
good and bad. But most who leave miss the feeling of neighborhood. They
miss the sound of familiar voices on porches on summer nights. They miss
the old man who sold them ice cream at the corner store. They miss the
ready companionship of the neighborhood barbershop and auto-repair
shop.
When I visit them out in the places of endless lawns they ask me why I
dont get out of the old neighborhood. I tell them that they may sleep in
their new locations, but they dont live there. I tell them that they are
living in comfortable refugee camps. I tell them that refugees dont get to
call a place their own. A place has got to have soul. I tell them that a soulless place hurts our souls. And I tell them that everyones got to make their
own decision about how to live, and Ive made mine.
Ive made a decision that I will keep the local park and playground safe
for children. That might mean organizing neighbors to rake weeds by day
and chase junkies out with baseball bats at night. I made a decision to light
a re under an aldermans fat ass to get streets xed. I made a decision to
liberate some of those vacant lots and get some community gardens going.
I made a decision to work with neighbors to get a food-buying club in the
old grocery store space. I made a decision to support every cooperative,

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church, fraternal lodge, and parent-teacher group that wages a ght to

keep our neighborhood livable.
We cant all run away. And even if we could, what happens when the
places weve run to turn into the places weve left? In the end theres no
place to run to, only places to stick up for. You need to treat the place you
live like your beloved. In sickness and in health, for richer and for poorer,
for as long as ye both shall live.
If your neighborhood is your beloved, you dont let your neighbors
just moan about its decline. You organize and challenge them at every
step. You make them take responsibility for their piece of Gods Earth. You
turn every complaint on its head and set them to work so much that they
duck into the shadows when they see you coming. You get them and their
ladders and brushes and get that widows house painted. You get them to
push those abandoned cars out to where the city will deal with them. And
you get them to stick with the agreed-upon story when that drug house
on the block has an unfortunate re of undetermined origin.
Country people are blessed with space. My people came up from Mississippi three generations ago and the link to their country space was
strong. As a child I heard the stories of the elds and orchards. I feel like
I know their swimming holes and the swamps where they hunted. It took
lynchings and awful brutality to run them out.
City people have to look at their space the same way. It has to be worth
ghting for. Not only to hold onto, but to keep decent and worthwhile to
live in. It has to be a place of memories, a place where memories and traditions are kept alive. Without memories and traditions were just rootless
refugees.
So much has happened since we were snatched out of Africa. We endured slavery. We suered cruel injustice. We suered forced economic
migration and conscription for wars. We spilled enough blood to make
honest claim to our modest piece of this Earth. So I tell my neighbors to
stick with it and Ill stick with them.

Farm Warrior

In the 1980s, the farm situation was very grim in heartland America. Farm foreclosures were common, and thousands more family farms went quietly under
through fatigue and resignation. The causes were many and the recriminations
heated; few would deny that those losses changed rural landscapes and cultures.
Rural life is a quiet life and rural people are often thought of as stoic and
uncomplaining. But there are those among us who can bear witness to disquiet
and resistance in the countryside during that period. Not all of those disappeared farms went quietly into that good night. There was not only protest but
also civil disobedience and some actions not so civil.
Some of this activity was organized, and some was spontaneous. Some of it
was in the context of deep grieving. In other instances blood ran hot in anger.
Church groups oered comfort and aid. Hate groups oered conspiracy theories and extremism.
In the middle of all this stood some rural stalwarts in the classic midwestern progressive populist tradition. They were ghters and agitators. Theirs were
booming voices of anger, not the calm resolve I rst encountered among those
struggling to stay on the land. Those voices expressed the view that the many
human tragedies of farm country were not accidents of modernization. There
was often a feeling that sinister forces were behind the changes, forces that did
not hesitate in grinding up people and land.
It was just like Russia under Stalin, as far as Im concerned. Maybe without the executions, but the suering in the countryside was immense.
Families were destroyed. Good farmers became shamed drunks. Grandparents saw century farmsfarms in one family over one hundred years
slip away into the hands of strangers. Small rms that depended on rural
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income just shriveled up, equipment dealers went belly up, and once protable taverns closed. On top of that, we had the mental problems, the
domestic abuse, the accidents and disabilities brought on by insane overwork, and the suicides.
That was the human toll.
But I noticed other things that went with it. Things that made farm
country a poorer place to be in many ways. Some of it related to nature,
and some of it related to the feel and look of farm country.
Family farms were refuges of diversity. Theres no way that a corporate
farm keeps a couple of Dutch Belted cattle or Shire horses around. No way
that a couple of tenant farmhands are going to keep up an orchard or
berry patch at an old farmhouse. In this environment, no one straightens
a leaning barn: No, knock it down and build a poll shed. Chicken houses,
pigpens, and log granaries. Gone! Our landmarks are going so fast that our
parents wouldnt even recognize the places they grew up on.
Thats just part of it. Rural churches are empty. Cemeteries look overgrown. Schools are closed. I dont mean the one-room schools of long ago.
I mean the consolidated elementary schools that replaced them. Some
parts of farm country are completely devoid of childrens laughter. The few
stray kids left have to ride twenty miles to another town for school.
Take a look at the woodlots on the family farms that bit the dust. Skidders come in, pluck a few choice veneer logs, and atten the rest. Now
such places are either a tangle or a bulldozed wasteland where they park
broken machinery, no longer the places that youd nd a fat squirrel or
den of foxes. No well-worn path to that cold spring anymore. The treehouse and deer stand were knocked down by the skidders. The turtles,
toads, and salamanders are gone. The hawk and owl nests too.
Down in the meadow, the creek doesnt run fast and deep anymore. Log
debris from the woods has dammed it in spots. If youre lucky, the creek
is only muddy from the silt of nearby big operations. If youre unlucky,
youve got the stink of their manure lagoon. Forget about frogs and trout.
In the elds you see the crazy hand of government. Youll see corn where
there never was any before and never should be. Many family farms were
never in a government program. When the big neighbors buy them up, the
acreage goes right into mandatory crop rotation programs whether thats
the right t or not. So now were mining old hay ground so we can produce more of something we have too much of.

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I cant think of another area of American life where so many people,

agencies, and programs have conspired to make such a big mess. But I
also cant think of another group of Americans who would put up with
this foolishness. Thats what gets my blood pressure upthe willingness
of farmers to eat whatever is shoveled into the trough. I fought the ght
against this stu for over twenty years. Won some and lost some. It was
a ght that had to be fought by any farm person who wanted to keep his
self-respect.
It was a ght made more complicated by so-called farmers organizations. It was like herding cats. You couldnt get them to agree on a common direction. You couldnt get them to ever agree what the problem was.
Still cant. Meanwhile, the big boys and money movers were laughing their
asses o at us and raking it in. The Farm Bureaus answer to everything was
to let the market economy shake it out. Good thing Franklin Roosevelt
didnt do that during the depression, or there would have been a revolution.
Some of my neighbors were so thick-headed about what was going
on. When the rst one would be losing the farm, many of his neighbors
would say, Oh, hes a bad manager, cant be helped. Another would go,
and the talk was, That fellow never liked to work too hard. They were
picked o one at a time.
We wouldnt have had any ght at all if it werent for farm warriors
who were willing to drive a hundred miles or so to make some ruckus. You
couldnt be nice about it. I went belly to belly with sheris on courthouse
steps. I grabbed my share of bureaucrats by the necktie. I guess I was a war
chief in this. I helped nd ways to shuttle cattle and equipment around
so it wouldnt be seized by creditors. We blocked silos, disrupted foreclosures, chased o bidders, and made some bankers and bureaucrats miserable. I dont regret a damn bit of it. I only wish thered been more of us
and more will to press it even further. I know I gave it everything I had
and then some.
The young folks get the legacy, and they better pay attention. Theres
always somebody who wants to control the land and make their fortune
o of it. They dont care about connecting to it and living on it. The
farmers who survived the last round may be cocky enough to think theyre
home-free. But nobody who lives on or near raw materials or natural resources is ever safe from the forces of the grid. When they decide to squeeze
more blood and bucks out of these places, they will. Look out!

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Dont expect much from government in the way of help. Those clowns
are useless, bought and paid for. I dont remember a single politician who
showed up to stop a farm sale. Hell, that would have been national news
and about as likely as one of those dipsticks driving a tank into Baghdad.
I dont have any answer for you other than resistance. Make it too hot
for them in the countryside. Make them import their food from their
overseas slaves. Unionize those factory farms, or shut them down.
I have seen the future of the countryside. Its a future of mobile-home
parks for agriculture labor, poisoned watersheds, game-farms for the rich,
and ghost towns. Its a sad future for the land and the people.
I hope somebody takes up the ght after us. Just tell them that theyre
in a long tradition that goes back to 1776. Tell them that our war cry was
No Sale!! Tell them that theyre in a line of farm warriors.

Reeducation Camp

It probably doesnt surprise many readers that homeschooling has a foothold

among grassroots ecologists and back-to-the-landers. Its almost an instinctual
response to the mass commercialized culture that redenes humans as consumers. For many activist parents in the rural Midwest, the issue of how to instill
respect for the Earth (and for human rights) in their children is a pressing
one. Parents of ecological bent have plenty of negative inuences to counteract:
local rednecks, greed-is-good advocates aunting material goodies, televangelists, mass media, and talk-show nut-cakes.
An observer of intentional communities and land cooperatives in the late
1980s would have easily noticed many children in those environments. In
part, this was the result of a baby boomlet among reproductive late bloomers.
In part it was because of in-migration by established families. No matter
the origins of the demographic shift, it made issues of child-rearing central,
along with economic theory and communal organization in these alternative
settings.
By the early 1990s, visits to the homes of such activists revealed a growing
revulsion toward the public education system. The bookshelves of these homes
had long contained the works of Henry David Thoreau, Aldo Leopold, and
Wendall Berry. Now these books were joined by Paul Goodmans Compulsory
Miseducation and John Taylor Gattos Dumbing Us Down.
Naturally, the sentiments provoked by such reading material went beyond
discussion. In some places parents formed Waldorf schools. Some created environmental charter schools in the public schools. Homeschooling also grew in
popularity. But some in these circles, particularly young mothers, organized
additional approaches. One such mother could tell you about a summer camp
she ran near Monona, Minnesota.
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We laughingly call this Reeducation Camp, since we try to remedy some

of the sins and omissions of the school system during our turn in the
summer vacation. The name also makes us remember that we are dealing
with human minds. Its a sacred task to challenge minds to think and not
spoon-feed them, to not replace societys rigid system with one of our own
making. We stay mindful of the horrible things that have been done to
people under the label of political reeducation.
In some ways, were an anti-school. We stress things that free children
up from socialization. Many of us believe that much of what passes for
socialization is actually brutalization. Youll nd that we dont spend much
time maintaining order and discipline here. Our whole philosophy is to
connect the child to nature and to cultivate the inner nature of the child.
I can accept the possibility of a child of destructive nature. I just have
to tell you that I havent seen one. Weve had children from troubled families and a few with mental disturbances. If anything, they beneted from
their time here even more than normal children. We believe that children need less structured time and more opportunities to learn through
observation.
Part of what we are about is a modest attempt to build a sense of community. This is the place where those in the tri-state bioregional networks
and co-ops bring children together to experience a taste of communal
interdependence. Its where we try to help children appreciate how their
parents eorts contribute toward a dierent sort of future, a future that
looks to build human-scale and ecologically sane institutions.
Im a former public school teacher. In that role I felt like I was an agent
of a system that insisted on homogenizing everything. We talked in terms
of helping children adjust and adapt, of repetitive behavior modication
and continual retraining to meet social needs. We saw the home and the
community as problematic settings that held the potential to interfere
with classroom organization.
Now I understand that this bureaucratic view of education is part of
what destroys community. Now I understand that, just like organic produce, organic community and its education of children must sprout from
a soil thats free of contaminants and toxins. In that metaphor, you look
at ways to build up the nutrient level of your community.
I left the educational bureaucracy when I moved to the country. I had
to leave that system because I was carrying my rst child and realized that

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I would not subject that child to the system that employed me. I came
to understand that most of the basic skills that justify educational structures could be accomplished in a fraction of the time in a less structured
setting. I had a class where I worked on critical thinking techniques with
advanced students, and I was given a poor assessment because I did not
require students to raise their hands before going to the bathroom. I had
one student who went on to become a Rhodes scholar, two who were
selected for service academies, and a young Hmong woman who made it
to medical school. But I forgot that my real purpose was to be part of the
toilet police. When I realized that society valued me mostly as a babysitter,
then it was time to leave.
So we moved to this area, and I had my three children. All three were
reading by four years of age. I helped start a homeschoolers network so
parents could skill-share. This way we brought children into community,
so a father who was a Wisconsin DNR forester could expose them to botany and a young mother who moved to Winona from Germany could
share language instruction. We even had a Green Beretturned pacist run
survival training for kids.
This is the type of thing that really connects children to the Earth. We
try to make sure theyre outside most of the time. Thats when we expanded
the network to include a summer camp that even public school students
could attend. We use nature and real-life settings to provide the teaching.
I have found that the Mississippi River is one of the best classrooms on
Earth. Apparently Mark Twain thought so too. We use trips to the Mille
Lacs Indian Reservation to understand cultural and environmental issues.
We canoe the St. Croix River to get physical activity, to deepen understanding of our region, and to give children the chance to explore their own
quiet inner space.
We use the parents in summer camp too. Weve spent time helping
build a timber-frame house. Weve repaired streambeds on a trout creek.
Weve taken part in the process at an organic cheese factory. And weve
taken turns supporting a family with a terminally ill mother. There are
very few slices of life that weve missed out on. Just when we think we have
a gap, we put out the word and an amateur astronomer or ddle player
pops up.
It has been great for all the children, but I think its especially important for boys. I have two of my own, and it doesnt take much observation

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to see that boys dont handle long stretches of sitting still very well. Schools
probably hurt boys the most through that institutional insistence that
they be quiet and behave. For little creatures who learn through handson engagement and physical experimentation, this rigidity is the rst step
in crushing their curiosity.
Ive seen boys just blossom as they learn to nd turtles, watch turkey
eggs hatch, and grow their rst plot of sweet corn. We had a few that
were clearly headed for trouble and had been pulled out of school systems.
I dont think Ive ever felt a greater sense of accomplishment than when I
see a troubled youth gentled by nature and people acting in more natural
ways. One made up and recited a poem to me as we lay in the grass watching a meteor shower. Thats when I knew that I was the beneciary of reeducation too!

