Subject: LAND CIRCLE: Lessons ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Comments: Linda Hasselstrom is a woman rancher. She is an environmentalist and a writer, and spends time studying nature and Native American cultures. She devotes a chapter in her latest book LAND CIRCLE to land ethics and what we must now learn from the land in order to sustain ourselves and life as we know it on earth. In this period of history when we have made an unprecedented assault on nature--both due to our industrialization in so-called developed countries and our ever-increasing numbers everywhere--Hasselstrom's message is especially timely. "Lessons" will challenge you to think-through some tough questions about land, our culture, and our responsibilities. Hasselstrom asks not that we live as she does, neither that we believe as she does. Rather, she asks that we accept our responsibilities. She reminds us that the time for compromise is past--that we must now take action both individually and collectively to restore our past and continuing abuses of the land. 14 pages. Dve. -------========X========------- LAND CIRCLE: Lessons Linda Hasselstrom You have noticed that everything an Indian does is in a circle, and that is because the Power of the World always works in circles, and everything tries to be round. In the old days when we were a strong and happy people, all our power came to us from the sacred hoop of the nation and so long as the hoop was unbroken the people flourished. ... This knowledge came to us from the outer world with our religion. Everything the Power of the World does is done in a circle. The Sky is round and I have heard that the earth is round like a ball and so are all the stars. The Wind, in its greatest power, whirls. Birds make their nests in circles, for theirs is the same religion as ours. The sun comes forth and goes down again in a circle. The moon does the same, and both are round. Even the seasons form a great circle in their changing, and always come back again to where they were. The life of a man is a circle from childhood to childhood and so it is in everything where power moves. Our tipis were round like the nests of birds and these were always set in a circle, the nation's hoop, a nest of many nests where the Great Spirit meant for us to hatch our children. ---Hehake Sapa, Black Elk, Oglala Lakota I wasn't born on the land; I was reborn here when I moved from a small city to a ranch at the age of nine. I was adopted by the land, and began developing a personal land ethic the first time I looked out on the empty, rolling prairie around my home. Although I have left the ranch where I grew up several times--to go to college, to marry a philosophy student--I have always returned. My second husband, George, joined me in working the ranch with my parents, and now that I am a widow, the land is still most of my family, as well as my spiritual guide. Most people develop their beliefs about the land in less intimate, less grueling ways: by visiting it on vacations, or by seeing it outside their city or their car windows. I do not insist that living in the land leads automatically to a more profound wisdom, though I suspect it's often true; anyone who lives in the country and pays attention is often exposed to happenings that are not easily explained, and may take time to think about them. I do know that most people in our society look at the land across an ever-widening abyss. I believe that chasm separates us from our best traits. As we become more distant from the land, we begin to regard other animals, including human beings, as if they were warm mechanical playthings. In the process, we are becoming coldly machine-like ourselves. When we lost faith in the old gods and goddesses of the earth, we lost touch with our best traits and capabilities, the best of our own souls. Gary Paul Nabhan believes those who have lost touch with the land are incomplete, not fully developed as humans: "By remaining uninitiated to the power of wilderness, a large percentage of our present human population remains in an arrested, immature stage of development." To find ourselves in the land, we don't need to buy a farm or pay high prices to so-called Christian priests or New Age priestesses. We are all creatures born to soil and wilderness; the outdoors, not an air-conditioned office or schoolroom with windows that can't be opened, is our natural habitat. Night or day, walk out into the grass or woods alone, sit down, and listen. Dig in the earth; plant something. Walk and watch any living thing except another human. You will find guidance, some comfort. To find more, to become fully human, you must commit more of yourself to the search. Don't start by backpacking in the Rocky Mountains; start with the closest spot of earth to you right now. Sit outside at midnight and close your eyes; feel the grass, the air, the space. Listen to birds for ten minutes at dawn. Memorize a flower. One benefit that has nothing, and everything, to do with your main purpose is that you cannot overdose on this experience, and it doesn't cause a disease, or require you to seek therapy. You can only benefit. I have been a student all my years on the ranch; I might have learned the same lessons elsewhere, but I learned well where the tests were life or death for my animals and myself. The lessons of the ranch can