Stalker Stillness

Hunting was long the introduction to the wilderness during the westward
expansion. Even in the industrial age, hunters occupy an uneasy niche on the
environmental spectrum. Though responsible for many core conservation values, they are increasingly alienated from the very agencies and movements they
helped birth. Todays hunter often feels profoundly misunderstood.
Cultural transitions and postmodern organization have not been kind to
hunters and their traditions. Hunting is now seldom the introductory experience to the outdoors that it was for many generations. Many factory workers,
not to mention physicians and writers, once still had relatives on the farm. The
great social leveling force of conscripted armies also built networks of service
buddies who became hunting buddies.
For much of the twentieth century, hunters in North America were a prime
social and political force. Their ranks included many illustrious citizens, with
President Theodore Roosevelt serving as the energetic archetype. While their
lobbying muscle remains intact in Washington, D.C., and many state capitols,
they face a growing divide with an emerging society of high-tech city dwellers.
Hunting is an extremely alien concept in this emerging sector.
Age and other demographic trends also seem to play a role in how hunting
is seen by the non-hunting public. Family structure is dierent, and so are living patterns. Distance from agriculture and the realities of how animal protein
gets into the plastic wrapper in the super market makes for a psychological
remove from the food chain. Reminders of these realities ll some non-hunters
with disdain and even disgust.
Many hunters grumble about this cultural divide, but few appreciate their
own role in it. There are some, however, who have thought about it and have
strong points of view and a willingness to exchange perspectives. You can hear
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some pessimism shaped by seeing what development has done to once hunted
places in Winnebago County, Wisconsin.
My wife says Im just an old sourpuss. That may be, but who says you
have to smile when a bird dumps on your head? I just dont like what I
see. The knotheads on both sides of these issues have barn compost for
brains.
What the hell happened to the concept of the hunter-naturalist? Where
are our Teddy Roosevelts? Hunting is now my turf, your turf, with squabbles over overlapping seasons. For the auent, commercialized hunting has
all the connection with nature of a brothel package tour to Bangkok.
We need to revisit hunting ethics. We need to make sure the concepts
of clean kill and fair chase are understood and observed. Too many suburbanites are dealing with gut-shot deer. Hunting-dog problems are bringing people to blows. Trespassing incidents are driving land closures like
never before.
So its not a pretty picture, and its likely to get worse. The hunting
lobby today is more of a front for the gun-nut lobby, which in turn serves
as the shoeshine brigade for the Neanderthals whove wrecked my beloved
Republican Party. They sure arent looking at the trends about where people are moving, what sort of future is coming. A generation from now, it
will be apparent that hunters fought the wrong battles.
We need to restore and update the hunter-naturalist perspective. It is
a highly ethical system that has reverence for quarry. A hunter feels a sense
of loss and awe for the game hes taken. If you dont feel that, youre not
really a hunter, youre a mechanic at best and a mindless killer at worst.
A hunter nds connection in hunting; a killer maintains separateness.
Theres a dierence between just plain taking and taking what you use.
It ts with a sense of balance in nature. Humans are the only ones in this
system to concern themselves with ethical bounds. Were the only ones who
must account for our behavior. If we ignore our capacities and obligations,
more than hunting is in trouble.
Were heading in such a crass direction, just the opposite of what we
need. The reasons for this are many, and some are beyond the control of
the hunting community. Family structure is changing. Im not trying to
be an old fuddy-duddy, but kids are unlikely to learn hunting from a single
mom. Im not making a judgment, just stating the result.

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Then there are those political miscalculations that I mentioned. Sure,

there are provocative anti-hunting boneheads. But they get more attention through our reaction then they would through their own arguments.
Thats the problem with the reactionary overkill of our so-called allies.
How did we let ourselves become part of the culture wars? Why are
we even seen in the same room with lunatics who believe in God-given
and constitutional rights for weapons with thirty-round capacities and
armor-piercing bullets? How have we let reason be pushed aside? I can only
conclude that were being used by partisan forces working on a broader
agenda.
Were on the wrong track on funding issues too. Were joined at the hip
with anti-tax nuts who want to gut natural-resource agencies. Sure, look
for eciencies and spend smart, but dont forget that taxes are societal
dues. When costs go up at the marina where I keep my boat, I expect the
fee to go up. I dont expect them to let the dock rot. Resources are under
increased threat, land acquisition costs keep rising, and habitat protection
is increasingly complex. How can we not expect costs to go up? This is the
same shell game we let slick pinheads play with large companies: Razzledazzle us with the quarterly balance sheet, loot the operation, and run the
thing into the ground.
If we really want to get crass and worked up that our hunting fees might
pay for a bike path somewhere, we should just pay for our game by the
pound!
In the meantime, all we are doing is driving reason and moderation
out of the discussion. We let fear and outlandish claims end the careers
of decent and honorable men. This old Marine voted for Nixon all three
times, but I hated what was done to George McGovern at the end of his
Senate career. He was a decent man and another victim of gun nuts in a
cabal with other extremists.
We need a dierent message from hunters, one that arms the basics
behind the hunting experience. I dont want to be lumped in with thugs
and militia idiots. Ill never set foot in a gun show again. The last one I
went to was more like a bazaar for terrorists. There is something deeply
wrong if hunting pursuits are sharing forums with Nazi memorabilia.
Lets reintroduce the public to the wholesome vigor of the hunting life.
We have much to oer about days aeld and treks in beautiful places.
Lets talk about the romance and tradition of hunting. We have a gateway

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to the human past and our ancestors skills and heightened senses. I call it
stalking stillness.
Reintroduce some of these busy people to stalker stillness. Thats the
essence of hunting to me. Thats where I nd beauty in the wild. The ability to blend in, to move quietly, or to not move at all for hours. To become
so much a part of the setting that the creatures accept your presence.
In that stillness you can nd yourself. You can come to know yourself
in ways that others cannot. You are given the power of choices in that stillness, even the choices of whether or how to interrupt it, whether to take
what you have come for or to let it pass and to come back another day.
I wish I thought that everyone in the hunting lobby understood this.
But it is not in the nature of noisy and irksome types. Theirs is the world
of machinery and tavern boasts. They know nothing of real stillness.

Take a Hike

Walking has long occupied a signicant niche in the narratives of lovers of

the land. Here in North America we have inherited a walking legacy chiey
from European lineages. This includes everything from romantic pastoral rambles to religious pilgrimages to grail quests to the dark paths of the Brothers
Grimm.
Our sense of walking as discovery of Nature and self is also heavily informed
by other cultural currents. Foremost among these are the ancient wanderings
of Native Americans. Their migration stories rival the joys and tribulations of
the biblical exodus. Solo treks were often rites of passage and signs of spiritual
development.
Out of these various crosscurrents, we have developed a walking culture that
has some variant for almost anyone capable of getting up o the sofa. It ranges
from dowagers with their parasols to extreme speed-hikers. It has produced
singer-songwriters, naturalists, eco-activists, survivalists, poets, philosophers, and
a fair number of oddball cranks.
Mostly it makes nice folks who do themselves, and their kids, a cardiovascular favor. The Midwest has yet to produce trails and hikers as fabled as the
Appalachian or Pacic Crest. But were working on it, according to my hiking
sources. Many long-distance hikers go by a trail name. Heres a fellow whose
trail name cannot be spoken in the presence of delicate ears. When he leaves
his Dubuque, Iowa, business in the hands of trusted employees to cut trails
near and around the Great Lakes, he leaves delicacy behind.
Hiking is good for what ails you. It works for just about everything. It can
walk the meanness out of a rotten son-of-a-bitch. It can walk the grief out
of a widow. It can walk the foolishness out of a punk. Its not a foolproof
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technique, but it has a better success rate than medication, intoxication,

or incarceration.
I got my start in the Army. I got left behind in Cambodia in 1970. So I
had to walk out about forty miles. It took me nearly a week. As you might
guess, there were lots of obstacles and things to consider on the way back.
Things that can bring a hike to a sudden end. But walking helps you
focus, helps you think about your surroundings.
After discharge, I visited a buddy in Georgia and he took me out for a
walk. I asked where the trail went. He said, All the mother-humping way
to Maine. All I could do is let out a whistle of amazement. But it grabbed
me good, and trails have been running in my blood ever since.
I hiked that long one. Thats my story to tell someday! Then I hiked
another long trail, then another. Then I just started hiking to see where
roads or trucks went. Guess Ive hiked across the continent ve or six
times, depending on whether you count a jaunt from Cancun to Puerto
Vallarta.
It took about that much walking to walk the war out of me. But I just
kept walking because it gave me so much I cant imagine a life without it.
I take the old slogan See America First and add one step at a time. Forget the interstate!
Unless you slow down, you cant say youve been at a place. What can
you know of a place you passed on the interstate? Ive had places tattooed
right on my ass. Hell, sometimes literally by bugs, scorpions, crabs, and
fungi. Not to mention the scars that serve as souvenirs. Every nick has a
story.
But as I mellowed, it occurred to me to give something back to walkers.
So Im a volunteer trailblazer and brush hog on developing trails. Weve
got to build up our long trail networks in the Midwest. I dont mean the
cute rail-to-trail multi-use trails for equines, human bovines, and mechanical contraptions. No, I mean boot-pounding, hardcore hiking trails.
First on my agenda is to see the thousand miles of Wisconsins Ice
Age Trail lled in and turned into a quality walk. The North Country Trail
across the top of the United States needs to be lled in, given an Ontario
loop, and extended out to the Continental Divide Trail and the Pacic
Crest Trail. Then we need to blaze all sorts of side trails into northern
Wisconsin and Minnesota where we dont have to hear or dodge ATVs or
snowmobiles.

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Thats the big advantage of some of the mountain country trails. The
gear jockeys have their toys broken up on those rock piles. I dont mean to
sound elitist, but you cant have a quality hike if youre eating internalcombustion exhaust. Hell, Id rather hike barefoot through horse apples.
We need to work on hiking ethics and hiking philosophy in our section
too. Sometimes on Midwest trails you nd too many snoops, narcs, and
busybodies. Who the hell wants to hike endlessly around Lake Wobegon?
If the skinny-dippers arent running through your camp and if the cannabis smoke isnt aggravating your asthma, whats the problem?
Youll hear this a million times in serious hiking circles, but its as true
as anything in the Ten Commandments: hike your own hike. Leave the
shoulda, woulda, couldas at home. Find your walking groove and go with
it. Theres a hiking zone that is just plain magic.
I didnt get this point until my second through-hike on the Appalachian
Trail. Early in the trip, I was bummed out by young testosterone speedhikers. They were in the shelter giving a retired guy a hard time about how
quick they caught up to him after his two-week head start. What he said
has stuck with me all these years. Im after a record too, pissants, he said.
I want to take the longest anybody ever took, see the most anybody ever
saw, and have the most trail memories that anybody ever remembered.
Sometimes when you hear truth, it just resonates. The old guys words
resonated for me. I knew for sure I was with that program when I
attempted an early North Country Trail walk, back before hardly any of
it was blazed. I got good and lost in the U.P., but I didnt care. I just kept
an eye on the setting sun. Saw some damn nice parts of Wisconsin and
Minnesota. Had people along the way steer me to all sorts of sights.
Hidden lakes, great overlooks, and misty waterfalls, not to mention village
cafs, backwoods taverns, and hospitable hunting camps. Trails dont
always go by those places. But follow a trail a bit, and it might get you in
the neighborhood.
Here in the Midwest what is elsewhere called trail magic is usually
found a bit o the trail. Thats because our trails are still maturing. Ill bet
there wasnt any trail magic on the Appalachian Trail in its rst twenty or
thirty years.
Trail magic consists of the favors and surprises provided to hikers by
total strangers. It could be as simple as a six-pack of Hamms left in a cold
spring by the trail. It could be as big of a deal as a three-hundred-mile lift

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home for a family emergency. In the Midwest it often happens in lake and
owage country. A family at a cottage might invite you to their grill-out.
Or shermen might treat you to pan-fried walleye.
You know right away how to repay trail magic in the Midwest. You gotta
tell the story of the trails. Thats, after all, the reason these people invited
you in. They want to know it all. Where are you going? Where have you
been? What have you seen? Would you do it again?
Walking had to be the original inspiration for storytelling. The others
back in the cave always wanted to know what was out there. Maybe they
couldnt go themselves, but, dammit, they thought about going. Through
listening to a walker they got to go in their minds. The whole notion of a
road trip evolved out of the trail trip.
Those stories give us our sense of distant vistas, moonlight on remote
bays, and the exhilaration of trekking into the face of the blizzard. Our
lifelong accumulation of such stories lets us measure our mettle and our
character. Those whove not done the likes of this are found wanting. To
them, I say theres always still time. Take a hike!

In Defense of Neighborhoods

It takes many of us several moves and lifestyle experiments before we are prepared to choose among rural, small town, suburban, and urban living. Often
the moves are prompted by circumstances outside our own preferences, including vocational opportunity and family needs. Yet, it is accepted wisdom that
the good life revolves in large part in nding ones niche and dwelling in it.
In forming views of the land and our place as humans upon it, we often give
the cities and city life short shrift. There is no shortage of poetry romanticizing
Nature, no lack of defense of wilderness, and no scarcity of praise for smalltown virtues. The city, as an object of popular culture, is often portrayed as a
cauldron of conict and neuroticism. It is the place from which the past three
generations have been eeing.
Defenders of cities, until recently, have been embattled and saddled with
enormous image problems. It has been dicult to promote understanding of
cities as human environments when all the attention has been on violence
and decaying infrastructure. Far too often, the advocates of urbanized life have
been reduced to apologies for contaminated lands and euent discharges. Far
too often, urban advocacy has lacked any real vision about how a city, properly planned and administered, could be an ecient and livable environment.
That is changing now, with new urbanists putting the matters of sprawl
and sustainable growth squarely before the public and decision makers. But
such initiatives do not develop in a vacuum. They require inspiration and
commitment. In the case of our region, much of the current discussion of how
we treat the land can be traced to passionate devotees of cities. Many have
given their professional lives to this vision. A few have even run the political
rapids to municipal leadership. Heres the type of voice that might be found in
Madison, Wisconsin.
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Cities are the answer to our environmental woes, not the source of them.
In a time when we chart population increases by billions, we need a solid
urban model in which humans can live and reduce their impact on the biosphere. This may run against the myth of the self-reliant yeoman, against
the legacy of the land-owning small farmer as the engine of populism,
and even against the immigrant and freedmen dreams of forty acres and
a mule.
Maybe cities dont make for good storytelling, but they are fertile territory for economies of scale and rationalization of distribution of resources.
A well-planned city, compact and human-scale in its design, is an incredibly ecient engine to deliver goods and services. A good city reduces
the need for repetitive travel, reduces consumption of fuel, and helps its
occupants save money on the horric amount of resources devoted to the
care and feeding of automobiles. Proper design permits a city to deliver
more services to more people at less cost than the sprawl and disperse
model.
That said, there are not a lot of well-designed cities in the United States.
But the issue is nally on the agenda. The revitalization-of-cities discussion
is fueled by two considerations: First, there is the very real issue of how
much land is sucked up by poorly planned cities. Second, we nally have
people connecting the dots between the rising cost of sprawl infrastructure and how it drains the lifeblood out of human services and healthful
social interaction.
Quite a few midsize Midwest cities still have vistas of cornelds running to the horizon. But in many of our older cities, there is a feeling of
being hemmed in by rings of strip malls and expressways. Those rings
around cities devour land and create ineciencies.
The costs of this sprawl are incredibleincluding everything from sidewalks to re stations. Distance is a cost variable on policing, garbage pickup,
snowplowing, and just about every service you can imagine. The lack of
planning is bankrupting municipalities and states, gouging property owners with high taxes. Add to that the built-in cost ineciency of overlapping layers of government in a citys natural service area. You couldnt
come up with a worse system.
The key to the well-designed city is not centralized business districts
or impressive oce towers. It is the oldest element of urban life: neighborhoods. Its what makes an urban space livable, the way we interact in

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base-level community. The neighborhood isnt so much the cost end of the
equation; its the social interaction end that brings meaning to life in proximity to other humans. Its the range of people and their personalities in a
dynamic relationship that brings synergy to urban life.
This is where you discover talents and capacities in others that dont
emerge in more isolated lifestyles. In a true neighborhood, you have a spirit
of mutual assistance and cooperation. Its about the ability to borrow a
snowblower. Its about an impromptu front-porch ddle concert. Its the
civility of the hand-pushed reel lawnmower. Its short sidewalks and no
secrets. Its old people, little kids, and standing in the middle of the street
for conversation. Its mixed usage blocks with families living above their
shops. Its apartment buildings with shopping and restaurants next door.
Its walking, lots of walking. People taking walks around the block on
summer evenings. Residents walking to their churches. They walk to taverns and bakeries, maybe even a hardware store and a market. Thats what
neighborhoods were a generation or two ago, thats what they must become
again.
The real neighborhood is known through the small things. Neighbors
take turns shoveling the snow from an elderly persons sidewalk. Neighborhood dogs know each other and through interaction learn how to behave
in the urban setting. Baking smells identify a particular household and its
ethnic heritage.
Then expand that thinking into cities as interlinking networks of neighborhoods. Thats what makes a city, not its business district or city hall.
Neighborhoods that ow into one another, not separated by chain-link
fences or expressways. Neighborhoods that you can bike and jog through.
Places that breed their own organic politics as neighborhoods are sorted
into precincts and wards.
Heres where the neighborhood synergy comes in. Diversity plays out
in urban politics in a healthy and progressive way. It fosters a communal
sense of politics thats dierent from the rugged individualism and libertarianism that come with lower density. This makes for evolving and adaptive politics, not the status quo.
Places that can argue, debate, and evolve help foster creativity. Places like
this have room for artists and the work of artists. They have great street
festivals. They have little nightclubs that draw national acts. They have
interesting restaurants and plenty of innovators.

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In this type of environment, the creative types draw energy from one
another, cross-pollinating among ideas, disciplines, and technologies. Creative people need to immerse themselves in these environments from time
to time, even if theyre cabin-in-the-woods recluses. Ive heard many
whove studied in London, Paris, or Rome proudly recite the lists of cultural institutions they visited while in residence in those cities. But their
faces positively light up at the memory of cafs and shops in their adopted
neighborhoods.
So dont call my neighborhood quaint. Dont call someone elses shabby.
They are alive and need to be nurtured. They may look like the past to
some. But theyre really the only sustainable future I can see on this planet
for most people.

Business on the Land

One neednt look far for examples of the market economys negative impact
on our environment. Free-market advocates hasten, correctly, to point out that
the environmental track record of command-and-control economies is mostly
unenviable. Both the capitalist and the state ownership bureaucrat have
shared the tendencies to treat air, water, and land as free goods and to neglect cost-accounting for remediation or restoration.
There are some signs that planners and economists of all stripes recognize the
need to take a wider and longer view. Some in big business see the need to take
natural systems into account. Others on the cutting edge actually see business
opportunities in eco-friendly enterprise.
Meanwhile, globalization and the continued shift of industry to the developing world make for a complex situation beyond the reach of our traditional
regulatory systems. Issues of scale are made baing through the questions raised
by the needs to restore human-sized operations and develop viable transnational protocols that can match the muscle of the mega-corporations. This paradoxical situation leaves citizens across the globe dissatised with the pace of
governmental environmental oces and the outcomes of their eorts.
Proponents of small is beautiful, cooperative economics, and sustainability
have worthwhile ideas to contribute to the conversation. Whether their voices
are heard is one question; whether they have sucient clout in even a limited
region is another. Those lacking mainstream business credentials are often poohpoohed as Ben and Jerrys, after the counterculture ice-cream moguls. We could
ask a fellow who comes at it from a unique angle, attempting to sort it out
within the context of tribal enterprises in an urban area. Lets assume we met
him as he was on his way to a conference in San Diego, but a storm kept us
grounded in Green Bays Austin Straubel Airport. A conversation might follow.
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We Oneida have some aptitude for organization and business. We come

out of this Iroquois Confederacy, you know. The grandmothers of our
people knew how to pick the men who could get things done and the ones
who could follow instructions. You need both.
Then we had the lessons that come with our not entirely planned or
welcomed exodus from New York State to our tract west of old Fort
Howard. Our ancestors found at arrival something a little dierent than
other new residents of the reservation system. In addition to the longresident tribes with claims to the area, we had squatting Americans with
designs on the whole place. This was an omen of things to come and lessons to be learned.
Our next course of instruction came when the federal government
decided to bring the forty acres and a mule concept to Indian Country.
Maybe youve heard of allotments. This was the idea that reservations
would be carved up into individual land holdings. That was supposedly
more civilized. Conveniently for the local powers-that-be, it was also a
way of separating individual Oneida from their land. Thousands of acres
slipped away under that system. Some simply thought of this as assimilation. We almost headed toward disappearance.
Under this system some Oneida took up farming. Others logged, ran
sawmills, or sold lumber; lots of crafts turned into businesses. Others went
into Green Bay or down to Appleton to work in industry. We had some
who went into construction and some who signed on to the lake boats. So
we gained a lot of experience in commerce that most tribes dont get.
Here we are in this tricky and touchy relationship with our land. It is
not the land of our old stories, the land of our cousins in New York and
Canada. It is the land of those we sometimes fought many years ago. But
it is treasured land that is now dear to us.
It was important enough to cause us to have a dream. That dream is the
restoration of all of the original Oneida tract to Oneida ownership. With
the advent of Indian gaming, that became a possibility. Suddenly there
was a cash ow from blackjack and slot machines. Along with that came
political and economic muscle.
The dream cant be pursued recklessly or with the same sort of mindless greed that pushed us here. Dreams can come gently and with good
business sense. If you start throwing hundreds of millions around in the
real estate market, you simply distort prices and drive speculation. You can

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also make the stubborn dig in. But if you stick to the Oneida timetable,
you can wait generations. Good things are worth waiting for.
It is a much better idea to see what we can do to make the area better
for everyone who lives here. If you have it in your power to make things
better, it is your duty to do so. This means investments in the community,
in health and education. It means job creation and training. It means
encouragement and support for other business that serve those purposes.
Oneida have a sense of the people, who we are, our identity. American
Indians often get stuck with the goofy models that the federal government
foisted on us. It was the federal government that displaced the hundreds of
integrated tribal systems. We naturally had systems that were spiritual, economic, and civil. The United States needed a structure it could understand.
They need one chief, an authority through whom to distribute services.
Some think we outanked them on this score. Because of our checkered
experience, we were able to surprise them. We learned to operate as a business. That doesnt mean were always businesslike or that were always
doing business in the most ecient way. Sometimes we do it exactly the
opposite. But theres a lesson in that. Business serves many values of the
people who create it, those who make up the reason for it.
I think we still understand that business is supposed to serve people,
not the other way around. I hope we never forget thatit looks to me like
the dominant culture has. Congressional representatives and legislators
fall down and bow when it comes to business interests. They forget something important about their country.
What are the rst three words of the U.S. Constitution? We the people.
It doesnt say we the corporation or we the special interests. This is
something we Iroquois take seriously. The idea of a United States is partly
an Iroquois gift to you. Yes, read your history about where Ben Franklin
looked for models.
The United States has done some goofy things over the years, but the
gooest is the multinational corporation, which has rights of citizenship
that allow the auction of public policy and none of the responsibilities.
These things are Dr. Frankensteins monster, hunks of the unliving sewn
together and terrorizing the globe. The monsters are now stronger than
their creators.
This is why I think we need a new model of peoples business. Business
that is at the service of people is more adaptable than government. Your

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government is all stuck in rules and procedures. Its always ghting the last
war and has almost zero ability to think creatively. Government is stuck
with boundaries for problems that dont respect boundaries. It is stuck
with ways of doing things that made sense two hundred years ago but
dont make sense now. Your government is now the cavalry sent against a
modern armored tank.
Its better if you can keep your rituals and traditions as part of an identity and part of your religion. They should inform how you do business,
but they should not be the procedural manual for business or government.
It would frighten me to serve on the board of an enterprise that was going
to use the Book of Revelations or the Tibetan Book of the Dead as its
operational guide.
One of the best things old Franklin and those other dead white guys
gave you is the idea that the way of the Spirit and the method of reason
can be used together to promote the common good. They saw reason as
a gift from the Creator. They gave you a system that depends on reason;
so dont fault them if they didnt foresee everything. Look back on those
guys; most wanted nothing more than a system that permitted everyone
to maximize opportunity. Basically, they were looking for the way that
allowed people to take care of business.
What does taking care of business mean today? Everybody can have
a slightly dierent view of that, depending on their situation. But I think
it has to mean, at minimum, taking care of the land youre entrusted with,
to use resources wisely, to restore what you can, and pass it on to the next
generation in better shape than you found it. Thats good business.

New Kid in Town

Slow migratory patterns of our ancestors and settled existences of many of our
parents have been replaced by young adult expectations of four or ve career
moves during a work life. We are an increasingly mobile society, which raises
many social and environmental concerns. Who stands up for a place if many
are just passing through? How do the newcomers develop a sense of place in a
PDQ world?
Human demographics and living patterns clearly have signicant impacts on
ecosystems in terms of air and water quality, waste issues, infrastructure development and repair, and delivery of associated services. Our movements have consequences. Brain drain in one area might be the butterys wing ap that builds
an art district in another area. What seems like overdevelopment in one place
might provide the population density and cultural critical mass that makes food
co-ops, craft galleries, neighborhood cafs, and alternative music venues thrive.
Such things just might be the very lifeblood of livability and sustainability.
People on the move challenge a sense of place and bioregional ethics. How
do we get newcomers to pay attention to those patterns of season and location?
How do we attune them to the needs of places that they have not yet fully incorporated into their sensibilities?
Our heartland does this pretty well by being welcoming in the main. Not
that we are totally free of hostile provincials or paranoid survivalists, but we
have a long tradition of people moving here. Its part of our sense of opportunity and freedom. I know, I was welcomed to Wisconsin thirty years ago as a
misplaced Pennsylvanian.
Many astute women I have met surpass my slow and incremental learning
and absorption. Ive known a few who made themselves part of the region at
a dizzying pace. Lets check in with one who in less than a decade went from
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a student thinking she was pausing in Madison, Wisconsin, just long enough
to get her ticket punched, to someone deeply rooted in a multitude of regional
cares and solutions. In record time, she went from the new kid in town to
someone who aected policy and education on land use, family services, and
special needs populations.
I didnt give much thought to being part of a place before I moved to Wisconsin. Im from Washington, D.C., a place with an unusual sense of
place. The transients there overwhelm the natives.
I came to the Midwest for school but stayed for love. In that sense I
discovered one of the best ways to get to know a place. Interpersonal connection, community, and deep relationships put you in touch with a place.
Bear children and raise a family in a place you feel a connection to. Thats
a process that stays with a family and circle of friends for generations.
Next to the personal connectionyour stake in a placethe next best
way of getting to know your spot is by getting to know its life and issues.
For me, that means diving in and pitching in. Thats everything from
neighborhood associations to park clean-up days. Its amazing how much
of community can be built around caring for or celebrating a place.
I found this an incredible way of building the social connections that
can provide a basis for citizen action. In the Midwest, this organizing
focal point can often be around social and recreational activity. Thats how
mothers who bring children to a park get involved in chemical spray issues
concerning the park. Thats how canoers and kayakers get mobilized around
threats to a river.
Diving right into land-use issues was a great entry point for me. It gave
me a quick look at the areas natural and social history, its system of ethics,
and its customs. Its like a free university of civics and environmental studies. I learned whos who and how things t together.
Sometimes you can bring insight too, just by virtue of not being totally
invested in generations-old struggles and feuds. You can look past the
Schmidts not liking the Andersons or other personal or partisan stu. I
have had some satisfaction when I can cut through those circumstances
simply by being nice and reasonable. Also useful are the fresh eyes that
come with being the new kid in town. Looking at a seeming gridlock and
saying, I dont know, why dont we try such and such? and see some light
bulbs go on can be another satisfying moment.

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But the new kid cant drive everything real hard without coming o as
pushy. Especially when the new kid is also the young kid. Especially when
there are elders in charge and egos like body armor complete with burglar
alarms. You go slowly and observantly in such circumstances, always pulling back your own ego. Be sincere, be real, and be full of honest questions.
I was lucky to fall naturally into that position of questioning. I found
that asking big questions helped me tie into land-use issues. Questions like
What do people want? What do they know? and What information
do they need? You can get to know a place all the better when you havent
made up your mind entirely about what needs to be done. We can work
together with so much more productivity if we look for the widest range
of workable and acceptable solutions.
So I would say that working in an educational capacity around the environment is the best way to get to know a placeat least it is if youre
open to learning yourself and open to what your students, clients, or
members have to teach you. This approach works as long as youre comfortable with conditional positions and works in progress and can accept
doing the best that can be done with the current tools and information. If
you can be that open, then you can hardly fail to get to know the people
and the nature of a place.
One of the conditional things I learned was to look out past the current
argument. It often seems that our land-use battles are about rigid notions
of what is and what has been, not about what could be or what is actually
becoming while were not paying attention. This has become clearer to
me in the area of building stu and the ghts over what to build, where,
how big, and who gets to decide. Maybe, while we werent paying attention, the social circumstances and technologies have made the old questions irrelevant. Maybe that stu is obsolete before its even built.
Those are the conversations I want to have and the questions I want to
raise. They go way beyond building codes, zoning, and land-use planning.
They go to the heart of how we live and what type of place we want to live
in. Those questions connect environmental conversation to discussions
about what works for families, children, elderly, disabled, employees, and
businesses.
So for me, this getting to know a place starts with the natural environment and then moves out to include everything. If there is a developmentally disabled child in your neighborhood or a shut-in retiree next door,

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theyre part of your place. Place is the sum of everything around us and
what were doing with it.
Maybe we can leave wilderness out of this equation and keep it in a
dierent category. But the rest of the land gets lived on, farmed, played
on, traveled across, and otherwise reshaped. How we make sense of what
we do in terms of the future is the big question for me. I guess I started
by nding the place that makes sense to me, the place where those questions come easier and have the beginnings of clearer answers.