be summarized in a way that is almost absurdly simple, yet they cover the larger work of my life as a rancher and a writer, as well as my politics and religion. Succinctly, they give me hope for the simplest and most difficult job I face: survival. The lessons I have learned concern birth, death and responsibility for the life between. In 1991, schools in Wisconsin will require that studies of the environment be part of all subjects taught in schools from kindergarten through twelfth grade. Although I can see numerous pitfalls in this approach, by which a poor system or poor teachers could ruin environmental studies much as "creative" writing has often been devastated by being taught, still the theory is correct. The environment is part of everything we live, and it should be part of everything we study. So I believe the lessons I have learned are relevant for all of us. The environment--the land around us and all the living things on it--is no longer a luxury to which we can retreat for enjoyment when the day's work is over; it is an essential part of our lives; without it we will die, slowly and painfully and without understanding why. I: The Road I Took It's difficult to understand how an individual arrives at a particular set of beliefs unless you follow the same road, but I know that what I believe is in part because of my associations with the land. When I moved to the ranch, I was a typical nine-year-old city kid; the move changed my life drastically and completely. Ranching I pictured as all white hats and sparkling spurs, prancing horses and green grass, a kind of glorified rodeo played all year long. I didn't know about the work, or the loneliness, and I had no conception of the beauty or rewards. In the city I was never alone, but protected by a watchful mother and grandmother, surrounded by friends. Sometimes, I suppose, I whined that there was "nothing to do." On the ranch, I rode my horse everywhere, and became absorbed in all the details of the prairie. I raced antelope, but I also sat down and let them approach me, stamping and whistling. My mother and grandmother began to complain that I was growing "unladylike," and tried desperately to get me to care as much about cleaning my room and doing dishes as I cared about my horse. Dear women, they failed; I'd still rather ride a horse than vacuum a carpet. I learned not to complain of nothing to do; when I did, someone handed me a hoe. Every day, I watched coyotes catch mice, toss them in the air, swallow them at a gulp. I chased them on horseback, laughed as they tripped while looking over their shoulders at me, came to appreciate them as tricksters long before I knew the wealth of Indian myth on the subject. A great horned owl that ghosted out of a tree when I rode under it taught me to watch for it, because I never heard it. I lay down in the open under a perfectly empty sky and remained still until a buzzard appeared and circled close enough for me to see its head turning, casting first one yellow eye, then the other, on me. I knew what buzzards ate, but it never occurred to me to fear or revile them. I walked my horse in circles around coiled rattlesnakes to watch them watching me, struggling to stay coiled and in a striking position. I learned that their rattle warned me in time to avoid them, if they didn't simply hide, and realized it was seldom really necessary to kill one. Even barefoot in the garden, stepping over a rattler bulging with gophers, or finding my horse with a nose swollen around two fang marks, I respected them and let them escape. I had no playmates, and no siblings. I learned how to live and play and be happy alone, before I learned how to live with people. Country children didn't visit other children just to play. Our families got together to share work, and enjoyed it if we could, and we learned about sharing responsibility early. We didn't get many toys; our status symbols were work implements: a horse, a saddle, a tractor, a gun, a pickup. We acquired these things when we were adult enough, responsible enough,to use them wisely. We were proud of them; we knew how much they cost, and we knew what they meant: adulthood. Admission to the life of labor our mothers and fathers knew. I loved the prairie, and became as close to it as to a sister. I started writing at that time--poems, stories, a novel--to entertain myself, and to keep track of all the interesting things I saw and heard. I taught myself to be an environmentalist long before I heard the word. Without my realizing it, Nature became my church as well. Once I chose a secret name for myself, a name linking me to one of the four elements though I didn't know that then, and carved it on a block of sandstone which I hid. Later, I told my secrets to a tree and knew they were safe in the heart of that tall sentry. I found these actions entirely natural in a world where I saw more of trees and rocks than of children my age; I now believe that it is natural for all of us to be children of the earth in this way. Only later, as we learn to stand in straight lines and adhere to the rules, do we learn to give allegiance to patterns outside ourselves, and to value them above our own perfectly correct instincts. Except for the writing, I believe most people who grow up in the country could tell much the same story. I wrote about my family's relationship