Winter in the North

Remembering

Some of the conversations in this collection hint at how our views of Nature
might be shaped by memories of mentors or casually encountered teachers.
Often we are unconscious of learning at the moment it is going on, giving it
little more thought than we do to functions of everyday life that build muscle
capacity. That is the learning of natural systems, the type that builds patterns,
instincts, and synergy.
Learning of other types, of course, does factor into our evolving relationship
with the Earth. Some of these may be transformational, the result of the rigors
of a journey toward deeper understandings. Others may be intellectually demanding and stem from a more scientic view of systems. Almost every type
has its merits, applications, and masterful instructors.
What can we make of those who help us see the world in multiple ways?
What do we make of their ability to tailor their lessons to the individual, the
setting, and the stage of life? What are we taught about compassion, wisdom,
and the Spirit in all things through contact with these rare people?
Our Ojibwe friend has been with us on this conversational journey through
the seasons of life and understanding. He helped many nd the renewal of
spring, the growth of summer, and the harvest of autumn. Yet, for many of us,
he left too early to fully share the contemplation and wisdom of winter. Perhaps it only seems that way. Perhaps he did, intentionally or unintentionally,
leave us with marks by which to navigate the winter of our lives and of our
growing ecological consciousness.
I like to think he seeded those navigational markers into the many lives he
touched. His shape-shifting and political exibility gave rise to many diering interpretations about who he was during his life. After his death, friends
and associates often invoke his words in ecological disputes and sometimes nd
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contradictory pronouncements. We learned that a storyteller/warrior/sorcerers

view of Nature is constantly evolving.
One young mother met him during a journey he made around Lake Superior to gauge the regions sense of eco-community. He sought her out as a Canadian who fought for water quality on the north shore of the big lake. When
he showed up in a rez car with a load of big Ojibwe men in her suburban
driveway outside Thunder Bay, Ontario, she was a bit shocked.
A few years later, our Ojibwe friends life and contributions were commemorated through a group walk around Lake Superior. More than one hundred
participants started o from the Bad River Reservation, and many stories of his
exploits circulated. The Canadian soccer mom told this one on the road from
the lakeshore to Highway 2.
I still remember that smile and giggle he had when he called himself the
chubby little Chippewa. He knew quite a bit about powerful medicine,
but the cure he resorted to most often was laughter. He could get the most
racist, earth-raping, lake-fouling, greed-obsessed numbskulls laughing when
he responded to criticism of tribal spearshing with a pantomime of a
walleye on a hook.
He left an impression on nearly everyone he ever met and usually left
them with something to think about in terms of where and how they
lived. I met a local ocial in Superior, Wisconsin, who remembered our
Ojibwe friends excitement in the 1980s upon discovering the writings of
Petra Kelly and Charlene Spretnak. I met a tobacco farmer from Viroqua,
Wisconsin, who cried as he recalled our Ojibwe friends blessing of the
farm. I met a Micmac elder from the Atlantic provinces who called our
friend our Gandhi and Tecumseh.
He was so many things to so many people that it will never be sorted
out. It wasnt that he pandered, far from it. No, he knew how to reach
people on their own terms, in their own language. He was many things,
but above all he was a great communicator about all things of the Earth.
Ive come to see that you Yanks like to classify things, to see them as one
thing or another. He was very frustrating on that score. He was biodiversity in one package. When I asked what he was doing with his arms
extended into a lake wind he replied, Im a tree today. Another time he
was trying to persuade a group to take an action and talked them into it
and himself out of it. When the frustrated participants pressed him on his
rationale he said, Im making the world safe for ambiguity.

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This is why his disciples ght about his legacynot that he ever
wanted disciples. Funny how those who dont want disciples can get them
anyway, while those who seek them desperately end up being avor-ofthe-week at best. But he was simply somebody dierent to each person.
I saw him approach an issue with dierent audiences in amazingly
diverse ways. He talked sustainable business sense to a group of loggers.
He waxed poetic about beauty to the preservationists. He told a parable
about the Creator and stewardship to the church group. He spoke the
language of bioregionalism to a co-op of aging hippies. He even related
the Ojibwe creation and migration story to strategic advantage in the hot
connes of a traditional sweat lodge lled with elders.
Those were just a few of his angles on environmental issues. He was like
that everyday on every issue. When he ran out of ideaswhich wasnt
oftenhe knew just how to get brainstorming. He would call or e-mail a
dozen or so contacts and ask what he called dumb questions. He loved
to pose questions and get conversation going, especially on ecological issues.
He knew exactly how to get human synergy from provoking thought. He
had a rare talent for going to people in one eld and having them apply
their knowledge to something totally dierent. He was the master of
what if.
He told me that talk was a natural system too. I dont know if he told
others that, but he knew I love conversation. He saw it as the organic
and authentic way of democracy and sustainability. It seemed important
to him that such conversation be unhurried and not handicapped by
deadlines. That was his Ojibwe sense of time. Crisis could compel him to
act, but only conditionally and subject to more thought, more talk.
He was not comfortable with the usual model of organizational decision-making. I would often see him leave a meeting after he explained his
perspectives and heard the perspectives of others. He rarely waited around
for the formal decision of a group. It was as if he thought the idea of illinformed people debating and voting a silly European ritual. He looked
for conversation, listening, learning a sense of the subject, and a growing
comfort level of participants to guide thinking and action. Not exactly
consensus, thats another rule-xed system. More a developing conversational community.
The man was very much into cross-fertilization of ideas. He loved regional and global conversation as much as he loved talking to his elders
at Red Cli. At the international conference we attended in Toronto, he

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could not leave until he had listened to the women from India who had
saved their forests and the rubber tappers from Brazil who struggled against
the big landowners.
Those exchanges were always a two-way street. He learned much from
them but also was generous with his own ideas. He was most helpful to
others, seeing fundamental lessons in their victories and defeats that they
didnt see on their own. That is rare talent, and we are all poorer for having lost him.
But it is important to remember he was not a saint, just a tremendously
creative esh-and-blood man from the shore of Gitche Gumme. He was
an unmade bed in so many respects. Smoked like a chimney and smelled
like an ashtray. Had demons to wrestle with and creditors too! Life was
just too full for him to totally conquer, but he sure tried.
While he was trying, he inspired lots of others to do the same. He
armed their perspectives on loving the Earth and gave them blessings.
He said many dierent things to many people, that is true. But for him
they were all part of an evolving understanding of Creation and our part
in it. So when asked to recall his contributions, its that ongoing journey
toward ecological understanding that Ill be remembering.

Environmental Conversation

Most of this collection is based on the notion that there are many views of the
Earth worth listening to and learning from. It is meant to urge us all to hear
each other out on our various connections to the land; it is primarily through
listening that we discover common themes, aspirations, and concerns.
The lack of good listening skills among those in the government and policy
sphere makes it dicult for many of them to claim they are representing widely
held opinions or positions. Politicians and advocates of various stripes look for
readymade sound bites, oversimplication of complex material, and packaged
information that mirrors sentiments revealed in polls and focus groups. Just
about the last thing in the world they would do is listen for nuance, distinction, and sharp contrast. They know unconsciously that such elements are the
stu of synergy and expanding horizons.
Many in these spheres are adamant in their refusal to be confused by facts.
Perhaps more telling is their inability to consider alternatives, fresh perspectives, or the breakthroughs that sometimes pop up in the most unlikely places.
Conversation on conservation and other land talk is not served by rigid agendas or ideological constraints. The Earth is in ux, so must be our Earth-speak.
The whole point of listening is to begin conversation. Listening gives us
something to think about and respond to other than our own checklists. Our
questions and suggestions help rene the thinking of those talking. The exchange
of ideas expands the general reach of individual and collective visions. Your
idea, plus my modication, can be acted on by broad publics, tested and recongured. Sometimes this process results in impressive breakthroughs. Even
when it doesnt, it builds community and promotes understandingno small
thing in our fractious world.
Few would openly block the way to more and improved environmental
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conversation. To do so would tend to expose questionable agendas and antidemocratic leanings. At the same time, still fewer with the ability and resources to
promote deeper dialogue are lifting a nger to do so. The players, actors, advocates, hired guns, insiders, and bag men who work the wizard levers of policy
in our Land of Oz have everything to lose if the Munchkins decide to take back
discourse on the things that matter.
In a quarter-century of listening I have heard many complaints, manifestoes, send-ups, put-downs, smoke screens, epiphanies, prophecies, delusions, attitudes, and laments. Many called me to listen. But I remember best the one who
rst summoned me to conversation. This son of the Upper Mississippi Valley
brought his La Crosse, Wisconsin, exuberance to academic and policy positions
in several regions of the country while remaining true to his heartland roots.
Its hard to nd the right forums for eco-talk. You know the drill. Were
all busy, dispersed, commuting, and stressed by work. Civic organizations
are more narrowly focused and sometimes dont have enough volunteers
to pull o a pancake breakfast. Then theres all the mass-produced pabulum and entertainment that has many sitting in splendid isolation in front
of glowing screens.
But we know something is missing. We have the echo of it in our memories of grandfathers and grandmothers. It has many names in many families. Some knew it as the German Stammtisch, others as the traveling
Chautauqua. Some found it with the Progressives, the Farm-Labor Party,
or the Non-Partisan League. They heard the discussions in dozens of different fraternal halls, granges, and labor temples. It is what happened in
the taverns after the politicians whistle stop. It is what was said in the
veterans post after the Memorial Day service. It was in the thousands of
smaller conversations over fences, in sale barns, at county fairs, in hunting
shacks, on boat landings, and at church suppers.
Talk went at a slower, more deliberate pace. That was partly the product of the way that much work was still organized. They werent in cubicles. Many things were still labor intensive. Many issues of the day were
discussed during the raising of a barn or the digging of a ditch. Today it is
hard to believe, but a century ago many sit-down assembly workers actually chipped in on funds to pay young scholars to read to them while they
were working. So while one can say our forebears had less information
than we, it is hard to deny that they were doing more with it.

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This was also the age when conversation on conservation took o and
spread throughout the population. The romantics like Thoreau planted
seeds that bloomed on clear-cut forests, overgrazed range, and eroded elds.
Thinkers and communicators like Teddy Roosevelt, Giord Pinchot, John
Muir, and, yes, Aldo Leopold put more ideas into intellectual commerce.
Their inuence still shapes the dialogue.
The question today is how to take the environmental conversation to
the next level. By that I mean an authentic form of citizen discussion that
matters in policy circles, not the token study committee and Earth Day
speech. This would call for far broader participation in environmental
conversation and a much deeper understanding of what environmentalism represents in relation to almost all other societal issues.
I happen to think that the place to start is in personal relationships.
One-on-one is the classic Socratic form. It is the best way to practice and
is the best workshop for eavesdropping. I even consider things I overhear
between two other people as audited courses in discourse. The best ones
to listen to are partnersspouses and signicant others. After all, how can
we expect to improve societal deliberation if we cannot manage an openended conversation under our own roofs? You probably know many marriages that put this matter to the test, some with better results than others.
There is something essential about open-ended conversation. There is
an inherent respect, perhaps even an underlying aection. I have heard
some say that talk and empathy underlie the social democratic outlook,
and they point to European caf society as the model. Others believe that
interactive conversation is the device that gentles even the libertarian soul
and opens it to communitarian possibilities. I would observe that there are
many socially useful things that result from collections of diverse people
coming to understand each others experiences.
Environmentalists today make a big mistake by banging people over the
head with platforms and programs that scream, Heres the truth. Maybe
the basic error is to begin with the environment as the central issue. The
other issues must be seen in their full environmental context. The entry
points for environmental thinking are so numerous that it is relatively
easy to talk of citizen thinking on the economy in terms of ecology and
sustainability.
Such thinking can lead to a conversation that probes our ways of organizing our minds and our world. You can start with religion or globalization,

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questions of scale or national security. This type of discussion doesnt tell

anyone what a correct environmental position is. Instead it helps them
discover what to do with their environmental sensibilities in other areas
of life.
People quickly realize in this type of discussion how the environment
aects everything. But they move beyond that too. During prolonged and
deep conversation, they discover that everything they believe in aects their
perceptions of the environments importance. Then they see that all those
things are hard to separate. That can scare some, since it seems like an incredible tangle of mirrors and language. Still, the practical types come to
see that everything they care about has environmental implications.
At this point, some of my paranoid Green friends chirp about the business and government conspiracies that prevent such conversation. There
might be some of that, but mostly its a matter of brain-dead plutocracies
going through the liturgical motions and punishing heretics. It requires a
type of thinking that our linear leadership class is unaccustomed to. It puts
those leaders in a position of non-ownership of the answers.
So I think the key is support of communities and organizations that
keep asking questions about all things people care about. This deals with
where people are at now, not activist or ideologue fantasies about where
they should be. This refusal of political elites to engage the actual concerns
of citizens leads to profound disenchantment and alienation. Instead, we see
a steady diet of trumped-up issues and manufactured causes on all sides.
Let people talk and discuss and learn. Help them to do that. Environmental considerations will come to play a huge role in such conversations.
They will bring out values and ethics in unpredictable ways. I dont see
how such conversation can fail to deepen everyones shade of green.

Creations Pantry

The image of Earth as a garden has long roots in spiritual and cultural traditions. The metaphor summons forth thoughts not only of paradise and abundance but of order and symmetry. Followers of the garden path come in many
varieties, and the themes of horticulture and stewardship pop up frequently in
this collection.
My search for conservation conversations has aorded me acquaintances
with some who nd the above organized frameworks too conning. These
contrarians insist that the Earth is essentially an untidy place. They often go
farther and insist it is humans who crave order in Nature and impose this
order in ways that reect cultural values, not underlying needs of ecosystems
or species. A few of these souls even insist that these impositions constitute a
form of violence toward Nature. For them, wilderness is the only natural
garden.
As with most schools of thought, there are gradations of intensity among
such attitudes. Unabombers, fortunately, are few. More common are those who
look for small ways to recapture unmediated relationships with fragments of
Nature within their reach. Throughout the Upper Midwest one can nd thousands of individuals carving unique lifestyles that emphasize a personal relationship with Nature. Some of the minimalists among them can be serious, if
not grim.
Now well visit with one who has an upbeat take on the business of getting
by. Her approach to gardening is expansive, to say the least. Our conversation
took place during a rigorous ve-mile hike, as she gathered blackberries in the
hills overlooking the Pine River in southwest Wisconsin. What a joyous combination of eco-politics, personal provisioning, and spiritual practice. She is the
most cheerful survivalist you could imagine.
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I like to think of my self as a New Testament lily of the eld. You know
the verse about the lilies neither sowing nor reaping? Thats pretty much
me. I pretty much live o of what the Creator sees t to put in front of
me. I consider myself a gatherer.
I consider the whole Earth to be my garden though my idea of gardening is not conventional. I keep a small regular garden near my cabin,
mostly for owers and some herbs I cant do without. But my real garden
is the surrounding land upon which the neighbors who are kind enough
let me wander. Youd be amazed how much food is out there, especially if
you help nature along. I call it Creations pantry.
My dislike for drudgery took me in this direction. I like to ramble and
am not suited to laboring in a eld. When I moved out here, I was forty
pounds heavier and looking at an early heart attack. I started walking.
Before long, I found that in some parts of the year, I could graze healthy
foods as I walked. Soon I was trim enough to get back into my blue jeans
and felt great.
I decided that a lot of walking, gathering Gods bounty, praying, and
tending to things along the way was my calling. It is a good life, and Im
content.
At one time, I was lled with worry about whether my life had ecological balance. I worried about the consequences of my past consumerism
and personal decisions. I struggled with things like whether or not to bring
children into an overpopulated world.
Walking and gathering brought me peace and release from such worries. As I mentioned, it brought me health and tness. You now know that
my form of gathering can be aerobic. It also brought the inner silence that
allows prayer to swell up out of me and have meaning that originates in
my soul. It allows me to surrender and put myself in Gods hands.
Im very fortunate to be allowed to wander those valleys and hills. You
would be amazed how much of my diet comes from foraging. I dry quite
a bit of the bounty, can a little, and eat much of it seasonally. I usually have
enough surplus to barter too. The whole swapping thing helps me t in
locally. I mend clothes for a couple of local men and often nd dressed
wild turkeys on my porch. I dont forget them at berry time, and they dont
forget me when they process a steer.
Now, its true that the neighbors dont want to swap for some of my
food. I cant convince them to eat spring nettles even though I nd them