with the land in my book, Going Over East: I realize suddenly that the circle of our world lies within a mile radius. Here lie our homes, the garden whose products supplement our own beef to feed our bodies, the wintering and birthing grounds for our cattle, the hayfields that feed them, the boneyard where they slowly return to earth, the junkyard where dead machinery becomes spare parts, and the garbage dump where we get rid of what we cannot use. All that is missing is a graveyard for the humans; it may not be too late. I think of our lives as circular: our work is dedicated not just to profit-making but literally to feeding ourselves. We are sometimes able to choose work that sustains us mentally, or at least gives us variety, and to plan our own days rather than working to a schedule set up by someone else. But the steady rhythm of night turning to day, spring to summer, birth to death, the progress of the moon and sun, the sweep of wind and rain--those natural cycles determine how we arrange our lives. What does not fit into the smooth circle of our days, into the repeating cycle of the seasons, does not belong here. When I first conceived the idea of our lives as circular, I had not yet read Black Elk's famous statement, but I knew that work, responsibility, love of the land, respect and affection for both domestic and wild animals, all fitted together to keep us fed and clothed and housed and entertained. My parents didn't get a TV until I went to college; I had no idea I was deprived. Television didn't contribute anything to our circle of existence, so I hardly missed it. In college, I joined a strict, nondancing, nonsmiling church, and when I left it and the boyfriend I'd joined it for, I went to Catholic services for a while, then to a Quaker fellowship that met in a burned-out Methodist church for an hour of blissful silence every Sunday morning. By that time I was married, teaching full-time, studying for a master's degree, living in a city, trying to be a perfect stepmother in the hope that one day I would be a perfect mother. I needed silence more than faith in God, or else I sensed they were linked. When we Quakers and other war protestors stood in front of the World War II memorial in silent protest against the Viet Nam war, I studied the faces of the young people who screamed epithets at us, and realized that most of them would call themselves Christians. Farm boys with fresh, familiar faces sicced their dogs on us when we sat on the grass on Gentle Thursday. The highway patrolmen who charged out through the front door of the administration building swinging batons and clubbing us to the ground--after the students were killed at Kent State--were good, clean-cut, family men; most of the students were middle-class midwestern youngsters who had gathered on the quadrangle because they were frightened, and didn't understand what was going on. I taught at an exclusive women's school, Christian College. The girls who cheered and ran laughing through the dormitory when Martin Luther King was murdered were nice, intelligent white girls from Christian families. I was beginning to get a little cynical about Christians and their insistence that they could save the world. When I was divorced, I retreated to the ranch, the only thing I had left. My parents were there in summer, and in winter I lived alone. I was thirty years old, and everything for which I had prepared myself by going to college and marrying the "right" man and getting an education so I'd have "something to fall back on," had failed me, and disappeared from my life. I didn't trust anyone or anything--but the land. At that time I wrote a poem called "First Night Alone on the Ranch." The final lines are: My family is darkness before the flickering fire, the cow calving in the barn. I didn't realize how seriously I meant that for a long time. But suddenly I realized that the things I really valued about South Dakota were its air, its water, its space--and its land. During the next few years I talked more to cows than I did to people, and listened more than I talked. I read a lot about the relationship of people we call "primitive" to the land, and the land healed me, and I began to write seriously and well for the first time. I also started a publishing company, printing the work of Great Plains writers, convinced we had something unique to say to the world that wasn't being heard from anyone else. When my first book was published in 1987, and received the kind of attention all writers crave--a favorable review in the New York Times, selection by a book club as an alternate--it was a journal of a year in my life of seasonal ranch labor. The pages were filled with the beliefs and feelings that accompany my work, taken from the journals I have kept since I was nine years old. After all my searching, all my detours into many modes of thought, I was back where I began, only this time I was armed with some hard-won convictions, and determination. I also had sufficient education to quote Thoreau on my reasons for staying: "I love Nature partly because she is not man, but a retreat from him. None of his institutions control or pervade her. There a different kind of right prevails. In her midst I can be glad with an entire gladness. If this world were all man, I could not stretch myself, I should lose all hope. He is constraint, she is freedom to me. He makes me wish for another world. She makes me content with this." My favorite result from Windbreak has been letters I receive from readers. The letters have given me a feeling for the community of farmers and ranchers, their similarities and differences. One day, I received letters from two women--one a farm wife and poet in Minnesota, the other the only woman Episcopal priest in South Dakota. The farm wife wrote: "Much as I loved your book, I do think it's sad that you seem to have turned away from Christianity. With all the TV evangelist scandals, it's especially hard to convert someone right now, and I'm not going to try." The Episcopal priest wrote: Though I initially attempted to follow traditional models, I soon discovered that would not work. And so I have embarked on a new road for me. It has taken me into feminist theology, Christian mysticism, native American tradition and culture, the power of myth and story, and a renewed love of the land. I have often thought that I was on that crooked road by myself... often the journey is lonely. There are few role models in my own neighborhood. Then I read your books...[and N. Scott Momaday, Frank Waters, John Neihardt, contemporary native American authors] and all that...catapulted me into a place within my own soul that I knew was there, but was lurking in the corner. And so I bought your books and read them immediately, one right after another. And I knew that I was on a journey with, at least, another pilgrim ... The first woman believes I'm a degenerate non-Christian; the Christian priest sees me as a pilgrim like herself. It's not profound, and not enough, to say people find what they look for. When I replied to the farm wife, I suggested that turning away from Christianity didn't necessarily mean turning away from God, but I failed to convince her. I was gratified by the letter from the Episcopal priest because, while I wasn't really on a pilgrimage to find God, I had certainly been on a parallel road. I was especially struck by her statement that her study of Christian mysticism and Native American tradition and myth had led her to renewed love of the land, because that's what happened to me. By studying unusual subjects--some, like witchcraft, forbidden by religious leaders--and by exploring the histories of people Christian missionaries called "primitive," like Australian aborigines and Plains Indian tribes, I found meaning for my own life, especially as it revolves around the land. I found peace in beliefs about the earth that mingled bits of a dozen different cultures, and knew part of my job is to work for a better understanding of our environment without making futile speeches to legislators who seemed to regard me as an annoyance. When I emerge from my own small circle to catch up with the world, I find that millions of other people are combining their ideas of God with their ideas of worth of the land in ways that make traditional Christians nervous. But if Christians had read and understood their own history, they would know that none of us, no matter how unusual our beliefs, is walking a road that has not been walked before. I haven't resolved all my questions about Christianity, but I decided to give up church, and spend more time taking care of the land. I decided that if God didn't give me credit for that, He, or She, wasn't the kind of God I wanted to believe in anyway. I also have come to believe that the only way to save the nation and world from the ecological crisis we've created by our greed and exploitation is for the people who are still in touch with the land to show the rest of us the way out of this mess. II: Birth and Death Birth and death are indivisible; because of my ranch experiences, I can't talk about one without talking about the other. They are the most natural of events, yet they are abstracts for most people. Most Americans have distanced ourselves from these two most basic events of life. Many of our children are born while we lie drugged in a sterile hospital bed, and we die in the same cold atmosphere, giving up responsibility for both events to so-called "experts." Lately, controversy has boiled around people who have demanded responsibility for the mode and time of their deaths; I find this odd. Surely we should all demand such a responsibility as a part of living on the earth. I signed a living will years ago, and hope that someone will be responsible enough to help me enforce it if I cannot. When he was eight, my second stepson explained sex to me in terms I didn't understand until I got to college. I hear considerable debate about sex education; I got mine from cows, and my recipe for preventing teen pregnancies is a month on a ranch during calving season--being literally immersed in the messy realities of birth. I get up at three in the morning, step into my pants standing by the bed--they stand because they're stiff with blood and manure and other natural fluids--and shuffle a quarter-mile down to the barn through knee-deep snow, listening to the coyotes and the trucks on the highway. Before long I'm positioned behind a cow with my arm to the shoulder inside her, trying to keep her tail out of my mouth while I decide which leg to pull on to encourage the calf's natural emergence. When the calf hits the ground I am not thinking of how much money the cow is worth, or