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to be one of the tastiest and most nutritious greens on Earth. Pick them
with gloves and steam them, and theres no stinging. You can even dry
them for soup in the winter.
Another food that doesnt get rave reviews in the neighborhood is cattail root. It meets the carbohydrate craving pretty well. Ive even had some
luck making our with it. It has some limits but is serviceable. I thought
maybe my digging of the roots might endanger the plants. But it appears
that disturbing the cattail buds might distribute its seeds: It seems like we
have more in the wetlands than ever.
Thats where my big-scale gardening comes in. I look at it from the perspective that anywhere I can walk to is part of my garden. So Im a little
more than just a gatherer. I think it started when I pruned up a rough tree
that produced good apples. Then I started to scatter asparagus and oyster
plant seeds in some abandoned pastures. From there I worked up to planting wild plum pits in old farmlands and transplanting particularly good
berry canes in new, more favorable locations.
Most days in good weather it means I have four or ve miles of walking to do. Most days its a combination of checking up on things and
gathering what is in seasonsomething you have to be right on top of
or the critters will beat you to it. Like hazelnuts: Squirrels love them and
can barely wait to let them get ripe. Theres a mulberry tree that gives a
crop that the birds and I compete for every year.
You have to keep an eye out for surprises too. Watercress can pop up at
a spring where there was none before. Mushrooms move around like crazy.
A young nut tree can suddenly become very productive.
Another source that nally dawned on me was the produce of abandoned homesteads. I have found surprises near crumbled buildings and
barely visible foundations. Some old herb gardens of comfrey, sorrel, and
mints still thrive on such places. Rhubarb can hang on for a hundred years
in an old patch. In these places a thick old grapevine can turn out to be
domestic rather than wild, and if you trim it up you may have some wonderful concords or catawbas. I even found one hardy prolic and luscious
pear in the tangled yard of a collapsed house. That location will only be
disclosed in my last will and testament!
The walks are great ways to stay in touch with things. I get to know
the cycles of things. I practically feel like a midwife to some does and their
fawns. That daily contact gives you advance notice about drought stressing

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certain trees or too much rain changing the nature of bottomland. You get
to learn the routines of your neighbors, and they get to know yours, even
if they dont physically see you for long stretches of time. Theyll know Ive
been through if they see snips of ribbon marking new discoveries.
We have our annual rituals that come out of this bounty. I know that
several neighbors look forward to my late-fall or early-winter visits when
I bring the hickory-nut pies. And I have to admit that I have found myself
looking forward to one young fellows batches of homemade wine and the
silliness of the sampling sessions.
Its not just about getting food. Its about understanding the links in
the food chain, understanding your broader ecological community and experiencing the spiritual richness of life. Each day is part of a pilgrimage
for me. Each day brings lessons and wonder. My cupboard has never been
bare. But just as important, it is an altar where I can make oerings and a
curio cabinet where I accumulate delights.

Making Your Vote Count

It was just the usual crowd of Canadians, Minnesotans, and Wisconsinites

hanging around at the bar of the Zihua Centro Hotel on the Calle Augustin
Ramirez in Zihautanejo, way down Guerrero way in Mexico. Just taking the
cure for seasonal aective disorder as they say, allowing that Pacica, Dos
Equis, Tecate, and Superior constitute medicina cerveza. This club has been
meeting for some time, at least since the mid-1990s.
The membership requirements are not rigid, but usually somewhere in the
shank of a tropic January evening there are oaths taken, forsaking ice-shing
and professing a desire to view Super Bowl telecasts in Spanish. Since the crowd
runs toward the contrarian bent, this minor swearing causes no consternation.
Like a Manila tattoo, one barely remembers initiation into this order of the
poorly kept secret.
The gang is composed almost totally of eco-types of various stripes with only
the token libertarian of cheerful leanings. The annual meeting is occasion for
all manner of fellowship and debate. Until January 2001, friendship had always
survived the arguments, as betted temporary and sporadic camaraderie.
Its not as if they had never talked politics before. But they had only skirted
electoral politics with a feathery touch, being of collective belief that elections possessed but weak therapeutic eect for what ails us. The discussion started civilly
enough, with expressions of universal disgust at a stolen election and subsequent
judicial contortions. The cordial tone, however, was eventually dashed on the
rocks of partisanship. Soon epithets such as Naderista and Gore Whore were
ung, grenadelike in close-quarter combat. Oddly enough, even the Canadians
divided along these lines, but then again, they had their own partisan dierences.
They left it to Paco, the long-suering bartender, to take the discussion to a
global level. He urged his Great Lakes customers to look past whose dad could
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whip the other guys dad, past the allegiances and alliances built on the u
of which environmental studies or urban planning professor had given us the
A freebie on the term paper. He made them realize that others in the global
village have as much at stake in our elections as we in the United States do, if
not more.
It is not my place to tell another person how to vote. In most countries, it
is simply a matter of voting for your interest or class. It would be good to
let voting be a matter of conscience. You would hope that people would
have a conscience. You can think that self interest would play a part too.
But you want to think that self interest really comes down to broad questions of peace and security. But with the United States, these matters are
not so simple. We are not so sure that you know your interest or how that
interest comes to the rest of us in the world.
It is my wish that everyone who votes in the United States would have
a friend in another country to talk to before the election. Who would your
Brazilian friend think to vote for? Which candidate would your Palestinian friend hope could bring peace? Who would be the best U.S. president
for someone in a Burmese prison for political crimes? You see, this is a
dierent question, is it not?
For many nations, it is the United States that looks like an undeveloped
country. It is underdeveloped politically and morally and has no idea how
its actions are seen in the rest of the world. You even have many citizens
who are proud that they dont care how things turn out in the rest of the
world. They must think that they live on a separate spaceship and only the
rest of us peasants actually live on the Earth. America does not seem to
think about the big consequences of even its smallest actions in the poor
and sensitive areas of the world. It does not realize that a minor change in
the U.S. means hunger or homelessness for millions in other countries.
I think it is dicult for you to understand how strange your political
system looks to others. It does not look like a democracy to many of us. I
think it is a good question why the rest of the democratic countries do not
send election monitors and human rights investigators to the United
States. For many of us, your country is like cowboy cinema. Big man, with
big gun, running lots of big cattle.
This is something I do not understand about the United States. I meet
lots of people from Minneapolis, Milwaukee, Madison, and other northern

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cities. They always seem like good people, never want to hurt no one.
They tell me they like dark beer and whole-grain bread. You would think
their politics would be in that vein. You look behind the faade, and it
seems Democrats are Miller Lite and Wonder Bread and Republicans are
prune juice and saltines. But for U.S. presidents you elect cowboys with
big guns. Maybe you need to make another country?
I dont know what system would be best for the United States, but your
winner-take-all leaves a lot to be desired. I have heard dozens dierent
types of views from American tourists. I hear an American menu that has
chilis and moles of dierent intensity to put on every kind of meat. But
when you vote, you vote for corn tortilla or wheat tortilla. The choice loses
all its avor.
It is also hard to understand how the United States works its political
system on the environment. Sometimes it is like to x your environment
means more problems in other countries. We do not understand when
you tell chemical companies that they cannot sell something in the United
States but they can sell it everyplace else. Why is the eight-hour day and
minimum wage a good idea in America, but not for brown people? We
do not understand when you nd protection for old forests in the United
States but not everywhere else. This is the lost opportunity of NAFTA
and so forth. Your country has the inuence to make better protections
for everyone but usually lets the rest of the world stay behind. Then on
something like global warming, where the whole world is ready to do
something, it does not want to help there either.
You have vast responsibility. Only the United States can reach around
the world and touch lives swiftly in times of crisis. Only the United States
can operate on the scale that ts the biggest problems. But when you do
reach out on a big scale, it is often bombs and invasions that seem to get
the resources. I see your country as a neighbor who needs to learn to give
away water when nearby houses are burning. Your leaders need to stop
looking for deals and advantage. Help put out the res. If you have pollution control technology, productive crop seeds, or health technology, just
give it away. Your return will be incredible.
You cannot blame the rest of the world if it cannot understand whether
there is an angel or a demon working when the United States comes to
visit. They may give out food, or they may drop bombs. They may help
the sick, or they may take the oil. Sometimes they do both in the same

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place. The right hand does not know what the left hand is doing, and it
makes sure not to look over that way. Your media spins tales totally at odds
with what we see happening right before our eyes. We see policy reversals
that are denied to be that. We see rash actions follow American calls for
caution. Sometimes we see greed and lust for power behind these actions.
But sometimes we cannot tell what the reasons are for any of this.
I do not want to be disrespectful. It is not for me to tell you how to
vote. But I must tell you that if you care about the environment and the
people who live in it, then you must nd better people for your political
system. In much of the world, your election is an obscene gesture. It is
just my opinion, but Bush is the better president for the World Bank,
Gore is the better president for the comfort of the U.S. people, and Nader
is the better president for the rest of us.

Tapped In

Never for a moment would anyone, including this writer, think that any
compendium of old wisdom, no matter the subject, could avoid a bartender as
a dispenser of wit, pith, and froth. How could a land looker traverse the Upper
Midwest, with its pockets of German and Bohemian farmers and Nordic
woodsmen and not encounter tavern keepers with something of import to say
on the environment? It should be a mission possible for anyone with one or two
slightly functioning senses.
Which site and which person to pick? Now thats the harder task in this
tavern-rich environment. The late and beloved George Vukelich uncovered his
trove of land lore at the mystical Three Lakes American Legion Bar and took
us there again and again in North Country Notebook. Even in our Radioland of Hotel Milwaukee and Big Top Chautauqua we are occasionally
transported to imaginary tavern terrain. Yes, we are blessed with diverse tavern species.
Favorites? Oh, I can venture a few. From the anarchistic Toms Burned
Down Caf on Lake Superiors Madeline Island to the New Diggings General
Store and Inn down in the hills of southwest Wisconsin. Or hanging with the
natural resources majors at Stevens Points Witz End or talking smart growth
with my Naderite friends at the Harmony Bar on Madisons east side. Where
have I heard land talk spoken in our region? Roughly in about two-thirds of
the three-thousand-plus taverns that three decades of wanderings have allowed
me to sample in all seasons.
But this is not a book about microbrews, sh fries, and Saturday night
bands. True, those things gure into our sense of place and evoke many a memory of taverns on northern lakes and on country crossroads. When reaching
back for the memory of a tavern and bartender to t in the connes of these
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pages, I recalled a taverns last day in the late 1990s. The location was that sand
and marsh country west of the midsection of the Wisconsin River. The bar sign
was already taken down when I arrived. Inside, the elderly regulars were saying goodbye to the gloried shingle-clad shack and its widowed owner.
She talked mostly about the cycle of things. A bit wistful but lled with wisdom and the reality of this mortal sphere. Change again took me by the site in
the summer of 2001. The building was gone except for some foundation stones
the Earth was in the process of reclaiming.
Nothing lasts forever. Nothing! Forever is just too long for our human
minds to deal with. Best we can hope for, like my Elmer would say, is a
good run. We had that here. We had a wonderfully good run. Elmer had
been overseas and seen the old pubs and such. He also saw the ones that
were bombed out or crushed by tanks. He came back knowing that we are
lucky to have our little bit of peace, that we should treasure it while we
have it, and that we should know that its time is limited.
Those scared of such limits can push a bit harder. They think about
what they can do to leave their mark. They want to be remembered in
some way. They can raise up cathedrals and pyramids. They name libraries
after themselves. But such things dont change the basic facts. Were all just
passing through. We just get to borrow this life for a while. Shouldnt it
be pleasant?
We came into this right at the best time. Elmer got back from the war
in 1946 and came into some money. He never said how that happened,
but I guessed that he found something of value in that house-to-house
ghting when they crossed into Germany. When I ventured that guess
he never contradicted me. He only said something good should come out
of that horrible war. He built the cabins for our little resort and built this
tavern. Built them with his own hands! With salvaged lumber, sand from
the river, and his brothers cement mixer. Oh, he had a little help, what
with service buddies who dropped by with beer and strong backs. Show
me a business owner who does that today. Funny to think about it. Imagine a Holiday Inn executive up on a ladder with a hammer.
The economy was picking up. There was a bit of money to spend.
Many regular working people in the cities were getting cars for the rst
time. The idea of vacation grabbed a hold of them. They got the notion
of fresh air and woods. They had dreams of water and rowboats like they

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had seen in movies. That was a dierent time, it was . . . when families
with three or four kids would pile in a car and take o for one or two
weeks, maybe a month. Not many people vacation like that anymore. Now
its three days at Disney World.
Its dierent in another way too. Back then the idea was to be away, to
break with the routine. People wanted something dierent and didnt expect all the conveniences of home, even though those were few at the time.
We were plush for the time, oering running water and fans. Now people
have to have everything from their regular life with them, and everything
looks pretty much the same everywhere. Wheres the away in that?
Even though people were looking to be away, they were still looking
for connection too. We grew up and grew old with many couples from
Milwaukee, Racine, and Kenosha. Had them here on their honeymoons,
met their children, and met their grandchildren. We were part of family
traditions. We knew all their milestones and their heartbreaks. We were a
place of rsts for so many of those families. First shing trip, rst buck,
rst time in a canoe, and even rst kisses.
Our guests were mostly regulars, people who came year after year. They
became friends with each other, made friends in the area around here.
Some of the guest families intermarried. Some eventually bought property
nearby. Some had children who moved up here as adults. It was always
a treat to know that a child who youd shown her or his rst turtle came
back to this area as a nurse or football coach.
Most of our regulars were factory workers. At least the men were. Most
of the women were stay-at-home moms. These were people who arrived
bone-tired and looked forward to that time. These were the people who
built that prosperity of those days. I knew what kind of vacation they
needed. Those women didnt need to herd kids, clean sh, and cook all
day. So my daughter ran activities for the children, our son cleaned most
of the sh, and we did a lot of potluck cookouts, with Elmer grilling the
dogs and brats.
Many of these people worked at Allis Chalmers and American Motors.
They still lived in the neighborhoods they grew up in. They patronized
neighborhood taverns across from plant gates, where our spot was talked
about until their tavern owners came to visit us and we visited them. They
lived in small houses with small yards. Maybe just enough for a shade tree
and a dog. They were just getting started. The boats and the snowmobiles

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came later. So did the homes in the suburbs. They were glad to get away to
someplace green, someplace with fresh air, someplace to drift a rowboat.
We sure werent fancy; we never intended to be. Elmer said, Keep it
simple. We added plumbing improvements and better beds over the years
but kept it simple. That left us behind eventually. Really, to compete today
wed need to knock the whole thing down and start over. Probably would
need a water park thingamajig. Ive seen those young mothers in minivans
look in here like this was a dog patch full of hillbillies.
It was a dierent time back in our prime. People were just happier with
simpler things. Some of our customers told us it was heaven. Guess we
didnt know any better. It probably sounds ignorant to say we had lovely
nights where a dozen guest couples and a handful of locals were in here
listening to the Braves on the radio while playing sheepshead. Happy and
carefree, not a problem in the world.
It was the same for the kids. Not a backpack full of electronic games like
today. Just pure exploration. Theres nothing more basic than a boy and a
stick poking in mud or under rocks. Discovering tadpoles, duck eggs, shed
snake skins, and, Lord, hornet nests. We saw a lot of city kids shape their
view of the country right on these few acres. And many came back as
adults to tell us how much it meant to them. Thats enough reward for me.