what we'll sell the calf for in the fall if it lives. I am aware that I have saved one, and maybe two lives, that would have been lost. I go back to bed with the feeling that I have accomplished something; I have saved something. How many of us can have that feeling? Gandhi said everything you do will be insignificant, but you must do it anyway. I believe most people in towns and cities are frustrated by thinking that when they read about the destruction of the environment, they can't do anything. They can send money, but they can't get in there and physically save a life. And we can't all move to the country and raise calves. Country people live with a continual interweaving of birth and death. We are intimately aware of the death of winter in spring's birth, but we have to kill some of the kittens or we'll be knee deep in starving cats by July. Even if we beggar ourselves to buy cat food, and sterilize the females, we have too many cats. If we keep more than can support themselves on mice, they will kill every songbird, grouse, and rabbit on the ranch. In winter, the warmth of the barn will not be enough, and I will heap their frozen carcasses in the pickup to haul to the pasture. When city people sidestep their responsibilities and drop unwanted dogs at my gate, we must shoot them or they'll grow up wild to chase and kill antelope, deer, rabbits, cattle. We hate to shoot dogs, but we believe we have no choice. In every major city in the nation, thousands of pets are killed at taxpayers' expense each year, abandoned by owners who made promises they are unwilling to keep. Every year, some of our calves will die, be dragged out of the barn to the hillside to feed litters of coyote pups, and next spring the grass will be greener there. Some of my neighbors shoot antelope each summer to save grass for cows; they'd give the meat to someone who could use it, but shooting antelope without a license is illegal, so they use what they can and let the rest rot or feed coyotes or vultures. Meanwhile other neighbors plow up the native grass, allowing more of the thin topsoil to blow away, to plant crops that burn to death under the sun--because they can receive government payments for planting crops that do not yield. That's not illegal; in some circles it's considered a cleverer way to make money than hard work. More and more of us judge things by legality, and the work "morality" has been so twisted by its narrowest interpreters that thinking adults are uncomfortable with it. A city friend wrote to me once of her sorrow at having to put her old dog to sleep. "Your must get used to it," she said. I wrote rather passionately back to her that we did not dare "get used to it," but that getting used to it was different from accepting it, from allowing the knowledge of death to give more meaning to our lives. Several friends have remarked to me about the courage with which George faced his death; I believe anyone who wants to die as George died, smiling and talking of the love he felt for us, must live as he lived: enjoying what each day gives us, wasting nothing. He truly knew that death could take him at any moment of half his young life; that knowledge gave his days more meaning than most of us ever taste. As Gandhi said, man lives freely only by his readiness to die. III. Responsibility The third lesson I have learned from the land, the one that ties the other two together, is responsibility. I believe tribal cultures and most country people are considerably more advanced in their understanding of this significant subject than most modern Americans. Several writers have noted that our society teaches males to think and speak in terms of rights, while females are taught to think of their responsibilities. It is time for all of us to be less concerned about out rights, and take up our responsibilities. This idea will be unpopular, because it threatens our political structure, as well as our sex lives. Most of us are no longer responsible for providing much of what we need to live--or no longer even understand what is necessary for life, because we are so encumbered with luxuries. The Roper Organization recently asked wealthy people what they couldn't live without; the results were startling. Fifty-seven percent said they "couldn't live without" a microwave oven. Forty-nine percent couldn't live without an answering machine, forty-two percent without a home computer, and thirty-six percent without their videotape recorder. That's how far we've come from understanding survival and necessity. We buy what we want; we don't make or grow it ourselves and we rarely see or know the people who do. We have forgotten where necessities come from, and therefore are out of touch with the consequences of our actions. Most of us don't throw garbage out of car windows along the highways, but we think nothing of driving those cars three blocks for a quart of milk, or of turning the faucet and seeing water come out. We walk across green, water-sucking lawns which we'll have to mow next week before going to the store for vegetables grown in California, when we could grow them all in the front yard and eliminate gas-powered lawn mowers. We've probably all heard the stories of the child who refused to drink milk after learning that it came from a bag that hangs between the back legs of a cow, or the man who didn't worry when