On the Pot

Its not hard to nd lovers of the land whose aection is fueled by getting their
hands dirty. This tactile linkage is very obvious among gardeners and oldschool agriculturists. The tie is also present in varying degrees in almost all the
robust outdoor occupations. But what of those who work with their hands in
more conned spaces?
Practitioners of the ne arts often nd inspiration in Nature. We are blessed
with photography, painting, and products of the written word that help us
see and hear with new eyes and ears. The visions of these gifted individuals
help us soar, help us smile at the sublime, and, occasionally, help soothe our
spirits.
In between the arts and the workers on the land we have artisans of many
types who straddle both worlds. Here we nd hewers, carvers, weavers, and
others who pull not only inspiration from the land but raw material as well.
It is instructive to nd one in these ranks with a strong sense of craft and a
strong sense of place.
A potter active in ecology circles possessed these qualities, along with a twinkle in the eye. The twinkle, I learned, is the result of secret knowledge related
to his craft. His shop is tucked away along the north edge of Wisconsins Kettle
Moraine. On this October eve the chill is broken by the residual heat of a
wood-red kiln and smoke mixes with the damp earthiness of clay.
Clay is a wonderful thing to work. Its like working dough and kneading bread. Gets right in my pores. As elemental a thing as there ever was.
The thing that the Divine shaped us out of. Sometimes I dont know
where it ends and I begin. Doubt if Ill ever get it totally out from under
my ngernails.
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I started working with clay in college, in the city. That is where I

learned technique. Connection with the spirit of clay was to come later.
But I had to get to know the Earth through clay and get to know clay
through the Earth. Then I really started working with clay. Or maybe thats
when clay let me start working with it.
As with many types of craft, the journey toward a quality product
begins with acquisition of quality raw materials. That is certainly true in
the potters trade. Perhaps doubly true when you do as I do and use triedand-true traditional methods. The clay must t the style, technology, and
end product if it is to have the beauty, durability, and functionality that
Im looking for.
So Ive become a hunter of clay. In some ways Ive become a stalker of
clay. On some occasions, I confess, Ive even become a poacher of clay. Well
leave those details for another day and Ill simply say that the hunt for the
right clay for the right job taught me a great deal about my surroundings.
It didnt take me long to gure out that getting the right clay was not
just a matter of wielding pick and shovel in the backyard. No, clay ends
up in certain places and is of various qualities depending on a lot of natural forces. So, to nd the right stu, you have to be part natural historian, part geologist, and part geographer. In this neck of the woods you
need to understand the old glacial forces and the current topography.
Clay is an unusual substance resulting from the Earths processes. Its
really ne mineral particles that are bound up in ways that make it moist
and plastic in its deposits. It comes in various types and grades that have
various applications. And you can nd what you need if you know how to
read the signs in the land.
Clay also embodies history. We see the lives of the ancients in the red
clay they left behind. This is the way that we know something of how they
saw the world and what was important to them. Usually it was the creatures they knew and the forces of nature that controlled their lives. Their
clayware was an extension of themselves and their environment. Thats
the type of thing I aspire to today, to make objects that harmonize with
our surroundings and remind us of their beauty and power.
The diversity of clay is remarkable. It really is a locally shaped substance
that can tell you what went on in a particular place. I mean dramatic stu,
practically Old Testament stu. There are rare dark red clays from meteoric dust. There are remarkable clays from volcanic ash. In lake country

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173

we have beautifully layered varve clays from variable deposits on bodies

of water.
Im not about to say where I get my favorites. Id rather give away my
special shing spots. Fat chance! Not to mention that a few locations
involve the delicate art of trespassing But you could nd them too, if you
learn to read the land.
The land brought me to the spirit of clay too. Its an instrument of
reation. Its a mythical substance, a holy substance. It is the metaphor for
the medium that the Creator uses to create. Its connected to the stories of
Earth-creation, rst humans, mystical creatures, and frightening golems.
It retains some of these qualities in the hands of the potter. Clay is the
body, the vessel of the soul. Clay is the material of creation itself. You take
it, shape it, re it, and transform it. Out of that comes a vessel with the
potential to hold special things. If youre lucky, you end up with beautiful
receptacles for magic and dreams.
Here in home territory, I use the Earth signs to nd the clay for such
receptacles. I nd those signs where the glaciers moved and left old lakes
and marshes. You just look for the signs along the tracks of the glacier.
Tracks come in many forms. There are the kettle holes where large
blocks of remnant ice left depressions. Moraines are the deposits of glacial
till. Erratics are the boulders from faraway places that tell you where the
glacier came from and give you clues about what else it left behind. You
have the drumlins, the low, rounded hills aligned in the direction of the
ice ow. You have kames, hills of stratied glacier debris. And the long
berms of gravel called eskers.
But I digress. The whole point is how to t your life into the land you
occupy and how to bring the land fully into that life. Dont make the two
spheres things apart from one another. It may sound contradictory, but
there are ways to live lightly and deeply on the land. Ways to build rm
connection without leaving many traces.
Our lives are clay to mold. Shaping those lives into things of beauty,
strength, and functionality is an art. Where better to look for the lessons
of that art, the models for that art, and the material for that art, than the
Earth itself? Maybe thats the potters way of looking at creation. But
maybe, from Creations point of view, we are the clay.

Stars in the Eyes

Ever since people have struggled to protect their little piece of paradise there
have been those who focus on small slices of the overall environmental picture.
It may often seem like minutiae to some or come o eccentric to others, but it
is usually heartfelt and occasionally reveals a novel perspective that can open
our eyes, if we open our hearts.
The variety of these perspectives may no longer surprise me, but it certainly
continues to delight me. Our region has its due portion of narrow-band ecologists for a multitude of reasons. Its too easy for the powers that be to write
them o as crackpots, and perhaps its too tempting for the rest of us to write
o their potential prophetic power. These are the sorts of cranks that scream
and dream and, sometimes, come up with the breakthrough.
Occasionally they irt with raising their neighbors ire, if not the authorities scrutiny and intervention. It is for good reason that most do not seek attention. Lets just say that somewhere west of La Crescent, Minnesota, I met one
of those annel-shirt women who make up a goodly portion of what passes
for the overlap in Midwest deep ecology and new age communities. A veteran
of Indias ashrams, Israels kibbutzim, and the Mississippi Rivers houseboat
otillas, she has taken up the gun, as it were, on behalf of her slice of the ecology pie.
Since the statutes of limitations on her ongoing transgressions have not expired, well just call her Star Woman. Its a tting nom de guerre for someone
who indeed does have a celestial name, bequeathed in a ceremony of sky
watchers.
As for her motivations, and a more general understanding of those who
think small in their eco-action, well just let her words stand as her defense.
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People who know me often ask why I do what I do. Its not a complicated
answer and probably would serve many others who pick one thing to
work on. Its a matter of scale and manageability. I do it because I can get
my arms around it. I cant save the rainforest. I cant save the whales.
Ill grant you that part of me does it because I dont look the part. It
would surprise and outrage people. Because Im a scrawny woman not yet
forty, in baggy khaki pants and tennis shoes, who looks like shes pushing
sixty. Add to that glasses that look like the bottoms of beer mugs and my
spaghetti arms, and I look the total picture of helpless female bookworm.
I never even red a weapon until I was past thirty. No one in my long
line of tailors, haberdashers, and seamstresses ever owned a weapon more
formidable than a pair of scissors. So it was quite a struggle to self-teach
about long distance shooting, how to sight in a scope, and to scout out
targets. And Im told Im a damn good shot. Im probably the only girl
youve ever met who owns three Marine Corps sniper videos who also
washed out of Brownies for being too sissy. Now I feel like I could shoot
competitively if it wouldnt expose my hidden talents.
It all started when I was up in the Twin Cities at a conference. I heard
this man from Colorado talk about the dark-skies idea. The idea that
theres too much background light pollution, that our cities are overilluminated, that our parking lots are Hollywood premiers, and that our
farms are like ships ablaze on a prairie sea. It went straight to my heart,
like an arrow of truth. It was the rst time a male has said anything I
believed so deeply. Strangely, it made me feel warm and loving toward
him. I like to think something could have developed between us if not for
an attractive grad student who had already ung herself at him.
But, still, there was the gift of the truth. It was the truth of a condition
so common I had failed to notice it, failed to notice how it had built up
over the years, and failed to notice how it was killing the stars. It was
the fright of being told an incredibly sad thing that hurt but was important to hear if you want to live the truth. That truth was that generations
to come might not know the stars, that children might not get dizzy and
lost in the abundant night sky. I loved that Colorado man for telling me
that. Not a romantic love of pitter-patter heart, but the warm love of one
true thing.
Ive tried to honor that love, not with longing that isnt there, but honoring it with a passion that comes only from truth. Yes, passion in the form

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of being moved deeply. I was moved to tears and laughter. Everything was
suddenly clearer, and I was relieved of accumulated stress. I was touched
in the deepest way possible. I had found purpose and mission. I went
home knowing that I would do something to reveal the night sky.
Found my rst BB gun at a garage sale and explained to the lady that I
had a bird problem. I plinked othe language you pick up in gun
magazinesa few porch lights. But that didnt do much. I graduated to a
pellet gun and took out my rst mercury vapor lamp, a glaring and prideful obscenity that kept the restfulness of darkness from a tidy ower garden. You have to get close with a pellet gun. My rst four or ve shots
bounced o the plastic shield from about thirty yards. So I dashed right
up underneath and red directly up the shield cone and into the bulb.
Gosh, that felt good as the darkness washed over the weary honeysuckle
and herbs.
The experience caused me to study light xtures more closely. Clerks in
hardware stores wondered at my questions. Ill bet utility workers and
municipal public works employees also marveled at my coee-shop conversations. It was easy enough to acquire this side of the technical expertise. Those lights are not very sturdy xtures, you know.
The weapon side of the knowledge was a bit dierent. My rst experiments let me know that I needed more accuracy and repower. I didnt
have a clue about where to start. Then I saw those gun magazines in the
local convenience store. It isnt prudent for me to purchase them there, so
I pick them up on little jaunts in Iowa. Sometimes I get to read others
when Im at the local barber to get my bangs trimmed. Thats the talk of
the locals anyway, that I dont use the so-called beauty parlor. So while
theyre wondering about my sexual preference, I just slip that copy of Guns
and Ammo inside of a Better Homes and Gardens.
I really got started with a Ruger .22 automatic with a scope. Found a
small town with six streetlights. Visited an antique shop by day to scout
the place out. Knocked all six out on six shots in under ten minutes, moving across backyards in the dark without choking on clotheslines. Not bad
for a girl, right?
I was surprised how good that felt. It was pure exhilaration. No wonder men do that stu ! Its almost intoxicating. You have to rein it in so
you dont keep going. But the best thrill is after the shooting, when you
savor that moment of stars before the getaway. Thats how I learned to do

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177

it on the clearest nights possible. Fog, rain, or snow would oer more
cover. But I wanted the impact that comes with startled people stepping
out onto their dark porches and seeing the points of light that they had
forgotten.
Thats better than George the Elders Thousands Points of Light. Its a
million points of light. Its the zeal of Earth First! combined with performance art. Its Ed Abbey and practical, if short-lived, energy conservation. Its simple, and its perfect for me.
Ive learned to be both daring and careful. You learn to plan and stick
with the plan until instinct tells you to improvise. I picked up some basic
hunting techniques in a women-in-the-outdoors course. Then luck sent
me the best teacher I could hope for. Up north, my sister has a cabin, and
theres this guy in a wheelchair who taught me more than you can imagine.
Hes a veteran on disability pension, a former Army Ranger and sniper. He
let me re a .50 caliber custom-built rie with a scope that reveals craters
on the moon.
Probably sounds like true love, doesnt it? Its not, but its pretty darn
good. He lives far enough away to not be constantly under foot or arouse
suspicion about my clandestine activity. I leave the lights up north alone.
Last birthday, he gave me a wonderful target barrel: at shooting, light
caliber, heavy barrel, and smooth bolt action. Slick as wet you-knowwhat on Saturday night, he said. He worked up some special handloaded ammo of his own formula. In practice, Ive been routinely hitting
pop cans at two hundred yards from a prone position. O a good sandbag rest, I can shoot a two-inch group at the same distance. Its not the
right weapon for all situations that I deal with. Plus, I dont like to admit
the sin of pride that comes with knocking out a light at ve hundred yards.
I take perverse delight in all the impacts of my modest crusade. It
almost always gets blamed on local delinquents. I nd it prudent to travel
further aeld now. Dont want some bored detective to start putting pins
on a county map and having a light bulb go on. No pun intended.
So now I mostly sneak over to Wisconsin and down to Iowa. Ive
done one spree through Nebraska and South Dakota. There, the distance
between lights made me realize I was in the wrong place. Better to concentrate on the pointless clusters of bright light. Im thinking about WalMart, but that brings in issues of sprawl and free trade that I dont pretend
to fully understand. Not to mention more pressure from law enforcement.

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But Im still thinking about how to best approach it. Ive thought of a
James brothers Northeld-to-Missouri memorial tour, but that too might
trigger law enforcement attention.
Better to stick to basics. Find the most obnoxious lights and a good
nighttime shooting location. Figure out where the bullet goes for safetys
sake. Map out the escape route. Liberate the stars.
Im cautious, but not overly worried, simply because I dont look the
part. I was stopped once in my car by a kindly deputy sheri who warned
me that some drunk was shooting up the town. Another time, I had a rie
in my luggage right at the lunch counter with two police ocers next to me.
Ive learned to make exceptions too. I was scouting one area and
stopped at a roadside stand to buy berry jam. A nice young farmer chatted with me and told me how much he loved his place. How much he
liked the peace and quiet and the dark. Said that when he bought the
place, the rst thing he did was put a switch on the barnyard light so that
it didnt go on automatically at dusk. That way he could turn it on as he
needed it for farm chores but could still see the stars at other times. It was
on when I worked that territory. I gave him the benet of the doubt.
One time I heard some gloating techno-fan talk about the circle city
of light that can be seen from Earth orbit. A ring of light running from
Chicago to Minneapolis and back around through Iowa. We dont know
much about whats out there in space. But do we really want to call attention to ourselves that way?

New Ears

Our neck of the woods has been greeting newcomers at least since the last ice
age. Of our Native peoples, only the Ho-Chunk and their Lakota cousins have
roots that go way back in time. Everyone else has a migration story.
Iowa, Minnesota, and Wisconsin are particularly fabled in terms of their
place in the history of European American settlers and European immigrants.
The former were a rough bunch who wrested land from the original occupants
and commenced gouging the land, felling the timber, and shooting at fur and
feather. The latter were more likely to be farmers and tradespeople.
Our area became a magnet for all manner of northern European breeds.
The Scandinavians and Germans, of course, left a huge mark. Not far behind
were Irish, Poles, Swiss, Scots, and Dutch. But there were also lesser-known
clusters of Icelanders, Belgians, Bohemians, Luxembourgers, Cornish, and Welsh.
All left imprints and contributed to an evolving land-based sensibility.
Everybody mentioned so far represents, in a sense, the beginning of the story,
not the end. French Canadians, present since the rst European explorations,
reasserted their presence. African American freedmen and runaway slaves
became part of our communities, even starting signicant farming settlements.
Elements of Native American tribes from the East found homes here. Over
time, peoples from eastern and southern Europe, Latin America, and Asia
found their way to our neighborhood.
It goes without saying that each new group added to the tapestry. Still, there
is an impression that many of these groups saw themselves primarily as urban
people with European views of planning or Latin America views of communal life. One group was easily distinguished in this stewpot: the Hmong of Laos.
The role (and, daresay, exploitation) of these tribal hill people from Southeast Asia in the conict of 1960 to 1975 is yet another sad chapter in the history
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of local people caught in conicts too large for them to contend with. I wont
recite my version of the politics here. Suce it to say that I have muddled sympathies for the Hmong as my brief sojourn in Laos was marked by frantic ight
from a beautiful but tortured land.
The Hmong shamans escape was years after mine. He found his way to central Wisconsin and rebuilt a relationship to the Earth in very unfamiliar terrain. He uses what he learns of this new place to help his people adjust. I have
freshly seen many familiar places through the new eyes of others. The shaman
gave me the gift of hearing our places through new ears.
There is so much to learn at my age. It was hard to leave Laos. It was
dangerous to stay. I came only because of a song from Spirits.
I work with Spirits for medicine and happiness. That was our old way.
The old way still gives something to the Hmong. Even with new things
in United States, it helps Hmong.
Some call this the way of the shaman. That is not a Hmong word. This
is part magic, part religion. Maybe it is part of how to live in Nature.
Spirit work comes easily in Nature. You can have teachers, but Nature
is the better teacher. Nature no makes you do silly things to show who
boss. Nature is always boss and knows this.
Nature lets you know if you must work with Spirits. Nature decides,
not you. Nature decides the type of work you do and how you do it. Then
Nature sends Spirits to teach the teachers among us.
My old healing teacher told me that Spirits picked me. He said that
Spirits clouded my eyes to send message. This made me listen and not
turn my head around looking to see and miss important things. When I
young, I was not happy about that.
I see shadow and light, but no colors or little things like when I was
young. I found my teachers in the shadows. Those teachers showed me
how to hear and use my ears.
In Laos I walked four or ve days without getting lost. I found food and
hid from danger. This happened mainly with ears, maybe some with
touch and smell.
Ears are the most important part of my medicine because the music in
the Earth teaches many things. Everything in Nature has its own music.
Some of it is like a drumbeat. Some of it is like a song. There are teachings in the songs. There is healing in the songs.
When I came here, many other Hmong told me, This is dierent, it

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looks very dierent. The Spirits vibrated dierent. The music was very
dierent.
So I had to learn everything again. But I let the children guide me, and
I visited with an Ojibwe medicine man. The ears of children and native
teachers are good places to start. Soon things were better, and I gradually
learned music of this part of the Earth.
There is good music here. I nd it in plants and water. It is in the rocks
and trees. There are songs in the birds and animals. It is good place for the
Hmong and others who live here.
I am like a boy again learning new things. There are many new sounds.
New things to feel, smell, and taste. When young, you learn a few things,
then some other things. It comes gradually and naturally. When you change
your place on Earth, then everything is dierent at the same time.
Americans think I am crazy when I talk about the sounds of things.
Like snow. Snow has many dierent sounds. There is wet, big snow that
you can hear easily. There is little, sandy snow that rings. There is blowing snow across a roof. There is snow that squeaks and snow that sounds
like mud. This was all new sound for me.
I now know the sound of hail tearing leaves in forest. I know sleet on
windows. I know the roar of a tornado.
There are wonderful sounds at lakes and rivers. Birds, turtles splashing,
sh jumping. Music in the owls, hawks, and eagles. Songs from the buzzing bugs.
You can follow this music to medicine. Yes, it is true. Follow the music
of a bee, and it takes you to the owers of healing plants. Follow the music
of stream up to the cleanest spring to drink. Follow bird songs to ripe
berries. If you have a good ear, you can hear the music of rocks and trees
that tell you secrets.
So when Hmong worry about this place, I tell them it is dierent, not
strange, not bad. Places in the world are all dierent, but all have music.
All have teaching in them.
Some Hmong do not like the rules for hunting, shing, and nding
plants in this place. But I tell them, see if the rules t with the place. We
are new here. So listen and learn.
I listen to Ojibwe. They hear Natures music. Young people tell me about
science of animals and plants. There some nd Natures music. Maybe it
is dierent music, but I think they nd the same Spirits there. I think they
nd a song that says, Take care of place, place take care of you.

Team Green

Theres a tendency in traditional discussions of land ethics to assume that

the value of a perspective is enhanced by its holders age and experience. There
is merit in that viewto a point. But what of synergistic combinations of
established views, adaptations of methods to new circumstances, and sparkling
innovations?
Those are often the provinces of the young, alert, and energetic. Yet these are
often exactly the members of society who are ignored or marginalized for lack
of clout or credentials. Add to those issues the practical problems of nding
mentors devoted to developing potential and who are not vested in orthodoxies that sustain the age-old foundation for generational tensions.
Some believe that those tensions are the reason for the inevitable rise, maturation, and eventual atrophy of movements and direct-action groups. A healthy
organization would prepare for generational transitions that allow the young
room to take the group into the future. Unfortunately, there are few such organizations, with calcication and enshrinement of methods being more the
norm. Worse still, many of our institutions today insist that the young check
their challenging views at the door as the cost of admittance to the world of
status and rewards.
In the United States the young activist nds opportunity to experiment
mainly in ad hoc groups and in alternative political parties. These are imperfect incubators but have nevertheless provided the young of various generations
a string of eld testing of ideas and skills that go back at least to the civil rights
and antiwar movements of the 1960s.
For the last several decades, ecology movements and Green parties have served
as the college of hard knocks. But we of graying tress or beard would be mistaken if we think of it in terms of our dated experiences.
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Check out a young woman who has had to put up with a lot of middleaged guys as shes navigated a multipolar world of activism in Great Lakes
cities, north-country resource conicts, and Appalachia community organizing. Shes learned a good bit about what works and what doesnt, and shes
become seasoned in the ways of movement life in the early twenty-rst century.
Listen up, old-timers!
I appreciate the eorts of those who have gone before. Especially the ones
whove already passed on. But I especially miss those who have passed on
prematurely because of their lifestyles and habits. You dont know whether
to be angry at their boneheaded obliviousness to their own health or to
admire their zeal and single-mindedness. Maybe a little of both.
One thing that my teachers have taught me is how many ways we
approach any task. Often a teacher or mentor has a particular way to do a
particular thing. Now, some have a lesson embedded in that method, but
others are just stuck in a habit. I learn even from that.
I listen to my elders, but Im not an empty vessel for them to ll with
thrilling tales of yesterday. Im interested in concrete lessons and subtle
growth of consciousness. You can nd those things in the strangest places,
even goofy old men with beer bellies. Its partly a matter of nding the
right one to listen to and then listening closely enough to sort through
the quirks.
For a time I thought of these things in terms of the teacher or the
mentor. But it seems that its more complicated and humanly frail than
that. Even some of those I met with the greatest insights and kernels of
wisdom often stumbled on their own humanity. Ive learned a lot about
Green politics from those who were poor husbands, bumbling parents,
poor listeners, and somewhat disruptive in group settings.
You quickly learn that not all lessons can be found in one place. You
wont get anywhere if youre only open to one teacher. You need to allow
every person, event, and place to teach you. Even a small child, an angry
group, or a sudden rainstorm. Sometimes the best teachers arent even
people. A lake or a heron can teach without an agenda. Theres less confusion in that sort of lesson.
But thats the sort of thing Ive been trying to teach those who have
been teaching me. They say a good teacher is twice taught, once by the
mentor and once by the pupil. Not all of my mentors got this part of it.

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Ive tried to give them a glimmer of changing conditions, of what is likely

coming next.
One thing Ive learned from the old guys is the diculty of unlearning
inappropriate or unuseful things. There is great diculty in letting go of
perceptual frameworks that get entwined with a persons identity, even
when those frameworks are clearly out of sync with whats going on. The
best of mentors are those who can appropriately grieve old ideas and let
go. Theyre rare. Maybe mortality is a natural system for tidying up after
those who cant.
Most of the people Ive learned from only had one job in their adult
life. Many only lived in a few dierent places and mostly among people
very much like them. Some were anchored to places through ties and
forces as mysterious as softball leagues, civic groups, family churches, and
neighborhood taverns. These were their frames of reference.
But I think younger Greens need to nd their commitment to ecology in ways less rooted to a particular place. Its a changed world. Not just
changing, but changed in ways that are not entirely apparent at present.
We know the supercial elements: globalism, the obsolescence of nations,
and changes in Earth-systems. We just dont know whats going to emerge
from these conditions. It wont be anything someone born before World
War II would recognize.
We need to take those lessons of our elders and blend them with the
things that make sense in our setting. Maybe this means fewer meetings
and more e-groups. Maybe it means less emphasis on local group structure and more emphasis on international coalitions to link people in distant places. It means dierent music and dierent dances that blend the
lives of mobile people.
All this needs a way of looking at ecology and social justice in a postleft Left way. The power in the economy is not in things anymore; its in
information and ideas. Americas biggest export is squalid work and environmental degradation, but its exported jobs for regular people along
with our mess. Its unclear what the arrangements will be in this postcarbon, postnation state environment.
We do need a new framework for looking at wholeness. Maybe we
need to ask: Whats good for living things and systems? This framework
stresses linkages and interconnectedness. Its not just the pollution in the
developing nation that makes our clothing. Its the oppression in that

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country that keeps those workers in line. Its the lack of a living wage in
the Wal-Marts that sell those clothes. Its the closure of the local stores that
once sold clothing. And its the corporate governance beyond our reach
that makes those decisions without regard for consequences.
Our battles are both more global and more fragmented. Our adversaries
are more elusive and harder to identify. I once worked on a corporate
campaign to change a companys decision about a new location only to
nd that the big shareholders were churches, union pension funds, and
so-called socially conscious investment funds. The bigger surprise was how
cautious they were about anything that might disturb the dividend ow.
It is amazing how much eort it can take to get organizations devoted to
doing the right thing.
Its not a matter of reform. Its a matter of breaking down the old hierarchies. There are too many institutions stuck in the pyramid model, and
the people at the top are increasingly desperate and dangerous. They want
to resist the spread of networks and decentralization. Their time is really
over, but they still control the guns, bombs, and Federal Reserve. They
may not go quietly.
This makes our time dierent than the 1960s. It seems like that was
protest that was directed at the abuses by those in authority. Reforms, better people in oce, revolution to put control in their handsthats different from what Im talking about. Im protesting the notion of authority.
Authority is the underpinning of the isms: feudalism, industrialism, and
militarism. Theyre all outmoded ideas that need replacement.
We need to look at work dierently, for our sakes and the sake of the
Earth. We will need to look to other places to get the things we now nd
in work. Years from now, the idea of one job, one church, and one bowling league for a lifetime will seem like a mythical way of life.
We need to look at our relationships and society dierently. Its time to
move past lip service and recognize global demographics. Women are the
majority, and most of them are women of color. A world of equality wont
be a perfect world, but theres reason to think that clean water and healthy
children might receive more consideration in that world.
What can you old guys do? Ill surprise you by not saying, Get out of
the way. No, we need your active help. My teachers have taught me you
have to ask for help again and again. Just understand that Im not recruiting you to be a rearguard of nostalgia. Im signing you up for Team Green.

Joy from the World

Conversations with those close to the land reveal many ways of experiencing
pleasures in the relationship with Nature. The pleasures range from simple to
sublime and encompass virtually all worldviews. This is the sphere wherein
our bodies react to Nature. Here, we move past the logic of conservation and
sustainability that might reside in our heads. Here too we might surrender
some of the spiritual connection or oneness with Nature that ows from our
cosmologies. Here is where we long for Nature because it feels so darn good.
Travel exposes us to many of Natures dierent pleasures. They are not only
molded by place but acted upon by culture. Thus does the childs pleasure of
cavorting in the tropical waterfall contrast with the romance of the young
adult on the beach at sunset and the enduring magic of the elder in the deserts
starry night.
The cultural and commercial phenomenon of the couples getaway suggests
a strong connection to Natures pleasures. From honeymoon resorts to singles
cruises to autumn-color bus excursions, there are hints that the joys of interacting with natural beauty are enhanced in the company of the object of ones
aection (or even a prospective candidate for that aection).
Human diversity being what it is, this synergy of aection and place takes
many forms. Some experience love in its deepest romantic forms and nd a
charge that sustains them in an enduring relationship. Others nd playfulness
that brings light into corners of the psyche that have been temporarily darkened. And discretion demands circumspect mention that sometimes Nature
serves as catalyst for passion at its rawest and most unbridled peak.
Many men come to both a gentler and yet more passionate connection with
Nature through the kindness of a female friend serving as muse. I have been
fortunate to know several of these women. Here I will let you listen in on one
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who is clearly excited by ideas and experiences. More to the point, she can communicate that excitement and inspire others to see things dierently. No small
wonder that she is sought after by environmental and cultural organizations
that are in need of fresh perspectives in a large campus community in the
Upper Midwest. She has a way of taking a lunch conversation in an unanticipated direction.
Sometimes our eorts to ground our environmentalism in sound science
and progressive politics get in the way of the reality of human experience.
Few people go through a checklist of principles before they interact with
an environmental question. They come as the sum of previous encounters,
feelings, and aspirations. They usually come at it in a way that is intuitive
and integrated.
For many people, this way could be called joy. It is an excellent way
to experience the natural world. If a person has not experienced that joy,
it makes sense to open them to that possibility. Something tells me that
the results will be much more helpful in our current world than the great
bulk of books, seminars, and advocacy we have about this environment.
One could easily come to believe that the biggest obstacle to environmental integrity is the alienation of many in politics and business from
this joy.
This alienation has serious consequences for the rest of usfor all living systems. When the expression of joy through life is replaced by things
like prot, status, and power, everything is put at risk. The market economy is a successful device but an inadequate mechanism to deal with joy.
According to the market model, one would expect more smiles in auent
American suburbs than in poor villages in developing countries. But we
all know that it does not always work that way.
A case in point: children. A child is a great indictor and embodiment
of joy. But other than the eorts to commercialize childhood and train
little consumers, what does the market economy do for children? Where
is the true joy that helps them break the addiction to material stu?
The growing distance of children from joy bodes ill for the future. Joy
is not an easy thing to pick up on if you reach adulthood without knowing joy. Childhood memories of joy permit people to regain their equilibrium and sense of direction later. Even memories of a spring ower or
a meadow of reies can serve this purpose. Without those memories, it