the farmers drove their tractors to Washington, because if they all quit raising cows, he'd just buy his meat at the supermarket like he always did. These stories are no longer a joke. Even many environmentalists have a hazy concept of what really goes on in nature; ecology, says John McPhee, means who is eating whom. When we make impassioned speeches about saving snail darters, dolphins, spotted owls, and grizzlies, we also have to realize we are saving ticks, along with Rocky Mountain fever and Lyme disease. Save wilderness and you save tarantulas, scorpions, and rattlesnakes. You can't have one without the other. But many of us want our wilderness sanitized, safe; we want to see grizzlies, not to be eaten by them. It's easy to say the ranchers ought to be willing to lose a few calves so the rest of us can have a wolf population, but no one is willing to sacrifice her child because her neighbor keeps a pit bull. Wilderness isn't something you can look at though a window; if you want wilderness, you have to take your chances. Responsibility requires the same thoughtfulness; we may have to sacrifice some or all cows on public lands in the west in order to have wolves; we may have to sacrifice a hiker now and then for grizzlies. People who want to drink water in Los Angeles may have to give up air conditioning or baths. Responsibility is giving up some things; responsibility requires choices. I have been lectured sternly about raising beef instead of artichokes or grain, and can recite statistics on how much water and grain a cow can use, and how many people the same foodstuffs would feed. But where the prairie was plowed for grain crops by homesteaders, it has remained nearly barren for sixty years. When several of my cows died of grass tetany in spring, 1991, I discovered that Andre' Voisin, an expert on holistic grazing, believes the disease is caused by grasses that invade where native forage has been plowed up. Any crop that requires plowing this land will ruin it; given that, my job is to select the most efficient grazing animal, use the grass to raise meat, and avoid plowing. It is my job to practice ranching that is sustainable, that will support itself without damaging the land beyond its own inherent power to recover. The animal I choose to utilize the grass may, or may not, be a cow. If it is a cow, then my job is to try to mitigate the damage cows do by their nature--to harvest the land's natural and best product, grass, while doing as little damage as possible. If Wes Jackson develops a perennial grain, as he hopes to do at the Land Institute in Salina, Kansas, established to develop the concept and technology of perennial polycultures, I still must consider whether ripping the native grass out of the soil is a fair exchange for producing grain. But I sometimes resent the fact that my choices are direct, and clear, and can result in my own immediate poverty. Most people don't realize they are choosing for all of us when they drive a car, or buy a gold necklace. The chain of their responsibility for air pollution and paving the world, for heap-leach mining of gold in the Black Hills, is longer and harder to see. It's easier to notice and criticize ranchers for grazing cattle on dry land. Last winter, I watched in amazement a television program about animal rights and its implications. While deer died of disease and starvation in the East because of overpopulation, hunting protestors followed deer hunters into the woods, and screamed to scare away the deer. The hunters patiently explained many of the animals they were harvesting would die that winter anyway, and some said they couldn't afford to buy meat; none of them pointed their lethal weapons at their tormentors. In the Black Hills, forest managers have prevented tree-cutting, and some environmentalists say their goal is to stop any cutting of trees here. Now the slopes are so overgrown that streams are drying up, fish dying, water levels dropping, towns rationing water. The forest is choked with dry tinder, and fire danger is immense. During a recent summer an entire subdivision of the state's second largest city might have burned but for the heroic efforts of fire fighters. Neither group stood up to say, "We were wrong. Let's sit down and figure out how to cut some trees." Most of us can cheerfully place responsibility elsewhere--"Call the police!" We dislike the idea of shooting another human being, so we want to ban guns--but we want protection. "That movie offends me, so you shouldn't watch it!" can logically lead to: "That book is offensive; I'll pay somebody to kill the author!" We're in similarly precarious positions environmentally. We move back to the land with our wood-burning stoves, but hate air pollution. We can't escape contradictions in our lives, but we must try to understand the consequences of our actions, and how those consequences relate to our beliefs. It is a cliche' that country kids are different because they grow up already viewing sex and work, birth and death, as natural parts of life, but it's true, and the difference is crucial to our belief systems. And while many people today recognize the difference, they ignore its corollary: that not everything and everyone can live exactly as we please; we have to make hard choices very soon. Aboriginal mothers in Australia teach their children not to drag