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is like learning a complex language system as an adult. You might master

vocabulary and grammar, but you are unlikely to be uent or think in that
language.
Adults who nd themselves out of touch with joy need to become
childlike again. One way to do that is through play with children: collect
bugs, make snow angels, and play in the mud. But another way is to practice childlike wonder and contemplation.
This can t a solitary and spiritual style. A retreat allows us to experience solitary joys. It gives us respite from cares and responsibility. It puts
us in a moment where even silence is joy, where silence can be sensual.
There is a paradox with joy in terms of the individual and interactions with others. It is strange and beautiful that something so wonderful
to share must rst grow deep inside of the self. We must start with ourselves, beginning with the openness to joy. If you cannot experience it on
your own, you are unlikely to nd it with others.
This is where Nature can open a person up. It can start with the most
childlike of pleasures and move up through all the possibilities of joy.
There are so many ways to experience these pleasures. You might bathe
in a hidden pool, drink a bottle of wine on an overlook, break bread by
a lake, take a nap on a bed of pine needles, or make love among the moss
and ferns.
Those experienced in joy know how to move back and forth between
solitary and shared experiences. You use both to enhance both. It is wonderful to experience solitary joy in Nature and then on your return share
the memory with your beloved. There is also joy in bringing the joy of
your beloved with you on your retreats. It seems to me that you must draw
these elements together and enrich both.
In adult form, this openness to joy has many manifestations. I nd that
Nature can reinvigorate romance, heighten libido, focus erotic energy, increase skin sensitivity, and improve all aspects of sensuousness and sensuality. Even without a partner on a trip, Nature can bring you to a sense of
possibility and receptivity.
It is probably no accident that some people nd this change in exotic
treks, safaris, and romantic hideaways. Such trips may be explained to
strangers in terms of parrots seen and ruins visited, but many of us have a
standard more focused on joy. A good trip can be judged based on opportunities to skinny-dip in beautiful spots, to be fed pieces of fresh fruit by

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someone we nd attractive, to lounge in a hammock while listening to

birds singing, and to share a bed with our beloved within earshot of the
breaking waves.
Out of that can come a contentment and peace that I nd to be the
ultimate experience. It is spiritual and sexy at the same time. It allows you
to feel part of all things blossoming and growing. There is a community
of all things living at these moments. Maybe an even broader notion of
what is living, including the rocks and water.
I realize I may seem animated by talk of this. It does excite me in many
ways. Just the recall of these moments elevates my pulse and widens my
eyes. The physical body responds to joy. When the feeling is at its strongest,
my skin glows and feels electric. I get a uid feeling in my being, like I
could just melt and take any form.
In these moments, there is incredible anticipation and satisfaction. It
starts o as an intensely personal thing, like a small ame deep inside of
me. Then it builds to encompass my entire being. Depending on the circumstances, it can move beyond me. It can take in a place and my beloved.
It can bathe us both in a glow and allow the exchange of energies among
the two of us and the place. And it can lead to explosive, earth-shaking,
reality-altering release.
That is the joy I get from the natural world.

Grandpops Treehouse

It is far too easy to think of environmental consciousness as a product of the

adult mind, with all the quirks and linear intellectualism that such an attitude implies. We celebrate the sages of ecological thinking but seldom stop to
consider that some develop a love and understanding of Nature without the
rigors of systems thinking.
Chief among the overlooked and untutored friends of the Earth are our
children. Many of us treasure the moments when we were privileged to share
a childs rst encounters with beauty and mystery. We nd insight and wonder
mirrored in their fresh eyes. Their innocence and honesty oer much that can
refresh us.
Some say that the childhood sense of the magic within Nature inevitably
fades like the ability to believe in Santa Claus. Education and the lure of mass
entertainment displace unmediated experience with information and points of
view. Many children in the world face challenges that alienate them from the
birthright of wondereverything from the grind of poverty to the horrors of
war to the indierence of bloated auence.
Still, I can suggest that it might have been easier to come up with a coherent collection of childrens ecological wisdom. Adults, with their baggage and
idiosyncrasies, make things so damn complicated.
We have here a sturdy eleven-year-old of lively disposition who will serve as
our case study. He seems like a normal kid. Knee scrapes and elbow bruises suggest an active bent, though his sense of curiosity labels him as one engaged with
ideas. His take on Nature is a legacy of sorts, a legacy that helps him appreciate the context of his place on a family farmstead overtaken by development
outside of Freeport, Illinois.
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This is the treehouse that Grandpop built. He built it pretty good. My

Dad and all my uncles used it. My older brothers and cousins used it.
Maybe our children and grandchildren will use it.
Grandpop died two summers ago, but when Im up here in the treehouse I feel like hes still here. I remember him climbing up here slowly
his last summer. Mom was mad at me for asking him to come up. She said
he could have got hurt.
Grandpop just laughed and said she could stick his carcass right up here
and that would be O.K. with him. Then he talked about tribes that put the
dead on platforms. And he laughed about needing a boost up to Heaven.
Grandpop said that he had learned many things in this treehouse and
that all the boys of our family had gone to school here. When I asked him
what he meant, he laughed some more. He said this was school for the
eyes, ears, nose, and skin. He said the main thing to learn involved waiting and watching.
Uncle Raymond told me a story about being sent up here when he
couldnt sit still in the house. He said that Grandpop told him not to come
down until he knew how a bird built a nest. Grandpop must have known
that birds were working on one right in this big oak. Uncle Raymond said
he watched for hours and didnt see anything except birds carrying junk.
Then he watched closer. He saw things of dierent sizes; he saw things
that were smooth and some that were rough. He saw birds y over by where
the barn was and grab of snack of bugs and then come back with animal
hair. Then hed watch them y over by the drainage ditch, drink, and y
back with wet grass. Then a twig, then a string, and on and on. Every little
thing they did was part of building the nest, even scaring o other birds.
Uncle Raymond said he learned a lot about how things get done that
day. He said thats why he works on the pieces of things and lets the big
stu take care of itself. He said that he learned that the biggest job in the
world is just a bunch of little jobs that are tied together by a good plan.
Dad said all the boys in the family learned things like that up here.
Grandpop told him to come up here on a spring night and watch how
the stars turn. He didnt believe it and told me he thought Grandpop was
tricking him. He was really mad and was shivering up here in a blanket
on a night with frost. But he eventually saw what Grandpop meant about
star movement and he came back up in summer, fall, and winter to see the
turns the rest of the year.

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I remember Grandpop saying that everybody needs a watching place

and that this is ours. He told me to watch the little things and the big
things. He believed that watching would show you how the little things
t into the big things. He even thought watching from here would tell you
what was going on all over the world.
He liked to talk about climbing up here as a boy. That was before the
tree had a treehouse in it, even though it was a big tree then. It was before
there was electric here. He said all he saw on three sides were other farms.
On the other side there was the town about a half-mile away. He saw
horses plowing and the smoke of Milwaukee Road steam engines.
His boys saw the road get paved and the town get closer and wrap
around us. He built a little house over on the corner. His boys sold pieces
of the farm, and other houses got built here. Now I can only see two farms
farther away.
Grandpop said that its easy to get sad about such things but we should
try to gure out what were sad about. He said its natural to be sad about
losing things that we like. But he saw that as part of life and change. How
did he say it? I think he called it good change, bad change, and just
change.
I asked him how I would know which is which. His answer was that
you need the lessons of the treehouse. He thought it was natural that
some places would be built up. This close to town it was a good thing, he
thought. But he had a dierent idea about big houses going up around the
lake near his cottage up north. He thought the houses here were letting
others in and that big houses on the lake kept others away from the lake.
He told us that you cant see anything really greedy from the treehouse,
but he had seen greed from his cottage. All he saw from here were people
living, just like the birds building a nest.
I know that it might happen that this tree and treehouse might not
be here for boys in fty years. Grandpop talked about that and said that
it was a little sad to think about. But he told me not to worry too much
about it. He said the worry is when there are no trees for treehouses anywhere. Thats bad change.
He told me to be like a bird. Move when I need to and nd a new tree
if I need to. He promised me that he would be with me at that new tree
no matter where it is.

Hurley Burley

One does not have to hang around environmentalists for too long to detect a
dour note now and then. While this collection has attempted to stay on the
Earth-arming side of the ledger, there is no shortage of doom and gloom in
the eco-ranks. It is serious survival stu after all, and prophetic voices do sometimes need to call us to repentance. There are, of course, professional environmentalists for whom imminent disaster is the fund-raising stock in trade.
Members of my crowd tend toward the optimistic and combative side, at
least measured by their willingness to battle in defense of the Earth. The eort
signals their hope, though not absolute, that the ecological outcomes are not
foreordained and that they wish to be counted among those on the side of
the angels. Still, even among this number there are plenty who believe things
will likely get substantially worse and that much suering will proceed the
Awakening.
But among that Greenish throng has long labored a Fox River fox. Hes been
green and Green since the dawn of his political consciousness on a campus in
the 1960s. He was always as much a cultural activist as a political one. When
questioned, his contemporaries bring forth a ood of labels: bohemian, beatnik,
hippie, anarchist, anti-establishment, gady, guerrilla actor, class cutup, deep
thinker, idealist, enthusiast, and, based on his expressive and talkative face, the
mime who wont shut up.
Hundreds, if not thousands, of grassroots activists in the area know him as
the fellow who breaks up tension in stuy meetings and manages to say things
no one has said before. Its a damn important function.
Im repackaging my eco-politics these days. Post-Nader, you might say.
No sour recriminations. No worry about snooty Democrats and low-ber
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Republicans. All that stu represents a bizarre political culture of mandatory eight-track tapes. Its so . . . twentieth century.
My new political package is the Dont Piss and Moan Party. You get
the ip side, dont you? Yeah, do something, do whats right, do what feels
right. Dont wait for the convention to put your plank in the platform.
That time might not come, and there you are ngering the bratwurst and
the parade has moved down the street.
We alternative types shouldnt take our own institutions too seriously.
The situation calls for mocking institutions and inventing new ways to
relate, new ways to have civic relationships. The German fundis (the radical wing of the German Greens) understood that you need an anti-party.
Get over that inltrate-and-change-the-establishment brain toxin. Its
a trap. You end up propping up the monster. So I see limited usefulness
for electioneering, since most sane people have tuned it out. Its still
good theater, though, if youre smart about your stagecraft. Even helps if
you elect some eco-freaks if they stay on track. By that, I mean grabbing
the slumbering by the face and yelling loud as you can, Were arguing
about the wrong stu ! I dont mean put on a tie and make the bus run
on time.
Anyway, as I was saying, forget the establishment. Its hold is very shaky.
The government doesnt matter as much as you think. Business doesnt
matter as much as you think. In one sense, theyre bad dreams and we have
to get over them. I know they have the capacity to cause great harm. But
weve let them run like wild dogs. Time for the leash, time for the muzzle,
or time for the Drano doggie biscuit.
We let simple economic concepts that were only meant to deliver goods
and services take over our civic life. We let the public sphere of collective
action run global beyond our ability to grasp it. Sure, change is needed,
but the biggest change must rst come in our heads. Dont be a collaborator. Just imagine you live in Vichy France. The pin on your label will
identify you to others in the Resistance.
In the Dont Piss and Moan Party we know that the new civic relationship is evolving now. Its a far-ung and uncertain thing. Stu like kids
in the Battle of Seattle, volunteer trail maintainers, community-supported
agriculture, international human shields, witnesses for nonviolence, day
labor for Habitat for Humanity, and Amish and Native Americans doing
logging business together. Out of that stew we can expect something new.

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What, who knows? I just happen to think that the general trend is toward
workable human relationships. We sure know what doesnt work!
In the Dont Piss and Moan Party we work with whats there. Dont
keep crying about the suburbs. Theyre there. Put fruit and trees there and
get something back from those lawns. Same with the public lands. Get
berry canes and communal gardens in those places. Vote with your feet;
vote with your dollars.
The Dont Piss and Moan Party has a more uid vision of urban and
rural. Bring those farmers into the village to live. Have sister-city, -neighborhood, and -township arrangements. Get people moving back and forth.
Theres a lot to be said for getting city people out to the country for harvests, especially when its done with jugs of wine and ddles instead of Pol
Pots bayonets.
Thats the whole point of the Dont Piss and Moan Party. A party, a
good time. What do you think NASCAR and theme parks are about?
People have just forgotten how to do it for themselves. Our new party
helps them remember, helps them ex their civic hootenanny muscle. Lets
them nd their own beat so that Kumbaya can be reggae, bluegrass, or rap.
Now, I know I have a slightly dierent take on what ecology is about.
I dont just want to save the planet. Thats a start. But I really want to save
places for the human family and all the critters. I want to save the places
where my family goes for the smelt run. I want to save the places to make
babies, have babies, and play with babies. I want to save the places of the
sacred herbals and the places to eat, drink, and smoke them.
Wilderness? Yes, save some. But then back o and keep the buses and
snowmobiles out of there. Run a list, like the bear-hunt lottery, so that one
week every ve to ten years you get to go in and live with the natives and
the critters in the old way.
Nature can heal itself pretty good if we can learn to take care of the
people end. Thats what I mean by the civic relationship. Not just how we
govern ourselves. Its more about how we act with one another. America
used to be the capital of civic relationships. Now were the idiots. Cant
have civic relationships now without acts of Congress, think-tank reports,
and Federal Reserve projections.
Its up to us to jar people out of lethargy, not just to ask government
or the market to do it. Im no super-motivator of people. But I remember one time after a storm when some trees were blocking the road. There

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were about ten vehicles in front of me so I got a bow saw out of my truck
and walked up to the brush and started sawing. Old boy in the luxury
sedan up front snickers and says hes called the county highway department. You and I know hes exactly the type who wouldnt piss on county
workers if they were on re, a tax grumbler, a riding-tall-in-the-saddle man.
But within minutes others were up helping me. A chainsaw appeared, a
winch came into playa little work party, a road-clearing bee and civic
relationship right on the spot. The malted milk ball in the luxury sedan
represented government and the chamber of commerce in this little ditty.
The people clearing the brush represent what Im talking about.
If were ever going to be nicer to the Earth it would be a good idea to
be nicer to each other. The old pre-Reagan conservatives understood that.
I have many fond memories of old fogies for Goldwater because they
understood what a pleasant world was created by more options and neighborliness. Somewhere along the line, that mutated into kick ass and take
names. It was only a hop, skip, and a jump from that to Lock em up and
throw away the key and Our oil is under your sand.
So thats the message of the Dont Piss and Moan Party this week. The
Earth is already whole; work on wholeness for the human critters. Clean
up after yourself, look both ways before you cross the street, and dont take
any wooden nickels.
Stay tuned for next weeks oering from the Holy Mother of Observation Party.