a stick behind them, marking the ground; reminded that this is painful to the earth, the children grow up understanding the earth's pain. As reality, this is illogical; we do worse damage backing a car out of the garage, or planting carrots. But as a lesson and a warning to our affluent society, it is powerful; if we regarded each action toward the earth in this light, we might take time to consider all the implications. We cannot afford to lose four tons of topsoil for every ton of grain U.S. farmers produce; to continue justifying such production is to deserve the holocaust that faces us as world populations become ever more hungry, and unable to produce their own food. IV: Individual Responsibility February 2, 1968 In the dark of the moon, in flying snow, in the dead of winter, war spreading, families dying, the world in danger, I walk the rocky hillside, sowing clover. --Wendell Berry Wendell Berry has been writing and speaking about sustainable agriculture and difficult choices for years; I find much of what he has said summarized in that brief poem. Each of us must continue to sow clover on our hillsides, no matter how rocky, and no matter how dark and dismal the world seems to us. But how can we be responsible, individually, for the health of the universe? How can you, in your small city apartment, join hands with me on the plains of Sough Dakota, and an angler on the Gallatin River, to save not only the beauty, but the air we breathe and the ground which provides our food? The first step is to accept responsibility as we should accept death: as a part of our lives, a fact that gives meaning and strength to our daily actions. Responsible people try to understand the implications of what they do. I cannot know or save the entire world; I would probably love whales if I could hear them singing in the ocean instead of in the box in my living room but I no longer contribute to organizations which work to save them. I know the rain forest is essential, but I spend more time worrying about the tiny Black Hills. Like Thoreau, I can know only a small part of the earth, and I work to protect only a small part of it. I can refuse to buy plastic or styrofoam, because no one knows how to get rid of them. I can refuse to use harmful chemicals on my cows or my weeds. And I can tell everyone who will listen, willingly or not, why I am doing these things; some of those listeners will learn, some will vote, some may make laws. In every case I can study until I am reasonably sure I have traced my action to its ultimate consequence, and then act so that what I am doing is not simply prolonging the problem, or dumping it in someone else's lap. Working directly for at least some of my food, clothing, and fun, disposing of the waste from my actions, reminds me there's a connection between responsible labor and reward, or even survival. If each of us did so, we would vastly improve our chances of saving the whole. Our society has operated on a delayed payment schedule for a century. If we all begin making payments now, we may avert some of the more devastating forms of interest. I can grow some of my own food, to make me aware of the health and fragility of this thin skin of fertile earth, and teach others the connections between earth, water, and work, both in providing food and in providing solace for the soul. I don't insist on religious aspects of this earthly labor, unlike some adherents of specific religions; I won't consign you to hell if you don't do it my way, or appear at your elbow to quote statistics or scream epithets. But every action you take has its consequence; the responsibility is yours. I know these solutions seem vague; I wish I could give you a neat ten-step program, preferably with a memorable acronym like "STOP WASTE" that would solve all the world's problems. Magazines are filled with articles which do just that, introduced with a little cheery text to make you feel as if you can save the world by separating your garbage. Doing it will make you feel better, and the articles sell a lot of magazines; some are even printed on recycled paper. But anyone who tells you the solution to the pollution crisis is simple is misinformed--at best. Do South African diamond miners suffer more from poor mining conditions and racism than they benefit from having jobs? If you really believe so, don't buy diamonds. (Not a great sacrifice for most of us.) Does heap-leach mining destroy the earth and pollute water? Don't buy gold jewelry or coins; most gold is mined for decoration or investment, not vital purposes. The beauty and the threat of human existence on earth is that we have the power to destroy ourselves, and the intelligence not to. Like the fact of our own advancing deaths, this knowledge should make us eager to be responsible and spiritual in ways we can handle. Some people will wander off into fluffy spirituality and spend their lives contemplating their own navels, leaving more work for the rest of us. Responsibility demands consideration of all life. Barry Commoner, writing in Greenpeace in late 1989, noted that Congress began responding to growing concerns about the environment in 1970. Nearly twenty years later he asked, "How far have we progressed toward the goal of restoring the quality of the environment?" The answer was terse: "Apart from a few notable exceptions, environmental quality has improved only slightly, and in some cases has worsened." But the exceptions clearly show what works and what does not. Every success on the very short list of significant environmental quality improvements reflects the same remedial action: Production of the pollutant has been stopped. DDT and PCB levels have dropped because their production and use have been banned. Mercury is much less prevalent because it is no longer used to manufacture chlorine. Lead has been taken out of gasoline. And strontium has decayed to low levels because the United States and the Soviet Union had the good sense to stop the atmospheric nuclear bomb tests that produced it. The lesson is plain: Pollution prevention works; pollution control does not. The lesson for us is this: compromise doesn't work. We've been good little environmental activists and pacifists, just as we were advised to be in the 1960's; we've compromised, worked within the system, spent our own money and our time talking, talking, talking, trying to convince the public and government that we don't want the earth polluted, that a majority of us, worldwide, are more concerned about the purity of the air, water, and earth than we are with anything else. If we must choose either missiles, bombs, and airplanes devoted to waging war or growing healthy food in countries where children breathe good air and families are self-sufficient, we will choose the latter. It is increasingly clear that our present course has brought us devastation as well as starvation, and despite the downfall of the Berlin Wall, many of the world's fingers are still on a very dangerous trigger. Meanwhile, the polluters have continued to lay waste the earth in the filthy names of Profit and Progress. Only when we have built up anger in enough people and educated voters thoroughly enough to make dangerous activities flatly illegal have we won victories. And even when the profit-merchants have been defeated, some of them have slunk sullenly away to dump waste secretly in our water supplies and on hidden lands. We've made some progress by showing polluters the economic benefits of pollution control, but the big successes have been where we used the power of the law to stop actions that are harmful to the earth. In some cases, we will have to fight already established law. The 1872 Mining Law, the federal statute that still governs mining almost everywhere, was passed to encourage miners to swarm into the wild West and rip out its treasures; modern miners lobby hard to keep its outmoded rules in effect. "Farming sustainably," as Mother Jones recently reported, "is illegal in the United States for most farmers." A farmer operating in the current market is forced to use chemicals to get the maximum yield per acre; most get federal money to subsidize their operations. Lobbyists for chemical companies have influenced government policy, but so have the agricultural colleges, often financed by the same chemical companies. Many banks won't loan money to farmers, and insurance companies won't sell crop insurance, without evidence of chemical use. Banks operate on the same poisonous theory in Third World countries, which don't get loans for anything but the kind of developments that promise fast payback. Responsible users of the earth must work toward creating a renewable, sustainable economy at all levels; most of the technology exists. Poisonous fuels like oil, coal, gas, and nuclear energy must be phased out in favor of renewable fuels; by 1941 Henry Ford had devised an "all-vegetable car." Where is it? Chemicals that poison the earth must be banned completely, and any mechanism that emits toxic pollution must be shut down if it can't shift to a method of operation that will eliminate pollution. Agriculture, as well as other industries, must take advantage of the knowledge we already have, using organic compounds and encouraging soil conservation instead of waste. Our government, which has handed massive subsidies to the nuclear industry throughout its existence, must end that support, and if possible transfer it to solar and other energy forms which do not destroy. Compromise has not been enough. There are too many of us, and humanity is too greedy for material goods to rely on individual concern to save the earth. No matter how dire the warnings, we have continued to use beyond the earth's power to regenerate for too long. The bill is due now; we can pay the interest a little longer by radically altering our thinking and our actions, or the punishment for nonpayment will be exacted: loss of everything that has made this the most beautiful of planets. Though the marvelously resilient earth and its plants and animals may survive, it will be unable to sustain human life. We will become the people who murdered ourselves, and did it knowingly. -------------------------------------------------- From: "Land Circle: Lessons," pp. 240-259 in Land Circle--Writings Collected from the Land, by Linda Hasselstrom, (Fulcrum Publishing, Golden, Colorado, 1991). Her other works include: Windbreak, (Barn Owl Books, 1987)--a journal of a year of ranch life; Going Over East--Reflections of a Woman Rancher, (Fulcrum, 1987); and two books of poetry: Caught By One Wing (Holcomb, 1984) and Roadkill (Spoon River Poetry Press, 1987). Her many commentaries and journal articles are too numerous to list.